Old Soviet Nuclear Site in Asia Has Unlikely Sentinel: The U.S.

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The United States Defense Department has paid for aerial drones to spot intruders, and for motion detectors that signal when a person, or a horse or a car, crosses into restricted territory. The classified project aims to keep terrorists away from what the Soviets left behind in patches of earth and a warren of tunnels that they used for atomic testing: among other things, plutonium and highly enriched uranium that Western scientists fear could be used to build an improvised nuclear device.

Protecting this material has meant teasing out nuclear secrets that have been kept for decades. Russia is warily sharing archival material about Soviet-era tests, and the United States is paying to remove or secure weapons-grade material. Kazakhstan is providing the labor, but because it is not a nuclear power, its officials are forbidden from learning exactly what it is that they are guarding.

“People ask me, are we doing the right thing, closing access to the tunnels?” said Kairat K. Kadyrzhanov, general director of Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Center, which manages the test site. “And I say I do not know what is there, and I do not have the right to know.”

The edge of the Semipalatinsk Test Site is a two-hour drive from the nearest large city, across an expanse of dun-colored, featureless steppe.

In 1948, racing to break the American monopoly on nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union selected this stretch of land to test their own. Local villagers knew only that the earth quaked, making china shudder on the shelf; years later, charts showed radioactive plumes that settled over population centers.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, 20,000 to 30,000 troops withdrew from their positions, leaving 500 Kazakh soldiers to guard the site, Mr. Kadyrzhanov said.

Ever since then, the test site — or, specifically, the fissile material and fission products left there — has been a concern for the United States. The project has continued behind a curtain of secrecy, with a few exceptions; in 2003 Kazakh officials told a reporter for Science magazine about “Operation Groundhog,” in which plutonium-contaminated earth was paved with a two-meter-thick slab of steel-reinforced concrete to protect it from terrorists who might cart it away to use in a dirty bomb.

Officials from the Defense Department and the State Department would not comment. But cables published by WikiLeaks last year describe an urgent push to “prevent nuclear residue material from falling into terrorists’ hands,” as a top defense official put it in 2009. One describes it as “the most critical” of all the American-financed projects to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.

After above-ground testing was banned, the Soviets detonated 295 devices in 181 tunnels under the Degelen Mountains, according to a study published last year by Kazakhstan’s Institute for Radiation Security and Ecology. Each explosion consumed between 1 and 30 percent of the device’s fissile material, leaving the remaining fuel mixed with debris and melted rock underground, according to the study.

President Obama’s inauguration marked a “radical change of attitude” toward security at the site, and American officials demanded a fivefold acceleration in the work, Mr. Kadyrzhanov said. Meanwhile, Russia, which for years refused to share Soviet documents about the site, has been more forthcoming, he said.

“The danger that Russia is keeping something from us has been diminished,” he said.

With the Soviet collapse, poverty and disorder lapped at the edges of the Semipalatinsk Test Site, still littered with radioactive hazards.

Activity ended so abruptly that a nuclear device lowered into one tunnel in preparation for a test sat unexploded until 1995, when technicians managed to destroy it without creating a nuclear reaction, according to the National Nuclear Center.

View the original article here

Japan’s Nuclear Sites Raised U.S. Concerns, Cables Show

 

The cables from the United States Embassy in Tokyo were sent in 2006 and 2007, and recount warnings from American diplomats who visited Japanese nuclear plants and observed security drills. The Americans were raising concerns about Japan’s readiness for guerrilla-style attacks by groups like civilian terrorists or North Korean commandos.

In a cable dated Feb. 26, 2007, American officials expressed concern about the absence of armed guards at a nuclear facility in Tokaimura, north of Tokyo, which they described as “a major plutonium storage site.” But the Ministry of Science and Education, which oversees Japan’s nuclear sites, said “there was not a sufficient threat to justify armed police,” the cable said.

The Japanese explained that the site was protected by civilian guards, who cannot be armed under Japanese law, the cable said.

Other cables described the placement of fences, security cameras and motion detectors, and the readiness of Japan’s coast guard to protect nuclear plants near the ocean from seaborne attacks.

In the 2007 cable, the Americans also asked the ministry to conduct background checks of workers with access to sensitive areas of the Tokaimura site, as is standard practice in the United States. Ministry officials replied that while such checks were conducted “unofficially,” constitutional restrictions and privacy concerns prevented the government from making them routine.

While the cables noted that Japan was becoming more aware of threats to its nuclear facilities, they also faulted some countermeasures, particularly antiterrorism training drills, characterized as unrealistic.

A cable dated Jan. 27, 2006, describes an antiterrorism drill at the Mihama nuclear plant in central Japan as “a bit too scripted and perfect.” A cable dated Nov. 2 of the same year faults a drill at the Tokaimura facility at which participants had been given “advance copies of the scenario.”

 

Nuclear Agency Is Criticized as Too Close to Its Industry

 

The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs.

The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick — less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness — would be good enough.

Though no radioactive material was released, safety experts say that if enough pipes had ruptured during a reactor accident, the result could easily have been a nuclear catastrophe at a plant just 100 miles west of Chicago.

Exelon’s risky decisions occurred under the noses of on-site inspectors from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. No documented inspection of the pipes was made by anyone from the N.R.C. for at least the eight years preceding the leak, and the agency also failed to notice that Exelon kept lowering the acceptable standard, according to a subsequent investigation by the commission’s inspector general.

Exelon’s penalty? A reprimand for two low-level violations — a tepid response all too common at the N.R.C., said George A. Mulley Jr., a former investigator with the inspector general’s office who led the Byron inquiry. “They always say, ‘Oh, but nothing happened,’?” Mr. Mulley said. “Well, sooner or later, our luck — you know, we’re going to end up rolling craps.”

Critics have long painted the commission as well-intentioned but weak and compliant, and incapable of keeping close tabs on an industry to which it remains closely tied. The concerns have greater urgency because of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, which many experts say they believe was caused as much by lax government oversight as by a natural disaster.

The Byron pipe leak is just one recent example of the agency’s shortcomings, critics say. It has also taken nearly 30 years for the commission to get effective fireproofing installed in plants after an accident in Alabama. The N.R.C.’s decision to back down in a standoff with the operator of an Ohio plant a decade ago meant that a potentially dangerous hole went undetected for months. And the number of civil penalties paid by licensees has plummeted nearly 80 percent since the late 1990s — a reflection, critics say, of the commission’s inclination to avoid ruffling the feathers of the nuclear industry and its Washington lobbyists.

Although the agency says plants are operating more safely today than they were at the dawn of the nuclear industry, when shutdowns were common, safety experts, Congressional critics and even the agency’s own internal monitors say the N.R.C. is prone to dither when companies complain that its proposed actions would cost time or money. The promise of lucrative industry work after officials leave the commission probably doesn’t help, critics say, pointing to dozens over the years who have taken jobs with nuclear power companies and lobbying firms.

Now, as most of the country’s 104 aging reactors are applying for, and receiving, 20-year extensions from the N.R.C on their original 40-year licenses, reform advocates say a thorough review of the system is urgently needed.

The agency’s shortcomings are especially vexing because Congress created it in the mid-1970s to separate the government’s roles as safety regulator and promoter of nuclear energy — an inherent conflict that dogged its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission.

“It wasn’t much of a change,” said Peter A. Bradford, a former N.R.C. commissioner who now teaches at Vermont Law School. “The N.R.C. inherited the regulatory staff and adopted the rules and regulations of the A.E.C. intact.”

Mr. Bradford said the nuclear industry had implicitly or explicitly supported every nomination to the commission until Gregory B. Jaczko’s in 2005. Mr. Jaczko, who was elevated to chairman by President Obama in 2009, had previously worked for both Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat and longtime critic of the nuclear industry, and Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and current Senate majority leader who sought to block a nuclear waste repository in his state.

