Nov. 9 — “A journalist of Shukan Asahi, Mr.Imanishi was invited to go into the site by an actual Fukushima worker,” reports Mochizuki. The journalist reported that “the spent fuel pool of reactor 4 is completely ‘exposed’,” Mochizuki writes. For the video below Mochizuki summarizes Imanishi’s comments: The wall and ceiling of Reactor No. 4′s building was completely blown off by “some explosion” “The spent fuel pool is totally left outside, out of control so what you can even see it from out of the reactor” “The wall of the reactors are about 1m thick of huge concrete mass. It is blown off.” “It shows how much the explosion(s) were more massive that they were announced by the government.”

Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Mexico, one of three Latin American nations that uses nuclear power, is abandoning plans to build as many as 10 new reactors and will focus on natural gas-fired electricity plants after boosting discoveries of the fuel.

The country, which found evidence of trillions of cubic feet of gas in the past year, is “changing all its decisions, amid the very abundant existence of natural-gas deposits,” Energy Minister Jordy Herrera said in a Nov. 1 interview. Mexico will seek private investment of about $10 billion during five years to expand its natural gas pipeline network, he said.

“This is a very good decision by the Mexican government,” said James Williams, an economist at WTRG Economics, an energy research firm in London, Arkansas. With a power generation project based on gas “you can build multiple plants at a much lower cost and much faster pace than a nuclear facility.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the No. 2 reactor at its destroyed Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station isn’t in a critical state after the company detected signs of nuclear fission.

The discovery of xenon, announced yesterday, at the plant was caused by “natural” nuclear fission, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the company known as Tepco, said today at a press briefing in Tokyo.

The occurrence of the gas, which is associated with nuclear fission, was confirmed yesterday by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. No increase in radiation was found at the site and the situation is under control, officials said.

TOKYO — Nuclear workers at the crippled Fukushima power plant raced to inject boric acid into the plant’s No. 2 reactor early Wednesday after telltale radioactive elements were detected there, and the plant’s owner admitted for the first time that fuel deep inside three stricken plants was probably continuing to experience bursts of fission.

The unexpected bursts — something akin to flare-ups after a major fire — are extremely unlikely to presage a large-scale nuclear reaction with the resulting large-scale production of heat and radiation. But they threaten to increase the amount of dangerous radioactive elements leaking from the complex and complicate cleanup efforts, raising startling questions about how much remains uncertain at the plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The Japanese government has said that it aims to bring the reactors to a stable state known as a “cold shutdown” by the end of the year.

On Wednesday, the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that measurements of gas from inside Reactor No. 2 indicated the presence of radioactive xenon and other substances that could be the byproduct of nuclear fission. The presence of xenon 135 in particular, which has a half-life of just nine hours, seemed to indicate that fission took place very recently.

Well, the big day has come and gone. Andrea Rossi's one-megawatt-capable E-Cat cold fusion device has been tested in Bologna, Italy; and the unknown customer, who ran the test, is apparently happy.

There were some issues, so it couldn't be run at full power in self-looped mode, but what it did do was plenty impressive.

It ran for 5.5 hours producing 479 kW, while in self-looped mode. That means no substantial external energy was required to make it run, because it kept itself running, even while producing an excess of nearly half a megawatt. Rossi explained the reasons for this in the presentation he gave, which I videotaped and will be posting later.

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.

The case is being brought in the name of Louise Bowen-West on behalf of the King's Cliffe community near Peterborough against secretary of state for communities and local government, Eric Pickles.

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.

(Reuters) - Japanese utilities will largely avoid power shortages this winter despite prolonged reactor shutdowns amid public concerns over nuclear safety, but hurdles remain for next summer, the government said on Tuesday.

It also unveiled ways to bridge the gap next summer, when peak-hour demand is expected to exceed supply by 16,560 megawatts, compared with the biggest gap this winter of 2,530 MW in one area, if no reactors restart by then.

Utilities plan to secure additional fossil-fuel capacity of 4,090 MW by next summer, but other plans depend on how far policy initiatives, such as fiscal spending, can encourage energy conservation and the use of solar and wind power, leaving the risk of rolling blackouts.

Since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that set off the nuclear disaster, a popular backlash against nuclear power has halted the reopening of reactors closed because of damage at the time or unrelated glitches, or for routine inspections. Regulations require reactors to close at least every 13 months for checks, meaning more and more reactors have gone out of service, with none allowed to restart — until Tuesday.

Only 10 of Japan’s 54 reactors are now generating electricity, a sharp reduction for an industry that once supplied 30 percent of the country’s electricity. The shortfall in supply forced the Tokyo Electric Power Company to tell companies to slash energy use by 15 percent this summer.

The government has been keen to soothe local jitters about nuclear energy and enable reactor restarts. But power companies must submit results of “stress tests” that evaluate a reactor’s defenses against earthquakes, tsunamis, station blackouts and the loss of water for cooling — and they must get a go-ahead from local the government.

