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The village of Feldheim 60km from Berlin has become an unusual tourist attraction. The village’s independent energy grid and 100% renewable energy sources has gained international attention. The village has its own energy grid and generates power from wind, biogas and solar. The model of Feldheim extinguishes the myth of needing nuclear or fossil fuel for baseload power and the assumption that big utility companies are required for electricity.

The transformation in Feldheim began in 1995 with a few wind turbines. Now the village has more wind turbines than homes. in 2008 the village added a biogas heat plant that runs off of corn waste and pig manure with a back up furnace that runs on lumber waste. In 2008 Feldheim decided they wanted their own energy grid. E,on refused to sell the existing grid to the city so they partnered with Energiequelle and built their own smart grid. Each villager paid in $3,972 for the grid installation but get a 31% savings on electricity and 10% savings on heat. It also created 30 permanent jobs for the town. Energiequelle is not building an electricity storage facility that will hold two days worth of electricity.

Feldheim did all of this while fighting the big utility companies and Germanies regulatory system that was not friendly to the drastic change Feldheim made.

Part 2: Workers Pushed to Their Limits TEPCO is preparing to spend decades in J-Village. Workers have spread gravel around the large soccer stadium and in a number of adjacent areas. Here they have placed row after row of gray trailers. There are 40 per row and they sit two stories high, extending right up to the blue plastic seats in the stands. The stadium's large scoreboard still hangs behind this makeshift community. The stadium clock has stopped at 2:46 p.m., which was the moment when the earthquake cut off the electricity here and at the power plant 20 kilometers (12 miles) away. Now, the power is on again and white neon lights illuminate the rows of trailers. In one room the workers can pick up bento boxes. Next door TEPCO has built a laundromat with more than a hundred washing machines. Behind the main building in J-Village, buses are parked on the former soccer fields and debris is stored in large plastic bags on the tartan track.

Stacks of Contaminated Suits In the courtyard of the main building, TEPCO has had a small store built, where workers can purchase cigarettes and tea. Some of them, still wearing their work overalls, have gathered around a number of ashtrays and are smoking in silence. There is an Adidas advertisement glued to one of the doors and an obsolete warning sign: "No SPIKES!" An exhausted worker is asleep on the floor in the hallway.

In the window of the atrium hang huge banners for TEPCO Mareeze, the soccer team that belongs to the energy company. In the center of the building stands a panel with a large white and green map of J-Village. There was a time when this was there to help athletes find their way around. Now, a man in a TEPCO uniform stands here and uses a red felt pen to post the current radiation levels for over a dozen different places on the premises. Three TEPCO employees are sitting nearby with their laptops. The workers hand them their daily dosimeters. In return, they are given a receipt that resembles a cash register sales slip and shows the dose of radiation that they have received that day.

Milepost 231 now marks the end of the road. Barricades prevent traffic from proceeding farther north on Highway 6, a four-lane road that leads to the ruin of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Men in uniform are waving stop signs. In the evening twilight, a red illuminated sign flashes the following message: "No access… disaster law." Two policemen armed with red glow sticks vigorously turn away every lost driver. Three of their colleagues are blocking the exit to the right. They yell at anyone approaching on foot.

A total of 20 officers guard this intersection, day and night. To the right of the road block, the highway leads to J-Village, a former training center for the Japanese national soccer team. Since March 11, Japan's largest soccer complex has been transformed into the base camp for Japan's peculiar heroes -- the workers who are trying to regain control of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. More than 1,000 of these workers prepare themselves for their shifts here, day after day. The TEPCO power company, which is the operator of the stricken nuclear power plant, sponsored construction of the sports facility years ago. Since it has become the hub for the nuclear cleanup workers, though, the company has sealed off the area to the media and the general public.

Temporary Workers Doing the Dirty Work One of the workers feels that the public has a right to know what is happening in J-Village. He has decided to speak with SPIEGEL, although he would prefer not to give his name. He will be referred to as Sakuro Akimoto here. On busy days, he says, more than 3,000 workers pass through the radiation detection station.

On September 16, Fukushima Prefecture announced its first result of the main survey of radioactive materials in the harvested rice. No radioactive cesium above the detection limit (between 5 to 10 becquerels/kg) was detected in the rice harvested between September 12 and 14 in 4 locations in Kitakata City, located in northwest Fukushima. Total 52 locations in the city are to be tested, and the results for the remaining locations will be announced later.

