Fishermen in northern Fukushima Prefecture gave Tokyo Electric Power Co. the green light on July 27 to release radioactive groundwater from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant into the ocean after it undergoes decontamination treatment.
The Soma-Futaba fisheries cooperative association approved TEPCO’s “subdrain plan” at a board member meeting after earlier approval by the Iwaki fisheries union, which brings together fishermen operating on the southern Fukushima coast, to back the plant operator’s plan.
After the decisions by the two fisheries unions, the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations is expected to formally approve the subdrain plan in mid-August at the earliest.
To deal with the accumulation of contaminated groundwater at the plant, TEPCO and the central government implemented from May last year a “groundwater bypass” that intercepts clean groundwater before it flows into contaminated reactor buildings and reroutes it safely around the facility into the ocean.
Under the subdrain plan, the utility will pump 500 tons of water from 41 subdrain wells around the premises of the plant’s four crippled reactors each day. It expects that the amount of groundwater flowing into the reactor buildings will be drastically reduced, and the amount of contaminated water generated at the plant will be halved from the current levels.
The water will be released into the sea after it undergoes decontamination treatment to reduce cesium levels to below 1 becquerel and beta ray-emitting radioactive materials to less than 3 becquerels.
Because the decontamination equipment cannot remove tritium, water contaminated with the radioactive isotope that emits 1,500 becquerels or more of radiation will not be released into the sea.
TEPCO has sought the fisheries cooperatives’ approval of the subdrain plan.
But TEPCO’s delay in disclosing the flow of radioactive water into the ocean whenever it rained–which came to light in February–hampered negotiations with the fisheries unions, which felt the incident undermined their confidence in the utility.
At the meeting of the board members of the Soma-Futaba fisheries union, TEPCO officials explained that the subdrain plan was essential in reducing the flow of contaminated water into the ocean, according to Hiroyuki Sato, the union president.
Accidental power cable damage briefly disables frozen soil shields at Fukushima No. 1
The Japan Times: July 29, 2015
Frozen soil shields aimed at curbing the buildup of radioactive water were temporarily disabled at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on Tuesday.
The problem occurred after a power cable was damaged by mistake, Tepco said. […]
The underground shields, designed to block groundwater from flowing into the basements of the stricken reactor buildings, were restarted later in the day.
The power leakage also halted a device circulating nitrogen reactors1, 2 and 3 to prevent hydrogen explosions.
According to Tepco, a plant worker found white smoke around the power cable at around 8:35 a.m.
An new leak has been found at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Radioactive water has overflowed from a drainage channel, spilling into the ocean. Apparently, the authorities are blaming heavy rain.
The new leak was reported by NHK World on July 16, 2015. It is unclear when the new leak was discovered and there have been no reports of it being stopped.
A screenshot from the original NHK World report says TEPCO “cannot stop the spill anytime soon”.
It appears the original report included more details that have since been scrubbed from the NKH World english website. Both ENEnews & WND quote NHK World as saying “samples taken from the channel about 2 hours later contained 830 becquerels per liter of radioactive cesium” but this information is not currently included on the NHK World website.
People who live in areas near hydraulic fracturing are more likely to be hospitalized for heart conditions, neurological illnesses and cancer, according to researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
Fracking is an oil- and gas-extraction technique using a mixture of water, chemicals and sand to break apart underground rock formations. It has triggered a surge in U.S. energy production in recent years, along with a debate over whether the process causes air and water pollution.
The study, published this week in the journal PLOS ONE, looked at hospitalization rates in parts of Pennsylvania from 2007 to 2011 and found them significantly higher in areas with fracking compared to those without.
One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn’t really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction.
I’d been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it’s now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It’s a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop.
And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn’t know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn’t seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead?
So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn’t really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I’ll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn’t realize I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them — it turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances — to the only country that’s ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we’re going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies.
But let’s start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew. Let’s think about this middle row here.Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. (Laughter) Don’t worry, it’s just a thought experiment.Imagine you did that, right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen that we’ve been told for a century. We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you’d start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you’d all be heroin addicts. Right? That’s what I thought.
First thing that alerted me to the fact that something’s not right with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I’ll be taken to hospital and I’ll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It’s actually much better heroin than you’re going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff you get from the doctor is medically pure. And you’ll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you’ve taken quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is right — those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks — What should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied really carefully. It doesn’t happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn’t come out as a junkie. (Laughter)
And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so contrary to everything I’d been told, everything I thought I knew, I just thought it couldn’t be right, until I met a man called Bruce Alexander. He’s a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction we’ve all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century.They’re really simple experiments. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a little bit sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right? That’s how we think it works. In the ’70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he noticed something. He said ah, we’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let’s try something a bit different. So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called “Rat Park,” which is basically heaven for rats. They’ve got loads of cheese, they’ve got loads of colored balls, they’ve got loads of tunnels.Crucially, they’ve got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they’ve got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But here’s the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don’t like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they’re isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives.
Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they’re quite different to us. Maybe not as different as we’d like, but, you know — But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we’re going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn’t go to rehab. They didn’t go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to thinkthere might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction isn’t about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage? What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment?
Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn’t even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we’re happy and healthy, we’ll bond and connect with each other, but if you can’t do that, because you’re traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that’s our nature. That’s what we want as human beings.
