Tag Archives: fukushima

Masao Yoshida, Nuclear Engineer and Chief at Fukushima Plant, Dies at 58

by Myrna Posted on July 9, 2013

Mr. Yoshida won praise for his effort to minimize the damage at the power plant as multiple reactors spiraled out of control after a tsunami. More: Masao Yoshida, Nuclear Engineer and Chief at Fukushima Plant, Dies at 58 ; ;Related ArticlesTheodore Reed, Who Lifted National Zoo’s Profile, Dies at 90Pollution Leads to Drop in Life Span in Northern China, Research FindsPollution Leads to Drop in Life Span in Northern China, Study Finds ;

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Masao Yoshida, Nuclear Engineer and Chief at Fukushima Plant, Dies at 58

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Japan’s utilities clamor to fire up nuke plants

by 85138uz Posted on July 8, 2013

Japan’s utilities clamor to fire up nuke plants

By John Upton

IAEA

International inspectors visiting Fukushima in April.

Fuku-what?

Two years after the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, Japan’s government is inviting utilities to file the paperwork needed to fire back up their idled nuclear reactors. Never mind that many Japanese citizens think that’s a terrible idea.

Japan is home to 50 reactors, which provided about a third of the country’s electricity until the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami triggered the meltdown. Just two of those reactors are currently producing power, with the rest shut down as a precaution. But the number of operational reactors could gradually begin rising. From The Japan Times:

Japan on Monday reopened procedures to allow idled reactors to be brought back online, putting in place new nuclear regulations that reflect the lessons learned from the 2011 Fukushima No. 1 meltdown disaster.

While power utilities are expected to rush to file applications with the Nuclear Regulation Authority for safety assessments on a total of 10 reactors, none will be restarted anytime soon, because it may take around six months for each safety-screening process to finish.

Facing what the NRA calls the world’s toughest level of nuclear regulations, utilities may also opt to give up efforts to restart some of the country’s 50 commercial reactors and scrap them instead of investing in costly safety measures.

There is strong economic pressure within Japan to restart the nuke plants. From Bloomberg:

Tokyo Electric, Japan’s biggest utility better known as Tepco, said earlier this week that it would seek permission to start the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant as soon as possible. The utility, which had a 685.3 billion yen ($6.8 billion) loss last fiscal year, said in May 2012 that it would return to profit this year if it’s allowed to restart the reactors at the plant. …

Combined with rate increases planned for sometime before October, the restarts would enable those utilities to become profitable again during the fiscal year ending March 2015 by reducing their fuel bills, [energy analyst Hidetoshi] Shioda said.

Japan’s nine utilities with atomic plants reported combined losses of 1.59 trillion yen in the year ended March 31. Only Hokuriku Electric Power Co. posted a profit, ending the year 100 million yen ahead.

Japan has relied on traditional fuel sources to fill much of its energy gap since Fukushima, paying 24.7 trillion yen for fossil fuels in the year ended in March, up 36 percent from the 12 months before the disaster.

It’s been more than two years since the Fukushima accident, but the site of the meltdown remains a harrowing reminder of the dangers of nuclear power.

Tepco is still struggling to contain radioactive water used to cool radioactive rods at the crippled power plant. Groundwater under the plant was recently confirmed to be toxic. Out-of-work fishermen are being hired to pull fish from the sea for scientific tests — and those tests are finding that the fish are radioactive.

Some 150,000 people are still unable to return to their homes, and Fukushima Prefecture estimates that 1,415 evacuees have died in shelters since the accident — deaths that are being ruled disaster-related. Twenty-nine people are believed to have killed themselves in the wake of the tragedy.

From a Japan Times editorial published last month:

Thousands of protesters took to the streets last Sunday, rallying in Tokyo’s Shiba and Meiji parks and marching to the Diet area to protest against nuclear power. The organizers of the rally claimed that 60,000 people ringed the Diet Building, though the Metropolitan Police Department put the number at 20,000 to 30,000.

Whatever the exact number, the rally was another expression of deep-seated opposition to nuclear power in Japan. The central government should recognize rallies like this as an important expression of political opinion.

Unfortunately the government appears not to be listening. Neither are they paying attention to the countless problems with the cleanup of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, whose meltdown is Japan’s worst nuclear disaster.

The disaster has displaced some 150,000 people and left others living in fear of exposure to radiation. Every day, a new problem is announced by Tokyo Electric Power Co., whether it’s rats eating electric lines or another tank leaking radioactive water. The proposed solutions, whether to expand the number of storage tanks or to make frozen walls in the soil to lessen leakage, show little progress and much desperation.

Power companies and the central government do not seem to be listening to scientists, either.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Japan’s utilities clamor to fire up nuke plants

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Nation’s biggest uranium mine planned in New Mexico

by Alison O'neil Posted on May 21, 2013

Nation’s biggest uranium mine planned in New Mexico

By John Upton

Mike Fisher

The uranium mine is proposed on terrain such as this, near Mount Taylor, seen in the distance.