The prefectural government will allow the shipment of rice by the municipalities as long the density of radioactive cesium tests below the national provisional limit (500 becquerels/kg) in the designated locations within a city/town/village. [In case of Kitakata City, therefore] the September 16 survey result was not enough to allow the city to ship rice. Some Japanese consumers believe neither the report nor the Fukushima prefectural government. Their "baseless" suspicions include: They must be mixing last year's rice. Jiji Tsushin and Fukushima Prefecture, deadly lying combo. Personally, I think Jiji is better than Kyodo News.There are eye-witness report of sighting the last year's rice bags with proof of inspection from other prefectures piled up high at rice distributors and wholesalers in Fukushima.My suspicion: How many points did they measure? One rice paddy or two per town/village?

Kitakata City is located north in "Aizu" region of Fukushima Prefecture, the western one-third of the prefecture with less contamination than the rest of Fukushima. According to Japanese wiki, today's Kitakata City is the result of the mergers of 17 towns and villages over time. Total 52 testing locations for 17 towns and villages within Kitakata City would mean about 3 locations per town/village. (Fukushima Prefecture's site says 2 samples per town/village.)

The residents of a picturesque village in the south of England will on Wednesday go to the high court in a last ditch attempt to prevent thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste being dumped into a nearby landfill site.

He argued the "risk of actual harm from the development would be very low" but the villagers have brought in Richard Buxton, a Cambridge law firm that specialises in environmental and public law.

The minister ruled in May in favour of a plan drawn up by waste management company, Augean, to allow 250,000 tonnes of nuclear materials to be placed in the East Northamptonshire Resource Management Facility.

Iitate is located 45km (28 miles) from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant hit by a tsunami on March 11th this year. In the mountains above the town, the forests are turning the colour of autumn. But their beauty is deceptive. Every time a gust of wind blows, Mr Sato says it shakes invisible particles of radioactive caesium off the trees and showers them over the village. Radiation levels in the hills are so high that villagers dare not go near them. Mr Sato cannot bury his father’s bones, which he keeps in an urn in his abandoned farmhouse, because of the dangers of going up the hill to the graveyard.

Iitate had the misfortune to be caught by a wind that carried radioactive particles (including plutonium) much farther than anybody initially expected after the nuclear disaster. Almost all the 6,000 residents have been evacuated, albeit belatedly, because it took the government months to decide that some villages outside a 30km radius of the plant warranted special attention. Now it offers an extreme example of how difficult it will be to recover from the disaster.

That is mainly because of the enormous spread of radiation. Recently the government said it needed to clear about 2,419 square kilometres of contaminated soil—an area larger than greater Tokyo—that received an annual radiation dose of at least five millisieverts, or over 0.5 microsieverts an hour. That covered an area far beyond the official 30km restriction zone (see map). Besides pressure- hosing urban areas, this would involve removing about 5cm of topsoil from local farms as well as all the dead leaves in caesium-laden forests.

The information comes from a strange source - the husband and wife comedian couple cum independent journalists attending and reporting on TEPCO and the government press conferences when they are not on stage. In their blogpost on August 11 (in Japanese), they relate their talk with a researcher at the University of Tokyo who has submitted a scientific paper to a foreign academic society. This researcher, whom they say they cannot name because the paper is being reviewed right now, went to Fukushima and collected soil samples, rice hay samples, and water samples. He even went to the front of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant and collected samples there.

He also went to Iitate-mura. And he tells the couple that he found neptunium-239 in Iitate-mura, about 38 kilometers from the plant, in approximately the same amount as he found at the front gate of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. That is the topic of his paper. The couple says in the very intelligent post that they cannot provide details because the paper is in review (but they also say the researcher has given them permission to talk about it in general terms), but it was in several thousand becquerels. There is no mention of whether it was per kilogram or per square meter or per something else.

There is no mention of when the researcher went to Iitate-mura. I could be wrong but the indication from the post is that it was after the news that chlorine-38 detection at Fukushima I Nuke Plant was false. TEPCO retracted the earlier announcement of chlorine-38 detection, on April 20. Uranium-239, whose half life is about 24 minutes, decays into neptunium-239 through beta decay. Neptunium-239, gamma emitter whose half life is about 2.4 days, decays into plutonium-239 whose half life is 24,200 years.

or so the tweet by the worker at the plant with big twitter followings says:

Oh by the way, like I tweeted some time ago, we're notified September 14 will be the last day of [free food] distribution at J-Village.

