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“The future existence of Japan as a whole was at stake,” admits Japan’s prime minister at the time of the 2011 quake and tsunami, revealing that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people. Naoto Kan expressed satisfaction at the three TEPCO executives facing charges over negligence, but this shocking admission comes as AFP reports, conservation group Greenpeace warned that “signs of mutations in trees and DNA-damaged worms beginning to appear,” while “vast stocks of radiation” mean that forests cannot be decontaminated.

In an interview with The Telegraph to mark the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, Naoto Kan described the panic and disarray at the highest levels of the Japanese government as it fought to control multiple meltdowns at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.

He said he considered evacuating the capital, Tokyo, along with all other areas within 160 miles of the plant, and declaring martial law. “The future existence of Japan as a whole was at stake,” he said. “Something on that scale, an evacuation of 50 million, it would have been like a losing a huge war.”

Mr Kan admitted he was frightened and said he got “no clear information” out of Tepco, the plant’s operator. He was “very shocked” by the performance of Nobuaki Terasaka, his own government’s key nuclear safety adviser. “We questioned him and he was unable to give clear responses,” he said.

“We asked him – do you know anything about nuclear issues? And he said no, I majored in economics.”

“When we got the report that power had been cut and the coolant had stopped working, that sent a shiver down my spine,” Mr Kan said. “From March 11, when the incident happened, until the 15th, the effects [of radioactive contamination] were expanding geographically.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Japan Hits Demographic Tipping Point With First Official Population Decline In History

February 27, 2016

Japan Hits Demographic Tipping Point With First Official Population Decline In History

As troubling as Japan’s deflationary, and now negative interest rate, economic quagmire is, the biggest threat facing Japan has little to do with its balance sheet and everything to do with its demographics, for the simple reason that not only is Japan’s population the oldest it has ever been, as well as the oldest on average in the entire world, but is now also officially shrinking.

According to data released yesterday by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, in the latest 5 year census, Japan’s population declined last year for the first time in nearly a century.

The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said the latest census shows that Japan’s population as of Oct. 1, 2015, was 127,110,047 – a decline of 947,305, or 0.7 percent, since the last census conducted in 2010.

The number of Japanese dropped to 127.1 million in a national census for 2015, down 0.7 percent compared with five years earlier, and was the first recorded decline since the 5-year census started in 1920. As the Shimbun adds, in the 2015 census, men accounted for 61,829,237 of the population, and women 65,280,810.

The population of Fukushima Prefecture, where many residents are still being forced to live away from home due to damage caused to their hometowns by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, saw the biggest decrease, or 115,458, a 5.7 percent decline from the last census. The two other prefectures hit hardest by the disaster — Iwate and Miyagi — also saw population declines.

To be sure, this is not exactly a surprise: Japan’s ministry had estimated that the nation’s population had been declining for four straight years since 2011, but the latest results are the first official confirmation via a census that the national population has gone down since the government began conducting them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima’s 5th Year of Full-Blown Crisis

February 26, 2016

Fukushima’s 5th Year of Full-Blown Crisis

March 11th is the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Japan’s NHK broadcaster recently conducted a poll of how citizens feel about nuclear power. According to NHK’s poll results, over 70% are in favor of completely or partially abandoning nuclear power plants. Nothing too surprising about that, but on the other side of the spectrum, the Abe administration is pushing real hard to re-open closed nuclear power plants, in fact some are already splitting atoms like crazy.

Here’s what the March 1st 2016 issue of Scientific American says about the prospects for Fukushima/TEPCO on its 5th anniversary: “Today the disaster site remains in crisis mode… Even more troublesome, the plant has yet to stop producing dangerous nuclear waste,” Madhusree Mukerjee, 5 Years Later, the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Site Continues to Spill Waste, Scientific American, March 1, 2016.

