On the night of October 10, 1957 a fire broke out in Pile Number One at Windscale. The reactor had been loaded beyond its original design limit in order to provide materials for Britain's nuclear weapons programme.
Nuclear fuel cartridges caught fire, releasing contaminants into the atmosphere via the reactors air cooling system. As fire ripped through the pile, the staff at Windscale struggled to find a way to extinguish it and avert disaster, a situation no-one had ever faced before.
***
Japanese to build £700m UK nuclear power plants: Hitachi deal will provide energy for 14m homes for 60 years
09:17 GMT, 30 October 2012 | Updated: 22:51 GMT, 30 October 2012
By James Chapman
Up to six new nuclear power reactors will power 14million homes for 60 years following a massive deal announced yesterday.
In the most significant boost yet for Government plans for a new network of atomic power stations, Japanese engineering giant Hitachi took on a project to construct plants in Wales and Gloucestershire.
The £700million deal will create 12,000 jobs for construction workers, engineers and other skilled employees, and spark a broader multi-billion-pound investment in the nuclear industry.
First Fukushima beef in 30 months shipped to the USA
News On Japan via NHKReloaded -- October 16, 2012
Cattle farmers in Fukushima Prefecture have resumed beef exports to the United States for the first time in 2 and a half years.
Farmers celebrated the shipment of 3 cattle with a ceremony on Sunday. The leader of a local agricultural cooperative said the resumption is a tailwind for Fukushima farmers who have been suffering from the effects of the nuclear accident.
The 3 cattle will be processed in Japan and the meat will be sold to upscale restaurants in the United States.
The video below displays epicentres and earthquakes greater than magnitude 3.0 from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011. The yellow line lists the number of earthquakes in Japan over the one year period. The magnitude 9.0 large sequence earthquakes begin at 1:48 on the video.
Japan has 55 nuclear plants and is situated in an earthquake and tsunami zone. There are more than 127 million people living within close proximity of 54 nuclear reactors. As of June 2011, more than 80 per cent of Japanese are anti-nuclear and distrust government information on Fukushima and radiation.
The spent fuel rod pool in Fukushima Reactor 4 is in danger of collapse. If the spent fuel rod pool in Fukushima Reactor 4 collapses and the rods catch fire, experts claim the amount of radiation released will be the equivalent of 1000 atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima.
On April 26, 1986, one reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in the Ukraine, emitting deadly radiation 100 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Five hundred thousand men worked for seven months to build the sarcophagus that encases the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Hundreds of thousands of those men died from exposure to lethal doses of radiation.
Thousands of babies have been born with terrible deformities because of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster released more than four times the amount of radioactive cesium-137 leaked during the Chernobyl disaster.
***
Conference on The Nuclear Danger: Nuclear War and Nuclear Power
Dr Helen Caldicott, Montreal, March 18, 2011
"The International Atomic Agency which promotes nuclear power has an unholy alliance with the World Health Organization which says you must not examine any nuclear accidents unless we say you can. Therefore, WHO says only 56 people died at Chernobyl.
However, the New York Academy of Science has just, to its credit, translated 5,000 papers from Russian because there were very few papers written in English because no one wanted to find out. Almost a million people have died as a result of Chernobyl. … Forty percent of the European landmass is currently radioactive. There are farms in England whose lambs are so full of caesium 137 they can't be sold on the market.
Do not buy European food ever because you don't know what's radioactive and what is not. It will be radioactive for 100s or 1000s of years. Turkey got a hell of a fallout and the Turkish government was so annoyed with Russia, it picked all of its radioactive tea and sent it back to Russia. But you'll see your health food shops are full of dried Turkish apricots, dried Turkish tomatoes and the like."
"Plutonium has a half life of 24,400 years so it lasts about a half a million years. … Plutonium, you only need 5 kilos to make a bomb and each reactor makes 500, no, 250 KG a year. It's so toxic that a microgram is carcinogenic, that's a millionth of a gram. Hypothetically, if you could take a pound of plutonium and distribute that in every person's lung on earth, that's enough to kill every person on earth. Each of those six reactors (Fukushima, Japan) contain more than 250 KG of plutonium."
On March 14, 2011, Unit 3 of the Fukushima reactor exploded, sending a huge smoke plume into the air. This particular reactor contains rods fueled with MOX plutonium. MOX plutonium fuel is two million times more deadly than enriched uranium. This information has been largely absent from most media reports on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
MOX plutonium is a highly dangerous "mixed-oxide" (MOX) fuel that is present in six percent of the fuel rods at the plant's Unit 3 reactor. According to the Nuclear Information Resource Center, this plutonium-uranium fuel mixture is far more dangerous than enriched uranium -- a single milligram (mg) of MOX is as deadly as 2,000,000 mg of normal enriched uranium.
If even a couple milligrams of MOX plutonium were released during this explosion -- or if other explosions at the plant inflict any damage on the MOX-filled rods -- then the consequences would be more devastating than the leakage of enriched uranium. And, since no one knows for sure exactly which rods have been damaged, and whether or not the situation can actually be contained, it is only a matter of time before the world learns what can and cannot be done.
The Japanese government considered evacuating all of Tokyo, but did not evacuate Tokyo because of the confusion and fear that would happen.
The spent fuel rod pool at Reactor 4 is in danger of collapse. If it collapses and the spent fuel rods catch fire then that will contaminate all of Japan with a deathly dose of radiation that could be the equivalent of 1000 atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima.
Uranium 238, Uranium 234 and Plutonium 239 were all used at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Uranium Alpha 238 is a radioactive element with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Uranium Alpha 234 is a radioactive element with a half-life of 245,000 years.
Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years.
By August 2011, Fukushima had released the same amount of radioactive caesium-137 as 168 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. Read more here.
Fukushima will continue to release radiation for 1000s of years.
The British government owned Sellafield nuclear plant on the northwest coast of England produces approximately one-fourth of the United Kingdom's energy. Radioactive nuclear waste discharged from Sellafield into the Irish Sea has turned it into one of the most radioactive bodies of water in the world. There has been an increase in the rate of childhood leukaemia in the area surrounding the Sellafield nuclear plant.
Great Britain is responsible for 80 per cent of the radioactive nuclear waste dumped and discharged into the oceans.
***
The Children of Plutonium High Cancer Rate Found in Offspring of Sellafield Fathers
By William Keepin, PhD (First appeared in Nuclear Guardianship Forum, #3, Spring 1994)
Adults who work in facilities that handle plutonium and other radioactive materials may unwittingly pass on cancer to their future children. This is the implication of a detailed scientific study recently carried out by British epidemiologist Martin Gardner and his colleagues, to examine anecdotal reports that cancer rates are excessively high for children who live near the Sellafield plutonium reprocessing plant in Great Britain.
The Sellafield plant is one of the principal sources of plutonium bound for Japan in numerous shipments planned over the next few decades. The first of these shipments has already arrived in Japan. Gardner and his colleagues concluded that the increased incidence of leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma among children in the vicinity of Sellafield is correlated with paternal employment at the plant. The results indicated that a father's exposure to routine low-level radiation on the job at Sellafield increases six- to eight-fold his children's risk of contracting leukemia or lymphoma. The Gardner findings are unprecedented, because they suggest that exposure to very low levels of radiation - well within accepted safety standards - may be sufficient to induce cancer in offspring.
Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare is a chilling 2009 documentary about the nuclear industry and what it does with radioactive waste. Much of that radioactive waste is dumped straight into the ocean.
Beyond Nuclear Fact Sheet Nuclear Power and France: Setting the Record Straight
The liquid discharges from La Hague (and the UK reprocessing plant at Sellafield) have resulted in contamination of area beaches and of seas as far as away as the Arctic Circle and are considered among the ten main anthropogenic sources of radioactive pollution of the world’s oceans.
Two independent medical studies found elevated rates of leukemia in young people living around La Hague. (Similar leukemia clusters have also been recorded around the British reprocessing site at Sellafield which has turned the Irish Sea into one of the most radioactively contaminated bodies of water in the world.)
Note: La Hague is a nuclear plant on the Normandy coast in France.
***
Nuclear special Links between childhood leukaemia and nuclear power plant radiation
15th February, 2012 By Matilda Lee
The UK government's scientific advisory group found no link between childhood leukaemia and proximity to nuclear power plants, but German and French research has found an alarming doubling of risk
In the latest development in the debate over to what extent there is a link between childhood leukaemia and radiation from nuclear power plants, a French study has found a doubling in the incidence of the disease among children under 5 living within 5-kilometre radius of a nuclear plant.
Conference on The Nuclear Danger: Nuclear War & Nuclear Power
Montreal, March 18, 2011, Dr Helen Caldicott
"Plutonium has a half life of 24,400 years so it lasts about a half a million years. … Plutonium, you only need 5 kilos to make a bomb and each reactor makes 500, no, 250 KG a year. It's so toxic that a microgram is carcinogenic, that's a millionth of a gram. Hypothetically, if you could take a pound of plutonium and distribute that in every person's lung on earth, that's enough to kill every person on earth. Each of those six reactors (Fukushima, Japan) contain more than 250 KG of plutonium."
***
Nuclear special Links between childhood leukaemia and nuclear power plant radiation
15th February, 2012 By Matilda Lee
The UK government's scientific advisory group found no link between childhood leukaemia and proximity to nuclear power plants, but German and French research has found an alarming doubling of risk
In the latest development in the debate over to what extent there is a link between childhood leukaemia and radiation from nuclear power plants, a French study has found a doubling in the incidence of the disease among children under 5 living within 5-kilometre radius of a nuclear plant.
Fish Caught off San Diego Coast Radioactive: Researchers
15 tuna captured contained levels of two radioactive substances
Monday, May 28, 2012 | Updated 9:43 PM PDT
Copyright Associated Press / NBC 7 San Diego
Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of San Diego 6,000 miles away -- the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.
"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
Five months after the Fukushima disaster, Fisher of Stony Brook University in New York and a team decided to test Pacific bluefin that were caught off the coast of San Diego.
To their surprise, tissue samples from all 15 tuna captured contained levels of two radioactive substances -- ceisum-134 and cesium-137 -- that were higher than in previous catches.
Plutonium and Uranium have been detected in abnormal density measuring from the end of March to the beginning of April in Guam, Hawaii, and the US west coast, according to my close examination on the RadNet database of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This proves that Plutonium and Uranium, some of the most toxic materials, had dispersed from the Fukushima Diichi Nuclear Plant (and it also means that these materials have contaminated the ocean). While the government, mainstream media, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), and biased academia in Japan have closed their mouth tight about this fact (By the way, the US government also provides very limited information of radioactive substance in the main pages of the website that most of the people visit), it has already been spreading among net users, both ordinary people and specialists, by making it impossible to conceal the truth from us any more.
If radioactive material from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant—disabled by the March11 Japan earthquake and tsunami—continues to enter the ocean, marine life could be threatened, experts say.
In the past week, seawater samples taken near the nuclear power plant, on Japan's eastern coast, have shown elevated levels of radioactive isotopes, including cesium 137 and iodine 131, according to the New York Times. (See "Japan Tries to Avert Nuclear Disaster.")
MOX plutonium fuel used in Fukushima's Unit 3 reactor two million times more deadly than enriched uranium
Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Ethan A. Huff
(NaturalNews) Largely absent from most mainstream media reports on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is the fact that a highly-dangerous "mixed-oxide" (MOX) fuel in present in six percent of the fuel rods at the plant's Unit 3 reactor. Why is MOX a big deal? According to the Nuclear Information Resource Center (NIRS), this plutonium-uranium fuel mixture is far more dangerous than typical enriched uranium -- a single milligram (mg) of MOX is as deadly as 2,000,000 mg of normal enriched uranium.
On March 14, Unit 3 of the Fukushima reactor exploded, sending a huge smoke plume into the air. This particular reactor, of course, contains the rods fueled with MOX.
