Japan nuclear plant crisis: Fourth reactor on fire as blasts spark fear of serious radiation release

A fourth reactor was on fire and there were fears that the steel containment vessel protecting the plant’s nuclear core had been breached – the worst-case scenario in such situations.

“There is a very high risk of further radioactive leaks,” Prime Minster Naoto Kan said in an address to the nation.”I ask you to stay calm.”

More than 180,000 people living in a 12-mile radius of the Fukushima Daiichi plant 150 miles north of Tokyo had already been evacuated over the weekend.

Kan asked that people living between a 12- and 18-mile radius hunker down inside.”Remain indoors, at home or in your offices,” he said. “Avoid going outside.”

Officials evacuated staff plant after reactor No. 2 exploded – the third blast there since Saturday.

via Japan nuclear plant crisis: Fourth reactor on fire as blasts spark fear of serious radiation release.

Iraq – A Nation of Tears (video)

By Layla Anwar – Arab Woman Blues

This video is a 17 minutes sample of your Democracy at work in the Iraq al Jadeed, in the new Iraq.

This video shows you the daily life for Baghdadis, through the eyes of a few.

I have no strength to write more words, I leave you to watch the fruits of your labor, of your indifference, your apathy and your deafening silence.

from information clearinghouse

third explosion at crippled nuclear power plant

An explosion has been heard at No. 2 reactor at the Japanese nuclear facility where scientists are battling to prevent a fuel rod meltdown after two earlier explosions at neighbouring reactors.

A spokesman for Japan’s nuclear safety agency, speaking on Tuesday on national television, said the explosion was heard at 6.10am (8.10am AEDT).

No other details were immediately announced.

Fears of a meltdown at the reactor have grown after officials said its fuel rods were “fully exposed” for more than two hours, as the country grappled with a growing humanitarian and economic crisis following Friday’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Radiation Levels Surge Outside Two Nuclear Plants in Japan

Japanese government officials say there was shaking and a trail of white smoke at a nuclear plant in the area devastated by a massive earthquake.

Fukushima Prefecture official Masato Abe says the cause is still under investigation, and it was unclear whether there was an explosion.

Another official said the utility that runs the Fukushima Daiichi plant is reporting Saturday that several workers may have been injured.

One reactor at the plant is facing a possible meltdown after its cooling system was knocked out.

death toll in japan in the tens of thousands

the “official” death toll from the mega-earthquake and the resulting tsunami has so far been dramatically under-estimated.

a quick search through the internet confirms that the officially stated number of 2,000 is nowhere near the actual number.

getting accurate information out of the areas affected by the tsunami is difficult because everything – including government offices – has been destroyed, and government officials are missing.

here are some articles describing the potential loss of life:

20,000 missing in 2 towns

About 20,000 people were unaccounted for as of Sunday afternoon in two coastal towns devastated by tsunami after the Tohoku Pacific Offshore Earthquake.

About 10,000 residents each of Minami-Sanrikucho, Miyagi Prefecture, and Otsuchicho, Iwate Prefecture, were missing, authorities said. Otsuchicho Mayor Koki Kato is among those unaccounted for.

Rescuers, but no one left to rescue in Natori

Natori, a coastal town in Japan, was virtually wiped out by the earthquake and tsunami. Rescue workers began to arrive on Monday, but they found few people to rescue. NBC News’ Ian Williams is one of the few reporters to reach what is left of the coastal town. Natori City had an estimated population of 72,757.

Kesennuma burns through the night after earthquake

The city of Kesennuma (74,000 people) in north-east Japan has been burning furiously, with public broadcasters reporting that fires are spreading beyond regional control.

Kesennuma, located 300 miles north-east of Tokyo in Miyagi prefecture, was near the epicentre of the magnitude 8.9 earthquake.

Night-time aerial footage of the city, home to 74,000 people, shows the whole area engulfed in flames after the biggest earthquake in the country’s history.

