Government team keeps high radiation data on three Fukushima municipalities from the public

By Maan Pamintuan-Lamorena
Japan Daily Press: March 26, 2014

Despite people’s clamor for transparency in radiation levels found in the prefecture of Fukushima, a Cabinet office team has delayed releasing the results of its latest measurement of radiation in three municipalities in the region. The government has postponed making the results public as they seek to recalculate the information and release a much lower level findings.

While the three municipalities in question currently have an active evacuation order, the order might be lifted soon. As such, the government has begun taking radiation levels in the area to support the lifting. But a source, speaking to the Mainichi newspaper, said that tests yielded results that are higher than expected, which pushed the Cabinet Office team to withhold the data temporarily as it might discourage residents from going back.

Documents from November last year, which detail the radiation measurements and date of release, were never made public. They indicated the measurements taken by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and the National Institute of Radiological Sciences from the city of Tamura’s Miyakoji district, the village of Kawauchi and the village of Iitate. New dosimeters, left indoors and outdoors at houses, buildings, farms and wilderness areas, were used to take the radiation levels. As most of the measurements were done on an aerial level, the Cabinet Office wanted to compare results from that with those taken on the ground to come up with radiation estimates by job type. This is with the government’s assumption that the residents would be spending eight hours outdoors, and sixteen hours indoors daily.

Previous levels were measured using old dosimeters given by the Fukushima prefecture to its residents, which showed much lower levels. However, the recent ones taken were significantly higher than expected. While expectations were at 1 to 2 millisieverts a day, data showed the levels to be at 2.6 to 6.6 millisieverts. As the team realize that the results would “have a huge impact” which will “need to be explained to local communities,” it was decided to defer releasing the results. The JAEA and NIRS recalculated results by changing their initial assumption that people would be working outdoors for a shorter period, such as a farmer who will spend only six hours outdoors. The new results were submitted to the Cabinet Office team, which they planned to release later this month to the three municipalities.

(read the full article at Japan Daily Press)

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AlternativeFreePress.com

The Fukushima Nuclear Plant is facing a storage crisis. With nearly 90% of storage tanks capacity already full of radioactive water and 400 metric tons of water accumulating each day, there is nowhere to put all the radioactive water.

In a desperate attempt to maintain some control, TEPCO has negotiated with local fisherman to allow a release of uncontaminated groundwater around the facility into the ocean. Reuters reports that “Tepco’s bypass will release 100 metric tons of groundwater a day that flows downhill towards the devastated plant and funnel it to the sea before it reaches the reactor buildings.”

It is unclear how much these measures will help as 100 metric tones is only 25% of the compounding ground water. It seems unlikely this release will provide lasting relief to Fukushima’s stressed storage capacity. Tepco can hold “more than 431,000 metric tons of radioactive water” but being already at nearly 90% capacity, they will still be running out of space quickly with 300 metric tones a day being added.

It appears clear that this is a last ditch hail-mary effort at delaying the inevitable complete loss of control by TEPCO, as Kenji Nakada, an official at the Fukushima fisheries federation says “The final consideration was based on the fact that we cannot allow them to release contaminated water. We realized that if the situation continued as it was, the whole system will fall down,”

Of course anyone who has been paying attention already has little faith in TEPCO which has repeatedly lied about radiation readings and recently stopped water decontamination.

It’s hard to imagine how things will get any better at Fukushima… It feels like things can’t get any worse, but unfortunately that is not true, this problem compounds every single day, and it appears that over 3 years after it all started we still don’t know how to fix it.

Written by Alternative Free Press

Fukushima Storage Crisis: Full Of Radioactive Water by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Sources for this story:

1. Fukushima Fishermen Approve Plan to Release Groundwater from Plant http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fukushima-fishermen-approve-plan-to-release-groundwater-from-plant/

African health workers battle Ebola; suspected Canada case

By Mouctar Bah
AFP: March 24, 2014

Conakry (AFP) – Health officials in Guinea battled to contain west Africa’s first outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus as neighbouring Liberia reported its first suspected victims and a traveller returning to Canada was hospitalised with suspicious symptoms.

