Japanese authorities noted that Israel will be one of the first countries to provide aid in accordance with their requirements. While other countries sent planeloads of equipment, they did not consult with the Japanese regarding specific requirements. The Japanese also noted Israeli efficiency and flexibility in determining the list of items that would be shipped to Japan.
The world’s largest concrete pump, deployed at the construction site of the U.S. government’s $4.86 billion mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River Site, is being moved to Japan in a series of emergency measures to help stabilize the Fukushima reactors.
“The bottom line is, the Japanese need this particular unit worse than we do, so we’re giving it up,” said Jerry Ashmore, whose company, Augusta-based Ashmore Concrete Contractors, Inc., is the concrete supplier for the MOX facility.
The 190,000-pound pump, made by Germany-based Putzmeister has a 70-meter boom and can be controlled remotely, making it suitable for use in the unpredictable and highly radioactive environment of the doomed nuclear reactors in Japan, he said.“There are only three of these pumps in the world, of which two are suited for this work, so we have to get it there as soon as we can,” Ashmore said in an interview with The Chronicle today. “Time is very much a factor.”
The pump was moved Wednesday from the construction site in Aiken County to a facility in Hanahan, S.C., for minor modifications, and will be trucked to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, where it will be picked up by the world’s largest cargo plane, the Russian-made Antonov 225, which will fly it to Tokyo.Bloomberg explains the logic of dumping concrete on a dysfunctional radioactive plant:
Dismantling the plant and decontaminating the site may take 30 years and cost Tokyo Electric more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said. The government hasn’t ruled out pouring concrete over the whole facility as one way to shut it down, Edano said. Tokyo is 135 miles (220 kilometers) south of the Dai-Ichi power plant.
Dumping concrete on the plant would serve a second purpose: it would trap contaminated water, said Tony Roulstone, an atomic engineer who directs the University of Cambridge’s masters program in nuclear energy. “They need to immobilize this water and they need something to soak it up,” he said. “You don’t want to create another hazard, but you need to get it away from the reactors.”
The process will take longer than the 12 years needed to decommission the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania following a partial meltdown in 1979, said Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University.Meanwhile, Energy News is reporting that Radioactive Iodine-131 in rainwater sample near San Francisco was 18,100% above federal drinking water standard.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says computer forecasts show that radiation leaking from a nuclear plant could pose a hazard to people outside its 30-kilometer zone.Meanwhile, the Daily Mail is reporting that 5 of the 50 workers who stayed behind to save the plant are now believed to be dead.
Edano said at a news conference on Wednesday that a computer forecast system has shown that radiation levels in some areas outside the 30-kilometer zone would exceed 100 millisieverts, which is the level that could affect the human thyroid if a person is exposed to it outdoors for 24 hours.
Edano cited a lack of data and the need for more precise calculations, and said there is no need for immediate evacuation or to seek shelter indoors.
At the same time, he urged people living downwind from the plant to stay indoors as much as possible and keep the windows shut as a precaution.
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| The foreign ministers on Japan and Iran met in Tehran in late February |
The Japanese deputy foreign minister said Japan supports Iran's nuclear energy program and added that Iran has the right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. He went on to say that Tokyo is determined to develop ties with Tehran. Salehi and Koro also discussed the latest regional developments and called for the expansion of cooperation between the two countries in all spheres.What exactly are the latest regional developments? Iran suppressing democratic protests? The threat of Iranian-funded terrorism taking hold in the new chaos facing the Middle East? Gaza firing Iranian rockets on Israel? Where exactly are the regional developments that create an environment conducive between anything resembling the 21st-century world with one of the most oppressive and unstable regimes on the planet?!
