News about nuclear accident in Fukushima in April 2011

Tokyo is Japan's main container port and is just 200 kilometres from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, the Safe Port Foundation says. "A single container doesn't pose a serious threat but a great many grouped in a single area could cause dangerous radiation levels", the organisation explains. Not only ports in China and the US are likely to face the threat, the foundation's website warns, but harbours in Europe are also expected to be exposed.

Port staff are urged not to touch anything coming from Japan unless it is strictly necessary. It is wrong to assume, the organisation stresses, that most radioactive material is washed away or blown off the ships and the containers during a long sea voyage.

On a tract of government land along the Savannah River in South Carolina, an army of workers is building one of the nation’s most ambitious nuclear enterprises in decades: a plant that aims to safeguard at least 43 tons of weapons-grade plutonium by mixing it into fuel for commercial power reactors.

THE PROBLEMS The cost has soared to nearly $5 billion, and the structure — as big as eight football fields — is half finished.
The project grew out of talks with the Russians to shrink nuclear arsenals after the cold war. The plant at the Savannah River Site, once devoted to making plutonium for weapons, would now turn America’s lethal surplus to peaceful ends. Blended with uranium, the usual reactor fuel, the plutonium would be transformed into a new fuel called mixed oxide, or mox.

New EPA milk samples in Hawaii show radiation in milk at 800% above limits for C-134, 633% above limits for C-137 and 600% above EPA maximum for I-131 for a total of 2033%, or 20.33 times, above the federal drinking water limits.

The government will expand evacuation districts near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, its top spokesman said Monday.

With the crisis at the plant dragging on, some municipalities within a 20- to 30-kilometer radius of the power plant will now be designated as additional evacuation areas, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a news conference.

The government had earlier ordered residents within the 20-km radius of the power station to evacuate and those in the 20-30 km zone to stay indoors after the plant was hit by a deadly earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

The government changed the radiation exposure level which had been used to determine the evacuation zone.

(NaturalNews) As the famous physicist Dr. Michio Kaku said on April 4th, "The situation at Fukushima is relatively stable now... in the same way that you are stable if you hang by your fingernails off a cliff, and your fingernails begin to break one by one." (http://bigthink.com/ideas/37705). That same article also refers to the Fukushima damage assessment by the NRC's Nuclear Safety Team, which concluded that "cooling to the core of Unit 1 might be blocked by melted fuel and also by salt deposits left over from the use of sea water."

The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan released a preliminary calculation Monday saying that the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had been releasing up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour at some point after a massive quake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan on March 11.

The disclosure prompted the government to consider raising the accident's severity level to 7, the worst on an international scale, from the current 5, government sources said. The level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale has only been applied to the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
The current provisional evaluation of 5 is at the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in the United States in 1979.

Meanwhile, a French Research Body On Radioactivity has broken stride with the corporate controlled media/experts and released a stern warning.

“The risks associated with iodine-131 contamination in Europe are no longer “negligible,” according to CRIIRAD, a French research body on radioactivity. The NGO is advising pregnant women and infants against “risky behaviour,” such as consuming fresh milk or vegetables with large leaves,” reported euractiv.com.

The report went on to say that while the risks of prolonged exposure for vulnerable groups are no longer negligible, there was still no need to stay indoors or take potassium iodide.

The Japanese government's nuclear safety agency has decided to raise the crisis level of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant accident from 5 to 7, the worst on the international scale.

"The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl," an official from operator Tokyo Electric and Power told reporters on Tuesday.