Another dirty way how to get rich.

TAKAHAMA, Fukui — A town assembly member who runs a real estate company has received unusually high rent from a subsidiary of Kansai Electric Power Co. (KEPCO), apparently in return for promoting the utility’s nuclear power plant in the town, it has been learned.

Tomio Yamamoto, 53, a member of the Takahama Town Assembly in Fukui Prefecture and president of OHC Fukui, a real estate company in the town, received over 100 million yen from a subsidiary of KEPCO for renting an unused factory over four years until fiscal 2010. The subsidiary firm used the factory as storage.

The town of Takahama is home to KEPCO’s Takahama Nuclear Power Plant, which has four nuclear reactors.

According to the revelations, senior officials of the Takahama Municipal Government solicited KEPCO to make the property contract with OHC Fukui, in which the rent was set at almost twice the standard in the area, according to realtor sources.

In September last year, Yamamoto cooperated with the town assembly’s proposal for an opinion statement seeking the reactivation of the nuclear power plant — setting another example of local assembly members receiving “nuclear money” for promoting nuclear energy projects.

The opinion statement was proposed by Akio Awano, 62, vice speaker of the town assembly, and was endorsed by Yamamoto and two other town assembly members before it was submitted to the assembly. The proposal eventually passed the assembly in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March last year.

According to the town hall and other insider sources, Yamamoto established a company to produce new material from used tires in 2004, for which he built a factory on the approximately 5,910-square-meter land lot he purchased from the town for 88.65 million yen. However, the project failed and the factory became out of use.

Although it has not been clear how much money was paid in rent to the real estate company in fiscal 2007, 50 million yen was paid to the firm annually by the KEPCO subsidiary from fiscal 2008 to 2010, according to the sources.

Getting my attention. Second gauge broken?

The temperature of unit 2′s RPV bottom rose by 11.5°C in 24 hours reaching 47.8°C at 11:00 AM on Thursday, while the temperatures from the RPV supporting skirt have also risen nearly 10°C over the last 5 days. The temperature levels from the Safety Relief Valves and the feedwater nozzles have also been steadily increasing since February 19th. Currently the temperatures levels are recorded at 50°C and 38.4°C at the feedwater nozzles. Tepco was forced to inject additional cooling water into the same reactor earlier this month after the temperature started rising at the beginning of the month.

“Ashes of death” Bikini Attol

Eleven months since the outbreak of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), with people still living in fear of radiation exposure, I went to hear what a man who was exposed to radiation 58 years ago, had to say.

Matashichi Oishi, 78, was a crew member of the fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru, or “Lucky Dragon 5,” which one day in 1954 found itself covered in the “ashes of death” from a nuclear experiment being conducted in the Pacific by the U.S., off the Bikini Atoll.

“Many people were exposed to blasting winds and extreme heat by the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Oishi said. “As for us, we were covered in radioactive white powder that rained down from the sky, and suffered internal radiation exposure.”

It was Feb. 11, and Oishi was speaking to an audience of about 60 people attending a study session co-hosted by a civic group and the Nishitokyo Municipal Government. He’d shut down the dry cleaning business that he’d run for years in Tokyo at the end of 2010.

“I’d always been trying to share my experiences through spoken and written words, but no one would listen to a mere former fisherman-turned-launderer. But ever since the disaster in Fukushima broke out, what I have to say is no longer ‘someone else’s pitiful story,’” he said.

That Oishi characterized his ordeal — an incident which sparked Japan’s anti-nuclear activist movement — as having been viewed as “someone else’s pitiful story” is testament to the turbulent road he’d been forced to take.

Oishi was the eldest son in a family of six children in the Shizuoka Prefecture town of Yoshida, located next to the city of Yaizu, where Daigo Fukuryu Maru’s home port was located. He was 14 years old when he joined the crew of a bonito fishing boat. In January 1954, right after Oishi turned 20, he left port on the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a tuna fishing boat. In the predawn hours of March 1, Oishi and his colleagues were in the Pacific near the Marshall Islands, when a nuclear bomb device detonated some 160 kilometers away.

In his book, “The Day the Sun Rose in the West,” Oishi describes what happened in the immediate aftermath: “Two hours passed … I noticed that the rain contained white particles … I took a lick; it was gritty but had no taste.”

Only later did it emerge that the white powder had been coral reef that had been incinerated by the hydrogen explosion, and scattered through the sky.