Under the alleged compromise fuel swap deal that Japanese diplomats quietly briefed U.S. officials on earlier this month, some 70% of Iran’s low enriched uranium stockpile would be moved to Japan, according to what one Washington source, speaking anonymously, was told by the Japanese. Japan would then take responsibility for the stockpile, and ensure the delivery to Iran of fuel rods for nuclear medical use.If there were any plans in the works for Japan to supply Iran with fuel rods for "medical use", the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis "wiped them off the face of the earth", so to speak. In the Politico article, there's an interesting fact mentioned that creates an eerie connection between the future of Egypt and the latest nuclear crisis:
In addition, in November, a Japanese diplomat, Yukio Amano, succeeded Mohamed ElBaradei to become director general of the IAEA, in effect the top international nuclear negotiator in the world.El Baradei, or the soft-on-Iran nuclear watchdog impostor, and the poster child for the Muslim Brotherhood's PR campaign in seizing control of the new Egypt. Hashem works in interesting ways...
The Government of Japan deplores the decisions of the Government of Israel to give permission for the construction of 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem in addition to 112 units in West Bank just after the Israeli and Palestinian leadership’s acceptance of the start of indirect talks. The Government of Japan does not recognize any act that prejudges the final status of Jerusalem and the territories in the pre-1967 borders. Japan demands that the plans should not be implemented.One message does seem to be clear from recent disasters: hey, idyllic countries far off there: stop using your God-given blessings to pick on Israel. God's kingship in today's world may be the most hidden it has ever been, but those with a pure and deep faith, a faith bequeathed to us from our ancestors, rooted deep in the the Jewish soul, cultivated throughout the ages precisely for days such as these, know without a shadow of a doubt that lo yanum v'lo yishan Shomer Yisroel -- no, the Guardian of Israel does not slumber! -- and even though galus feels like a state of slumber and abandonment, we know without a doubt that God is right here, about to save us from all our enemies, as present and as real as He was when He spoke to our people at Sinai, aware of our suffering and clearing the way for our geulah. The days are near when all the words of all the prophets regarding the Jewish people -- and the fall of their enemies -- will come true before our very eyes. May it be so speedily in our days.
In a reminder that the battle to stop the spread of radiation at the plant is still not over, officials said Tuesday that a pool holding spent nuclear fuel had heated up to around the boiling point.
Even spent fuel rods can generate intense heat and dangerous radiation. The rods need to be stored in a water-filled pool for a year or more to allow them to cool, and the heat from the pools needs to be constantly removed.
The worry at the overheating Fukushima fuel pool is that if it's not cooled down soon, radioactive steam will be emitted. And if the situation worsens, the water within could boil away, exposing the fuel rods, which would throw up much more radiation.Last week, the IAEA warned that if the reactor in Japan continues to emit radiation, the health hazard to the USA would have to be reexamined.
A radiation monitor in California has detected a trace of radioactive material from the stricken nuclear power plant in Japan, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization said Friday.
The exact amounts were not available, but the test ban organization's executive secretary, Tibor Toth, said the measurements were below what would be considered harmful to human health.
The treaty organization's chief press officer, Annika Thunborg, said its officials were "absolutely certain" that the radiation detected in California is from Fukushima because the isotypes were consistent with those emitted by the Fukushima reactors, and the timing of their detection is consistent with projections.
...The Sacramento monitor detected minute amounts of radionuclides -- substances that emit radiation -- which had been expected, Toth said.
The EPA, in a statement, confirmed that a monitoring station in Sacramento that feeds into the treaty organization's monitoring system "detected minuscule quantities of the radioactive isotope xenon-133, a gas that is produced during nuclear fission. The origin was determined to be consistent with a release from the Fukushima reactors in northern Japan.See video at CNN
The plume from Fukushima has now reached the western Atlantic but its radioactivity is likely to be "extremely low" and have no impact on health or the environment, France's Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) said on Saturday.
"As of yesterday, the cloud covered most of North America and northeastern Siberia. It is currently passing over the North Atlantic," it said, naming French terroritories in the Caribbean and off Canada's eastern coast.