At least 59 people are known to have died in Guinea’s southern forests and there are six suspected cases in Liberia which, if confirmed, would mark the first spread of the highly contagious pathogen into another country.

And there are fears the virus may have crossed continents, with a man returning to Canada from Liberia seriously ill in hospital after experiencing symptoms consistent with the virus, health officials said.

“As of this morning six cases have been reported of which five have already died — four female adults and one male child. One of the suspected cases, a female child, is under treatment,” Liberian Health Minister Walter Gwenigale said in a statement.

“The team is already investigating the situation, tracing contacts, collecting blood samples and sensitising local health authorities on the disease,” he added.

Gwenigale did not specify the victims’ nationalities, but Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said they were Liberian residents who had attended funerals in the Ebola-hit area of Guinea, which has strong “family ties” with northern Liberia.

“People come to attend funerals on one side and unfortunately they unwittingly get infected and then return home,” Brussels-based MSF emergency coordinator Marie-Christine Ferir told AFP.

The local health ministry in Canada’s Saskatchewan province said a man had been placed in solitary confinement, with his family in quarantine, pending expected results on Tuesday of tests.

“All we know at this point is that we have a person who is critically ill who travelled from a country where these diseases occur,” Denise Werker, joint director of health in Saskatchewan, in western Canada, said.

To date, no treatment or vaccine is available for the Ebola pathogen, which kills between 25 and 90 percent of those who fall sick, depending on the strain of the virus, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

(read the full article at Yahoo)

UPDATE: Tests conducted in a Winnipeg lab have ruled out Ebola along with fellow hemorrhagic fevers Marburg, Lassa and two others as the cause of the man’s symptoms. While his actual illness remains a mystery, the Public Health Agency of Canada told the CBC that the risk is still low.

The World Health Organization’s head of public relations said they now suspect the man may have malaria. Tests are ongoing.

(Source of update: The Albatross)

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By Greg Palast
Truthdig: March 23, 2014

Two decades ago I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska’s coastline 25 years ago on March 24, 1989.

The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit—British Petroleum, now BP—got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.

And because BP’s willful negligence, prevarications and fraud in the Exxon Valdez spill cost the company nothing, its disdain for the law, for the environment and for the safety of its workers was repeated in the Gulf of Mexico with deadly consequences, resulting, two decades later, in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.

It would be worth the time of our ever-trusting regulators to take a look at my Exxon Valdez BP files. They would see a decades-long pattern of BP’s lies, bribes and cover-ups that led, inexorably, to the Deepwater Horizon blowout—and that continue today within BP’s worldwide oil operations.

Here is a sample from my files on BP from the original Exxon Valdez fraud and racketeering investigation:

Fraud No. 1: The Emergency Sucker Boat fraud

Containing an oil spill—preventing spilled crude from spreading to the shore—is not rocket science.

As the principal owner of the Alaska Pipeline and Terminal, BP, not Exxon, was designated by law to prevent oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez from hitting the beach. It was BP’s disastrous failures, more than Exxon’s, that allowed the oil to devastate Alaska’s coast.

To contain a spill all you need are rubbers and suckers. It works like this:

If a tanker, oil rig or pipe bursts open, you surround it with a giant rubber skirt known as “boom.” Then you suck the oil out through vacuum hoses on board special “containment” ships. The containment ship, which lays out the boom and skimmer hoses, is the firetruck of oil spills. You simply don’t let tankers out of port unless a containment ship is ready to roll. It’s against the law.

But the law has never meant much to BP.

In May 1977, as the first tankers left Valdez, BP executives promised the state of Alaska that no tanker would leave port unless there were two containment barges at the ready and loaded with boom, with one placed near Bligh Island.

In fact, on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, right at Bligh Island, the containment barge was far away in Valdez, locked in a dry dock, its boom and hoses under Alaskan ice. As a result, by the time the emergency oil spill vessel got to the stricken ship, the oil slick was a hundred miles in circumference and beyond control.

