Singapore must steadfast not to buy foodstuff from Fukushima - despite pressure from Japan foreign ministry.
The previous justification that Fukushima is free from radiation is not accurate.
Singapore should not subject ourselves to hazardous cancer-risk by buying foodstuff from Fukushima.
ricky l11 seconds ago
Japan presses Singapore to ease restrictions on Fukushima imports
AFP News
January 10, 2016
ricky lricky l8 seconds ago
The package of the food imported from Fukushima should be labelled as imported from Fukushima so that consumers can decide whether to buy or not.
Otherwise by default to err on the caution side, consumers may refrain from buying Japanese food as there is no way to tell whether which products come from Fukushima.
Reply
ricky lricky l1 hour ago
Consumers have a choice to decide whether to buy food from Fukushima even if the ban is lifted.
If no label on the food of origin, then it will be prudent to stop eating Japanese foods as there is no way to tell whether the food come from Fukushima or not.
Reply
ricky l11 seconds ago
Even the Japanese from other provinces are not taking the risk of consuming foodstuff from Fukushima, why should Singapore subject to the pressure to consume the hazardous cancerous foodstuff?
Fukushima's ground zero: No place for man or robot
By Aaron Sheldrick and Minami Funakoshi4 hours ago
REUTERS - The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site.
Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-metre high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods.
Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods.
The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) <9501.t>, has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed.
“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in an interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation.”
The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.
A member of the media, wearing a protective suit and a mask, looks at the No. 3 reactor building at …
But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said.
Each robot has to be custom-built for each building.“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said.
IRRADIATED WATER
Tepco, which was fiercely criticised for its handling of the disaster, says conditions at the Fukushima power station, site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in Ukraine 30 years ago, have improved dramatically. Radiation levels in many places at the site are now as low as those in Tokyo.
More than 8,000 workers are at the plant at any one time, according to officials on a recent tour. Traffic is constant as they spread across the site, removing debris, building storage tanks, laying piping and preparing to dismantle parts of the plant.
Much of the work involves pumping a steady torrent of water into the wrecked and highly radiated reactors to cool them down. Afterward, the radiated water is then pumped out of the plant and stored in tanks that are proliferating around the site.
A worker, wearing a protective suit and mask, takes notes in front of storage tanks for radioactive …
What to do with the nearly million tonnes of radioactive water is one of the biggest challenges, said Akira Ono, the site manager. Ono said he is “deeply worried” the storage tanks will leak radioactive water in the sea - as they have done several times before - prompting strong criticism for the government.
The utility has so far failed to get the backing of local fishermen to release water it has treated into the ocean.
Ono estimates that Tepco has completed around 10 percent of the work to clear the site up - the decommissioning process could take 30 to 40 years. But until the company locates the fuel, it won’t be able to assess progress and final costs, experts say.
The much touted use of X-ray like muon rays has yielded little information about the location of the melted fuel and the last robot inserted into one of the reactors sent only grainy images before breaking down.
ICE WALL
Tepco is building the world’s biggest ice wall to keep groundwater from flowing into the basements of the damaged reactors and getting contaminated.
First suggested in 2013 and strongly backed by the government, the wall was completed in February, after months of delays and questions surrounding its effectiveness. Later this year, Tepco plans to pump water into the wall - which looks a bit like the piping behind a refrigerator - to start the freezing process.
Stopping the ground water intrusion into the plant is critical, said Arnie Gunderson, a former nuclear engineer.
“The reactors continue to bleed radiation into the ground water and thence into the Pacific Ocean,” Gunderson said. "When Tepco finally stops the groundwater, that will be the end of the beginning.”
While he would not rule out the possibility that small amounts of radiation are reaching the ocean, Masuda, the head of decommissioning, said the leaks have ended after the company built a wall along the shoreline near the reactors whose depth goes to below the seabed.
“I am not about to say that it is absolutely zero, but because of this wall the amount of release has dramatically dropped,” he said.
(Reporting by Aaron Sheldrick and Minami Funakoshi Editing by Bill Tarrant)
BY THE NUMBERS: The Fukushima nuclear disaster, 5 years on
FILE - In this Feb. 10, 2016, file photo, a Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) employee, wearing a protective suit and a mask, walks in front of the No. 1 reactor building at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan. Five years after a powerful earthquake and tsunami sent the nuclear power plant in the country into multiple meltdowns, cleaning up the mess both onsite and in surrounding towns remains a work in progress. (Toru Hanai/Pool Photo via AP, File)
TOKYO (AP) — Five years after a powerful earthquake and tsunami sent the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan into multiple meltdowns, cleaning up the mess both onsite and in surrounding towns remains a work in progress. Here's a look, by the numbers, at the widespread effects of radiation from the March 11, 2011, disaster:
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164,865: Fukushima residents who fled their homes after the disaster.
97,320: Number who still haven't returned.
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49: Municipalities in Fukushima that have completed decontamination work.
45: Number that have not.
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30: Percent of electricity generated by nuclear power before the disaster.
1.7: Percent of electricity generated by nuclear power after the disaster.
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3: Reactors online, out of 43 now workable. On Wednesday, however, a court issued an order for one of those three reactors to be shut down immediately.
54: Reactors with safety permits before the disaster.
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53: Percent of the 1,017 Japanese in a March 5-6 Mainichi Shimbun newspaper survey who opposed restarting nuclear power plants.
30: Percent who supported restarts. The remaining 17 percent were undecided.
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760,000: Metric tons of contaminated water currently stored at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
1,000: Tanks at the plant storing radioactive water after treatment.
10.7 million: Number of 1-ton container bags containing radioactive debris and other waste collected in decontamination outside the plant.
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7,000: Workers decommissioning the Fukushima plant.
26,000: Laborers on decontamination work offsite.
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200: Becquerels of radioactive cesium per cubic meter (264 gallons) in seawater immediately off the plant in 2015.
50 million: Becquerels of cesium per cubic meter in the same water in 2011.
7,400: Maximum number of becquerels of cesium per cubic meter allowed in drinking water by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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Sources: Fukushima prefectural government, Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., the Nuclear Regulation Authority, the Federation of Electric Power Companies and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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Follow Mari Yamaguchi at https://www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi
And at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/mari-yamaguchi
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