WSJ: "There's no evidence that low doses of radiation are harmful"

Or so Mr. William Tucker writing for Wall Street Journal on March 6, 2012 assures us.

The last I checked, there is no evidence that low doses of radiation aren't harmful. But what am I to say anything against "experts", pro- or anti-nuke? Mr. Tucker had assured the world very early on in the nuclear crisis (March 14, 2011 to be exact) that Fukushima was no Chernobyl.

Mr. Tucker starts his piece by citing the famous cobalt-60 contamination of an apartment building in Taiwan in the early 1980s. See, they were better off with added radiation!

Other familiar refrains include:

• No one has died in the Fukushima accident;

• There are other locations in the world with much higher natural background;

• All the health damage from radiation is in the "head";

• Low-level radiation is good for health.

There is no banana though. Thank goodness.

From Wall Street Journal (3/6/2012; emphasis is mine):

Fukushima and the Future of Nuclear Power

There's no evidence that low doses of radiation are harmful and no reason to paralyze our economy out of fear of nuclear power.

By WILLIAM TUCKER

In the early 1980s, a Taiwan steel company accidentally mixed some highly radioactive cobalt-60 into a batch of steel rebar. The radioactive rods were then used in the construction of 1,700 apartments. As a result, people living in these buildings were subject to radiation up to 30 times the normal amount received from the natural background.

When dismayed officials discovered this enormous error 15 years later, they surveyed past and present apartment dwellers expecting to find an epidemic of cancer. Normal incidence would have predicted 160 cancers among the 10,000 residents. To their astonishment, the researchers discovered only five cases of cancer—97% lower than the anticipated amount. Birth defects were also 94% below the anticipated rate. These findings were published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons in 2004. As one researcher phrased it, exposure to high levels of background radiation had apparently bestowed upon residents "an effective immunity from cancer."

The incident illustrates the enormous gap that has grown between radiation science and the popular perception of the dangers of nuclear power. One year after Japan's Fukushima accident, much of the world is running away from nuclear energy on the grounds that its risks are too great for a modern society to bear.

Germany has reinstituted plans to close down all its reactors by 2022, even if it means importing huge quantities of natural gas from Russia and nuclear-generated electricity from France and the Czech Republic. Japan has taken all of its 54 reactors out of service with the possibility that they may never run again. The result has been a complete reversal of Japan's trade balance from 20 years of surpluses to a record $18 billion deficit. Oil and liquid natural gas imports have increased dramatically while factories have slowed because of power shortages.

In the United States, the reaction so far has been less severe. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has increased its vigilance and is under tremendous pressure to close down aging reactors such as Vermont Yankee in southeastern Vermont and Indian Point north of New York City. But the NRC did issue its first new license in 30 years for two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at the Vogtle plant in eastern Georgia. Construction is expected to begin soon. Still, it's a far cry from the 30 to 100 new reactors that were being touted a year ago as part of America's "nuclear renaissance."

Meanwhile, 100 coal plants have been shut down in the U.S. over concerns about mercury and carbon emissions while the "renewables," solar and wind, that are supposed to take their place are proving to be much more intractable and land-consuming than previously imagined. With so much economic damage in the wake of Fukushima, it might behoove the world to ponder what the dangers of nuclear energy really are.

All 54 of Japan's reactors absorbed an earthquake of 9.0 on the Richter scale—the biggest in Japan's recorded history. Though the shock exceeded design specifications, the steel reactor vessels and concrete containment structures remained intact. The problem occurred when the subsequent 50-foot tsunami wiped out the backup generators at Fukushima, crippling the cooling system and causing the four operating reactors to overheat.

The core of three reactors melted down, but that in itself is not a public catastrophe as long as the reactor vessel and containment structure hold. All the radiation releases have come from contaminated cooling water and steam vented or escaping into the environment. Other releases came from the spent fuel pools, which also lost some of their coolant and proved to be a greater danger.

Nuclear engineers have long recognized these vulnerabilities. The AP1000 being built in Georgia is specifically designed with a "passive" cooling system that relies on natural convection currents rather than electric pumps so the reactors can cool themselves for several days while waiting for power to be restored. Spent fuel rods at existing reactors will be moved inside the containment structure wherever possible or into dry casks where they do not require cooling. All this takes time and expense but will be a necessary step toward improving nuclear safety.

The real problem, however, may be in the public's overestimation of the danger posed by small exposures to radiation. In order to avoid any possible charge of negligence, regulatory bodies around the world have adopted what is called a "linear-no-threshold" or "no safe dose" standard for radiation safety.

This says, quite simply, that because huge doses of radiation—the kind you might get from standing in the same room with a spent fuel rod—can cause illness or cancer, we must assume that even the smallest doses will have the same effect on a smaller scale. It's exactly the same as saying that because jumping off a 10-story building will break every bone in your body, stepping off a one-foot curb will also cause some minor damage.

So far there have been zero fatalities or adverse health effects from radiation exposure at Fukushima. All the damage has been from depression, despair and even suicide among the 100,000 people who have been evacuated from their homes within a 12-mile radius.

Some of these people are even being shunned in their new locales under the bizarre supposition that they constitute a radioactive danger. Yet as Ted Rockwell, one of the most notable veterans of the Manhattan Project, points out, people around the world live with radiation levels much higher than is present in the evacuation zone without showing any ill effects. The residents of the Taiwan apartments experienced 10 times the level of radiation as is prevalent in the evacuation zone.

The etiology of radiation-related disease is well-known. Radiation can cause DNA damage but the body has repair mechanisms to deal with it. Last December scientists at Berkeley made microscopic videotapes of these cellular repair sites in action. "Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses," wrote Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher who co-authored the report. "This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive."

Other researchers speculate that low radiation doses may immunize the body against cancer and birth defects by stimulating these repair mechanisms into greater responsiveness, just as vaccines stimulate the immune system. That would explain the low cancer rates in Taiwan.

