RALEIGH — North Carolina State University says a small leak in its nuclear research reactor is not a public health threat.
The reactor is housed in the Burlington Nuclear Engineering Laboratory. The building is located at 2500 Katharine Stinson Drive.
N.C. State physicist Gerry Wicks said Thursday the reactor is leaking about 10 gallons of water per hour. Facilities are only required to report leaks in excess of 350 gallons an hour.
NC State said the leak was suspected on Friday and confirmed on Saturday. It said the public was not informed sooner because of the low level of danger. The amount of radioactivity was compared to what someone might receive getting an x-ray.
We are apparently living under tremendous risks. The accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant triggered by the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami drove home to us this eerie fact. How long and to what extent will the damage spread? And what is its true nature?
The Asahi Shimbun interviewed German sociologist Ulrich Beck in search of answers. Beck had already pointed out that we are living in a “risk society” even before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in 1986.
Excerpts from the interview follow:
* * *
Question: What should the world learn from the Fukushima nuclear disaster?
Answer: When a catastrophe like this happens, we are not at all prepared for this kind of catastrophe.
Q: What kind of catastrophe?
A: This catastrophe is, on the one hand, man-made, but on the other hand, geographically, socially and in the time dimension, unlimited. It doesn’t have a limit.
The normal accident, as we have it in mind like a car accident, or maybe even a greater accident, even if thousands of people die, is limited to a specific place, to a specific time, to a specific social group.
But the catastrophe–the consequences of a nuclear catastrophe–is unlimited in space, time and the social dimension. It’s the new kind of risk.
TOKYO (Kyodo) — A government-appointed panel held its first meeting Tuesday to consider a proposal to seek UNESCO registration for Japanese food culture as an intangible cultural heritage with a view to promoting food exports and Japan’s tourism industry.
Many of those present at the meeting were positive about the idea, saying Japanese food is valued around the world because it is healthy and also because of the esthetics of the way a dish is presented, the farm ministry said.
The panel, assembled by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, will submit its report by October with an eye toward winning registration from the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization by November 2013.
The ministry hopes the initiative will help restore trust in the safety of Japanese food now that some 40 countries have toughened regulations on food imports from Japan following the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
So far, French, Mexican and Mediterranean foods have been designated by UNESCO, and Korean imperial cuisine is expected to be added to the lists in November.
Mainichi Japanese (7/5/2011) has a bit more detail. The government panel consists of food industry big shots including the honorary chairman of Kikkoman and the head of a famous cooking school.
Katsuo (shipjack tuna) is in season, and in a normal year the port of Onahama, Fukushima Prefecture should be bustling with activities, with fishing boats hauling katsuo they caught into the port, noisy auctioning by the wholesalers.
This year is anything but normal, and the amount of the haul at the Onahama port is zero. Zero.
Where are the fishing boats loaded with katsuo going? Other ports, so that the katsuo that they catch off the coast of Fukushima and all along the Pacific North can be sold as coming anywhere but from Fukushima.
The Onahama Port in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture, the biggest port in Fukushima Prefecture and one of the best known port for hauling katsuo (shipjack tuna) in the Tohoku region, finds itself in difficult times.
It’s the prime season for katsuo fishing right now, but the katsuo hauling at the port, which reopened three weeks ago for the first time since the March 11 tsunami, is zero. It’s because fishing boats head for other ports in other prefectures, fearful that their catch will be considered “caught in Fukushima Prefecture”, a big negative in the aftermath of the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident. The local fishery people lament, “katsuo all come from the same fishery….”
Agent Orange is one of the most devastating weapons of modern warfare, a chemical which killed or injured an estimated 400,000 people during the Vietnam War — and now it’s being used against the Amazon rainforest. According to officials, ranchers in Brazil have begun spraying the highly toxic herbicide over patches of forest as a covert method to illegally clear foliage, more difficult to detect that chainsaws and tractors. In recent weeks, an aerial survey detected some 440 acres of rainforest that had been sprayed with the compound — poisoning thousands of trees and an untold number of animals, potentially for generations.
Officials from Brazil’s environmental agency IBAMA were first tipped to the illegal clearing by satellite images of the forest in Amazonia; a helicopter flyover in the region later revealed thousands of trees left ash-colored and defoliated by toxic chemicals. IBAMA says that Agent Orange was likely dispersed by aircraft by a yet unidentified rancher to clear the land for pasture because it is more difficult to detect than traditional operations that require chainsaws and tractors.
