SF Rally-Speak Out On 9/11! Let's Stop Another 3/11 From Happening Again In Japan

9/11 SF Rally-Speak Out On 9/11! Let's Stop Another 3/11 From Happening Again In Japan That Could Destroy The Country
Defend the Children and Families From Fukushima
Sunday September 11, 2016 3:00 PM
275 Battery St./California St.
San Francisco

Update From Japan By No Nukes Action Leader Chizu Yamada

On Sunday September 11 at 3:00 PM , people will speak out at the San Francisco Japanese consulate to demand the closure of all nuclear plants in Japan and the evacuation of the children and families in Fukushima. While Americans remember 9/11 another deadly man made disaster like Fukushima could take place at any moment as more nuclear plants open up five years after the Fukushima man made disaster. It was a "dirty" nuclear bomb that blew up and contaminated people in Japan and around the world.
With US support the Japanese Abe government is re-opening more and more nuclear plants despite the dangers of another Fukushima happening that could even destroy the entire country. Even former Japanese prime minister Koizumi has called Abe a liar for telling the Olympic committee that the Fukushima meltdowns had been solved in order to get the Olympics. In fact the government is telling the people that they can "overcome radiation" and also that Fukushima has been "decontaminated". These lies and propaganda points are simply to get people to even think about the growing dangers to themselves and their families.
At the same time, no US Congress person has even challenged these actions despite the dangers to people in California and the west coast of another meltdown in Japan. Secretary Hillary Clinton and Obama are also supporting the militarization of Japan and also spending billions on modernizing US nuclear power and US nuclear weapons. The militarization of Japan and Asia is also leading to another world war. The Abe government has passed a secrecy law that prevents information coming out about the growing cancer epidemic and it is pushing to remove the peace clause in their constitution prohibiting imperial war. The US again is supporting the further militarization of Asia which will lead to another world war. The government has also removed tents near the prime minister's office to stop any further regular public activity against the restarting of the nuclear power plants.
Another Fukushima could not only destroy Japan but also further contaminate the Asian rim with radioactive waste. The Fukushima radioactive contamination continues to flow into the Pacific ocean and this contamination is threatening the health and safety of our hemispheres and world.
US sailors have also were in the area at the time of Fukushima have also been contaminated and are now getting serious cases of cancer and other diseases. They are also suing TEPCO for damages.
We must continue to speak out against the danger of Fukushima and other nuclear plants to the people of Japan and the world of these dangerous nuclear plants and call for the closure of all nuclear plants around the world.
LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD

Speak Out and Rally initiated by
No Nukes Action Committee
http://nonukesaction.wordpress.com/
For more information
(510) 495-5952

Japan Governors’ moves muddle reactor restart bids
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/08/31/national/governors-moves-muddle-reactor-restart-bids/#.V8dtcRT9--Q
BY ERIC JOHNSTON
STAFF WRITER

• AUG 31, 2016
OSAKA – Political moves by the governors of Kagoshima and Niigata over the last week, one sudden and one that was mostly expected, are likely to affect plans in both prefectures to restart or continue running nuclear reactors.

On Wednesday, Kyodo News reported that Kagoshima Gov. Satoshi Mitazono’s call for two reactors at Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai plant to be shut down over safety concerns would be rejected. Kyushu Electric said it expected to formally reply to the governor soon.

Mitazono, elected last month on an anti-nuclear platform, on Friday formally requested that the reactors at the Sendai plant be halted — a move unprecedented for a governor.

Still, even if Kyushu Electric does turn down his request to shut the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors, as expected, both are due to go offline in about two months for regular inspections. That could lead to further legal maneuvers by the governor or anti-nuclear activists, who have cited concerns over earthquakes, volcanic activity and evacuation plans for his desire to permanently shutter the reactors.

Meanwhile, in Niigata Prefecture, the future of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s efforts to restart two reactors at the giant Kashiwazaki-Kariwa power plant were thrown wide open by incumbent Gov. Hirohiko Izumida’s sudden announcement Tuesday that he would not stand for re-election. Izumida had long opposed restarting the plant’s No. 6 and No. 7 units until the full causes of the March 2011 triple meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant were made clear.

With Izumida’s pending departure, only Nagaoka mayor Tamio Mori so far has officially declared himself ready to replace him. Tadao Yabe, an unaffiliated Kashiwazaki assemblyman who opposes the restarts, said Mori is considered locally to be very much in the pro-nuclear camp and already has the support of some prefectural assembly members who want to see the reactors fired up again.

“The election is not until Oct. 16th, but Izumida’s sudden announcement has created a lot of confusion,” said Yabe. “The search is under way for a candidate to run against Mori.”

