from (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/12/us-japan-nuclear-reactor-idUSTRE74B1H520110512?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews)

“Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant is leaking water from the center of the reactor seen as the closest to stabilizing…

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have been pumping water into four of the six reactors on the site to bring their nuclear fuel rods to a “cold shutdown” state by January.

But after repairing a gauge in the No. 1 reactor earlier this week, Tokyo Electric Power Co discovered that the water level in the pressure vessel that contains its uranium fuel rods had dropped about 5 meters (16 ft) below the targeted level to cover the fuel under normal operating conditions.

“There must be a large leak,” Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility also known as TEPCO, told a news conference.

“The fuel pellets likely melted and fell, and in the process may have damaged … the pressure vessel itself and created a hole,” he added.

Since the surface temperature of the pressure vessel has been holding steady between 100 and 120 degrees Celsius, Matsumoto said the effort to cool the melted uranium fuel by pumping in water was working and would continue.

Based on the amount of water that is remaining around the partially melted and collapsed fuel, Matsumoto estimated that the pressure vessel had developed a hole of several centimeters in diameter.

The finding makes it likely that at one point in the immediate wake of the disaster the 4-meter-high stack of uranium-rich rods at the core of the reactor had been entirely exposed to the air, he said. Boiling water reactors like those at Fukushima rely on water as both a coolant and a barrier to radiation.

Matsumoto said the utility would study whether to increase the amount of water it was injecting to overcome the leak and raise the level of water covering the fuel, at the risk of allowing more radioactive water to leak out of the facility.

Nearly 10,400 metric tons of water has been pumped into the reactor so far, but it is unclear where the leaked water has been going. The high radiation levels makes it difficult for workers to check the site, Matsumoto said.”

from: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/09/angela-merkel-green-energy)

“Clearly, Angela Merkel has reacted to the Fukushima disaster completely differently from Barack Obama and other world leaders. In the past, Merkel too has been pro-nuclear. She was convinced that nuclear power was safe and clean, and that the Chernobyl accident was a result of Soviet inefficiency, not of the technology itself. Only last year, she fought to extend the operation time of Germany’s reactors by 12 years on average, against fierce opposition from the left and environmental groups.

In my view, the key to the chancellor’s radical turnaround lies deep in her past. In the 1980s, well before she became a politician, Merkel worked in the former East Germany as a researcher in quantum chemistry, examining the probability of events in the subatomic domain. Her years of research instilled in her the conviction that she has a very good sense of how likely events are, not only in physics but also in politics. Opponents of nuclear energy were “bad at assessing risks,” she told me in the 1990s.

Then came the March disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, which made the chancellor realize that she had been terribly wrong about the probability of a nuclear catastrophe in a highly advanced nation. Merkel’s scientific sense of probability and rationality was shaken to the core. If this was possible, she reasoned, something similar might happen in Germany â?? not a tsunami, of course, but something equally unexpected. In her view, the field trial of nuclear energy had failed. As a self-described rationalist, she felt compelled to act.

“It’s over,” she told one of her advisers immediately after watching on TV as the roof of a Fukushima reactor blew off. “Fukushima has forever changed the way we define risk in Germany.”

Merkel’s conservative environment minister, Norbert Röttgen, recently echoed this line of thinking when he said that the Fukushima disaster “has swapped a mathematical definition of nuclear energy’s residual risk with a terrible real-life experience.” He added: “We can no longer put forward the argument of a tiny risk of ten to the power of minus seven, as we have seen that it can get real in a high-tech society like Japan.”

“Acceptable” levels are those levels which are relatively safe.

A relatively unsafe level would not be acceptable.

Zero risk is safe. But you can have risk and still be relatively safe, if the risk is small relative to other risks one will encounter.

And this is why people like me bring up food safety or driving safety, etc. when discussing nuclear safety. Those comparisons provide context (risk relativity) in a world that is not zero risk. And you denounced me for that in an earlier blog.

Note that the PSR, in the above quoted paragraph, intentionally omitted the risk relativity from what BEIR VII actually said. BEIR VII actually says that in a lifetime, approximately 42 of 100 people will be diagnosed with cancer. 1 additional cancer per 100 people could result from a single exposure to 10 rem.