As long as government agencies around the world continue to operate under the premise that even the smallest exposures to ionizing radiation can be harmful, Germany and Japan will go on dismembering their economies while countries such as the U.S. attempt to straddle the widening gap between outlawed coal and a renewables future whose promise now appears greatly exaggerated.

Taking a clear-eyed look at the actual dangers of nuclear energy seems like a much more sensible course.

Mr. Tucker is author of "Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey" (Bartleby Press, 2010).

"Power shortage"? What power shortage? There was an unnecessary rolling blackout to scare people into asking for more nuke plants.

"The steel reactor vessels and concrete containment structures remained intact" after the quake? How did I miss that good news?

"People around the world live with radiation levels much higher than is present in the evacuation zone without showing any ill effects"? The radiation level in Ottozawa in Okuma-machi inside the evacuation zone is 70 microsieverts/hour or higher. I'd love to know which people on this planet live in such a place.

"Other researchers speculate". Exactly. Speculate. Is a government supposed to form its nuclear safety policies on speculation that radiation is good for the residents?

Radiation hormesis. That's one grand experiment going on in Japan right now, probably unintended, and resulting from the sheer incompetence of the governments of all levels. (Or so I hope.) There are even some experts who suggest that the radioactive debris, food, and building materials mixed with incinerated ashes and slag, etc. be evenly distributed throughout Japan to see if there is any effect over time on the residents.

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Wall Street Journal Stating the Obvious: "Tepco and the government were made for each other..."

Just like Chisso (of Minamata mercury poisoning fame) and the government were meant for each other, I suppose, with taxpayers footing the bill. Nothing new.

From Wall Street Journal (2/16/2012):

Reading Austen in Tokyo
Tepco and the government were made for each other, if only they would admit it.

By Joseph Sternberg

An Internet wit offers a facetious summary of Jane Austen's collected works: "Female Lead: 'I secretly love Male Lead. He must never know.' Male Lead: 'I secretly love Female Lead. She must never know.' They find out." While perhaps not entirely accurate with regard to Austen's novels, it does describe the comedy of manners now unfolding between the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco.

Nearly a year after an earthquake and tsunami devastated eastern Japan, Tepco is still shaking. Saddled by astronomical costs for clean-up and compensation related to the tsunami-induced disaster at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the company is fighting the government over the terms of a bailout. The government insists on a majority voting share for taxpayers—an effective nationalization—and some officials have even hinted darkly at the prospect of breaking up the vertically integrated utility. Tepco is resisting any dilution of existing owners while trying to hike commercial power rates.

That both sides are making this look like a genuine feud is enough to raise suspicions in a land where subtlety and indirect speech are the norm. Sure enough, there are good reasons to think that despite the conflict, this Jane and Mr. Bingley will end up living happily ever after together by the time the last chapter is written.

Tepco's calculation is simple: It needs the cash. The government is offering 1 trillion yen ($13 billion) in ready money with which the utility can meet demands for nuclear-related compensation, fully shut down the stricken Fukushima plant, and pay for the more expensive fossil fuels it's burning now that its former generation mainstay, nuclear, has fallen into ill repute. Tepco recently announced it lost 623 billion yen from April to December 2011.

The utility also can make a cogent argument that government money need not come with managerial strings attached. The taxpayer cash injection would amount to an insurance pay-out. There has been a lot of talk over the past 11 months about pre-tsunami management failures and safety lapses at Tepco. Lost in the shuffle is the fact that whatever its inability to plan for or respond to a once-in-a-hundred-lifetimes natural disaster, the company under normal circumstances would have functioned quite happily indefinitely had Mother Nature not intervened.

That makes Tepco different from the case of Resona Bank, a financial institution Tokyo bailed out in 2003 in exchange for management control. Yukio Edano, the trade minister and government point man on Tepco, now says Tokyo views Resona as a model for how to do intervention. In that case, a long string of management failures on matters such as lending standards prompted government to step in. But there is a less obvious argument that Tepco needs better, government-imposed management to . . . do what, exactly? Stop the next earthquake?

Note that the government's interests align neatly with Tepco's, despite Mr. Edano's strong statements to the contrary. Since honest socialism—paying compensation directly from the government purse—seems to be off the table, Tokyo's chief goal is to preserve Tepco as a going concern capable of "paying back" over time taxpayer money used for accident payouts today. Yet while it may be impossible to save the utility without taxpayer cash, it likely would be equally impossible to rescue it with the kind of government control Mr. Edano purports to want.

Consider rates. The rate of increase in electricity consumption has been fairly low over the past decade (and sometimes negative), and is likely to remain so for as long as the overall Japanese economy stagnates. That leaves tariff increases as the only way Tepco could realistically expect to raise the additional revenue needed to pay back government bail-out money.

Such increases are proving hard enough now, while Tepco still is nominally a private-sector company. Last month the utility proposed raising rates for commercial customers by some 17% (it also wants to raise household rates, which are capped by regulation). Political uproar ensued, but the company appears to be standing its ground—to the benefit of politicians who will have to cope with less of a Tepco loss thanks to the increase. It would be hard for politicians to inveigh against rate increases approved by their own proxies on the board.

Similarly, the government doesn't stand to gain much if Tepco were broken up and sold for parts. In theory this would generate sufficient cash to fund compensation claims. But if it didn't? Good luck finding a buyer for whatever piece of a broken-up Tepco got stuck with the nuclear liabilities, and good luck funding those liabilities without revenue from all the other parts of what as a whole is a viable, cash-generating utility. The government would have to step in to pay compensation directly, in a form of socialism a bit too honest for Tokyo's liking.

Thus are our protagonists not-quite-so-secretly pining for each other, and eventually will admit their love. They're likely to do so in a deal where Tepco gets all the cash it needs in exchange for token government board representation, if any. If it all lacks a certain romance, well, it's business we're talking about. And anyway, marriage also had a certain mercenary quality in Jane Austen's day.

Mr. Sternberg edits the Business Asia column.

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WSJ Runs a Hagiography of Naoto Kan, Former PM of Japan Who Presided (Unfortunately) Over the Fukushima Nuke Accident

A political "rags to riches" story, says Wall Street Journal writer Toko Sekiguchi.

