[Apologies in advance for the ad.] By Kyung Lah, CNN26 January 2012 Inside Fukushima Exclusion Zone, Japan (CNN) – When you stand in the center of Japan’s exclusion zone, there is absolute silence. The exclusion zone is the 20-kilometer (12-mile) radius around the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, an area of high radiation contamination. On March […]
By arevamirpal::laprimavera 26 January 2012 When it was someone else’s problem (Chernobyl), Japan was telling the truth about the effect of radiation, particularly on children. Here’s Tokyo Brown Tabby’s translation and captioning of a TV program from 1993. Ironically, the female newscaster has morphed into one of the strongest proponents (even today) of nuclear power […]
By Yoko Kubota and Shinichi Saoshiro; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher24 January 2012 TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s energy minister admitted on Tuesday that no records were kept of top level discussions in the critical early days on how to respond to the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 25 years. The admission, and apology, by Trade Minister […]
By MARTIN FACKLER21 January 2012 ONAMI, Japan – In the fall, as this valley’s rice paddies ripened into a carpet of gold, inspectors came to check for radioactive contamination. Onami sits just 35 miles northwest of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which spewed radioactive cesium over much of this rural region last March. However, […]
By ALEX ROSLIN, The Montreal Gazette14 January 2012 After the Fukushima nuclear accident, Canadian health officials assured a nervous public that virtually no radioactive fallout had drifted to Canada. But last March, a Health Canada monitoring station in Calgary detected an average of 8.18 becquerels per litre of radioactive iodine (an isotope released by the […]
By arevamirpal::laprimavera7 January 2012 (UPDATE: Second part of the translation is posted, translation done by the reader Florian Zschage.) (H/T to the readers who did the translation and the summary of the original German article on TAZ. Thank you.) What struck me about the article interviewing Dr. Dörte Siedentopf, other than the negative health effects […]
By arevamirpal::laprimavera2 January 2012 Teeth and toenails falling off and clumps of hair coming off, she reports in her blog. She doesn’t seem to care any more if people dismiss her as fabricating the story, and just tells as a matter of fact what’s been happening to her and her husband, probably both in their […]
By Bill Rigby27 December 2011 SEATTLE – Scientists in Alaska are investigating whether local seals are being sickened by radiation from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Scores of ring seals have washed up on Alaska’s Arctic coastline since July, suffering or killed by a mysterious disease marked by bleeding lesions on the hind flippers, irritated […]
[Desdemona can’t help thinking that the blue tarps in this first image contain radioactive soil.] By Beenish Ahmed21 December 2011 Years before the monster earthquake shook Japan and unleashed a massive tsunami in March, Google had mapped the roads of northeast Japan with its Street View project, as it had done in many parts of […]
By arevamirpal::laprimavera16 December 2011 Declaring a cold shutdown, even with “state”, is a joke, but Noda went further and declared the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident to be over. Why did he do that? Asahi Shinbun (12/16/2011) reports that: 「事故の収束」という、より強い表現に置き換えることで、風評被害など国内外に根強い原発事故への不安を払拭（ふっしょく）したいという狙いがある。政権は今後、放射性物質の除染を進めていく方針。避難区域の縮小も行い、住民の帰還へとつなげたい考えだ。 By using the word “the accident is over”, the government wants to dispel […]
