In addition, according to New York Times, it was TEPCO who said so.
Well, TEPCO is refuting the reporting by the Japanese media of "1,800 millisieverts/hour radiation that would kill in 4 hours", and nowhere in the information TEPCO has made available (in the "email alert to the press" section and "handout for the press" section) does the company even indicate that.
Radiation Near Japanese Plant’s Tanks Suggests New Leaks
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: August 31, 2013
TOKYO — A crisis over contaminated water at Japan’s stricken nuclear plant worsened on Saturday when the plant’s operator said it had detected high radiation levels near storage tanks, a finding that raised the possibility of additional leaks.
The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, said it had found the high levels of radiation at four separate spots on the ground, near some of the hundreds of tanks used to store toxic water produced by makeshift efforts to cool the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s three damaged reactors. The highest reading was 1,800 millisieverts per hour, or enough to give a lethal dose in about four hours, Tepco said.
(Full article at the link)
Bloomberg News Japan, on the other hand, decided to have a Japanese professor at Kinki University declare "1,800 mSv/hour exposure for 4 hours will kill people in 30 days if untreated" in its article on September 2, 2013. I don't know if this article has been translated into English yet. Again, no mention of beta radiation or dose equivalent.
Meanwhile, BBC Radio at least dropped the "lethal in 4 hours" part, and I just heard their news saying the 1,800 mSv/hr radiation is mostly beta radiation and with careful protection the workers could avoid most of exposure.
The Guardian sticks to the meme and says "The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said radiation near the bottom of the tank measured 1,800 millisieverts an hour – high enough to kill an exposed person in four hours."
In the UK, "newspapers of record" are considered to be The Times and The Daily Telegraph.
I have no idea who this person is, but his tweet on Friday set up a weekend of praising and adoring foreign media (again) among many Twitter users when it comes to reporting on the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident.
His tweet says the most (literally) incredible thing:
フクイチ3号機の格納容器頂部分が折れてると世界中で報道。日本だけ隠蔽中
"It is reported all over the world that the top of Reactor 3 Containment Vessel has broken off. Only Japan hides it"
I looked and looked, but I couldn't find anything remotely referring to what he says. The word "containment vessel" is not even mentioned in the article.
But I think I've finally figure it out. It's the third sentence in the article which is nothing but the short summary of what TEPCO announced in the recent press conferences and what was being reported in Japan (emphasis is mine):
"The steam has raised concerns about the damaged reactor, but TEPCO said no significant changes occurred, including in the levels of potentially cancer-causing radioactivity the broken reactor is releasing."
This person who tweeted decided to translate the word "broken" from the original verb "break": "Separate or cause to separate into pieces as a result of a blow, shock, or strain". In his mind, it must mean something has been broken off (like a tree branch, or a bone). Further, he decided what has been broken off must be the Containment Vessel top (whatever that means).
And people are retweeting this tweet, clearly without bothering to read (or unable to read) the original English article, and exclaiming "How the Japanese media lies!" "We can rely on only foreign media to tell us the truth!"
All I can say is that it may be actually a good idea to make TOEFL English proficiency test as a requirement not just for career bureaucrat candidates but for graduation from colleges, or better yet, from high schools.
"Broken" reactors are the ones at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant (Reactors 1-4), damaged by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, suffered core melt with part of the corium dropped down to the floor of the Containment Vessels, reactor buildings half-wrecked, water injected into the reactors leaking to the building basements.
So far, the original tweet has 929 retweets and 276 favorites. Not too bad, but enough to make me despair. I had to write a tweet to tell people they are lied to, but it only has 113 retweets.
Then, along came the July 23 BBC News video, which is being tweeted furiously as well. After TEPCO finally acknowledged on July 22, 2013 that the contaminated groundwater may have been leaking into the open culvert inside the silt fence in the plant harbor, foreign media, including BBC, started to report on this leak.
However, to many, many Japanese, BBC was the first one to break the news (not true), and if only Japanese media reported it before the July 21 election (they did) things might have been different!
