Nuclear Free: April 2012

A confession of an ex-Tepco worker - Video
First broadcast on 25th November 2011

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The original Japanese video borrowed from LunaticEclipseKimura
(Part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ggzk6YZT5w
(Part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCHBpI3Jjzc

If you can, please send a thank you message to the Mayor of Tosashimizu city mayor, Akio Sugimura, being open and environmentally friendly. I think support and acknowledgement from the world would give him a sign that he is on the right track!
Domo Arigatou Gozaimasu (means 'Thank you very much' in Japan)
You could use the google translate if you want to cut & past your English message into your email.

The address is kankyou@city.tosashimizu.kochi.jp
http://www.city.tosashimizu.kochi.jp/section/shityou.html

I'm not a pro so if you find any translation or english mistakes, please let me know. I'll fix them.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The Fukushima Lie, ZDFzoom (Eng. Subtitles)

The Fukushima Lie, ZDFzoom (Eng. Subtitles)
Documentary by Johannes Hano, camera Heiko Käberich, Toby Marshall

ZDFzoom asks how it could come to this catastrophe, and how the Japanese nuclear bosses and government dealt with the crisis. Our research shows even before the catastrophe a network of energy criminals existed who kept serious mistakes and flaws secret to save costs. For decades many Japanese workers and top government officials are forced into silence for bringing up safety concerns. Insiders such as Kei Sugaoka, former safety engineer, speaks about the criminal practices of the company TEPCO.

http://zoom.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/9/0,1872,8235273_idDispatch:11369630,00.html
Subtitles by Jerry Sa, translation by Steven Muschalik

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Monday, April 9, 2012

Daya Bay Power Plant Contingency Plans - Herman Tsui

Taking notes
Herman Tsui says there are safety messages Hong Kong can take away from the Fukushima nuclear accident to bolster the effectiveness of contingency plans for a failure at the Daya Bay power plant
Apr 10, 2012
SCMP, Hong Kong

The major nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March last year raised questions again about the safety of nuclear power and contingency planning. With nuclear power plants nearby, Hong Kong is rightly concerned with the safety of these power plants and the adequacy of our contingency plan.

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The questions include: Was the Fukushima accident preventable? Should a major nuclear accident occur, what are the potential impacts on Hong Kong and what can be done to minimise them?

Recently, the government conducted a comprehensive review of the Daya Bay contingency plan. The key is that there are lessons learnt from the Fukushima accident available to improve contingency planning for Hong Kong.

Triggered by the "once-in-a-thousand-years" natural disaster, the Fukushima accident resulted in seriously damaged reactors, radiation releases and evacuation.

Despite the comments on the less than well-prepared emergency response, the consequences were reasonably controlled. (totally lie) Although some workers and nearby residents received radiation above the usual regulatory limits, the official reports confirmed that:

• No radiation casualties were reported by June 2011;
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2011/10/japan-nuclear-disaster-death-toll.html

• Of the 20,549 people who had worked on the site since March 11 last year, six workers received doses over 250 millisieverts;

•No harmful health effects were found in 9,747 residents near Fukushima by July 2011. Of these residents, 5,636 received within 1 mSv, which is a fraction of the global average radiation dose of 2.4 mSv per year from natural sources, and 10 received over 15 mSv, a level equivalent to six years of global average radiation dose from natural sources but much below the world maximum; (totally lie)

• The evacuation zone was 20 kilometres and some contaminated areas within a range of some 20 to 50 kilometres northwest of the plant were also evacuated.

Thus, despite the severity of the Fukushima accident, the general public's exposure to radiation was within safety limits. A 20-kilometre emergency planning zone appears to be appropriate, in accordance with international best practices and in view of the experience from Fukushima. However, due consideration should also be given to actions to mitigate the impact of an unlikely event of radioactive release extending beyond 20 kilometres.

Japan's Daily Yomiuri newspaper reported on February 5 this year that 573 deaths were classified as "disaster-related" as a result of the Fukushima accident. These deaths were not radiation casualties. They were caused by fatigue or the aggravation of a chronic disease due to evacuation. These added to the over 15,850 deaths caused by the natural disasters of the earthquake and tsunami.

A lesson learnt is that evacuation, particularly for the elderly and those suffering from chronic medical conditions, may present a higher risk.

Could the nuclear accident have been prevented in the first place? The scale of the natural disaster went well beyond what the design of the Fukushima plant had catered for. Although the safety measures worked to minimise the impact of the earthquake and tsunami, the accident could have been avoided if the plant had been upgraded to incorporate the latest understanding of the potential hazard (tsunami) and safety technology.

