Malaysia Support No Nuclear Energy Facebook Groups Pages

International
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2011/10/support-no-nuclear-energy-nuclear-free.html



1M Malaysians Reject Nuclear Power Plant & 100 Storey Mega Tower
https://www.facebook.com/NoNuclearPowerPlantinMalaysia
Nuclear power is the costliest, slowest, riskiest, most inflexible and most limited choice of energy to fight climate change. Compared to renewables like solar, wind, marine and geothermal, nuclear is inferior and unnecessary. 3419


Nuke Off! (Belia Tanpa Nuklear) Malaysia
http://www.facebook.com/nukeoff
2722


反对大马政府兴建核电厂 
Oppose Malaysia Government To Build Nuclear Power Station Plan
http://on.fb.me/qxxNjG 
1675


Say No To A Nuclear Malaysia!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/SAY-NO-TO-A-NUCLEAR-MALAYSIA/114420655264516
1229



反对马来西亚核电发展计划
Anti Malaysia nuclear power plan
http://on.fb.me/snrQTJ 
379


Malaysians against nuclear power in Malaysia
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Malaysians-against-nuclear-power-in-Malaysia/120983487939865
178


Against Nuclear Energy in Malaysia
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Against-Nuclear-Energy-in-Malaysia/119403054751488
121


Malaysians Say No 2Nuclear
全民向核电说不 
http://on.fb.me/t8ohn0 
73

Reject Malaysia Nuclear Power Plants or Rare Earth Plant 反对大马兴建核电厂或稀土厂

http://www.facebook.com/RejectNuclear

46

坚决反对马国建核电厂
http://on.fb.me/kjwKsO 
38

坚决反对马来西亚政府考虑兴建核子发电厂
Say NO for Nuclear Power Plant to Malaysia Government

http://on.fb.me/sJkOZD

36

反对兴建核电站
Oppose the construction of nuclear power plants
http://on.fb.me/u3BjDl
2



Greenpeace Malaysia
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Greenpeace-Malaysia/227093683985154
65


Greenpeace Malaysia
http://www.facebook.com/GreenpeaceMalaysia
59


Greenpeace Singapore
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Greenpeace-Singapore/276543422357650
40


Greenpeace Southeast Asia
http://www.facebook.com/GreenpeaceSEA
32




民主行動黨
「全民反對興建核能發電廠」請願簽名運動，打造更清潔、綠意及安全的馬來西亞
5/06/2011
http://dappg.org/6830/tss_20110506a/


星洲日報
「反對建核電廠」巴生民聯百人請願
4/03/2011
http://www.sinchew.com.my/node/199094?tid=1


彭文寶：已向中央呈函反對立場「檳堅拒核電廠！」
3/28/2011
http://mykampung.sinchew.com.my/node/136017


光明日報
檳州消協大馬自然之友 -6理由反對建核電厰
5/24/2010
http://www.guangming.com.my/node/74757?tid=23


中國新聞網
馬來西亞政府將檢討是否興建核電廠
3/16/2011
http://www.chinanews.com/gj/2011/03-16/2911324.shtml


獨立新聞在線
學者探討核電政策 本刊本週四辦講座
3/21/2011
http://www.merdekareview.com/news_v2.php?n=17513


人民網
馬來西亞核電廠計劃遭國內質疑
5/06/2010
http://energy.people.com.cn/GB/11530905.html


當今大馬
中華總商會表態反對核電計劃
3/21/2011
http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/159217


正報
馬來西亞檢討 是否興建核電
3/21/2011
http://www.chengpou.com.mo/news/2011/3/21/11161.html


台灣經濟部能源局
2011年06月能源報導－國際能源透視
http://energymonthly.tier.org.tw/outdatecontent.asp?ReportIssue=201106&Page=26&keyword=


Free Malaysia Today
Soi Lek, Gerakan urge govt to relook nuclear plans
3/14/2011
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/2011/03/14/soi-lek-gerakan-urge-govt-to-relook-nuclear-plans/

Fukushima lays bare Japanese media's ties to top

Fukushima lays bare Japanese media's ties to top
By DAVID MCNEILL
Special to The Japan Times

Sunday, Jan. 8, 2012
SUNDAY TIMEOUT


Is the ongoing crisis surrounding the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant being accurately reported in the Japanese media?


Official lines: Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano on April 17, 2011, during his first visit to Fukushima after the disasters triggered by March 11's Great East Japan Earthquake. 


No, says independent journalist Shigeo Abe, who claims the authorities, and many journalists, have done a poor job of informing people about nuclear power in Japan both before and during the crisis — and that the clean-up costs are now being massively underestimated and underreported.


"The government says that as long as the radioactive leak can be dammed from the sides it can be stopped, but that's wrong," Abe insists. "They're going to have to build a huge trench underneath the plant to contain the radiation — a giant diaper. That is a huge-scale construction and will cost a fortune. The government knows that but won't reveal it."