What's more, they look at the BBC News clip that someone put the Japanese caption on, and are horrified. "Look! The steam rising from the reactors is so vigorous! I didn't know things are this bad!"
Vigorous steam or smoke rising, yes, from Reactors 1, 2, 3, 4 right after the explosion on March 14, 2011. BBC uses the old footage of the accident extensively as it narrates the news about the most recent steam rising from Reactor 3, without telling the viewers that these images are from 2011.
BBC may have thought that by now everyone knows these images of reactors are from 2011, right after the accident. Well clearly not so in Japan. They think that's how it is right now at the plant because that's how BBC reports it, and accuse Japanese media for not telling them the truth.
However, in the video, when the announcer says (14 seconds into the video),
"And yet today, for the second time in a week, steam is seen rising from the Reactor No.3..."
what do they show? The video of vigorous steam escaping from the blowout panel hole of Reactor 2, in March 2011.
For the narration
"and TEPCO can only guess where the steam is coming from"
they show huge steam coming out of half-wrecked Reactor 4 while water is being injected from the boom of a Putzmeister crane. That's also March 2011.
Does BBC ever show the steam rising NOW, in July 2013, from the top floor of Reactor 3? Yes, for two seconds, from 1:11 to 1:13, but the BBC announcer says:
"And at the same time that it finally acknowledged the water leaking problem..."
Water leaking problem? Over the 2-second video clip of Reactor 3 steam?
The news ends with reference to the workers at Fukushima I Nuke Plant:
"The numbers of the workers at the plant exposed to levels of radiation that could cause cancer was not 175 as previously reported but more than one thousand nine hundred, or 10% of total work force"
It not only parrots erroneous Asahi Shinbun's article that doesn't bother to say it is about "equivalent dose" on thyroid, but goes further by eliminating the reference to the thyroid altogether, making it sound like it is about effective dose for the overall body. The equivalent dose of 100 millisieverts on thyroid would be 4 to 5 millisieverts in overall effective dose.
This BBC reporting is being praised as "truth telling" by the Japanese. Go figure.
Whenever I can, I still watch the live press conference given by TEPCO. Journalists who attend the press conference, whether they are independent journalists like Ryuichi Kino or mainstream-media journalists from Asahi, Yomiuri, or even NHK, ask tough questions these days, as they are much more knowledgeable than they were in the beginning of the nuclear accident two years ago. Many of their tough questions have led TEPCO to finally acknowledge the dire situations at the plant, and this groundwater leak is one of them. As to the foreign media, I've seen Japanese reporters from AP, Reuters asking uncomfortable questions to TEPCO.
But many Japanese firmly believe only foreign media like BBC will tell them the truth about radiation and about the nuclear accident. Some of these people worship foreign "experts" who visit Japan from time to time to warn them with their dire warnings on nuclear contamination, simply because their warnings are very dire.
Each year the serfs of the UK are coerced out of billions to fund the British Broadcasting Corporation. What do they get for their money? How about a children's presenter who turns out to be a satanic pedophile? They got about forty years of that guy. They also get an unquestioning government mouthpiece for all its wars, a propaganda arm of the State for pretty much anything the oligarchs want. If you are a Malthusian you can expect a long and illustrious career for the BBC. If it turns out you are not, they'll snuff you out. Need further evidence of their ties to the State? Check out this story on the MI5 vetting their prospective hires.
Ms. Seiko Takahashi responds to BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes (1/3/2013) when he asks about "Fukushima 50", workers who remained at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after Reactor 3 building exploded and kept on doing whatever they could to contain the situation:
Before the meltdowns, Seiko Takahashi never thought of activism. Now the middle-aged mother from Fukushima City is a passionate anti-nuclear campaigner. And she admits there is little sympathy for the Fukushima workers.
"They are not heroes for us," she says. "I feel sorry for them, but I don't see them as heroes. We see them as one block, they work for Tepco, they earned high salaries. The company made a lot of money from nuclear power, and that's what paid for their nice lives."
