The DailyMail (UK) has photos of "The Fukushima Fifty" today.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... plant.html

Despite sweltering heat from the damaged reactors, they must work in protective bodysuits to protect their skin from the poisonous radioactive particles that fill the air around them.

But as more radiation seeps into the atmosphere minute by minute, they know this job will be their last.

But as more radiation seeps into the atmosphere minute by minute, they know this job will be their last

I feel like my heart will break when I think about the 50. And then I think about the poltroons we follow and I JUST WANT TO SCREAM. People like Orly and Hate will never acknowledge that we are all in this together and we need to work together. They are all about denying The Other, and I wouldn't trust a single one of them in an emergency. They A the reason we can't have nice things.

I want to be there when Hate and Heather and QL get to the pearly gates and St. Peter says GTFOOMH.

I want to be there when Hate and Heather and QL get to the pearly gates and St. Peter says GTFOOMH.

I want to be there when Hate and Heather and QL get to the pearly gates and St. Peter says GTFOOMH.

At that point, they'll realize how high the conspiracy really goes.

Radiation injuries to three workers at Japan's stricken nuclear plant have put a focus once again on the unnamed and largely faceless corps of men risking their lives to prevent further catastrophe for their countrymen.

First dubbed the "Fukushima Fifty," their number has now risen to more than 700 workers toiling inside an evacuation zone at the facility on Japan's northeast coast that was battered on March 11 by an earthquake and then a tsunami.
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"Among the mainstream media there's also a growing sense of how responsible TEPCO is for this whole mess, and this is making them reluctant to praise anybody involved in cleaning it up," Miyajima said.

"After all, these workers are mainly TEPCO people or from TEPCO affiliates."

An 8-meter tsunami that hit Japan’s northeast in 869 swept as far as 4 kilometers inland at Sendai Bay, stretching south toward the Dai-Ichi plant, according to at least half a dozen scientific studies spanning more than a decade.
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Japan has suffered 195 tsunamis since 400, according to Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, which produced a report on tsunami threats to nuclear plants on the opposite coast to Dai-Ichi in July 2008. Three in the past three decades had waves of more than 10 meters.

A 7.6-magnitude quake in 1896 off the east coast of Japan created waves as high as 38 meters, while an 8.6- magnitude temblor in 1933 led to a surge as high as 29 meters, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Radioactivity in water at reactor 2 at the quake-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant has reached 10 million times the usual level, company officials say.

Workers trying to cool the reactor core to avoid a meltdown have been evacuated.

Earlier, Japan's nuclear agency said that levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the plant had risen to 1,850 times the usual level.

The UN's nuclear agency has warned the crisis could go on for months.

RT @BreakingNews: Tsunami advisory issued after 6.5 earthquake off Japan - Japan Meteorological Agency

RT @AlertNet: Japan issues tsunami warning after quake hits northern Japan, tsunami expected to be about 50 centimeters - NHK #japan #tsunami

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http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/ ... T5F5O/82/h[/url]

TOKYO — Already-grave conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant worsened Sunday with the highest radiation readings yet, compounding both the risks and challenges for workers trying to repair the facility’s cooling system.

Japan's government revealed a series of missteps by the operator of a radiation-leaking nuclear plant on Saturday, including sending workers in without protective footwear in its faltering efforts to control a monumental crisis. (March 26)

Leaked water sampled from one unit Sunday was 100,000 times more radioactive than normal background levels — though the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant, first calculated an even higher, erroneous, figure that it didn’t correct for several hours.

“The Japanese fell behind,” Mr. Hardy said. “Once they made the proclamation that this was the maximum earthquake, they had a hard time re-evaluating that as new data came in.”

The Japanese approach, referred to in the field as “deterministic” — as opposed to “probabilistic,” or taking unknowns into account — somehow stuck, said Noboru Nakao, a consultant who was a nuclear engineer at Hitachi for 40 years and was president of Japan’s training center for operators of boiling-water reactors.

“Japanese safety rules generally are deterministic because probabilistic methods are too difficult,” Mr. Nakao said, adding that “the U.S. has a lot more risk assessment methods.”
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Mr. Synolakis called Japan’s underestimation of the tsunami risk a “cascade of stupid errors that led to the disaster” and said that relevant data was virtually impossible to overlook by anyone in the field.

Highly toxic plutonium is seeping from the damaged nuclear power plant in Japan's tsunami disaster zone into the soil outside, officials said Tuesday, as the government grew frustrated by missteps in the effort to stabilize the overheated facility.

Safety officials said the small amounts of plutonium found at several spots outside the complex were not a risk to humans but support suspicions that dangerously radioactive water is leaking from damaged nuclear fuel rods -- a worrying development in the race to bring the power plant under control.

The department of energy has developed a number of remotely operated robots designed to clear up radioactive waste from department of energy test weapons sites, Lyons said.

The earliest versions were developed in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 when robots were sent in to get a view of the damaged reactor, and to suck up radioactive water and partially melted fuel.

In addition to the robots, which will be accompanied by trainers to instruct Japanese workers in their operation, the department of energy earlier sent nearly 40 people and almost 8 tonnes of equipment, including devices that measure radiation from aircraft.

Lyons said US flights were only going within 2.5 miles of the plant, because of the elevated radiation levels.

Japanese lawmakers publicly debated nationalizing the Tokyo Electric Power Company on Tuesday, as there seemed no end in sight to the problems at the company’s crippled nuclear power plant.

The prime minister’s office said the government was not considering a takeover of Tokyo Electric “at the moment.” But the plunging stock price indicated investors were abandoning hope that the company could cope with the cost of its rebuilding and the potential liabilities from its nuclear disaster.