But PSR reframed that. They multiplied 10 rem and 100 people to get 1,000 man-rem yields one cancer (not a certainty according to BEIR, though you wouldn’t know it from the PSR statement). And they failed to mention that there are 420 other cancers in that group of 1,000 people, which have other causes.

I thought it was more like what is acceptable, not what is safe. Some of the effects of radiation are not dose dependent at all, but merely stochastic. Therefore, there can not be a “safe level.”

It is not just their hypocrisy which is problematic. It is their intentional spinning of the science. For example, from one of your links to them:

“The nuclear industryâ??s most common argument is that there is no significant health consequences associated with low doses of radiation. However, it is the consensus of the medical and scientific community, summarized in the National Research Councilâ??s BEIR VII report, that there is no safe level of radiation. Any exposure, including exposure to naturally occurring background radiation, creates an increased risk of cancer. The BEIR report concluded that every thousand man rems of radiation exposure will cause one cancer.”

BEIR VII does not speak to “safe levels” of radiation, though reading that paragraph, one might think otherwise. Safety is a relative term. And there is medical and scientific community consensus on what levels of radiation are relatively safe, contrary to what PSR claims.

Can’t say thanks enough, but I’ll keep saying it anyway, since major news outlets have clearly forgotten there is a problem in Fukushima.

from: (http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2011/05/04/-work-continues-at-fukushima-daiichi-as-radiation-detected-on-seabed_2c00_-in-treated-sewage–_2800_with-new-packbot-video_2900_050402.aspx)

“Contamination from radioactive particles escaping from the plant grounds has been an ongoing concern. On Tuesday Kyodo News quoted TEPCO reports that samples taken from the sea floor near the coastal plant have shown radiation levels 100 to 1,000 times background levels. The samples, recorded Friday, were taken at a depth of 20 to 30 meters.

Radioactive contaminants also have been found at a nearby sewage treatment plant, according the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. On April 30, sludge and the remnants of incinerated sludge from the sewage treatment plant in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, tested positive for cesium at levels of 334,000 becquerels. Japanese regulators plan to meet to discuss the handling of the radioactive sludge, which does not fall within any current safety guidelines.

Officials believe runoff from rain washed contaminants accumulated on the ground into sewers. Material from the incinerated sewage routinely is shipped to cement companies in Japan. Local authorities are tracking shipments of potentially radioactive material, and officials say sludge at the treatment plant is being stored safely.”

This really underscores how many avenues there are for radioactive materials to disseminate from Daiichi. First, the incineration of the sludge raises concerns about how the exhaust is vented (not to mention who is looking after the workers at the incineration plants); next, cement work is a pretty dusty business– don’t think I want much cesium floating around construction sites throughout Japan; finally, as any resonable person might have expected, radioactive materials are acumulating on the seabed, rather than dispersing and diluting in seawater. Between biological uptake through the foodchain, and churning of the seabed during storms, we can predict ongoing ‘re-dosing’ with longer lived radionuclides for a long, long time.

That is analogous to PSR criticizing the nuclear power industry based on radiation safety.

Not really….the medical industry has ACTUALLY, on average, doubled the radiation dose Americans receive. It’s not some hypothetical nuclear power accident.

I’m not disputing or supporting that statement. I’m simply noting that you seem to judge the credibility of a source on the basis of whether or not you agree with it.

Meanwhile, these physicians ignored the increased cancer risk from medical exposures over the last 20 years to Americans.

This is similar to the argument that since most of the Fukushima workers who don’t die of old age will die of a car accident (or train accident or whatever kills you in Japan) means that the women who were over-exposed based on the prevailing standards have no right to worry. I’m pretty sure there are not independent criteria that you are in charge of that determines what an organization should do and not do.

Example: The National Center for Science Education does almost none of the things one might think an organization interested in science education does. Rather, it spends all of its time fighting creationists. All organizations have the potential of having a list of priorities and record of activities that don’t match an outsider’s preconceptions. That discordance does not invalidate their priorities and most importantly it does not affect the validity of what they are saying or doing.

Comment moderation seems almost random on this platform.

The PSR was anti-nuclear power prior to Fukushima, while they totally ignored medical radiation exposure risks.

Crazy.

Not crazy talk.