Russia Today ......
EX SKF.....
The video (dubbed with English subtitles) and the accompanying highly detailed report (both in English and in Japanese) were published on October 25, 2013. Judging from the number of tweets (zero, until I tweeted just now) of the Japanese report, hardly anyone paid any attention in Japan.
"We knew that. There's nothing new..." And so we continue to leave these workers to their misery while being busy shouting anti-nuclear slogans or praising alternative energy.
Unlike Japanese media (like Gendai the other day), Reuters is naming names - of layers of subcontractors that exploit the workers by design.
Unlike Japanese media, Reuters talked to more than 80 people - workers, subcontractors, government officials.
The most humorous passage to me in the article below was a comment by one of the largest construction companies in Japan - Obayashi:
Energy News.......
Submitted by testosteronepit on 11/01/2013 12:41 -0400
Earthquake hits close to Fukushima, tremors felt as far as Tokyo
A 5.0 earthquake was registered on Japan’s east cost in a prefecture neighboring Fukushima. It comes as a top Japanese politician called for acknowledgement of the fact that some Fukushima evacuees would never be able to return to the area.
Sunday’s tremors were felt as far away as Tokyo, but no casualties or damage reports were released at the time.
The news comes just ahead of one of the most dangerous nuclear cleanup operations ever attempted. Scheduled to start at the beginning of November, it will involve the careful, manual removal of 400 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods from the plant’s Reactor No. 4 - with an atomic yield greater than the Hiroshima bomb. The long and cumbersome operation will not permit even the slightest tremor, or Japan risks a catastrophe greater than Chernobyl.
Meanwhile, a Japanese official from the government’s ruling party disagrees with a plan to allow people back, who escaped the Fukushima disaster on the grounds that habitable areas have not yet been identified by the government.
The evacuation was precipitated by huge amounts of radiation released into the air and sea, following the 2011 reactor meltdowns, which had been a result of an earthquake-induced tsunami.
The number of displaced people stands at approximately 150,000. Although the government wants to allow everyone to return, large patches of the surrounding land still remain off-limits due to radiation risk.
The secretary-general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Shigeru Ishiba, said that some people must be prepared for the reality of never returning to their home. "The time will definitely come that someone must say 'they cannot live in this area, but they would be compensated'," Reuters quoted Ishiba as saying in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Ishiba also warned that if authorities are realistic about ever rebuilding the battered area, radiation exposure limits will have to be lowered.
"Unless we come up with an answer as to what to do with a measure for decontamination, reconstruction of Fukushima won't ever make progress," the secretary-general told reporters.
The Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the nuclear plant’s operator, has been plagued by problems during the cleanup process –some because of the sheer scale of the catastrophe, others man-made. But the opinion, that it could neither afford nor manage the complex and dangerous cleanup, has already forced the government to step in with additional funds.
TEPCO has also accepted America’s help with the cleanup and decommissioning of the power plant.
EX SKF.....
M5 level of quakes hit Japan for 3 times in the afternoon of 11/3/2013
Posted by Mochizuki on November 3rd, 2013 · No Comments
Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
Related to this article.. [Column] Fuel removal of Reactor4 pool to start next week – No quake is allowed for 13 months [URL]
The seismic activity is becoming active in Japan again. Approx. M5 of earthquakes hit Japan for 3 times in the afternoon of 11/3/2013. The largest one was M5.1 with the epicenter in South Ibaraki prefecture according to Japan Meteorological Bureau.
It’s been one week since M7.1 hit Fukushima. (cf, [Right now] M6.3~7.3 hit Fukushima offshore [URL])
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2013
Reuters: #Fukushima Worker Exploitation "60 Dollars a Day, Nowhere Else to Go"
The video (dubbed with English subtitles) and the accompanying highly detailed report (both in English and in Japanese) were published on October 25, 2013. Judging from the number of tweets (zero, until I tweeted just now) of the Japanese report, hardly anyone paid any attention in Japan.
"We knew that. There's nothing new..." And so we continue to leave these workers to their misery while being busy shouting anti-nuclear slogans or praising alternative energy.
Unlike Japanese media (like Gendai the other day), Reuters is naming names - of layers of subcontractors that exploit the workers by design.
Unlike Japanese media, Reuters talked to more than 80 people - workers, subcontractors, government officials.
The most humorous passage to me in the article below was a comment by one of the largest construction companies in Japan - Obayashi:
A spokesman for Obayashi said the company "did not notice" that one of its subcontractors was getting workers from a gangster.