Restarts of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactors are still a long way off, as they have yet to undergo the Nuclear Regulatory Authority’s new safety tests. But Yabe said if they were cleared for restart, various legal measures, including a petition seeking a temporary injunction against such a move, would be carried out.

Yabe added he did not think Izumida’s sudden decision not to run for re-election was specifically about the struggles to restart the reactors. The official reason for deciding not to seek re-election, as explained by the governor to reporters on Wednesday, was over his unhappiness with a report in the local Niigata Nippo newspaper that raised questions related to the sale by a prefecture-related entity of a used ferry boat that ran between Niigata and the Russian Far East.

Japanese Ex-PM Koizumi: Abe ‘Lied’ Claiming Fukushima ‘Under Control’
https://sputniknews.com/asia/20160908/1045074778/koizumi-says-abe-lied-fukushima.html
©REUTERS/ Toru Hanai

ASIA & PACIFIC

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/asia/20160908/1045074778/koizumi-says-abe-lied-fukushima.html

02:29 08.09.2016(updated 10:30 08.09.2016) Get short URL

61062123 On Wednesday, former Japanese Premier Junichiro Koizumi said that current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a “lie” by downplaying the damage wrought by the Fukushima nuclear accident, and claiming that the radioactivity contaminating the site was “under control.” After a March 2011 tsunami and earthquake caused a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Koizumi, who served as premier from 2001 to 2006, began sharply criticizing nuclear power, saying he was “ashamed” for believing that nuclear energy was a clean, safe and cheap energy alternative for Japan. © AP PHOTO/ KOJI SASAHARA, POOL Tokyo Hopes To Lift No Go Zone Order In Fukushima In Next Five Years "I studied the process, reality and history of the introduction of nuclear power and became ashamed of myself for believing such lies," Koizumi said after the accident. The plant, owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co's (TEPCO) is the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident since 1986’s Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine. Abe made his claims in Buenos Aires in 2013 while trying to convince the International Olympic Committee to bring the popular and lucrative games to Tokyo. The 74-year-old Koizumi said "Mr. Abe's 'under control' remark, that was a lie…It is not under control," pointing out TEPCO’s attempts at building an expensive underground “ice wall” to prevent groundwater from becoming contaminated after flowing through damaged reactors. © AFP 2016/ TORU HANAI Public Cost Of Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Continues to Rise Koizumi, once thought to be Abe’s successor in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), said the prime minister "believes what he’s being told by nuclear experts. I believed them, too, when I was prime minister. I think Abe understands the arguments on both sides of the debate, but he has chosen to believe the pro-nuclear lobby." In 2012 12,539 people sued TEPCO for negligence, their suits totaling nearly $1 billion. Over 99 percent of those who sued were former residents of the prefecture of Fukushima, and were forced to evacuate after the meltdown. An additional 223 US Navy sailors filed a class action suit for suffering a host of serious health problems after assisting with the Operation Tomodachi (Friends) cleanup effort. Koizumi supports the claims of the sailors. According to experts, one the most daunting challenges in the cleanup effort is handling almost a million tons of radioactive water currently stored in tanks at Fukushima. By 2030, the government hopes to have nuclear power supply a fifth of the country’s energy. Over 160,000 people had to be evacuated from the areas around Fukushima after the accident, which caused contamination in the land, food, air and water.

Japan’s ‘Hail Mary’ at Fukushima Daiichi: An Underground Ice Wall
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/science/fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-plant-cleanup-ice-wall.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
By MARTIN FACKLER
AUG. 29, 2016


At the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, 95-foot tanks used to store contaminated water abound. CreditKo Sasaki for The New York Times
FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI NUCLEAR POWER STATION — The part above ground doesn’t look like much, a few silver pipes running in a straight line, dwarfed by the far more massive, scarred reactor buildings nearby.

More impressive is what is taking shape unseen beneath: an underground wall of frozen dirt 100 feet deep and nearly a mile in length, intended to solve a runaway water crisis threatening the devastated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan.

Officially named the Land-Side Impermeable Wall, but better known simply as the ice wall, the project sounds like a fanciful idea from science fiction or a James Bond film. But it is about to become a reality in an ambitious, and controversial, bid to halt an unrelenting flood of groundwater into the damaged reactor buildings since the disaster five years ago when an earthquake and a tsunami caused a triple meltdown.

Built by the central government at a cost of 35 billion yen, or some $320 million, the ice wall is intended to seal off the reactor buildings within a vast, rectangular-shaped barrier of man-made permafrost. If it becomes successfully operational as soon as this autumn, the frozen soil will act as a dam to block new groundwater from entering the buildings. It will also help stop leaks of radioactive water into the nearby Pacific Ocean, which have decreased significantly since the calamity but may be continuing.