 

Japan Reaffirms Nuclear Energy Use

TOKYO — Japan remains committed to nuclear power despite the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, Prime Minister Naoto Kan indicated Sunday, as workers moved closer to repairing the crippled plant by opening the doors of a damaged reactor building.

The view on Sunday from an observation deck at the Hamaoka nuclear plant, which the government wants to shut down until protections can be built.

Japan's Prime Minister reaffirmed the country's commitment to nuclear energy on Sunday, although the Hamaoka plant near Tokyo will be temporarily shut down.

The move is intended to air out the building that houses Reactor No. 1 to ensure that radiation levels are low enough to allow workers to enter. The plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the procedure would release little radiation into the atmosphere because an air filtering system installed last week had already removed most of the dangerous particles.

Eight hours after the doors were opened, workers entered the building to test radiation levels. The next step is to begin replacing the reactor’s cooling system, which was destroyed by the tsunami on March 11.

The company has said it will take at least six months to stabilize the plant, in which three of the six reactors were damaged by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami. Hydrogen explosions spewed radiation into the atmosphere, causing the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine.

Despite the crisis in Japan, Mr. Kan indicated Sunday that his government was not rethinking the nation’s energy policy. There had been speculation that the government might seek to shut down more nuclear plants after Mr. Kan requested last week that the Hamaoka nuclear plant in central Japan be temporarily closed because of safety concerns.

Mr. Kan told reporters on Sunday that he would not seek to close any more of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors. He said the Hamaoka plant, 125 miles west of Tokyo, was “a special case” because it sat atop a major fault line. Government seismologists say there is an almost 90 percent chance of a major earthquake on the fault line within the next 30 years.

Critics have long warned of a possible accident at the Hamaoka plant, which is upwind of Tokyo. Mr. Kan asked that the plant be closed until a tsunami-resistant wall could be built and backup systems could be installed to strengthen the plant against earthquakes.

The Hamaoka plant’s operator, the Chubu Electric Power Company, accepted the prime minister’s request on Monday. The company’s board did not reach a decision at a meeting on Saturday, when some board members expressed concern about summer power shortages if the plant were shut down.

The utility company supplies power to central Japan, including Aichi Prefecture, the home of Toyota. In Tokyo, residents face the prospect of electricity shortages because of the loss of the power supplied by Fukushima Daiichi and other plants in earthquake-damaged northern Japan.

Despite the setbacks, Yoshito Sengoku, the deputy chief cabinet secretary, said Japan was not reconsidering its dependence on nuclear power, which supplies about a quarter of the nation’s electricity.

 

Nuclear Agency Is Criticized as Too Close to Its Industry

 

The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs.

The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick — less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness — would be good enough.

Though no radioactive material was released, safety experts say that if enough pipes had ruptured during a reactor accident, the result could easily have been a nuclear catastrophe at a plant just 100 miles west of Chicago.

Exelon’s risky decisions occurred under the noses of on-site inspectors from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. No documented inspection of the pipes was made by anyone from the N.R.C. for at least the eight years preceding the leak, and the agency also failed to notice that Exelon kept lowering the acceptable standard, according to a subsequent investigation by the commission’s inspector general.

Exelon’s penalty? A reprimand for two low-level violations — a tepid response all too common at the N.R.C., said George A. Mulley Jr., a former investigator with the inspector general’s office who led the Byron inquiry. “They always say, ‘Oh, but nothing happened,’?” Mr. Mulley said. “Well, sooner or later, our luck — you know, we’re going to end up rolling craps.”

Critics have long painted the commission as well-intentioned but weak and compliant, and incapable of keeping close tabs on an industry to which it remains closely tied. The concerns have greater urgency because of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, which many experts say they believe was caused as much by lax government oversight as by a natural disaster.

The Byron pipe leak is just one recent example of the agency’s shortcomings, critics say. It has also taken nearly 30 years for the commission to get effective fireproofing installed in plants after an accident in Alabama. The N.R.C.’s decision to back down in a standoff with the operator of an Ohio plant a decade ago meant that a potentially dangerous hole went undetected for months. And the number of civil penalties paid by licensees has plummeted nearly 80 percent since the late 1990s — a reflection, critics say, of the commission’s inclination to avoid ruffling the feathers of the nuclear industry and its Washington lobbyists.

Although the agency says plants are operating more safely today than they were at the dawn of the nuclear industry, when shutdowns were common, safety experts, Congressional critics and even the agency’s own internal monitors say the N.R.C. is prone to dither when companies complain that its proposed actions would cost time or money. The promise of lucrative industry work after officials leave the commission probably doesn’t help, critics say, pointing to dozens over the years who have taken jobs with nuclear power companies and lobbying firms.

Now, as most of the country’s 104 aging reactors are applying for, and receiving, 20-year extensions from the N.R.C on their original 40-year licenses, reform advocates say a thorough review of the system is urgently needed.

The agency’s shortcomings are especially vexing because Congress created it in the mid-1970s to separate the government’s roles as safety regulator and promoter of nuclear energy — an inherent conflict that dogged its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission.

“It wasn’t much of a change,” said Peter A. Bradford, a former N.R.C. commissioner who now teaches at Vermont Law School. “The N.R.C. inherited the regulatory staff and adopted the rules and regulations of the A.E.C. intact.”

Mr. Bradford said the nuclear industry had implicitly or explicitly supported every nomination to the commission until Gregory B. Jaczko’s in 2005. Mr. Jaczko, who was elevated to chairman by President Obama in 2009, had previously worked for both Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat and longtime critic of the nuclear industry, and Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and current Senate majority leader who sought to block a nuclear waste repository in his state.

View the original article here

Japan Asks Another Nuclear Plant to Shut Down Its Reactors

The plant is 120 miles southwest of Tokyo, about 40 miles closer than the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been spewing radioactive material since a magnitude-9.0 quake and a tsunami devastated the country’s northeast coast on March 11.

Safety activists say the problems at the plant include inadequate protections against tsunamis; its operator has said it relies on sand dunes to block waves.

Mr. Kan’s decision to suspend operations at the Hamaoka plant was made relatively quickly by the standards in Japan, where leaders generally prefer to build a consensus before announcing such policy changes.

But Mr. Kan has faced withering criticism for his handling of the Fukushima disaster, including accusations that a slow government response in the early hours of the crisis made it worse.

In explaining his decision on Friday, he said it was “the result of considering the tremendous repercussions a major accident at Hamaoka would have on the entire Japanese society.”

The government’s own experts have estimated that there is a close to a 90 percent chance of an earthquake of about magnitude 8.0 hitting the area within the next 30 years. Much less severe earthquakes have damaged at least one nuclear plant in Japan in recent years.

In 2009, Hamaoka’s operator, the Chubu Electric Power Company, decommissioned the site’s two oldest reactors after deciding that upgrading them to withstand earthquake risks would be too costly. Those reactors were built in the 1970s, around the same time as those at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The power company argued that the remaining three reactors, built in the 1980s, were safe enough to withstand a major earthquake. But the crisis at the Fukushima plant has heightened concerns over the risks posed by quakes and tsunamis to the nearly 50 nuclear reactors in operation in Japan.

Mr. Kan said that Chubu Electric would be asked to strengthen its defenses before a restart could be authorized. The company said that constructing an adequate sea wall would take about two years.

“More than anything, I have the safety and security of the Japanese people in mind,” Mr. Kan said.

To brace for any shortfall in electricity, he called for Japanese citizens to do even more to conserve energy.

Offices and factories in eastern Japan have already dimmed lights and altered operating hours after the government requested that they reduce their energy use by 15 percent this summer. The three operating reactors at Hamaoka have a combined capacity of about 3,500 megawatts, or about 7 percent of Japan’s nuclear power generating capacity.

