Japan suspends work at stricken nuclear plant - (again) 4:21 AM est

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20110316/as-japan-earthquake/

FUKUSHIMA, Japan — Japan ordered emergency workers to withdraw from its stricken nuclear plant Wednesday amid a surge in radiation, temporarily suspending efforts to cool the overheating reactors.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the workers, who have been dousing the reactors with seawater in a frantic effort to stabilize their temperatures, had no choice but to pull back from the most dangerous areas. "The workers cannot carry out even minimal work at the plant now," Edano said, as smoke billowed above the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex. "Because of the radiation risk we are on standby."

---

Later Wednesday, officials said they were considering using helicopters to dump water onto the most troubled reactors in a desperate effort to cool them down.
But Edano has already warned that may not work.

"It's not so simple that everything will be resolved by pouring in water. We are trying to avoid creating other problems," he said.

SkyNewsBreak‎ Tokyo Electric Power says highest radiation levels recorded so far in reactor 3 at Fukushima nuclear plant
Twitter -
2310
38 minutes ago

2 minutes.

do you really think the huff po is going to be "breaking" any news about japan?

it's the same incident. reported hours after the fact. just so people can post it and confuse everyone.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

FUKUSHIMA, Japan (AP) – Japan ordered emergency workers to withdraw from its stricken nuclear plant Wednesday amid a surge in radiation, temporarily suspending efforts to cool the overheating reactors.

i'm talking about the huff po report. it's clearly about the earlier withdrawal.

Reporters are frustrated at the lack of updates and you are complaining about posters here?

i just wish people wouldn't post from secondary media. they are always hours behind. and every time something out of date is posted, people get confused.

Oh and I do not want to be cold, but these people are already dead...

from twitter:

Japan pulls workers, suspends operations on nuke plant as ...
1 hour ago
"The workers cannot carry out even minimal work at the plant now," Edano said. "Because of the radiation risk, we are on standby." Radiation levels had gone ...

as is your twitter.

during the daytime in Japan, I might add.

Follow the latest events around the Pacific Rim after an 9.0-magnitude earthquake off Japan's coast triggered a devastating tsunami.

Blog: Mar11-12 - Mar13 - Mar14 - Mar15

(All times are local in Japan GMT+9)

5:22pm
Joi Ito (@Joi) blogs about how the change of location of workers at Fukushima plant was misreported as 'evacuation' -as it simply got lost in translation - here is Joi's blog post

This morning at 8:30AM March 16 JST Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano held a press conference to talk about the smoke billowing from Reactor 3 at Fukushima.

At this press conference, he explained that the radiation levels spiked and that TEPCO staff would be temporarily moved to "a safe region". He probably should have said "location" as Hiroko Tabuchi pointed out to me.

The foreign press misunderstood this and started reporting that the TEPCO staff had evacuated the reactor causing a broad panic. Hiroko Tabuchi of the New York Times contacted the Nuclear Industry Safety Agency and TEPCO directly to clarify and confirmed that they had not in fact been evacuated, but just moved temporarily to a safer area during the spike.

Jun Seita then reported that as of 11:30AM, NHK was reporting that the staff were back to work.

The frustrating thing was that once this corrosive and sensational misinformation was in the main stream media via the wires, it was very hard to get them to fix it.

Al Jazeera was the first that I saw to edit their news story to reflect that indeed they had not been evacuated.

At the same press conference Edano accidentally said 1000 millisievert instead of 1000 microsieverts causing further confusion in the media.

If you look at the sat photos you can see the destruction on No. 3.

The lopsided smoke could mean it's coming right from the core (torus) and that is broken through.

Just a wild hare guess.

Off to sleep, tomorrow might be worse! Ate my kelp at least.

I read (sorry, somewhere, been jumping around a lot) that the 70 or so onsite had gone into the main control room, which is heavily shielded.

releases at #3 are the deepest concern, because of the "fresh" 2010 mox rods... pluto....

