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I posted to youtube.com
Mondura Dam - Andy Roberts original song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3C0E3aTLDc&feature=youtube_gdata
June 13 2011, 6:02am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Japanese nuclear firm admits error on radiation reading
Tokyo Electric Power who run the ill fated Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant says initial reports of radiation levels 10m times higher than normal in parts of No 2 reactor were inaccurate.
This article titled “Japanese nuclear firm admits error on radiation reading” was written by Justin McCurry in Tokyo, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 00.10 UTC Fresh doubt has been cast on the handling of the Fukushima nuclear crisis after officials admitted wildly overstating levels of radiation, prompting an evacuation of the nuclear site damaged by the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said initial reports of a level 10m times higher than normal in parts of the No 2 reactor were inaccurate, although it could not say by how much. Tepco said at first that the worker who took the measurement, of a pool of water in the reactor’s basement turbine building, had fled before taking a second reading. The discovery prompted another evacuation at the site, halting work to pump and store radioactive water that has built up in the turbine buildings of three of the six reactors. Tepco later said the pool of water had been contaminated but the extremely high reading was a mistake. “The number is not credible,” spokesman Takashi Kurita said. “We are very sorry.” However, later reports on Sunday showed contamination 100,000 times normal in water at reactor No 2, and 1,850 times normal in the nearby sea, the most alarming levels since the crisis began. Evidence of dangerous contamination in reactor No 2 emerged days after three workers were exposed to high levels while repairing the cooling system at the No 3 reactor. Two of the men received suspected beta ray burns after stepping into water. Reports said the workers were due to be discharged from hospital on Monday. One pump is being used to extract radioactive water, and two more will be taken to the site. The US military is sending barges loaded with 500,000 gallons of fresh water to nearby Onahama Bay. Early this morning a magnitude 6.5 earthquake rocked north Japan, the latest aftershock, and officials warned it would trigger a 50 cm (two ft) tsunami. Two of Fukushima’s six reactors are safe, having achieved “cool shutdown”, but the other four have yet to be brought under control. Japan’s nuclear safety agency, Nisa, said the temperature and pressure inside all six reactors had stabilised. Yukio Edano, the chief government spokesman, said the myriad problems at the plant were no closer to being resolved. “We have restored power and pumped in fresh water, and we are making basic steps towards improvement. But there is still no room for complacency.” Modest progress was made on removing contaminated water and stepping up work to cool the reactors with fresh water, rather than corrosive sea water, over the weekend. But Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the emergency could continue for weeks, or possibly months. Concern over food safety spread to fishing over the weekend when officials said seawater samples taken 20 miles off the coast of Fukushima contained 1,850 times the normal level of radioactivity. Nisa said the tainted seawater posed no risk: “Ocean currents will disperse radiation particles and so it will be very diluted by the time it is consumed by fish and seaweed, and even more by the time they are consumed by humans. There is no need to worry about health risks.” US authorities said on Sunday night that low concentrations of radiation in samples of Massachusetts rainwater were probably caused by Fukushima. Nevada, California, Hawaii, Colorado and Washington state have also reported tiny amounts of radiation from the accident but officials said they presented no health risks.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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Related posts:Japanese nuclear officials fear crack in reactor core Japanese nuclear plant hit by fire and third explosion Visualising radiation leaks from the Fukushima nuclear power plant
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March 28 2011, 11:32am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Japanese nuclear officials fear crack in reactor core
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/25/japanese-nuclear-officials-fear-crack-in-reactor-core
Possible core damage at the Japanese Fukushima nuclear power plant could be causing a leak of high levels of radiation and oh no! this is the number 3 reactor – the one with the much more deadly plutonium mixture. MOX = Plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel
This article titled “Japanese nuclear officials fear crack in reactor core” was written by Justin McCurry in Tokyo, for The Guardian on Friday 25th March 2011 09.12 UTC Nuclear safety officials in Japan fear the core of a reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have cracked, causing a leak of high levels of radiation. Growing uncertainty over the state of the stricken reactor prompted the government to tell people living within a 12-19 mile (20-30km) radius of the plant to consider leaving their homes temporarily. The government’s chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, said 130,000 residents in the area had been encouraged to leave to improve their quality of life, not because their health was at risk. The nuclear emergency, 150 miles north of Tokyo, has caused severe disruption to business, supply routes and other services in the area. On Thursday, three workers were exposed to radiation after stepping in contaminated water in the turbine building of the No 3 reactor. They were trying to cool the crippled reactor when the accident occurred. “The contaminated water had 10,000 times the amount of radiation as would be found in water circulating from a normally operating reactor,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for Japan’s nuclear safety agency. “It is possible that there is damage to the reactor.” Two of the men received possible beta ray burns to their legs. All three have been transferred to a special radiation treatment facility. Edano said the source of the leak remained unknown. “We are exploring every possibility, but we don’t think this is a new situation, rather that a certain amount of radiation may have leaked from the reactor. This is a possibility that we have been mentioning for some time. “But at this point we don’t know if the radiation is coming from the reactor itself or from another source.” Nuclear officials say the leak may have come from pipes or the reactor’s pool for storing spent fuel rods, which workers have been struggling to cool off since the plant was badly damaged in the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. Officials were preparing themselves for the possibility that the reactor core was damaged in an explosion three days after the disaster that destroyed its containment building. The reactor contains 170 tonnes of radioactive fuel in its core, and is the only one of the facility’s six reactors that contains the potentially more dangerous plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel. Thursday’s accident forced a temporary halt to work on two reactors while technicians check radiation levels. “We should try to avoid delays if at all possible, but we also need to ensure that the people working there are safe,” Nishiyama said.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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Related posts:Japan nuclear reactor water-bombing has little effect Japanese nuclear plant hit by fire and third explosion Fukushima nuclear power plant second nuclear reactor explosion – Video
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March 25 2011, 5:21am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Japan ministers ignored safety warnings over nuclear reactors
Earthquake seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko claimed that an accident was likely and that nuclear plants have ‘fundamental vulnerability’. Fukushima came very close.
