By Kate Seamons
More than two years after disaster struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, TEPCO has confirmed what pretty much everybody thought: radioactive water that leaked from the wrecked reactors is believed to have seeped into the underground water system, TEPCO officials finally admitted today at a regular news conference. Japan’s nuclear… …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
Steam or vapors appeared to be coming from a damaged reactor building at Japan’s tsunami-crippled nuclear plant Thursday, but the plant operator said radiation levels were steady.
The video images showed a small amount of vapor or steam but the origin wasn’t clear. Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the reactor’s spent fuel pool is stable and measurements of the temperatures and pressure have not changed significantly.
Workers were continuing to inject water into the No. 3 reactor to cool it, the utility said.
The No. 3 reactor was one of three at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant that suffered core meltdowns after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, leading to the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. Thousands of people have been unable to return to their homes near the plant because radiation levels are still high.
Most of Japan’s nuclear reactors remain shut down for safety checks following the disaster.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
The operator of Japan’s crippled nuclear plant says steam appears to be coming from a reactor building but radiation levels are steady.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. says workers Thursday are continuing to inject water into the No. 3 reactor to cool it. It says the reactor’s spent fuel pool is stable and the temperatures and pressure there aren’t changing significantly.
The No. 3 reactor was one of three at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant that suffered core meltdowns after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, leading to the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. Thousands of people have been unable to return to their homes near the plant because radiation levels are still high.
Most of Japan’s nuclear reactors remain shut down for safety checks following the disaster.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
A U.N. nuclear watchdog team says Japan may need longer than the planned 40 years to decommission its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant and is urging its operator to improve plant stability.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant is so complex that it is “impossible” to predict how long the cleanup may last.
He suggested it would take longer than the 40 years Japan has projected.
The plant runs on makeshift equipment and frequently suffers glitches.
Lentijo urged the plant operator to promptly replace temporary equipment with a more reliable, permanent system.
The 12-member mission plans to release a report next month.
The plant was badly damaged by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/ClqFlx-vjPo/
A U.N. nuclear watchdog team has begun inspecting Japan‘s crippled nuclear plant, which has been plagued with radioactive water leaks and other glitches more than two years it was struck by a tsunami.
The International Atomic Energy Agency team is primarily reviewing the decommissioning of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, which was ravaged in the March 2011 disaster. The team will also investigate recent blackouts and leaks that have raised doubts whether the plant can survive the decades-long cleanup process.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. President Naomi Hirose said he hoped to gather expertise from around the world to resolve the problems hampering the cleanup at the plant.
Japan‘s government is launching a panel specifically on the contaminated water, a mixture of cooling water runoff from melted reactors and underground water.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/AaPo_laISyI/
A U.N. nuclear watchdog team is reviewing the cleanup process at Japan‘s crippled nuclear plant amid growing safety concerns triggered by recent glitches.
Juan Carlos Lentijo, leader of the 12-member team, said Monday that it will assess and analyze melted reactors, radiation levels and waste management at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency team will inspect the plant and hold talks with operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. and government officials during its weeklong visit, then compile an independent assessment and give advice.
The plant, ravaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, runs on makeshift equipment and has suffered blackouts, leakage of highly radioactive water from underground tanks and other glitches in recent weeks, triggering safety concerns. Its decommissioning is expected to take 40 years.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/Zm-i5OmEMjE/
The operator of Japan‘s crippled nuclear power plant says it has detected a fresh leak of radioactive water from one of the facility’s storage tanks.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. previously said that two of seven underground tanks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant had been leaking since Saturday.
TEPCO said Tuesday that the latest leak involves a tank that was being used to take water from one of the two that were leaking. It said none of the radioactive water was believed to have reached the ocean.
TEPCO has halted the transfer of water while looking for alternative storage.
The tanks are crucial to the management of contaminated water used to cool melted fuel rods at the plant’s reactors, which were damaged in March 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
By Matt Cantor Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority was launched in September to keep a closer watch on the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi plant and TEPCO‘s work there—but what was supposed to be a more independent, tougher regulator is simply running “the same old routine,” says an investigator. The NRA is just rubber-stamping TEPCO‘s… …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
The operator of Japan‘s crippled nuclear plant said Saturday that it was moving tons of highly radioactive water from a temporary storage tank to another after detecting signs of leakage, in a blow to the plant’s struggles with tight storage space.
Tokyo Electric power Co. said about 120 tons of the water are believed to have breached the tank’s inner linings, some of it possibly leaking into the soil. TEPCO is moving the water to a nearby tank at the Fukushima Dai-chi plant — a process that could take several days.
TEPCO detected the leak earlier in the week, when radiation levels spiked in water samples collected in between the inner linings of the tank. Radiation levels in water samples taken outside the tank also have increased, an indication of the water leak, TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono said.