According to Naohiro Masuda, Chief Decommissioning Officer for Tokyo Electric Power Company (“TEPCO”), the technology required to remove nuclear fuel from the reactors does not exist yet: “Engineers are studying the problem, but we don’t think that there’s no way to remove the fuel. There’s huge risk involved. If you make one small mistake, it might cause a huge problem for the local people, or even worldwide. We have to be aware of that possibility,” Steve Featherstone, Fukushima: Five Years Later, Popular Science, March/April 2016.

“There’s huge risk involved. If you make one small mistake, it might cause a huge problem for the local people or even worldwide.” Those are the words of the Chief Decommissioning Officer for TEPCO. Here’s the problem: TEPCO doesn’t even qualify for “small mistakes,” all of their mistakes, and there have been many, mucho mistakes, have been huge, big, gigantic, elephantine mistakes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima Mon Amour

January 22, 2016

Fukushima Mon Amour

cpmarilyn

Is the crisis in Fukushima over or just beginning? You might be forgiven for scratching your head at that one. Nearly five years after the nuclear meltdown triggered by the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami, one of the planet’s worst radioactive catastrophes has almost completely faded from both the media and public consciousness. Amid that information void, the lethal history of those events has been swamped under pernicious myths being spread by nuclear hucksters.

In brief, the revised story of the Fukushima meltdown goes something like this: the Daiichi facility was struck by an unprecedented event, unlikely to be repeated; the failsafe systems worked; the meltdown was swiftly halted; the spread of radioactive contamination contained and remediated; no lives or illnesses resulted from the crisis. Full-speed ahead!

One of the first to squirm headlong down this rabbit hole of denial was Paddy Reagan, a professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Surrey: “We had a doomsday earthquake in a country with 55 nuclear power stations and they all shut down perfectly, although three have had problems since. This was a huge earthquake, and as a test of the resilience and robustness of nuclear plants it seems they have withstood the effects very well.”

For Reagan and other atomic zealots, the Fukushima meltdown did not represent a cautionary tale, but served as a real time exemplar of the safety, efficiency and durability of nuclear power. Call it Fukushima Mon Amour, or How They Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Atom.

Such extreme revisionism is to be expected from the likes of Reagan, and other hired guns for the Big Atom, especially at a moment of grave peril for their economic fortunes. More surreal is the killer compact between the nuclear industry and some high-profile environmentalists, which reached a feverish pitch at the Paris Climate conference this fall.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Plutonium’s global problems are piling up

January 22, 2016

Plutonium’s global problems are piling up

The nuclear fuel carriers Pacific Heron and Pacific Egret in port at Barrow-in-Furness, England, before setting sail for Japan. Image: CORE

Increasing worldwide stockpiles of surplus plutonium are becoming a political embarrassment, a worrying security risk, and a hidden extra cost to the nuclear industry.

LONDON, 22 January, 2016 − Two armed ships set off from the northwest of England this week to sail round the world to Japan on a secretive and controversial mission to collect a consignment of plutonium and transport it to the US.

The cargo of plutonium, once the most sought-after and valuable substance in the world, is one of a number of ever-growing stockpiles that are becoming an increasing financial and security embarrassment to the countries that own them.

So far, there is no commercially viable use for this toxic metal, and there is increasing fear that plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists, or that governments could be tempted to use it to join the nuclear arms race.

All the plans to use plutonium for peaceful purposes in fast breeder and commercial reactors have so far failed to keep pace with the amounts of this highly-dangerous radioactive metal being produced by the countries that run nuclear power stations.

The small amounts of plutonium that have been used in conventional and fast breeder reactors have produced very little electricity − at startlingly high costs.

Out of harm’s way

Japan, with its 47-ton stockpile, is among the countries that once hoped to turn their plutonium into a power source, but various attempts have failed. The government, which has a firm policy of using it only for peaceful purposes, has nonetheless come under pressure to keep it out of harm’s way. Hence, the current plan to ship it to the US.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gail Tverberg: Something Has Got To Break

January 3, 2016

Gail Tverberg: Something Has Got To Break

Growing debt faster than your energy supply has hard limits

Actuary Gail Tverberg explains the tight correlation between the rates of GDP growth and growth in energy supply. For decades, energy has been becoming more costly to obtain, and instead of accepting lower GDP growth, we have been using debt to fund further energy exploration and extraction.