She is essentially saying they get what they deserve, for having worked for TEPCO.
Her city, Fukushima City, is in the highly contaminated middle-third of Fukushima Prefecture. While most Japanese (and foreigners) may sympathize with her and her city's plight, many of them are also angry that the city, along with almost all municipalities in that prefecture, continues to grow crops and sell them outside, claiming they are "safe" (i.e. less than 100 Bq/kg of radioactive cesium), and claims it suffers tremendously from "baseless rumors".
For how some of the Fukushima I Nuke Plant workers have been treated by their fellow Fukushima residents, see my post from February 2012. That post was about an article that appeared in Germany's Der Spiegel. I have seen hardly any coverage on the issue in the Japanese media.
As BBC's Wingfield-Hayes says at the end of his report,
There is wide sympathy here for victims like him, [Mr. Yoshizawa the cattle farmer in Namie-machi] but the Japanese public appears to have little sympathy or concern for the suffering of Fukushima workers.
After citing unnamed "officials" warning about a "catastrophe" if the Reactor 4 building collapses, BBC news quotes a Dounreay manager who says their experience in cleaning up contaminated beaches and seabeds could help TEPCO in the clean-up of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant and its immediate vicinities.
Efforts to clean up a seabed off Scotland's coast could provide Japan with solutions to dealing with its earthquake-hit Fukushima nuclear plant.
Radioactive particles were flushed from Dounreay in Caithness into the sea through the plant's liquid discharge pipe in the 1960s and 1970s.
The fragments contaminated local beaches and seabed. Work to recover the seabed particles started in 2008.
Staff from Dounreay have been to Japan to offer advice.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was crippled after being hit by a tsunami in the aftermath of a huge earthquake in March 2011.
Radiation leaks were recorded following subsequent explosions and fires.
Late last month, power company Tepco said reactors at the plant were stable.
But there was concern about the spent fuel pool on the top floor of the badly damaged reactor number four building.
If it collapses, it could cause another catastrophe, officials have warned. But Tepco said it has reinforced the structure against another earthquake.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of residents remain evacuated from an exclusion zone around the plant.
Phil Cartwright, senior manager in charge of contaminated land clean up at Dounreay, said lessons learned in Scotland could help Japan deal with radioactive contamination.
He said: "At Dounreay, we had a release of radioactive material beyond the site, increasing public anxiety in the late 1990s about the potential health effects and controls put in place to protect public health."
A strategy was produced to deal with contamination, including efforts to detect and recover particles from the seabed near the site, he said.
Mr Cartwright added: "Japan is at the start of a much bigger clean-up project with significant challenges both on and off site but the issues they face are similar to those we had to work through, even though ours were on a much smaller and more localised scale.
"They were very interested in our experience."
Dounreay has already donated equipment to Japan for use in dealing with the damaged Fukushima Daiichi complex.
Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL) gathered a van-load of respirators, hand-held radiation survey kit, masks and suits.
The equipment was driven to Sellafield, in Cumbria, for distribution.
The girl, who evacuated from the no-entry zone in Fukushima, speaks in a plain language with a disarming smile.
She and her father play kicking a ball (she looks like a great kicker) on a parking lot, where the surface radiation of asphalt is 0.8 microsievert/hour. It is still much better than the wooded park nearby. Her young father has a pained look on his face as the girl reads her diary.
"It makes me angry", said a friend after watching the video, "that the girl has to stay there".
The documentary includes footage from early days of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster that started on March 11, 2011 that I've never seen before - weather camera video when the tsunami hit the plant, a video shot by a plant worker as he tried to escape uphill. The fact I wasn't aware at that time - there were people in Okuma-machi (where the plant is located) on March 12 when they did the vent, looking for their family members lost in the earthquake/tsunami.
People interviewed include a current TEPCO employee at the plant, a former plant inspector, farmers and fishermen in Fukushima, and Naoto Kan, who has been very busy spinning the story ever since he finally quit so that he is portrayed as a "hero", foiled by the scheming bureaucracy.