However, the ice wall has also been widely criticized as an expensive and overly complex solution that may not even work. Such concerns re-emerged this month after the plant’s operator announced that a section that was switched on more than four months ago had yet to fully freeze. Some also warn that the wall, which is electrically powered, may prove as vulnerable to natural disasters as the plant itself, which lost the ability to cool its reactors after the 45-foot tsunami caused a blackout there.

The reactor buildings are vulnerable to an influx of groundwater because of how the operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, built the plant in the 1960s, by cutting away a hillside to place it closer to the sea, so the plant could pump in water more easily. That also put the buildings in contact with a deep layer of permeable rock filled with water, mostly rain and melted snow from the nearby Abukuma Mountains, that flows to the Pacific.

The buildings managed to keep the water out until the accident on March 11, 2011. Either the natural disasters themselves, or the explosive meltdowns of three of the plant’s six reactors that followed, are believed to have cracked the buildings’ basements, allowing groundwater to pour in. Nearly 40,000 gallons of water a day keep flooding into the buildings.

Once inside, the water becomes highly radioactive, impeding efforts to eventually dismantle the plant. During the accident, the uranium fuel grew so hot that some of it is believed to have melted through the reactor’s steel floors and possibly into the basement underneath, though no one knows exactly where it lies. The continual flood of radioactive water has prevented engineers from searching for the fuel.

Since the accident, five robots sent into the reactor buildings have failed to return because of high radiation levels and obstruction from debris.

Photo

Pipes containing coolant are being used to help create an underground ice wall to try to stop contaminated water from leaking. CreditKo Sasaki for The New York Times
The water has also created a waste-management nightmare because Tepco must pump it out into holding tanks as quickly as it enters the buildings, to prevent it from overflowing into the Pacific. The company says that it has built more than 1,000 tanks that now hold more than 800,000 tons of radioactive water, enough to fill more than 320 Olympic-size swimming pools.

On a recent visit to the plant, workers were busily erecting more durable, welded tanks to replace the temporary ones thrown up in a hurry during the early years after the accident, some of which have leaked. Every available patch of space on the sprawling plant grounds now appears to be filled with 95-foot tanks.

“We have to escape from this cycle of ever more water building up inside the plant,” said Yuichi Okamura, a general manager of Tepco’s nuclear power division who guided a reporter through Fukushima Daiichi. About 7,000 workers are employed in the cleanup.

The ice wall is a high-technology bid to break that cycle by installing what might be the world’s largest freezer. Pipes almost 100 feet long have been sunk into the ground at roughly three-foot intervals, and filled with a brine solution supercooled to minus 30 degrees Celsius, or minus 22 Fahrenheit. Each pipe is supposed to freeze a column of soil about a foot and a half in radius, large enough to reach the ice column created by its neighboring pipes and form a seamless barrier.

Engineers with the wall’s builder, the construction giant Kajima Corp., estimate that it will take about two months for the soil around a pipe to fully freeze. Solidifying the entire wall, which consists of 1,568 such underground pipes, will require 30 large refrigeration units and consume enough electricity to light more than 13,000 Japanese homes for a year.

Fukushima Five Years After Nuclear Disaster
Five years after an earthquake and tsunami devastated the northeast Japanese coast, Japan has not fully recovered.


The technique of using frozen barriers to block groundwater has been used to build tunnels and mines around the world, but not on this scale. And certainly not on the site of a major nuclear disaster.

Since the start, the project has attracted its share of skeptics. Some say buried obstacles at the plant, including tunnels that linked the reactor buildings to other structures, will leave holes in the ice wall, making it more like a sieve. Others question why such an exotic solution is necessary when a traditional steel or concrete wall might perform better.

Some call the ice wall a flashy but desperate gambit to tame the water problem, after the government and Tepco were initially slow to address it. Adding to the urgency is the 2020 Olympics, which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan helped win for Tokyo three years ago by assuring the International Olympic Committee that the water troubles at Fukushima Daiichi were under control.

“It’s a Hail Mary play,” said Azby Brown, a Japan-based researcher for Safecast, an independent radiation-monitoring group. “Tepco underestimated the groundwater problem in the beginning, and now Japan is trying to catch up with a massive technical fix that is very expensive.”

Supporters and skeptics alike will soon learn if that gambit will succeed. After two years of work, Kajima finished installing the pipes and refrigerator units to create the ice wall in February. At the end of March, it switched on part of the ice wall for the first time — roughly half a mile that runs between the reactor buildings and the Pacific. Most of the other, uphill side of the wall was activated in mid-June.