Last week, in another part of the Amazon, an investigation conducted by the agency uncovered approximately four tons of the highly toxic herbal pesticides hidden in the forest awaiting dispension. If released, the chemicals could have potentially decimated some 7,500 acres of rainforest, killing all the wildlife that resides there and contaminating groundwater. In this case, the individual responsible was identified and now faces fines nearing $1.3 million.
LITTLE AXE, Okla. — Wanda Tiger and her husband needed a new home after a long-term house-sitting arrangement came to an end. But for members of their American Indian tribe in rural Oklahoma, affordable housing options were few.
Then tribal leaders learned of an impossibly attractive offer: Mobile homes that had never been occupied were available from the government almost for free. They had stood vacant for years after being rejected as temporary housing following Hurricane Katrina.
He later corrected his word about “100 micro sievert per hour”. He told that he meant “10 micro sievert per hour”, however what he said after 100 micro sievert is ” It’s obvious that whether if you can stay outside or not under 5, 10 or 20 sievert per hour.” His correction does not make any sense at all.
Now, children in Fukushima has geiger counter whenever they go. City it self looks just like huge human experimentation facility.
Yamashita must be trying to become Japanese version of “Josef Mengele”
B.C.’s chief coroner is urging parents to use safe sleep practices in light of a spike in the number of sudden infant deaths across the province this year.
There have been 21 sudden infant deaths in B.C. so far this year, while there were 16 sudden infant deaths for all of 2010, Lisa Lapointe said Tuesday.
Now on to one of the favorite topics of this blog: Swimming pools in Japan.
Well they did it again, this time the Board of Education in Joso City in Ibaraki Prefecture. Back in May, as one of the annual, educational events of the schools, public elementary schools and junior high schools in Joso City had their pupils clean out the school swimming pools in preparation for the school swimming classes during summer. The teachers also helped out. Together, they cleaned the pools and scooped out the dirt that had accumulated at the bottom of the pools.
5 schools kept the dirt in a corner of the schoolyards. At one elementary school, a concerned PTA member decided to measure the radiation of the dirt. The result? 17,020 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium.
There are 14 public elementary schools, 5 junior high schools in Joso City. The city’s Board of Education runs both elementary schools and junior high schools.
It was disclosed that 17,020 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium was detected from the dirt that were scooped out from the swimming pool when the teachers and pupils of one public elementary schools in Joso City did the cleaning of the pool in May. The amount is more than twice the safety limit set by the Ministry of the Environment for the radioactive debris that could be buried. The school moved the dirt in a separate area. Upon this news, the city’s Board of Education surveyed the situation of the pool dirt in city’s elementary schools and junior high schools on July 4, and found out there were 4 other elementary schools who had kept the dirt on the school premises.
(NaturalNews) The accidental mixing of two unidentified chemicals at a Tyson chicken processing plant in Springdale, Ark., has landed 173 of its roughly 300 workers in the hospital, according to reports. The two chemicals, which Tyson refused to identify, somehow got mixed together to produce deadly chlorine gas, which sent five of the workers to intensive care, with another 50 remaining hospitalized days after it occurred.
Donnie King, senior vice president of poultry and prepared foods at Tyson, said that human error was partially responsible for the mixing of the chemicals, but did not provide further details. Gary Mickelson, a company spokesman, added that the plant does not actually use chlorine gas as part of its processing regimen, despite the fact that chlorine itself is commonly used as an antimicrobial treatment for factory chicken.
The whole incident is the type of scenario you might expect to occur at some kind of chemical or other industrial factory, not a food processing plant. And yet millions of people consume Tyson chicken, which apparently is processed with the help of some sort of chemical concoction that, when mixed, creates a gas that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says can cause respiratory illness and sudden death.
Last year, the country of Russia actually banned poultry product imports from the US because many chicken processors use chlorine to sanitize their chicken. Russian safety standards are apparently much higher than they are in the US, and the country basically announced to the world that it does not approve of chicken that is dunked in chlorine baths prior to being consumed by humans (http://www.naturalnews.com/028363_c…).
TOKYO — Soil radiation in a city 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Japan’s stricken nuclear plant is above levels that prompted resettlement after the Chernobyl disaster, citizens’ groups said Tuesday.