The cloud has been progressively thinning as it heads eastwards around the northern hemisphere at high altitude and will reach mainland Europe on Wednesday or Thursday, it said, citing a computer model jointly compiled with the French weather service, Meteo France.
"The concentrations of caesium 137 in the air over land traversed by the plume are expected to be extremely low," it said.
U.S. government nuclear experts believe a spent fuel pool at Japan's crippled Fukushima reactor complex has a breach in the wall or floor, a situation that creates a major obstacle to refilling the pool with cooling water and keeping dangerous levels of radiation from escaping.
That assessment by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials is based on the sequence of events since the earthquake and information provided by key American contractors who were in the plant at the time, said government officials familiar with the evaluation. It was compelling evidence, they said, that the wall of the No. 4 reactor pool has a significant hole or crack.
Unlike the reactor itself, the spent fuel pool does not have its own containment vessel, and any radioactive particles and gases can more easily spew into the environment if the uranium fuel begins to burn. In addition, the pool, which contains 130 tons of uranium fuel, is housed in a building that Japanese authorities say appears to have been damaged by fire or explosions.
A breach in the pool would leave engineers with a problem that has no precedent or ready-made solution, said Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"My intuition is that this is a terrible situation and it is only going to get worse," he said. "There may not be any way to deal with it."
The utility increased its workforce at the Fukushima Dai- Ichi plant to 322 yesterday from 180 on March 16 as it tried to douse water over exposed nuclear fuel rods to prevent melting and leaking lethal radiation.
...“They have an access time of 10 to 25 hours at the most,” Price, 60, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “At that rate, you are going to go through workers very fast.”
Workers are being ordered to leave the plant, located 135 miles (220 kilometers) north of Tokyo, before radiation dosages reach the maximum permissible level, said a spokesman for the utility who declined to give his name.
Radiation exposure levels are measured in millisieverts. Exposure totaling 100 millisieverts over a year is the lowest level at which any increase in cancer is evident, according to the World Nuclear Association in London. The cumulative maximum level for nuclear workers was increased to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts by Japan’s health ministry on March 15.
“Once they have reached that limit, they can’t go in the plant anymore,” Price said. “You shouldn’t be doing that sort of work ever again.”
One plant worker was exposed to 106.3 millisieverts, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said in a website posting yesterday.See here for the latest on the USA health hazard
Federal agencies are beefing up their radiation-monitoring capabilities at home and abroad, even as they insist that significant amounts of fallout won’t waft from Japan onto U.S. territory. At home, the Environmental Protection Agency said it's adding seven monitors in Alaska, Hawaii and Guam to its RadNet radiation-tracking system, which operates about 100 air-sniffing stations nationwide. Putting in those extra stations "allows us to gather data from a position closer to Japan," EPA said in an online question-and-answer guide.The combination of the earthquake and the tsunami has botched the emergency cooling systems at the Fukushima power plant, leading to a drying-up of the spent fuel pools at units 3 and 4, raising fears of nuclear meltdown.