Continue reading the main story
Photo

One of the approximately 7,000 workers being employed in the cleanup of Fukushima Daiichi, which was devastated by an earthquake and a tsunami in 2011. CreditKo Sasaki for The New York Times
Kajima is freezing the wall in stages under orders from the Nuclear Regulation Authority, Japan’s nuclear watchdog. The authority is concerned that cutting off the groundwater too suddenly might lead to a reversal of flows, causing the radioactive water accumulated inside the reactor buildings to starting pouring out into the surrounding soil, possibly reaching the Pacific. It has told Kajima to leave a half-dozen “gateways” in the uphill side that will not be closed until much of the contaminated water is drained from the buildings.

This month, Tepco told the nuclear agency that the seaside segment of the ice wall had frozen about 99 percent solid. It says a few spots have failed to solidify because they contain buried rubble or sand left from the plant’s construction a half-century ago, which now allow groundwater to flow through so quickly that it will not freeze.

Tatsuhiro Yamagishi, a spokesman for Tepco, said the company was trying to plug these holes in the ice wall with quick-drying cement. “We have started to see some progress in temperature decrease,” he said.

Even if the cement helps make the ice wall watertight, skeptics question how long it can last. They point out that such frozen barriers are usually temporary against groundwater at construction sites. They say the brine solution used to chill the pipes is highly corrosive, which could make them break or leak. It is also unclear whether the system could break down under the stresses of operating in a high-radiation environment where another earthquake could lead to another power loss.

“Why build such an elaborate and fragile wall when there is a more permanent solution available?” said Sumio Mabuchi, a former construction minister who has called for building a slurry wall, a trench filled with liquid concrete that is commonly used to block water.

Photo

Workers must wear protective gear while inside the plant. CreditKo Sasaki for The New York Times
Isao Abe, a Kajima engineer overseeing the ice wall, said his company had made the wall more durable by installing underground pipes that are easy to replace if they corrode. He also said the ice wall was self-sealing, meaning that if another earthquake caused cracks, any incoming water would freeze right away, restoring the wall. He also said it would take months for the wall to thaw, giving engineers ample time to restore power even if the plant has another outage.

Mr. Abe said the wall was intended to operate until 2021, giving Tepco five more years to find and plug the holes in the reactor buildings, though skeptics say this difficult task will require more time. Mr. Abe also pointed out that the ice wall was part of a broader strategy for containing the radioactive water. Before installing the ice wall, Kajima also built a conventional steel wall underground along the plant’s border with the Pacific last year.

Tepco says that wall has already stopped all measurable leaks of radioactive materials into the sea. However, some scientists say that radioactive water may still be seeping through layers of permeable rock that lie deep below the plant, emptying into the Pacific far offshore. They say the only way to eliminate all leaks would be to repair the buildings once and for all.

Even if the ice wall works, Tepco will face the herculean task of dealing with the huge amounts of contaminated water that have accumulated. The company has installed filtering systems that can remove all nuclear particles but one, a radioactive form of hydrogen known as tritium. The central government and Tepco have yet to figure out what to do with the tritium-laced water; proposals to dilute and dump it into the Pacific have met with resistance from local fishermen, and risk an international backlash.

For now, the only visible sign that the freezing has begun are silver-dollar-size patches of ice that have formed on top of the aboveground, silver pipes. At one spot, the No. 4 reactor building loomed, an enormous cube six stories tall with concrete sides that showed large gashes left by the tsunami.

“The water is here, just three meters beneath our feet,” said Mr. Okamura, the Tepco general manager, who stood near the pipes wearing a white protective suit, goggles and a surgical mask. “It still flows into the building, unseen, without stopping.”

Japan Governor to call on Kyushu Elec. to halt nuclear plant operation
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160826/p2g/00m/0dm/049000c
August 26, 2016 (Mainichi Japan)


The No. 1 and No. 2 reactors are seen at the Sendai nuclear power plant in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima Prefecture, in this photo taken from a Mainichi helicopter. (Mainichi)
FUKUOKA (Kyodo) -- The governor of Kagoshima Prefecture on Friday afternoon is set to request Kyushu Electric Power Co. suspend two reactors at its Sendai nuclear plant in the southwestern Japan prefecture, sources close to the matter said.

Gov. Satoshi Mitazono, who was elected on an antinuclear platform last month, is expected to make the request regarding the plant's Nos. 1 and 2 reactors -- two of only three reactors currently operating in the country -- at his meeting with the utility's President Michiaki Uriu, slated at the prefectural government office at 3 p.m.

The former TV commentator is likely to call on the utility to re-examine safety measures for the complex, citing increasing concerns among citizens about nuclear power security after huge earthquakes hit nearby prefectures in April, according to the sources.

Kyushu Electric is expected to prepare its answer to the request by early September.

Governors have no legal power to suspend operation of nuclear power plants.

Regardless of the governor's request, the Nos. 1 and 2 reactors are scheduled to be taken offline for regular checks on Oct. 6 and Dec. 16, respectively.