International Law

120 Nanosievert

Posted on March 26, 2011
this morning in Tokyo. Down again from 128 yesterday. The nice thing about radiation is that much of it decreases quickly. In contrast, CO2 has no short half-life. Whatever gets into the atmosphere stays there a long time.

Edano press conference

Posted on March 25, 2011
today at 4 PM. One point he made before: All data need to be published immediately. Especially data that make the situation worse. There will be no attempts at deceiving the public or making the situation look better than it actually is.

Prime Minister press conference

Posted on March 25, 2011
today, two weeks out from the earthquake. Prime Minister Kan thanked the people involved in the shutdown process, mentioning TEPCO employees, Japanese Self Defense Force, police and firefighters from Tokyo and Osaka. And then he also mentioned help from the American military...

Tap water radiation levels declining fast

Posted on March 25, 2011
in Tokio, now at only 51 becquerel, well below the very conservative safe limit for infants of 100 (Kyodonews article).

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Operation Tomodachi

Posted on March 25, 2011
that is the codename for the US military effort to help dealing with the earthquake. Information on that can be found here. Kyodonews says that the Americans will provide water to be pumped at Fukushima, since it is desirable to stop using sea water if possible.

5.3 million years

Posted on March 25, 2011
is what it takes to restore the fossil fuels the world now consumes in one single year. So says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a leading German scientist,  in an interview with DER SPIEGEL. Link seen at Daily Kos diarist citisven. That does not sound like a sustainable thing to do.

10 Gigawatt needed in summer

Posted on March 25, 2011
At the latest press conference today at about 11 AM, Chief cabinet secretary Edano explained that with the current level of power generation there will be a shortage of about 10 Gigawatt come summer, since there is more electricity needed for running air conditioning...

Great interactive radiation map

Posted on March 25, 2011
at Wall Street Journal here. They map the data and on top also provide graphs for the history of each measuring point. Even at the reactor site in Fukushima there are only about 200 Microsievert measured for the last couple of days. To get a mildly worrying dose of 100 Millisievert, a person would have [...

Temperature in spent fuel pools falling.

Posted on March 25, 2011
From an WSJ article: A week ago, much of the plant was still without power, control rooms were dark and temperatures were out of control in the pools holding spent nuclear fuel. Now, all the units are hooked up to the electric grid, all but one have lights on, and the temperatures in the pools [...

Radiological treatment assets

Posted on March 25, 2011
in Japan are close to zero (Kyodonews article). There is some limited capacity at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, but they could not even handle 100 patients. Therefore the Japanese Government has come up with a plan to designate not specialized hospitals around the country for the purpose.

Again, hard to believe

Posted on March 25, 2011
but some of the people working on the site on the shutdown are not actually TEPCO employees, but subcontractors. That includes the three people getting radiated for lack of boots the other day (Kyodonews article). This is a job with potential influence on the whole nation...

128 Nanosievert

Posted on March 25, 2011
this morning in Tokyo. These numbers are now going down steadily, which is to be expected with a half-life of 8 days for much of the nasty stuff.

Boots

Posted on March 24, 2011
would seem to be a good idea if people are working in puddles of strongly radioactive water (Kyodonews article). It is still amazing that with all the chaos at the site, not one worker has been exposed to over 250 millisievert yet.

Tap water radiation level down again

Posted on March 24, 2011
in Tokyo (Kyodonews article). However, people are still overreacting and buying up bottled water. The government has asked to step up production of bottled water and is considering increasing imports.

Zeppelin NT over Paris

Posted on March 24, 2011
The company producing and operating the Zeppelin NT airships has a press release out about radiation measurements. That press release is in German language. To summarize: As it happens, one of their airships just came back from a mission to map basic radiation data over Paris...

Ganbare Nippon

Posted on March 24, 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...

German Bundeswehr radiation units

Posted on March 24, 2011
The German Bundeswehr (military) has some serious capability in dealing with nuclear threats. I wonder why these guys are not on the ground in Fukushima right now. They probably would wear boots when working in puddles of radioactive water.

American radiation data

Posted on March 24, 2011
The American Government has over 30 specialists on the ground in Japan to monitor radiation data. They have released the data as a Powerpoint presentation, which is best viewed here. A press release explaining how they got the data is here. Their results confirm the fact that there is no reason to worry in the [...

Ganbare Nippon

Posted on March 23, 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...

Message of thanks

Posted on March 23, 2011
for foreign assistance by Prime Minister Kan.

Book review

Posted on March 23, 2011
by Dailykos diarist A. Siegel on “Crossing the Energy Divide“. Just a note to myself to order this book tomorrow.

Tokyo tap water radiation level

Posted on March 23, 2011
Now over the safety standard for infants. The good news is that this is radioactive iodine, which has a short half-life of only about a week.

Food safety

Posted on March 23, 2011
This morning’s Government press conference is now viewable at the Government live stream site (21st, six PM). Chief cabinet secretary Edano explained the aggressive food safety measures the Government has decided. Many vegetables from the affected regions are stopped from entering the market, even if at the levels measured right now they are no immediate [...

Control room in Units 1 and 3 working

Posted on March 23, 2011
(Yomiuri Online article). That means operators get access to much more data about the status of the plant. They found that the reactor at Unit 3 is running too hot and increased the pace of seawater pumping in reaction to that. The concrete pumping machine has been spraying over 150 tons of water at the [...

141 microsievert

Posted on March 23, 2011
this morning in Tokyo. That is slightly down from yesterday.

Ganbare Nippon

Posted on March 22, 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...

More cowards like this one, please

Posted on March 22, 2011
The Wall Street Journal Japan Real Time blog reports that Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son has declared himself a “coward”. He says that he is worried about the nuclear plant and is leaving Tokyo. But not for Osaka or for some place out of Japan,  but for Fukushima...

Hard to believe

Posted on March 22, 2011
but for the first couple of days, the shutdown operation at the Fukushima plant was a show run by the operator TEPCO alone. The Japanese Government didn’t step in until March 15th. See this Wall Street Journal article. As a consequence, the Tokyo firefighter vehicles were on site only a week later...

Electricity usage

Posted on March 22, 2011
TEPCO is publishing data on electricity used here. The Japanese Yahoo page shows a nice graph from that data, showing for example for 5 PM today electricity running at 90 percent of capacity. Publishing this data can help to get everyone on board for the necessary steps to conserve energy.

Power connected

Posted on March 22, 2011
to Unit 4 in the morning today (Kyodonews). That leaves now only Unit 3 without access to the power grid.

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