This is very worrying. There is no doubt that we have not seen anything like this in years, perhaps ever since nuclear experiments were conducted in the atmosphere in the 1950s. From what we can gather, this disaster is even more dangerous than Chernobyl, both from the standpoint of the population's exposure to radioactive material and the spread of radioactive contamination in the area. Once there is an uncontrollable heating up, the nuclear fuel undergoes a metamorphosis into the gaseous phase. Since we are talking about metals and solid items, they turn into particles that are capable of traveling great distances. They can wander thousands of kilometers.Yossi Melman of Haaretz, who quoted Professor Luria, explains:
If these gases are indeed emitted into the atmosphere in large quantities, the wind regime could carry them all the way to China, South Korea, and eastern Russia, or in the other direction, toward Hawaii and the west coast of the United States.Melman qualifies this doomsday prospect by saying that the likelihood of this is not high. But check out this map on AccuWeather:
Calculated time for radioactive particles to cross the Pacific from the power plants in Japan to big West Coast cities if the particles take a direct path and move at a speed of 20 mph:
Cities Approx. Distance (miles) Approx. Time to Cross Pacific (days) Anchorage 3,457 7 Honolulu 3,847 8 Seattle 4,792 10 Los Angeles 5,477 11
Experts have suggested that, if there were a reactor meltdown or major leak at Fukushima, the radioactive cloud would likely be blown out east across the Pacific, towards the US West Coast. “The wind direction for the time being seems to point the (nuclear) pollution towards the Pacific,” said Andre-Claude Lacoste of the French Nuclear Safety Authority, briefing journalists in Paris on the Japanese crisis.The question of course is how much radiation will be released in Japan, and until that is known, no one can say with 100% assurance that harmful levels will not reach the US. If Japan faces nuclear meltdown at multiple plants - a scenario which is not ruled out by the way things are going - officials will began to change their tone.
About 25 passengers arriving in Taiwan from Japan were observed with levels of slightly higher exposure to radiation, a government official said on Thursday.
Authorities in South Korea had earlier reported unusually high radiation levels on three passengers arriving from Japan.High Radiation levels detected 30 km NW of Fukushima
Japan's science ministry says radiation levels of up to 0.17 millisieverts per hour have been detected about 30 kilometers northwest of the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.Radiation levels at spent fuel rod pool now now fatal (from Bloomberg Q&A on Fukushima vs. Chernobyl)
Experts say exposure to those levels for 6 hours would result in absorption of the maximum level considered safe for 1 year.
Fuel rods at the plant’s No. 1 and No. 2 reactors, both of which were operating at the time of the temblor, may have been damaged, Tokyo Electric said. Pressure in the containment chamber of unit No. 2 fell yesterday, indicating that radiation may have been released after an explosion on March 15.MSNBC's Today reports that reporter Lester Holt and his crew tested positive for small amounts of radiation:
Radiation is also leaking from spent fuel rods stored in a pool near reactors No. 3 and No. 4. Water in the pool has evaporated due to radioactive heat, exposing the uranium- containing rods to the atmosphere. The exposed rods can emit radiation and give out radioactive iodine and cesium, both of which are cancer-causing agents.
A worker at the edge of the pool would receive a fatal radiation dose in 16 seconds, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear physicist for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety instructor.
He said of the workers remaining inside the plant that "individuals have to have agreed they are going to do this and know it present tremendous risk to them. They recognize risk of developing symptoms of acute radiation syndrome and long-term risk for cancer also increases." He said acute radiation syndrome affects the gastrointestinal tract, central nervous system and blood forming organs. Pepper explained that while the workers are wearing suits, they are still not protected from certain types of potentially harmful radiation.NYT: Last defense at troubled plant: 50 Japanese workers
Those remaining are being asked to make escalating -- and perhaps existential -- sacrifices that so far are being only implicitly acknowledged: Japan's Health Ministry said Tuesday it was raising the legal limit on the amount of radiation to which each worker could be exposed, to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts, five times the maximum exposure permitted for American nuclear plant workers.BBC: Anger over Japan nuclear exodus
The chief of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says all the water is gone from one of the spent fuel pools at Japan's most troubled nuclear plant. This means there's nothing to stop the fuel rods from getting hotter and ultimately melting down.