That strategy has diminishing returns, Tverberg warns. And we are close to the moment of reckoning:

The more we look at it the more we see that the rate of growth and energy supply is very closely correlated with the rate of GDP growth. And I know on some of my recent posts I’ve included a chart that goes back to 1820 that shows the same correlation. You have to have an increasing supply of energy in order to get GDP growth. The GDP growth tends to be a little higher than the energy growth. That’s especially the same when we made the change in the mid 70’s, when we had the big first oil crisis and we realized that Japan had already started making small cars, and so we could make smaller cars, too, and save quite a bit of oil very quickly. And we realized then that we didn’t have to burn oil to create electricity; there were a lot of other alternative approaches, including nuclear. So we pulled those off line, and where home heating had been done by oil it was easy to transfer that to other types of energy. So we had a number of different things we could do very quickly back then — and I think people got the idea that because we could pick the low-hanging fruit, then somehow or other we could do the same thing again. But we’re not getting that same kind of effect any more.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ukraine’s Looming “19 Fukushimas” Scenario

December 25, 2015

Ukraine’s Looming “19 Fukushimas” Scenario

With all the action in Syria, the Ukraine is no longer a subject for discussion in the West. In Russia, where the Ukraine is still a major problem looming on the horizon, and where some 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees are settling in, with no intentions of going back to what’s left of the Ukraine, it is still actively discussed. But for the US, and for the EU, it is now yet another major foreign policy embarrassment, and the less said about it the better.

In the meantime, the Ukraine is in full-blown collapse – all five glorious stages of it – setting the stage for a Ukrainian Nightmare Before Christmas, or shortly after.

Phase 1. Financially, the Ukrainian government is in sovereign default as of a couple of days ago. The IMF was forced to break its own rules in order to keep it on life support even though it is clearly a deadbeat. In the process, the IMF stiffed Russia, which happens to be one of its major shareholders; what gives?

Phase 2. Industry and commerce are approaching a standstill and the country is rapidly deindustrializing. Formerly, most of the trade was with Russia; this is now over. The Ukraine does not make anything that the EU might want, except maybe prostitutes. Recently, the Ukraine has been selling off its dirt. This is illegal, but, given what’s been happening there, the term “illegal” has become the stuff of comedy.

Phase 3. Politically, the Ukrainian government is a total farce. Much of it has been turned over to fly-by-night foreigners, such as the former Georgian president Saakashvili, who is a wanted criminal in his own country, which has recently stripped him of his citizenship. The parliament is stocked with criminals who bought their seat to gain immunity from prosecution, and who spend their time brawling with each other.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The False Promise of Nuclear Fusion

December 11, 2015

The False Promise of Nuclear Fusion

CP11j-047-02

There have been some pretty radioactive climate change ideas making the rounds at the COP21 talks in Paris. Team Hansen’s wildly unrealistic notion of switching on 61 new nuclear reactors a year was taking the cake until an even fruitier one reared its familiar head: the nuclear chimera known as ITER.

ITER was originally called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, with ‘experimental’ being the operative word in that lofty title. Which is perhaps why today they refer to it only by acronym (apparently the word ‘thermonuclear’ also had some rather explosive connotations.) The official website equates ITER with its coincidental Latin meaning, ‘The Way’.

ITER was initiated in 1985 by then presidents Reagan and Gorbachev. The multi-nation project included not only the United States and the already crumbling Soviet Union, but the European Union and Japan. Today there are 35 countries in the partnership.

If it ever gets completed and actually works, ITER will be a fusion reactor known as a Tokomak. Fusion is the physicists’ wet dream, and they’ve been hallucinating about ITER for precisely three decades and Tokomaks and fusion itself for even longer.