The article is totally uncritical, glossing over everything that happened under Kan's watch since March 11, 2011, and is written in a simple English to match the simplistic content that doesn't read like a Wall Street Journal at all.

What's the occasion anyway for this hagiography? Kan is attending the Davos meeting, annual confab of the world's rich and powerful in Davos, Switzerland, and is saying "No More Nuke Plants". Oh isn't that great.

"I'm pouring most of my time and energy into promoting renewable energy, and I'm having a great time"

From Wall Street Journal (1/25/2012):

Japan's Former Premier Takes Antinuclear Campaign to Davos

By TOKO SEKIGUCHI

TOKYO—Former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan returns to the world stage this week, part of a campaign to reinvent himself as a global antinuclear activist nearly a year after he oversaw his government's widely criticized handling of the Fukushima Daiichi accident.

"I would like to tell the world that we should aim for a society that can function without nuclear energy," he said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, previewing his speech scheduled for Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Mr. Kan was last in the spotlight in August, when he tendered his resignation as prime minister barely a year after taking office, and just over five months after the March 11 tsunami triggered the Fukushima meltdowns. He was forced out by the parliamentary opposition and by critics inside his own ruling party, who blasted his handling of the accident and, more generally, his strong-willed, improvisational style of governing.

Japan runs through prime ministers so quickly—Mr. Kan is one of six men to have held the title in the past five years—that former ones rarely wield influence domestically or internationally. But Mr. Kan is betting he can break the mold, by reverting to his prelegislative career as a civic activist. Before entering Parliament in 1980, he worked as an advocate for affordable housing for Tokyo's long-suffering salarymen.

"People tell me that I've gone back to my roots," he said in the interview, his first with a non-Japanese news organization since leaving office. "I'm pouring most of my time and energy into promoting renewable energy, and I'm having a great time," he added.

Mr. Kan has been traveling the world. On a recent trip to Spain and Germany, his alternative-energy inspection tour included visiting solar-energy control centers. As he talked of energy-efficient building codes and described a visit to a Japanese biomass community project, flipping through PowerPoint printouts, the 65-year-old Mr. Kan flashed a youthful smile—an expression he rarely showed during his tumultuous administration.

While his successor, Yoshihiko Noda, is pushing to restart closed reactors in Japan and to promote Japanese nuclear-reactor exports to countries such as Vietnam and Turkey, Mr. Kan is now pursuing an alternative-energy agenda, hoping to use his connections to make headway. "I think we should aim to create a world in which people do not need to depend on nuclear energy, and it would be ideal if Japan can become a model country for the world," he said.

In some ways, it is a likely end to what had been an unlikely career. In a political rags-to-riches tale, Mr. Kan won his first national election on his fourth grass-roots campaign bid as a member of the smallest opposition party at the time. But the issues raised then by a leftist activist-turned-politician of a miniparty went unheeded as Japan made the transition from its breakneck postwar growth to the bubble economy, protected by an iron triangle of big business, the nation's bureaucracy and the Liberal Democratic Party, which had ruled continuously since 1955.

"We used to talk about defeating the LDP, to eliminate the bureaucrat-led, special-interest politics," said Jiro Yamaguchi, a Hokkaido University political- science professor and longtime friend of Mr. Kan. "It sounded like a dream back then. No way did I think that he'd be premier one day."

Early in his career, Mr. Kan developed an interest in renewable energies, and he still proudly shows a fading picture of himself as a young, long-haired legislator visiting a Colorado wind farm. He discussed wind power during a parliamentary session in 1982, drawing a rebuke from the then-minister of science and technology, who, according to the legislative transcript, chided him: "Don't use it as a reason to reject nuclear power; don't get too excited or carried away."

Mr. Kan recalled that exchange with bemusement, saying nuclear power wasn't even part of that discussion. He said the official's reflexive response demonstrated the ruling government's obsession with the technology. At the time, Japan was still recovering from the oil crises of the 1970s, and nuclear power was emerging as the alternative to foreign oil.

As Mr. Kan rose to power, he came to embrace the national consensus that Japan should ramp up its use of nuclear energy.

Mr. Kan said that as a young politician, he believed atomic power was only a transitional energy source. But " as our party grew in size, many of us began to see nuclear power as a safe power that should be more aggressively utilized," he said.

By the time his Democratic Party of Japan wrested control from the LDP in a historic 2009 victory, the new government had adopted the LDP's pronuclear policy, promising to build 14 new nuclear reactors by 2030. Nuclear power was repackaged as clean energy, becoming the centerpiece of the DPJ's plan to cut carbon emissions by 25%, in relation to Japan's 1990 output levels, by 2020.

March 11 changed that. Mr. Kan had to make gut-wrenching decisions, including rejecting a request from Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. to pull workers back from the increasingly dangerous reactors. "It was the first time since World War II that a Japanese leader was asking people to risk their lives," he said.

In his mind, he said, he simulated an worst-case evacuation scenario that included the 35 million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area. "Not only would we lose up to half of our land, but spread radiation to the rest of the world," he said. "Our existence as a sovereign nation was at stake."

"Just when he reached the peak, an accident that questioned his very core erupted," said veteran lawmaker Satsuki Eda, a Kan ally for three decades.

Four months after the accident, Mr. Kan used the bully pulpit of the premiership to declare that he was revising Japan's energy policy, aiming eventually to rid the country of all its nuclear-power plants. He called the technology's risks impossible to contain. The announcement surprised his own cabinet ministers, who were notified of the decision only hours beforehand, and shocked a political system in which consensus-building skill is prized.

Even onetime close allies within the ruling party questioned Mr. Kan's competence in handling the accident and his response—blaming his impetuous style for aggravating the costly chaos. "Mr. Kan is a skillful politician when on the offensive, forcefully breaking through and overcoming barriers—but crisis management and day-to-day communication with the public is not an offensive skill," said Yukio Edano, Mr. Kan's chief spokesman during the height of the crisis, told reporters last month.

