汚染水漏れ、東電幹部ら不起訴　社長ら、嫌疑不十分via 朝日新聞

Posted on 2016/03/29 by

　東京電力福島第一原発の事故をめぐり、高濃度の放射能汚染水を海へ流出させたとして、福島県内の住民らが公害犯罪処罰法違反の疑いで東電と東電の幹部ら３２人を告発していた問題で、福島地検は２９日、不起訴処分とし、発表した。

　不起訴処分は「嫌疑不十分」と「嫌疑なし」に分かれる。嫌疑不十分とされたのは、法人としての東京電力と広瀬直己社長ら幹部数人。残る幹部は「嫌疑なし」だった。
[…]

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高浜原発差し止め　原告への“賠償請求”もvia日テレnews24

Posted on 2016/03/28 by

高浜原発の運転差し止め仮処分決定が出されてからおよそ３週間。関西電力の八木社長が２８日、決定後初めてとなる社長会見を開いた。先が見通せない中、社長は、原告の住民への“賠償請求”の可能性も示唆した。きょう午後３時、会見場に現れた関西電力の八木社長の表情は、普段より険しいように感じられた。八木社長は「今回、仮処分の決定が出まして、これは当社の見解を踏まえないもので、誠に遺憾である。到底納得できるものではない」と語った。去年１月、滋賀県の住民２９人が高浜原発３号機・４号機について「安全性が確保されていない」などとして、運転差し止めの仮処分を申し立てた。大津地裁は、今月９日、「安全性の確保について関西電力は説明を尽くしていない」などとし、申し立てを認め、運転停止を決定。翌日、関西電力は稼働中だった３号機を停止。稼働中の原発が司法判断によって止められたのは全国で初めて。
[…]関西電力は高浜原発３号機・４号機の停止で、ひと月におよそ１００億円の損害が出るとしている。これを住民側へと請求する可能性を示唆した。
[…]

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Nuclear Power Plants: Pre-Deployed WMDs via CounterPunch

Posted on 2016/03/28 by

By Karl Grossman

Pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction.

That’s what nuclear power plants are. And that’s another very big reason—demonstrated again in recent days with the disclosure that two of the Brussels terrorists were planning attacks on Belgian nuclear plants—why they must be eliminated.

Nuclear power plants are sitting ducks for terrorists. With most positioned along bays and rivers because of their need for massive amounts of coolant water, they provide a clear shot. They are fully exposed for aerial strikes.
[…]
Last week, in advance of the “summit” and in the wake of the Brussels suicide-bombings at the city’s airport and a subway line, Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said: “Terrorism is spreading and the possibility of using nuclear material cannot be excluded. Member states need to have sustained interest in strengthening nuclear security. The countries which do not recognize the danger of nuclear terrorism is the biggest problem.”

However, a main mission of the IAEA, ever since it was established by the UN in 1957 has been to promote nuclear power. It has dramatically minimized the consequences of the catastrophic accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima and routinely understated all problems with atomic technology.
[…]
UCS says the NRC “ignored the possibility of air-and water-based attacks…it did not address the possibility of large attacking groups using multiple entry points, or of an attack involving multiple insiders…it concentrated on threats to the reactor core, failing to address the vulnerability of spent fuel storage facilities.” Since 2011, says the UCS, the NRC “finally revised its rules to address the threat of aircraft attack for new reactor designs—but at the same time has rejected proposed design changes to protect against water- and land-based attacks.”

There is “also concern about the testing standard used,” notes UCS. “In July 2012, the NRC adopted the new process. However, as a result of industry pressure, the standards were watered down..”

[…]

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EDITORIAL: Nuclear power proponents still scoffing at public safety concerns via The Asahi Shimbun

Posted on 2016/03/28 by

An Otsu District Court injunction has suspended operations of two reactors at Kansai Electric Power Co.’s Takahama nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture, one of which was online.