BBC obliged. But it is still a very good documentary.
Asia-Pacific high budget: Tokyo, Japan This sprawling metropolis is consistently ranked among the most expensive cities worldwide, but since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Tokyo needs your tourism dollars now more than ever. Despite the high price tag, the city’s culinary scene is top notch -- Tokyo offers more Michelin-star-rated restaurants than Paris! For starters, sushi snobs will be hard pressed to find fresher fish than at Kyubey. And for a taste of Japan’s signature Kobe beef, try Seryna -- you may even find a menu in English. Stay for at least 10 days at the over-the-top Peninsula Hotel, and aim for May when the rainfall and heat are not at their peak — but average sunshine is.
Fresh fish, Kobe beef... Fukushima does not exist in the minds of people at BBC; the cache was cleared long time ago, apparently.
...Seismic activity has definitely increased since the M 9.0 event, with the incidence of small earthquakes registered in some parts of Japan, hundreds of kilometres from the source, increasing by a factor of 10.
Hazard assessment in the region is therefore a pressing priority for researchers; but it is far from easy.
"The Kanto region is very complex, and the size of quakes triggered there is probably going to be limited by that complexity," says Chris Goldfinger from Oregon State University in the US, who works in collaboration with Japanese researchers.
"But given the proximity to Tokyo, even a limited quake there would be damaging."
Kanto sits very close to a tectonic triple junction - a point where vast slabs of the Earth's surface grind past each other.
The tectonic plate making up the Pacific Ocean floor is moving westwards under Japan towards Eurasia.
The Pacific plate is being pulled down (subducted) underneath Japan; and crowding in on this collision is the Philippine Plate, further south, also trying to get under Japan.
Ross Stein from the US Geological Survey (USGS) is one of a US/Japanese team that has modelled the region around the triple junction to help gauge future risks.
They used seismic signals from 300,000 tremors of various sizes to build a three-dimensional view of what was going on deep in the Earth, much like a doctor might use X-ray tomography to scan tumours in the brain.
They found a 25km-thick fragment broken off one of the plates that they now believe plays a significant role in shaping seismic activity in the Kanto region - and by implication, the outlook for Tokyo.
"When it comes to Tokyo, things get immensely complicated," said Dr Stein.
"There seems to be broken pieces of plate that are jammed under Tokyo like a pill that won't go down your throat. And on top of that we have the two different slabs of plates beneath it, so there's really a triple stack of faults beneath Tokyo."
To make matters more complicated, there is some disagreement among researchers about the most important geological factors around Tokyo, with some pointing to the Sagami Trough (a subduction zone leading off the triple junction) as the likely cause of big earthquakes, and others citing Dr Stein's "pill", known as the Kanto Fragment.....
And lastly,
One curiosity is that Japanese researchers are currently very reluctant to talk on the issue.
Scientists we contacted - in one case, someone known to one of us for years - did not want to go on record.
Given the devastation caused by the tsunami and the fact that an event near Tokyo could do even more damage, the reluctance to talk is eminently understandable.
It can, however, be interpreted as a signal of real concern.
(They've been probably told by the Japanese government not to talk without permission.)
The BBC article has an audio of the interview with Dr. Stein of USGS.
Reuters seems to have stopped the coverage of the Japan March 11 earthquake/tsunami/nuke crisis. The last entry is March 25 at 8:38PM, and there's no place to post comments. So out goes the link from my blog. Same for BBC and Al Jazeera links.
Many non-Japanese news outlets have moved on. The Japan's nuclear crisis is just taking too long to unfold, I'm guessing...
Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi's security forces detained and beat up a BBC news team who were trying to reach the strife-torn western city of Zawiya.
The three were beaten with fists, knees and rifles, hooded and subjected to mock executions by members of Libya's army and secret police.
The men were detained on Monday and held for 21 hours, but have now flown out of Libya.