The disaster at the Fukushima plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) again revealed one of the major fault lines of Japanese journalism — that between the mainstream media and the mass-selling weeklies and their ranks of freelancers.


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The mainstream media has long been part of the press-club system, which funnels information from official Japan to the public. Critics say the system locks the country's most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources, and discourages them from investigation or independent lines of analysis.


Once the crisis began, it was weekly Japanese magazines that sank their teeth into the guardians of the so-called nuclear village — the cozy ranks of polititicians, bureaucrats, academics, corporate players and the media who promote nuclear power in this country.


Shukan Shincho dubbed Tepco's management "war criminals." Shukan Gendai named and shamed the most culpable of Japan's goyō gakusha (unquestioning pronuclear scientists; aka academic flunkies).


Meanwhile, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper's well-respected weekly magazine AERA revealed that local governments manipulated public opinion in support of reopening nuclear plants. The same magazine's now-famous March 19, 2011, cover story showing a masked nuclear worker and the headline "Radiation is coming to Tokyo" was controversial enough to force an apology and the resignation of at least one columnist (though the headline was in fact correct).


Others explored claims of structural bias in the mainstream press.


Japan's power-supply industry, collectively, is Japan's biggest advertiser, spending ¥88 billion (more than $1 billion) a year, according to the Nikkei Advertising Research Institute. Tepco's ¥24.4 billion alone is roughly half what a global firm as large as Toyota spends in a year.


Many journalists were tied to the industry in complex ways. A Yomiuri Shimbun science writer was cited in "Daishinsai Genpatsu Jiko to Media" ("The Media and the Nuclear Disaster"; Otsuki Shoten, 2011) as working simultaneously for nuclear-industry watchdogs, including the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (sic). Journalists from the Nikkei and Mainichi Shimbun newspapers have also reportedly gone on to work for pronuclear organizations and publications.


Before the Fukushima crisis began, Tepco's advertising largesse may have helped silence even the most liberal of potential critics. According to Shukan Gendai, the utility spent roughly $26 million on advertising with the Asahi Shimbun. Tepco's quarterly magazine, Sola, was edited by former Asahi writers.


The financial clout of the power-supply industry, combined with the press-club system, surely helped discourage investigative reporting and keep concerns about nuclear power and critics of plants such as the aging Fukushima complex and Chubu Electric Power Co.'s Hamaoka facility in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, which sits astride numerous faults, well below the media radar.


Throughout the Fukushima crisis, the mainstream media has relied heavily on pronuclear scientists' and Tepco's analyses of what was occurring. After the first hydrogen blast of March 12, the government's top spokesman, Yukio Edano, told a press conference: "Even though the reactor No. 1 building is damaged, the containment vessel is undamaged. ... On the contrary, the outside monitors show that the (radiation) dose rate is declining, so the cooling of the reactor is proceeding."


Any suggestion that the accident would reach Chernobyl level was, he said, "out of the question."


Author and nuclear critic Takashi Hirose noted afterward: "Most of the media believed this. It makes no logical sense to say, as Edano did, that the safety of the containment vessel could be determined by monitoring the radiation dose rate. All he did was repeat the lecture given him by Tepco."


As media critic Toru Takeda later wrote, the overwhelming strategy throughout the crisis, by both the authorities and big media, seems to be to reassure people, not alert them to possible dangers.


By late March, the war in Libya had knocked Japan from the front pages of the world's newspapers, but there was still one story that was very sought after: life inside the 20-km evacuation zone around the Fukushima atomic plant.


Thousands of people had fled and left behind homes, pets and farm animals that would eventually die. A small number of mainly elderly people stayed behind, refusing to leave homes that often had been in their families for generations. Not surprisingly, there was enormous global interest in their story and its disturbing echoes of the Chernobyl catastrophe 25 years earlier.


Yet not a single reporter from Japan's big media filed from inside the evacuation zone — despite the fact that it was not yet illegal to be there. Some would begin reporting from the area much later after receiving government clearance — the Asahi Shimbun newspaper sent its first dispatch on April 25, when its reporters accompanied the commissioner-general of the National Police Agency. Later, they would explain why they stayed away and — with the exception of government-approved excursions — why they continue to stay away.


Smoke signals: The leaking Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 20, 2011. Critics accuse Japan's mainstream media of failing to properly report the ongoing crisis. 


"Journalists are employees and their companies have to protect them from dangers," explained Keiichi Sato, a deputy editor with the News Division of Nippon TV.


"Reporters like myself might want to go into that zone and get the story, and there was internal debate about it, but there isn't much personal freedom inside big media companies. We were told by our superiors that it was dangerous, so going in by ourselves would mean breaking that rule. It would mean nothing less than quitting the company."