“There was enough of it accumulating on the deck of our boat that we would leave footprints. But it wasn’t hot to the touch, and it didn’t give off an odor, so we weren’t fearful of it,” Oishi explained. The hydrogen bomb, given the code name “Castle Bravo,” is said to have released 1,000 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

In the two weeks between the explosion and the boat’s return to port, the crew members continued to be exposed internally to radiation through the food they ate and the air they breathed, though the exact degree of their exposure is unknown. According to the public-interest corporation that runs the Tokyo Metropolitan Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall, it is estimated from crew members’ white blood cell counts and other symptoms that they were exposed to an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 millisieverts of radiation. Exposure to 4,000 millisieverts of radiation at once is said to result in death for 50 percent of people.

The oldest of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru’s 23 crew members, then 40-year-old Aikichi Kuboyama, died half a year later from acute radiation syndrome. Oishi, meanwhile, lost his hair and saw his white blood cell count drop, but was able to go home after being hospitalized for 14 months.

In 1955, the Japanese and U.S. governments reached an agreement in which the U.S. government would pay the Japanese government 720 million yen in “sympathy money,” without having to take any legal responsibility. Politically, the Bikini Incident had been settled. But what awaited Oishi in his hometown were others’ prejudiced and discriminatory attitudes toward him as a victim of radiation exposure, and jealousy over the 1.9 million yen he’d received. People even asked him to shoulder loans that they had no prospects of paying back.

Unable to withstand the treatment, Oishi relocated to Tokyo and began working at a dry cleaner’s. “I wanted to live unnoticed among the crowd in a place where no one knew about my past radiation exposure,” Oishi said.

He eventually married, but the couple’s first child was stillborn. Fearing that the discrimination that plagued him would burden his wife and two children who survived, Oishi kept mum on his experience. And still, he could not keep the prejudice from seizing his loved ones.

“Two of my daughter’s engagements were broken off,” Oishi recalled. “Just because one was exposed to radiation or is related to someone who did, people saw us as somehow deviating from ‘the human realm.’”

Through all this, his fellow crew members continued to die from cancer and other health problems. Oishi asked himself if it was acceptable to stay quiet about what he and his fellow shipmates had experienced. In 1983, 29 years after the incident took place, Oishi spoke to a group of junior high school students about the Bikini Incident. This experience led to his decision to continue sharing his story far and wide.

“It’s frustrating, isn’t it? I’ve suffered so much from discrimination and prejudice, while many of my fellow fishermen died from illness in their 40s and 50s. Meanwhile, their surviving families continued to suffer. If I do not speak out about it, as someone who was actually there, the incident will be forgotten. I have no choice but to speak out. That’s what I thought.”

Since then, Oishi has traveled across the country giving talks about the dangers of radiation and internal exposure. It was one day in the recent past that “someone else’s pitiful story” turned into “my grave story” for all those affected by the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

“The Bikini Incident and the recent nuclear plant disaster are essentially of the same nature in that they have both caused internal exposure to radiation. However, I inhaled and was covered (in radioactive materials) for two weeks, while the people of Fukushima are living in it. It’s outrageous. (Radiation) isn’t visible, and no one wants to leave their hometowns. But radiation detection devices register certain radiation levels. … The people must be at their wits’ end.

The Daigo Fukuryu Maru fishing boat, which was drenched in radioactive particles from a U.S. nuclear experiment, is pictured here on display at the Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall. (Mainichi)
“What are we going to do about radiation, and about nuclear power? We can’t leave it up to the leaders who don’t want to lose in international competition, because they will resist seeing the health effects of radiation exposure as significant. The public must think this through with raised awareness, or this problem will remain unresolved forever.”

At his home in Tokyo, Oishi showed me a bag full of his medications, including ones to improve the symptoms of angina and myocardial infarction, others to prevent asthma attacks, as well as those for the treatment of infections. He takes approximately 30 kinds of drugs per day.

“To be honest, the reason I’m able to hold out is because of the medication,” Oishi said. “If it weren’t for the medication, I wouldn’t be here.”

In 1992, Oishi was diagnosed with liver cancer and received surgery for it. He now has a tumor in his lung, and his asthma-like coughing fits can’t be kept under control without his meds. He also has arrhythmias and cataracts. It’s not clear if there’s a causal relationship between his encounter on a shipping boat years ago and his ailments today, but Oishi says in his aforementioned book that none of the conditions existed before he encountered the U.S. nuclear experiment.

