Filtering of Tainted Water Begins at Japanese Plant

The filtering equipment, hastily cobbled together by several foreign and Japanese companies, is urgently needed because the storage facilities at the power plant are flooded with tens of thousands of tons of radioactive water and are expected to overflow as soon as next week if nothing is done.

If that occurs, Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, would be forced to dump thousands of tons of even more tainted water into the ocean, and would probably bring down even more criticism on the embattled company and the government, which has been attacked for its handling of the crisis.

Hoping to avoid releasing any more contaminated water, Tepco in late April set out an ambitious nine-month road map for stabilizing conditions at its nuclear reactors. The plan includes setting up a sprawling water treatment plant that is expected to cost about $663 million. Built under the supervision of Toshiba and Hitachi, the filtration system is meant to sift out oil, and then cesium and other radioactive elements, before desalinating the remaining water.

The system is expected to process about 1,200 tons of water a day, which will be stored in tanks, some of which are being brought to the compound. Some of the filtered water will be reused to cool the reactors, reducing the need for fresh supplies. Tepco plans to filter water for about a year, said Junichi Matsumoto, a spokesman.

Tepco originally planned to begin operating the filtration system in July, but it sped up construction because contaminated water had been produced faster than expected at the nuclear plant. A leaky valve halted testing of the system on Thursday, and there were several more delays on Friday, before it finally got running. Tepco acknowledged that the system could falter again and might have to be shut down for repairs.

While the filtration system was being built, Tepco reduced the amount of water it was pouring into the plant’s stricken reactors to avoid filling up its storage facilities.

The beginning of the rainy season this month has complicated efforts to slow the creation of toxic water.

“It is something like a chemical plant constructed in a rush, so we have to go by trial and error,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, referring to the repeated problems that have plagued the project. “We have had to do this in a hurry, so conditions have been very severe.”

In all, about 500 tons of water is newly contaminated at the plant each day, adding to the 105,000 tons of highly radioactive water that is already stored on the site, mostly in the trenches and basements of the turbine and reactor buildings. Many of these areas are perilously near full to the brim. In the trenches at the No. 3 reactor, for example, there was just seven inches to spare on Friday.

Critics contend that while the filtration system will delay the runoff of radioactive water for a while, Tepco will continue to face water disposal problems because it may take years to fully cool the reactors at the plant.

“It’s just a matter of time before it overflows,” said Satoshi Sato, a nuclear engineer who formerly worked for General Electric at the reactors in Fukushima. “It’s an endless game.”

The water stored at the plant is contaminated with cesium 134, cesium 137 and iodine 131 with a total radioactivity estimated at 720,000 terabecquerels, more than the amount of radioactive material that has been spewed into the air at the plant so far.

The new filtration system still faces many hurdles. The companies operating it, including Areva from France and Kurion from the United States, have little experience working with seawater. And Tepco must still dispose of the radioactive material that is being sifted out of the wastewater; it is mixed with a chemical agent to create a toxic sludge.

During the summer, Tepco will deliver 370 tanks to the Daiichi plant to store an extra 40,400 tons of radioactive water. A megafloat that can store yet more water is moored near the plant.

The contaminated water has been an unavoidable side effect of Tepco’s “feed and bleed” strategy for dealing with the four destroyed reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. To cool them for eventual dismantling, the company is pouring huge volumes of freshwater and seawater directly onto the highly radioactive reactors, which contaminates the water, creating an environmental headache.

The devilish consequences of the company’s efforts became clear in April, when rivers of contaminated water seeped through cracks in drainage pits and flowed directly into the Pacific Ocean. While that leak was plugged, a lack of storage for contaminated water soon forced Tepco to deliberately release an additional 11,500 tons into the sea.

The dumping led to an international outcry. In waters near the plant, a variety of fish and seaweed were found with higher than normal levels of radioactivity, prompting a ban on the sale of marine products harvested from parts of Japan’s Pacific coast.

Several workers at the plant have suffered burns on their feet and ankles after stepping in highly radioactive water. Reducing the amount of water in and around the power plant will make it easier for workers to undertake other repairs.

Yasuko Kamiizumi and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

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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.

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Five Men Arrested Near Plant In Britain

LONDON — Five men have been arrested near the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the north of England under antiterrorism laws, the police said.

The men were stopped in a vehicle “close to the site” on the Irish Sea coast on Monday afternoon, according to a statement from the West Cumbria police. All were in their 20s and from London, it said.

They were arrested under a provision of Britain’s terrorism laws that allows suspects to be questioned without charge, the police said, and they were handed over to the North West Counter Terrorism Unit in Manchester.

A BBC report suggested that the men were of Bangladeshi origin and that they were thought to have been filming near the site.

A spokeswoman for the terrorism unit, which works closely with Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, declined to offer details, saying that “the investigation is at an early stage” and that questioning was under way.

The spokeswoman said there was no apparent link between the arrests and the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan early Monday. Some Islamic extremists had warned that Britain would be a target for attacks in retaliation for the killing of Bin Laden by American special forces.

Britain’s national terror alert level remains at “severe,” meaning a terrorist strike is “highly likely,” though no specific threats have been detected.

Such is the reach of those concerns that the fee-paying British School of Paris told parents on Tuesday that students should not wear school uniform to avoid being identified by their nationality. The school also said that "all students who are traveling to and from school by themselves or on public transport or while they are on school trips, have been discouraged from displaying 'Britishness' in public."

The Sellafield plant, the largest in Europe, is still “operating as normal,” a spokesman said.

The large complex includes a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant that has long raised concerns in Britain about the costs and hazards of nuclear waste. The closely guarded site is one of few major employers in the region, providing some 10,000 jobs.

The plant was the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, operating from 1956 to 2003. Britain’s worst nuclear accident took place there in 1957, when the core of a reactor caught fire, releasing radioactive contamination.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Japan Still Struggling to Control Crippled Nuclear Plant

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。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。 Japan Still Struggling to Control Crippled Nuclear Plant | News | English/* Voice of America ?

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April 17, 2011 Latest News: Select Your LanguageAfan OromoAlbanianAmharicArmenianAzerbaijaniAzeriBanglaBosnianBurmeseCantoneseChineseCreoleCroatianDariEnglish WorldwideFrenchGeorgianGreekHausaIndonesianKhmerKhmer (English)KinyarwandaKirundiKoreanKurdiKurdishLaoLearning EnglishMacedonianMandarinNdebelePashtoPashto - DeewaPersian PortugueseRussian SerbianShonaSomaliSpanishSwahiliThaiTibetanTibetan (English)TigrignaTurkishUkrainian UrduUzbekVietnameseZimbabwe - EnglishNewsProgramsVideoLearning EnglishLive Streams:Latest Newscast|Africa Live|Global LiveNews USA Africa Americas Asia Europe Middle East Arts and Entertainment EconomyMore TopicsEducationEnvironmentHealthNews AnalysisReligionScience and TechnologySports Web FeaturesSpecial ReportsPhoto GalleriesGoing Green Money In MotionNow You KnowOff the Beaten PathThe LinkInteractive YouTubeFacebookTwitter Web ServicesPodcastsRSSMobileNewsletterWebcastsLinks About the USEditorialsRFE/RLRFAPronunciation Guide NewsNewsRSS FeedJapan Still Struggling to Control Crippled Nuclear Plant Steve Herman|Tokyo?April 16, 2011

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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