Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts

20160706

Scientists Find New Kind Of Fukushima Fallout


Some of the radioactive material that escaped the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in 2011 took a form no one was looking for, scientists have discovered. Now they have to figure out what it means for Japan and for future disasters.

Radioactive cesium—specifically, cesium-137—is one of the waste products of nuclear power. It’s also one of the most dangerous substances in a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima.

One reason why is that the type of radiation it emits is particularly damaging to our bodies. Another is that cesium-137 dissolves in water. That means it can spread quickly through the environment and get into the plants, animal and water we consume.

Until now, scientists and disaster experts thought cesium-137 fallout from the Fukushima reactor meltdown was in this soluble form. That guided their cleanup efforts, like removing and washing topsoil, and helped them map where radiation might spread...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2016/06/30/scientists-find-new-kind-of-fukushima-fallout/

20160530

600 tons of melted radioactive Fukushima fuel still not found, clean-up chief reveals

The Fukushima clean-up team remains in the dark about the exact locations of 600 tons of melted radioactive fuel from three devastated nuclear reactors, the chief of decommissioning told the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program in an exclusive interview.

The company hopes to locate and start removing the missing fuel from 2021, the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) chief of decommissioning at Fukushima, Naohiro Masuda, revealed.

The fuel extraction technology is yet to be elaborated upon, he added.

Following the tsunami-caused 2011 meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant uranium fuel of three power generating reactors gained critical temperature and burnt through the respective reactor pressure vessels, concentrating somewhere on the lower levels of the station currently filled with water.

The melted nuclear fuel from Reactor 1 poured out completely, estimated 30 to 50 percent of fuel from Reactor 2 and 3 remained in the active zone, Masuda said.

The official estimates that approximately “200 tons of [nuclear fuel] debris lies within each unit," which makes in total about 600 tons of melted fuel mixed up with metal construction elements, concrete and whatever else was down there....

https://www.rt.com/news/344200-fukushima-melted-nuclear-fuel/

20130819

Fukushima apocalypse: Years of ‘duct tape fixes’ could result in ‘millions of deaths’


Even the tiniest mistake during an operation to extract over 1,300 fuel rods at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan could lead to a series of cascading failures with an apocalyptic outcome, fallout researcher Christina Consolo told RT.

Fukushima operator TEPCO wants to extract 400 tons worth of spent fuel rods stored in a pool at the plant’s damaged Reactor No. 4. The removal would have to be done manually from the top store of the damaged building in the radiation-contaminated environment.

In the worst-case scenario, a mishandled rod may go critical, resulting in an above-ground meltdown releasing radioactive fallout with no way to stop it, said Consolo, who is the founder and host of Nuked Radio. But leaving the things as they are is not an option, because statistical risk of a similarly bad outcome increases every day, she said....

...- The process of removing each rod will have to be repeated over 1,300 times without incident...

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse-fuel-removal-598/

20120329

Japanese camera can scan 36 million faces per second | Mail Online

A new camera technology from Hitachi Hokusai Electric can scan days of camera footage instantly, and find any face which has EVER walked past it.

Its makers boast that it can scan 36 million faces per second. 

The technology raises the spectre of governments - or other organisations - being able to 'find' anyone instantly simply using a passport photo or a Facebook profile...

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2119386/Could-governments-recognise-ANYONE-instantly-CCTV-Japanese-camera-scan-36-million-faces-second.html

20110330

Fukushima, the FMI and the silent victims.

I was also in Sendai, a touristic zone for the connoisseur that wanted to flee the Financial-Military-Industrial Complex with its 70 million ant-workers, coming out of the subways in white and black at 7.50 pm. Within 10 minutes all were in their cubicles. Their company-mothers were asking them a sacrifice that summer: they were sweating at work without air conditioned to save more money to their owners, but they were told this was to reduce global warming, a campaign paid by the Nuclear Industry, the placebo that hides the more pressing problems of the evolution of robotics that throw us from jobs and nuclear weapons and predators that will kill us when the FMI complex becomes truly a biological ecosystem of machines that has displaced man as man displaced mammals from  mother-earth.

20110105

Japan nano-tech team creates palladium-like alloy: report

'Kyoto University professor Hiroshi Kitagawa and his team said they used nano-technology to combine rhodium and silver, elements which do not usually mix, to produce the new composite, the Yomiuri daily said.
The alloy has similar properties to palladium, which is used in cars' emission-reducing catalytic converters as well as in computers, mobile phones, flatscreen TVs and dentistry instruments.

Like other white metals, such as silver and platinum, palladium is expensive, with its deposits largely limited to South Africa and Russia...'

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-japan-nano-tech-team-palladium-like-alloy...