Over the last decade, evidence of much larger once-in-a-thousand-years tsunamis in the area has emerged. For example, there was the 8.3-magnitude Jogan earthquake in the year 869. A 2008 study revealed the tsunami hazard to the plant had been severely underestimated.

Similarly for the Daya Bay nuclear power station, safety measures should be continually reviewed and upgraded, in line with the world's best practices.

The Daya Bay station is located in a geologically more stable region and is designed to withstand various natural hazards such as the effect of the biggest earthquake in history, plus a margin.

The Daya Bay station's pressurised water reactor is also different from the boiling water reactor of Fukushima. The Daya Bay's type of reactor more effectively contains radioactivity released from the reactor cooling system than the Fukushima type, and the corresponding likelihood of a major-core-damage accident is thought to be 10 times less likely. Daya Bay has passive cooling equipment for the reactor as well as a passive sand filter, which could significantly reduce the amount of radioactivity released into the environment.

A nuclear power station's safety design has a direct effect on the severity of the consequences of an accident. Take exposure to the radioisotope iodine-131 as an example. Of the three severe nuclear accidents, Chernobyl released 10 times more iodine-131 than Fukushima, while Three Mile Island released about 100,000 times less than Fukushima.

The Daya Bay contingency plan should give due consideration to the specific safety characteristics of a plant. Our view is that the government should use whatever means available to support continued safety improvements of the power station. Furthermore, the government should ensure that information about the improvements, implemented and planned, is effectively transmitted to the public.

Despite the continuing effort of the nuclear industry to make nuclear power ever safer, there is still a chance of a nuclear accident. The government should make best use of the contingency plan and exercises to ensure the Hong Kong public understand how to respond in the event of a serious nuclear accident. The government should take any further lessons learnt from the Fukushima accident into consideration in planning as well as its review exercise to make the contingency plan most appropriate for our local situation.

Ir Dr Herman Tsui Yik-wai is senior vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Nuclear Society

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Fukushima Japan Floating windmills offer hope of ending nuclear reliance

Floating windmills offer hope of ending nuclear reliance
By CHISAKI WATANABE
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Bloomberg

A consortium backed by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is preparing to bolt turbines onto barges and build the world's largest commercial power plant using floating windmills off Fukushima Prefecture, tackling the engineering challenges of an unproven technology to cut reliance on nuclear power.

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Marubeni Corp., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Nippon Steel Corp. are among the developers erecting the 16-megawatt pilot plant. The project may be expanded to 1,000 megawatts, METI said, bigger than any wind farm fixed to the seabed or on land.

"Japan is surrounded by deep oceans, and this poses challenges to offshore wind turbines that are attached to the bottom of the sea," senior vice environment minister Katsuhiko Yokomitsu said last month. "We are eager for floating offshore wind to become a viable technology."

The world's third-largest economy is struggling to diversify its energy mix after last year's earthquake and tsunami crippled Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. A few countries — including Britain, the U.S. and South Korea — are testing windmills that float, a technology far more expensive than most fossil-fuel or renewable energies.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and its partners are positioning themselves for future contracts to develop gear that so far isn't used in commercial electricity production.

Capital expenditure is about $1.7 million a megawatt for an onshore wind project and $5.5 million a megawatt for offshore, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Statoil ASA has the largest floating project currently, a 2.3-megawatt "Hywind" turbine off the coast of Norway, which cost $29 million a megawatt, according estimates by Fraser Johnston, an offshore wind analyst for the agency in London, based on company data.

"Hywind is a 10-year project from the drawing board in 2001 to when we were done with the demo period last year," Morten Eek, a Statoil spokesman, said. "In a commercial phase, the costs will be significantly lower based on the experience from the demo project."

Statoil is currently considering two test parks off Scotland and the U.S. with three to five windmills each, potentially by 2016.

Japan "certainly has excellent offshore wind resources and huge potential to develop this sector," said Justin Wu, lead wind analyst for New Energy Finance in Hong Kong. "But offshore wind is significantly more expensive than onshore wind at the moment."

Japan, whose geography and earthquake risk have long shaped its economy, is lagging behind developed nations, including the United States, Germany and Spain, in wind energy. Wind supplied just 0.4 percent of Japan's electricity demand in 2010, according to the International Energy Agency Wind 2010 Annual Report.

Ranking as the world's fifth-largest carbon emitter, Japan is trying to elevate its wind-energy capacity from 2,500 megawatts, the 13th-highest among all nations, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.