ITER itself isn’t even the final step to electricity-producing fusion power plants. Its purpose is in “preparing the way for the fusion power plants of tomorrow.” A tomorrow that is heralded as ten years away, decade after decade.

Wrestling with plasma

Indeed, ITER has been such a perpetually longstanding aspiration that I can delve for information into my father Mike Pentz’s 1994 memoirs without risk of being much out of date. A physicist and founder of Scientists Against Nuclear Arms, here’s how he assessed the challenge of fusion, something he began wrestling with back in 1948.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima Gets A Lot Uglier

November 3, 2015

Fukushima Gets A Lot Uglier

fukushima2

As time passes, a bona fide message emerges from within the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster scenario, and that message is that once a nuclear power plant loses it, the unraveling only gets worse and worse until it’s at its worst, and still, there’s no stopping it. Similar to opening Pandora’s box, there’s no stopping a ferocious atom-splitting insanity that knows no end.

Four years of experience with Fukushima provides considerable evidence that splitting atoms to boil water is outright unmitigated madness. After all, nuclear power plants are built to boil water; yes, to boil water; it’s as simple as that, but yet at the same time it’s also extraordinarily complex. Conversely, solar and wind do not boil water and are not complex and never deadly (Germany knows).

As it unfolds, the Fukushima story grows more convoluted and way more chilling. For example, according to The Japan Times, October 30th Edition: “Extremely high radiation levels and the inability to grasp the details about melted nuclear fuel make it impossible for the utility to chart the course of its planned decommissioning of the reactors at the plant.”

Thereby, the bitter truth behind a major nuclear meltdown shows its true colors: “Impossible for the utility to chart the course of its planned decommissioning…” is very definitive, divulging the weak underbelly of the fission-to-heat process; only one slip-up, and it’s deadly dangerous and likely out of control!

Not only that, but the entire Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex is subject to recurring mishaps and setbacks, as well as various technical tribulations, something different going wrong on any given day. And, it’s always big, never small.

For example, according to The Japan Times, October 30th Edition: “Deadly 9.4 Sieverts Detected Outside Fukushima Reactor 2 Containment Vessel; Checks Stop.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pipeline Politics: Russia, Turkey Clash Over Energy As Syria Rift Shifts Focus To German Line

October 14, 2015

Pipeline Politics: Russia, Turkey Clash Over Energy As Syria Rift Shifts Focus To German Line

In June, we noted that Russia had signed an MOU with Shell, E.On and OMV to double the capacity of the Nord Stream pipeline, the shortest route from Russian gas fields to Europe.

Here is a helpful visual:

What you’ll note from the above is that the Nord Stream allows Gazprom to dodge Ukraine, which is desirable for obvious reasons.

Of course that’s not good for the Eastern European countries (like Ukraine) who derive revenue from the flow of gas. Late last month, Slovak PM Robert Fico had the following to say about the Nord Stream project:

“They are making idiots of us. You can’t talk for months about how to stabilize the situation and then take a decision that puts Ukraine and Slovakia into an unenviable situation.”

To which we said the following:

When it comes to making grand public declarations about “stabilizing” unstable geopolitical situations and then turning around and doing something completely destabilizing, the West (and especially the US) are without equal, as evidenced by all manner of historical precedent including Washington’s efforts to help sack Viktor Yanukovych whose ouster precipitated the conflict in Ukraine in the first place. And make no mistake, to the extent there’s energy and money involved, that’s all the more true which is why it isn’t at all surprising that Western Europe would facilitate a deal that lets Gazprom bypass a war zone if it means getting natural gas to countries that “matter” in a more efficient way.