“I am certain that with an even stronger energy-saving effort by both local residents and the entire Japanese nation, we will overcome the power shortage,” he said.

One of the three remaining reactors at Hamaoka had already been shut down for scheduled inspections. The company released a statement late Friday saying it would “promptly consider” Mr. Kan’s request.

Environmental groups, including Greenpeace, quickly lauded Mr. Kan’s decision and urged the Japanese government to consider halting operations at all of the reactors in Japan, which is prone to earthquakes.

“Greenpeace welcomes Prime Minister Kan’s request to close Hamaoka, one of the most dangerous nuclear reactors in Japan,” said Junichi Sato, the organization’s executive director in Japan.

“The government must continue to close and decommission existing plants and cancel all new reactors,” he said. “Only then can the Japanese people feel their government is truly putting their safety first.”

But Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist at Kobe University who has long argued for more stringent seismic standards for Japan’s nuclear power plants, said that simply halting operations at the Hamaoka plant was not enough. The reactors would remain vulnerable to quakes and tsunamis while they cooled down, he said, as would the spent fuel rods stored at the plant. “Work must be carried out immediately to make sure the plant is protected,” he said.

He also said that the government had moved too slowly in recognizing the risks posed by earthquakes to the country’s nuclear reactors. In 2006, Mr. Ishibashi urged a government committee on which he served to adopt more stringent earthquake guidelines for nuclear power operators. He later resigned when his calls were ignored.

“If Japan had faced up to the dangers earlier, we could have prevented Fukushima,” he said.

At the Fukushima plant, workers have been struggling to bring the plant’s damaged reactors and fuel rod pools under control since the March 11 tsunami knocked out all power to the plant and shut down crucial cooling systems. Three of the reactors subsequently overheated and suffered hydrogen explosions. The plant is operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known here as Tepco.

Tepco has said it will take at least six to nine months to bring all of the plant’s reactors to a stable state known as a cold shutdown.

Another nuclear plant operated by Tepco, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station on the coast of the Sea of Japan, was damaged in a magnitude-6.6 earthquake in 2007. Fire broke out at one of the reactors, though it was quickly put out, and Tepco officials said there had not been a widespread release of radioactive material.

The plant was shut down for almost two years for repairs and inspections. Since then, four of its seven reactors have been restarted.

View the original article here

Nuclear Agency Is Criticized as Too Close to Its Industry

The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs.

The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick — less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness — would be good enough.

Though no radioactive material was released, safety experts say that if enough pipes had ruptured during a reactor accident, the result could easily have been a nuclear catastrophe at a plant just 100 miles west of Chicago.

Exelon’s risky decisions occurred under the noses of on-site inspectors from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. No documented inspection of the pipes was made by anyone from the N.R.C. for at least the eight years preceding the leak, and the agency also failed to notice that Exelon kept lowering the acceptable standard, according to a subsequent investigation by the commission’s inspector general.

Exelon’s penalty? A reprimand for two low-level violations — a tepid response all too common at the N.R.C., said George A. Mulley Jr., a former investigator with the inspector general’s office who led the Byron inquiry. “They always say, ‘Oh, but nothing happened,’?” Mr. Mulley said. “Well, sooner or later, our luck — you know, we’re going to end up rolling craps.”

Critics have long painted the commission as well-intentioned but weak and compliant, and incapable of keeping close tabs on an industry to which it remains closely tied. The concerns have greater urgency because of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, which many experts say they believe was caused as much by lax government oversight as by a natural disaster.

The Byron pipe leak is just one recent example of the agency’s shortcomings, critics say. It has also taken nearly 30 years for the commission to get effective fireproofing installed in plants after an accident in Alabama. The N.R.C.’s decision to back down in a standoff with the operator of an Ohio plant a decade ago meant that a potentially dangerous hole went undetected for months. And the number of civil penalties paid by licensees has plummeted nearly 80 percent since the late 1990s — a reflection, critics say, of the commission’s inclination to avoid ruffling the feathers of the nuclear industry and its Washington lobbyists.

Although the agency says plants are operating more safely today than they were at the dawn of the nuclear industry, when shutdowns were common, safety experts, Congressional critics and even the agency’s own internal monitors say the N.R.C. is prone to dither when companies complain that its proposed actions would cost time or money. The promise of lucrative industry work after officials leave the commission probably doesn’t help, critics say, pointing to dozens over the years who have taken jobs with nuclear power companies and lobbying firms.

Now, as most of the country’s 104 aging reactors are applying for, and receiving, 20-year extensions from the N.R.C on their original 40-year licenses, reform advocates say a thorough review of the system is urgently needed.

The agency’s shortcomings are especially vexing because Congress created it in the mid-1970s to separate the government’s roles as safety regulator and promoter of nuclear energy — an inherent conflict that dogged its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission.

“It wasn’t much of a change,” said Peter A. Bradford, a former N.R.C. commissioner who now teaches at Vermont Law School. “The N.R.C. inherited the regulatory staff and adopted the rules and regulations of the A.E.C. intact.”

Mr. Bradford said the nuclear industry had implicitly or explicitly supported every nomination to the commission until Gregory B. Jaczko’s in 2005. Mr. Jaczko, who was elevated to chairman by President Obama in 2009, had previously worked for both Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat and longtime critic of the nuclear industry, and Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and current Senate majority leader who sought to block a nuclear waste repository in his state.

 

Japan to Halt 3 Nuclear Reactors Over Quake Fears

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在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

TOKYO (AP) — Japan's prime minister said Friday he instructed a utility to halt all three reactors at a power plant in central Japan because of safety concerns in the event of a major earthquake and tsunami.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the measure was to ensure safety, citing experts' forecast of a 90 percent probability of a major quake striking the central region within 30 years.

The government has asked operator Chubu Electric Power Co. to suspend two running reactors and a third shut for a regular inspection at its coastal Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka, west of Tokyo.

"If an accident occurs at Hamaoka, it could create serious consequences," Kan said.

Kan's action followed a safety review of all Japan's nuclear plants after the radiation crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that also left more than 25,000 people dead and missing on the northeast coast.

The Hamaoka plant is the only one where operations have been ordered halted until the utility can implement safety measures. The plant is about 155 miles (250 kilometers) west of Tokyo.

The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant lost its power and cooling systems, triggering fires, explosions and radiation leaks in the world's second-worst nuclear accident.

Radiation leaks from the Fukushima plant have forced 80,000 people living within a 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius to leave their homes. Many are staying in gymnasiums and community centers.

Residents in Shizuoka have long demanded suspension of the Hamaoka reactors.

View the original article here

Drumbeat of Nuclear Fallout Fear Doesn’t Resound With Experts

The fear is unwarranted, experts say. People in Japan near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have reason to worry about the consequences of radiation leaks, scientists say, and some reactor workers, in particular, may suffer illness. But outside of Japan, the increase is tiny, compared with numerous other sources of radiation, past and present.

Experts say that humans are bombarded by so much radiation from so many other sources, including many natural ones, that the uptick from Japan disappears as a cause of concern the big picture is considered.

That perspective suggests a human population and a global environment in which exposure to radiation is constant and significant. For example, people around the globe were exposed to radioactive fallout from hundreds of nuclear bomb test explosions in the atmosphere during the cold war. Today, medical patients choose to be exposed to regular doses of radiation from millions of X-rays and CT scans.

In the world’s oceans, thousands of decomposing drums of radioactive waste pose bigger dangers than the relatively small amounts of radioactive water released from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. And natural radiation from rocks, cosmic rays and other aspects of the environment, experts say, represents the biggest factor of all — far bigger than all the man-made emissions, including the current increase from the crippled Japanese reactors.