The cartel-like behavior of the leading Japanese media companies meant they did not have to fear being trumped by rivals. In particularly dangerous situations, managers of TV networks and newspapers will form agreements (known as hōdō kyōtei) in effect to collectively keep their reporters out of harm's way.


Teddy Jimbo, founder of the pioneering Internet broadcaster Video News Network, explains: "Once the five or six big firms come to an agreement that their competitors will not do anything, they don't have to be worried about being scooped or challenged."


Frustrated by the lack of information from around the plant, Jimbo took his camera and dosimeters into the 20-km zone on April 2 and uploaded a report on YouTube that scored almost 1 million views. He was the first Japanese reporter to present TV images from Futaba and other abandoned towns (though images from the zone, shot during government-approved incursions, later appeared on mainstream TV news programs).


"For freelance journalists, it's not hard to beat the big companies because you quickly learn where their line is," Jimbo said. "As a journalist I needed to go in and find out what was happening. Any real journalist would want to do that." He later sold some of his footage to three of the big Japanese TV networks: NHK, NTV and TBS.


Says Abe: "The government's whole strategy for bringing the plant under control will have to be revised. The evacuees will never be able to return. They can't clean up the radiation. Will the media report this? I'm waiting for that."

Germany’s nuclear endgame: the lessons

Germany’s nuclear endgame: the lessons
Paul Hockenos, 26 July 2011
opendemocracy


Subjects:International politics Democracy and government Civil society Germany europe democracy & power politics of protest


The historic decision by Germany’s government to end the country’s nuclear-energy programme is owed to the enduring vitality of the anti-nuclear movement. Paul Hockenos maps the implications for the rest of the world. 


About the author
Paul Hockenos is a Berlin-based journalist. He is editor of Internationale Politik-Global Edition and senior fellow of the World Policy Institute. He is the author of Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Routledge, 1993); Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars (Cornell University Press, 2003); and Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (Oxford University Press, 2008). 


Germany’s anti-nuclear movement is the poster-boy of its kind in Europe, even worldwide. Over the course of nearly forty years this potent, enduring campaign swayed German public opinion decisively against nuclear power. In June 2011, Germany became the first industrialised nation to commit to abandoning the atom as an energy source once and for all by 2022 - a move unthinkable without the unremitting pressure of Germany’s tenacious anti-nukes movement.


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The reactor meltdowns in Fukushima, Japan, following the tsunami of March 2011 forced the German government’s hand; but it was the popular distrust and solid arguments against nuclear technology that left chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative administration with no alternative but to abruptly reverse itself, and pledge to a future based on renewable sources.


By late spring 2011, anti-nuclear activists had convinced the overwhelming majority of Germans and the bulk of the political establishment - finally, even conservatives - of three major points. 


First, nuclear energy is unsafe. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima (as well as hundreds of smaller incidents) have confirmed beyond any doubt that the risks inherent in atomic-energy production are real and lethal. Second, there is not now, nor will there ever be, a solution to the problem of nuclear-waste storage. Third, the time of renewable-alternative energies has at last arrived - and nations that ignore it will miss out not only on clean, abundant sources of energy, but will also deprive their economies of profits and jobs.


All these points are applicable everywhere there are nuclear plants. In this sense, perhaps Germany’s groundbreaking shift is a harbinger of a nuclear-free world, one that simultaneously battles climate change and powers its factories with alternative sources. If Germany can do it, so can others, including the United States and China. But that will require more than merely following the German example. For Berlin’s plan to scrap nuclear power was a direct consequence of the efforts of the anti-nuke movement - and at present no other nation has anything comparable to it. In this sense its track record and best practices are vitally instructive for opponents of atomic technology everywhere.  


The spirit of Wyhl


There have been in broad terms seven vital elements in the German anti-nuclear movement’s potency and endurance. The first is that from the outset the campaign was decentralised and rooted in local, grassroots opposition. The earliest anti-nuclear protests coalesced in West Germany’s southwestern-most corner in the early 1970s. As reactors began to crop up in rural locations across Germany, so local inhabitants - resident farmers, church pastors, educators, and parent groups - began to look more closely at this supposed miracle technology plunked in their backyards without their say.


An example is a reactor intended for the hamlet of Wyhl, which lay between the progressive college town of Freiburg and France’s fertile Alsace region. The conservative, church-going community had tended vineyards and pressed grapes for centuries. Now they saw their livelihoods endangered by the towers. By 1975, over fifty locally organised citizens’ initiatives had emerged around Wyhl, and in neighbouring towns in France and Switzerland, to protest the reactor’s construction. As word of the rising resistance got out, the grape-growers were joined by students and left-wing faculty from Freiburg’s university. The mobilisation at Wyhl thus radiated from the central core of the local people rather than being imported from the elsewhere.


