International Law

Government report on electricity

Posted on March 28, 2011
This report was distributed at a meeting at METI on March 25. It gives some numbers to note about the current crisis. TEPCO had a capacity of 52 Gigawatt before the quake. That was reduced to only 31 Gigawatt immediately after the quake and is expected to return to 36 by end of March...

WSJ on power saving

Posted on March 28, 2011
I learned a couple of interesting facts from this article on power saving in Japan in the Wall Street Journal. Electricity usage is up by 35% from 1990 with unchanged population. Going back to 1990 levels would solve the summer shortage immediately. About half of the street lights in Tokyo are turned off right now, [...

111 Nanosievert

Posted on March 28, 2011
this morning in Tokyo. Down again. I really like the fact that much of the nasty stuff has a short half-life. That also makes me wonder if it isn’t an overreaction to immediately dispose of vegetables found to be over the already very low limits...

Latest TEPCO status report

Posted on March 27, 2011
says that Units 1 to 3 now are all cooled with fresh water.

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Three workers radiated

Posted on March 27, 2011
will be discharged from the hospital tomorrow, their health not affected (Kyodonews article).

TEPCO radiation data

Posted on March 27, 2011
for the Fukushima site here.

Another good crowdsourced radiation map

Posted on March 27, 2011
here.

Latest Government press conference

Posted on March 27, 2011
of 4 PM today now online at the Government streaming site. Chief cabinet secretary Edano remarked in answer to the question about highly radioactive water in Unit 2 that they are still stopping the situation from getting worse, being able to cool all the Units now...

They should ask everybody

Posted on March 27, 2011
Japan will ask WTO members not to overreact to the nuclear accident next Tuesday. Several countries have restrictions in place for Japanese food exports. Japan will watch these and check if they are unreasonable overreactions based on irrational fear, which would make them illegal under the WTO trade framework (Kyodonews article).

Disaster websites of the Japanese Government

Posted on March 27, 2011
here, with translations of all press conferences. Japanese version is here. The Japanese Twitter stream has some more info not necessarily translated to the English one. (bumped)

Ganbare Nippon

Posted on March 27, 2011
(bumped) I would like to get a balloon with the message ?Ganbare Nippon? floating right at the Fukushima site. That balloon should be well visible, via all those television reports. It should also transport a small camera to look closely at the plants from above, giving the operators valuable information...

Useful link collection on Fukushima

Posted on March 27, 2011
in Wiki format here.

Self-Restraint

Posted on March 27, 2011
An article in the New York Times about Japanese self-restraint describes some of the reactions. Now is not a very good time to be running a Karaoke business. And people are turning off their gadgets. My electrical toilet-seat warmer is unplugged for the next couple of months as well...

Former German Chancellor

Posted on March 27, 2011
Helmut Kohl weighs in on the crisis. He warns against a knee-jerk reaction of shutting down nuclear energy in Germany. I agree. There is obviously some danger from radiation. However, the danger from CO2 is much more serious and not limited to one region of the world...

Blackouts

Posted on March 27, 2011
TEPCO is continuing their rolling blackouts, but from today on they have introduced a more finely tuned method of announcing them (Kyodonews article). I have yet to experience my first blackout. There have been announcements of impending blackouts just about every day, but they were all canceled...

Expert Bank

Posted on March 27, 2011
That’s the title of a television show I watched yesterday. They had two experts, one who drills wells for a living and another 72 years old guy who has been making charcoal for the last twenty years. These were sent to a small village in Nepal, to help out the locals...

Measuring mistake

Posted on March 27, 2011
The operators running the shutdown have corrected one of their more alarming figures, saying the made a mistake. Being unable to correctly measure radioactivity matches nicely with the mistake of having people work there without boots and ignore radiation warnings...

114 Nanosievert

Posted on March 27, 2011
this morning in Tokyo. Down again from 120 yesterday, continuing a steady declining trend.

Ganbare Nippon

Posted on March 26, 2011
(bumped) I would like to get a balloon with the message ?Ganbare Nippon? floating right at the Fukushima site. That balloon should be well visible, via all those television reports. It should also transport a small camera to look closely at the plants from above, giving the operators valuable information...

Great Dailykos diary on evacuation zones

Posted on March 26, 2011
This diary gives the numbers of people living at several distances from the reactor site. The short results: 20 kilometer means about 90.000, 30 about 145.000, 50 about 726.000 and 80 kilometers (the 50 mile zone the American government recommends) about 2,4 million...

Pumping fresh water

Posted on March 26, 2011
Until now, there was no fresh water to cool the plant, so the operators used sea water as a stopgap measure. However now that power is back to the site, they are able to draw fresh water from a dam 10 kilometers away (Nikkei online article). They then pump it into the reactors with fire [...

Specialist in radiation protection

Posted on March 26, 2011
cited in this Yomiuri online article: “Trying to keep water out of your shoes is common sense at locations with [radiation] contaminated water,” said a specialist in radiation protection. “Failure to do even that means the workers weren’t trained properly and radiation safety specialists weren’t given good enough instructions...

Crowdsourcing of radiation data

Posted on March 26, 2011
People have Geiger counters and access to the Internet. The result is a lot of livefeeds for radiation levels. This site collects over 100 of them. I just found a feed right for Shibuya, where my university is located. It says 42 Nanosievert right now...

Irrational fear

Posted on March 26, 2011
makes for real damages, as in this case (Kyodonews article). Reactions like these show why it is necessary to keep cool people as well as the reactors.

Latest Government press conference

Posted on March 26, 2011
of 4 PM today now online at the Government streaming site. Chief cabinet secretary Edano was asked how long the shutdown process will probably take. And, as he did before, he declined to comment on that question, since there are too many uncertainties left and this is certainly not yet the time to relax and [...

2010 Japan Energy Plan

Posted on March 26, 2011
Under Article 12 of the Japanese Basic Act on Energy Policy of 2002 the Government is required to develop a Basic Energy Plan. The latest version is of summer 2010, available as a PDF-file at the website of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy...

Another serious case

Posted on March 26, 2011
of irrational fear syndrome.

SkyControl

Posted on March 26, 2011
I am not sure if it will be possible to get some Zeppelin NT airships flying around Japan to monitor airborne radiation anytime soon. After my previous post I got a reply from a representative of the operating company. It seems I was the first one to contact them in the matter...

Closing category ?Google-Free Zone?

Posted on March 26, 2011
I have just now updated the “About” page of this blog to change the license to a standard Creative Commons “Attribution-NoDerivs”. Until now, I had my own license that specifically gave no rights whatsoever to Google, as part of the category “Google-Free Zone” on this blog...

Stunning

Posted on March 26, 2011
This Wall Street Journal article quotes an anonymous regulator: “Radiation levels in some parts of the facilities are just stunning,” said one official at Japan’s nuclear regulator. “The work to fix the cooling system was made all the more difficult by the lack of information about where radiation is high inside the complex...

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