In an interesting, if predictable twist, Western Europe may need to step up its cooperation with Gazprom even further going forward because now, the conflict in Syria has strained the energy relationship between Moscow and Ankara.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima Reactor No.2 May Have Suffered Total Meltdown

September 29, 2015

Fukushima Reactor No.2 May Have Suffered Total Meltdown

To the extent the memory of Fukushima had faded over the last several years, the “fallout” (no pun intended) from the nuclear-like blast that tore through an industrial complex at the Chinese port of Tianjin last month served to remind the world of how far-reaching and unpredictable the consequences can be when disaster strikes at a site that houses potentially toxic materials.

For those unfamiliar, the explosion at Tianjin set the stage for an apocalyptic scenario whereby water soluble sodium cyanide could interact with incoming thunderstorms creating cyanide rain and while that doomsday-ish scenario didn’t play out in as dramatic a fashion as some feared, there was an eerie white foam covering the streets following the first rains that fell in the wake of the explosion.

In case Tianjin didn’t satisfy your thirst for potential cataclysms, just a few days after the explosion, Japan warned that Sakurajima (one of the country’s most active volcanos) was set to erupt. That was notable in and of itself, but what made the story especially amusing (if worrisome) was that just days earlier, Tokyo had greenlighted the reopening of the Sendai nuclear power plant which is located just 50 kilometers from Sakurajima. The reopening at Sendai marked the first nuclear reactor to be restarted in Japan since the Chernobyl redux at Fukushima in 2011.

As The Guardian noted at the time, some experts claim “the restarted reactor at Sendai [is] still at risk from natural disasters,” despite the fact that it was the first nuclear plant to pass new regulations put in place by the country’s Nuclear Regulation Authority on the heels of the disaster in 2011.

Well, don’t look now but experts now say the No. 2 reactor at Fukushima may have suffered a complete meltdown. Here’s RT with more:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Power Kills: the Real Reason the NRC Canceled It’s Nuclear Site Cancer Study

September 22, 2015

Nuclear Power Kills: the Real Reason the NRC Canceled It’s Nuclear Site Cancer Study

Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.

After spending some $1.5 million and more than five years on developing strategies to answer the question of increases of cancer near nuclear facilities, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last week reported that they would not continue with the process. They would knock it on the head [1].

This poisoned chalice has been passed between the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the NRC since 2009 when public and political pressure was brought to bear on the USNRC to update a 1990 study of the issue, a study which was widely seen by the public to be a whitewash.

The NCR quickly passed the unwelcome task up to the NAS. It requested that the NAS provide an assessment of cancer risks in populations living ‘near’ the NRC-licenced nuclear facilities that utilize and process Uranium. This included 104 operating nuclear reactors in 31 States and 13 fuel cycle facilities in operation in 10 States.

The NRC request was to be carried out by NAS in two phases. Phase 1 was a scoping study to inform design of the study to be begun in Phase 2 and to recommend the best organisation to carry out the work.

The Phase 1 report was finished in May 2012. The best ‘state of the art’ methods were listed and the job of carrying out the actual study, a pilot study, was sent to: Guess who? The NRC. The poisoned chalice was back home. The NRC was now in a corner: what could they do?

If you don’t like the truth … suppress it

The committee sat for three years thinking about this during which time more and more evidence emerged that if it actually carried out the pilot study, it would find something bad. It had to escape. It did. It cancelled it. The reason given was that it would cost $8 million just to do the pilot study of cancer near the seven sites NAS had selected in its 600 page Phase 1 report. [2]

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima: Thousands Have Already Died, Thousands More Will Die

August 20, 2015

Fukushima: Thousands Have Already Died, Thousands More Will Die

Official data from Fukushima show that nearly 2,000 people died from the effects of evacuations necessary to avoid high radiation exposures from the disaster.

The uprooting to unfamiliar areas, cutting of family ties, loss of social support networks, disruption, exhaustion, poor physical conditions and disorientation can and do result in many people, in particular older people, dying.

Increased suicide has occurred among younger and older people following the Fukushima evacuations, but the trends are unclear.

A Japanese Cabinet Office report stated that, between March 2011 and July 2014, 56 suicides in Fukushima Prefecture were linked to the nuclear accident. This should be taken as a minimum, rather than a maximum, figure.