The survey of four locations in Fukushima city, outside the nuclear evacuation zone, showed that all soil samples contained caesium exceeding Japan’s legal limit of 10,000 becquerels per kilogram (4,500 per pound), they said.
The highest level was 46,540 becquerels per kilogram, and the three other readings were between 16,290 and 19,220 becquerels per kilogram, they said.
The citizens’ groups — the Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and five other non-governmental organisations — have called for the evacuation of pregnant women and children from the town.
The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.
Kobe University radiation expert professor Tomoya Yamauchi conducted the survey on June 26 following a request from the groups.
“Soil contamination is spreading in the city,” Yamauchi said in a statement. “Children are playing with the soil, meaning they are playing with high levels of radioactive substances. Evacuation must be conducted as soon as possible.”
The coastal Fukushima Daiichi plant has been spewing radiation since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out its cooling systems.
FUKUSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) – They scoop up soil from their gardens and dump it in holes dug out in parks and nearby forests, scrub their roofs with soap and refuse to let their children play outside.
More than three months after a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear meltdown at a nearby power plant, Fukushima residents are scrambling to cope with contamination on their own in the absence of a long-term plan from the government.
“Everything and everyone here is paralysed and we feel left on our own, unsure whether it’s actually safe for us to stay in the city,” said Akiko Itoh, 42, with her four-year old son in her lap.
Even though this city of 300,000 lies outside of the 30-km evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant, a recent survey showed radiation levels in several spots exceed 13 millisieverts per year, more than six times natural levels.
As increasingly panicked residents take matters into their own hands, experts warn that their do-it-yourself efforts to reduce contamination risk making matters worse by allowing radiation to spread without monitoring and by creating hotspots of high radioactivity where soil is piled high.
“I scooped up all the radioactive soil and grass from my garden and dumped it in the forest, so no one could find it,” said a mother of a four-year-old child from Fukushima city, who did not want to be identified by name.
“When I put my Geiger counter close to that mountain of soil it showed 10 microseverts per hour,” she said. That is more than four times the official annual nuclear exposure limit. Others were spotted dumping their nuclear waste in public parks and by the river, residents said.
America’s richest people meet to discuss ways of tackling a ‘disastrous’ environmental, social and industrial threat
SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.
The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.
These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.
The vaccine used in the United States and other Western nations is given in shots, which use a killed virus that cannot cause polio.
So when WHO officials discovered a polio outbreak in Nigeria was sparked by the polio vaccine itself, they assumed it would be easier to stop than a natural “wild” virus.
“I love vaccines,” Gates stated at a TED conference in February, 2010, while lecturing on ways to reduce global populations to stem environmental pollution. Source
Bill Gates administers an oral polio vaccine (LIFE VIRUS!) in New Delhi in 2000. As he turns his full focus to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he plans to visit China, India and Africa in the coming year.
And now Bill Gates and his elitist friends want to vaccinate EVERY child on the planet!!!
(NaturalNews) Microsoft guru Bill Gates is busy rallying the troops to bring about what he calls “vaccine equity,” which is his plan to vaccinate every single child in the world. Manipulating the heart strings of his listening audience, Gates stated at a recent Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) conference that “rich” kids take for granted the vaccines they receive, and that now is the time to provide the same vaccines for the world’s poorest children.
“It’s now that we’re gonna start to get the last two vaccines that rich kids take for granted, the pneumococcal and rotavirus, and over these next five years, get them out to every child everywhere,” said Gates. “That means for the first time ever that we have equity in vaccines.”
By structuring his statements this way, Gates first implies that vaccines are some type of precious commodity that “rich kids” take for granted, and that need to get into the hands of “poor kids” to create health care equality. He then beckons the nations of the world to use taxpayer dollars to fund this massive, multi-billion-dollar dream to “save the children” by injecting them with various mixtures of toxic chemicals.
TOKYO (Kyodo) — Around 45 percent of children in Fukushima Prefecture surveyed by the local and central governments in late March experienced thyroid exposure to radiation, although in all cases in trace amounts that did not warrant further examination, officials of the Nuclear Safety Commission said Tuesday.
The survey was conducted on 1,080 children aged 0 to 15 in Iwaki, Kawamata and Iitate on March 26-30 in light of radiation leakages from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crippled after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disaster.
Separately, a survey of soil at four locations in the city of Fukushima on June 26 found that all samples were contaminated with radioactive cesium, measuring 16,000 to 46,000 becquerels per kilogram and exceeding the legal limit of 10,000 becquerels per kg, citizens groups involved said Tuesday.