Land-based wind energy development is limited by Japan's mountains, making offshore developments more viable. The depths of the oceans nearby creates a bigger potential for floating turbine technology, which is still in its infancy compared with the more conventional method of deploying fixed versions of the machines.

The turbines are mounted on a floating structure that allows them to generate electricity in water depths where bottom-mounted towers cannot be erected easily. The country aims to develop the floating offshore wind turbines for commercialization by March 2017.

The biggest challenge in erecting floating turbines offshore is ensuring the buoyancy mechanisms are stable, and getting fixed lines to the seabed, which can be extended to depths of 200 meters.

A so-called feed-in tariff program due to start in July that guarantees above market rates for clean energy including solar, wind and geothermal could boost the development of wind energy, analysts say.

"We believe Japan's sluggish wind market will experience a kick-start under the FIT," CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets analysts Penn Bowers and Dean Enjo said in a Feb. 20 report. "Historically, in countries that have implemented FIT schemes it is wind, not solar, that grows the most," it said, citing Germany and China as examples.

Japan's production of wind turbines and parts and maintenance services is forecast to grow from an estimated ¥300 billion a year currently to ¥500 billion in 2030, according to the Japan Wind Power Association.

The industry group has set a wind-power installation target of 50,000 megawatts by March 2051, including 17,500 megawatts and 7,500 megawatts in floating and fixed offshore wind respectively. That compares with the 49,000 megawatts of nuclear power, which is being debated by the government after the triple-meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 plant. The JWPA estimates Japan's potential for wind is 144,000 megawatts for onshore and 608,000 megawatts for offshore.

The government hasn't determined what rates they will earn. A delay in price setting may deter investments and put wind power at a disadvantage compared with solar because it takes longer to build a wind farm.

A new regulation due to take effect in October could also delay wind projects. Wind will be added to a list of power plants such as nuclear and thermal that will be subjected to environmental impact assessments to address concerns about noise and birds.

Such surveys can take as many as four years and cost developers an additional ¥100 million for a plant with about 10 turbines, according to Tetsuro Nagata, president of the wind association.

That also means wind developers may fail to take advantage of the first three years when feed-in tariffs are expected to be higher, he said in an interview.

"Even though the government may set high tariff prices, developers will be left unable to do anything" while conducting an assessment, Nagata said. "That is not fair."

The government is considering measures to simplify the process, said Kenji Kamita, an official at the Environment Ministry who oversees assessment of projects.

To increase wind capacity in a mountainous country, Japan is looking offshore, where wind speeds are faster and more stable.

"Japan has a weak position in onshore wind," METI's task force on new energy industries said in a report released March 12. "But the floating offshore technology is not yet established so this is an area we can aim for a comeback."

The environment ministry plans to set up a 2-megawatt floating offshore turbine in Nagasaki by June 2013. The project is being developed by Toda Corp. and Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd.

The Fukushima pilot project will have three floating turbines installed by March 2016 with plans to eventually expand the capacity to 1,000 megawatts in the region, according to METI. It has set aside ¥12.5 billion as the ceiling to fund the initial stages of the study.

METI has also been steadily increasing funding for offshore wind research and development, mainly for fixed turbines, from ¥200 million in 2008 to ¥5.2 billion this year.

For offshore wind farms, cooperation with local fishing industries is also key, said Chuichi Arakawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo who studies wind power.

"It all begins with having thorough discussions with local partners," he said.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Foods with excessive radiation under new rule found in 8 prefectures

Foods with excessive radiation under new rule found in 8 prefectures
Mainichi Japan
April 1, 2012

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Food items containing levels of radioactive cesium exceeding a new limit, to be enforced from Sunday, have been found in 421 instances in eight prefectures since January this year, a survey by the health ministry showed Saturday.

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The food items with levels exceeding 100 becquerels per kilogram of cesium were found in Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi, Yamagata, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Chiba prefectures in the survey conducted through March 21, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.

Of the 421 cases, about 80 percent involved seafood and river fishes, and the remainder involved shiitake mushrooms and the meat of wild animals such as boars and birds.

Almost all cases involving vegetables related to shiitake mushrooms.

The government will enforce new ceilings on Sunday, setting a limit of 100 becquerels per kg of cesium for regular food items such as meat, vegetables and fish, 50 becquerels for milk and infant food, and 10 becquerels for drinking water.

The figures compare with the present ceilings of 500 becquerels per kg for a broad category of regular food items and 200 becquerels for milk, dairy products and water.

In Fukushima, there were 285 instances of excessive radiation in food items, followed by Ibaraki with 36 cases and Tochigi with 29.