The second element is non-violent civil disobedience. The precedent here was set at Wyhl in February 1975, when demonstrators stormed and occupied the construction site. The troupe improvised a makeshift camp complete with communal kitchens, teach-ins, and direct democracy. In the end, the energy giant Badenwerk and the local authorities caved in, postponing construction indefinitely. The Wyhl insurgents had achieved a double success: challenging their vastly more powerful opponents, and creating a model for the anti-nuclear movement.    


The locally rooted, bottom-up character of the movement is still clearly evident in Germany’s more recent demonstrations, even when they attract as many as 250,000 protestors. This has been central to sustaining the momentum even through difficult years, such as the period of the “red-green” government (1998-2005) when the Social Democrat and Green coalition partners were negotiating a phasing out of nuclear power. The government eventually compromised by deciding to wind down nuclear power gradually over twenty-one years; this was sharply criticised by anti-nuke protesters, yet efforts to mobilise activists became much harder.


But activists continued to push the case, whose third element was to emphasise an issue that won’t disappear until the last reactor is closed: that there’s no solution for nuclear waste. The protests that continued, such as those at the Gorleben waste-storage site in northern Germany along the Elbe river, were sustained by local NGOs and the farmers of Gorleben. Nationwide groups, like x-tausendmal quer and Campact, focused their efforts on helping the Gorleben community to block - or at least delay - the incoming deliveries to Germany’s single repository.


The spirit of Wyhl also lives on in the movement’s fourth element, its un-ideological diversity. Germany’s urban leftists found at Wyhl common ground beyond their own ranks. “This diversity was - and still is - so important because it made it impossible for politicians and the energy lobbies to label the protestors as crazy, left-wing agitators”, explains Dieter Rucht, Germany’s leading expert on social movements. “They had to be taken seriously because they were the conservatives’ own constituency, upstanding folk with jobs and families who voted Christian Democrat.” For four decades, a single, familiar icon and message unified the anti-nuke movement: the smiling, red sun against a yellow background with the simple but powerful message - Atomkraft? Nein Danke! (Nuclear Power? No thank you!)


The green answer


In the wake of the victory in Wyhl, the anti-nuclear movement mushroomed across the country, its fiercest pockets of activism in out-of-the-way places with names like Kalkar, Brokdorf, Grohnde, and Neckarwestheim, where nuclear facilities were stationed or planned. Yet even though many demonstrations in the late 1970s gathered more than 100,000 - and were boosted enormously by the Three Mile Island disaster in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1979 - activists were unable to follow up on their success in Wyhl with similar victories. True, legal contests that cost the power companies millions of Deutschmarks; but the reactors hummed along, and Germany’s three main political parties backed nuclear power, including most of chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s ruling Social Democrats.


The answer to this stalemate was the Green Party, initially a hodge-podge of social-movement activists voicing their concerns in town and state legislatures. The fifth element is that the Greens wrote “no nukes” prominently on their banners and fought fiercely to advance the cause, from tiny village councils to the Bundestag in Bonn and the European parliament in Brussels. The Social Democrats and other parties eventually came around to their arguments, but the Greens were the pioneers.


The sixth element is that the Greens both represented the movement in legislatures and provided infrastructure and crucial logistical support, such as offices and copy-machines and access to nationwide public relations. Petra Kelly, one of the first Greens elected to the Bundestag, was prominent among those who gave the movement a recognisable face and even enabled it to reach across national borders and speak to an international audience, including in the United States. The anti-nuclear movement and the Greens, however, were never identical.


When the Greens entered national government for the first time in 1998, the majority of Germans were opposed to nuclear energy. The best the Greens could secure in discussion with their Social Democrat coalition partners was a phasing out of nuclear energy. The Green leaders promised that neither future governments nor the power companies could backtrack on the agreement; it was, they claimed, as good as written in stone. The Greens might even have believed this - but they were wrong.


By the time the Greens left power in 2005, the anti-nuke campaign had been laid low. With the conservatives’ return to power, the muscular energy lobbies of southern German were scoring points by arguing that nuclear energy was the answer to climate change. They claimed that Germany needed its own nuclear-power industry to avoid dependence on France’s nuclear energy and Russia’s gas. The renaissance of nuclear power in the United States and China seemed to reinforce them.   


The power of no


But the movement had a potent new asset. This was delivered by the law the Greens had pushed through in office, offering subsidies and tax-breaks to consumers and producers of renewable energies. The outcome was a booming cottage industry around solar-panels and wind-turbines, which added nearly 400,000 jobs to the German economy and transformed Germany into a leading exporter of alternative-energy technology.  


This entirely new approach was founded on the seventh element, the Greens’ and the movement’s forceful “argument that renewable energies translated into ‘green jobs’” (in the description of Sascha Müller-Kraenner, the Berlin-based Europe representative of the United States group, the Nature Conservancy). This line of attack was so convincing, notes Müller-Kraenner, that it even won over many Christian Democrats.