The outer shell of the rods could also ignite with enough force to propel the radioactive fuel inside over a wide area. (ABC News)Maclean's blog explains the spent fuel pool danger:
The spent fuel pools are where fuel rods are stored after they’re removed from the reactors. As with the fuel rods in the reactor, the spent fuel needs to stay submerged in cold water or it will heat up. What’s happened is that, with nearby fires and the heat given off by the spent fuel rods, the water temperature has been rising. If the water boils off, and the rods are exposed, they could meltdown. Unlike the fuel rods in the reactors though, the spent fuel rods don’t have steel and concrete enclosures. If the heat damages the rod casings, they could catch fire and spew radiation into the atmosphere. Experts are warning that the spent fuel pools may pose the biggest radiation threat at Fukushima.MSNBC: Slow-moving nightmare unfolds at Japan plant:
The European Union's energy chief, Guenther Oettinger, told the European Parliament that the plant was "effectively out of control" after breakdowns in the facility's cooling system.Japan's Emperor Akihito addresses the nation in a rare appearance and says:
"In the coming hours there could be further catastrophic events, which could pose a threat to the lives of people on the island," Oettinger said.
"There is as yet no panic, but Tokyo with 35 million people, is the largest metropolis in the world," he said.
"No one knows how many people will die"
and
"I pray for the safety of as many people as possible"
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| Rabbi Edery of Chabad Tokyo in Sendai (Chabad of Tokyo) |
Chabad-Lubavitch centers in Tokyo and Hong Kong have shipped tons of food into one of the Japanese cities hardest hit by last week's earthquake and tsunami.Chabad Tokyo writes on their blog:
The Tokyo-based Chabad-Lubavitch of Japan and the Hong Kong-based Chabad-Lubavitch of Asia have shipped bread, rice, noodles, soups, canned foods, flour and oil to the city of Sendai, Chabad.org reported.
The organization also has commissioned a bakery in Sendai to give out free bread. The bakery also will serve as the Jewish response’s command center, Chabad-Lubavitch of Japan director Rabbi Mendy Sudakevich told the website.
Sudakevich said he also has organized 50,000 ready-to-eat food rations to be flown in from the United States.
Together with our humanitarian efforts, we combine “The Seven Noahide Laws” campaign and distribute materials to residents of Japan, emphasizing that the strengthening of religious practice adds security the entire country.
...The response of the Rebbe MH”M Shlita through Igros Kodesh, that Torah and mitzvos must be maintained even when it is fraught with difficulties and tests, left no doubt. Rabbi Edery understood that he was obligated to help. The very next day he set off, accompanied by a group from his Chabad Center, known as the “Goyim of the Geula” (Gentiles of Redemption).
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| Japanese mitzva tank to distribute supplies (Chabad of Tokyo) |
Apparently, he is frightening himself more and more… May it be [Hashem’s] will that he will begin to act in a manner that “his head will rule over his heart”, and as the Alter Rebbe says, “himself, in his nature”, and specifically that there is no basis for the fear that is apparent in his letter.
Radiation in Vladivostok, some 800 km (500 miles) northwest of Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, were 1 microroentgen per hour higher at 0400 GMT than six hours previously, the regional interior ministry said.
Russia's military said it was on alert to evacuate people if required from Russia's Sakhalin island and the Southern Kuril island chain which is at the heart of a territorial dispute with Japan, Interfax news agency reported.
Called the Northern Territories by Japan, they are inhabited by Russians and one of the islands, Tanfilyeva, is a mere 6 km (4 miles) from Japan's coast.
• There has been an explosion at the Fukushima No 1 nuclear power plant in north-eastern Japan, close to the epicentre of the quake.
•Tens of thousands of people in the areas surrounding Fukushima No 1 and No 2 plants have been urged to evacuate.
• Japanese authorities are preparing to distribute iodine to residents in the evacuation zones to protect them against radiation exposure.
•Dozens of aftershocks, some as strong as magnitude 6, struck Japan on Saturday. Japan's state broadcaster has warned people in coastal areas that there could be further tsunamis.
•Around 1,700 people are estimated to have been killed, according to local media reports, but that death toll is expected to rise dramatically.
•Around 9,500-10,000 people are missing in the town of Minamisanrikucho in Miyagi prefecture, according to Japanese news reports.
•More than 215,000 people are in emergency shelters and around 50,000 rescuers have been deployed across the country.
•At least 1.4m homes are without water and around three million are without power.