Mr. Kan remains unapologetic: "A large part of people's criticism against me was that I acted spontaneously or just off the top of my head. But for me, that's a positive thing. If you're not inspired, you can't act."

Now, unfettered by the burdens of office, he has more freedom to act. "He's finally back to his normal self," said Mr. Eda.

Write to Toko Sekiguchi at toko.sekiguchi@dowjones.com

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Wall Street Journal: "IAEA Says Japan Alone Should Decide on Reactors"

The head of the delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) currently visiting Japan has said Japan alone should decide whether to restart the reactors in Japan after the "stress test". The IAEA is to examine the ways the "stress test" has been carried out, and to visit two nuclear power plants whose "stress tests" have been "successfully" concluded.

My guess: A ringing endorsement of the way the "stress test" have been done by the Japanese government, with a few pieces of kindly advice on how to further improve.

There are still Japanese citizens who think IAEA will somehow rein in the Japanese government's drive to re-start the nuclear power plants despite stiff citizen-level oppositions. Sorry. And wake up.

Wall Street Journal has a rather disjointed article on the IAEA mission in Japan this time, with the first one-third of the article dedicated to analyzing the trend on tweets in Japan regarding the danger of a big earthquake in the Kanto region and the last one-third dedicated to disaster preparedness of municipalities within 30-kilometers of any nuclear power plants.

(Never mind that radioactive materials from the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident have significantly contaminated areas that are more than 200 kilometers away, and the government is still thinking in concentric circles...)

From Wall Street Journal English (1/23/2012):

IAEA Says Japan Alone Should Decide on Reactors

By MITSURU OBE

TOKYO—The International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday began a mission to help identify gaps in Japan's safety-check procedure for nuclear plants, to boost reactor resilience to natural disasters, as Tokyo began drawing up emergency plans with local governments.

Underscoring the risks facing Japan, a new research institute investigation has determined there is a 70% chance of a magnitude-7 earthquake striking the Tokyo metropolitan area within the next four years, and 98% over 30 years. The March 2011 earthquake was a magnitude-9.

The latest prediction surprised residents, and grabbed headlines in the local media. The government's forecast, using a different methodology, has been that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude-7 quake hitting Tokyo over the next 30 years.

The term "within four years" began trending on Twitter early in the day, with users saying that while the threat of the big one hovered in the back of their minds, the new calculation has made them more aware of the need to make emergency preparations.

The IAEA mission was dispatched in response to Japan's request to evaluate the methodology of its stress-test safety checks now being implemented on idled reactors. By offering to put itself under international scrutiny, Japan hopes to regain public trust in its safety procedures and bring about an eventual restart of nuclear reactors.

So far, Japan's efforts to regain public support for restarting the reactors has made little headway, with 49 out of the nation's 54 reactors currently offline. By May, those last five will be required to close for maintenance.

The head of the IAEA mission, James Lyons, said a decision on whether to restart Japan's idled nuclear reactors is solely up to the Japanese government.

"We will not be focusing on whether or not it is acceptable to restart any given plant. That is fully the responsibility of the Japanese government," said Lyons, director of the IAEA's nuclear-installation safety division and a former official with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, at a news conference.

Mr. Lyons said the mission will focus on a number of areas in examining the government's stress tests, including severe accident procedures, extreme external events and loss of off-site power supply.

During their nine-day stay through Jan. 31, the IAEA's team of 10 experts will visit two reactors that have recently been certified as safe by Japanese regulators to evaluate whether the checks address all potential risks.

On Monday, the Japanese government asked local authorities within a 30-km radius of nuclear plants to draw up emergency-response plans to possible nuclear disasters.

Such plans have been required only for local governments within an 8-10 kilometer (5-6 mile) radius, but the government has decided that emergency plans should be made for much wider areas in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which was triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

The government also is requesting that plans for major natural disasters be far more specific, detailing the methods of evacuation, distribution of iodine pills for radiation exposure, securing of communication channels and deployment of radiation-monitoring posts.

"The March nuclear disaster has exposed serious flaws in communication between the central and local governments," said Goshi Hosono, minister in charge of nuclear disasters, referring to the failure to alert local communities on the spread of radiation plumes from the Fukushima Daiichi plant in the early days of the 2011 crisis.

Meanwhile, Prof. Naoshi Hirata, of Tokyo University's Earthquake Research Institute, said the March earthquake apparently has increased the chances of major quakes striking the Tokyo metropolitan area over the next four years.

There is a correlation between the number of small quakes and that of large quakes, according to Prof. Hirata. A recent jump in the number of small jolts around Tokyo indicates the chance of a large quake has also increased, he said.

"The balance has changed since March 11," added Shinichi Sakai, a research associate at the institute. He said that pinpointing the exact location of any pending temblor is impossible, but that researchers will attempt to narrow down field of possibilities and revise scenarios of what might occur in the new time frame.
—Yoree Koh contributed to this article.

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WSJ: Potassium Iodide That Never Came

for the residents near Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, because of "miscommunication" between the government agencies in the post-accident confusion.

(And after more than 6 months WSJ still tries to give two versions of the same story - one for the Japanese, one for everyone else, withholding information in the Japanese version. See the bottom of the post for more.)

But if you read the article carefully, "miscommunication" alone does not explain the actions taken by both the national government and the Fukushima prefectural government.

But here's the Wall Street Journal article by Yuka Hayashi (9/29/2011) to form your own opinion (emphasis is mine). The WSJ article has a map of Fukushima that shows the affected municipalities:

TOKYO—Government officials failed to distribute to thousands of people pills that could have minimized radiation risks from the March nuclear accident, government documents show.

The disclosure is the latest evidence of government neglect of emergency procedures in the chaotic days after the disaster, in which an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The Fukushima area and some municipalities surrounding the stricken plant had ample stocks of potassium iodide, like most local communities near nuclear reactors around the world. That is a relatively safe compound that can prevent thyroid cancer, the most common serious outcome of a major nuclear accident.

Government disaster manuals require those communities to wait for the central government to give the order before distributing the pills. Though Japan's nuclear-safety experts recommended dispensing pills immediately, Tokyo didn't order pills be given out until five days after the March 11 accident, the documents show.