The eighth element of the movement was a new generation of activists in its fold, with organisations that reflected their diversity. Campact, for example, is based on the advocacy group MoveOn, which activists like Christoph Bautz had visited in the United States. “We were fascinated by the way they could mobilise people so quickly with the internet”, says Bautz. Campact has a 490,000-address email list that enables it to put together demonstrations like the one in Fukushima’s aftermath in a week’s time. It is also a platform for people to be engaged via the internet, through mass petitions, email campaigns, and blogs.


The nationwide group Ausgestrahlt focuses on supporting the network of smaller, local groups across the country with campaigning materials and ideas, enabling them with more clout. X-tausendmal quer specialises in blockades of nuclear-waste transports; another Gorleben-based group, Castor Shottern, takes civil disobedience a step further by sabotaging the railway tracks along which the waste transports run.


Germany’s scrapping of nuclear power was unthinkable without the pressure and persistence of the anti-nuke campaign. In other countries, the place to begin this rebellion is not at the top, but from below, like the Germans, in those localities directly affected by nuclear-power plants and waste-storage dumps. Until they say Nein Danke! to the power plants in their backyards, there’ll be no convincing anyone else. 

Vote Holds Fate of Nuclear Power in Taiwan

Vote Holds Fate of Nuclear Power in Taiwan
By ANDREW JACOBS
January 12, 2012
nytimes

TAIPEI, Taiwan — When voters here choose a president and a new legislature on Saturday, their decisions will also determine whether Taiwan pulls the plug on a state-backed nuclear power industry that provides the country with a fifth of its electricity.


Although the presidential race has mostly been about pocketbook concerns and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan’s relationship with China, the leading challenger has made the elimination of Taiwan’s reliance on nuclear energy a central plank of her campaign. Pollsters and analysts say that the challenger, Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party, has a good chance of unseating the incumbent, Ma Ying-jeou, whose party has long been a reliable backer of nuclear energy.



http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree



In recent months, Ms. Tsai has vowed to retire the island’s six aging reactors and has said that she would seek to mothball a problem-plagued nuclear plant that has been under construction since the late 1990s. The plant, whose price tag has nearly doubled to $9.3 billion, was supposed to begin operating this year, but further delays appear likely.


“After Fukushima, our society has realized that nuclear power is not only expensive but also unsafe,” Ms. Tsai said recently, referring to the nuclear disaster in Japan last March that contaminated a large area around the Fukushima Daiichi plant.


The repercussions from Fukushima have been pronounced in Europe, where the governments of Germany, Switzerland and Belgium have promised to abandon nuclear power in the coming decades. However, countries across Asia continue to embrace it. China has 28 plants under construction, and India is building seven reactors and has plans for 20 more. And despite its proximity to Japan, South Korea, with 21 active nuclear reactors, is moving forward on 18 more. Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are all actively seeking to join the nuclear-power club.


But Taiwan — an island devoid of oil, gas and coal reserves — appears to be losing its appetite for the atom. Last spring thousands of protesters in Taipei demanded an end to the construction of the latest plant, the Lungmen nuclear project, or Nuke 4. Soon afterward, one of Taiwan’s richest tycoons joined the antinuclear chorus: Chang Yung-fa, chairman of the Evergreen Group, one of the world’s largest shippers.


Opponents say that there are a number of active seismic faults across the island and that more than five million people in northern Taiwan live within an 18-mile radius of two nuclear plants. For the 23 million people living on an island the size of Maryland and Delaware combined, there would be few places to run in the event of a disaster.


“Taiwan is simply ill suited for nuclear energy,” said Tsui Shu-hsin, secretary general of the Green Citizens’ Action Alliance, which has been waging a lonely battle against atomic power.


Through the years Mr. Ma’s party successfully beat back efforts to kill the Lungmen project, but he has lately softened his stance. Adopting Ms. Tsai’s talk of a “nuclear-free homeland” at a news conference in November, Mr. Ma eased away from a government proposal to extend the life of the existing plants, which were built in the 1970s when Taiwan was led by the Kuomintang under martial law. He also insisted that Nuke 4 would become operational only if it met much stricter safety guidelines.


Environmentalists have been heartened by such pronouncements. “Before, no one was interested in talking about the problems of nuclear power, but now it feels like history and politics are on our side,” said Gloria Hsu, a professor of atmospheric sciences at National Taiwan University and a former chairwoman of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union.


Proponents of nuclear energy say all the talk of a nuclear-free Taiwan neglects one important detail: how to replace the power generated by the reactors. Taiwan produces about 1 percent of its energy supplies and relies on a mix of imports: oil from the Middle East, coal from China and Australia and natural gas from Indonesia and Malaysia.