Again, the significance of that development should be taken to heart. Proponents of nuclear power, in particular, should squarely face up to the public anxiety that lies in the backdrop of the court decision. But instead they are boiling with disgruntlement.

“Why is a single district court judge allowed to trip up the government’s energy policy?” Kazuo Sumi, a vice chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation, said resentfully.

“We could demand damages (from the residents who requested the injunction) if we were to win the case at a higher court,” Kansai Electric President Makoto Yagi said, although he prefaced his remark with a proviso that he is arguing only in general terms.

The government is maintaining a wait-and-see attitude.

The decision called into question the appropriateness of the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s new regulation standards and government-approved plans for evacuations in case of an emergency.
[…]
The Otsu decision is the third court order issued against the operation of nuclear reactors since the meltdowns five years ago at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

There has, in fact, been no fixed trend in court decisions. Another court rejected residents’ request last year for an injunction against reactor restarts at Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai nuclear plant in Kagoshima Prefecture.

But courts appear to be playing a more active role now than before the Fukushima disaster.

[…]
A safety net, left in the hands of experts, collapsed all too easily during the Fukushima disaster, turning the phrase “by any chance” into reality.

Courts, which are the guardians of law, should rather be commended for trying to find out independently, to the extent that they can, if there is enough preparedness when a nuclear reactor will be restarted.

The latest alarm bell sounded by the judiciary sector provides an opportunity to ask once again why all the safety measures taken after the Fukushima nuclear disaster are still struggling to win the trust of the public.

The Fukushima disaster changed the awareness of the public. The judiciary sector was also affected.

It is high time for a change among nuclear proponents.

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Fukushima Special Report: Where mountains and forests cannot be decontaminated via The Straits Times

Posted on 2016/03/28 by

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN – Up to 20,000 workers have been toiling to decontaminate towns and villages to clear the way for evacuated residents to return following the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.

In head-to-toe protective gear, their primary task is removing by shovel and machinery topsoil contaminated with radioactive caesium, which leaked from the crippled power station when a tsunami swamped it five years ago.

The soil is put into plastic flexible container bags and transported by truck to isolated temporary storage sites, where they are surrounded with bags of clean soil to “seal” off emitted radiation. The interim facilities will receive some 22 million cubic m of soil from 43 cities, towns and villages across Fukushima prefecture. It will be put there for 30 years.

[…]
But there remains a sizeable area where decontamination was suspended due to high radiation levels, including Futaba district, where the power plant is located.

The disaster also contaminated vast amounts of paddy straw and grass with radioactive material. This has led to plans for facilities for “designated waste”, which from Fukushima alone accounts for around 140,000 tonnes. It is now temporarily stored on farmland and at waste incineration plants.

The radiation reality will last for years to come.

“While it is possible to decontaminate residential areas, the same cannot be done with mountains and forests. You can’t remove all the trees. But radioactive matter has contaminated trunks and leaves, and when rain falls, these particles return to the ground,” said Ms Emiko Fujioka, secretary-general of non-profit group Fukushima Beacon.

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EPA: Nuclear Waste Closer to Bridgeton Landfill Fire via CBS/St. Louis

Posted on 2016/03/28 by yukimiyamotodepaul

[…]

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster says the new data places the radioactive waste “hundreds of feet” closer to the fire than previously known.

The Neighborhood Moms group spokesman Dawn Chatman now worries they won’t have enough time to build a firebreak barrier.

“As a resident living here, I’m horrified, I’m scared, but I’m really angry right now,” Chatman told KMOX, her voice cracking. “They should have known this five years ago, six years ago when this fire started.”

[…]

Koster took a different approach:

“Today’s report confirms that EPA has never had a clear picture of the extent of contamination at the West Lake landfill, and it is deeply concerning that it took EPA so long to figure that out,” Koster said in a statement. “The EPA has yet to reveal its plan for preventing the fire from ever reaching the waste. It is long past time for the federal government to transfer responsibility of the site to the Army Corps for swift and certain remedial action.”