Two decades later, I watched fireboats uselessly spraying the burning oil on the Deepwater Horizon. Once again there were no BP skimmer barges, no boom surrounding the rig. Just as in Alaska, the promised spill containment operation was a con. By the time the Navy set out 400 miles of rubber boom days later, the slick was already as big as Cuba and slathering the Gulf shores.

Recently, Chevron and other big oil giants, now drilling the Gulf, have printed a series of full-page ads in papers across America touting their new state-of-the-art oil spill containment operations. Hey, thanks. But these are the same vessels BP and its fellow Gulf drillers promised before the Deepwater Horizon blew apart.

Fraud No. 2: Ghost Crews

There’s no sense having a firetruck without firemen. And so, years before the Exxon Valdez grounding, Alyeska, the oil company consortium headed by BP, promised the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Congress, under oath, that the oil shipper would employ a trained and equipped crew around the clock to jump from helicopters, if needed, to contain an oil spill. My clients, the Chugach Natives of Alaska, agreed to give up ownership of the land under the Port of Valdez to the oil companies in return for those jobs.

The night the Exxon Valdez grounded, Chugach Natives watched from the beach at nearby Tatitlek Village as the tanker headed into the reef. They could have prevented the disaster—but they were helpless: BP had fired them.

In my team’s investigation for the Chugach, we discovered that, to save money, BP’s Alyeska simply drew up lists of nonexistent emergency spill response workers or wrote down names of untrained, unequipped dockworkers: an imaginary crew to man phantom emergency ships.

Fraud No. 3: Phantom Equipment

And the rubber boom? That was a phantom as well. BP’s Alyeska had promised that too, in writing. The equipment was supposed to be placed along the tanker route including Bligh Island—exactly the spot where the Exxon Valdez grounded.

And so, it was no surprise to me that 21 years later in the Gulf there were neither skimmers nor boom at the site of the Deepwater Horizon. The equipment was there, as in Alaska, only on paper.

Indeed, part of BP’s Gulf Coast response plan was a photocopy of the Alaska plan, including ways to wash down Arctic seals.

Cover-Up, Threats and Bribery

Did BP’s top executives and partners know of the ghost response teams and phantom equipment ruse? Yes, we have the documents and insiders’ testimony. Just three examples from my bulging file cabinet:

In a confidential letter dated April 19, 1984, Capt. James Woodle, BP’s commander of the port at Valdez, warned that “due to a reduction in manning, age of equipment, limited training and lack of personnel, serious doubt exists that [we] would be able to contain and clean up effectively a medium or large size oil spill.”

In response, BP threatened him with a file on his marital infidelities (fabricated), fired him, then forced him to destroy his files.

Ten months before the Exxon Valdez spill, BP’s Alyeska chief, Theo Polasek, told a secret meeting of the top executives of the Alaska group oil companies (including BP, Exxon and ConocoPhillips) that containing an oil spill “at the mid-point of Prince William Sound [is] not possible with present equipment.” But no change was made. Polasek was denied the funds needed to protect the mid-Sound—exactly where the tanker grounded.

In September 1984, before the Exxon Valdez disaster, BP’s shipping broker, Charles Hamel, was so concerned at what he saw as an immediate danger in Alaska that he flew by Concorde to London to warn BP’s chiefs of the looming emergency. In response, BP hired ex-CIA operatives to tap Hamel’s phone and intercept his mail. BP’s black ops team even ran a toy truck with a microphone into the air vents of a building where he was speaking with a congressman. (Ultimately, BP’s spooks were captured by a team of Navy SEALs.)

BP Gets Off Cheap

The team of attorneys representing the Natives and fishermen whose lives were destroyed by the tanker spill chose to hold back the true and ugly story of systematic fraud and penny-pinching negligence by BP and its partners. We focused instead on the simpler story of human frailty and error—“drunken skipper hits reef.”

We didn’t have a choice: Oil company chiefs had told our clients—Natives who were out of cash, isolated and desperate—that they wouldn’t get a dime unless we agreed not to use the “f-word”: fraud. Exxon would withhold payment for 20 years.

We buried the fraud charges—yet Exxon still didn’t pay for 22 years. By that time, a third of the Natives and fishermen in the lawsuit were dead.