Ms. Tsai speaks of increased conservation and of shifting the Taiwanese economy away from power-hungry manufacturing. Part of her “2025 Nuclear-Free Homeland Initiative” also calls for the construction of gas-fired turbines and an expanded reliance on solar and wind power.


But Wey Kwo-dong, an economics professor at National Taipei University, said none of those options could quickly replace the loss of nuclear power. “Taiwan has to import 98 percent of its energy needs, so I’m not sure where people expect to get their electricity from,” he said. “The issue has become so political, no one is considering the impact on Taiwan’s economy.”


Mia Li contributed research.


A version of this article appeared in print on January 13, 2012, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Vote Holds Fate of Nuclear Power in Taiwan.

Japan planning breast milk radiation tests

Japan planning breast milk radiation tests
By Kyung Lah, CNN
January 12, 2012 -


A doctor checks the level of radiation on a woman at a treatment centre in Nihonmatsu city on March 13, 2011.


STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Mothers in the Fukushima area had expressed concerns about the possible effects of radiation
A government study found traces of radioactive cesium in the breast milk of 7 mothers
Experts say the small amount posed no health risks to babies


Tokyo (CNN) -- Some new mothers in Japan may soon be adding radiation testing of their breast milk to their list of health checkups.


Government officials say they are considering widespread testing of breast milk samples of new mothers in Fukushima Prefecture, home of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.


The details have yet to be finalized, according to a spokesman at the prefecture, who declined to give his name as is customary in Japan. But the spokesman said the prefecture is working out a plan to obtain samples of the breast milk from new mothers in the region.


Mothers in the prefecture have publicly held protests, expressing outrage over possible health effects of radiation from the plant affecting their newborns. About 18,000 babies are born each year in the prefecture. About half of those babies, according to the government, are breastfed.

http://easss.com/baby

A survey conducted in May and June by Japan's national government found traces of radioactive cesium in the breast milk of seven of 21 mothers in Fukushima. Experts say the minute amounts posed no health risks to babies.


The new plan is one of the many safety measures that have been considered after the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011. The disaster killed more than 15,000 people in northeastern Japan and sent plumes of radioactive particles from the damaged nuclear power plant.

12 Nuclear Tourism Destinations: Not Your Typical Vacation

12 Nuclear Tourism Destinations: Not Your Typical Vacation
Thursday, January 12, 2012
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/photos/12-nuclear-tourism-destinations/not-your-typical-vacation


Mother Nature Network:
If you're looking for a unique vacation experience, skip the beach this year and check out some of the world's most notorious locations from the Atomic Age. 


http://easss.com/travel


A relatively new trend, nuclear tourism involves traveling to significant sites in atomic history. The headlines -- including those for Japan's Fukushima disaster in March 2011 -- make the concept controversial, but that's also what draws people in to learn more.

Radiation-Tainted Japanese Car Parts Confiscated At Russia's Far Eastern Border

Radiation-Tainted Japanese Car Parts Confiscated At Russia's Far Eastern Border
1/11/2012 


(RTTNews) - Russian police have confiscated dozens of car parts imported from Japan after they were found to be radiation-tainted.


The Far Eastern customs service in Vladivostok said in a press release on Wednesday that customs officers detected 34 'hot' automotive parts including chassis and engines in the first ten days of January alone.


Russia has been maintaining strict vigil at its borders against import of automobiles from Japan since its Fukushima nuclear power station suffered a series of nuclear meltdowns as a result of an earthquake in March last.


http://easss.com/cars


Several cars with radionuclide contamination traces were spotted at the border checkpoints since then, and those with excess radiation were not allowed to cross the border.


In December, a consignment of radioactive tires shipped from Japan was seized at Vladivostok.


Goods found to be radioactive upon arrival in Vladivostok are usually rejected, but a small portion is allowed into Russia after decontamination.



Russian police confiscate radioactive Japanese car parts
Jan 11, 2012
monstersandcritics


Moscow - Police in the Russian Pacific port city Vladivostok confiscated dozens of car parts contaminated by Japan's Fukushima-1 nuclear power accident, port authorities said Wednesday.


'In the first 10 days of January alone, Vladivostok customs officers detected 34 'hot' automotive parts including chassis and engines,' a statement from the Vladivostok customs office said.


The parts were irradiated as a result of a March nuclear power accident in Japan, according to the statement.
In December, a shipping container packed with of radioactive tyres from Japan was seized at Vladivostok. Dozens of Japanese automobiles contaminated by radiation arrived in the port in April and June, according to official statements.


Some of the Japanese cars were found to emit dangerous isotopes at six times safe levels.


Japan's Fukushima nuclear power station suffered a series of nuclear meltdowns as a result of an earthquake.