Widespread Devastation in Japan after Deadly Earthquake - video report

Complete neighborhoods in towns like Rikuzentakata have been flattened after the country’s worst earthquake and tsunami hit last Friday. The city had an estimated population of 23,687

Personal items are mixed in with debris making their recovery nearly impossible.

Crude flags mark the location of bodies found.

Hell on Earth: a town reduced to a morass of splintered wood, jagged concrete and twisted metal where 10,000 have died – photo journal

The most astonishing view stretches out below towards the sea for at least four miles. An entire town of around 17,000 people has simply ceased to exist here.

At least 95 per cent of the buildings are not merely ruined; they have been reduced to a morass of splintered wood, jagged concrete and twisted metal. All of this is hideously decorated with the details of destroyed family lives: a woman smiles up from her wedding photographs, a smashed guitar lies in the debris. I see a broken doll, and pages from a child’s school exercise book.

(this report includes photos from Izushima island, Minami Sanriku, Natori City, Minamisanrikucho, Otsuchi, Hachinohe, Miyako, Sendai, Fudai, Ishimaki City, Otsuchi Town, Ofunato City, and others.

the unofficial death toll is likely in the tens of thousands, and is very likely more than 100,000.)

as of the 15th, the government was still keeping estimates of deaths so low as to defy credibility…

Japan quake official death toll tops 2400

THE death toll from a killer earthquake and tsunami that flattened much of Japan’s northeast coast topped 2400, police say.

The National Police Agency today said 2414 people are confirmed dead and 3118 missing, with 1885 injured in the disaster which struck on Friday afternoon.

The official toll yesterday stood at 1647.

On Sunday, the police chief of Miyagi, one of the hardest-hit prefectures, said the number of deaths was expected to exceed 10,000 in his region alone.

bradley manning’s mistreatment intensifies

Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking a massive trove of classified material to WikiLeaks, has been imprisoned since May 2010. The treatment to which he has been subjected, including protracted isolation, systematic humiliations and routinised sleep deprivation, got more extreme last week when the commander of the brig at Quantico, Virginia, imposed on him a regime of forced nakedness at night and during an inspection of his cell every morning until his clothing is returned.

These types of abusive tactics were authorised by the Bush administration for use on foreign detainees captured in the war on terror, on the theory that causing “debilitation, disorientation and dread” would produce “learned helplessness” and make them more susceptible and responsive to interrogators’ questioning.

Reports about Manning’s treatment indicate that the Pentagon has continued to utilise reverse-engineered SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, extraction) techniques that were developed during the Cold War to train US soldiers in case they were captured and tortured by regimes that do not adhere to the Geneva Conventions.

The use of such methods in 2011 signals that the American torture playbook hasn’t been retired; it’s gone into a new printing. In the years between 9/11 and mid-2004, the actual policy of torture was still largely secret. Before the lid was peeled back by the Abu Ghraib photos and the first batch of “torture memos”, the touchstone of the public debate was the hypothetical ticking bomb scenario.

Torture advocates opined that the use of non-maiming techniques (i.e., “torture lite”) is a lesser evil, and might be legitimately employed by American interrogators to break a recalcitrant terrorist suspected of possessing valuable intelligence (e.g. the whereabouts of that ticking bomb) in order to keep Americans safe. In those years, torture advocates never envisioned the use of such tactics on a US soldier, for if they had, their claims would not have gotten such traction in the mainstream media (or been fetishised in the Jack Bauer character of the popular television program 24).

Domestic torture

Yet, today here we are, subjecting an American soldier to some of the techniques that were cleared for use by the CIA on Abu Zubaydah in 2002. The panoply of tactics applied to Abu Zubaydah includes many that Manning has been spared, such as waterboarding and the confinement box.

This development was hardly unforeseeable. Opponents of torture had staked their positions in the early debate with warnings not only that torture is illegal and ineffective, but also with historic evidence that states which authorise the torture of enemies embark down a slippery slope.