By then, most of the nearly 100,000 residents evacuated had gone to safer areas and the release of radiation from the plant had subsided from its earlier peaks.

Potassium iodide, which blocks radioactive iodine from entering the thyroid gland, is most effective when taken just before exposure, or within two hours after. It has little effect when administered days after the release of radiation.

In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, several national and local government officials and advisers blamed the delay on a communications breakdown among different government agencies with responsibilities over various aspects of the disaster.

They also cited an abrupt move by the government shortly after the accident, when local officials raised sharply the level of radiation exposure that would qualify an individual for iodine pills and other safety measures, such as thorough decontamination.

"Most of our residents had no idea we were supposed to take medication like that," said Juichi Ide, general-affairs chief of Kawauchi Village, located about 20 miles from the plant. "By the time the pills were delivered to our office on the 16th, everyone in the village was gone."

Mr. Ide said the boxes containing pills, also known as KI, for Kawauchi's 3,000 residents still sit in its now-empty village hall.

The towns closest to the plant had pills in stock, and two of them—Futaba and Tomioka—did distribute them to residents without awaiting word from Tokyo. Two communities farther away from the plant, Iwaki and Miharu, handed out KI pills to their residents based on their own decisions. While Iwaki residents were told to hold off until the government gave instructions, those in Miharu took the pills, leading late to a reprimand from prefectural officials.

Japanese radiation experts say results of subsequent tests among Fukushima residents suggest few had been exposed to dosages large enough to raise the risk significantly of developing thyroid disease, even without the medication. [This statement is simply not true. Actually, the expert at Nuclear Safety Commission the article cites later said in August that at least 40% of the evacuees must have reached the level where they should have taken the KI pills.]

Still, officials from two government bodies—the Nuclear Safety Commission and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency—are asking why the residents weren't given the pills known to be highly effective, particularly among young children.

A NISA official said the agency is investigating the case.

"It was very clear to us experts what we needed to worry about the most was to provide protection against the risk of thyroid cancer among children," said Gen Suzuki, a physician specializing in radiation research who was summoned to the Nuclear Safety Commission following the March 11 accident as a member of its emergency advisory team. "I had simply assumed local residents had been given potassium iodide."

When he learned recently [in August, as clearly stated in the Japanese version of the article] that wasn't the case, Mr. Suzuki said he was "flabbergasted."

The NSC, a national government-policy advisory body, recently posted on its website a hand-written note dated March 13 as proof that it recommended distribution and ingestion of the pills.

NISA, the main nuclear-regulatory body charged with administering the government's nuclear-disaster headquarters, says the note never came.

Kenji Matsuoka, director of the Nuclear Emergency Preparedness Division at NISA, said the agency was still investigating the case of the lost memo. "We are sorry if the message was lost because of the chaos at the disaster headquarters," he said. "Our priority at that time was getting people out as quickly as possible."

Officials in Fukushima prefecture in charge of distributing potassium iodide to local communities say they waited in vain for an instructions from the government's disaster headquarters, headed by then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

The failure to disburse the preventive pills follows other examples of how the Japanese government failed to implement available measures aimed at protecting local residents from the harms of radiation.

Some local officials have accused the government of failing to share the data from its radiation-projection systems, which, they said, resulted in their evacuating residents into highly contaminated areas.

Others blame the authorities for taking weeks before asking some residents outside the initial evacuation zones to evacuate, despite signs of radioactive dangers. The government was widely criticized for declaring food, including beef, to have been safely tested, only to find later that contaminated meat had been sold in grocery stores.

Potassium iodide is an inexpensive and readily available substance that governments and local communities with nuclear reactors typically have on hand. Following the Chernobyl accident in 1986, Poland gave 10.5 million children at least one dose of KI soon after the accident, with very few reports of resulting side effects. In the U.S., Congress passed a law in 2002 promoting distribution of the pills to communities near nuclear plants, but the law hasn't been implemented.

Japan's NSC recently posted on its website a document dated March 13 stating Fukushima residents aged 40 or younger should be given potassium iodide, if radiation screening confirmed they received certain levels of exposure. The commission says the document was sent to NISA, the coordinator of disaster response, at 10:46 a.m. that day, two days before the worst day of the accident on March 15, when explosions of two reactors sent thick radioactive plumes across many towns of Fukushima prefecture.

As with most of the correspondence between government officials following the accident, the statement was sent to disaster headquarters in Tokyo by fax, rather than via e-mail. An NSC representative stationed in that office then handed a copy to a NISA official, according to Hideaki Tsuzuku, director of the radiation-protection and accident-management division at the NSC. "It's not for us to know what kind of judgment was made and action was taken after that," he said in an interview.

NISA's Mr. Matsuoka says the agency can't confirm whether a NISA official received the memo, adding that an investigation into the case continues.

NISA issued an instruction March 16 for residents of towns within 20 kilometers of the plant to take KI pills, nearly four days after the government issued an evacuation order for those same towns.

People close to the situation say the delay may have been caused in part by an abrupt change in the standard used in determining what level of radiation exposure would trigger distribution of the pills. According to official disaster manuals written before the accident, anyone who showed radiation readings of 13,000 counts per minute—a measure for external exposure, as opposed to the more commonly used benchmark of sieverts, which measures health effects—was to be given KI pills, as well as a thorough decontamination, including showering and a change of clothes.

On March 14, Fukushima prefecture raised that cutoff to 100,000 cpm. Once the level was raised, people registering between 13,000 and 100,000 were given wet wipes to clean off the top layer of their clothing. They were not given pills.

During March, roughly 1,000 residents registered readings of 13,000 cpm or higher—102 had readings above 100,000 cpm.

"When they told us they wanted to raise the screening level, we instantly knew we had a serious level of contamination," said Mr. Suzuki, the NSC adviser. "They were implicitly telling us they had more people than they could handle logistically, amid the shortage of water, clothing and manpower."

