Japan's TEPCO suspends cleanup at Fukushima plant
Japan's TEPCO suspends cleanup at Fukushima plant
TOKYO, Jun (Reuters) - The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, said on Saturday it had suspended an operation to clean up radioactive water only hours after it had begun as radiation levels rose faster than expected.
"The level of radiation at a machine to absorb cesium has risen faster than our initial projections," said a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co.
The plan had got underway on Friday after being delayed by a series of glitches.
Officials had said earlier this week that large and growing pools of radioactive water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were in danger of spilling into the sea within a week unless action was taken quickly.
Tepco has pumped massive amounts of water to cool three reactors at the plant that went into meltdown after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems.
But managing the radioactive water has become a major headache as the plant runs out of places to keep it. Around 110,000 metric tones of highly radioactive water is stored at the plant.
(Reporting by Hideyuki Sano; Editing by Ron Popeski)
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Read more at www.reuters.com
UN backs gay rights for first time ever
UN backs gay rights for first time ever
FILE - In this June 11, 2011 file photo demonstrators attend the Europride gay rights …
Video: Gay Marriage Bill In NY Senate In The Hands Of GOPCBS 2 New York 2:14 | 1232 views
- Article: New York same sex marriage vote delayed
Fri, Jun 17, 2011
GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations endorsed the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people for the first time ever Friday, passing a resolution hailed as historic by the U.S. and other backers and decried by some African and Muslim countries.
The declaration was cautiously worded, expressing "grave concern" about abuses because of sexual orientation and commissioning a global report on discrimination against gays.
But activists called it an important shift on an issue that has divided the global body for decades, and they credited the Obama administration's push for gay rights at home and abroad.
"This represents a historic moment to highlight the human rights abuses and violations that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people face around the world based solely on who they are and whom they love," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement.
Following tense negotiations, members of the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council narrowly voted in favor of the declaration put forward by South Africa, with 23 votes in favor and 19 against.
Backers included the U.S., the European Union, Brazil and other Latin American countries. Those against included Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Pakistan. China, Burkina Faso and Zambia abstained, Kyrgyzstan didn't vote and Libya was suspended from the rights body earlier.
The resolution expressed "grave concern at acts of violence and discrimination, in all regions of the world, committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation and gender identity."
More important, activists said, it also established a formal U.N. process to document human rights abuses against gays, including discriminatory laws and acts of violence. According to Amnesty International, consensual same-sex relations are illegal in 76 countries worldwide, while harassment and discrimination are common in many more.
"Today's resolution breaks the silence that has been maintained for far too long," said John Fisher of the gay rights advocacy group ARC International.
The White House in a statement strongly backed the declaration.
"This marks a significant milestone in the long struggle for equality, and the beginning of a universal recognition that (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) persons are endowed with the same inalienable rights — and entitled to the same protections — as all human beings."
The resolution calls for a panel discussion next spring with "constructive, informed and transparent dialogue on the issue of discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against" gays, lesbians and transgender people.
The prospect of having their laws scrutinized in this way went too far for many of the council's 47-member states.
"We are seriously concerned at the attempt to introduce to the United Nations some notions that have no legal foundation," said Zamir Akram, Pakistan's envoy to the U.N. in Geneva, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Nigeria claimed the proposal went against the wishes of most Africans. A diplomat from the northwest African state of Mauritania called the resolution "an attempt to replace the natural rights of a human being with an unnatural right."
Boris Dittrich of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights program at Human Rights Watch said it was important for the U.S. and Western Europe to persuade South Africa to take the lead on the resolution so that other non-Western countries would be less able to claim the West was imposing its values.
At the same time, he noted that the U.N. has no enforcement mechanism to back up the resolution. "It's up to civil society to name and shame those governments that continue abuses," Dittrich said.
The Obama administration has been pushing for gay rights both domestically and internationally.
In March, the U.S. issued a nonbinding declaration in favor of gay rights that gained the support of more than 80 countries at the U.N. In addition, Congress recently repealed the ban on gays openly serving in the military, and the Obama administration said it would no longer defend the constitutionality of the U.S. law that bars federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
The vote in Geneva came at a momentous time for the gay rights debate in the U.S. Activists across the political spectrum were on edge Friday as New York legislators considered a bill that would make the state the sixth — and by far the biggest — to allow same-sex marriage.
Asked what good the U.N. resolution would do for gays and lesbians in countries that opposed the resolution, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary Daniel Baer said it was a signal "that there are many people in the international community who stand with them and who support them, and that change will come."
"It's a historic method of tyranny to make you feel that you are alone," he said. "One of the things that this resolution does for people everywhere, particularly LGBT people everywhere, is remind them that they are not alone."