On August 29, 2002, the government of Japan revealed that TEPCO was guilty of false reporting in routine governmental inspection of its nuclear plants and systematic concealment of plant safety incidents. All seventeen of its boiling-water reactors were shut down for inspection as a result. TEPCO's chairman Hiroshi Araki, President Nobuya Minami, Vice-President Toshiaki Enomoto, as well as the advisers Shō Nasu and Gaishi Hiraiwa stepped-down by September 30, 2002.<6> The utility "eventually admitted to two hundred occasions over more than two decades between 1977 and 2002, involving the submission of false technical data to authorities".<7> Upon taking over leadership responsibilities, TEPCO's new president issued a public commitment that the company would take all the countermeasures necessary to prevent fraud and restore the nation's confidence. By the end of 2005, generation at suspended plants had been restarted, with government approval.

In 2007, however, the company announced to the public that an internal investigation had revealed a large number of unreported incidents. These included an unexpected unit criticality in 1978 and additional systematic false reporting, which had not been uncovered during the 2002 inquiry. Along with scandals at other Japanese electric companies, this failure to ensure corporate compliance resulted in strong public criticism of Japan's electric power industry and the nation's nuclear energy policy. Again, the company made no effort to identify those responsible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Electric_Power_Company

Just sayin' :shrug:

These damned "news" stations need to get with the program and slap a "RECORDED EARLIER" on every rebroadcast.. especially when there is a real emergency in progress..

I absolutely agree with you on the rebroadcast crap. Unbelievable.

I got confused myself, about whether the last workers had left--a very dire sign of imminent multiple meltdowns--or whether they returned and then were told to leave again--or what. And in trying to judge the status of this disaster, that's critically important info. We've also had the problem of translation. As someone pointed out here, they meant to say that the workers had been moved to a different area (because of radiation levels) but instead said to a different "region." Big difference in English.

There are ENOUGH problems already--with what may well be official lying (for good reasons or not), cascading events (at one point, not even the official who was reporting was sure which reactor something was happening in--radiation sensor wasn't working, area was too "hot" to get near, they had to take an aerial photo)--multiple fires, explosions, meltdowns, first this reactor then another--time zone problems (what day is it in Japan? what time?), and on and on. ADDING to all this, different news organizations reporting things at different times and in different ways, probably plcking up stories from each other and reporting them later, and repeating stories numerous times.

I get a feeling of "disconnect" between how these scumbag news corporations view disaster in a very lucrative industry and how the rest of us view it--especially a nuclear disaster that could turn Japan into a waste land, poison the Pacific Ocean and reach across it thousands of miles to drop horrible poison on multiple countries. I suppose the same could be said for the BP disaster coverage--news corps all too willing to lie, spin and ignore on cue. But not Katrina, where government officials were on the hot seat but not corporations. Anyway, they apparently DON'T feel obliged to treat this as an unfolding disaster of vital interest to millions of people which should be presented as coherently as possible, and with as much depth and frankness as possible. It's not so much that they are sensationalizing it, as they are fragmenting it--so that people can follow it, don't understand it, get spurts of fear or pathos, but can't really think about it. Cuz if you think about it, you might conclude that nuclear power plants are insane.

:grr:

Nuclear experts said the solutions being proposed to quell radiation leaks at the Daiichi complex in Fukushima, 240 km (150 miles north of Tokyo, were last-ditch efforts to stem what could well be remembered as one of the world's worst industrial disasters.

"This is a slow-moving nightmare," said Dr Thomas Neff, a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies, which is part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Panic over the economic impact of last Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami knocked $620 billion off Japan's stock market over the first two days of this week, but the Nikkei index rebounded on Wednesday to end up 5.68 percent.

Nevertheless, estimates of losses to Japanese output from damage to buildings, production and consumer activity ranged from between 10 and 16 trillion yen ($125-$200 billion), up to one-and-a-half times the economic losses from the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake.

Damage to Japan's manufacturing base and infrastructure is also threatening significant disruption to the global supply chain, particularly in the technology and auto sectors.

/... http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/16/us-japan-quake-idUSTRE72A0SS20110316

be following for recent info.

it is behind even the us media.

kindly let me know.

yokoso news does nearly all of them though the translation isn't as good.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/yokosonews

kyodo news wire is more up to date than ap.

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78598.html

guy who runs a social media site.

he & a couple of women from tokyo are voluntarily using his equipment to do english translation of all the japanese media updates so that non-japanese speakers in japan can get up to date info easily.

he's been on air 14-18 hours a day during the crisis.

he is also helping them locate people & giving background info so that foreigners can better understand the situation and meaning of events.

if you aren't so familiar with japanese culture i think it is helpful.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/yokosonews