Right. Who could have known? The word "subcontracting pyramid" exist to describe decades-old (if not centuries-old) practice in the Japanese construction industry.
From Reuters (10/25/2013):
From Reuters (10/25/2013):
Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters
Oct 25 (Reuters) - Tetsuya Hayashi went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He lasted less than two weeks.
Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima's hottest radiation zones.
He was told he would have to wear an oxygen tank and a double-layer protective suit. Even then, his handlers told him, the radiation would be so high it could burn through his annual exposure limit in just under an hour.
"I felt cheated and entrapped," Hayashi said. "I had not agreed to any of this."
When Hayashi took his grievances to a firm on the next rung up the ladder of Fukushima contractors, he says he was fired. He filed a complaint but has not received any response from labor regulators for more than a year. All the eight companies involved, including embattled plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, declined to comment or could not be reached for comment on his case.
Out of work, Hayashi found a second job at Fukushima, this time building a concrete base for tanks to hold spent fuel rods. His new employer skimmed almost a third of his wages - about $1,500 a month - and paid him the rest in cash in brown paper envelopes, he says. Reuters reviewed documents related to Hayashi's complaint, including pay envelopes and bank statements.
Hayashi's hard times are not unusual in the estimated $150-billion effort to dismantle the Fukushima reactors and clean up the neighboring areas, a Reuters examination found.
In reviewing Fukushima working conditions, Reuters interviewed more than 80 workers, employers and officials involved in the unprecedented nuclear clean-up. A common complaint: the project's dependence on a sprawling and little scrutinized network of subcontractors - many of them inexperienced with nuclear work and some of them, police say, have ties to organized crime.
Tepco sits atop a pyramid of subcontractors that can run to seven or more layers and includes construction giants such as Kajima Corp and Obayashi Corp in the first tier. The embattled utility remains in charge of the work to dismantle the damaged Fukushima reactors, a government-subsidized job expected to take 30 years or more.
Outside the plant, Japan's "Big Four" construction companies - Kajima, Obayashi, Shimizu Corp and Taisei Corp - oversee hundreds of small firms working on government-funded contracts to remove radioactive dirt and debris from nearby villages and farms so evacuees can return home.
Tokyo Electric, widely known as Tepco, says it has been unable to monitor subcontractors fully but has taken steps to limit worker abuses and curb the involvement of organized crime.
"We sign contracts with companies based on the cost needed to carry out a task," Masayuki Ono, a general manager for nuclear power at Tepco, told Reuters. "The companies then hire their own employees taking into account our contract. It's very difficult for us to go in and check their contracts."
The unprecedented Fukushima nuclear clean-up both inside and outside the plant faces a deepening shortage of workers. There are about 25 percent more openings than applicants for jobs in Fukushima prefecture, according to government data.
Raising wages could draw more workers but that has not happened, the data shows. Tepco is under pressure to post a profit in the year to March 2014 under a turnaround plan Japan's top banks recently financed with $5.9 billion in new loans and refinancing. In 2011, in the wake of the disaster, Tepco cut pay for its own workers by 20 percent.
With wages flat and workers scarce, labor brokers have stepped into the gap, recruiting people whose lives have reached a dead end or who have trouble finding a job outside the disaster zone.
The result has been a proliferation of small firms - many unregistered. Some 800 companies are active inside the Fukushima plant and hundreds more are working in the decontamination effort outside its gates, according to Tepco and documents reviewed by Reuters.
Tepco, Asia's largest listed power utility, had long enjoyed close ties to regulators and lax government oversight. That came under harsh scrutiny after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a massive tsunami hit the plant on March 11, 2011. The disaster triggered three reactor meltdowns, a series of explosions and a radiation leak that forced 150,000 people to flee nearby villages.
Tepco's hapless efforts since to stabilize the situation have been like someone playing "whack-a-mole", Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Toshimitsu Motegi has said.
'NUCLEAR GYPSIES'
Hayashi is one of an estimated 50,000 workers who have been hired so far to shut down the nuclear plant and decontaminate the towns and villages nearby. Thousands more will have to follow. Some of the workers will be needed to maintain the system that cools damaged fuel rods in the reactors with thousands of tonnes (1 tonne = 1.102 metric tons) of water every day. The contaminated runoff is then transferred to more than 1,000 tanks, enough to fill more than 130 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Dismantling the Fukushima Daiichi plant will require maintaining a job pool of at least 12,000 workers just through 2015, according to Tepco's blueprint. That compares to just over 8,000 registered workers now. In recent months, some 6,000 have been working inside the plant.