Two foreign-owned mining companies, betting that the world will quickly forget the horrors of Fukushima, plan to sink a pair of shafts into the rugged New Mexico landscape near near Mt. Taylor and begin 0perating the nation’s biggest uranium mine.

If approved by the U.S. Forest Service and state agencies, the mine would be the first of its kind to operate in the state in more than a decade, extracting as much as 28 million pounds of the radioactive heavy metal and desecrating as many as 70 acres of land sacred to Native Americans that’s designated by the federal government as traditional cultural property.

Previous uranium mining left the state’s landscape scarred and workers sickened. But the Roca Honda joint venture of Canadian and Japanese companies says the industry has learned from past mistakes and now has the whole safe-isotope-extraction thing sorted out. From the Albuquerque Journal:

[Roca Honda Manager John] DeJoia said he would be the “first to admit there are legacy issues,” but that much has been learned in the industry.

“Were cars less safe 60 years ago? Of course they were … Do we know more about food? We certainly do, and that’s the case with uranium, coal, copper,” DeJoia said. “It is an evolving process and just because it wasn’t done properly 40 or 50 years ago doesn’t mean we can’t do it properly today.” …

He concedes that for now, neither spot market nor long-term sales market prices “support fervent development.”

“However, the nuclear-power situation in the world — in our country — indicates a true shortage and that the price will go up once the fervor over Fukushima and everything gets past us,” he said, noting that the U.S. itself produces only 7 or 8 percent of the 55 million to 60 million pounds of uranium used a year by the nation’s nuclear plants. “We will have to realize nuclear power is probably the most viable, cleanest power source we have.”

Needless to say, DeJoia’s glee is not shared by all of the neighbors of the proposed mine. From the same article:

[A] coalition of community organizations, including several Native American groups and an organization of former uranium miners, contends a mining operation would imperil the area’s water supply and quality. The group also believes it would severely impact an area designated by the Forest Service as a traditional cultural property that has great spiritual significance for indigenous people across the Southwest.

“It is essentially the same as proposing a huge uranium mine in the middle of the Vatican. There’s just no way to avoid the impacts,” said attorney Eric Jantz of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, which is representing the coalition, the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment.

Jantz said water pumped from the mine could result in significant drawdowns of surface water and springs. There is also concern waste piles and toxic heavy-metal materials could make their way into ground and surface water, he said.

The Forest Service could issue its approval this year, the newspaper reports, clearing the path for drilling to begin within the next several years. And once that happens, hoo-boy, is New Mexico in for an economic bonanza — the likes of which DeJoia can’t even describe to a reporter:

“I won’t run you through all the economics on that, but you can rest assured there is an awful lot of income tax paid on that,” he said. “There are a lot of New Mexico taxes in there.”

Thanks for sparing us the numbers. Nobody wants to be thinking hard when we could just be mindlessly digging for short-term profits.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

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Nation’s biggest uranium mine planned in New Mexico

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Scientists See Cruelty in Killing Method Used in Japan’s Dolphin Roundup

by Myrna Posted on April 6, 2013

A peer-reviewed analysis finds the killing method used on dolphins in a Japanese town is far from humane. Link:   Scientists See Cruelty in Killing Method Used in Japan’s Dolphin Roundup Related ArticlesThe Fire Hose: Mink Exports, Planetary Limits, Nuclear BenefitsKnowosphere at Work: Farmer-to-Farmer Video Advice Boosting YieldsSurvey Finds Most Republicans Seek Action on Climate Change

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Scientists See Cruelty in Killing Method Used in Japan’s Dolphin Roundup

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James Hansen says natural gas is worse than nuclear

by 7MelansonHayden940 Posted on April 5, 2013

James Hansen says natural gas is worse than nuclear

By John Upton

Shutterstock

If forced to decide between living in a world powered by natural gas or a world powered by nuclear energy, which would you choose?

Seems a little like trying to decide whether to chop off an arm or a leg.

Evacuees of Fukushima or residents of San Luis Obispo (a coastal Californian county where a nuclear power plant sits near poorly understood earthquake faults) may opt for natural gas. Then again, residents of nearby Contra Costa County, Calif. (where the air is poisoned by natural-gas-burning power plants), or of Pavilion, Wyo. (where the water was poisoned by natural gas fracking), may prefer nuclear.

Leave it to NASA scientist-turned-climate activist James Hansen to bring a little clarity. He crunched the numbers to determine which of the two options is less deadly to humanity. The result isn’t even close: Despite the horrific threats posed by nuclear fission, Hansen and NASA colleague Pushker Kharecha found nuclear power to be far safer than natural gas.

From their paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology:

On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420 000–7.04 million deaths and 80–240 [gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent] emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power.