Naoki Matsuda, a professor of radiation biology at Nagasaki University and an adviser to the Fukushima prefecture government, recalled a meeting with prefectural staff after a day of screening local residents on March 14. They reported gauges on radiation monitors set for 13,000 cpm going off repeatedly. "It was very clear the previous level of 13,000 cpm wouldn't work," Mr. Matsuda wrote in an essay posted on the university's website. "We discussed how the staff should turn off alarm sounds and refrain from wearing protective suits and face masks in order not to fan worries among residents."

The NSC was initially cautious about allowing the higher screening benchmark. On March 14, it issued a statement advising Fukushima to stick to the current level of 13,000 cpm, noting that level is equivalent to a thyroid-gland exposure level at which the International Atomic Energy Agency recommends disbursing KI. The World Health Organization advocates one-tenth of that level for giving the medication to children.

The NSC relented on March 20, after the prefecture used the new benchmark for days. In a statement, the commission noted 100,000 cpm was permissible according to the IAEA's screening standard in the initial stage of a nuclear emergency.

Before the government's March 16 order to disburse the iodine pills, two towns located near the plants, Futaba and Tomioka, with a combined population of 22,500, independently ordered some of their residents to take the pills that were in their stock, according to town officials.

Those in other nearby towns never did so, including Namie, where contamination was later confirmed to be worst among Fukushima communities.

In all, after the government's March 16 order, the prefecture delivered to all communities located within 50 kilometers of the plant enough KI pills and powder to be given to 900,000 people. Most were untouched.

It doesn't make sense to me. The article says there were enough potassium iodide pills to give to the residents but the prefecture waited for the national government to give orders to do so. Then what was the move by the Fukushima prefectural government to raise the standard from 13,000 cpm to 100,000 cpm?

It could be interpreted in two ways:

• They waited for the orders, and they were unwilling to do anything on their own. So they raised the standard so that they wouldn't need to administer KI pills and violate the pre-determined government protocol of waiting for the national government to give orders; or

• Contrary to what the article says, they did not have enough KI pills to give to the residents. If they were worried about 1000 people exceeding 13,000 cpm, that would mean they didn't even have 1,000 doses.

Either way, to cover this ineptitude, the national government and its experts went on PR blitz, telling everyone inside and outside Japan that everything was under control, that potassium iodide side effects would be more dangerous than a remote threat of thyroid cancer, that the level of radiation was not enough to warrant the distribution of the pills.

Now the new administration is just the same or worse than the old one, and it is determined to extend and pretend. "Cold shutdown" (of the reactor vessels, nothing more), "decontamination" of forests and mountains by picking up dead leaves and cutting off some branches, and this minor nuclear accident will be over. The government will continue to ask local governments like Tokyo to burn the radioactive debris and sludge to share the pain of Fukushima.

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Oh wait a minute.... I just noticed the part that this WSJ English article mentions but is completely missing in the WSJ Japanese article on the exact same topic. It's this part in red:

The NSC was initially cautious about allowing the higher screening benchmark. On March 14, it issued a statement advising Fukushima to stick to the current level of 13,000 cpm, noting that level is equivalent to a thyroid-gland exposure level at which the International Atomic Energy Agency recommends disbursing KI. The World Health Organization advocates one-tenth of that level for giving the medication to children.

I don't know who the editor is at Wall Street Journal Japan, but the paper sure behaves just as good as the Japanese counterparts. Omit the very inconvenient part that the Japanese authorities may not want the citizens to know from its Japanese version, but state it clearly in the English article to calm their journalistic conscience.

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Wall Street Journal: How the Japanese Government Failed Residents of Namie, Fukushima

Clearly, the Japanese government didn't understand, didn't know the meaning of, "simulation". The whole point of simulation is to provide possible scenarios based on limited inputs, and that's what SPEEDI was supposed to do. It did exactly that, but the government squashed the simulation results.

In order to be "correct" with only the measured data (which was non-existent at that time), the politicians both in the government and in the Nuclear Safety Commission chose to keep quiet and let the residents of Namie-machi irradiated, their homes, fields contaminated, probably beyond repair. Not only that, they went on the offensive, telling Fukushima residents and the Japanese people that everything was under control, it was safe.

Without any warning or advice from the government or TEPCO based on SPEEDI, Namie residents ended up evacuating to where the radioactive plume went. SPEEDI had correctly predicted that the radioactive plume would go the direction of Namie based on the prevailing wind pattern.

Here's the video news created by Wall Street Journal:

There's a long accompanying article to this video in the subscription-only section by Yuka Hayashi:

NIHONMATSU, Japan—On the afternoon of March 12, 24 hours after a tsunami crippled Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, some 700 residents of the coastal town of Namie were gathered at an elementary school just outside the government's 6.2-mile evacuation zone. Children played in the schoolyard, adults walked their dogs and volunteers cooked rice balls and soup outdoors. With cellphones knocked out and no television, few had any inkling of the rapidly escalating threat posed by the nearby plant.

Back in Tokyo, however, red flags were popping up inside a nondescript office building outside of the central business district, home to one of Japan's nerve centers for responding to a nuclear disaster. A computer system there, called Speedi, used real-time weather data to predict how radiation would spread in the event of an accident, spitting out maps for the government to use to get people out of harm's way.

That afternoon, the system was generating an ominous forecast for Namie: If radiation were to escape the plant, the wind would blow it straight through the town of 21,000, beyond the 6.2-mile safety perimeter and right over the schoolyard. But that information never reached the townspeople, according to Tamotsu Baba, the mayor.

At 3:36 p.m., the plant's reactor No. 1 blew up, spewing radiation sky-high.

"I heard a tremendous noise from the direction of the nuclear plant and knew right away it had exploded," recalls Toshio Konno, a 60-year-old retail-store worker who was standing in the schoolyard. He says he immediately "jumped in my car and headed off in the opposite direction. No one told me what to do. It was up to me to protect myself."

Many people gathered at the school, however, didn't realize what had happened, and most didn't leave for a few more hours.

