Category: Disastrous

Off the reservation

~ susie

Reunión con el Diputado Bunmei Ibuki, Presidente de la Cámara de Representantes de Japón.

A man of conscience, it seems. I wonder how they’ll punish him:

In the midst of the solemn, scripted memorial marking the anniversary of Japan’s 2011 triple disaster, a discordant note seemed to creep in.

A leading lawmaker used the bully pulpit at the ceremony to call for an end to nuclear power, a rare instance of apparent public dissent by a top ruling party official against the policy of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

“It seems as if we have reaped the benefits of electricity…while letting the people of Fukushima bear the cost,” said Bunmei Ibuki, the speaker of Japan’s lower house of parliament. Mr. Ibuki made his remarks at the National Theater during Tuesday’s memorial to mark the third year since a giant earthquake off the country’s northeast coast triggered a mammoth tsunami that killed nearly 16,000 people, left over 2,500 missing and caused one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.

Mr. Ibuki, a three-decade veteran lawmaker, has held four cabinet posts and once served as secretary-general of Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party. His current position in the lower house placed him among the eight official speakers at the event, just after Mr. Abe and the Emperor.

Facing a floral memorial for the disaster’s victims, his back to the audience, Mr. Ibuki lamented how Japan’s admiration of science and technology “gave rise to a sense of arrogance, that humans can control nature.” He ended his brief remarks advocating an energy policy “with a view toward a nuclear phaseout in the future.”

More than two dozen arrested at Philly federal building

~ susie

phillyKeystoneXL

The beat goes on….

PHILADELPHIA — More than two dozen people were arrested Monday after they blocked entrances to the William J. Green Federal Building in Center City to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

The protesters – most of them members of the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team – said they were calling on President Obama to block construction of the pipeline. They gathered on the plaza outside the federal building to wave signs, chant slogans, and block entrances.

“This is a preview of the resistance to come,” said Alexa Ross of West Philadelphia. Activists around the country, she said, have pledged acts of civil disobedience to protest the project, which has been controversial since its inception.

H/t Shawn Sukumar.

‘Trust us’

~ susie

TEPCO transfers fuel rods

I’m sure it’ll all be fine. I mean, I’m sure they’d tell us if it was going to be a problem!

A senior adviser to the operator of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has told the firm that it may have no choice but to eventually dump hundreds of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.

Speaking to reporters who were on a rare visit to the plant on the eve of the third anniversary of the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, Dale Klein said Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] had yet to reassure the public over the handling of water leaks that continue to frustrate efforts to clean up the site.

“The one issue that keeps me awake at night is Tepco’s long-term strategy for water management,” said Klein, a former chairman of the US nuclear regulatory commission who now leads Tepco’s nuclear reform committee.

“Storing massive amounts of water on-site is not sustainable. A controlled release is much safer than keeping the water on-site.

“Tepco is making progress on water management but I’m not satisfied yet. It’s frustrating that the company takes four or five steps forward, then two back. And every time you have a leakage it contributes to a lack of trust. There’s room for improvement on all fronts.”

Tepco’s failure to manage the buildup of contaminated water came to light last summer, when it admitted that at least 300 tonnes of tainted water were leaking into the sea every day.

That revelation was followed by a string of incidents involving spills from poorly assembled storage tanks, prompting the government to commit about $500m (£300m) into measures to contain the water.

They include the construction of an underground frozen wall to prevent groundwater mixing with contaminated coolant water, which becomes tainted after coming into contact with melted nuclear fuel deep inside the damaged reactors.

Fukushima water reaches Canada

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Okay, I can’t help wondering. Did they raise the permissible levels lately?

Researchers say radioactive cesium isotopes from Japan’s severely damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant have made their way to the waters just off the coast of Canada.

Scientists confirmed the arrival of radioactive Fukushima water at the annual American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu today, but pointed out that the concentrations of the two isotopes were still well below safe drinking levels.

Researchers from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography have been continuously sampling water off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia, since 2011.

“These levels are still well below maximum permissible concentrations in drinking water in Canada for caesium-137 of 10,000 becquerels per cubic metre of water — so, it’s clearly not an environmental or human-health radiological threat,” Bedford’s Dr. John Smith told BBC News.

UK towns are drowning

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

RNLI helping out in Moorland, Somerset

Everything, everywhere, is terribly wrong. No one represents people like us:

Over 5,000 homes and businesses have been affected, rail services have been cut and thousands of roads closed. And the danger is far from over yet. At the time of writing severe flood warnings remain in place along the River Thames and in Somerset, a large county in south-western England.

It’s revealing to compare the attitude of the authorities in Britain to such matters in the pre-neoliberal era, to today. In 1974 work began on the Thames Flood barrier, to protect London from flooding. It was opened in 1982. It was a great engineering project-typical of the sort of work that public bodies undertook in the post-war era when our politics was more democratic. In recent years however flood protection has been very low down on the list of priorities for the government.

The Thatcher government, on an ideological mission to privatize and deregulate, started the rot by easing planning restrictions. That led to hundreds of thousands of houses being built on flood plains, a recipe for disaster at a time when climate change was leading to milder, wetter and stormier winters. The Labour government which came to power in 1997 did increase funding for flood protection but not by the amount that experts had called for.