The Tepco hiring estimate does not include the manpower required for the government's new $330 million plan to build a massive ice wall around the plant to keep radiated water from leaking into the sea.
"I think we should really ask whether they are able to do this while ensuring the safety of the workers," said Shinichi Nakayama, deputy director of safety research at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.
Japan's nuclear industry has relied on cheap labor since the first plants, including Fukushima, opened in the 1970s. For years, the industry has rounded up itinerant workers known as "nuclear gypsies" from the Sanya neighborhood of Tokyo and Kamagasaki in Osaka, areas known for large numbers of homeless men.
"Working conditions in the nuclear industry have always been bad," said Saburo Murata, deputy director of Osaka's Hannan Chuo Hospital. "Problems with money, outsourced recruitment, lack of proper health insurance - these have existed for decades."
The Fukushima project has magnified those problems. When Japan's parliament approved a bill to fund decontamination work in August 2011, the law did not apply existing rules regulating the construction industry. As a result, contractors working on decontamination have not been required to disclose information on management or undergo any screening.
That meant anyone could become a nuclear contractor overnight. Many small companies without experience rushed to bid for contracts and then often turned to brokers to round up the manpower, according to employers and workers.
The resulting influx of workers has turned the town of Iwaki, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the plant, into a bustling labor hub at the front line of the massive public works project.
In extreme cases, brokers have been known to "buy" workers by paying off their debts. The workers are then forced to work until they pay off their new bosses for sharply reduced wages and under conditions that make it hard for them to speak out against abuses, labor activists and workers in Fukushima said.
Lake Barrett, a former U.S. nuclear regulator and an advisor to Tepco, says the system is so ingrained it will take time to change.
"There's been a century of tradition of big Japanese companies using contractors, and that's just the way it is in Japan," he told Reuters. "You're not going to change that overnight just because you have a new job here, so I think you have to adapt."
A Tepco survey from 2012 showed nearly half of the workers at Fukushima were employed by one contractor but managed by another. Japanese law prohibits such arrangements, in order to prevent brokers from skimming workers' wages.
Tepco said the survey represents one of the steps it has taken to crack down on abuses. "We take issues related to inappropriate subcontractors very seriously," the utility said in a statement to Reuters.
Tepco said it warns its contractors to respect labor regulations. The company said it has established a hotline for workers, and has organized lectures for subcontractors to raise awareness on labor regulations. In June, it introduced compulsory training for new workers on what constitutes illegal employment practices.
Tepco does not publish average hourly wages in the plant. Workers interviewed by Reuters said wages could be as low as around $6 an hour, but usually average around $12 an hour - about a third lower than the average in Japan's construction industry.
Workers for subcontractors in the most-contaminated area outside the plant are supposed to be paid an additional government-funded hazard allowance of about $100 per day, although many report it has not been paid.
The work in the plant can also be dangerous. Six workers in October were exposed to radioactive water when one of them detached a pipe connected to a treatment system. In August, 12 workers were irradiated when removing rubble from around one of the reactors. The accidents prompted Japan's nuclear regulator to question whether Tepco has been delegating too much.
"Proper oversight is important in preventing careless mistakes. Right now Tepco may be leaving it all up to the subcontractors," said the head of Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority, Shunichi Tanaka in response to the recent accidents.
Tepco said it will take measures to ensure that such accidents are not repeated. The utility said it monitors safety with spot inspections and checks on safeguards for workers when projects are divided between subcontractors.
The NRA, which is primarily charged with reactor safety, is only one of several agencies dealing with the Fukushima project: the ministries of labor, environment, trade and economy are also responsible for managing the clean-up and enforcing regulations, along with local authorities and police.
Yousuke Minaguchi, a lawyer who has represented Fukushima workers, says Japan's government has turned a blind eye to the problem of worker exploitation. "On the surface, they say it is illegal. But in reality they don't want to do anything. By not punishing anyone, they can keep using a lot of workers cheaply."
Economy Minister Motegi, who is responsible for Japan's energy policy and decommissioning of the plant, instructed Tepco to improve housing for workers. He has said more needs to be done to ensure workers are being treated well.
"To get work done, it's necessary to cooperate with a large number of companies," he told Reuters. "Making sure that those relations are proper, and that work is moving forward is something we need to keep working on daily."