......The three of them were taken to a huge military barracks in Tripoli, where they were blindfolded, handcuffed and beaten.
One of the three, Chris Cobb-Smith, said: "We were lined up against the wall. I was the last in line - facing the wall.
"I looked and I saw a plain-clothes guy with a small sub-machine gun. He put it to everyone's neck. I saw him and he screamed at me.
"Then he walked up to me, put the gun to my neck and pulled the trigger twice. The bullets whisked past my ear. The soldiers just laughed."
They also report on the Libyan detainees and how badly they were treated:
Koraltan said: "I cannot describe how bad it was. Most of them [other detainees] were hooded and handcuffed really tightly, all with swollen hands and broken ribs. They were in agony. They were screaming."
Killani said: "Four of them [detainees] were in a very bad situation. There was evidence of torture on their faces and bodies. One of them said he had at least two broken ribs. I spent at least six hours helping them drink, sleep, urinate and move from one side to another."
A senior Libyan government official later apologised for the BBC team's ordeal.
Just a slight misunderstanding. What of some beating between good friends, anyway? Show of affection, can't you see?
Libya's opposition forces seem to be moving in much quicker than the morally bankrupt West has anticipated (and hoped).
The same BBC Radio news says Libyans are furious that British soldiers are ON THE GROUND inside Libya, seen escorting British officials in the eastern part of the country.
So, the rumor that Britain (along with France and the US) sent several hundred special forces to Libya on February 23-24 may have been true.
Libyans, don't ever trust the Western governments.
A real estate agent in Shanghai selling luxury high-rise apartments is puzzled at the question by the BBC Business Daily's interviewer: "Is this a bubble?"
"Bubble? People are more cautious these days, but no, it's not a bubble. 80% of the buyers are the "end users" (not speculators). A 320 square meter apartment sells for US$4.5 million. We have USD$30,000 bathtub in the master bedroom. This is what the discerning buyers (top 5% of population) expect nowadays..." (I'm paraphrasing.)
The average wage of urban workers in China was about $5000 per year in 2007. The wage gap between the workers, though, have grown rapidly in recent years. Within the same company, the gap can be between 10 to 100 times (and that's from an article in 2007!) - an average worker of the company may be getting $5000 a year, but a middle manager may be getting $125,000 a year.
There are 477,000 millionaires in China (that's the world's 4th after the US, Japan, and Germany), politically still a Communist country.
You can listen to the entire program here. (Total 18 minutes. Shanghai real estate is after 7 minutes into the program.)
The last segment of the report is about London real estate. London's high-end real estate (over US$3 million) is booming again because of foreign investors (Russians, Indians, and Greeks, whose investment doubled in recent weeks) looking for a place to park their money in relative safety. (Besides, British Pound got cheaper.)
At the height of the real estate bubble in Japan, office ladies were eating tiny pieces of cake with pure gold flakes on top with their afternoon tea. $30,000 bathtub seems very close to being a signal of the real estate market top in China.
If a real estate professional in Shanghai is confident he can sell a $4.5 million apartment, good for him, but it is a bubble; the question is how much bigger can it still get before the inevitable collapse, and how long will it take?
He can withstand extreme cold. A full marathon in the arctic circle with only shorts and sandals, bath in ice cubes, climbing Mt. Everest in shorts and without oxygen. He will be doing another marathon, this time in Sahara, without water, and he thinks what matters most is the will power.
(I think he is a direct descendant of Neanderthals.)
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I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.
"Magno Arms" What Does It Indicate? Nothing Good
-
*UPDATE *
As an affiliate of Elliott Wave International I'll be promoting the
following all week:
EWI has given me the OK to share Bob Prechter's April ...
SO WHAT'S NEXT
-
Just a list. Not too complicated, but time to think about the next few
months. We're in the "Quickening"......"the Fourth Turning"..... basically
we'r...
DOWN we go.......
-
corona virus could be a black swan Hehehe
Information here is not meant as trading advice. Please do your own DD
before any decisions.
Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word. ------------------ This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.
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