Associated Press writer David Crary in New York contributed to this report.
Read more at beta.news.yahoo.com
Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
Nuclear watchdog wants probe into how two workers were exposed to twice legal level of radiation at tsunami-hit plant. ( 10-Jun-2011 )
"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
Japan's 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."
TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.
"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"
Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.
"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."
Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive "hot spots" around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.
"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."
Radiation monitors for children
Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.
TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.
Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.
In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.
The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.
"There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to children," Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.
Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, but added: "There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese government's 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well."
Gundersen points out that far more radiation has been released than has been reported.
"They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this," he said. "The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."
According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles".
"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."
Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.
The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer.
"These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant," he explained, "One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April."
Blame the US?
In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear reactors over the next decade. In a referendum vote this Monday, 95 per cent of Italians voted in favour of blocking a nuclear power revival in their country. A recent newspaper poll in Japan shows nearly three-quarters of respondents favour a phase-out of nuclear power in Japan.
Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?
Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.
Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in Japan.
He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the fact that most of them are of US design.
"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes," Dr Sawada told Al Jazeera. "I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan."
Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US, something Dr Sawada feels is also a large component of the problem.
"Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use," he explained. "The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese government not use this technology yet, but the government accepted to use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power stations, and was thus subjected to US government policy."
As a 13-year-old, Dr Sawada experienced the US nuclear attack against Japan from his home, situated just 1400 metres from the hypocentre of the Hiroshima bomb.
"I think the Fukushima accident has caused the Japanese people to abandon the myth that nuclear power stations are safe," he said. "Now the opinions of the Japanese people have rapidly changed. Well beyond half the population believes Japan should move towards natural electricity."
A problem of infinite proportions
Dr Ramana expects the plant reactors and fuel cores to be cooled enough for a shutdown within two years.
"But it is going to take a very long time before the fuel can be removed from the reactor," he added. "Dealing with the cracking and compromised structure and dealing with radiation in the area will take several years, there's no question about that."
Dr Sawada is not as clear about how long a cold shutdown could take, and said the problem will be "the effects from caesium-137 that remains in the soil and the polluted water around the power station and underground. It will take a year, or more time, to deal with this".
Gundersen pointed out that the units are still leaking radiation.
"They are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount of radioactive liquid," he said. "It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids."
Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how to cool two of the units.
"Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple," he said. "After the earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you're at a point where, if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They've not figured out how to cool units three and four."
Gundersen's assessment of solving this crisis is grim.
"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor."
Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely.
"Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations," he explained. "To do otherwise is simply an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing."
Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan.
"So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water," Gundersen said. "We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come."
Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen's assessment.
"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."
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Ex-CIA: 'Forged document' released as birth certificate
Gen. Paul Vallely: Congress afraid to probe 'possible felony' over fears of 'black backlash'
Ex-CIA: 'Forged document' released as birth certificate
Gen. Paul Vallely: Congress afraid to probe 'possible felony' over fears of 'black backlash'
By Bob Unruh
© 2011 WND
Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, the chief of Stand Up America, a national security expert and Fox News contributor, says the "Certificate of Live Birth" released in April by the White House as "proof positive" of President Obama's Hawaiian birth is a forgery, but the FBI is covering the fraud and no one in Congress is willing to tackle the situation because of fears of a "black backlash" if the failings of the nation's first black president are revealed.
In an interview today with Greg Corombos for WND, Vallely, who previously has expressed concerns about whether the Obama administration is in violation of the U.S. Constitution, said, "His actual birth certificate has never been found in Hawaii nor released from Hawaii hospital there, Kapiolani hospital there, if it in fact did exist."
"We've had three CIA agents, retired, and some of their analytical associates look at it, and all came to the same conclusion, that even the long-form was a forged document," Vallely said.
Get the New York Times best-seller "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to be President," autographed by Jerome Corsi, Ph.D.
"No members of Congress will take this on. The word I get out of Washington is that they don't want to challenge this because it would be in fact a felony offense and in some cases may be even treasonous and [they are] afraid of a black backlash from some of the urban areas," Vallely said.
"But that's a very poor excuse for not taking necessary steps to make sure this president in fact is a legitimate president under Article 2 and he is a born U.S. citizen."
The departments of government designed to uncover wrongdoing, in this case, are on the wrong side, he said.
"I think they're (the FBI) covering for this administration. I think the corruption within this administration is so proliferated through the agencies of government now, we're just in a bad situation here. I think the lack of confidence in our government is growing and many feel that not only all the members of Congress but even our courts are corrupted at this time," he said.