J-Village is the staging area for the plant workers. After September 14, TEPCO will make the workers pay for food, if what he tweeted is true.TEPCO has been bleeding badly financially because of the nuclear accident. The Japanese government, now under the new administration whose approval rate is suspiciously high, continues to pretend it is a problem of a private business. TEPCO does not have a choice but to treat the accident as some maintenance job gone really very bad, and try to come up with a cost-effective patchwork.

SOURCE: Radiation in Japan: Hot spots and blind spots, The Economist, October 8, 2011 [Iitate, 45 km from meltdowns] offers an extreme example of how difficult it will be to recover from the disaster. That is mainly because of the enormous spread of radiation. [...] Outside [the chief of Iitate's village council, Mr. Chohei Sato's] house, however, a reading of the equivalent of 150 millisieverts a year left your correspondent strangely reluctant to inhale. The Hills Crest the hill into the village of Iitate, and the reading on a radiation dosimeter surges eightfold—even with the car windows shut. [...]  Radiation levels in the hills are so high that villagers dare not go near them. [...]

Joining the first press tour to the power plant, eight months after the Great East Japan Earthquake, I headed to the site aboard a bus from J-Village about 20 kilometers south. Originally a sports facility, J-Village is currently used as the base for workers at the crippled plant. Wearing protective gear along with cotton and rubber gloves on each hand, I began to sweat even before being told to put on a full-face mask about three kilometers from the plant. We had to wear the masks to prevent internal radiation exposure, but I had difficulty breathing because the mask stuck to my face every time I inhaled. I imagined it would be quite hard to work in this clothing. Guards in the same outfits stood at the main gate of the plant, keeping an eye on comings and goings.

Aboard the bus was a worker tasked with checking radiation, who constantly read out radiation levels. Tension on the bus spiked when he said, "It's 20 microsieverts per hour." I realized how devastating the accident was when we arrived on a hill about 34 meters above sea level to take in a wider view of the site. From the hill, we could see the 45-meter-high No. 4 reactor building in the foreground, which had been severely damaged with only its steel framework remaining. I also spotted a large green crane used to pull nuclear fuel from the pressure vessel--it should not have been visible as it is supposed to be inside the building. Behind the No. 4 reactor building was the No. 3 building, which showed much more severe damage with bent steel beams clearly visible.

The reactor buildings, which are the last line of defense to prevent radioactive materials from leaking, have one-meter-thick concrete walls. I was overwhelmed to see the devastating power of the explosions that destroyed such solid walls.

35 Prefectures from Hokkaido to Kagoshima; in other words, all over Japan. Good news for the residents of 4 cities in Ishikawa Prefecture who do not want radioactive debris burned in their neighborhood: the cities have suspended the decision to accept disaster debris because of the opposition from the residents, even though city officials are quite willing to accept debris to "help" Tohoku. Why these officials want to "help" Tohoku by soiling their beautiful, historical cities with radioactive materials, however small, remains a mystery to me. The only answer that I can think of is what Haruki "Detarame" Madarame of the Nuclear Safety Commission said - "It's all about money, isn't it?"

For all the other cities and prefectures, residents beware. Beware of the mass media too, who is very quick to mislead by branding the residents as "selfish" and "uncaring" for refusing to burn the radioactive debris. Or firewood. Like a heap of abuse dished out to Kyoto City residents. Glancing through the tweets of people in Japan knowledgeable about waste management, I'm beginning to realize that there is a figurative "waste management village" whose residents are made up of experts, industry people, government officials with vested, common interest in promoting waste processing facilities - just like the "nuclear power plant village" that may or may not be unraveling.

List of Prefectures and cities that will accept disaster debris:

Kazue Tazaki is a professor emeritus at Kanazawa University in Ishikawa Prefecture. She took the contaminated soil from Iitate-mura in Fukushima Prefecture where the villagers were required to evacuate, and grew rice using that soil.Rice planting and growing was banned in Iitate-mura this year.Professor Tazaki just harvested the rice, and measured the concentration of cesium-137. The result?From the rice grains: 2,600 becquerels/kgFrom the straw: 2,200 becquerels/kgFrom the roots: 1,500 becquerels/kgSoil contamination: 50,000 becquerels/kgRoughly an equal amount of cesium-134 is to be expected. The transfer rate of cesium-137 in this case was about 0.05.