On Friday Canadian regulators published their post-Fukushima Daiichi report on nuclear safety, concluding the country’s reactors could stand up safely to the conditions that triggered the crisis in Japan. As in the United States, the Canadian government ordered inspections of its operating nuclear plants and a review of their accident preparedness in response to the March station blackout that severely damaged three reactors. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s Fukushima Task Force Report “concludes that Canadian nuclear power plants are safe and pose a very small risk to the health and safety of Canadians or to the environment.” The report identified no gaps in emergency planning or regulatory oversight related to severe accidents. Further, the CNSC said in a release the country’s reactors can “withstand conditions similar to those that triggered the Fukushima event.”

Global energy advisory body, the International Energy Agency (IEA), says that India should not get influenced by countries that have announced changes in their nuclear energy plans in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. “India should go ahead and implement its civil

nuclear power plans,” Richard Jones, American diplomat and the deputy executive director of IEA told the Hindustan Times in an exclusive interview. “Of the countries like Germany, Italy and few others that have announced changes in their nuclear policy, we were not expecting them to do much in nuclear anyway.”

Jones said while India must “take a lesson from the Fukushima nuclear disaster and adequately address its security and safety concerns,” but should not slow down its nuclear capacity addition plans as switching to alternate fuels like gas for power generation.

(Reuters) - Japan and Vietnam on Monday reaffirmed their plan to build a nuclear power plant in the Southeast Asian country using Japanese technology, even as Tokyo still struggles to put the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years under control.

Last October, energy-hungry Vietnam accepted Japan as a partner in the construction of two nuclear reactors in Ninh Thuan province in central Vietnam.

But in March, a massive earthquake and tsunami knocked out the cooling functions at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo, triggering fuel rod meltdowns, explosions and radiation leakage.

Devastating news from eastern Turkey has riveted the country this week -- more than 500 killed and thousands left homeless by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Van province.

The earthquake in Van left investors in Korea worried that Turkey would call off its plans to build a nuclear power plant in the Black Sea province of Sinop, a project for which Korean firms hoped to win the construction bid, news agency dongA reported Tuesday. "The nuclear plant deal with Turkey has become very tough," it quoted an anonymous source from the Korean nuclear-power industry as saying, and added, without attribution, that the industry "expects the project to be scrapped in the wake of Sunday's powerful earthquake."

(Reuters) - Japanese officials in towns around the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant reacted guardedly to plans announced on Saturday to build facilities to store radioactive waste from the clean-up around the plant within three years.

Japan aims to halve radiation over two years in places contaminated by the crisis. To do so, it may have to remove and dispose of massive amounts of radioactive soil, possibly enough to fill 23 baseball stadiums.

Towns near the crippled nuclear plant have barely been able to start cleaning up until now because they have been unable to convince residents about where to store the radioactive waste.

Over the last few days there have been reports suggesting water levels were low and the water "boiling"; and now the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which has a team of 11 experts advising in Japan, says the pool is completely dry.

This means the fuel rods are exposed to the air. Without water, they will get much hotter, allowing radioactive material to escape.

More remarkably, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which owns the power station, has warned: "The possibility of re-criticality is not zero". If you are in any doubt as to what this means, it is that in the company's view, it is possible that enough fissile uranium is present in the cooling pond in enough density to form a critical mass - meaning that a nuclear fission chain reaction could start.

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Removing the melted nuclear fuel from the crippled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant should start within 10 years after the plant's cold shutdown, and decommissioning is likely to take 30 years or more, a government panel projected in a draft report released Friday.

"We set a goal to start taking out the (core) debris within a 10-year period...and it is estimated that it would take 30 years or more (after the cold shutdown) to finish decommissioning," the draft said.

A reactor at the Genkai nuclear power plant in western Japan was shut down automatically on Tuesday, following a technical glitch with the unit's cooling system. Kyushu Electric Power Company, the plant's operator, says no one was hurt and there have been no changes in radiation levels monitored near the plant. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency says the Number 4 reactor at the plant stopped operations at around 1:40 PM on Tuesday, after abnormalities in the steam condenser of its cooling system were signaled by equipment. Tuesday's suspension has left the utility with only one of its 6 nuclear reactors in operation. Tuesday, October 04, 2011 18:55 +0900 (JST)

The operator of Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant aims to restore the cooling systems of the reactors at the troubled facility within three months and achieve “cold shutdown” of the plant in six to nine months.

''We will do our utmost to curb the release of radioactive materials by achieving a stable cooling state at the reactors and spent fuel pools,'' said TEPCO’s Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata at a news conference on Sunday, as cited by Kyodo news agency.

The water, which has been pumped into the reactors to cool them down, started leaking into the basements of the facility’s buildings through the cracks that appeared as a result of the earthquake. The level of water reached 85cm below ground level on Sunday in reactor 2 and threatens to overflow into the ocean. It happened despite the efforts to decant some of the water to a condenser tank at the premises of the reactor.

Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s president was forced to resign as the Fukushima nuclear crisis triggered a loss of 1.25 trillion yen ($15 billion), the biggest for a non- financial Japanese company.

Shares in the company, which reported a 133.8 billion yen profit in the year ended March 31, 2010, rose 2.5 percent to 367 yen today. The stock is down 83 percent since the day before the quake and tsunami.

Tepco has lost 2.9 trillion yen of its market value since the March 11 quake and tsunami crippled its Dai-Ichi nuclear plant north of Tokyo. Costs for the disaster may reach as much as 11 trillion yen, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The government may need to take control, said an asset manager.