National
John Hofilena on May 22 2013
Just outside of Japan’s disaster-stricken
Fukushima Prefecture, there are people who are saying they have been denied compensation despite experiencing increased radiation levels even from living around the fringes of the nuclear disaster that was caused by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. 700 residents of the Hippo district in
Miyagi Prefecture, an area northeast of Fukushima, filed their claims on Tuesday via a government arbitration office, saying that they should at least be getting the same rates of compensation as the residents of Fukushima.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team that inspected the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant last month said that the plan by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) to pump groundwater into the sea before it flows into the reactor buildings is a good
solution to the increasing radioactive water inside the plant.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (
TEPCO) on Monday met with Fukushima fishermen looking for their approval for the utility company’s plan to dump the groundwater it has pumped from the premises of the disaster-stricken
Fukushima nuclear power plant. Groundwater that is collected in the ground from rain and precipitation may get mixed with the highly radioactive waste water in the plants already leaking underwater tanks, and the embattled utility company wants approval to redirect the groundwater before it mixes with the radioactive water in the tanks.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (
TEPCO), operators of the disaster-stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, have revealed that radiation limits with the plants area and boundaries could exceed their self-imposed “safe” limit in the next few days. This is due to the power utility deciding to dump radioactive waste water
from leaking underground tanks to storage facilities above-ground. The radiation level increase is directly connected to the transfer of water from underground to above-ground storage tanks.
They once were the mightiest entities in Japan, but now power utility companies are facing a second straight year of combined losses of 16 billion dollars, amidst the delays in the restart of their
nuclear reactors, plus the rising costs of importing fossil fuel due to the weaker yen. Now they would have to either raise consumer prices or seek further government assistance just to keep afloat.
One of the biggest changes within Tokyo Electric Power Co (
TEPCO), two years after the nuclear meltdown of its Fukushima Daiichi power plant during the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, is that women are taking a more active role in its corporate reform. 48 year old Rieko Sato has now become the youngest and the first woman to take an executive post in the company.
A Japanese court has rejected a lawsuit that demanded the Japanese government to evacuate children from Koriyama City,
Fukushima Prefecture due to possible negative health effects of radiation on them. The city is around 50 kilometers west of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (
TEPCO) stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, and the parents – with the help of anti-nuclear lobbyists – filed the lawsuit because while the government says that the area is safe for adults, children have been traditionally more prone to radiation effects.
The third time is definitely not the charm for Tokyo Electric Power Co. as it struggles to continue the decommissioning process of the stricken
Fukushima nuclear power plant, for the third time in five weeks the process has been halted by rodents.
TEPCO revealed on Monday that it once again had to stop the cooling of used uranium fuel rods to remove the rats from the cooling pool and to install a net to prevent it from happening again.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (
IAEA) team, headed by Juan Carlos Lentijo said that the decommissioning of the Fukushima nuclear plant might take more than 40 years. The nuclear watchdog also urged Tokyo Electric Power Co (
TEPCO), the operator of the crippled plant to improve the "essential systems" so as to avoid prolonging the clean-up.
In what is hopefully a long-term solution to Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) radioactive water storage issues in the stricken
Fukushima nuclear power plant, the embattled utility company is set to transfer the huge amounts of tainted liquid from its leaking underground cisterns to above-ground storage tanks. The transfer pipeline itself suffered other leaks, causing further delays in the process, but
TEPCO is assuring the public that the transfer will start on April 16.
