Là-bas à Fukushima et ailleurs

[zev]

Le Bq est une unite infinitesimale quand meme... Les unites qu'on utilise sont en general le kilo voire le MegaBq ou plus.



Tiens en passant je me suis ballade avec mon compteur geiger dans le tohoku (Yamagata->Miyagi->Iwate->Akita) et Tokyo via Niigata (Donc Niigata->Gunma->Saitama->Tokyo->Kanagawa)
Pas de valeur superieure a 0.15 microSv pour l'instant (sachant que le compteur a une sensibilite de 0.1, donc certainement moindre en realite.)

Je mattendais a avoir un pic a Morioka, mais il n'en est rien.

[TB]

« TEPCO has also begun work to cover the entire No. 4 reactor building in order to start removing the spent nuclear fuel from the storage pool. Work to remove the fuel rods could begin as soon as next year.

However, one problem is that TEPCO’s information is now generally greeted with doubts.

"The trust in the central government and TEPCO which allowed the accident to happen has fallen around the world,” Murata said. “There is no nation that wholeheartedly believes those releases."

In the United States, plans have been devised to set up a neutral and independent evaluation committee consisting of experts from around the world to look into the situation at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant and consider ways to resolve the problems there. Such moves show that many feel TEPCO and the Japanese government can no longer be depended upon to deal with the accident. »

Lire Doomsday scenarios spread about No. 4 reactor at Fukushima plant, Par Sato Hideo, Shukan Asahi Weekly Magazine.

[zev]

Tiens en passant, je suis en France, et les taux rencontres ici sont superieurs a ceux du Japon la ou j'habite, j'ai facile 0.2, 0.3 microSv en Bretagne

[nicowisamu]

Surement une centrale nucléaire de bretagne (joke) en train de fuire

[zev]

Tu sais, entre le granit, la centrale de brenilis et les sous marins de l'ile longue...

[TB]

« Au Japon, 3 des 11 communes de la zone interdite autour de Fukushima ont rouvert dans l’indifférence générale. Dans certains secteurs la radioactivité est encore supérieure à la limite fixée pour l’évacuation ! Sciences et Avenir a suivi le retour hésitant des sinistrés de Fukushima dans les villes fantômes. [...]

La réouverture rapide de Minamisoma tient d’abord et avant tout à la volonté de fer du maire, Katsunobu Sakurai. C’est cet élu qui a convaincu le gouvernement de lever la barrière des 20 kilomètres autour de la centrale. «Pour le moment, seules les villes dont les maires étaient les plus motivés et les plus combatifs pour faire revivre leur communes ont rouvert, confirme Kiyomi Sakuma, membre de la cellule chargée des réfugiés du nucléaire. Le gouvernement attend d’être sollicité par les collectivités locales pour rouvrir une ville». La politique dirigiste de protection des riverains de la centrale est donc en train de céder la place à des décisions de compromis, prises au cas par cas avec les autorités locales. »

Lire Fukushima: réouverture de la zone interdite, par Cécile Dumas, dans Science et Avenir

[zev]

Comme je l'avais posté plus tôt sur le forum, les combustible utilisé du la piscine reacteur 4 font encore parler d'eux, le gouvernement lui, soutient mordicus que la piscine est dans un état stable.

Radioactive waste at Fukushima threatens second nuclear catastrophe

Hiroko Tabuchi, Matthew Wald

May 28, 2012

Inspection ... the Nuclear Minister, Goshi Hosono, at Fukushima. Photo: AP




TOKYO: What passes for normal at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant today would have caused shudders among even the most sanguine of experts before an earthquake and tsunami set off the world's second most serious nuclear crisis after Chernobyl.
Fourteen months after the accident, a pool brimming with used fuel rods and filled with vast quantities of radioactive caesium still sits on the top floor of a heavily damaged building, covered only with plastic.
The public's fears about the pool have grown in recent months as some scientists have warned that it has the most potential for setting off a new catastrophe. The three nuclear reactors that suffered meltdowns are in a more stable state, but frequent quakes continue to rattle the region.