From Toyama Shinbun, local paper in Ishikawa Prefecture (9/27/2011):

Kazue Tazaki, professor emeritus at Kanazawa University has compiled the result of her experiment of growing rice using the soil from Iitate-mura in Fukushima Prefecture where high radiation levels have been recorded. 2,600 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium was detected from the harvested rice, more than 5 times the provisional safety limit (500 becquerels/kg) set by the national government. It was prohibited to plant rice in Iitate-mura because of the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident. The professor's data will be extremely valuable in studying the effect of radiation in the soil on the agricultural crops.

Japan Failed to Hand Out Radiation Pills, Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2011:

Government officials failed to distribute to thousands of people pills that could have minimized radiation risks from the March nuclear accident, government documents show. [...] Though Japan’s nuclear-safety experts recommended dispensing pills immediately, Tokyo didn’t order pills be given out until five days after the March 11 accident, the documents show. By then, most of the nearly 100,000 residents evacuated [...] [The pill] has little effect when administered days after the release of radiation. [...] NISA issued an instruction March 16 for residents of towns within 20 kilometers of the plant to take KI pills, nearly four days after the government issued an evacuation order for those same towns. [...]

“Most of our residents had no idea we were supposed to take medication like that [...] By the time the pills were delivered to our office on the 16th, everyone in the village was gone.” -Juichi Ide, general-affairs chief of Kawauchi Village, located about 20 miles from the plant “I had simply assumed local residents had been given potassium iodide [... I was] flabbergasted [when learning recently that wasn't the case].” -Gen Suzuki, a physician specializing in radiation research and adviser to Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission

Seiji Maehara, who lost his bid to become the party leader and the prime minister of Japan, has nonetheless landed on a very powerful party position as the chairman of the DPJ's policy bureau.He went to Fukushima, and after visiting with the evacuees from Iitate-mura, he disclosed his party's plan to use the "eco-point" system for residential housing to promote timber from the disaster-affected area.

What is the "eco-point" for houses? Well, if you build or renovate your house with energy saving features and alternative energy features (eg. solar panels) the government will give you "eco-points". Then you can use the points at participating stores and buy whatever you want to buy with the points.Maehara is saying the government may entice builders to use the lumber from the disaster-affected area with "eco-points", even if the potentially radioactive lumber has nothing to do with energy saving.

Iitate-mura's major industry is forestry. Iitate-mura's mountains and forests have been contaminated with whatever fell on them - radioactive cesium, plutonium, strontium. No one has tested them (if someone did, he's not saying anything), but the contamination should be an order of magnitude bigger than the radioactive firewood from Rikuzen Takata City in Iwate Prefecture.

A Japanese mayor has called on the government to decommission the nuclear reactor in his village, 110 km northeast of Tokyo, the first local leader to urge scrapping a reactor as Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda tries to rehabilitate the tarnished nuclear sector to help meet the nation's power needs. The reactor at Tokaimura, where Japan's commercial nuclear power industry was born in the late 1950s, has been shut since a devastating earthquake and tsunami struck northeast Japan on March 11. It entered routine maintenance in May and is not due to restart until August 2012.

Only 10 of Japan's 54 commercial reactors remain operating seven months after the March disaster triggered a crisis at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, as safety fears have left local authorities wary of restarting reactors once they go offline for routine maintenance.But Tokaimura Mayor Tatsuya Murakami was the first local official to call for scrapping a reactor altogether, warning that, if the wave that struck his village on March 11 had been slightly higher, the Tokai Daini reactor could have posed far graver danger than the Fukushima plant, as 1 million people live within a 30-km radius and it is much closer to Tokyo.

A Tokaimura official said Wednesday that Murakami made his plea at a meeting the day before with nuclear disaster minister Goshi Hosono."Shouldn't the plant be decommissioned?" he was quoted as telling the meeting.The 33-year old reactor still has seven years before its operating license expires and Tokyo Electric Power Co had been counting on the 1,100-megawatt facility to help it make up for the 4,700 megawatts of lost power from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant.