FALSIFIED PASSBOOK
Hayashi offers a number of reasons for his decision to head to Fukushima from his home in Nagano, an area in central Japan famous for its ski slopes, where in his youth Hayashi honed his snowboarding skills.
He says he was skeptical of the government's early claim that the Fukushima plant was under control and wanted to see it for himself. He had worked in construction, knew how to weld and felt he could contribute.
Like many other workers, Hayashi was initially recruited by a broker. He was placed with RH Kogyo, a subcontractor six levels removed from Tepco.
When he arrived in Fukushima, Hayashi received instructions from five other firms in addition to the labor broker and RH Kogyo. It was the sixth contractor up the ladder, ABL Co. Ltd that told him he would be working in a highly radioactive area. ABL Co reported to Tokyo Energy & Systems Inc, which in Fukushima manages some 200 workers as a first-tier contractor under Tepco.
Hayashi says he kept copies of his work records and took pictures and videos inside the plant, encouraged by a TV journalist he had met before beginning his assignment. At one point, his boss from RH Kogyo told him not to worry because any radiation he was exposed to would not "build up".
"Once you wait a week, the amount of radiation goes down by half," the man is seen telling him in one of the recordings. The former supervisor declined to comment.
The statement represents a mistaken account of radiation safety standards applied in Fukushima, which are based on the view that there is no such thing as a safe dose. Workers are limited to 100 millisieverts of radiation exposure over five years. The International Atomic Energy Agency says exposure over that threshold measurably raises the risk of later cancers.
After Hayashi's first two-week stint at the plant ended, he discovered his nuclear passbook - a record of radiation exposure - had been falsified to show he had been an employee of larger firms higher up the ladder of contractors, not RH Kogyo.
Reuters reviewed the passbook and documents related to Hayashi's employment. The nuclear passbook shows that Hayashi was employed by Suzushi Kogyo from May to June 2012. It says Take One employed Hayashi for ten days in June 2012. Hayashi says that is false because he had a one-year contract with RH Kogyo.
"My suspicion is that they falsified the records to hide the fact that they had outsourced my employment," Hayashi said.
ABL Co. said Hayashi had worked with the firm but declined to comment on his claims. Tepco, Tokyo Energy & Systems, Suzushi Kogyo and RH Kogyo also declined to comment. Take One could not be reached for comment.
In September 2012, Hayashi found another job with a subcontractor for Kajima, one of Japan's largest construction companies. He didn't want to go back home empty-handed and says he thought he might have been just unlucky with his first bad experience at the plant.
Instead, his problems continued. This time a broker who recruited several workers for the subcontractor insisted on access to his bank account and then took almost a third of the roughly $160 Hayashi was supposed to be earning each day, Hayashi says.
The broker, according to Hayashi, identified himself as a former member of a local gang from Hayashi's native Nagano.
Ryo Goshima, 23, said the same broker from Nagano placed him in a crew doing decontamination work and then skimmed almost half of what he had been promised. Goshima and Hayashi became friends in Fukushima when they wound up working for the same firm.
Goshima said he was fired in December after complaining about the skimming practice. Tech, the contractor that had employed him, said it had fired another employee who was found to have skimmed Goshima's wages. Tech said Goshima left for personal reasons. The firm paid Goshima back wages, both sides say. The total payment was $9,000, according to Goshima.
Kajima spokesman Atsushi Fujino said the company was not in a position to comment on either of the cases since it did not have a contract with Hayashi or Goshima.
"We pay the companies who work for us and instruct those companies to pay the hazard allowance," the Kajima spokesman said in a statement.
THE YAKUZA CONNECTION
The complexity of Fukushima contracts and the shortage of workers have played into the hands of the yakuza, Japan's organized crime syndicates, which have run labor rackets for generations.
Nearly 50 gangs with 1,050 members operate in Fukushima prefecture dominated by three major syndicates - Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai, police say.
Ministries, the companies involved in the decontamination and decommissioning work, and police have set up a task force to eradicate organized crime from the nuclear clean-up project. Police investigators say they cannot crack down on the gang members they track without receiving a complaint. They also rely on major contractors for information.
In a rare prosecution involving a yakuza executive, Yoshinori Arai, a boss in a gang affiliated with the Sumiyoshi-kai, was convicted of labor law violations. Arai admitted pocketing around $60,000 over two years by skimming a third of wages paid to workers in the disaster zone. In March a judge gave him an eight-month suspended sentence because Arai said he had resigned from the gang and regretted his actions.
