The reflections on what is happening at Fukushima are beginning to have effects: The Mainchi Daily News How did Japan's nuclear industry become so arrogant? by Kosuke Hino, Osaka.

A bit more transparency from the Japanese government:

NHK World (English) May 3, 2011 Belated release of radiation forecast data

I'll report back when I see data from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. It will also be interesting to compare these forecasts to models being run in Europe and the U.S., which seem to be yielding wildly discrepant results. None of them show the forecast of that first fraudulent map of looming disaster, but some of them are not encouraging.

There may have been (may now be) a fire at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on May 8 (Japan time). There is no coverage of this in English-language Japanese newspapers. The live Webcam that took the video below is now offline.

Knowing that parts of Japan dropped two or more feet during the earthquake had not caused me to make the obvious connection: some Japanese towns and cities are now flooded twice a day at high tide. I suppose that engineers can deal with this by sea walls or other barriers.

NPR "In Japan, A City Shifted By Earthquake Faces A New Reality"

Sea walls may not be the solution. Much of these cities were built in former rural areas and marsh lands. The groundwater levels will just be reaching near to top soil. So everytime the tide sets in, the groundwater levels will also raise and inundate the now low lying areas.

Japan has "reclaimed" a lot of land from the ocean, building extensively on what used to be underwater or tide-flooded marshes. There are those man-made islands in Osaka and Tokyo Bays. (In Japan, man-made is an accurate description.) I wonder if this means that at least some of those areas have to be abandoned. It is hard to imagine that Ishinomaki can continue to function.

I wonder the same about U.S areas that the Mississippi and other rivers once flooded that are now neighborhoods or farms. Levees made that possible. In both cases, we humans may have overreached badly and will now pay a price for it.

I was thinking about this last night and wondered if the levees were originally built to claim the land as farmland, not necessarily to build homes and businesses and communities. The land protected by the levees is really still flood plain, the levees just turn the land from 10 or 20 or 30 year flood plain into 100+ year flood plain. It's really kind of nutso to build your house near a river that drains something like 40% of the country.

Maybe we need to start (or re-open) a topic about human arrogance in trying to manage the planet. It's not working out very well.

In the meantime, news reports out of Japan are that TEPCO is gaining control of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, despite having to plug another leak into the ocean yesterday. However, Japan's nuclear problems go far beyond Fukushima Daiichi. The World Socialist Web site has published a series of articles on this issue, one of which appears today: New threats emerge at Japanese nuclear plants. It will be very interesting to see if the Japanese nuclear power industry complies with the order reported below:

There had previously been court orders to shut down Hamaoko, which were blithely ignored by Japan Inc. -- the government and industry combination that permitted warnings and court orders to be ignored for several decades.

The Guardian July 1, 2011 Fukushima spin was Orwellian: Emails detailing how the UK government played down Fukushima show just how cosy it is with the nuclear industry

The Daily Mail has a gallery of before-and-after photographs as the cleanup proceeds after the great Tōhoku (Sendai) earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Sunday, February 12, 2012 "What a comeback! Eleven months after the tsunami ravaged Japan, a series of pictures reveals the incredible progress being made to clear up the devastation"

The area looks very much like Kobe did when it was possible to re-enter the city after its deadly earthquake of 1995 (the Great Hanshin earthquake). Vacant lots now wait where the debris of many buildings, automobiles, and corpses had accumulated. Structures that remain either survived with little damage or have been repaired.



What is being done with the rubble? Some of it has gone to dumps in what were once seaside parks. This is probably destined for reuse. Some of it (metal, concrete, lumber, plastics) may be readily reusable. Some of it will undoubtedly be used as landfill to create habitable land out of rifts and valleys, while some of it may build new artificial islands. New York Times June 2, 2011 Finding Use for 25 Million Tons of Rubble

Kobe did not have to cope with the destruction of nuclear reactors and the damage of others. The battle at Fukushima Daichi continues; the finger-pointing began almost immediately. There are new laws governing the operation of nuclear power plants. Irradiation of crops, soil, and people remains a concern. It now seems that two Fukushima reactors may be reheating despite efforts to keep them cool. The Guardian Sunday Feb. 12, 2012 Fukushima reactor readings raise reheating concern.

Those pictures are phenomenal!

On the first anniversary of the great earthquake and massive tsunami in Japan,
ARIGATO!

Thanks Toland.

God, the pollen must be somethin' awful here today.

Washington Post March 9, 2012 by Joel Achenbach Seismic hazards: Japan earthquake and other tectonic surprises challenge scientific assumptions

Bawled like a baby.

Arigatou gozaimasu, Tolland!