Concerned with the possible aftereffects of his exposure to radiation, Oishi continued to undergo physical exams once a year at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, which was founded in 1957 as a direct result of the Bikini Incident. He stopped going, however, after his checkup in 1992, because the institute would not give him detailed data even though he requested it.

“My liver cancer was detected at a different hospital, too,” Oishi said. “I began to feel that for the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, we were merely research subjects. Based on what I’ve seen and heard about the slow response of the national government to the plight of people in Fukushima, I get the impression that things haven’t changed. Unless we try to learn from the lessons of past radiation victims, I’m afraid that our painful experiences will be repeated.”

Of the 23 crew members who were on the Daigo Fukuryu Maru the day of the 1954 explosion, 14 have already died. With the exception of Kuboyama, the national government has not recognized any cause-and-effect relationships between the exposure of crew members to radiation and the illnesses they eventually developed. As Oishi has not been issued an atomic bomb survivor’s health handbook — official certification from the government that would make him eligible for special health benefits — he continues to receive medical treatment under the standard health insurance program. (By Mamoru Shishido, Evening Edition Department)

Kan admitting government’s faiture.

Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan has admitted that Japan was woefully unprepared for last year’s nuclear disaster and suggested that the crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant should not have been built so close to a tsunami-prone coastline.

In an exclusive interview, Kan acknowledged flaws in the authorities’ handling of the crisis, including poor communication and coordination among nuclear regulators, Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s management and the government Kan was heading at the time.

But he said the disaster — the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986 — laid bare a host of even bigger vulnerabilities in the nuclear power industry and its regulations, ranging from inadequate safety guidelines to crisis management, all of which he said need to be overhauled.

“Before 3/11, we were totally unprepared,” he said. “Not only in terms of the hardware, but our system and the organization were not prepared. That was the biggest problem.”

Kan said the disaster made him realize that Japan needs to dramatically reduce its dependence on nuclear power, which accounted for 30 percent of the country’s electricity supply before the crisis, and has turned him into a believer in renewable energy.

He also acknowledged that information was sometimes slowly disclosed and at other times erroneous, particularly in the days immediately after the crisis started. He blamed a lack of reliable data at the time and denied the government ever hid any information from the public.

Kan said the very location of the Fukushima plant was problematic.

“If they had thought about it, they wouldn’t have intentionally built it at such a low location,” Kan said. “The plant was built on the assumption that there was no need to anticipate a major tsunami, and that was the actual start of the problem.

“We should have taken more adequate safety steps, and we failed to do so,” he added. “It was a big mistake and I must admit that (the accident) was due to human error.”

Early on in the crisis, Kan said he had considered the possibility of a worst-case scenario in which all six of the plant’s reactors and rods in their spent-fuel pools would have melted down completely out of control. That probably would have resulted in radioactive fallout spreading over a wider area, requiring the evacuation of millions of people, including possibly the population of Tokyo.

But Kan said he never instructed officials to produce a blueprint for evacuating the 30 million people living in the greater Tokyo area, although an internal report submitted March 25 by the head of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission warned of such a possibility if the disaster deteriorated. Fearing panic, the report was buried and kept a secret.

“My mission was to stop (such an evacuation) from happening and to think how to do it,” Kan said. “We were lucky to manage to get the crisis under control before things worsened.”

He said the crisis was at its most dire stage around the time a third hydrogen explosion was detected at the Fukushima plant in mid-March. “Up until around March 15, we were losing ground to the invisible enemy,” he said.

Thermometer shut down.

The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has attributed abnormally high temperature readings at one of the facility’s reactors to a malfunctioning thermometer.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, reported the analysis of the problem at the Number 2 reactor to the government’s nuclear safety agency on Thursday.

The thermometer at the reactor has been showing much higher readings than 2 others.

The utility said it’s highly unlikely that temperatures could rise so high unless at least 60 percent of the melted nuclear fuel in the reactor were concentrated near the thermometer.

TEPCO confirmed signs of rising temperatures in experiments it conducted under unusually large electric resistance, as was found in the thermometer.

The thermometer serves as an indicator to assess whether the reactor can stay in a state of cold shutdown.