The share price plunged an additional 19 percent Tuesday with virtually no buyers, and trading was suspended by an automatic stop.

The closing price of 566 yen ($6.86) was the stock’s lowest close since at least 1974. The day before the March 11 earthquake, the shares closed at 2,153 yen (about $26). On Wednesday morning, its shares fell another 12.7 percent.

Setbacks mounted Wednesday in the crisis over Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear facility, with nearby seawater testing at its highest radiation levels yet and the president of the plant operator checking into a hospital with hypertension.

In dramatic images taken by an unmanned-drone, utter devastation is evident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Generating Station (FDI) after the 6-reactor site was pummeled by an earthquake, tsunami, and multiple explosions of hydrogen gas.

The drone is owned by Air Photo Service which released the images.

In some of the dramatic pictures, smoke or steam can be seen rising.

In others, gaping holes on the rooftops are visible, and crumpled metal beams are scattered like toothpicks.

As pools of highly radioactive water are found beneath Japan's damaged reactors, authorities hoping to protect the ocean and groundwater are struggling to find adequate storage.

In recent days workers at Fukushima have discovered contaminated pools filling basements and maintenance tunnels beneath some of the damaged reactors. They’ve been sandbagging tunnel outlets and hooking up more pumps in an effort to prevent this water from reaching the ocean or filtering into groundwater.

But on Thursday International Atomic Energy Agency officials announced that earlier in the week workers had stopped pumping radioactive water from the basement of the Unit 1 reactor because the unit’s turbine condenser – the place they had been putting the water – was full.

The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.

As the situation at the reactors deteriorated and Tepco’s explanations became increasingly opaque, Kan quickly lost patience. “What the hell is going on?” he was overheard asking on the phone to Tepco after one frustrating briefing. On March 16 Kan shifted responsibility for the crisis from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and Tepco to Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Tepco “has almost no sense of urgency whatsoever,” he complained. By this time, too, many Japanese had grown weary of the alarmist warnings of foreign governments and journalists. One group even posted an online “Wall of Shame” to document the “sensationalist, overly speculative, and just plain bad reporting” from foreign journalists.

That reporting, and the fact that so many media organizations had to fly journalists to Japan, underscores how much that country has disappeared from our political discourse since the early 1990s, when Japan’s economic juggernaut was halted by a financial and banking crisis that led to two decades of stagnation. At the same time, some of the US criticism of Kan seems to stem from nostalgia for the years when the LDP ruled supreme through a system in which -- in the Times reporters’ words -- “political leaders left much of the nation’s foreign policy to the United States and domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats.”

That is extremely misleading. Beginning in the early 1950s, the LDP was financed heavily by the CIA as a bulwark against the once-powerful Japanese left, and successive LDP governments acted as a junior partner to the United States in the cold war. While Washington provided the weapons (and the soldiers) to fight communism, the Japanese elite provided military bases and profited by funneling economic aid and investments to US allies in South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere.

At home, the LDP and its corporate backers fought ferociously to suppress labor unions and civic groups that organized to protect workers, human rights and the environment. The end result was an LDP-created “Japan Inc.” -- an undemocratic, corporatist state in which bureaucrats blessed and promoted nuclear power and other industries they were supposed to regulate, and then received lucrative jobs in those industries upon retirement -- a system known as amakudari.

The unfolding events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan are more than a human and environmental disaster.

The cooling problem and subsequent radiation leaks that are contaminating food, land and water are tragic reminders of the dilemma facing a growing world population that is demanding increasing amounts of energy to fuel higher levels of production and consumption.

The rising complexity of technology, the looming shortage of resources and the physical limits imposed by a finite planet all compound this dilemma. Indeed, Fukushima Daiichi is a symbol of the fragile successes and the menacing failings of our sophisticated age.

Fukushima Daiichi is a vivid reminder that the time has come for us to think very, very seriously about our own energy needs, lifestyles and priorities. Whether or not we have noticed, the unfolding events in Japan are an object lesson for us.

Aerial photos taken over Japan have revealed the scale of devastation across dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands of homes and businesses.

Hover over each satellite photo to view the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami.

Q: Let me ask you specifically about last week's scare here in Washington, and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to deal with that (inaudible), at B'nai Brith.

A: Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a false threat under the circumstances. But as we've learned in the intelligence community, we had something called -- and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.

Compared with other sources of energy, nuclear power is one of the safest. We worry about radiation but are happy to accept air pollution from fossil fuels. Coal-related air pollution from power plants is globally responsible for more than 100,000 deaths per year. The World Health Organisation estimates that indoor air pollution from biomass and coal causes 1.5m premature deaths per year.

Coal mining accidents also kill thousands every year, but are seldom reported.

The use of renewables is increasing and will play an important part in the future energy mix, but it's questionable whether renewables alone will be able to satisfy rising energy demands. Technical advances in storage, transportation and efficiency are still required.

In the meantime, if we want to provide sufficient carbon-free energy we will have to use nuclear fission. I don't think this is incompatible with an environmentalist attitude. People working in nuclear power often care deeply about the environment and the energy problem. Despite some obvious downsides, they see nuclear power as the best solution.

The Guardian April 4, 2011 Fear of nuclear power is out of all proportion to the actual risks. Workers have been found dead in one of the Fukushima power plants, but they apparently died from the tsunami. It is not being revealed and may not be known whether current workers at the plant are being exposed to lethal, sterility-inducing, or cancer-causing levels of radiation. I suspect that there will be deaths directly associated with Fukushima, but the point of the article is still valid.

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The latest report from Benjamin Fulford claims that the Japanese Government has paid the Federal Reserve Bank extortion in the amount of 60 trillion Yen in the face of a U.S.threat to useHAARPto cause Mt. Fuji to erupt.
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