A 2008 report by the National Audit Office found that 63 percent of Britain’s flood defenses were not being properly maintained. Meanwhile the building on flood plains increased – between 2001 and 2011 around 200,000 homes were built on flood plains in the UK.

Continue reading “UK towns are drowning” →

Fukushima updates

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Spent Fuel Pool (02813601)

Via FDL:

TEPCO has discovered that the #3 reactor is heavily damaged by falling debris. Personally, I think the plug displayed was damaged by the different explosion in #3.

Remember the worries I posted about damage to the racks in the #4 SFP? It looks like that happened in the #3 SFP as well. But worse. The damaged fuel rods obviously didn’t dump enough pellets to create a criticality, but how we’re going to remove the damaged rods I’ve no idea. The water itself is VERY hot from the spilled fuel. I suppose they’re going to have to lower torches from a safe distance and try to cut them out.

Here is an update report on a visit to the #4 reactor. Heavily damaged, as expected. They’re reporting about 20% of the fuel assemblies have been removed from the #4 SFP.

They’re seeing so much gamma radiation around the work area in #4 that they have had to put down lead plates and reduce work times. The gamma is likely coming from neutron activation of some of the nickle parts, turning them into cobalt 60. The #4 reactor was empty at the accident, so where did a neutron flux that intense come from? Perhaps the “different” explosion at unit 3?

Japanese Doctors are starting to issue more dire warnings.

The US and Canada have received about 13% of the Fuku emissions according to this study.

Very hot material found about 15km from Fuku. Probably from #3, though it’s not clear if it came from the explosion or floated in from the sea.

Remember last week I reported new record cesium levels? Well, that record has been broken. Officials admit there may be a new leak. TEPCO and the JG are still preparing the world for dumping massive amounts (“controlled releases”) of very hot (“within government guidelines”) of radioactive water. They’re still trying to come up with reasons the world will accept. IMO this is a cost issue, they simply don’t want to pay the price to store the water.

Fascinating

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

One Year Later: Remembering the Heroes of Hurricane Sandy

I can’t quite grasp why Christie was so indifferent to the treatment of Hurricane Sandy victims, but it’s sure coming back to haunt him now:

The Christie administration is quietly terminating a contract with a second company involved in a much-criticized program for Sandy victims, WNYC has learned.

Those homeowners who were relying on URS Corporation to supervise the rebuilding of their homes are being notified by state officials this week that the job will be picked up by another company.

“As we note in the letter, this change will have no impact on their assigned housing adviser or their case status,” said Richard Constable III, the commissioner for the Department of Community Affairs, which signed the contract, in a statement.

URS signed a contract for about $20 million. But the $600 million Reconstruction, Rehabilitation, Elevation and Mitigation program that it helped to run — which provides grants up to $150,000 — has come under fire from those it was intended to serve.

Applications were wrongly rejected, with a nonprofit advocacy group finding that 74 percent of those who appealed an RREM rejection were actually eligible. And at a hearing this week, Sandy victims complained of confusion and a nine-month wait for approved grant money. One man described the process as more stressful than when he was fighting in Afghanistan.

Christie officials have downplayed these problems, and an administration source says performance issues are not why URS’s contract is ending 15 months early. A spokeswoman for the Department of Community Affairs described the situation as part of the normal course of business: URS was one of three RREM program managers, and the state decided two were enough to handle the job.

Massive beef recall

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

frozen meat

Whenever possible, I try to get local food. Because these behemoth agri firms are impossible to inspect with the decimated USDA resources we have (thanks, deregulation and self-reporting!). Eating this food is like playing Russian roulette, but many of us are too poor and too distant from other options. Who would think so many years later that we’d be reliving Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” again, a book written in 1906? These huge companies send out beef to so many places, who in turn sell it to many other places, that we consumers have no idea where it is:

California-based Rancho Food Corp. has recalled over 8.7 million pounds of beef products — including oxtail, liver, tongue, and cow carcasses — because the animals they came from were diseased and never inspected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That’s equivalent to a full year’s worth of beef that gets processed by the company. The FDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, which has been investigating Rancho Food, classified it as a Class I recall out of fears that the uninspected meat may cause serious medical harm to consumers.

The massive recall comes just one month after Rancho Food Corp. had to recall another 40,000 pounds worth of meat that hadn’t been inspected. There have been no reported illnesses linked with the products to date.

Food recalls are alarmingly common in America. Foodborne illnesses cost the U.S. about $152 billion per year, sickens 48 million Americans annually, and kills 3,000 people ever year. The proliferation of massive, national food companies such as Cargill Beef also makes recalls tricky, since products from a tainted batch may be shipped all across the country.

Unfortunately, food safety inspections are stymied by a significant lack of funding and insufficient staff. Although President Obama signed the largest overhaul of America’s food safety regimen in 70 years into law in 2010, officials are concerned that the planned changes won’t become a reality without more appropriations.

“Simply put, we cannot achieve our objective of a safer food supply without a significant increase in resources,” warned the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, Michael Taylor, in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week. “We will continue our efforts to make the best use of the resources we have, but I can say with absolute certainty that we cannot do all that is asked of us without additional resources.”

Funding cuts to food safety agencies have continued despite the fact that the number of foodborne illnesses has actually increased over the last several years. Cuts included in the federal budget sequester are expected to reduce the number of food inspectors at meat and poultry plants by about 600 people.