After scary reports came this week about large amounts of Fukushima radiation wafting over Tokyo Japan came up with the most idiotic lie about the source. The downwardly mobile BBC chimed in with this: Elevated levels of radiation found in a residential area of Tokyo are almost certainly not connected to the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, say officials. . . . But Japan’s science minister said the radiation had been traced to material stored in the basement of a house[!!!]. Local residents had been told the radiation was no threat to health.

Umm-humm. Just some old jars of plutonium stored next to the pickled cucumber down in the ol’ basement. Such a relief! Compare that suspect story with this: Radiation in Tokyo: Over 2.7 Microsievert/Hr in Setagaya-ku on a School Route That is the air radiation. NHK News says the number happens to be much higher than the current air radiation in Iitate-mura (2.1 microsieverts/hour at the village office) in Fukushima Prefecture, where all the villagers have had to evacuate. Just like in Yokohama City, a citizen measured the air radiation, and alerted the municipal government who then went and measured. At least the municipal governments have started to at least respond. The result was 2.8 microsieverts/hour. The Setagaya-ku government power-washed the 10-meter stretch of the side walk, and the radiation came down to … (hold your breath)… 2.71 microsieverts/hour. . . . (more + MAP) http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/10/radiation-in-tokyo-over-27.html

Discarded Tyvek suits, 480,000 of them, which TEPCO would have to treat as low-level radioactive waste and dispose accordingly (unlike regular garbage or sewer sludge ash in Tokyo, which may be more contaminated than the Tyvek suits in Fuku I):

New Tyvek suits being distributed. Inventory at J-village, about 500,000:

A Tyvek suit costs about 1,000 yen (US$13) average in Japan, so it is costing TEPCO 1 billion yen ($13 million). As is usual for a big corporation like TEPCO, cost-cutting always starts at the bottom; the company is asking the Fuku I workers not to take more than one Tyvek suit.According to one of the workers who tweet from Fukushima I Nuke Plant, TEPCO has already downgraded Tyvek suits quality. It used to be 1,440 yen per piece, now it's 840 yen, achieving 40% cost reduction.The government, whether national or prefectural, shows no sign of helping TEPCO in any way when it comes to supporting and taking care of the workers at Fuku I. Instead, they want to waste taxpayers' money on inviting foreigners on free Japan trips (1 billion yen), inviting big social media writers (1.5 billion yen) to Tohoku, inviting IAEA "decontamination" mission who just recommended relaxing the standards (1 billion yen). Fukushima Prefecture is really raking in, over 100 billion yen for building a new cancer hospital at the medical university presided by Dr. Shunichi Yamashita.

The Dec. 2 morning edition of the Mainichi Shimbun ran an article reporting that in 2002, the then administrative vice minister of economy, trade and industry and the chairman and president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) were nearing an agreement to withdraw from a nuclear fuel recycling project. Nuclear fuel recycling refers to a process of treating spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power stations with chemicals and extracting reusable uranium and plutonium from it. This project has so far been unsuccessful and there are no prospects that the project will work. It was only natural that the government regulator and the power supplier were negotiating a withdrawal from the project. The negotiations came to nothing after top executives of TEPCO were forced to resign over the utility's cover-up of a series of technical problems. Nevertheless, the Mainichi report indicates that a change in Japan's nuclear power policy is not a pipe dream.

The country has consequently decided to bury part of its plutonium in an underground repository that is scheduled to begin operations in 2040. Even if the U.K. says it will bury only "part" of its surplus plutonium, its amount is enough to produce hundreds of atomic bombs. The amount of surplus plutonium that needs to be buried could increase as there is no prospect that the U.K. will be successful in developing technology to use plutonium-uranium MOX fuel in thermal reactors. Moreover, the U.K. will abandon its project to reprocess spent nuclear fuel over the next decade. Behind the decision is the growing awareness that plutonium offers no positives, while also being a terrible nuisance. This is the essence of the story written by Haruyuki Aikawa, a Mainichi correspondent in London.

The U.K. then attempted to develop technology for the use of plutonium-uranium MOX fuel in thermal reactors at nuclear power stations, a project known in Japan as "pluthermal." However, the country has been unsuccessful in producing such fuel. The same is true with Japan. Areva SA, a nuclear technology company in France, is now manufacturing plutonium-uranium MOX fuel, but questions remain as to its quality. The U.K. ended up being the world's largest holder of surplus plutonium.