The mayor later accused central-government representatives at the disaster-response headquarters in Fukushima of failing to protect Namie residents. "We walked straight into the areas where radiation levels were the highest," he said in a recent interview in Nihonmatsu, a neighboring city that is now home to Namie's town hall and some 3,000 of its evacuees. "I told them it was tantamount to an act of murder."

A Wall Street Journal investigation of Japan's efforts to protect people living around the stricken plant reveals that government officials failed to warn those residents despite projections showing a risk of radioactive contamination—information that wasn't made public until days or weeks later. In addition, the government and the plant's operator didn't provide many nearby residents with promised evacuation assistance, which forced the towns to improvise without any clear idea where the radiation was heading.

The fallout projections "could have been used as a guide for evacuation if they had been shared with people ahead of time," says Yukio Sudo, president of Nuclear Safety Technology Center, the government agency that operates Speedi on behalf of the education and science ministry.

The alarming reports did reach the central government's disaster headquarters headed by Prime Minister Naoto Kan. But bureaucrats there later said they didn't alert the politicians who were making evacuation decisions. The bureaucrats said the government didn't know precisely how much radiation had escaped the damaged reactors, so the forecasts, based on assumptions, weren't reliable enough.

Mr. Kan and top aides have said they weren't even aware of the system in the early days of the crisis. "We are truly very sorry that Speedi's projections weren't in the end shared among the parties who needed them," chief government spokesman Yukio Edano told a parliamentary committee on June 20. He said that would be a key subject for a government commission investigating the many things that went wrong at Fukushima Daiichi.

It is unclear how much radiation those living around the plant absorbed. The government to date has done full tests on just 120 residents of the affected communities, and those results haven't been released. Officials are now promising to survey all of Fukushima Prefecture's two million residents sometime in August, and to monitor over the next three decades the 200,000 considered most at risk.

Some experts say the delays mean it is likely too late to detect the full extent of the exposure and potential harm, since some radioactive elements disappear within weeks, even though any damage to the body triggered by those elements remains.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when Japan was ramping up its reliance on nuclear energy, the government and the utilities assured those living near reactors that they were safe. In the event of an accident, emergency evacuation protocols required authorities and plant operators to notify local municipalities and to keep residents informed about the accident and evacuation. The government was required to provide evacuation transportation.

In 1980, the year after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the U.S., the Japanese government began developing a computer system to help with evacuation planning. The system—called System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi—aimed to predict how released radiation would spread if an accident occurred. When the system was launched in 1986, the government said it could produce a detailed radiation map within 15 minutes of any accident that would show which areas were safe.

The guts of the system, developed with the help of Fujitsu Ltd., are housed in a Tokyo office building, above a bank branch. Computers sit in a cooled room, separated by a darkened glass wall from a team of operators at computer monitors. The system crunches data collected from a government meteorological agency and nuclear facilities around the clock, producing regularly updated maps of potential radiation fallout. At least two operators from the nuclear-safety agency are always manning it, ensuring that data are updated every hour.

At 3:42 p.m. on Friday, March 11, about an hour after the tsunami hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant, its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., declared a nuclear emergency. Speedi was switched into emergency mode. The system began forecasting how radiation, if released from the plant, would spread, and producing detailed weather reports for surrounding areas.

More than 130 miles away in Namie, residents focused first on escaping the giant waves that washed over parts of the town. Many left the town center for evacuation centers at higher elevations, located about 4.4 miles from the plant.

At 5:44 the next morning, a Saturday, the government said conditions at the plant were deteriorating and ordered the evacuation of everyone within 6.2 miles of it—including those gathered at the town's initial evacuation centers.

In addition to Namie, three other towns fell within that 6.2-mile radius. By prior agreement, all four were entitled to special assistance in the event of an emergency. In two of those towns, Futaba and Okuma, the government arranged for buses to transport residents.

Namie and Tomioka were left to fend for themselves. Namie officials began telling residents to get out immediately. They delivered their message over loudspeakers installed around town and from fire trucks driving block to block.

Without access to government buses, most residents left in their own cars, jamming the highway leading away from the coast. Residents say some people were stuck in traffic for hours. Most headed for the town's evacuation centers outside of the 6.2 mile zone, including the school in the neighborhood of Karino.

Back in Tokyo, government officials were using Speedi to forecast radiation fallout from such potential emergencies as venting radiation-laced steam to relieve reactor pressure, or, worse, an explosion at the reactor. That Saturday afternoon, at 12:36, the ministry of education and science received a simulation showing what would happen if reactor No. 1 exploded at 1 p.m. The conclusion: it would carry immense amounts of radiation well over 6.2 miles in a northwest direction, right over Namie, the Karino school and other evacuation sites. A 3 p.m. simulation reached a similar conclusion: any radiation released at about 4 p.m. would be blown in the same direction.

As many as 2,000 residents had fled to areas that Speedi projections showed would be covered by a radioactive cloud if reactor No. 1 was vented that afternoon. The residents were clueless about that danger. At about 2:30 p.m., the venting started.

At one evacuation site about 15 miles from the plant, a community center in Tsushima, dozens gathered in a parking lot to watch clouds of steam shoot up from behind a range of mountains. They knew what they were witnessing. They had heard on television that the plant was going to be vented.

"It never occurred to us radiation would come our way," says Hidehiro Asada, a 43-year-old owner of a lumberyard who was in the crowd. "We assumed the folks from the town or the prefecture would tell us if it was dangerous for us to be there."

At the school in Karino, evacuees also were in the dark about the risk. Many of them had no idea that reactor No. 1 had exploded in the middle of the afternoon until a volunteer fireman arrived about two hours later and told them about it.

That set off a panic. Some evacuees hurried to shut the wide-open sliding doors of the gym. Others started yelling at Tokyo Electric employees who were also taking shelter there, demanding information.

Before long, a Tokyo Electric employee arrived in a company car wearing full protective gear and toting a dosimeter, according to two people who were there. It beeped steadily, indicating high levels of radiation, these people say. He told the evacuees that they were safe because they were outside the official evacuation zone, they say. He left after a few minutes. A Tokyo Electric spokesman confirmed the incident.