Historically, the scientists conclude that air pollution would’ve killed nearly 2 million more people between 1979 and 2001 had all of the world’s nuclear power been replaced by the burning of coal and natural gas. The findings illustrate the difference 64 gigatons less carbon dioxide (or equivalent greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere can make.

Scientific American breaks it down:

What is even more starkly clear is that the number of deaths caused by nuclear power is far lower than those saved by it; in fact there’s scant comparison. As the report notes, even the worst nuclear accident in history (Chernobyl) caused about 40 deaths; these include 28 immediate responders and about 15 deaths caused among 6000 victims of excess cancers (it’s always very difficult to detect statistically significant excess cancers in the presence of a high natural background rate). There have been no deaths attributable to the Three Mile Island accident. And while the verdict on Fukushima is still not definitive, the latest report on the accident predicts no direct deaths and a much lower exposure to radiation for the surrounding population than that purported to lead to fatal cancers. The bottom line is that, even assuming pessimistic scenarios, the number of deaths caused by nuclear power is a minuscule fraction of those lives which were saved by nuclear power replacing fossil fuels.

So yay for nuclear, when compared in some important respects to fossil fuels. But maybe let’s not forget that option C is better than either one, hmm?

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

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James Hansen says natural gas is worse than nuclear

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Fukushima meltdown appears to have sickened American infants

by gammak Posted on April 1, 2013

Fukushima meltdown appears to have sickened American infants

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Fallout from that Fukushima meltdown thing a couple years back? It’s not just the Japanese who are suffering, though their plight is obviously the worst.

Radioactive isotopes blasted from the failed reactors may have given kids born in Hawaii and along the American West Coast health disorders which, if left untreated, can lead to permanent mental and physical handicaps.

Children born in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington between one week and 16 weeks after the meltdowns began in March 2011 were 28 percent more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism than were kids born in those states during the same period one year earlier, a new study shows. In the rest of the U.S. during that period in 2011, where radioactive fallout was less severe, the risks actually decreased slightly compared with the year before.

Substantial quantities of the radioisotope iodine-131 were produced by the meltdowns, then wafted over the Pacific Ocean and fell over Hawaii, the American West Coast, and other Pacific countries in rain and snow, reaching levels hundreds of times greater than those considered safe.

After entering our bodies, radioactive iodine gathers in our thyroids. Thyroids are glands that release hormones that control how we grow. In babies, including those not yet born, such radiation can stunt the development of body and brain. The condition is known as congenital hypothyroidism. It is treatable when detected early.

“Fukushima fallout appeared to affect all areas of the U.S., and was especially large in some, mostly in the western part of the nation,” wrote researchers with the Radiation and Public Health Project in their peer-reviewed paper published in Open Journal of Pediatrics.

The links between iodine radioisotope exposure and juvenile hypothyroidism were established after the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown. The authors of this new paper suspect that the spike in Pacific Coast cases in 2011 was linked to the Fukushima accident, but they warn that further analysis is needed “to better understand any association between iodine exposure from Fukushima-Dai-ichi and congenital hypothyroidism risk.”

Their findings may be only a tip of an epidemiological iceberg.

“Congenital hypothyroidism can be used as one measure to assess any potential changes in U.S. fetal and infant health status after Fukushima because official data was available relatively promptly,” the researchers wrote. “However, health departments will soon have available for other 2010 and 2011 indicators of fetal/infant health, including fetal deaths, premature births, low weight births, neonatal deaths, infant deaths, and birth defects.”

So stay tuned. Two years and one month after the meltdown, we’re only just beginning to understand how the nuclear catastrophe affected the health of people living around the vast Pacific Ocean.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

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Fukushima meltdown appears to have sickened American infants

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Japan plans world’s largest offshore wind farm near Fukushima

by gerdi Posted on January 16, 2013

Japan plans world’s largest offshore wind farm near Fukushima

By Philip Bump

pjh

An offshore farm near Kent, U.K.

The world’s largest offshore wind farm is coming to Japan. Eventually.

From New Scientist:

By 2020, the plan is to build a total of 143 wind turbines on platforms 16 kilometres off the coast of Fukushima, home to the stricken Daiichi nuclear reactor that hit the headlines in March 2011 when it was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami.

The wind farm, which will generate 1 gigawatt of power once completed, is part of a national plan to increase renewable energy resources following the post-tsunami shutdown of the nation’s 54 nuclear reactors. Only two have since come back online.

The project is part of Fukushima’s plan to become completely energy self-sufficient by 2040, using renewable sources alone. The prefecture is also set to build the country’s biggest solar park.

The planned farm will be almost twice the size of the largest such facility currently in operation. By installing the turbines near Fukushima, utilities can leverage the abandoned plant’s now-unused grid connections.

By 2020, it is possible that the United States will still have a wind industry. Stay tuned.

Source

Japan to build world’s largest offshore wind farm, New Scientist

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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