And BP? Who said crime doesn’t pay? BP walked away with a nominal payment to Alaska’s Natives, fishermen and towns of $125 million—100 percent of it covered by insurance.

And that’s what led, years later, to the incineration of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon and 600 miles of Gulf coastline still poisoned today.

BP and other oil companies have a clear motive for these safety games: skimmer barges, crews, equipment and operations cost billions of dollars a year worldwide to man and maintain. It’s cheaper to lie, cover up and buy the favor of politicians and regulators.

(read the full article at Truthdig)

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By Amy Goodman
March 21, 2014

Three years have passed since the earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The tsunami’s immediate death toll was more than 15,000, with close to 3,000 still missing. Casualties are still mounting, though, both in Japan and much farther away. The impact of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown on health and the environment is severe, compounded daily as radioactive pollution continues to pour from the site, owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO.

In an unusual development, more than 100 U.S. Marines and Navy sailors have joined a class action suit, charging TEPCO with lying about the severity of the disaster as they were rushing to the scene to provide humanitarian assistance. They were aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other vessels traveling with the Reagan, engaged in humanitarian response to the disaster. The response was dubbed “Operation Tomodachi,” meaning “Operation Friendship.”

Lt. Steve Simmons is one of the plaintiffs. Before Fukushima, he was physically robust. Eight months later, he suffered inexplicable health problems. He said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, that, while driving to work: “I blacked out and drove my truck up on a curb. Following that, I started coming down with what maybe I thought was just maybe a flu, started running fevers. I dropped about 20 to 25 pounds unexpectedly and then started experiencing night sweats, difficulty sleeping.”

He was hospitalized three times. Doctors dismissed his concerns about possible radiation poisoning. “Three days later, after I was discharged, I was back in the hospital because my lymph nodes started swelling, and still running constant fevers as high as 102.9.” In April 2012, his legs buckled under him while he was hospitalized. He has relied on a wheelchair ever since. He will be allowed to “medically retire” this coming April.

This is the second attempt to sue TEPCO on behalf of these sailors and Marines. The first lawsuit had eight plaintiffs and was dismissed for technical reasons based on the court’s lack of jurisdiction.

“By June of 2013, we had 51 sailors and Marines who had contacted us with various illnesses,” lead attorney Charles Bonner explained, “including thyroid cancers, testicular cancers, brain cancers, unusual uterine problems, excessive uterine bleeding, all kinds of gynecological problems, problems that you do not see in a population of 20-year-olds, 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds, even 35-year-olds. … So, now we have filed a class action for approximately a hundred sailors.” As news of the lawsuit spreads, many more will likely join in. The USS Reagan had at least 5,500 people on board when off the coast of Japan.

You might wonder why the group doesn’t sue their employer, the U.S. Navy, as well. “The responsible party for these young sailors’ injury is the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the fourth-largest power company in the world,” Bonner explained. “Tokyo Electric Power Company failed to tell the public, including the Navy, that they were in an active meltdown. They had a triple meltdown following the earthquake and the tsunami. They didn’t have batteries. They didn’t have backup power. They didn’t have any kind of auxiliary water supply to cool these reactors down.”

(read the full article at Oregonlive)

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RT: March 20, 2014

Treatment of radioactive water at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant might be indefinitely suspended after malfunctions crippled the water purification process and recontaminated thousands of tons of partially purified water, Japanese media report.

The failure in the system, known as the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), is the latest setback in Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) uphill battle to stockpile radioactive water, which is ballooning at a rate of 400 tons per day.

TEPCO said up to 900 tons of water, which had not been sufficiently cleaned in the ALPS equipment, flowed into a network of 21 tanks that were holding 15,000 tons of treated water. Not only have the 21 tanks been rendered unusable, but all 15,000 tons of previously cleaned water will now have to be retreated.

While efforts are underway to measure the full extent of the contamination, TEPCO officials said the problem was not noticed prior to March 18 because no abnormalities were detected in water sampled on March 14, Japan’s Asashi Shimbun daily reports.