Contaminated water at the plant, which went into multiple meltdowns after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan, has escaped into the sea several times during the crisis. Experts suspect there has been a continuous leak into the ocean through an underground water system, citing high levels of contamination among fish caught in waters just off the plant.
The leak is not only an immediate environmental concern, but threatens TEPCO‘s tight water management situation, Ono said.
The tank contains 13,000 tons of water, which is part of the water that was used to cool melted fuel at the plant’s reactors damaged in the twin disasters. So much water has been used that TEPCO is struggling to find storage space.
“The impact (from the leak) is not small, as the space is already tight,” Ono said. “We need to revise our water management plans.”
More than 270,000 tons of highly radioactive water is already stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks and another underground tank. They are visible even at the plant’s entrance and built around the compound, taking up more than 80 percent of its storage capacity.
TEPCO expects the amount to double over three years and plans to build hundreds of more tanks by mid-2015 to meet the demand.
Because of that, TEPCO is anxious to launch a new water treatment system that can purify the contaminated water. The machine, called ALPS, recently started a final test run after six months …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
By The Huffington Post News Editors
TOKYO — Power was restored Friday to a cooling system at a tsunami-damaged nuclear plant in Japan that failed for the second time in a month after an outage caused by construction work to keep out rats suspected of setting off the earlier blackout.
Power for the cooling system for a storage pool for fuel was restored after a two-hour break at reactor No. 3, and there was no immediate danger from the breakdown, according to Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that operates Fukushima Dai-ichi in northeastern Japan.
Read More…
More on Nuclear Power
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post
Japanese nuclear regulators say the cooling system has failed for a storage pool for fuel at one of the reactors at the tsunami-damaged nuclear plant in the northeast. There was no immediate danger from the failure, the second at the plant in a month.
A spokesman for the Nuclear Regulation Authority says an alarm went off Friday afternoon about the problem at reactor No. 3. The cause is still under investigation.
A spokesman for the plant’s operator said the cooling system can be turned off for two weeks before temperatures approach dangerous levels.
Fukushima Dai-ichi plant went into multiple meltdowns after the March 2011 tsunami. The plant is being decommissioned, but continues to have glitches.
Last month, a power outage led to a cooling system not working for two days.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Japanese nuclear regulators say the cooling system has failed for a storage pool for fuel at one of the reactors at the tsunami-damaged nuclear plant in the northeast. There was no immediate danger from the failure, the second at the plant in a month.
A spokesman for the Nuclear Regulation Authority says an alarm went off Friday afternoon about the problem at reactor No. 3. The cause is still under investigation.
A spokesman for the plant’s operator said the cooling system can be turned off for two weeks before temperatures approach dangerous levels.
Fukushima Dai-ichi plant went into multiple meltdowns after the March 2011 tsunami. The plant is being decommissioned, but continues to have glitches.
Last month, a power outage led to a cooling system not working for two days.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
The utility that operates Japan‘s crippled nuclear plant says it deserves most of the blame for the crisis, in the company’s strongest remarks about its own shortcomings.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. acknowledged in a report Friday that it was not prepared to deal with the earthquake and tsunami that ravaged northeast Japan in March 2011, causing meltdowns at its Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. TEPCO had earlier maintained that the tsunami was mostly to blame for the crisis.
The report said that TEPCO‘s equipment and safety measures were insufficient and that the meltdowns should have been avoided. It also said TEPCO did not try to inform the public of risks and troubles at the plant.
The report is part of an internal investigation into the crisis that TEPCO launched last year.
A Japanese utility has scrapped plans to build a nuclear plant near the site of a nuclear disaster two years ago.
Tohoku Electric Power Co. said Thursday that strong protests from local communities as well as radiation leaks at the proposed site of the new power station make the project unworkable. The company wanted to build a plant north of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant that was destroyed by a tsunami that struck after a huge earthquake on March 11, 2011.
But the utility said land acquisition and environmental surveys could not be completed due to contamination.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe supports resumption of reactors deemed safe. The company still plans to build a new reactor at an existing plant. Japan has 50 workable reactors and 12 in the pipeline.
Concrete rubble litters streets lined with shuttered shops and dark windows. A collapsed roof juts from the ground. A ship sits stranded on a stretch of dirt flattened when the tsunami roared across the coastline. There isn’t a person in sight.
Google Street View is giving the world a rare glimpse into one of Japan‘s eerie ghost towns, created when the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami sparked a nuclear disaster that has left the area uninhabitable.
The technology pieces together digital images captured by Google’s fleet of camera-equipped vehicles and allows viewers to take virtual tours of locations around the world, including faraway spots like the South Pole and fantastic landscapes like the Grand Canyon.
Now it is taking people inside Japan‘s nuclear no-go zone, to the city of Namie, whose 21,000 residents have been unable to return to live since they fled the radiation spewing from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant two years ago.