The worries gained new traction in recent days after the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, said it had found a slight bulge in one of the walls of the reactor building, stoking fears over the building's safety.
To try to quell such worries, the government sent the Environment and Nuclear Minister to the plant on Saturday, where he climbed a makeshift staircase in protective garb to look at the structure supporting the pool, which he said appeared sound. The minister, Goshi Hosono, added that although the government accepted TEPCO's assurances that reinforcement work had shored up the building, it had ordered further studies because of the bulge.
Some outside experts have also worked to allay fears, saying that the fuel in the pool is now so old that it cannot generate enough heat to start the kind of accident that would allow radioactive material to escape.
But many Japanese have scoffed at those assurances and point out that even if the building is able to withstand further quakes, a claim that they question, the jury-rigged cooling system for the pool has already malfunctioned several times, including a 24-hour failure in April. Had the failures continued, they would have left the rods at risk of dangerous overheating.
Government critics are especially concerned, since TEPCO has said the soonest it could begin emptying the pool is late next year, dashing hopes for earlier action. ''The No. 4 reactor is visibly damaged and in a fragile state, down to the floor that holds the spent fuel pool,'' said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at Kyoto University's research reactor institute and one of the experts raising concerns. ''Any radioactive release could be huge and go directly into the environment.''
The fears over the pool at reactor No. 4, amplified over the web, are helping to undermine assurances by TEPCO and the Japanese government that the Fukushima plant has been brought to a stable condition and are highlighting how complicated the clean-up of the site, expected to take decades, will be. The concerns are also raising questions about whether Japan's all-out effort to convince its citizens that nuclear power is safe kept the authorities from exploring other - and some say safer - options for storing used fuel rods.
''It was taboo to raise questions about the spent fuel that was piling up,'' said Hideo Kimura, who worked as a nuclear fuel engineer at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in the 1990s. ''But it was clear that there was nowhere for the spent fuel to go.''
The worst-case situations for reactor No. 4 would be for the pool to run dry if there is another problem with the cooling system and the rods catch fire, releasing enormous amounts of radioactive material, or that fission restarts if the metal panels that separate the rods are knocked over in a quake. That would be especially bad because the pools, unlike reactors, lack containment vessels to hold in radioactive material.
Attention has focused on No. 4's spent fuel pool because of the large number of assemblies filled with rods that are stored at the reactor building.
According to TEPCO, the pool at the No. 4 reactor, which was not operating at the time of the accident, holds 1331 spent fuel assemblies, which each contain dozens of rods.
Professor Koide and others warn that TEPCO must move more quickly to transfer the fuel rods to a safer location. But such transfers have been greatly complicated by the accident. Ordinarily the rods are lifted by cranes, but at Fukushima those cranes collapsed during the series of disasters that started with the earthquake and included explosions that destroyed portions of several reactor buildings.
TEPCO has said it will build a separate structure next to reactor No. 4 to support a new crane. But under the plan, released last month, the fuel removal will begin late next year.


Source: Bribane Times, The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/wo...-in-japan.html



Weakened Fukushima nuclear pool is not unstable, Japan insists


Toshiaki Shimizu / AFP - Getty Images
Goshi Hosono, Japan's environment minister, shows reporters the fuel rod pool at Fukushima's No. 4 reactor on Saturday.


FUKUSHIMA, Japan -- Amid concerns of a new disaster should a quake destroy the pool cooling off radioactive nuclear fuel rods at Fukushima's Reactor No. 4, Japan on Saturday arranged a tour for journalists and declared the situation manageable -- but also very long term.
"I don't think the situation is unstable," said Goshi Hosono, Japan's environment minister and the man in charge of the cleanup. He was speaking to reporters after his first tour of the twisted and partly destroyed building that houses the reactor.
Hosono said he expected workers to begin removing fuel from the reactor's storage pool next year.
Work began last month to raise what amounts to a giant tent over the building to keep radioactive dust from scattering during the transport of the fuel rods, which now are under just a tarp at the top of the building.

Senator Ron Wyden was the first U.S. Senator to get a look inside Japan's Fukushima nuclear energy plant. Wyden discusses what he saw inside the plant and whether or not imported food from Japan is safe to eat.

Hosono said his biggest concern was ensuring Japan could secure the labor and talent to finish the decommissioning of the Fukushima reactors over the coming decades.
"This may take 30 or even 40 years to complete and extremely difficult work is still ahead of us," he said.
Tokyo Electric Power, the utility that operates the Fukushima Daiichi plant, says its analysis shows the No. 4 reactor building would hold up in a strong earthquake even after being badly damaged by a hydrogen explosion when three nearby reactors suffered meltdowns in March 2011.
Japanese safety regulators on Friday ordered Tepco to recheck its findings after measurements showed the west wall of the reactor building was buckling out by about 1.2 inches.
Some experts believe the fuel in the pool is now too weak to generate much radioactivity, but others are still worried.
"The No. 4 reactor is visibly damaged and in a fragile state, down to the floor that holds the spent fuel pool," Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, told the New York Times. "Any radioactive release could be huge and go directly into the environment."
Hosono said the government accepted Tepco's estimate that the No. 4 reactor could withstand an earthquake measuring a "strong 6" on the Japanese scale.
The magnitude 9 quake last March that triggered a tsunami and overran Fukushima's backup power systems was measured at 7 on the Japanese scale.
Some environmental critics charge the No. 4 reactor presents a particular risk of a knock-on disaster if a subsequent earthquake were to topple it or puncture its fuel storage pool and allow the 65 feet of water now covering and cooling 1,535 uranium fuel assemblies to drain away.
Such an accident, they say, could release far more radiation than the leaks of radioactive water Tepco has battled since improvising a system for cooling reactor cores last year.
Hosono climbed a narrow and dark staircase built with scaffolding to take reporters to the top of the No. 4 building where the fuel pool has been covered with a tarp.
Tepco has taken steps to shore up support for the pool, which measures 30 feet by 60 feet across, by adding a cement column underneath.
Officials from the utility demonstrated how they were using water in the pool as a kind of level to confirm the building was not tipping. They also showed a grid of floats holding up the tarp they said could support a person if a worker fell in.

Source: msnbc.com

[maruchan]

In french please?

Perso suis allergique aux articles en anglais, je ne les lis que sous la torture.

[zev]

A la louche:
http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/monde...fukushima.html
http://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/en...-et-cie-117291

C'est pourtant pas dur de mettre quelques mot clefs dans google news [piscine fukushima]

Sinon il reste la torture

[maruchan]

Le problème n'est pas de savoir faire des recherches ou pas Zev.

Sur un forum français, il me semble normal de mettre des articles en français.

Il te semble aller de soi que tout le monde parle anglais mais ce n'est pas le cas. Écrire sur un forum, c'est penser à ceux qui vont lire les messages.