“It disappears as a contributor to population radiation doses,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist who advised the Clinton administration and now teaches at Princeton University. But the fear of radiation is different. “Somehow,” Dr. von Hippel added, “nuclear things get stigmatized relative to their statistical risks.”

After the Japanese disaster began on March 11, blogs warned of government conspiracies to cover up radiation dangers, and public-interest groups sounded alarms.

Dr. Dale Dewar, executive director of Physicians for Global Survival, a group that advocates the abolition of nuclear arms, said the accident meant future generations would live in a world with higher levels of background radiation.

“Your hair won’t fall out,” she told an interviewer at the Vancouver Sun. “But ‘No immediate danger’ is an easy way for the nuclear industry to duck the long-term effects.”

Even Washington got the jitters. On March 15, four days after the disaster’s start, the surgeon general, Regina M. Benjamin, said it was no overreaction for Americans to stock up on iodine pills. “It’s a precaution,” Dr. Benjamin told a television interviewer.

Her office backpedaled two days later, after President Obama said Americans needed to take no protective measures.

“Most people don’t have a good handle on the risks,” Dr. Fred A. Mettler Jr., professor of radiology at the University of New Mexico and the American representative to a United Nations panel on radiation assessment, said in an interview. “They don’t know the magnitude of the sources, so they don’t know how to put the risks in perspective.”

The jargon doesn’t help. Radiation is measured in obscure units that change significantly depending on the strength of the radiation and whether the units characterize radioactivity itself, or the interaction of the radiation with the human body. Radioactive sources are said to emit curies or becquerels of radiation, but the effect on living things is measured in sieverts or rem (for “roentgen equivalent man” — it’s true).

Given what may appear to be chaotic or incomplete information, people may base their perceptions of atomic risk on a volatile mix of sensational reports and instincts.

“Risk resides mostly as a feeling,” said Paul Slovic, a pioneer of nuclear psychology at the University of Oregon. “It’s a quick gut reaction often triggered by an image,” especially ones in the movies and on television.

Dr. Mettler said, “Children in the United States are inundated with all kinds of nonsense on television from the time they are 6 months old.” Cartoon characters like the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man and Homer Simpson, he said, all of whom experience scientifically impossible but highly entertaining effects of radiation, tend to provide most of the nation’s “radiation biology lessons.”

Dr. Slovic cited medical radiation as an example of variability in risk perception. Many experts see the public as getting a potentially risky overdose. But the public tends to think otherwise, he said. “We’re very tolerant of exposure,” Dr. Slovic said in an interview. “We want it or need it, so we feel it’s a strongly beneficial technology. And so the sense of risk is depressed.”

 

Life in Limbo for Japanese Near Nuclear Plant

  Kyodo News, via Associated PressTakaharu Ando, the chief of the National Police Agency, with reporters last Monday in an evacuated Japanese town.

TENEI, Japan — For seven generations, Yoshitoshi Sewa and his ancestors have tilled this farm in a gently curving valley filled with green rice paddies. But now he will not let his young grandchildren play outside their tile-roofed home for fear of an invisible and potentially long-lasting threat, radiation.

Yoshitoshi Sewa, a farmer, in his home in Tenei, 40 miles from Japan's stricken nuclear plant. He will not let his grandchildren play outdoors.

“Even if the government says it’s O.K., no one here wants to take the risk of radiation,” said Mr. Sewa, 63, whose farm sits about 40 miles west of Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant — well beyond the zone where residents have been told to leave or remain indoors.

Since an earthquake and tsunami on March 11 crippled the plant, spewing radioactive particles into the air and sea, Tokyo has ordered the evacuation of a 12-mile radius, and some villages beyond that. But those living outside the evacuation zones have felt left in limbo, exposed to levels of radiation that are several times the normal level, though not high enough to cause observable health risks. Still, experts admit that there is a lack of knowledge about the health effects of lower doses of radiation, especially over an extended period of time. Japan’s plant has been dispersing radioactive material for nearly two months and counting, far longer than the 10 days during which the Chernobyl plant released a much larger burst of radioactive particles in 1986.

It is difficult for Japanese experts to even agree on clear-cut numerical levels of radiation for deciding which areas are safe to inhabit — decisions that might affect hundreds of thousands of people living in hundreds of square miles of this densely population nation.

“This is an unprecedented situation, to which none of our textbooks apply,” said Shigenobu Nagataki, former chairman of the Nagasaki-based Radiation Effects Research Foundation, which studied victims of the World War II atomic bombings. “Decisions are being made now that will have a huge impact on Japan’s future.”

The disagreements came to the forefront on Friday, when a government adviser on radiation safety quit, calling on Japan to lower the permissible radiation dose of 20 millisieverts per year that the Education Ministry has set for schools for younger children, including elementary and junior high, in affected areas.

Other Japanese critics point out that the figure comes from the International Commission on Radiological Protection, which sets it as the upper limit of radiation exposure in inhabited areas after a nuclear accident, and thus too high for schools because children are more vulnerable. Government officials and some experts retort that the level was still low enough not to pose a health risk. They also said that radiation levels would fall over the next two months with the disappearance of short-lived iodine 131, which accounts for about half of the radioactive material emitted by the plant. Other measures are being taken to clean up the remaining radioactive matter, mainly cesium 137, which can last for generations.

Acting on its own, the city of Koriyama, about 35 miles west of the plant, will change the topsoil at 15 elementary schools where the city detected radiation doses above 20 millisieverts per year, and at 13 kindergartens where it found slightly lower radiation levels.

The Education Ministry has also found similarly high levels At 13 elementary schools, kindergartens and preschools in Fukushima Prefecture. In the city of Fukushima, 35 miles northwest of the plant, some schools have barred students from playing outside while at school. At least one school also requires children to wear hats and surgical masks, and to avoid contact with playground equipment.

The Education Ministry’s guidelines take into account the child’s exposure to radiation during the entire day, both at home and school, and experts say clean-up will have to happen all over towns, not just on school grounds. The radiation levels at schools is just one of the many decisions that Japan must make, whether on farm produce or the safety of entire towns. In Fukushima Prefecture, where the nuclear plant is located, the authorities conduct 50 tests a day on vegetables and milk, as much to reassure consumers as to find contaminated products.

Even so, Mr. Sewa, the farmer in Tenei, said that he had to destroy this spring’s crop of 880 pounds of cucumbers because he could find no buyers.

“Fukushima products are seen as tainted,” he said.

Martin Fackler reported from Tenei, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.

 

Life in Limbo for Japanese Near Nuclear Plant

  Kyodo News, via Associated PressTakaharu Ando, the chief of the National Police Agency, with reporters last Monday in an evacuated Japanese town.

TENEI, Japan — For seven generations, Yoshitoshi Sewa and his ancestors have tilled this farm in a gently curving valley filled with green rice paddies. But now he will not let his young grandchildren play outside their tile-roofed home for fear of an invisible and potentially long-lasting threat, radiation.

Yoshitoshi Sewa, a farmer, in his home in Tenei, 40 miles from Japan's stricken nuclear plant. He will not let his grandchildren play outdoors.

“Even if the government says it’s O.K., no one here wants to take the risk of radiation,” said Mr. Sewa, 63, whose farm sits about 40 miles west of Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant — well beyond the zone where residents have been told to leave or remain indoors.

Since an earthquake and tsunami on March 11 crippled the plant, spewing radioactive particles into the air and sea, Tokyo has ordered the evacuation of a 12-mile radius, and some villages beyond that. But those living outside the evacuation zones have felt left in limbo, exposed to levels of radiation that are several times the normal level, though not high enough to cause observable health risks. Still, experts admit that there is a lack of knowledge about the health effects of lower doses of radiation, especially over an extended period of time. Japan’s plant has been dispersing radioactive material for nearly two months and counting, far longer than the 10 days during which the Chernobyl plant released a much larger burst of radioactive particles in 1986.

