Japan 'had Tokyo evacuation plan'

Daily Telegraph

JAPAN feared that tens of millions would be evacuated in a secret worst-case scenario report after Fukushima. 
 
The Japanese government's worst-case scenario at the height of the nuclear crisis last year warned that tens of millions of people, including Tokyo residents, might need to leave their homes, according to a report obtained by The Associated Press. But fearing widespread panic, officials kept the report secret.

The recent emergence of the 15-page internal document may add to complaints in Japan that the government withheld too much information about the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
It also casts doubt about whether the government was sufficiently prepared to cope with what could have been an evacuation of unprecedented scale.

The report was submitted to then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his top advisers on March 25, two weeks after the earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, causing three reactors to melt down and generating hydrogen explosions that blew away protective structures.

Workers ultimately were able to bring the reactors under control, but at the time, it was unclear whether emergency measures would succeed.

Mr Kan commissioned the report, compiled by the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, to examine what options the government had if those efforts failed.

Authorities evacuated 59,000 residents within 20 kilometres of the Fukushima plant, and thousands more were evacuated from other towns later. The report said there was a chance far larger evacuations could be needed.

The report looked at several ways the crisis could escalate - explosions inside the reactors, complete meltdowns, and the structural failure of cooling pools used for spent nuclear fuel.

It said that each contingency was possible at the time it was written, and could force all workers to flee the vicinity, meaning the situation at the plant would unfold on its own, unmitigated.

Using matter-of-fact language, diagrams and charts, the report said that if meltdowns spiral out of control, radiation levels could soar.

In that case, it said evacuation orders should be issued for residents within a 170-kilometre radius of the plant and "voluntary" evacuations should be offered for everyone living within 250 kilometres.
That area that would have included Tokyo and its suburbs, with a population of 35 million people, and other major cities such as Sendai, with a million people, and Fukushima city with 290,000 people.
The report further warned that contaminated areas might not be safe for "several decades."

"We cannot rule out further developments that may lead to an unpredictable situation at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, where there has been an accident, and this report outlines a summary of that unpredictable situation," says the document, written by Shunsuke Kondo, head of the commission, which oversees nuclear policy.

After Mr Kan received the report, he and other Japanese officials publicly insisted that there was no need to prepare for wider-scale evacuations.

The government continues to refuse to make the document public. The AP obtained it yesterday through a government source, who insisted on anonymity because the document was still categorised as internal.

Goshi Hosono, the Cabinet minister in charge of the nuclear crisis, implicitly acknowledged the document's existence earlier this month, but said the government had felt no need to make it public.
"It was a scenario based on hypothesis, and even in the event of such a development, we were told that residents would have enough time to evacuate," said Mr Hosono.

"We were concerned about the possibility of causing excessive and unnecessary worry if we went ahead and made it public," he said.

"That's why we decided not to disclose it."

A Japanese government nuclear policy official, Masato Nakamura, said yesterday that he stood behind Mr Hosono's decisions on the document.

"It was all his decisions," he said. "We do not disclose all administrative documents."

Fukushima Radioactive Fallout Much Worse than Previously Reported

AllGov

 

The nuclear power plant in Japan crippled by a powerful earthquake and tsunami on March 11, released nearly twice as much radiation as the government claimed.

 

Researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research examined dozens of radiation monitoring stations throughout Japan and across the world and concluded that the amount of the primary contaminant, cesium-137 (an isotope with a 30-year half-life), that escaped into the atmosphere was about double the quantity estimated by Japanese officials.

 

The experts also reported that, despite what the Japanese government has claimed, the spent fuel rods stored at the Fukushima Daiichi plant contributed to the radiation release and that this added trouble could have been mitigated by a faster flooding of the pool that contained the fuel rods.

 

The report blames the unnaturally low Japanese estimate on the fact that Japanese scientists only measured radiation inside Japan.  Only about 20% of the total fallout landed over Japan. Most of the rest fell over the Pacific Ocean, and some drifted all the way to North America and Europe.

 

Even though clouds of radioactive cesium-137 passed over Tokyo, the city was saved from serious contamination because the weather was dry and the clouds swept by without the cesium-137 falling on densely populated regions.

-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky

 

Radiation levels spike at locations in Tokyo

Philstar

TOKYO (Xinhua) -- Radiation levels at areas in Tokyo and Chiba prefectures were found Thursday to far exceed current levels in Fukushima prefecture, home to the crisis-hit No. 1 nuclear power plant located 200 km north of Tokyo.

 

An area along a sidewalk in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward, frequently used by elementary school children, was found to have airborne radiation measuring 3.35 microsieverts per hour and a children's amusement park tested positive with 5.82 microsieverts in the Funabashi district of neighboring Chiba prefecture, local authorities said Thursday.

 

By way of comparison, the latest readings taken from inside the evacuation zone in Fukushima prefecture, the central to the world' s worst nuclear accident in 25-years, measured 2.17 microsieverts per hour, according to local prefectural officials.

 

An investigation is currently underway to determine whether the troubled nuclear plant in Fukushima is responsible for the high doses of radiation detected in and around Japan's capital city and Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said Thursday that nuclear agencies and government authorities will increase monitoring activities around the country.