Arai was convicted of supplying workers to a site managed by Obayashi, one of Japan's leading contractors, in Date, a town northwest of the Fukushima plant. Date was in the path of the most concentrated plume of radiation after the disaster.
A police official with knowledge of the investigation said Arai's case was just "the tip of the iceberg" in terms of organized crime involvement in the clean-up.
A spokesman for Obayashi said the company "did not notice" that one of its subcontractors was getting workers from a gangster.
"In contracts with our subcontractors we have clauses on not cooperating with organized crime," the spokesman said, adding the company was working with the police and its subcontractors to ensure this sort of violation does not happen again.
In April, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare sanctioned three companies for illegally dispatching workers to Fukushima. One of those, a Nagasaki-based company called Yamato Engineering, sent 510 workers to lay pipe at the nuclear plant in violation of labor laws banning brokers. All three companies were ordered by labor regulators to improve business practices, records show.
In 2009, Yamato Engineering was banned from public works projects because of a police determination that it was "effectively under the control of organized crime," according to a public notice by the Nagasaki-branch of the land and transport ministry. Yamato Engineering had no immediate comment.
Goshima said he himself had been working for the local chapter of Yamaguchi-gumi since the age of 14, extorting money and collecting debts. He quit at age 20 after spending some time in jail. He had to borrow money from a loan shark to pay off his gang, which demanded about $2,000 a month for several months to let him go.
"My parents didn't want any problems from the gang, so they told me to leave and never return," Goshima said. He went to Fukushima looking for a well-paying job to pay down the debt - and ended up working for a yakuza member from his home district.
DECONTAMINATION COMPLAINTS
In towns and villages around the plant in Fukushima, thousands of workers wielding industrial hoses, operating mechanical diggers and wearing dosimeters to measure radiation have been deployed to scrub houses and roads, dig up topsoil and strip trees of leaves in an effort to reduce background radiation so that refugees can return home.
Hundreds of small companies have been given contracts for this decontamination work. Nearly 70 percent of those surveyed in the first half of 2013 had broken labor regulations, according to a labor ministry report in July. The ministry's Fukushima office had received 567 complaints related to working conditions in the decontamination effort in the year to March. It issued 10 warnings. No firm was penalized.
One of the firms that has faced complaints is Denko Keibi, which before the disaster used to supply security guards for construction sites.
Denko Keibi managed 35 workers in Tamura, a village near the plant. At an arbitration session in May that Reuters attended, the workers complained they had been packed five to a room in small cabins. Dinner was typically a bowl of rice and half a pepper or a sardine, they said. When a driver transporting workers flipped their van on an icy road in December, supervisors ordered workers to take off their uniforms and scatter to distant hospitals, the workers said. Denko Keibi had no insurance for workplace accidents and wanted to avoid reporting the crash, they said.
"We were asked to come in and go to work quickly," an executive of Denko Keibi said, apologizing to the workers, who later won compensation of about $6,000 each for unpaid wages. "In hindsight, this is not something an amateur should have gotten involved in."
In the arbitration session Reuters attended, Denko Keibi said there had been problems with working conditions but said it was still examining what happened in the December accident.
The Denko Keibi case is unusual because of the large number of workers involved, the labor union that won the settlement said. Many workers are afraid to speak out, often because they have to keep paying back loans to their employers.
"The workers are scared to sue because they're afraid they will be blacklisted," said Mitsuo Nakamura, a former day laborer who runs a group set up to protect Fukushima workers. "You have to remember these people often can't get any other job."
Hayashi's experiences at the plant turned him into an activist. He was reassigned to a construction site outside Tokyo by his second employer after he posted an online video about his first experiences in the plant in late 2012. After a tabloid magazine published a story about Hayashi, his managers asked him to leave. He has since moved to Tokyo and filed a complaint with the labor standards office. He volunteered in the successful parliamentary campaign of former actor turned anti-nuclear activist, Taro Yamamoto.
"Major contractors that run this system think that workers will always be afraid to talk because they are scared to lose their jobs," said Hayashi. "But Japan can't continue to ignore this problem forever."
(Additional reporting by Kevin Krolicki, Sophie Knight and Chris Meyers in Tokyo and Yoshiyuki Osada in Osaka; Editing By Bill Tarrant)
Energy News.......