The questions over Obama's eligibility to occupy the Oval Office under the requirements in the Constitution that call for a "natural born citizen" have been raised since before he was elected.
Numerous lawsuits have been filed and challenges organized but none have uncovered Obama's documentation. For most of the past few years, his supporters relied on an online image of a Hawaiian short-form "Certification of Live Birth" as proof of his Hawaiian birth, claiming it was the only documentation available from the state.
However, just as the New York Times best-seller, "Where's the Birth Certificate: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President," by Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., was about to be released, Obama dispatched a private attorney to Hawaii to fetch the supposed long-form "Certificate of Live Birth" and explained that the record now would include the full documentation available from Hawaii.
The original hard-copy birth document, whatever it actually is, has never been seen by the public.
Image released by the White House April 27, 2011
Corsi told WND, "The list is growing of those openly acknowledging the Obama long-form birth certificate released by the White House on April 27 is a forgery.
"That former CIA agents are beginning to weigh in on the White House forgery is important. Too many experts remain afraid to speak out about what is an obvious forgery, fearful that openly speaking out against Obama will hurt their income. That Gen. Vallely has now spoken out shows the cracks are widening around the White House façade that the Obama birth certificate is a legitimate document."
He said, "Vallely is right in saying that millions of Americans are still trying to find out who Barack Obama is.
"The cover-up in Hawaii is still continuing. Every professional forensic document examiner knows the best evidence of the Obama long-form birth certificate is not the electronic Adobe file released on the White House website, but the original document the Hawaii DOH is still hiding in its vault, unwilling to let the public see it with their own eyes. Why won't the White House allow a team of independent professional forensic document examiners inspect and authenticate the original birth certificate document? It makes no sense — unless of course there is no long-form birth certificate in the Hawaii DOH vault."
When Obama released the purported long-form certificate, officials in the Hawaii Department of Health and governor's office refused to simply confirm to WND that the image being presented by Obama was an accurate representation of the records maintained by the state.
Vallely said the document should "thoroughly be analyzed by resident FBI officials and analysts to determine if in fact and validate whether it's forged or real."
"One of the apparent flaws in that document was they listed Kenya as the place of birth of Obama's father, but Kenya was not an established country at that time," he noted.
"There's still a lot of controversy about it, and some of us would just like to have this thing clearly authenticated."
He also cited one of the many issues raised by document experts who have challenged the "birth certificate's" authenticity – the layering in the Adobe computer file.
And Vallely said he knows some would not be satisfied with anything the Obama administration would release, which is a problem, in itself, for the White House.
"That's true, because they don't believe he is eligible. You have a fairly growing contingent out there."
Vallely also made similar statements in an online radio program in which he supported Lakin, the Army doctor who refused orders because neither the military nor the White House would document Obama's eligibility. He spent five months in Fort Leavenworth and only recently was released. His comments start at about 3:30 of the YouTube video:
There, Vallely said, "Obama's birth certificate – I've had retired CIA agents and other investigators go over the birth certificate that was produced and by far, 10 out of 10 have said it's a forgery. So we still have that corruptness going on in the White House. There's a great number of organizations and people still trying to find out who Barack Obama is, where he was born, what his legitimacy is as president of the United States. We know for sure that the Constitution has been violated in Article 2, particularly when you look at the natural-born status."
Only one day earlier, officials in the state of Hawaii claimed that the original of the Obama 'birth certificate' document – the document posted online by the White House – remains "confidential" and cannot be produced in response to a subpoena in a lawsuit over Obama's legitimacy.
The image released by Obama has been challenged by a number of document imaging analysts as a fraud, and it doesn't align with descriptions of it by Obama supporters.
For instance, two weeks before Obama finally released his "long-form birth certificate," Hawaii's former Health Department chief Chiyome Fukino – the one official who claimed to have examined the original birth document under lock and key in Hawaii – was interviewed by NBC News' national investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, who reported that Fukino told him she had seen the original birth certificate and that it was "half typed and half handwritten."
However, the document released by the White House was entirely typed. Only the signatures and two dates at the very bottom were "handwritten." What Fukino described apparently is a different document from what Obama released to the public.
The Sanctity of Marriage must be preserved
According to news reports, there are 2 Republican votes that will determine whether New York decides to trash Traditional Values by institutionalizing Homosexual Marriage.
The Sanctity of Marriage must be preserved.
Please call these state senators right away and urge them to stay loyal to the Family!
Andrew Lanza of Staten Island
(518) 455-3215
James Alesi of Rochester
(518) 455-2015
Thanks for standing up for the Family.
Sincerely,
Eugene Delgaudio
President, Public Advocate of the United States