 

The two hotspots have been cordoned off and authorities have attempted to reduce the concentration of radiation by using water and "other" methods, local media said, but the levels have remained worryingly high despite the counter-measures, sparking widespread panic around Japan's primary metropolis.

 

Japan Held Nuclear Data, Leaving Evacuees in Peril

FUKUSHIMA, Japan — The day after a giant tsunami set off the continuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, thousands of residents at the nearby town of Namie gathered to evacuate.

Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.

The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.

But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity.

“From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant. He and thousands from Namie now live in temporary housing in another town, Nihonmatsu. “We are extremely worried about internal exposure to radiation.”

The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”

In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry. As the nuclear plant continues to release radiation, some of which has slipped into the nation’s food supply, public anger is growing at what many here see as an official campaign to play down the scope of the accident and the potential health risks.

Seiki Soramoto, a lawmaker and former nuclear engineer to whom Prime Minister Naoto Kan turned for advice during the crisis, blamed the government for withholding forecasts from the computer system, known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi.

“In the end, it was the prime minister’s office that hid the Speedi data,” he said. “Because they didn’t have the knowledge to know what the data meant, and thus they did not know what to say to the public, they thought only of their own safety, and decided it was easier just not to announce it.”

In an interview, Goshi Hosono, the minister in charge of the nuclear crisis, dismissed accusations that political considerations had delayed the release of the early Speedi data. He said that they were not disclosed because they were incomplete and inaccurate, and that he was presented with the data for the first time only on March 23.

“And on that day, we made them public,” said Mr. Hosono, who was one of the prime minister’s closest advisers in the early days of the crisis before being named nuclear disaster minister. “As for before that, I myself am not sure. In the days before that, which were a matter of life and death for Japan as a nation, I wasn’t taking part in what was happening with Speedi.”

The computer forecasts were among many pieces of information the authorities initially withheld from the public.

Meltdowns at three of Fukushima Daiichi’s six reactors went officially unacknowledged for months. In one of the most damning admissions, nuclear regulators said in early June that inspectors had found tellurium 132, which experts call telltale evidence of reactor meltdowns, a day after the tsunami — but did not tell the public for nearly three months. For months after the disaster, the government flip-flopped on the level of radiation permissible on school grounds, causing continuing confusion and anguish about the safety of schoolchildren here in Fukushima.

Too Late

The timing of many admissions — coming around late May and early June, when inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Japan and before Japan was scheduled to deliver a report on the accident at an I.A.E.A. conference — suggested to critics that Japan’s nuclear establishment was coming clean only because it could no longer hide the scope of the accident. On July 4, the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, a group of nuclear scholars and industry executives, said, “It is extremely regrettable that this sort of important information was not released to the public until three months after the fact, and only then in materials for a conference overseas.”

The group added that the authorities had yet to disclose information like the water level and temperature inside reactor pressure vessels that would yield a fuller picture of the damage. Other experts have said the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco, have yet to reveal plant data that could shed light on whether the reactors’ cooling systems were actually knocked out solely by the 45-foot-tall tsunami, as officials have maintained, or whether damage from the earthquake also played a role, a finding that could raise doubts about the safety of other nuclear plants in a nation as seismically active as Japan.

Government officials insist that they did not knowingly imperil the public.

“As a principle, the government has never acted in such a way as to sacrifice the public’s health or safety,” said Mr. Hosono, the nuclear disaster minister.

Fukushima Radiation Readings at Their Highest, Japan Is Contaminated

Financial Feed

Robots sent to get Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactor No. 1’s radiation readings reflected 1,120 millisierverts of radiation per hour, said the general manager of Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) Junichi Matsumoto. The reading is 4 times higher than the yearly dose a nuclear worker is allowed to be exposed to. Following the quake and tsunami that hit the country, explosions ensued at the nuclear plant and radiation levels from 4 of the 6 reactors leaked. This caused the mass departure of thousands of people as farmland and drinking water were already contaminated.

Tepco said it is not possible to push through with the planned flooding of more water to reactor No. 1 to expedite its emergency cooling efforts. Kyoto University nuclear engineering professor Hironobu Unesaki said Tepco must figure out the high radiation’s source. If it’s from contaminated water leaking from inside the reactor, Tepco’s so-called water tomb may be jeopardized because flooding the containment vessel will result in more radiation in the building, added the professor. The explosion at the plant damaged reactors 1, 2, and 3’s cores and reactor 4’s fuel rods. Tepco has used several emergency measures to cool the units, such as pouring millions of liters of water.

Today in Tokyo, Tepco shares were at 412 yen, down by 3.3%. Since the disaster, shares have dipped by 80% but Tepco said damage to reactors 1 and 2 are less than what’s estimated. Reactor No. 1 was reportedly damaged by 55% against the estimated 70%. Reactor No. 2 was previously said to be damaged by 35% but that was reduced to 25% while No. 3 went from 25% to 30%. Matsumoto said core damage data was revised because some readings on the containment vessel monitors were wrong. There was also a recording mistake and they are investigating the matter, he added.

The public health institute today said radiation level in Tokyo’s water supply was reported to have decreased. Yesterday, iodine-131 level in tap water supply was at zero. There were also no detected Cesium-134 and cesium-137. On March 23, people were told that water supply was not safe for infants after iodine and cesium levels were found to be over the guidelines.