The city, about 60 kilometers northwest of the crippled plant, does not fall within the 20-km no-entry zone or nearby evacuation areas.
One location registered as much as 931,000 becquerels per square meter, surpassing the 555,000 becquerels per sq meter limit for compulsory resettlement in the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Samples from the other three locations measured between 326,000 and 384,000 becquerels per sq meter.
Daily life in Fukushima: ‘It was like visiting another universe’
Added: 03.07.2011
Jan Beranek, who is with a team of Greenpeace activists investigating the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, says Japanese are encouraged to return to their normal lives unaware of the dangers they face in the contaminated area. “I personally find it very disturbing, because on the one hand you see the Japanese authorities forcing people and society to get back to normal… And yet at the same time there are still extremely high levels of radiation and the contamination of the soil, and also potentially in the food,” the activist told RT. “This is just unbelievable because at those levels of exposure it certainly poses a risk to the lives and health of the people.
If you draw a parallel to the Chernobyl disaster, then actually the Soviets decided to evacuate everyone living in the place, where radiation was three or four times lower than what we see in Fukushima City today,” added Beranek, who personally visited the Chernobyl area after the 1986 disaster.
Radioactive cesium-137 was found in Tokyo’s tap water for the first time since April as Japan grapples with the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years. The level was below the safety limit set by the government.
Cesium-137 registered at 0.14 becquerel per kilogram in Shinjuku ward on July 2 and none was discovered yesterday, compared with 0.21 becquerel on April 22, according to the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Public Health. No cesium-134 or iodine-131 was detected, the agency said on its website.
“This is unlikely to be the result of new radioactive materials being introduced” into the water supply, Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University, said today by telephone. That’s “because no other elements were detected, especially the more sensitive iodine,” he said.
A medical doctor in Koriyama City in Fukushima Prefecture has a cheerful message about radiation exposure after the Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident. As you’ve already heard from the other good doctor Shunichi Yamashita, yes indeed, “radiation is good for you”, and it is good for Fukushima’s future.
Japan’s leading business journal Toyo Keizai has published an article by Hokkaido Cancer Center director Nishio Masamichi, a radiation treatment specialist. The piece, entitled “The Problem of Radiation Exposure Countermeasures for the Fukushima Nuclear Accident: Concerns for the Present Situation”, was published on June 27 and is consistent with the critical coverage of the Fukushima crisis that has appeared in independent weekly magazines, notably Shukan Kinyobi, which have taken a strong anti-nuclear stance since the March 11 earthquake-tsunami-meltdown, and have repeatedly focused on the dangers of radiation exposure while calling for far-reaching measures to protect those at risk.
Nishio begins by asserting that the Fukushima crisis has caused Japan’s “myth of nuclear safety” to crumble. He has “grave concern” for the public health effects of the ongoing radiation leak.
Nishio originally called for “calm” in the days after the accident. Now, he argues, that as the gravity of the situation at the plant has become more clear, the specter of long-term radiation exposure must be reckoned with.
Lamenting the poor state of public knowledge of radiation, Nishio writes, “Japan, with its history of having suffered radiation exposure from the atomic bombs, should have the most [direct] knowledge of radiation, but in fact, in the approach to the nuclear accident, has simply fallen into confusion.” He places blame on a number of groups:
TEPCO executives, who he accuses of having hidden the truth and prioritized the survival of the company over public health.
Bureaucrats who were unable to put together an accurate body of information about radiation effects from which to formulate policy.
A prime minister and cabinet lacking both leadership and an appropriate sense of urgency.
Politicians who sought to use the crisis in intra- or inter-party struggles.
Nuclear industry lobbyists and “academic flunkies” (goyo gakusha) of the government who built up the myth of nuclear safety in the first place.
Looking at these groups, he writes, “I just cannot feel any hope for Japan’s future. These circumstances are simply tragic.”
He leaves the press out of his main list of culprits, but points to the poor state of scientific knowledge among journalists as a major factor behind what he views as their inability to bring essential information to the public in a timely manner. He also accuses the media establishment of prioritizing “avoiding a panic” over “communicating the truth”.
Nishio provides a blunt and hard-hitting specialist perspective on major government decisions. Here is a summary of some of his major points:
TOKYO—A former nuclear adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan blasted the government’s handling of the crisis, and predicted more revelations of radiation threats to the public in the coming months.