That evening, the government expanded the evacuation zone to 12.4 miles, from 6.2, and asked people within 18.6 miles of the plant to stay indoors.

At about 6:30 p.m., a pair of military trucks arrived to pick up people from the school. It was nearly 11 p.m. when the last of evacuees left.

Ryuji Ohura, a town official who spent the day at the school looking after evacuees, locked up the school and headed northwest to another evacuation center. "We felt completely abandoned," recalls the 32-year-old father of two. "As I was driving, I just felt a sense of defeat. I kept thinking how I would get leukemia and die young."

In the wake of the bungled evacuation, government officials have been struggling to explain why the maps and forecast being churned out by Speedi didn't wind up in the hands of the people who needed them most.

Speedi is designed to produce two types of forecasts. Every hour, year-round, it maps where radiation would spread if released, using hypothetical release amounts. In the event of an actual emergency, the system is supposed to use actual radiation-release data collected from the plant.

Following the explosions, Fukushima Daiichi's system for sending real-time radiation-release data wasn't working. Mr. Kan's cabinet, in a report submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency in June, said complete data on radiation emitted from the crippled plant weren't available in real time. The release of radiation-fallout projections based on estimates, which Speedi produced, could have caused "unnecessary confusion," the report said.

But Japan's emergency law requires Speedi projections to be used even under such circumstances. The overseers of the system say it worked just fine. "Speedi has functioned just as it was always intended, with no error or delay," says Mr. Sudo.

Toshiso Kosako, a nuclear-safety expert at Tokyo University, stepped down as a nuclear adviser to Mr. Kan in late April. In his resignation statement, he blamed government agencies for their "inadequate initial responses" that prevented effectively using Speedi, thus "subjecting residents to unnecessary radiation exposure." In an interview, he said that the system offered useful information for planning evacuations, but that "nobody wanted to be associated with such fearful decisions."

As for the government's failure to communicate effectively with the people of Namie, deputy chief cabinet secretary Tetsuro Fukuyama blames a breakdown of emergency-phone systems.

Today, nearly all of Namie remains closed due to contamination, and residents have no idea when if will be safe to return. Reconstruction is under way in other tsunami-damaged towns, but Namie's coast is still covered in debris. Workers aren't allowed to go near it.

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WSJ's Hilsenrath Single-Handedly Tanks the Market Today (for Now)

Well, the markets didn't wait for the Fed announcement. On the pronouncement by the Wall Street Journal writer citing anonymous "fed officials" last night that the much-anticipated QE2 may be less and shorter, they decided to do the dumping right away.

The talk that the Fed may do less has been in the financial media for the past few days, but it took WSJ's Hilsenrath to give the market a definite direction: Down.

• Dow Industrial Average is currently down 130 points;
• Treasuries are down (yields are up);
• Gold, silver are down;
• Oil is down;
• Ag commodities are down (except for SGG and JO, as everyone needs a cup of strong coffee with sugar either to combat this market or stay awake during the market hours);
• US dollar is up, as I expected in the last post.

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(Semi-) Official Words from WSJ's Jon Hilsenrath

and Jon Hilsenrath doesn't need to quote many people (unlike the Bloomberg article I commented in my previous post), and shows he's THE Fed insider.

In the article titled "Fed Gears Up for Stimulus" on October 26, 2010, Hilsenrath writes:

The Fed's aim is to drive up the prices of long-term bonds, which in turn would push down long-term interest rates. It hopes that would spur more investment and spending and liven up the recovery. But officials want to avoid the "shock and awe" style used during the crisis in favor of an approach that allows them to adjust their policy, and possibly add to their purchases, over time as the recovery unfolds.

Uh oh...

Later in the article,

A Wall Street Journal survey of private sector economists in early October found that the Fed is expected to purchase about $250 billion of Treasury bonds per quarter and continue until mid-2011, amounting to about $750 billion in all.

Not $2 trillion, not even $1 trillion. Not $100 billion per month.

So who is going to be right? Hilsenrath with $750 billion? Hatzius with $2 trillion? If it's Hilsenrath, the stock market may sell off hard after the announcement, US dollar may shoot up, Treasuries may be dumped, along with gold and silver.

Maybe that's what Bernanke wants - for the markets to tank - so that he can push for QE3 (that's Marc Faber, isn't it?). Besides, three regional Fed presidents who have been vocal in their criticism of Bernanke's policy, Narayana Kocherlakota of Minneapolis, Richard Fisher of Dallas and Charles Plosser of Philadelphia, will become voting members of FOMC in January 2011. The most effective way to counter their opposition to further quantitative easing may be for the markets to tank after announcing a light-weight QE2, and give Bernanke a chance to tell them "I told you so."

Yesterday the US Treasury auctioned 4-year 6-month TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities), and for the first time ever, it resulted in the negative yield of minus 0.55%. The investors were paying the Treasury for the privilege of holding TIPS, because they expected the future inflation to be much higher partly thanks to the Fed's QE2 to come.

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Timmy Geithner Interview with WSJ/Digg

The site that posted this video has a very good accompanying article that you should go read: "Geithner: Auditing the Fed is a "line that we don't want to cross"

The interviewer is from Wall Street Journal, but the questions were submitted and voted on by the Digg community, with the top 10 questions being posed to Mr. Geithner.

Geithner looks extremely uncomfortable with the questions which are much sharper and pointed than what he's used to from mainstream media. (Citizen journalism, way to go! )

He is nervous, fussing with his shirt cuff, obfuscating, evading, lying, literally through his teeth. (He hardly opens his mouth when he speaks.) It is 20 minutes long, but please do watch. We need to be reminded just what kind of people are running the show and why.

Another interesting thing I've noticed: the interviewer looks just as nervous asking these pointed questions. (Maybe he should start asking real questions like these.)

(I laughed hard as Timmy tried to paint the Fed innocent in the creation of the bubbles, blaming every other country but this one. I laughed harder when he defended the ex-Goldman Sachs officials at Treasuries as "great statesmen". I'm sure they are, to be sarcastic. But that was not even the point of the question.)

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