Mental health consequences

It is necessary to include the mental health consequences of radiation exposures and evacuations. For example, Becky Martin has stated her PhD research at Southampton University in the UK shows that “the most significant impacts of radiation emergencies are often in our minds.”

She adds: “Imagine that you’ve been informed that your land, your water, the air that you have breathed may have been polluted by a deadly and invisible contaminant. Something with the capacity to take away your fertility, or affect your unborn children.

“Even the most resilient of us would be concerned … many thousands of radiation emergency survivors have subsequently gone on to develop Post-Trauma Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety disorders as a result of their experiences and the uncertainty surrounding their health.”

It is likely that these fears, anxieties, and stresses will act to magnify the effects of evacuations, resulting in even more old people dying or people committing suicide.

Such considerations should not be taken as arguments against evacuations, however. They are an important, life-saving strategy. But, as argued by Becky Martin,

“We need to provide greatly improved social support following resettlement and extensive long-term psychological care to all radiation emergency survivors, to improve their health outcomes and preserve their futures.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EPA’s Clean Power Plan Tougher Than Expected

August 4, 2015

EPA’s Clean Power Plan Tougher Than Expected

The Obama administration unveiled a much-anticipated, controversial rule on the regulation of greenhouse gases from power plants on August 3.

The first-of-their-kind limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants will actually require slightly tougher cuts than the original proposal. The EPA is calling for a 32 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from power plants below 2005 levels by 2030. That is up from the 30 percent target as part of last year’s proposal.

However, the EPA did throw the industry, and its opponents in Congress, a bone.

In the final rule, the Obama administration will allow for two extra years for utilities to hit their interim targets of achieving a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, with a deadline of 2022 instead of 2020. The EPA also offered up a “reliability safety valve,” which would allow states more leniency with deadlines in the event that the reliability of the electric grid came into question.

Under the final rule, the administration also decided to give new nuclear power plants credit towards the federal emissions target, as nuclear generates electricity without carbon emissions. That probably won’t be an avenue that many states pursue outside of a handful of nuclear power plants under construction in Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

The EPA estimates that the so-called “Clean Power Plan” will cost $8.4 billion annually by 2030 when implemented, but yield public-health and other benefits of $34 to $54 billion, including avoiding thousands of premature deaths each year.

The plan will accelerate a trend towards cleaner sources of electricity. The plan expects renewable energy to more than double its share of the electricity market, jumping from 13 percent in 2014 to 28 percent by 2030.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can U.S. Nuclear Plants Operate For 80 Years?

July 20, 2015

Can U.S. Nuclear Plants Operate For 80 Years?

The nuclear industry in the United States has been at a standstill for several decades. After an extraordinary wave of construction in the 1960s and 1970s, the nuclear industry ground to a halt. A confluence of events killed off new construction, including high interest rates, cost overruns, delays, and the Three Mile Island incident that scared the public and turned it against nuclear power.

But despite the nuclear industry’s inability to build more than a handful of new nuclear power plants since the 1980s, nuclear power still accounts for about 19 percent of electricity generation in the United States, the third largest source of electricity behind coal and natural gas.

Yet the nation’s 99 reactors are mostly nearing their retirement age. Having originally been planned for 40-year lifespans, many of the reactors would have already been forced to shut down by now, with nearly all of the rest hitting their limits at some point within the next decade. Instead, more than three-quarters of them have already received a 20-year extension, putting off their retirements until the 2030s.

But in the nuclear sector, where everything takes a long time, the 2030s are rapidly approaching. With one-fifth of the country’s electricity fleet nearing retirement, and very few nuclear power plants under construction to replace what is expected to be lost, how will the U.S. cope with the lost capacity?

“Four reactors are being built, but there’s absolutely no money and no desire to finance more plants than that. So in 20 or 30 years we’re going to have very few nuclear power plants in this country—that’s just a fact,” the former Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, said in a 2013 interview.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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