TEPCO says the thermometer will no longer be monitored. The firm says it will comprehensively examine data, including other thermometer readings and radiation levels in the reactor’s containment vessel, to determine whether a state of cold shutdown is achieved.

The utility plans to reduce water injections into the reactor to a level at which such injections were done before the thermometer readings began rising, if the nuclear safety agency says that doing so is reasonable.
Page 2 of 2Japan’s government says that about 120 pro-Pyongyang residents in Japan recently brought a total of least 70 million yen – about 890,000 dollars – on a visit to North Korea. The money was reportedly used to fund celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the birth of late leader Kim Jong-Il.

Public security officials say the Korean residents, including executive officials of a pro-North Korea association, traveled to the North via Beijing and other routes in late January and earlier this month.

North Korean residents are required to report to the customs authorities when they take over 100,000 yen, or some 1,270 dollars, to the North. Customs say that at least 890,000 dollars was brought into the country.
The public safety officials say that the pro-Pyongyang association was asked by North Korea to donate money to celebrate Kim’s anniversary.

Professor Toshio Miyatsuka at Yamanashi Gakuin University says North Korea is believed to have urged Korean residents in Japan to show their loyalty to new leader Kim Jong Un.

He predicts similar requests before the centenary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, Jong Un’s grandfather and the North’s founder. He says the demands have become a heavy burden on some North Korean residents in Japan.

A woman who defected from North Korea says many ordinary citizens in the North have no interest in these anniversaries and are only anxious to know if authorities will deliver food to mark the celebrations.

She also said the North’s security officers are said to have been ordered to open fire at defectors, and she’s heard that some have been shot to death.

Massive levels of radioactive cesium have been detected in Namie

FUKUSHIMA — Massive levels of radioactive cesium have been detected from gravel at a quarry near the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, after high radiation was detected at buildings using gravel from the same quarry, prefectural officials said.

The Fukushima Prefectural Government examined samples of the gravel from the quarry in the town of Namie after inspecting the site on Jan. 20.

Tests detected up to 214,200 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram of gravel, far above the levels at other quarries operating in the evacuation zones around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. About 60,000-210,000 becquerels of cesium was found in most of the gravel that had been kept outdoors at the quarry since the disaster.

High radiation levels have been detected at apartment blocks and other construction projects built with gravel from the Namie quarry, and the findings lend further backing to the theory that this gravel was seriously contaminated with large amounts of cesium.

Among 25 quarries in the evacuation zones, up to 122,400 becquerels of radioactive cesium was found at one that has been closed since the nuclear crisis broke out on March 11, 2011. A high of 5,170 becquerels was found at one of 14 operational quarries within the evacuation zones.

The national and prefectural governments have done spot inspections of about 150 of some 1,100 construction sites where gravel from the Namie quarry is believed to have been used.

Higher levels of radiation than surrounding areas were detected at 27 locations in five towns and cities, including Nihonmatsu and the city of Fukushima. Of these, 22 were residences. The central and prefectural authorities are expected to finish their inspections by the end of March.

In a related development, the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry held an expert panel meeting to consider standards for shipping gravel from quarries in the prefecture.

Noting that extraordinarily high levels of radiation were detected from only the Namie quarry, the experts said they recommended that the ministry only set standards for areas in Fukushima Prefecture where radiation levels remain high.

Key persons in gov’t acted inadequately over Fukushima crisis

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Two persons expected to have played a key role in dealing with the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant acted inadequately in the early days of the crisis, an investigation initiated by the Japanese parliament showed Wednesday.

In a hearing conducted by a panel of experts, Nobuaki Terasaka, the then head of the government’s nuclear safety agency, said his role was to pass on information to the prime minister’s office from the agency but he had not confirmed what level the information had reached.

Haruki Madarame, who heads another body called the Nuclear Safety Commission, was also summoned to the hearing and said he was not able to get much information.

“There was a limit to giving advice,” the commission chair and former University of Tokyo professor said.

He also called for a swift review of the country’s nuclear regulation in line with international standards, saying the current safety screening of nuclear power plants is based on “technology of 30 years ago.”

The poor communication among officials in the government in the early phase of the crisis has already been highlighted in an interim report issued by a government panel looking into the cause of the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

The hearing conducted Wednesday is part of a separate investigation process carried out by a panel set up in the Diet and led by Kiyoshi Kurokawa, former president of the Science Council of Japan.

