Decommissioning teams at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant have begun a two-week operation aimed at retrieving a sample of the radioactive debris that remains inside the facility’s stricken nuclear reactors, using a telescoping robot custom-built for the task, thirteen years after the power plant suffered multiple meltdowns in the wake of the tsunami thatread more
The Quake to Make Los Angeles a Radioactive Dead Zone Thanks to CommonDreams. Nothing significant has been done to improve safety at two coastal reactors upwind of ten million people that are surrounded by earthquake faults in a tsunami zone like the one where the four Fukushima reactors have alreadyread more
Two 6.1 earthquakes struck in the Pacific, one near the island of Vanuatu and the other off the coast of Japan uncomfortably near the damaged Fukushima power plant. At the same time, frantic rescue efforts have brought out a citizen army in Mexico city who are helping overstressed emergency services. Meanwhile, Hurricane Maria is causing a catastrophe on the island of Puerto Rico, where all electric power has failed and 155 MPH sustained winds are destroying infrastructure and gigantic flash floods are roaring down the mountainsides.
read more
Approximately 800 trillion becquerel of Cesium-137 is expected to reach the West Coast of North America by 2016, according to Michio Aoyama, a professor at Japan’s Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity. Professor Aoyama says that this would be the equivalent of 5 percent of the total discharge of 3,500 trillion Bq of Cs-137 into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
However, Aoyama says that the isotope’s impact on human health won’t be significant. "Even if all the 800 tera bq Cs-137 have arrived, the radiation levels will stay at relatively low level that aren’t expected to harm human health," said Aoyama.
read more