Fukushima

TEPCO's water decontamination system out of action again

The trouble-plagued ALPS water decontamination system at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has once again shut down, this time due to an unknown problem, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said on Oct. 4.

Asahi Shimbun,

4 October, 2013

According to TEPCO officials, the equipment automatically stopped operations after an alarm went off at around 6:45 a.m. on Oct. 4. Officials said no leak had been found, and they were working to find the cause of the latest problem, which resulted in the third such stoppage since June.

The equipment is designed to remove 62 radioactive contaminants from the water, including strontium.

The ALPS (advanced liquid processing system) unit has three channels, called A, B and C, and each has the daily capacity to process 250 tons of water.

Plans had called for using the equipment to process the huge volume of contaminated water that is stored in tanks at the plant. Some of the tanks have leaked, adding to the urgency for a system to remove radioactive materials to reduce the dangers posed by the water.

The ALPS system began a trial run starting in late March, but leaks were discovered in the system’s tanks in June, leading to the first stoppage. The trial run resumed on Sept. 27 in channel C, but operations were halted once again, just 22 hours later, when the equipment developed problems in discharging mud. TEPCO officials believe the cause of that problem was due to a failure to remove a rubber pad from the tank, leading to a blockage in the system.

HP News Network Podcast 

#8: Unit #3, MOX fuel, 

aerosolized plutonium in 

Lithuania

NRC FOIA documents pertaining to Fukushima:http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/foia/ja...

Fear and Loathing on Fukushima Unit 4:http://hatrickpenryunbound.com/?p=3928

Something Wicked This Way Comes: The story of Plume-Gate, the world's largest, provable cover-up:http://hatrickpenryunbound.com/?p=3683

Bobby1 fatality index study:http://freepdfhosting.com/37cc0eae6b.pdf

(Ian Fairlie PhD, UK) Chernobyl Study (where bobby1 references lead on the thyroid charts): http://www.chernobylcongress.org/file...

Abstract on Plutonium detection over Lithuania late March/early April 2011: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/...

‘

Significantly Deteriorating’: 

Fukushima disaster “causing 

irreversible radioactive 

damage” says top nuclear 

official

Tepco now admits it’s “affecting the environment” (VIDEO)

ENENews,

4 October, 2013

Kyodo, Oct. 4, 2013: Summoning Tepco President Naomi Hirose after a series of recent spills at the crippled power plant, Katsuhiko Ikeda, head of the NRA secretariat, tore into the utility for “rudimentary mistakes” that caused the toxic water problem and said its management in the field was “significantly deteriorating.”

Euronews, Oct. 4, 2013: Katsuhiko Ikeda, Secretary-General of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency [said] “I must say that the on-site management at TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant is becoming extremely poor.”

AAP, Oct. 4, 2013: “I can’t help but say that standards of on-site management are extremely low at Fukushima Daiichi,” [Katsuhiko Ikeda, Secretary-General of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency] said.

Xinhua, Oct. 4, 2013: Ikeda insisted the utility formulate an immediate strategy to deal with the latest crisis and slammed TEPCO’s management for its extremely poor organizational and practical systems that have led to human error causing irreversible radioactive damage to the environment. [...]

NHK Newsline, Oct. 4, 2013: “I’m terribly sorry for the mistakes we have made. We mishandled the leaking wastewater, and that is affecting the environment.” – Naomi Hirose, Tepco President

Watch NHK’s broadcast here

Professor: Fukushima disaster is the worst case of nuclear contamination in history 

It’s a crisis for all humanity Building up to something much worse? 

ENENews,

4 October, 2013

Emanuel Pastreich, Professor at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and Director of the Asia Institute: 

The basic parameters of the ‘Fuksuhima Initiative’ — which is to say to create a truly global peer-to-peer collaborative effort to muster all the expertise in the world, all the goodwill in the world, and also a lot of man hours from creative and thoughtful people to come up with a real, long-term solution to this remarkable crisis. And to do it with the seriousness equivalent to say putting a man on the moon, or if you want to reinterpret it to say something the equivalent of a reverse Manhattan Project to deal with the extremely serious and totally unprecedented challenges […]

Layne Hartsell, Asia Institute Fellow: The disaster has continued. When things like this leave the news, they seem to go away in the public psyche and public thought — but actually this is a lot worse right now, or building up to something much worse. Your thoughts?

Pastreich: Well, the news has not been good as you know in terms of the release of radioactive water, contamination and the amount of cesium and then strontium more recently. As we talked about in our paper  this is really going to be a serious challenge for us. It’s something which the Japanese and others have floated ideas, but we’re really in uncharted territory. What we really want to do here at the Asia Institute is put together the most basic framework for how we would build such a global collaborative effort. [...] There are many grim things I could talk about; actually I’d rather not stress the grimness of this. I hope the people out there understand just how serious this issue is and that really need to come together quickly. This is not something we can put off for another 6 months or a year. We really need it to come together.

Foreign Policy in Focus, Pastreich and Hartsell, Sept. 3, 2013: The Century-Long Challenge to Respond to Fukushima [...] the worst case of nuclear contamination the world has ever seen. Radiation continues to leak from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi site into groundwater, threatening to contaminate the entire Pacific Ocean. The cleanup will require an unprecedented global effort. [...] Solving the Fukushima Daiichi crisis needs to be considered a challenge akin to putting a person on the moon in the 1960s. [...] the situation potentially puts the health of hundreds of millions at risk. [...] To solve the Fukushima Daiichi problem will require enlisting the best and the brightest to come up with a long-term plan to be implemented over the next century. [...] The Fukushima disaster is a crisis for all of humanity [...]

Pastreich at The Asia Institute seminar, Sept. 7, 2013: The Fukushima crisis is a global crisis and it is just a matter of six months or less before it starts to get the attention it deserves. Yet we do not have a single proposal for a global response [...]