Madarame also told the panel that he “hardly remembered” what kind of advice he gave to the government, recalling that he barely had time to sleep for more than a week after the crisis erupted in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

(Mainichi Japan) February 16, 2012

Japanese official who outlined worst nuclear scenario blames plant’s design

TOKYO — The government official who outlined Japan’s worst-case scenario for the unfolding nuclear disaster last March defended how his study, warning that millions of people might have to flee, was kept secret.

Authorities would have had as much as a week or two to expand the evacuation zone if the worst-case scenario had started to unfold, said Shunsuke Kondo, who heads the Japan Atomic Energy Commission that helps set government nuclear policy.

But he also acknowledged Tuesday that the design for the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant had been faulty and he had not expected the “Chernobyl-style disaster” that occurred.

Kondo was commissioned by then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan to write the worst-case scenario on what might happen after the March 11 tsunami crippled the plant and caused three reactors to melt down.

But fearing widespread panic, officials kept secret the 15-page document he delivered March 25. It was obtained by The Associated Press last month.

The document said evacuation zones possibly would have to be expanded, including the Tokyo area with a population of 35 million people, if massive radiation began to leak from the plant, 230 kilometers (140 miles) from the capital.

Workers ultimately were able to bring the reactors under control.

But at the time, just two weeks after the disaster, it was unclear whether emergency measures would succeed, and an aftershock or another tsunami could have set off explosions and leaks at the crippled plant.

Kondo, 69, a former engineering professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, said the government responded properly to his scenario, which he prefers be called “contingency,” instead of “worst-case.”

“Thinking of contingencies is Common Sense Crisis Management 101,” said Kondo, while noting the secrecy decision was not his but politicians’.

“Implementing cost-effective measures was the proper response,” he told The Associated Press at his office in a rare interview.

Nearly a year after the disaster, the probability of the nuclear crisis spiraling out of control was tiny, according to Kondo, a stately looking man with white hair and sharp eyes.

The only task left undone from his scenario is relatively minor — covering the pools of spent nuclear fuel rods sitting next to each reactor at Fukushima Dai-ichi, he said.

Spent fuel rods are still highly radioactive. Hydrogen explosions blew apart two of six containment buildings at Fukushima.

Kondo’s scenario had warned the radiation equivalent of two reactor cores might leak if the spent fuel started to burn.

Now, the rods are immersed in water and are stable.

Kondo, a longtime advocate of atomic technology as clean energy, acknowledged the design of Fukushima Dai-ichi had been faulty.

It failed in crucial “venting,” to release pressure and prevent explosions, spreading radiation into the environment in what Kondo likened to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Kondo had erroneously expected problems at a Japan plant to be like the Three Mile Island accident, where radiation leakage was limited.

“That was our biggest mistake,” he said.

Decades will now be needed before Fukushima Dai-ichi can be fully decommissioned.

Authorities evacuated 59,000 residents within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the Fukushima plant. Thousands more left other towns later.

Kondo still has sleepless nights.

“I can’t sleep when I think of all those people who had to evacuate, all those mothers worried for their children,” he said.

___

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Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

What is going on?

 

These numbers talking very clear

We must protest. Japan is not a fit country for nuclear power.

TOKYO (Kyodo) — An antinuclear civic group led by Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe and other celebrities held rallies in Tokyo and Niigata Prefecture on Saturday calling for the abolition of nuclear reactors in the aftermath of radiation leaks at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant.

Addressing the protesters gathered at Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, who numbered around 12,000, according to the organizers, Oe insisted on the abolishment of nuclear reactors.

“We will be handing nuclear waste generated from the nuclear reactors to our grandchildren. This is unethical conduct,” Oe said.

The rallies were held as part of the group’s campaign to collect 10 million signatures against nuclear power to submit it to the prime minister and the chiefs of both chambers of the Diet. The executive committee for the “10 Million People’s Action to say Goodbye to Nuclear Power Plant” campaign said earlier it has gathered about 4 million signatures so far in sympathy with its goal to abolish all 54 commercial reactors in Japan.

Taro Yamamoto, an actor who is known as an anti-nuclear advocate, also took part in the rally.

“If a massive earthquake occurs now, our country will be finished. We cannot have the nuclear reactors resume their operations,” he told the protesters.

On March 11, the first anniversary since the disastrous earthquake and tsunami prompted the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, the group plans to hold a rally in Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture.