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<p>TOKYO (AP) A new probe at Japan's crippled nuclear power plant has found fatal radiation levels and hardly any cooling water inside one of the reactors, renewing concerns about the plant's stability.</p> <p>The operator of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant says an endoscopic examination Tuesday detected radiation levels up to 10 times the fatal dose inside the No. 2 reactor's contain chamber, suggesting challenges ahead in shutting down the facility.</p>

We noted in August that some parts of Tokyo have more radiation than existed in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zones. And see this and this. There are indications that radiation levels are increasing in Tokyo. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen took 5 random soil samples in Tokyo recently, and found that all 5 were so radioactive that they would be considered radioactive waste in the United States, which would have to be specially disposed of at a facility in Texas:

In the early 1980s, a Taiwan steel company accidentally mixed some highly radioactive cobalt-60 into a batch of steel rebar. The radioactive rods were then used in the construction of 1,700 apartments. As a result, people living in these buildings were subject to radiation up to 30 times the normal amount received from the natural background. When dismayed officials discovered this enormous error 15 years later, they surveyed past and present apartment dwellers expecting to find an epidemic of cancer. Normal incidence would have predicted 160 cancers among the 10,000 residents. To their astonishment, the researchers discovered only five cases...

All but two of Japan’s 54 commercial reactors have gone offline since the nuclear disaster a year ago, after the earthquake and tsunami, and it is not clear when they can be restarted. With the last operating reactor scheduled to be idled as soon as next month, Japan — once one of the world’s leaders in atomic energy — will have at least temporarily shut down an industry that once generated a third of its electricity. With few alternatives, the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, has called for restarting the plants as soon as possible, saying he supports a gradual phase-out...

How the Yakuza went nuclear What really went wrong at the Fukushima plant? One undercover reporter risked his life to find out By Jake Adelstein 11:30AM GMT 21 Feb 2012 /snip Tepco has long been a scandal-ridden company, caught time and time again covering up data on safety lapses at their power plants, or doctoring film footage which showed fissures in pipes. How was the company able to get away with such long-standing behaviour? According to an explosive book recently published in Japan, they owe it to what the author, Tomohiko Suzuki, calls “Japan’s nuclear mafia… A conglomeration of corrupt...

It’s been one of the mysteries of Japan’s ongoing nuclear disaster: How much of the damage did the March 11 earthquake inflict on Fukushima Daiichi’s reactors in the 40 minutes before the devastating tsunami arrived? The stakes are high: If the quake alone structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every other similar reactor in Japan is at risk. Throughout the months of lies and misinformation, one story has stuck: “The earthquake knocked out the plant’s electric power, halting cooling to its reactors,” as the government spokesman Yukio Edano said at a March 15 press...

Minami Soma City assemblyman Koichi Ooyama discloses the result of the test of the mysterious black dust found in locations in Minami Soma City, Fukushima Prefecture. A blogger whom I featured before, "Night that never ends", has been measuring radiation on the strange, black dust he finds in many locations in Minami Soma City, mostly on the road surface. His geiger counter (Inspector) measures all alpha, beta, gamma radiations and x-ray, and his measurement on the surface of this black dust was 295 microsieverts/hour. Assemblyman Ooyama apparently sent the sample to Professor Tomoya Yamauchi of Kobe University. Professor Yamauchi did...

TEPCO blames high reactor temperature reading on broken thermometer National Feb. 14, 2012 - 06:40AM JST ( 10 ) TOKYO — A rapidly rising temperature reading at one of the reactors in Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant that sparked fears of another meltdown is probably caused by a broken thermometer, TEPCO said Monday. Scientists have been watching the equipment for around a week as it slowly rose above 35 degrees Celsius that the two other temperature gauges on the No. 2 reactor showed. There were concerns when it exceeded 80 degrees that a spontaneous nuclear reaction had started in the...

Fukushima No. 2 reactor temperature up to 82C, but not critical: TEPCO TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday the temperature at the bottom of the No. 2 reactor at its crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant rose further to 82 C, but the reactor has not gone critical. While the thermometer reading at shortly after 2 p.m. marked a new high since the reactor attained a cold shutdown in December, the utility known as TEPCO said it has confirmed that sustained nuclear reactions are not taking place in the reactor as no radioactive xenon has been detected...

What if you were promoting an industry that had the potential to kill and injure enormous numbers of people as well as contaminate large areas of land for tens of thousands of years? What if this industry created vast stockpiles of deadly waste but nevertheless required massive amounts of public funding to keep it going? My guess is that you might want to hide that information. From the heyday of the environmental movement in the late 1960s through the late 1970s, many people were openly skeptical about the destructive potential of the nuclear power industry. After the partial meltdown at...