“We never expected radioactive water to flow into the storage tanks,” Masayuki Ono, acting general manager of TEPCO’s Nuclear Power & Plant Siting Division, told the paper. “We should have been better prepared. We have no idea how long it will take to clean them if we decided to do so.”

The ALPS system was developed to dramatically curb the radiation level of highly contaminated water that is accumulating at the plant. The APS consists of 14 steel cylinders through which the contaminated water is filtered. After the filtering, waste materials like the absorbent and remaining sludge are transferred to high-integrity containers (HICs) that are transported to a temporary storage facility.

The ALPS can remove 62 different types of radionuclides, including strontium and cobalt from contaminated water. While the system cannot remove tritium – a radioactive isotope of hydrogen – the purification of water through the system is expected to reduce damage levels if water leaks from storage tanks.

The equipment, which is supposed to be able to treat up to 750 tons of contaminated water a day, has been undergoing trial runs since March 2013. The system, however, has been plagued with problems from the outset. The latest glitch and the subsequent recontamination was caused when one of the three ALPS lines failed to remove radioactive substances to a sufficient level.

Water from the March-17 sample water that was supposed to have been treated along one of the three channels of the ALPS system was discovered to still contain one-10th of the original concentration of radioactive substances. The system, however, is supposed to reduce that level to one-100,000th of the initial readings.

The finding prompted TEPCO to shut down ALPS operations along all three channels on March 18. In another incident, an ALPS pump stopped working in February, leaving only one of the two lines being tested at the time operational. With only one line working, the daily clean-up capacity dropped to one-third its capacity: 250 tons. Approximately one week prior, around 100 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from one of the plant’s tanks.

In mid-January, TEPCO warned that nuclear radiation at the boundaries of the damaged facility had jumped to eight times the government safety guidelines, while, only a week into the New Year, plant operators once again had to stop using its systems to decontaminate radioactive water. Compounding their problems at the time, a crane used to get rid of the container from the ALPS ceased functioning.

Meanwhile, a United Nations rights investigator said Japan should expand its cancer tests beyond the thyroid screenings being employed by local authorities, Bloomberg reports.

(read the full article at RT)

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Navy Family: Fukushima Gave Our One-Year-Old Brain and Spine Cancer

By Mikael Thalen
Infowars: March 19, 2014

Child born with multiple cancers 18 months after father’s exposure

Since the 2011 meltdown, more than 50 U.S. sailors involved in the Navy’s Fukushima rescue efforts have been diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer.

According to Charles Bonner, an attorney representing dozens of the cancer-stricken sailors, Fukushima’s radiation is being passed onto his client’s children.

“This radiation not only hurts the young sailors, but it hurts their offsprings,” Bonner told Democracy Now.

Reading a declaration from the wife of one sailor, Bonner revealed how a one-year-old boy has already been devastated due to radiation exposure.

“My husband was exposed to radiation particles while assigned to the Seventh Fleet on the USS Ronald Reagan assisting in Operation Tomodachi beginning in March of 2011,” the declaration read. “As a result of this exposure, our son, who was born on November 14, 2012, at eight months was diagnosed with brain and spine cancer.”

Despite Fukushima’s clear connection to the deteriorating health of more than 100 U.S. military personnel, military leadership continues to exclude radiation poisoning as a possibility.

“There’s no indication that any U.S. personnel supporting Operation Tomodachi experienced radiation exposure at levels associated with the occurrence of long-term health effects,” Navy Lt. Greg Raelson said in a statement.

According to radiation-decontamination officer Michael Sebourn, who was aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, sailors were exposed to “incredibly dangerous” radiation levels, reaching as high as 300 times above safe limits.

While multiple branches of the military deny any danger from Japan, the Pentagon has quietly ordered 75,000 packages of potassium iodide, admittedly due to radiation fears. Other agencies such as the Dept. of Health and Human Services have ordered a staggering 14 million doses as well.

Unfortunately, the children of military personnel exposed to Fukushima may not be the only ones at risk. A recent study from the Radiation and Public Health Project found that babies born in the western United States shortly after the disaster were 28 percent more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism.

(read the full article at Infowars)

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