Goods found to be radioactive upon arrival in Vladivostok are usually rejected, but a small portion is allowed into Russia after decontamination.

Editorial: Gov't should promote renewable energy as myth of nuclear power's cheapness shattered

Editorial: Gov't should promote renewable energy as myth of nuclear power's cheapness shattered
Mainichi Japan 12/29/2011


"The cost of nuclear power generation is cheap" -- we have repeatedly heard such a line as part of the reasoning for promoting nuclear energy. 


The myth of the cheapness of nuclear power generation collapsed following the catastrophe at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.


http://easss.com/nuclear

A government panel set up in the wake of the nuclear disaster estimates that the cost of nuclear power generation now stands at a minimum of 8.9 yen per kilowatt hour -- 1.5 times higher than the figure presented by utilities and the government before the disaster. 


If the costs for decontaminating areas affected by radioactive materials, decommissioning the damaged reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant and compensating for damages emanating from the nuclear crisis soar further, the cost of nuclear power generation would be even higher.


Considering the fact that the costs of coal-fired power generation and liquefied natural gas (LNG)-fueled power generation stand at somewhere near 10 yen per kilowatt hour, respectively, the superiority that nuclear power generation had enjoyed in terms of "cost performance" can be said to have been shattered.


Even wind power generation and geothermal power generation could rival with nuclear power generation in terms of cost performance depending on conditions, while the cost of solar power generation is likely to become cheaper in 20 years time. 


The government should take this opportunity to proceed with full-scale measures to invest in and promote renewable energy sources, which had previously been shunned for their "high costs."


What makes the government panel's latest estimation significantly different from previous calculations is that the panel took into consideration the social costs emanating from nuclear power generation, such as accident risks, on top of the expenses for the construction, operation and maintenance of nuclear power plants as well as their fuel costs.


In hindsight, it was a mistake that we failed to take into account accident risks involving nuclear plants. 


It shows that the myths of the safety and the cheapness of nuclear power generation were closely intertwined with each other.


The government panel has also indicated that energy savings per household are tantamount to generating power and pointed to the potential of a dispersed power system, to which we should pay renewed attention. 


The panel's estimates should be indicating the feasibility of the government's policy of cutting down on nuclear power generation.


In the meantime, we should take heed of the fact that the figures currently presented are highly uncertain. Experts were sharply divided in their opinions over how nuclear accident risks should be evaluated when they were discussing how they should calculate the latest estimates. 


While some experts projected that the odds of such a serious accident as the Fukushima disaster happening were once every 100,000 years, their opinions are way too different from ordinary people's feelings considering the fact that we have seen three major nuclear accidents across the globe -- Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979, Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011 -- over the past several decades.


It should be noted that the government panel has given minimum estimates because it excluded accident probabilities from their estimates for nuclear accident risk-related costs. 


The panel has also indicated that the cost of the nuclear fuel cycle -- which the government describes as the core of Japan's nuclear energy policy -- is almost twice that of direct disposal. The nuclear fuel cycle program, albeit the large amount of money spent on it, should be reviewed from square one.


The panel's estimates should be examined by people from various quarters in order for Japan to come up with the best mix of energy policies. Those estimates should serve as the first step toward achieving such diverse energy policies.


Two new solar arrays in the Ogishima district of Kawasaki.


Huge wind power generators stand in the Aomori Prefecture village of Rokkasho with the nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the background. 

Nuclear watchdog members received donations from energy sector

Nuclear watchdog members received donations from energy sector
January 02, 2012
The Asahi Shimbun


One-third of Nuclear Safety Commission members on committees overseeing inspections of power plants and nuclear fuel received donations from companies and organizations affiliated with the nuclear energy sector, an Asahi Shimbun study has found.


The members of the NSC's examination committees were in their positions when the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant started on March 11.


The study found that two of five NSC commissioners and 22 of 84 NSC members received a total of about 85 million yen ($1.1 million) in such donations over a five-year period until fiscal 2010.


Haruki Madarame, the NSC chairman, was among those who received donations. However, he said the money did not affect any of the decisions he made related to nuclear safety.


At the same time, he acknowledged a need to disclose all such donations to the public to determine the propriety of such donations.


The other NSC commissioner who received donations was Seiji Shiroya. He also said the donations did not change what he said during inspections.


Eleven individuals received donations from nuclear plant manufacturers as well as from electric power companies and nuclear fuel manufacturing companies that are the subjects of safety inspections, the study found.


Although the individuals are not required to report on how they used the money, many told The Asahi Shimbun that the money covered travel expenses and work-related equipment and supplies.


The donations were uncovered through information disclosure requests and direct questioning of the universities where the individuals either graduated from or work at. In addition, research institutions affiliated with the NSC members were also interviewed.


The companies and industrial organizations made the donations to universities on condition the money be used for research and directed at specific professors.