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Los Alamos team visits Japan to gain perspective on atomic bombings via Santa Fe/New Mexican

Posted on 2016/03/28 by yukimiyamotodepaul

[…]

Despite the shared history between Los Alamos and the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where another bomb was dropped on Aug. 9, 1945, New Mexico residents “don’t hear a lot about the Japanese perspective,” said Judith Stauber, director of the Los Alamos Historical Museum.

On Thursday, Stauber, museum registrar Stephanie Yeamans and 16-year-old student intern Kallie Funk of Los Alamos High School flew to Japan to conduct research for a new exhibit that will explore connections created through World War II and the Manhattan Project.

The group will travel to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to meet with researchers, an atomic bomb survivor and the directors of both the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. “There is no precedent” for a trip like this, she said.

The idea for the trip, two years in the making, became a reality through a $10,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and has been supported by the New Mexico Japanese Citizens League. The exhibit, which will open in December, has a couple of working titles: Multiple Perspectives on the Atomic Bomb or New Mexican and Japanese Perspectives on the Atomic Bomb.

In addition to collecting data in Japan for the exhibit, Stauber plans to work with local Japanese-Americans to create a component exploring the internment camps in New Mexico during World War II, including one in Santa Fe. She plans to include oral histories and community art projects.

[…]

In contrast, said Bo Jacobs, a researcher at the Hiroshima Peace Institute who plans to meet with Stauber and her team, the history of atomic energy is told in Japan through “people who were killed, who lost family members, who were injured.” The innovation of the bomb is expressed only in “its human toll” — at least 129,000 people and possibly more than 200,000.

Jacobs said in an email that for the U.S., the atomic bomb “is the story of scientific discovery, industrial development and great political and military decisions. … The Japanese are only statistics in the story.”

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Indian Point nuclear plant reeks of troubled history but village is conflicted via The Guardian

Posted on 2016/03/28 by yukimiyamotodepaul

As New York’s governor and other critics wage an ongoing campaign to shut the facility down citing leaks and old age, nearby residents explain complicated tale

[…]

Indian Point’s two working reactors opened in the early 1970s and have had a lot of people worried for a long time. Five years ago the New York Times wondered if it was “America’s Fukushima” – the Japanese site of the world’s worst radiation crisis since Chernobyl. In February the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, called its operation “unacceptable” – he wants the plant closed.

It’s easy to see the source of his concern. The population density around Indian Point is of more than 2,100 people per square mile, by far the greatest for any of the US’s 61 nuclear power plants. Many of those people live and work in the plant’s shadow with growing unease.

In May 2015, an electrical transformer in the reactor called Unit 3 exploded, causing water to flood a room near the explosion where electrical distribution panels are housed and pouring 3,000 gallons of oil into the Hudson. The Union of Concerned Scientists classified the incident as a “near miss” in its annual review. Last year near misses occurred at eight nuclear facilities in the US.

“Had the flooding not been discovered and stopped in time, the panels could have been submerged, plunging Unit 3 into a dangerous station blackout, in which all alternating current (AC) electricity is lost,” the report’s authors wrote. “A station blackout led to the meltdown of three nuclear reactor cores at Fukushima Dai-ichi in 2011.”

[…]

In February, radiation levels at three monitoring wells around the plant spiked, in one spot by 65,000%. Patricia Kakridas, a spokeswoman for Entergy, said the source was likely “water which exited a temporary filtration system that was set up and dismantled in late January 2016” in preparation for refueling; the company said radioactive material won’t leach into drinking water.

And in March, when the plant was being refueled, a breaker tripped and cut power in one of the reactors; when the diesel generators kicked in, they died while trying to restart the first electrical system. Fortunately a second backup worked.

Because the plant is cooled in large part by water from the Hudson – up to 2.5bn gallons a day – it kills about 1 billion fish and other aquatic organisms a year.