And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I’ve got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I’m looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the drugs. Forget the drug war. Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk — I am right after this — (Laughter) — but we’re not. Now, because you’ve been able to afford the approximately gazillion poundsthat it costs to get into a TED Talk, I’m guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next six months. You wouldn’t end up homeless. You’re not going to do that, and the reason you’re not going to do that is not because anyone’s stopping you. It’s because you’ve got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. You’ve got work you love. You’ve got people you love. You’ve got healthy relationships. And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life.
Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, “I was a drug addict,”and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they’re going to have criminal records that mean they’ll never work in the legal economy again. Now, that’s a very extreme example, obviously, in the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the world we treat addicts to some degree like that. We punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system.
Now, there’s a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can’t go on with a country where we’re having ever more people becoming heroin addicts.Let’s set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, “Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but” — and this is the crucial next step — “take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them,and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society.” And that’s not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value. But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic. When you’re ready, they’ll go to a garage, and they’ll say,if you employ this guy for a year, we’ll pay half his wages. The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society.
It’ll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in every study is significantly down.One of the ways you know it’s worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system.
One of the largest leaks in Alberta history has spilled about five million litres of emulsion from a Nexen Energy pipeline at the company’s Long Lake oilsands facility south of Fort McMurray.
The leak was discovered Wednesday afternoon.
Nexen said in a statement its emergency response plan has been activated and personnel were onsite. The leak has been stabilized, the company said.
The spill covered an area of about 16,000 square metres, mostly within the pipeline corridor, the company said. Emulsion is a mixture of bitumen, water and sand.
The pipeline that leaked is called a “feeder” and runs from a wellhead to the processing plant.
Study has discovered some chemicals used in plastics may after all be harmful for health
Sanam Reza
Benchmark Reporter: July 10, 2015
Two chemicals believed to be safe, in a new study has now been declared to be linked to increased blood pressure, insulin resistance, and other dangerous health problems in children. These chemicals are used in a variety of consumer products including, plastics, cosmetics, and soap.
A phthalate called DEHP, which was associated with hypertension; therefore, succeeded by these two chemicals believed to be a safer alternative. The use of these two chemicals; -isononyl (DINP) and di-isodecyl (DIDP), has been increasing over the past decade but, only recently been fully tested.
The urine of over 1,300 adolescents between the age of 8 and 19 were tested by the researchers of one of the study from the NYU Langone Medical Center. They found levels of DINP and DIDP corresponding to levels in blood pressure. The same team performed another study that involves 356 teens. They found similar associations between the chemical levels and insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes.
The researchers made few recommendations after this study such as, for people to limit their exposure to these compounds by avoiding plastics marked with 3, 6, and 7. They also, suggested that everyone should go for fresh food rather than the packaged ones. They also, warned not to put plastic containers in the microwave or dishwasher, where it is easier to pull in chemicals.
The researchers’ report also included that it is not the first time plasticizing chemicals assumed to be safe has been retested and discovered to be otherwise. Last year, Mother Jones investigated the dangers of BPA-free plastics. Plastic industry’s “Big-Tobacco” style campaign was exposed by Mariah Blake that showed how their products were connected to a series of health problems. And, the US government’s failure to act on it.
Published in the Lancet Psychiatry, their analysis of 61 separate studies suggests nicotine in cigarette smoke may be altering the brain.
Experts said it was a “pretty strong case” but needed more research.
Smoking has long been associated with psychosis, but it has often been believed that schizophrenia patients are more likely to smoke because they use cigarettes as a form of self-medication to ease the distress of hearing voices or having hallucinations.
The team at King’s looked at data involving 14,555 smokers and 273,162 non-smokers.
It indicated:
– 57% of people with psychosis were already smokers when they had their first psychotic episode
– Daily smokers were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as non-smokers
– Smokers developed schizophrenia a year earlier on average
The argument is that if there is a higher rate of smoking before schizophrenia is diagnosed, then smoking is not simply a case of self-medication.
In 2014 we wrote about a University of Calgary four-year study entitled “Impact of substance use on conversion to psychosis in youth at clinical high risk of psychosis” which determined that cannabis did not increase the likelihood of psychosis. On the other hand, the study suggests that alcohol use could increase the likelihood of psychosis. The Abstract reads: “Results revealed that low use of alcohol, but neither cannabis use nor tobacco use at baseline, contributed to the prediction of psychosis in the CHR sample.”
Today, The City of Vancouver Council voted in favor of new regulations for the growing number of medical Cannabis dispensaries in the city. The new bylaws demand $30,000 from each dispensary. The new rules also restrict the location such businesses may operate within, which means dozens are now already in violation.
Councillor Kerry Jang has threatened that the city and/or their police force will shut down dispensaries which do not pay or violate other rules.
City Council claims it is the asinine position of Canada’s Health Minister Rona Ambrose which is forcing the hand of Vancouver’s Councillors. While her portfolio includes legal responsibility for medical marijuana access in Canada, she ridiculously claims cannabis does not have medical value and has failed to provide Canadians with access to their medicine as dictated by the Supreme Court. Now, this blame of failing to provide access is valid, but it does not justify demanding $30,000 with the threat of a police raid. The city could and should regulate dispensaries similarly to other businesses, but $30,000 is ridiculous. That $30,000 cost will of course be passed on to patients who are already paying too much.
The City of Vancouver charges liquor-serving establishments from $858.00 to a maximum $4,637.00 to process their licenses, while alcohol is more dangerous, more addictive, and significantly more damaging to health than Cannabis. A $5000 licensing fee might be reasonable, but $30,000 to dispense medicine to sick people is essentially extortion.