Twenty of the examination committee members received at least a total of 60 million yen in donations even after they assumed their posts at the NSC, according to the study.


Madarame became NSC chairman in April 2010. Between 2006 and 2009, when he was a professor at the University of Tokyo, he received 4 million yen in donations from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd.


Between 2007 and 2009, Shiroya served as an examination committee member while also working as a professor at Kyoto University. During that period, he received 100,000 yen from Nuclear Fuel Industries Ltd., which comes under inspection by the NSC. He also received 3.1 million yen from a regional branch of Japan Atomic Industrial Forum Inc.


(This article was written by Satoshi Otani and Yusuke Nikaido.)

Japan may shut down all nuclear power plants by 2012

Japan may shut down all nuclear power plants by 2012
POWER UTILITY | Isabelle Ulanday, Japan
31 Oct 2011
AsianPower


Shocking news as no power plants being restarted after maintenance will see Japan off all Nuclear by June 2011.


Nobuo Tanaka, Former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, said in the recently concluded Singapore Energy Lecture that Japan’s power plants are in danger of stopping operations altogether.


“Out of 55 nuclear reactors, only 11 of them are running. No nuclear reactors have been allowed to restart since March 11. If this continues, all reactors will stop, and then Japan would have to import more oil and gas,” he said.


When asked when Japan’s power stations will be restarted, Tanaka said that restarting nuclear power is the most logical option for the country. “There’s so much concern about the public’s safety. Logically, if Japan is not restarting nuclear power it means $3 trillion more expenditure in fields. This is irrational so it should start very quickly towards early next year.”


He added that in IEA’s view, Japan should continue nuclear operations but with safer regulations.


Dr Nobuo Tanaka with Geoff Cutmore of CNBC

Gregory Charles Minor, 62, an Engineer Who Criticized Nuclear Power

G. C. Minor, 62, an Engineer Who Criticized Nuclear Power
By WOLFGANG SAXON
July 31, 1999


Gregory Charles Minor, one of three middle-management engineers who caused a stir when they quit the General Electric reactor division in 1976 to protest nuclear power, died on July 20 at his home in Telluride, Colo. He was 62.


The cause was leukemia, which had been diagnosed in early June, Jim Burch, a friend in Palo Alto, Calif., said.


Mr. Minor, Richard B. Hubbard and Dale G. Bridenbaugh resigned from the division of G.E. that built nuclear reactors, saying that they believed nuclear power presented a profound threat to mankind. 


http://easss.com/nuclear


All three were managing engineers who had spent most of their careers building reactors, and their defection galvanized anti-nuclear groups across the country.


''My reason for leaving,'' Mr. Minor declared, ''is a deep conviction that nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons now present a serious danger to the future of all life on this planet.''


In Congressional testimony, the three cited the possibility of human error and asserted that nuclear engineers had become so specialized that none of them could see the whole picture any longer. As a result, they said, no one was in control.


The three founded a consulting firm, MHB Technical Associates, in San Jose, Calif. For 20 years they conducted studies and testified on the safety, reliability, construction and economics of power plants.


Mr. Minor evaluated energy programs for Federal agencies, 13 states, the Governments of Sweden and Germany and public-interest groups around the world. 


MHB was technical adviser on the 1979 movie ''The China Syndrome,'' which was denounced by the nuclear industry but seemed prophetic when the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania experienced a partial meltdown that year.


A native of Fresno, Calif., Mr. Minor was a 1960 electrical engineering graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. He earned an M.S. degree at Stanford University in 1966.


He went to work for G.E. in 1960. While there, he managed an engineering group working on new designs for reactor controls, safety systems and control rooms.


Early this year he and Mr. Hubbard followed Mr. Bridenbaugh into retirement and closed their company. Mr. Minor's illness was diagnosed after a lengthy stay in France, and he opted against radiation and chemotherapy to spend his remaining time visiting family members and friends.


Mr. Minor is survived by a son, Mark, of Salida, Colo.; two daughters, Lisa Buckley of Soquel, Calif., and Tani Scheiner of Sebastopol, Calif.; two sisters, Sue Bird of Hilo, Hawaii, and Michelle Minor of Vancouver, B.C.; and six grandchildren. His marriage to Gayle Pat Minor, of Santa Cruz, Calif., ended in divorce.

Fukushima's recovery plan aims to scrap nuclear reactors

Fukushima's recovery plan aims to scrap nuclear reactors
Kyodo News  
December 28, 2011 16:01 FUKUSHIMA, Japan


The Fukushima prefectural government on Wednesday laid out a policy to scrap all 10 nuclear reactors in the prefecture in light of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The policy was incorporated in the prefecture's reconstruction plan, which is based on the idea of building a society free from dependence on nuclear power and requires the state and Tokyo Electric Power Co. to decommission six .......


http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/12/134028.html