[…]

Not everyone wants the plant to close; it’s one of Buchanan’s few employers. About 1,000 people work at the plant, without counting the related businesses nearby. The town’s population is 2,060 as of the 2013 census.

Dennis Drogan, who worked at the plant from 2002 to 2003 and now owns the Bella Roma deli in the nearby village of Tarrytown, said Buchanan relies heavily on the plant and locals are stunned some of their neighbors want to shut down the place that supports their livelihood. He also said it’s safer than people say.

[…]

Courtney Williams, a cancer researcher who lives in the area with her husband and little girl, puts it this way: “If you are looking at it really just with fresh eyes, you’re just like, ‘This is fucking insane, there’s a pipeline going through it and gas pipelines underneath it and it’s 40 years old and it’s right outside of New York and it’s leaking tritium [the radioactive hydrogen from February’s leak], this is insane! What are you doing!’ But if you’ve been working at the plant for 40 years, and you work there and your mom worked there, you’re just like, ‘Everyone’s comfortable with it here. Their families live nearby. They wouldn’t be doing anything that’s dangerous.’”

In fact, Williams’s mother used to work at the plant as a nurse. But Williams says that having handled radioactive material in her scientific training – Yale and then a PhD in biochemistry Princeton – that feeling of safety is illusory. “It’s your sense of what is dangerous. There are snake-charmers and lion-tamers whose blood pressure doesn’t go up … Doesn’t mean it’s safe! It just means they’re acclimated to that level of risk.”

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脱原発　女子高生ＳＦを上映　「セシウムと少女」深谷であすから via 東京新聞

Posted on 2016/03/28 by yukimiyamotodepaul

　脱原発をテーマに、女子高生の冒険を描いた映画「セシウムと少女」の上映会が二十六、二十七の両日、[埼玉県]深谷市深谷町の深谷シネマ隣にある芸術精米所ミニホールで開かれる。

　映画は、主人公の女子高校生が雷に打たれて一九四〇年代の東京・阿佐ケ谷にタイムスリップ。原発事故をきっかけに、放射性物質セシウムを測定するため、都内のホットスポットをめぐる場面などが描かれている。

　上映会は、「３・１１市民ネット深谷」の小泉誠代表らでつくる実行委員会の主催。実行委は昨年、脱原発のドキュメンタリー映画を上映するなど、東京電力福島第一原発事故を風化させないための活動を続けている。

（略）

問い合わせは実行委＝電０９０（９８０１）１００２＝へ。

全文は脱原発　女子高生ＳＦを上映　「セシウムと少女」深谷であすから

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映画「大地を受け継ぐ」井上監督　福島の現実 伝えたい　via中日新聞

Posted on 2016/03/27 by

　東日本大震災で被災した福島県の農家が原発事故を悲観して自死した父や耕作への思いを東京からの学生たちに語る映画「大地を受け継ぐ」の公開が金沢市のシネモンドで始まり、２７日、初のドキュメンタリーに挑んだ井上淳一監督が舞台あいさつした。（鈴木弘）

　二年前に福島を舞台にした映画「あいときぼうのまち」の脚本を書いた井上監督は「見聞きする現実は自分の想像力がちっぽけだと思わされることばかり。なんとか福島の現実を映画で表現できないかと思っていたとき（主人公の）樽川さんと出会った」と説明。

[…]
　福島での先行上映でサイン会に並んだ観客一人一人から震災後の五年間の思いを打ち明けられたエピソードも紹介し「沈黙の向こう側に福島に暮らす人の数だけこういう声があることを想像してみてください」と呼び掛けた。

　井上監督は一九六五年、愛知県生まれ。早稲田大入学後、若松孝二監督に師事。脚本を手掛けた「退廃姉妹」は釜山国際映画祭の企画マーケットでグランプリを受賞。ほかの監督作品に「戦争と一人の女」（二〇一三年）など。

「。。。」

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