Temperature remains high at damaged reactor An unknown rise in temperature at one of the reactors at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant is troubling its operator. Tokyo Electric says the temperature hasn't gone down even after it increased the volume of cooling water on Tuesday. One of the thermometers at the bottom of reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant gradually rose to about 70 degrees Celsius since January 27th. It had stayed around 45 degrees before. In an effort to lower the temperature, the operator increased the amount of water sprayed on the nuclear fuel by 3 tons...

The Prometheus Trap / Order to Suspend Radiation Monitoring February 06, 2012 By YUMI NAKAYAMA / Staff Writer According to Greek mythology, it was Prometheus who gave fire to humans. The acquisition of fire allowed humankind to develop civilization. Fire derived from fossil fuels further spurred production capacity. In time, humans attained atomic fire, a feat that was also described as "superior energy." Playing with fire, however, has presented humans with a dilemma. Humans, who achieved a civilized world through Prometheus, are now troubled by atomic fire. The series of articles contemplate the country, its citizens and electric power in...

Temperature Soars Mysteriously Inside Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Updated: Monday, 06 Feb 2012, 9:22 AM EST Published : Monday, 06 Feb 2012, 9:22 AM EST By NewsCore TOKYO - The temperature of a reactor at Japan's stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has soared and remained mysteriously high Monday, despite more water being pumped through it. The facility's No.2 reactor had reached 164 degrees Fahrenheit (73.3 degrees Celsius) by Monday morning, after sitting at 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) on Jan. 27, broadcaster NHK reported. That was despite Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) officials pumping 9.6 tonnes (10.6 tons) of water...

Temperature rises at Fukushima No.2 reactor The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says the temperature in the No.2 reactor remains high despite the injection of additional water. A thermometer at the bottom of the reactor showed 73.3 degrees Celsius on Monday morning. It was around 45 degrees on January 27th and 71.7 degrees at 4 PM on Sunday. Tokyo Electric Power Company began injecting 10.6 tons of water per hour from around 1:30 AM on Monday. That's one ton more per hour than before. The utility says 2 other thermometers placed at the bottom of the reactor have...

More leaks found at crippled Japan nuclear plant By MARI YAMAGUCHI (February 3rd, 2012 @ 8:20am) Associated Press TOKYO (AP) - Leaks of radioactive water have become more frequent at Japan's crippled nuclear power plant less than two months after it was declared basically stable. /snip Workers spotted a leak Friday at a water reprocessing unit which released enough beta rays to cause radiation sickness, TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said. He said no one was injured and the leak stopped after bolts were tightened on a tank. /snip The structural integrity of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building has long...

Major new leak at Japan's nuclear plant - Kyodo 01 Feb 2012 22:38 Source: reuters // Reuters Feb 2 (Reuters) - More than 8 tonnes of water have leaked from Japan's stricken nuclear power plant after a frozen pipe burst inside a reactor buiding, but none of the water is thought to have escaped the complex, Kyodo news agency said on Thursday. Kyodo, quoting the Fukushima plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), said the water had leaked from the No.4 reactor when a pipe "dropped off" but that the liquid had all been contained inside the reactor building. The...

As days go by, food in Japan doesn't look very appetizing, to say the least. 1. Radioactive mandarin orange from Kanagawa Prefecture Radioactive cesium was found from the edible part of mandarin oranges (which in the US are called "satsuma" for some reason) and the skin. Security Tokyo is a private testing laboratory that uses the high-precision germanium semiconductor detector, not one of those fly-by-night testing "laboratories" cropping up in Japan (like the one who claimed to have "measured" high radioactive "iodine" in the snow in Hachioji. Totally false. Did I write about it? I don't remember...) But here's the...

From UC Davis News and Information (1/26/2012; emphasis is mine): Japan used seawater to cool nuclear fuel at the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant after the tsunami in March 2011 -- and that was probably the best action to take at the time, says Professor Alexandra Navrotsky of the University of California, Davis. But Navrotsky and others have since discovered a new way in which seawater can corrode nuclear fuel, forming uranium compounds that could potentially travel long distances, either in solution or as very small particles. The research team published its work Jan. 23 in the journal Proceedings of the...

The radioactivity dispersion simulation JCOPE (Japan Coastal Ocean Predictability Experiment) by JAMSTEC (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology), showing cesium-137 dispersion in the Pacific Ocean from March 21, 2011 to January 27, 2012. March 21, 2011 was when the high levels of radioactive materials from the seawater near the plant were first detected. Screenshots from their JCOPE page with the simulation animation (1/30/2012).

(UPDATE: The document issued by the Fukushima Prefecture's expert committee is here (PDF, in Japanese). Total number of children tested: 3765 No. of children found with lumps 5.1 millimeter or larger: 26 No. of children found with lumps less than 5.1 millimeter: 56 No. of children found with cysts 20.1 millimeter or larger: 0 No. of children found with cyst less than 20.1 millimeter: 1086 No. of children with no lumps, cysts: 2622 There are children who have both lump and cyst. ============================================ Waaaiiit a minute... I was looking for more information on the post I wrote about the lumps...