This article titled “Japan ministers ignored safety warnings over nuclear reactors” was written by Robin McKie, science editor, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 18.51 UTC The timing of the near nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi could not have been more appropriate. In only a few weeks the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear plant disaster ever to affect our planet – at Chernobyl in Ukraine. A major core meltdown released a deadly cloud of radioactive material over Europe and gave the name Chernobyl a terrible resonance. This weekend it is clear that the name Fukushima came perilously close to achieving a similar notoriety. However, the real embarrassment for the Japanese government is not so much the nature of the accident but the fact it was warned long ago about the risks it faced in building nuclear plants in areas of intense seismic activity. Several years ago, the seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko stated, specifically, that such an accident was highly likely to occur. Nuclear power plants in Japan have a “fundamental vulnerability” to major earthquakes, Katsuhiko said in 2007. The government, the power industry and the academic community had seriously underestimated the potential risks posed by major quakes. Katsuhiko, who is professor of urban safety at Kobe University, has highlighted three incidents at reactors between 2005 and 2007. Atomic plants at Onagawa, Shika and Kashiwazaki-Kariwa were all struck by earthquakes that triggered tremors stronger than those to which the reactor had been designed to survive. In the case of the incident at the Kushiwazaki reactor in northwestern Japan, a 6.8-scale earthquake on 16 July 2007 set off a fire that blazed for two hours and allowed radioactive water to leak from the plant. However, no action was taken in the wake of any of these incidents despite Katsuhiko’s warning at the time that the nation’s reactors had “fatal flaws” in their design. Japan is the world’s third largest nuclear power user, with 53 reactors that provide 34.5% of its electricity, and there are plans to increase provision to 50% by 2030. Unfortunately its nuclear industry is bedevilled with controversy In 2002 the president of the country’s largest power utility was forced to resign after he and other senior officials were suspected of falsifying plant safety records. Nor is the nature of its reactor planning inducing much comfort. The trouble is, says Katsuhiko, that Japan began building up its atomic energy system 40 years ago, when seismic activity in the country was comparatively low. This affected the designs of plants which were not built to robust enough standards, the seismologist argues. Since then, Japan has experienced more serious quakes as tension has built up on tectonic plates, culminating in Friday’s devastating earthquake, the worst in Japan for more than 100 years. The result was an incident that came perilously close to triggering a nuclear meltdown. Starved of coolant, the reactor would have heated up dangerously until its fuel rods melted and released a cloud of highly radioactive material. Not surprisingly, the International Atomic Energy Agency has announced it is now urgently seeking details of what happened at Fukushima. The rest of the world – which includes many countries, including Britain, that are preparing significant nuclear expansion plans – will be looking very closely at what it finds.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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Related posts:Fukushima nuclear plant blast puts Japan on high alert Japan battles to stave off possible nuclear meltdown After the earthquake, a tsunami of death and destruction in Japan
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March 13 2011, 11:22am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Blog Action Day 2010 – #BAD2010
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/10/15/blog-action-day-2010-bad2010
The topic for Blog Action Day 2010 is water, and I’m just going to link out to some other entries from here, this time. In 2009 I wrote blog-action-day-when-the-waters-rise In 2007, the first blog action day, I explained that individual-action-is-not-enough So this year I entered another song, Mondura Dam which according to the composer, myself, is bang on topic. It’s over on the Andy Roberts Podcast blog: Mondura Dam – as long as we have water and a piece about how to make cider using much less water to make cider than beer
This has been a post for blog action day 2010 tagged #BAD10
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Related posts:Blog Action Day – individual action is not enough Blog Action Day : When The Waters Rise Action Log examples
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October 15 2010, 7:21am | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Mondura Dam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ4qprTQjHY&feature=youtube_gdata
July 22 2010, 12:04pm | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Mondura Dam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBSCm83f_ow&feature=youtube_gdata
March 24 2010, 5:30am | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Mondura Dam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DId8s2MGLXU&feature=youtube_gdata
October 20 2009, 1:18pm | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Andy Roberts Tuesday Night - Mondura Dam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR9kYnvR-iQ
July 21 2009, 1:10pm | Comments »
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