US Energy Secretary: Tragic Fukushima event had “global consequences” — Report: Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant “is world’s worst nuclear disaster”
“We’ve opened a door to hell” at Fukushima plant, and may never be able to close it — Radio Host: You mean that even with robots they don’t know where the 3 reactor cores are? (AUDIO)
Fukushima Diary......
On 10/31/2013, Tepco announced they don’t consider disclosing the simulation of Fukushima workers’ exposure dose in the future.
Tepco not to let any other organization take over Fukushima plant / “We know the plant more than anyone else”
Posted by Mochizuki on November 3rd, 2013 · No Comments
Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
Tepco’s president Hirose stated they won’t let any other organizations take over Fukushima nuclear plant for decommissioning.
Having the continuous accident of contaminated water, Japanese government is consideringsplitting Tepco. Also world opinion is to doubt if Tepco is capable enough to decommission Fukushima plant.
In the press conference of 10/31/2013, Hirose stated it’s Tepco to know about the plant better than anyone else. In any cases, it will be Tepco to be in charge of decommissioning the plant.
Tepco simulates “Contaminated water overflows by June 2015″ without bypass and sub-drain pumping
Posted by Mochizuki on November 3rd, 2013 · No Comments
Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
Even from Tepco’s estimate published on 10/31/2013, they will run out of the contaminated water storage facility by June 2015.
Tepco is planning to build 15 new tanks every month in 2013. From 2014, they originally planned to increase the storage capacity from 500,000m3 to 700,000m3 by 2015, but they increased this planned capacity to 800,000m3 for this simulation. However, contaminated water increases faster than Tepco builds new tanks.
This simulation is on the assumption that they don’t discharge the groundwater pumped up from the bypass wells, nor don’t have the sub-drain system into operation. (cf, Read the column about what the bypass wells and sub-drain are for, “[Column] Kamikaze and contaminated water [URL]“)
Considering the crippled plant situation and Tepco’s past operation skills, this assumption seems rather realistic.
If the plant has another heavy rain or typhoon and they end up having to stock the contaminated rainwater, they would run out of the contaminated water storage sooner than June 2015.
22 billion yen spent on the additional contaminated water storage
Posted by Mochizuki on November 3rd, 2013 · No Comments
Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
According to Tepco’s announcement of financial statements, 22 billion yen was needed to reinforce the contaminated water storage.
Tepco’s president Hirose stated it was spent on changing the planned tanks from unwelded type to the welded type in the second quarter of 2013.
It has never been announced how much more budget is necessary to resolve the increasing contaminated water problem.
[Column] Fuel removal of Reactor4 pool to start next week – No quake is allowed for 13 months
Posted by Mochizuki on November 2nd, 2013 · No Comments
Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
It’s too dangerous to touch, but it can’t be left untouched forever.
Tepco is going to start removing the fuel assemblies from reactor4 pool next week.
They will take 13 months to remove over 1500 fuel assemblies one after one, which is over 5,000 times much as Hiroshima bomb (based on Cs-137).
They built 6 teams specially trained for this task. One team consists of 6 members. 1 member is from Tepco, but 5 members are from some other company, which Tepco conceals the name of and the reason of the concealment is also concealed.
The removed fuel is to be carried to the common usage pool. It’s not clear what to do with the fuel assemblies after transferring to the common pool.
Reactor4 spent fuel pool is covered with the crane building, so we cannot see the crane picking up the assemblies from live camera.
What makes it more dangerous than the daily fuel removal is the fact that the pool is full of debris.
They vacuum the small pieces of the debris over the assemblies but still it’s likely that the crane accidentally picks up a piece of debris when it grabs an assembly.
In that case, it’s possible that the assembly is dropped.
Tepco claims one assembly cannot reach the critical state. Even if it’s dropped on other assemblies, it wouldn’t affect the outside of the plant area.
Tepco’s statement has always been correct.
Even about the contaminated water issue, they announced it rains so heavily only once in ten years that the contaminated water tank dams overflow. Indeed, it overflowed every time a Typhoon hit Fukushima since this September.
As the emergency measures, Tepco is to warn the people around the plant area by using transceiver. This would save everyone like they did in 311.
The only thing we could do it to hope no earthquake to occur for the following 13 months. (It was just last week that M7.1 hit Fukushima.)
Fukushima Diary will try its best to keep the eyes and ears on reactor4.
Tepco not to disclose workers’ exposure dose simulation
Posted by Mochizuki on November 1st, 2013 · 1 Comment
Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
On 10/31/2013, Tepco announced they don’t consider disclosing the simulation of Fukushima workers’ exposure dose in the future.
Tepco monthly publishes the report about workers’ exposure dose in the plant.
In the press conference of 10/31/2013, for the question of the press about if Tepco has the simulation report about the potential exposure dose of the workers in advance, Tepco answered they do have the simulation.
They didn’t explain the reason why they don’t disclose it.
Tepco “Even if they drop a fuel assembly of
reactor4 pool, it wouldn’t affect outside of the
plant area”
Posted by Mochizuki on November 1st, 2013 · 1 Comment
Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
Related to this article..Fuel removal of reactor4 will continue until December 2014 [URL]
On 10/30/2013, Tepco announced the potential risk of the removal of fuel from reactor4 pool would be low enough.
They stated the fuel assembly would be removed one after one. One assembly would not reach the critical state by itself, according to Tepco’s estimate.
Also, in case they drop a fuel assembly to other assemblies, the exposure dose on the border of the plant area wouldn’t be significant.
In the case of dropping an assembly to other assemblies, they didn’t comment the fuel wouldn’t reach the critical state.
Tepco rejects disclosing the name of the
company to be in the operation of reactor4 fuel
removal
Posted by Mochizuki on November 1st, 2013 · No Comments
Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
Related to this article.. Tepco “Even if they drop a fuel assembly of reactor4 pool, it wouldn’t affect outside of the plant area” [URL]
Tepco stated they won’t disclose the name of the company to operate the cranes to remove fuel assemblies from reactor4 pool. The reason is not clear.
The facility is made by Hitachi GE.
Tepco stated they built several teams specially trained to operate the fuel removal task in the press conference of 10/30/2013.
Zero Hedge......
Japan’s Most Hated Outfit, TEPCO, Reports Fat Profit (From Taxpayer Bailout Money)
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
TEPCO, the utility that serves 29 million households and businesses in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and that owns the Fukushima nuclear power plant where three melted-down reactors are contaminating air, soil, groundwater, and seawater, an outfit famous for its lackadaisical handling of the fiasco and the parsimoniousness with which it doles out information – the most despised and ridiculed company in Japan reported earnings today. It was a doozie.
Instead of sending it into bankruptcy court to make bondholders and stockholders pay their share, the government has bailed it (and them) out lock, stock, and barrel. And it’s still on taxpayer-funded life support. So it was good news that revenues jumped 11.8% to ¥3.2 trillion during the fiscal first half ending September 30 – blistering hot growth for a utility with 49,000 employees in a slow-or-no-growth market!
But that was about it with the good news. It wasn’t even good news. It was based exclusively on electricity rate hikes that regulators had approved to compensate the company for the costs of running fossil-fuel power plants instead of its nuclear power plants, which remain shut down. It then inflicted those higher rates on already struggling businesses and squeezed consumers.
Sign of a booming Abenomics economy? Nope. Electricity sales volume fell by 1.7% in the first half. Among the reasons, ominously: a “decrease in production activities.” Commercial use fell 1.7% and industrial use 0.5% from the already depressed levels last year. Among large-scale industrial customers, electricity sales to ferrous metals companies suffered the most, down 6.7%, followed by sales to machinery producers, down 3.8%.
Net profit for the first half soared to ¥616.2 billion ($6.2 billion), up from a steep loss last year. But the rate hikes alone, big as they’ve been, couldn’t accomplish that. So cost cuts?
TEPCO is certainly trying to cut costs in dealing with the Fukushima fiasco, mostly by cutting corners. Efforts that produce curious results. A few days ago, for example, when it didn’t put enough pumps in place to deal with the rains from the typhoon, water contaminated with highly radioactive and toxic Strontium-90 leaked once again into the ocean. Despite all these valiant efforts at cutting corners, its “ordinary expenses” rose 1.2%.
So where did that big fat profit of ¥616.2 billion come from? Turns out, “ordinary income” was only ¥141.6 billion, up from a loss last year. Those were the rate increases. The difference? “Extraordinary Income.”
A lot of it! So TEPCO sold some fixed assets for a gain of ¥74.2 billion, fine. But then there was an interesting, and huge entry: ¥666.2 billion ($6.7 billion). It was the amount of taxpayer bailout money TEPCO had received during the first half. Booked as income!
After some extraordinary loss items – ¥22 billion for “extraordinary loss on natural disaster” and ¥230.5 billion for “nuclear damage compensation” – net disaster-related extraordinary income amounted to ¥413.7 billion ($4.2 billion), every yen of it from taxpayers. It became part of its net profit. What a way to make money!
These kinds of shenanigans have impact. TEPCO’s stock, which traded above ¥4,000 in 2007, skittered down during the financial crisis to land at ¥2,000 by the end of 2010. After the disaster in March 2011, the stock collapsed entirely and a few months later approached ¥100 yen – a technically bankrupt company with 49,000 employees. But since the bailout funds started pouring into TEPCO’s pocket, the stock has quintupled to ¥523.
Today, the government offered a view into the future. A panel composed of lawmakers from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party issued a draft report that recommended that the government, and therefore the taxpayer, step in and take control of the Fukushima cleanup and decommissioning efforts. It will be expensive and take four decades – unless the spent fuel rods in their destroyed pools ignite when the next big earthquake hits or when TEPCO screws up again, which would alter the hemisphere and eliminate any need to worry about the site.
The panel said that TEPCO must implement major internal improvements, including cost controls, and it suggested that the company may have to be broken up, partially or fully – with the good part likely going to bondholders and stockholders, and the bad part, that is Fukushima Daiichi and all associated costs and liabilities, being hung around the neck of the taxpayer.
There was urgency, the panel said. TEPCO could not manage the large amounts of groundwater that were getting contaminated daily by the reactors, and at the same time manage their decommissioning. The government would also have to figure out what to do with the nuclear waste from the site – and then pay for it as well.
The true costs of nuclear power are thus getting shuffled from the industry to the taxpayer – while bondholders and stockholders benefit.
Not a coincidence. Earlier this year, it was leaked that TEPCO had paid ¥1.8 billion ($189 million) in annual membership fees to a nuclear lobbying group in 2011, weeks after the melt-downs. The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, which lobbies for Japan’s ten mega-utilities, keeps its budget secret. This was the first time the fees seeped out, offering an idea of its annual lobbying budget – whose magnitude explains in part the overwhelming power the nuclear industry has over its regulators and governments.
That power is now being exerted on the Abe administration and the legislature – not only to slough off the costs of dealing with Fukushima but also to restart the 50 surviving reactors, against strong local and national opposition.
It's not like Japan doesn't have enough problems. Buried in the Bank of Japan’s Financial System Report is a gorgeous whitewash: if interest rates rise by 1 percentage point, it would cause ¥8 trillion ($82 billion) in losses across the banking system. Banks would be able to digest it. The system is safe. But then the report tallied up the losses of a 3 percentage-point rise. Read.... What Will It Take To Blow Up The Entire Japanese Banking System? (Not Much, According To The Bank of Japan).
Simply Info.......
Japan To Turn TEPCO Into Holding Company, May Join International Nuclear Liability Treaty
The Japanese government has announced they will turn TEPCO into a holding company. This would shift the decommissioning work into its own entity. The government would also increase involvement in the new decommissioning authority while TEPCO would still have some ownership. It is not clear how this would impact the potential restart of Kashiwazaki Kariwa after the NRA tied any restart to proving TEPCO could handle the work at Fukushima with competence. It is also … Read entire article »
NRA Gives Approval For Unit 4 Fuel Removal, To Start November 8th
The NRA has given approval to the equipment and plan to begin removing fuel from unit 4′s spent fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi. Work will begin November 8th. … Read entire article »
SimplyInfo.org: Fukushima News Roundup
A TEPCO worker in Ibaraki committed suicide by jumping off the roof of TEPCO’s branch office. The worker didn’t leave a note so officials were unsure why he took his own life at work. Spent fuel removal at unit 4 begins next week. There is conflicting information about the fuel being removed by computer control or manual crane operation by workers. The governor of Niigata says TEPCO can not be trusted to safely operate a nuclear plant. He cited “institutionalized lying” by the company as one problem. TEPCO is currently attempting to restart reactors in Niigata prefecture if they can gain government approval. TEPCO began dumping contaminated rain water into holding ponds previously used until they began leaking contaminated … Read entire article »
Hong Kong getting slammed by a typhoon, the jetstream is steering from Hong Kong over Shanghai then Tokyo then across to Alaska,, the Orient express in action.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.weather.com/maps/maptype/satelliteworld/asiasatellite_large_animated.html
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/western-pacific/2013/typhoon-Krosa?map=sat
ReplyDeleteThis typhoon is hitting Hong Kong , it followed a solar flare which happened as the planet Mercury exited it's path between us and the sun.