MSNBC April 2, 2012 Fukushima radiation headed across Pacific Ocean

Lotta pollen here, too.

Hit me last night reading about Pluto's son. Hit me this morning reading about 40,000 singing outside the Breivik trial.

Lotta, lotta pollen. Reminder to self: If you keep reading Fogbow, buy tissues.

After effect of the tsunami.

Japan shuts down last nuclear reactor
http://www.smh.com.au/world/japan-shuts ... 1y5o7.html

Most of the scare stories about the effects of Japan's earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima disaster have been about radiation reaching our West Coast. I've not yet seen any credible scientist or official identify this as a genuine problem.

However, there is a real problem in which it looks like Federal emergency aid will be required: some of what was taken by the tsunami floats, and the ocean is delivering that stuff along the West Coast. Some of it would be hazardous to local marine ecosystems.

A 66-foot dock arrived near Newport, OR in May. It was covered in exotic seaweed and other organisms (starfish, cockles and mussels?) that were considered to be invasive species. Volunteers burned them off the dock. Now the dock itself has to be removed from the beach.

Boats arrived early on. Balls have already washed up and been returned to Japan. Pieces of houses have been reported by observers at sea.

West Coast needs federal help with tsunami debris

See also NPR

There have been suggestions from some kindly souls that Japan should be billed for the clean-up costs, which I view as extremely tacky. This was a natural disaster of epic proportions. Nobody argued for billing Indonesia for the clean-up costs of the Boxing Day tsunami. Were radiation to become a real problem, I might rethink that because it is evident that Japan's lax enforcement policies played a very large role in the damage to the Fukushima reactors.

House Republicans may insist that if California, Oregon, and Washington receive Federal emergency assistance, compensating cuts must be made elsewhere.

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Asking Japan to pay for the clean-up costs would open wide the barn door for assertions that developing countries being affected by climate change should bill the industrialized nations of the 19th century for their losses and costs, on the "polluter pays" principle. A weak form of this is already in effect in the grants available from the UN to help developing countries adopt "green technologies." Most of that money stays with the industrialized nations, of course.

Mutant Butterflies Found near Fukushima



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/1 ... 77180.html

I want Mothra or I'm not interested.

The last nuclear power plant operating in Japan is being shut down. Whether nuclear power will ever again be used in Japan is questionable. It is a major political issue in which the interests of electric power companies, traditionally closely connected to the government, are in conflict with public opinion and scientific concern about the seismic instability of the island chain. The Diet has not yet succeeded in creating an independent agency on the order of our Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Kan government fell as a direct result of its inept and dishonest handling of the Fukushima crisis.

Japan is now at about 4% energy self-sufficiency. In order to reduce its heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels, since 2001 Japanese scientists and engineers have been trying to find a practical way to capture the methane stored in methane hydrates on the deep ocean floor. Some believe that the Eastern Nankai Trough, in Japanese territorial waters, has about 1.2 trillion cubic meters of methane hydrates, enough to supply Japanese energy needs for 12 years if all the methane could be captured. The technical challenges are large.

To me, it is not at all obvious that an island chain that is devoid of most of the resources required for an advanced industrial civilization can support a population of 128 million persons. The standard explanation for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor is that the nation's leaders knew that it could not survive Roosevelt's embargo on the importation of iron, steel, and oil. Expansion of empire seemed to be the only solution, and the U.S. stood in the way.

Used car auction houses have long been famous for importing stock from areas that have been devastated by floods, selling cars that have been cleaned up on the exterior but that are damaged in invisible ways.

Some Japanese gangs are apparently trying to do this with cars that were contaminated by radiation from the Fukushima disaster. Kenya and Tanzania have hired Japanese firms to certify that cars to be exported to their countries are free of radiation. Despite warnings from the Japanese Embassy in Kampala, Uganda has taken no such measures.

The Uganda Daily Monitor August 26, 2012 Radioactive Japanese cars on the market

I'm hearing the second round of the Civil Defense sirens now because I live close to the shore & a quake off of Canada has generated a tsunami warning for Hawaii, with a possible tsunami starting here at 10:28 our time. I'll hope that this will amount to nothing, but I certainly did contact family who might be affected. I am too busy now to do volunteer work with the Red Cross but I worked with them in the past & still commend the work they do, based on my prior experience with them.

All of us need to stay prepared for any disaster & I hope that the huge storm expected on the east coast won't be too bad. The first thing I told my kids, was to go fill up the gas tanks in their cars. Then store clean water & get batteries. We are so blessed here that we don't have to worry about the cold.

The early reports are that the tsunami hit Hawaii with 2-3 foot crests and that most people on the coasts had heeded the evacuation order. There could still be damage to beachfront properties, of course. How are things there now?