In the Bush administration’s inner circle, officials who opposed the authorisation and use of interrogational abuse as illegal and counterproductive to national security were excluded from decision-making. Interrogation policy was guided and gassed by the presumptions that violence and degradation would work to elicit true information, a claim that in the American case has been proven patently false – but still gets trumpeted as true by those who resist being encumbered by facts and evidence.

anonymous prepares offensive against banking cartels

The Anonymous Manifesto:

We are a decentralized non-violent resistance movement, which seeks to restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class.

One-tenth of one percent of the population has consolidated wealth in unprecedented fashion and launched an all-out economic war against 99.9% of the population.

We are not affiliated with either wing of the two-party oligarchy. We seek an end to the corrupted two-party system by ending the campaign finance and lobbying racket. Above all, we aim to break up the global banking cartel centered at the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlement and World Bank.

We demand that the primary dealers within the Federal Reserve banking system be broken up and held accountable for rigging markets and destroying the global economy, effective immediately. As a first sign of good faith we demand Ben Bernanke step down as Federal Reserve chairman.

Until our demands are met and a rule of law is restored, we will engage in a relentless campaign of non-violent, peaceful, civil disobedience.

In our next communication we will announce Operation Empire State Rebellion.

Cooling system fails in a third reactor at Japanese nuclear plant

Tokyo (CNN) — Another reactor at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant lost its cooling capabilities Monday, a government official said. The problem was detected in the plant’s No. 2 reactor Monday afternoon after an explosion rocked the building containing the plant’s No. 3 reactor, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters.

“We think that the hydrogen explosion in (the building housing) reactor No. 3 caused the cooling system of reactor No. 2 to stop working,” Edano said. Water levels were falling and pressure was building up inside the No. 2 reactor, he said, and officials were working on a plan to release gas and also inject seawater into that reactor.

Workers have been injecting seawater in a last-ditch effort to cool down fuel rods and prevent a full meltdown at two other reactors at the plant — No. 1 and No. 3 — after an 8.9-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami Friday knocked out the reactors’ cooling systems.

There are six reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, located in northeastern Japan about 65 km (40 miles) south of Sendai.

A buildup of hydrogen in the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s No. 3 reactor building caused the blast, authorities said, which injured 11 people and sent white smoke billowing above the nuclear plant.

But the explosion did not damage the reactor or result in significant radiation leakage, Edano told reporters.

The explosion blew away the roof and walls of the building housing the reactor, Japan’s Kyodo News reported. A similar blast occurred Saturday at the plant’s No. 1 reactor.

On Sunday, Edano warned that the same sort of explosion could occur in the No. 3 building.

After Monday’s blast, authorities ordered at least 500 residents remaining within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the plant to stay inside, Edano said. About 200,000 people evacuated the area over the weekend after a government order.

via Cooling system fails in another reactor at Japanese nuclear plant – CNN.com.

Japan Nuclear Crisis Spreads to Third Plant

Displaced vehicles and boats are scattered across the Oharai Port. The United States Geological Survey reported a new earthquake of 6.4 magnitude about 52 miles off the coast of Fukushima.

Tokyo – Japanese officials struggled on Sunday to contain a quickly escalating nuclear crisis in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, saying they presumed that partial meltdowns had occurred at two crippled reactors, and that they were bracing for a second explosion, even as they appeared to face cooling problems at two more plants and international nuclear experts said radiation had leaked from a fourth.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said the Japanese government had declared a state of emergency at the plant with the radiation leak; that plant is about 60 miles from Sendai, a city of 1 million people in Japan’s northeast. The government did not immediately confirm the report from the I.A.E.A., which said it was not yet clear what caused the release.

Soon after that announcement, Kyodo News reported that a plant about 75 miles north of Tokyo was having cooling system problems, making it the third plant to experience such troubles.

The emergency at the plant that suffered an explosion appeared to be the worst involving a nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago.

The government confirmed that radiation had escaped from the worst-hit plant, and local officials said that 22 people outside the plant showed signs of radiation exposure and about 170 other people near the plant had likely been exposed, but it was unclear if they had received dangerous doses. Early Sunday, the government said three workers were suffering full-out radiation illness.

The developments prompted the evacuation of more than 200,000 people.