In his first media interview since resigning his post in protest in April, Toshiso Kosako, one of the country’s leading experts on radiation safety, said Mr. Kan’s government has been slow to test for dangers in the sea and to fish, and has understated certain radiation threats to minimize clean-up costs. In his post, Mr. Kosako’s role was to advise the prime minister on radiation safety.
And while there have been scattered reports of food contamination—of tea leaves and spinach, for example—Mr. Kosako predicted there will be broader discoveries later this year, especially as rice, Japan’s staple, is harvested.
“Come the harvest season in the fall, there will be a chaos,” Mr. Kosako said. “Among the rice harvested, there will certainly be some radiation contamination—though I don’t know at what levels—setting off a scandal. If people stop buying rice from Tohoku … we’ll have a tricky problem.”
Mr. Kosako also said that the way the government has handled the Fukushima Daiichi situation since the March 11 tsunami crippled the reactors has exposed basic flaws in Japanese policy making.
“The government’s decision-making mechanism is opaque,” he said. “It’s never clear what reasons are driving what decisions. This doesn’t look like a democratic society. Japan is increasingly looking like a developing nation in East Asia.”
The good old days of robbing banks and liquor stores are going the way of the dinosaur as the new crime catching across America is knocking-over drugstores from coast to coast.
With more and more Americans developing addictions to prescription drugs, the country is experiencing a surge in violent crimes as fiends are taking drastic measures to fuel their fix.
Prescription drug abuse is nothing new in America, but not only is the problem getting worse in the States, but an increasing number of addicts are resorting to violent crimes to avoid withdrawal.
One study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) finds that prescription opiod abuse increased by 111 percent between 2004 and 2008, with almost 2 million Americans admitting to abusing the class of drug ever year, which includes codeine, hydrocodone, oxycodone and others. Expectedly, as use increases, so does misuse. SAMHSA figures reveal that those seeking treatment for opiod abuse made up only 8 percent of the total patient population in 1999, but ten years later that statistic has changed drastically, with one-third of treatment admissions being related to opiate abuse.
In another study from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), 15 percent of American high schoolers admitted to abusing prescription pills.
Children from 3 public elementary schools in Itabashi-ku in Tokyo did the tea picking in early May, the tea leaves were roasted and made into the final blend tea and was about to be given to the children. For some reason, the municipal officials decided to test the tea, and found radioactive cesium to the tune of 2,700 becquerels/kilogram, more than 5 times the loose national provisional safety limit of 500 becquerels/kilogram.
The public elementary schools and junior high schools in Itabashi are run by the Itabashi Board of Education. There are 53 elementary schools in Itabashi.
Itabashi-ku (special ward) in Tokyo announced on June 30 that 2,700 becquerels/kilogram of radioactive cesium were detected in the final blend tea grown and processed in Itabashi, exceeding the national provisional safety limit of 500 becquerels/kilogram.
In a shocking new video, Mike Adams (the Health Ranger) reveals that common cooking oils such as canola oil and soybean oil are used as key active ingredients in pesticide products because they work so effectively to kill bugs. The video shows how one pesticide product that kills insects is made with 96% canola oil and is so dangerous that the label says, “Hazards to humans and domestic animals.”
The label of the product, made almost entirely with canola oil, goes on to explain “CAUTION: Avoid contact with skin or clothing.” If you get it on yourself, you are directed to take off all your contaminated clothing, take a 15-20 minute shower to rinse the canola oil off your skin, and then “Call a poison control center or doctor for treatment advice.”
Again, this is a for an insecticide that’s made of 96% canola oil — an oil that’s found throughout the food supply and especially in products such as salad dressings and snack chips. Canola oil is also in ingredient often used in so-called “vegetable oil” shown on the ingredients label.This canola oil-based pesticide also says on the label: “Environmental Hazards: Do not apply directly to water. Do not contaminate water when disposing of equipment…”
Trace amounts of radioactive substances have been found in urine samples taken from children from Fukushima city, raising concerns that residents have been exposed internally to radiation from the stricken nuclear power plant 37 miles (60km) away.
Tests were conducted in May on 10 children, aged between 6 and 16, by a Japanese civic group and Acro, a French body that measures radioactivity. All 10 tested positive for tiny amounts of caesium-134 and caesium-137.
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