It is difficult for Japanese experts to even agree on clear-cut numerical levels of radiation for deciding which areas are safe to inhabit — decisions that might affect hundreds of thousands of people living in hundreds of square miles of this densely population nation.

“This is an unprecedented situation, to which none of our textbooks apply,” said Shigenobu Nagataki, former chairman of the Nagasaki-based Radiation Effects Research Foundation, which studied victims of the World War II atomic bombings. “Decisions are being made now that will have a huge impact on Japan’s future.”

The disagreements came to the forefront on Friday, when a government adviser on radiation safety quit, calling on Japan to lower the permissible radiation dose of 20 millisieverts per year that the Education Ministry has set for schools for younger children, including elementary and junior high, in affected areas.

Other Japanese critics point out that the figure comes from the International Commission on Radiological Protection, which sets it as the upper limit of radiation exposure in inhabited areas after a nuclear accident, and thus too high for schools because children are more vulnerable. Government officials and some experts retort that the level was still low enough not to pose a health risk. They also said that radiation levels would fall over the next two months with the disappearance of short-lived iodine 131, which accounts for about half of the radioactive material emitted by the plant. Other measures are being taken to clean up the remaining radioactive matter, mainly cesium 137, which can last for generations.

Acting on its own, the city of Koriyama, about 35 miles west of the plant, will change the topsoil at 15 elementary schools where the city detected radiation doses above 20 millisieverts per year, and at 13 kindergartens where it found slightly lower radiation levels.

The Education Ministry has also found similarly high levels At 13 elementary schools, kindergartens and preschools in Fukushima Prefecture. In the city of Fukushima, 35 miles northwest of the plant, some schools have barred students from playing outside while at school. At least one school also requires children to wear hats and surgical masks, and to avoid contact with playground equipment.

The Education Ministry’s guidelines take into account the child’s exposure to radiation during the entire day, both at home and school, and experts say clean-up will have to happen all over towns, not just on school grounds. The radiation levels at schools is just one of the many decisions that Japan must make, whether on farm produce or the safety of entire towns. In Fukushima Prefecture, where the nuclear plant is located, the authorities conduct 50 tests a day on vegetables and milk, as much to reassure consumers as to find contaminated products.

Even so, Mr. Sewa, the farmer in Tenei, said that he had to destroy this spring’s crop of 880 pounds of cucumbers because he could find no buyers.

“Fukushima products are seen as tainted,” he said.

Martin Fackler reported from Tenei, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.

 

Demonstrators in Germany Demand End of Nuclear Power

BERLIN — An estimated 120,000 people demonstrated across Germany on Monday, protest organizers said, demanding an end to nuclear power and increasing pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to speed up the closing of the country’s 17 nuclear plants.

Demonstrations that take place each year over the Easter holidays have tended in the past to be pacifist, for instance, calling for the end of the war in Afghanistan. But this year, because of the 25th anniversary of the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, in addition the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, the rallying theme was nuclear power.

Some of the biggest protests took place in the western state of Lower Saxony, where, according to the organizer’s spokesman, Peter Dickel, more than 20,000 demonstrators gathered near the Grohnde nuclear plant.

In the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, 17,000 protested at the Krümmel nuclear plant, Mr. Dickel said.

In Bavaria, which has three nuclear plants, more than 15,000 people gathered near the Grafenrheinfeld power plant and thousands of others marched toward the Isar 1 and Isar 2 plants. “We are many, we will be more and we will not keep quiet until the last nuclear power plant is shut,” said Martin Heilig, an organizer of the demonstrations there.

Last month Mrs. Merkel imposed a moratorium on new nuclear plant construction. Seven of the oldest plants were temporarily closed, and the remaining 10 are undergoing security checks. She made it clear that she was going to reconsider her decision, made last year, to extend the life of the nuclear plants by an average of 12 years. “Japan had changed everything,” she said.

Mrs. Merkel has already set up two committees, one to consider how nuclear energy could be phased out earlier than the mid 2030s and the other to see what impact the end of nuclear power would have on energy prices. They are expected to complete their work by June.

Despite her U-turn on energy policy, the Greens party was swept into power in the state of Baden-Württemberg last month. It is the first time the Greens will head a state government. On Monday, Winfried Kretschmann, premier designate of the Green-led government in Baden-Württemberg, was putting the finishing touches to his coalition with the Social Democrats — thus ending 58 years of conservative government.

Stricter E.U. tests sought

Austria’s environment minister said safety tests for European nuclear plants must be mandatory and take into account the possibility of terror attacks, The Associated Press reported on Monday from Vienna.

European Union nations agreed last month to submit their plants to tests, but Nikolaus Berlakovich said Monday draft criteria for the tests do not go far enough and “must incorporate human influences such as plane crashes or terror attacks.”

 

Ghost Town Bears Witness to Lasting Nuclear Scourge

Twenty-five years ago, the world’s worst nuclear accident literally erupted at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.

Yet when a heedless experiment with fuel rods caused the No. 4 reactor at Chernobyl to blow, there was no public echo. No cellphones or social networks relayed the news, as they would today.

It took the official news agency TASS three days to acknowledge, in terse sentences, that there had been an accident.

In the end, the impact of Chernobyl proved too great even for the Soviet state apparatus. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, then the leader, was trying to open up his country and eventually used the enormity of the accident to get the Soviet media to tell a bit more of the dreadful truth.

For six weeks now, the unfolding calamity at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, stricken in a record earthquake and tsunami, has stirred memories of Chernobyl. In particular, the stream of changing information, soaring or plunging radiation levels and doubts about the openness of the Japanese operator and government recall the questions posed in 1986 by that unseen plume of radiation that eventually traveled westward around the world.

Images of the ghost town of Pripyat, once home to 50,000 people, reinforce the lesson learned anew in Japan: Humans can fashion both wonder and horror with technology.

Japan is wealthier and more cohesive than the Soviet Union was then, or Ukraine is now. But, as Japanese scarred by the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki know, money and comfort do not dispel the lingering effects of nuclear disaster.

Only after the radiation spewing from Chernobyl set off alarms at the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden, 1,200 kilometers, or about 750 miles, to the northwest, did Soviet officials even acknowledge an accident. Today, the Ukrainian authorities are vocal in pleading, at an international meeting in Kiev last week, for hundreds of millions of dollars for the next stage of the unceasing containment of Chernobyl: a new sarcophagus to reinforce the now cracked one built by tens of thousands of workers in 1986.

Outside, twisted dolls on broken kindergarten cots remind us there was life here — once.

 

Miharu Journal: Japan’s Cherry Blossoms Bloom, but Nuclear Fears Keep Tourists Away

 

The town, however, may not be as resilient. The hundreds of thousands of people who come here each cherry blossom season to view the prized tree, one of the three oldest in the country and a designated national monument, are largely staying away this year, scared off by the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, just 30 miles away.

“This tree has lived through many disasters,” said Masayoshi Hashimoto, 85, a local vegetable farmer whose produce has also been rendered largely unsalable by the radioactive plume. “It may survive the nuclear accident,” he said, “but the town may not.”

Sakura, or cherry blossom season, reaches its peak this week along the Tohoku coast, a region still reeling from the March 11 quake, tsunami and accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Tohoku’s famous sakura trees usually draw hundreds of thousands of visitors, many from greater Tokyo, bringing precious tourist income to villages and towns that have little industry to speak of.

Even though many cherry trees in the disaster zone have survived, it will very likely take years to rebuild the tourism industry, officials warn. The troubles are many: severe damage to the tourism infrastructure, fears of heightened radiation levels in areas around Fukushima and an overall plunge in travelers in a country still shell-shocked by its worst disaster since World War II. JTB Corporation, Japan’s largest travel agency, said last week that it expected travel to fall 28 percent during a holiday period known as Golden Week, which starts this month.

Damage to tourism in the area adds to the woes of a local economy that has suffered severe blows: many fishing and farming communities were decimated in the tsunami, and many of the factories in the region are struggling to rebuild or restart production lines.

In Miharu, the weeping sakura has been an important source of income for an aging farming community. About 300,000 people descended on the town to view the 40-foot tree last year, spending generously at local inns and eateries, as well as on produce.

This year, the town expected the number of visitors to fall by about 80 percent. Though the town is not affected by the evacuation zone, which is now a 12-to-18-mile radius around the Fukushima plant, visitors “are playing it safe and staying away,” said Susumu Yamaguchi, a tourism official at Miharu’s town hall. “It’s a big blow for us,” he said.

In a bid to attract visitors, the town abolished its usual $3.60 viewing fee and went on a media offensive. “There won’t be any crowds this year, no traffic jam,” Miharu’s mayor, Yoshinori Suzuki, told a local paper last week.

Helped by sunny weather on Sunday, the tree attracted a larger-than-expected throng of visitors, though still far fewer than usual, according to officials.

Asuka Kimura, 29, a homemaker and mother of four from nearby Iwaki City, said that the thrill of an outing to see the cherry tree at Miharu had outweighed concerns over radiation. “I’ve had the kids play indoors for so long,” she said. “Today we’re spending the day outside, just for the day.”

The town has been desperate to protect its prized tree. Visitors were scarce during World War II, elders recall, but villagers still tended to the tree, preparing for the return to more peaceful times. Five years ago, when a blizzard threatened to overwhelm the tree, local farmers lovingly brushed off the snow and erected wooden supports to keep its branches from breaking.

They again raced to the tree after the devastating March 11 quake, which damaged some homes in the area. The tree remained intact and was far enough inland to escape the tsunami, but the bad news came the next day as the plant spewed radioactive steam toward the town. Local inns, which had been booked solid with reservations ahead of the sakura season, were inundated with cancellations.

Still, as the trees bloom, sometimes amid mountains of rubble, they have become symbols of resilience.

“These cherry trees blossom each year despite any catastrophe,” said Noriyuki Kasai, the mayor of Hirosaki, a city on the edge of the disaster zone, some 400 miles north of Tokyo. Though the city and its 2,600 cherry trees escaped the brunt of the damage, far fewer visitors are expected this season. “Like the trees, we will also recover,” he said.

 

Report Urges Storing Spent Nuclear Fuel, Not Reprocessing It

 

The challenge at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan involves not only damage to three reactors but also the loss of cooling water in at least one pool of spent radioactive fuel, which prompted some American experts to recommend an evacuation to a radius of 50 miles. And that pool was not loaded nearly as heavily as pools at similar reactors in the United States.

In a study to be released on Tuesday, engineers and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology therefore suggest that “the entire spent-fuel management system — on-site storage, consolidated long-term storage, geological disposal — is likely to be re-evaluated in a new light because of the Fukushima storage-pool experience.”

The accident in Japan has already generated calls for sending the fuel to factories where it would be mechanically chopped up and chemically dissolved to recover the plutonium that is made in routine reactor operations, as it frequently is in Europe and Japan. The plutonium could then be used as a substitute for uranium fuel at nuclear plants.

But in the M.I.T. report, experts argue that there is no reason to find a substitute for uranium because the existing global supply is plentiful. In fact, there is enough uranium available to fuel 10 times as many reactors as exist today, even if each of the new ones ran for 100 years, the study says.

Rather than processing the fuel to retrieve plutonium, the report suggests, the fuel should be “managed” so that the option of doing so is preserved — perhaps by storing the fuel in above-ground silos for a century. It recommends moving it to a centralized repository, starting with fuel from nuclear reactors that have been retired and torn down.

A summary of the report released last fall also made that point, but the conclusion is likely to gain far more attention in coming months as federal regulators and Congress awaken to the potential for an accident involving spent fuel.

Congress chose Yucca Mountain, a site in the Nevada desert, as the top candidate for a nuclear waste burial site in 1987, but President Obama shut down an Energy Department program to develop the repository and appointed a commission to study alternatives, including reprocessing. The panel is expected to issue a preliminary report this spring.

Also standing in the way of Yucca is the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, who has effectively blocked money for the program.

The M.I.T. study also raises the idea of storing more waste in small steel and concrete silos, known as dry casks, in a central area with low population density. All the spent fuel produced so far would fill an area under 300 acres, experts say.

Another alternative for nuclear waste disposal is to build a new class of reactors powerful enough to break up the elements that are hardest to dispose of: materials that are created in reactors and remain significantly radioactive for tens of thousands of years. But that would require development of new technologies at a substantial cost and, like reprocessing, would carry a risk of releasing radioactive contaminants from fuel that is now mostly packaged in compact and airtight forms.

The new reactors and conventional reprocessing would each create a waste stream for which a repository would be needed anyway, the scientists add. The executive director of the M.I.T. study, Charles W. Forsberg, said the Fukushima accident would therefore “place more emphasis on getting a geological repository program up and running.”

All the same, engineers involved in the Yucca Mountain project say that even if Congress could be persuaded to authorize money for a permanent repository, it would be a few years before the government could decide whether the site was suitable and many more years before it could absorb a major fraction of the waste now sitting at reactor sites.

 

Japan Considers Tightening Access Around Nuclear Plant

The national government is reviewing with local governments the possibility of establishing a “caution zone” around the power plant with a radius of 12 miles said Yukio Edano, the chief secretary of Japan’s cabinet. Such a zone would be legally enforceable, in contrast with the current evacuation, which is technically voluntary.

As most radiation releases from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station have been stopped, some families have been re-entering the area in recent days to remove belongings and some journalists have been exploring it. Dozens of families never left after the initial evacuation was ordered in stages nearly six weeks ago, following an earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

Growing activity in the evacuation area has prompted concern among evacuees that their homes may be robbed while they are away. Nuclear power experts have been debating whether the continued movement of people, livestock and vehicles in the area will make it harder to decontaminate after the nuclear power plant has been fully stabilized.

Noriyuki Shikata, a senior government spokesman, said on Tuesday that the government did not have the legal authority to prevent people from entering and leaving the evacuation zone, nor the legal authority to evict those who stayed behind. Media reports have suggested that as many as 200 households are still occupied in the zone, mainly elderly people who refuse to live at evacuation centers in gymnasiums or farmers who refuse to abandon their livestock.

Plans for a caution zone were reported by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, which said that the government also intended to allow residents to make brief trips into the zone to recover essentials from their homes.

The Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported on its Web site on Wednesday morning that residents of Minami-Soma city, which lies partly inside the northern side of the evacuation zone, were being given fliers warning that a legally enforceable caution zone could be created.

A spokesman for the Fukushima Prefecture police, whose jurisdiction encompasses the evacuation zone, said that the police have done spot checks on 3,378 addresses in the area during the past three weeks and found people at 63 sites; those people were asked to leave. According to the Japanese cabinet, there were 78,200 residents of the area inside the 12-mile radius before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident.

Mr. Edano, the second-ranking government official in Japan, said at a follow-up news conference on Wednesday afternoon that Prime Minister Naoto Kan would travel on Thursday to Fukushima to meet the prefecture’s governor and visit evacuation centers in two cities in the prefecture. Mr. Edano declined to predict whether a caution zone would be imposed.

Decontamination of a large area after a nuclear accident consists of very carefully mapping the “hot spots” where wind and rain may have concentrated radioactive fallout. Contaminated objects are then sent to a specially lined landfill; even the dirt may have to be dug up if contamination is high enough.

Michael Friedlander, a former nuclear power plant operator in the United States and nuclear emergency specialist who now lives in Hong Kong, said in interviews last week and this week that it was very important to prevent unnecessary activity in the evacuation zone. He contended car tires and other movement could result in smearing around the radioactive dust from the invisible hot spots, making it necessary to decontaminate other areas as well or leaving other areas with low levels of contamination.

But Michael Corradini, the chairman of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, said that with power crews already setting up electricity transmission lines across the evacuation zone to the damaged power plant, and with heavy repair equipment being brought in as well to the power plant, the movement of private individuals and their vehicles would probably not have much additional effect in spreading out the hot spots.

Another 62,400 people lived between 12 and 19 miles from the power plant. People living inside the larger area were initially told to stay indoors, but have since been asked to leave voluntarily, along with residents of five other communities outside the zone that also received some radioactive fallout because of wind and rain patterns. The cabinet has not released an estimate for the population of the other five communities.

After the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the former Soviet Union established a more stringently enforced exclusion zone with an initial radius of about 19 miles. The exact boundaries of the zone were later adjusted to reflect actual patterns of fallout. Wind and rain had pushed particularly heavy fallout to the north of the reactor that caught fire.

Japan has been fortunate in that weather patterns appear to have pushed much of the radiation straight east and out to sea, with the exception of one plume that fell on land to the northwest of the reactor.

Many of the wind gauges and other meteorological equipment close to the site were destroyed by the tsunami and earthquake. Masanori Shinano, a technical counselor at Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, said last week that the government had needed to estimate wind direction to calculate the total radiation released by the accident. The agency looked at weather forecasts for those days around the Fukushima area, which are generated from computer models using other weather stations, and concluded from the forecasts that the wind was mainly blowing out to sea during the days of the greatest release of airborne radioactive material.

The commission, a panel of independent experts, estimates that the total radiation released by the Fukushima accident was one-sixth of that at Chernobyl. Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which has a history of being close to the nuclear industry, estimates that the total release was a tenth of Chernobyl’s.

Ken Ijichi, Moshe Komata and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

 

Water Pumping Begins at Japan Nuclear Reactor

 

The Japanese government, meanwhile, said it was considering a plan to further restrict access to the evacuated area within 12 miles of the plant, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Some families have been re-entering the area to remove belongings, and dozens of people have never left.

At the plant itself, the Tokyo Electric Power Company said that it planned to pump 10,000 metric tons of water into a storage building at a rate of 480 tons a day, which would take nearly three weeks. The company is still working on ways to remove an additional 57,500 tons of heavily contaminated water at the same building, next to Reactor No. 2, and at other nearby buildings.

The cautious pace of the pumping and the volume of water to be moved are further signs of the complexity of the undertaking that faces Tokyo Electric. Removing the water is one of the 63 tasks that the company outlined Sunday in its plan to fully shut down the stricken reactors, halt all releases of radioactive material and restore reliable cooling and electricity roughly by the end of the year.

Michael Friedlander, a former senior nuclear power plant operator in the United States, said that while the pumping might be proceeding slowly, a faster pace could prove dangerous.

“If a pipe breaks and you’re pumping hundreds of gallons a minute, you’re going to make a huge mess,” he said.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, the deputy director general of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said that the heavily contaminated water that had accumulated in basements and trenches at the site is two million times as radioactive as the less contaminated water that workers pumped into the ocean from April 4 to April 10. Workers pumped 10,393 tons of the less contaminated water into the ocean in order to make room in storage areas for the far more highly radioactive water from inside the reactor buildings.

Pumping contaminated water into the ocean has provoked considerable dismay from Japanese fishermen and from nearby countries, particularly South Korea and China. Mr. Nishiyama said Tuesday that Japan had no plans and no need to do so anymore.

Plans are being made for the installation of water-purification equipment and heat exchangers so that the same water can be pumped repeatedly through the reactors.

Anne Lauvergeon, the chief executive of Areva, France’s nuclear-power equipment provider, said at a news conference in Tokyo on Tuesday evening that it would probably take until the end of May to set up a water treatment station at the plant. Once running, she said, it should be able to handle 50 metric tons of water an hour and should almost entirely remove the radiation.

The technology, called “co-precipitation,” uses chemical agents to remove radioactive elements from water. The treatment station itself will be provided by Veolia Water, a British water and waste management service. Areva and Tokyo Electric have not discussed the cost of the services, Ms. Lauvergeon said.

Areva, together with Veolia Water, will also provide three lines of desalination equipment to enable Tokyo Electric to convert seawater into fresh water for cooling the reactors. Fresh water provides better cooling; the spaces between the fuel rods have started to become congested with salt from seawater.

She also said that Areva was not preparing an overall plan to decommission the troubled plant, though she said the company was prepared to cooperate with any long-term process to eventually dismantle Fukushima Daiichi. Toshiba and Hitachi have submitted competing plans to dismantle the plant; the work could take decades.

In a further effort to improve cooling, Mr. Nishiyama said Tuesday that a decision had been made to flood the primary containment vessels of the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors with enough water to cover up the sides of the reactor pressure vessels up to the level of the uranium fuel rods.

This was not done sooner because only now have workers been able to determine that the primary containment vessels are sufficiently watertight. The vessel at the No. 2 reactor is damaged and leaking gases, and the leak or leaks need to be plugged before it can be flooded, Mr. Nishiyama said.

The No. 2 reactor has posed some of the greatest challenges in recent days, including another leak that spewed radioactive water until plugged two weeks ago.

Robots entered Reactors Nos. 1 and 3 on Sunday and measured the radiation inside. But when two robots entered Reactor No. 2 on Monday, the steam inside was so dense that a robot mounted with a camera was unable to get a clear image of a radiation sensor carried by the other robot, Japanese officials said.

Ken Ijichi, Moshe Komata and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

 

Japan Considers Clampdown on Returnees to Nuclear Zone

 VOA News ?April 20, 2011

Japanese officials say they are considering steps to legally enforce an exclusion zone within 20 kilometers of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

More than 60,000 people were evacuated from the zone shortly after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that knocked out cooling systems at the plant. But Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Wednesday that some residents and others have been venturing back in spite of a government advisory to stay away.

Edano said the government is talking to local officials about ways to legally enforce the restriction. Press reports said Prime Minister Naoto Kan will likely announce the measures during a visit to the region on Thursday and that the restrictions could go into effect as early as this week.

At the plant, engineers have been working since Tuesday to pump more than 10,000 tons of highly radioactive water out of the basement and utility tunnel at one of the six reactors. Officials said water levels in the tunnel -- which had been rising about two centimeters a day -- were down about one centimeter Wednesday morning.

A French company, Areva, has contracted to build a facility at the plant capable of decontaminating 50 tons per hour of water so it can be recycled to keep the plant's nuclear fuel rods from overheating. Officials hope to have the facility in operation by the beginning of June.

Officials with the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant's operators, released the first photographs from inside two of the badly damaged reactor buildings on Wednesday. The pictures were taken by remote-controlled robots sent in to measure radiation levels to determine whether humans can safely go back inside.

Japan's NHK Television said the robots' access to one of the buildings was hampered by debris. At another building, the interior was so steamy that the camera lens immediately fogged up.

The Kyodo news agency quoted a doctor who has examined some of the men struggling to stabilize the plant saying the men are at risk of depression or death from overwork. The doctor said the workers, some of whom lost their own family members in the tsunami, are pushing themselves out of a sense of moral responsibility.

Despite the problems, an official at the International Atomic Energy Agency said Tuesday in Vienna that radiation levels leaking from the plant are coming down steadily. IAEA expert Denis Flory said that unless something unexpected happens, he does not expect total radiation leaking into the environment to increase much beyond current levels.

The Japanese government has for the first time set radiation safety levels for school playgrounds in the prefecture surrounding the plant. It said normal playground activities should be allowable if radiation remains at current levels.

National police said late Tuesday that the confirmed death toll in the earthquake and tsunami has now topped 14,000, with more than 13,600 others still missing. It said more than 90 percent of the victims recovered so far died from drowning, and that more than 65 percent of them were over age 60.

 

Japan Still Struggling to Control Crippled Nuclear Plant

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Photo: VOA - S. HermanPolice herd marchers along the curb as the streets arenot blocked off for the demonstration in Tokyo, Japan, April 16, 2011

Share ThisFacebookYahoo! BuzzRelated ArticlesVOA Correspondent Reaches Crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear PlantJapan Nuclear Plant Operator to Pay Damages Japan's Kan Faces Calls to Quit Over Handling of Disasters

Small and peaceful anti-nuclear protests continue to be staged in Japan. The demonstrations are being held as troubles continue at and around the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant in the northeastern part of the country. It has been leaking radiation into the air and sea since it was severely damaged by a magnitude 9.0 quake and resulting tsunami more than a month ago.

The operator of the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima has begun dropping into the Pacific Ocean sandbags filled with an absorbent to try to reduce the danger from radiation. The bags are filled with zeolite, better known as the active material sprinkled in cat litter boxes to absorb odors. In this case, zeolite is meant to take up cesium that has been detected at high levels along the Fukushima coast.

On shore, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, is still struggling, more than a month after the Fukushima-1 plant was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami, to restore automatic cooling facilities for several reactors.

In Tokyo on Saturday, several hundred demonstrators peacefully marched past a TEPCO building. Some were dressed as vegetables, others were adorned with or carried produce.

The protesters chant "vegetables are more important than nuclear power. We don't need nuclear plants, we don't need radiation."

One of the participants, Naomi Saito from neighboring Saitama prefecture, lamented the small number of people who have taken to the streets in protest since March 11.? But Saito said she understands why that is the case in a resource-poor country heavily reliant on atomic energy where more than 50 nuclear plants have been built in the past 45 years.

"We're all in a very dangerous situation because of atomic [power]. But other Japanese think nuclear [power] is very important, so I feel very sad," said Saito.

Japan's government on Saturday ordered 13 nuclear plant operators to inspect and reinforce outside power links to avoid earthquake-triggered outages similar to one on March 11 in Fukushima.

The urgency of that directive was highlighted when a 5.9 magnitude earthquake jolted eastern Japan on Saturday.

Radiation leaking from the Fukushima plant has forced tens of thousands of people in the prefecture to flee their homes. It has also contaminated crops and fishing waters, and regenerated global concern about the safety of nuclear power plants.

Listen? Email? Print? Comments?Comments (8)16-04-2011Vaméri(US)

Radiation leak crisis in not under firm control yet, the ground is still shaking due to aftershocks. But no new troubles reported on top of crisis. It looks like OK for everybody else except Japanese themself. Chinese and Korean can stop crying foul now.

16-04-2011Joe(USA)

Banning nuclear power in Japan is like banning electricity in Japan. With no electricity, Japan basically dies. So, don't be so quick to eliminate nuclear. For the future, an alternate safe, clean cheap and efficient source of energy should be used. For now, Japan must concentrate on fixing, securing and minimizing.

16-04-2011Bert Savage(Canada)

Containment seawalls should be immediately increased to the 45' ft. Level around all nuke plants that are vulnerable.

16-04-2011claudia(colombia)

I feel for the Japanese people. How could the world nuclear authorities allow such a small country on a big fault line have so many nuclear plants?

16-04-2011wizardteo(malaysia)

using zeolite, I call this as "mass vacuum" ,new word? means in mass quantity to vacuum the radioactive, so is safe for live to continue. At the same time, I would like every1 to pray together with me the restoration so situation an restore to before the radioactive crisis at japan and politic stabil at the west asia.

17-04-2011sue(england)

Japanese people, please try to find an alternative to nuclear energy there is NO safe nuclear energy! You of all nations understand the devastation of the nuclear devil. We in Britain don't want any more reactors built, (there is no where to put the waste products) Japan is amazing at inventing new technology, invent something that will save the world..please. We are thinking of you constantly.

17-04-2011Robin Davies(Japan)

I doubt Japan's economic success since the war would have been so great without nuclear power. So do you play with God or not? As man has learnt how, I still believe he may as long as he understands the overwhelming power of his opponent. No problem IF you are 120% sure you have been humble enough. Make reactors yes, but build them to stand earthquakes of magnitude 11 or 12 and tsunami of more than 35 or 40 metres. Then you can play with God.

17-04-2011Sugi pula(Romania)

Invest in solar stocks people !!

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Japanese Officials on Defensive as Nuclear Alert Level Rises

  A volunteer in Ofunato, Japan, cleaned photographs that were found in the tsunami debris.

TOKYO — Japanese officials struggled through the day on Tuesday to explain why it had taken them a month to disclose large-scale releases of radioactive material in mid-March at a crippled nuclear power plant, as the government and an electric utility disagreed on the extent of continuing problems there.

A policeman watched colleagues prepare to transport a body by van in Minamisoma, Japan, on Thursday, inside a deserted nuclear evacuation zone.

The government announced Tuesday morning that it had raised its rating of the severity of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to 7, the worst on an international scale, from 5. Officials said that the reactor had released one-tenth as much radioactive material as the Chernobyl accident in 1986, but still qualified as a 7 according to a complex formula devised by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Japan’s new assessment was based largely on computer models showing very heavy emissions of radioactive iodine and cesium from March 14 to 16, just after the earthquake and tsunami rendered the plant’s emergency cooling system inoperative. The nearly monthlong delay in acknowledging the extent of these emissions is a fresh example of confused data and analysis from the Japanese, and put the authorities on the defensive about whether they have delayed or blocked the release of information to avoid alarming the public.

Seiji Shiroya, a commissioner of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, an independent government panel that oversees the country’s nuclear industry, said that the government had delayed issuing data on the extent of the radiation releases because of concern that the margins of error had been large in initial computer models. But he also suggested a public policy reason for having kept quiet.

“Some foreigners fled the country even when there appeared to be little risk,” he said. “If we immediately decided to label the situation as Level 7, we could have triggered a panicked reaction.”

The Japanese media, which has a reputation for passivity but has become more aggressive in response to public unhappiness about the nuclear accident, questioned government leaders through the day about what the government knew about the accident and when it knew it.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan gave a nationally televised speech and press conference in the early evening to call for national rebuilding, but ended up defending his government’s handling of information about the accident.

“What I can say for the information I obtained — of course the government is very large, so I don’t have all the information — is that no information was ever suppressed or hidden after the accident,” he said. “There are various ways of looking at this, and I know there are opinions saying that information could have been disclosed faster. However, as the head of the government, I never hid any information because it was inconvenient for us.”

Junichi Matsumoto, a senior nuclear power executive from the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, fanned public fears about radiation when he said at a separate news conference on Tuesday morning that the radiation release from Daiichi could, in time, surpass levels seen in 1986.

“The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl,” Mr. Matsumoto said.

But Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said in an interview on Tuesday evening that he did not know how the company had come up with its estimate. “I cannot understand their position,” he said.

He speculated that Tokyo Electric was being “prudent and thinking about the worst-case scenario,” adding, “I think they don’t want to be seen as optimistic.”

Mr. Nishiyama said that his agency did not expect another big escape of radiation from Daiichi, saying that “almost all” the material that is going to escape has already come out. He said that the rate of radiation release had peaked in the early days after the March 11 earthquake, and that the rate of radiation had dropped by 90 percent since then.

The peak release in emissions of radioactive particles took place following hydrogen explosions at three reactors, as technicians desperately tried to pump in seawater to keep the uranium fuel rods cool, and bled radioactive gas from the reactors in order to make room for the seawater.

Mr. Nishiyama took pains to say — and other nuclear experts agreed — that the Japanese accident posed fewer health risks than Chernobyl.