Koto Naganuma, 32, who lost her home in the tsunami, said some people find it too painful to see the places that were so familiar yet are now so out of reach.
She has only gone back once, a year ago, and for a few minutes.
“I’m looking forward to it. I’m excited I can take a look at those places that are so dear to me,” said Naganuma. “It would be hard, too. No one is going to be there.”
Namie Mayor Tamotsu Baba said memories came flooding back as he looked at the images shot by Google earlier this month.
He spotted an area where an autumn festival used to be held and another of an elementary school that was once packed with schoolchildren.
“Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forbearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children,” he said in a post on his blog.
“We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.”
Street View was started in 2007, and now provides images from more than 3,000 …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
Japanese government regulators say they’ll conduct their first investigation into the country’s nuclear crisis to address key unanswered questions.
Several groups have published findings of their own investigations into the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which was ravaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Previous investigations have largely blamed the disaster on botched crisis management, government-industry collusion and the tsunami.
But questions remain, and experts still suspect that the quake, not the tsunami, may have triggered a meltdown at the plant. This is a key point that could affect anti-quake measures at nuclear facilities nationwide.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority said Wednesday that its investigation will start by the end of April and could take decades because parts of the plant are in such poor condition.
By The Huffington Post News Editors
TOKYO — This week’s power outage at Japan‘s tsunami-crippled nuclear plant may have been caused by a rat.
Masayuki Ono, spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, says a 15-centimeter (6-inch) rat was found dead Wednesday near a switchboard. He says the rat may be linked to the power failure, but that more investigation is needed to be sure.
This week’s power outage at Japan‘s tsunami-crippled nuclear plant may have been caused by a rat.
Masayuki Ono, spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, says a 15-centimeter (6-inch) rat was found dead Wednesday near a switchboard. He says the rat may be linked to the power failure, but that more investigation is needed to be sure.
Cooling systems at the plant for four storage pools for nuclear fuel were knocked out Monday. Power was restored early Wednesday at all nine affected facilities.
The power outage was a reminder that the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl is far from resolved. Tsunami-damaged backup generators set off the March 2011 disaster. Decommissioning the Fukushima reactors is expected to take decades.
Four fuel storage pools at Japan‘s tsunami-damaged nuclear plant have been without fresh cooling water for nearly 20 hours due to a power outage, the plant’s operator said Tuesday, raising concerns about the fragility of a facility that still runs on makeshift equipment.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that pool temperatures at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant were well within safe levels, and that pools would remain safe for at least four days without fresh cooling water. The utility said the reactors were unaffected and no other abnormalities were found.
TEPCO workers were scrambling to find the cause and repair the problems.
Workers were fixing the last of the three switchboards that they suspect as a possible cause of the problem and the utility was preparing a backup system in case the repairs didn’t fix the issue, TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono told reporters.
“If worse comes to worst, we have a backup water injection system,” said Ono.
Japan‘s March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami destroyed the plant’s power and cooling systems, causing three reactor cores to melt and fuel storage pools to overheat.
The current power outage is a major test for TEPCO to show if it has learned anything from the disaster. TEPCO, which has repeatedly faced cover-up scandals, was already slammed by local media Tuesday for waiting hours to disclose the blackout.
Ono acknowledged the plant was vulnerable.
“Fukushima Dai-ichi still runs on makeshift equipment, and we are trying to switch to something more permanent and dependable, which is more desirable,” he said. “Considering the equipment situation, we may be pushing a little too hard.”
Ono said the utility did not immediately try to switch to a backup cooling system because doing so without finding and fixing the cause could lead to a repeat of the problem. There is a backup cooling system but no backup outside power.
Regulators previously have raised concerns about the makeshift equipment and urged the plant to switch them to more permanent arrangement. The operator still has to remove melted, fatally radioactive fuel from reactors before fully decommissioning the plant, which officials say could take 40 years.
Yoshihide Suga, the chief government spokesman, sought to allay concerns.
“In a sense, we have put in place measures that leave no room for worry,” Suga told reporters in a regular press briefing.
The command center at the plant suffered a brief power outage before 7 p.m. Monday. Electricity was quickly restored to the command center but not to equipment pumping water into the fuel pools.
The temperature in the four pools had risen slightly, but was well below the utility’s target control temperature of 65 degrees Celsius, TEPCO said.
The operator of Japan‘s tsunami-damaged nuclear plant says a power failure has left three fuel storage pools without fresh cooling water for hours.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. says the blackout Monday night at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was brief at its command center but continued for hours at three of the seven fuel storage pools and a few other facilities.
TEPCO says the reactors were unaffected, and it plans to restore power to the pool cooling systems as soon as it determines the cause. It says the nuclear fuel stored in the pools will remain safe for at least four days without fresh cooling water.
The March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami destroyed the plant’s power and cooling systems, causing three reactor cores to melt and fuel storage pools to overheat. The plant is now using makeshift systems.