January 5, 2021
Radiation at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant is far worse than previously thought, with the levels estimated at 10 sieverts per hour– a fatal dose for anyone who stays in the vicinity for an hour, according to experts. This means it will be extremely difficult for crews to move shield plugs, raising concerns that the plan to decommission the reactors will have to be reassessed.
Exceedingly high radiation levels inside crippled reactor buildings at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant were described by nuclear regulators as an “extremely serious” challenge to the overall decommissioning of the site.
According to the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), a huge amount of radioactive materials had attached to shield plugs of the containment vessels in the No.2 and No. 3 reactors.
With an estimated 10 sieverts per hour, the radiation levels are fatal for anyone who stays even an hour in the area. The finding also means that it would be extremely difficult for workers to move the shield plugs, which raised the prospect that the decommissioning plan will have to be reassessed.
Removing the highly contaminated shield plugs added to the challenge of recovering unclear fuel debris– the most taxing part of the process, said NRA chairman, Toyoshi Fuketa.
“It appears that nuclear debris lies at an elevated place,” Fuketa said at a news conference in December 2020. “This will have a huge impact on the whole process of decommissioning work.”
At normal times, the shield plug blocks radiation from the reactor core. Workers remove a shield plug to get access to the containment vessel’s interior when unclear fuels need to be replaced.
The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Reactor 1 to 4 from right to left.
In a study that resumed in September after a five-year hiatus, the NRA conducted fresh measurements of radiation levels in the surrounding areas of the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors.
It found that the amount of radioactive cesium 137 was at 20-40 petabecquerels between the top and middle layers of the No. 2 reactor’s shield plug. This works out to more than 10 sieverts per hour– radiation at these levels can be fatal to a person if they spend an hour in the vicinity. Meanwhile, the estimated figure was 30 petabecquerels for the No. 3 reactor.
The 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Fukushima caused the shield plug of the No. 1 reactor to slip out of place. It was also damaged by a hydrogen explosion at the reactor building.
As larger amounts of cesium 137 leaked from the No. 1 reactor through the damaged plug, the amount of radioactive material was estimated at 0.16 petabecquerels, lower than for the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors. On the other hand, the shield plugs, for the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors remained secure.
The Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TECPO) announced that the removal of nuclear fuel debris will be moved to 2022 or later, rather than the initially planned operation in 2021, due to a delay in the development of equipment.
Fukushima 311 Watchdogs 
1/9/2021 at 04:15:39
Donald Trump Has Been the Worst President in the History of the United States
By Eve ottenburg and Karl Grossman
Donald Trump is allied w the ldp in Japan. He never gave a darned about Fukushima . Trump never gave a damn about the Japanese fixing reactors in after Fukushima. Trump never gave a darned about Japan dumping the radioactive water from Fukushima into the ocean. Trump never gave a damn about the Japanese exporting radioactive food, from Fukushima all over the world. from Trump single handedly deregulated all reactors in the USA, now to the point of meltdowns all over the USA. Hurricane activity is higher than ever in the USA 5 more hurricanes than they thought not possible ,occured by the USA last year. 23 Agee shitty reactors on USA coast ready to blow. More earthquaqes and the Agee San Louis obisbo reactor still open. San onofre nuclear waste flooding into the Pacific. 3 old damaged, beat up reactors 30 and 40 yo reactors with damaged reactor containment kept open in Ohio. Ready to blow reactors. Reactors Kept open by Trump and corrupt Republicans in Ohio, by increasing taxes and electricty rates on the citizens of ohio. Trump did nothing to build up reactors in america since fukushima.
Trump wants to put nuclear waste in city dumps. Trump is opening another plutonium pit factory for nuclear weapons in Carolina for building up nuke weapons form 8 thousand to 10 thousand in wmerica. The Chinese have only 280 nuclear weapon. Two huge cities roseup in China against new nuclear reactors and nuke reactor plutonium processing plants. 60 percent of Americans hate nuclear if people Rose enmasse in america about nuclear.. Trump would have them arrested. Trump did nothing to fix hanford . Los alamos. San onofre. inl or the brunswick reactor in Carolina The Brunswick reactor damaged by hurricane maria. With Trump in power.
Trump wanted to detonate nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes by florida. Trump is importing nuclear waste from all over the world to america.
abrogated all nuclear treatiew. Started a Sept for nuclear weapons in space. He put small tactical nuclear w wponw on all American submarines inc easing the risk of nuclear war with China and Russia q thousand times. Trump wants to start testing nuclear weapons on American citizens again. Trump started a hypersonic nuclear weapons race with Russia. That caused an accidental nuclear missile explosion and, nuclear blast in russia. Trump gave 300 million dollars for small nuclear reactors like nuscale that have historically melted down in America for 70 years. Trillions for illegal occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan in Syria. For massive nuclear weapons programs.
“For those who concluded from the Covid-19 debacle that Trump simply wasn’t up to the job, it looks unlikely, to say the least, that his China legacy will be anything other than catastrophic. U.S. and Chinese economies are intertwined and, as we’ve already seen, decoupling hurts lots of Americans, starting with farmers. Trump’s executive order on December 28, prohibiting investments in firms reportedly controlled by the Chinese military does little besides ratchet up tensions. Hostilities between the two navies in the South China Sea could explode into regional war at any time. And how that war would be prevented from becoming nuclear is a very well-kept secret. But the geniuses in the Pentagon aren’t concerned. They believe in their new generation of small, “smart” nuclear weapons and “winnable” nuclear wars, as does Trump, the president who arguably has done more to promote nuclear war than perhaps any predecessor since mankind first split the atom.
Donald Trump has been the worst president in the history of the United States.”
Eve ottenburg
The attack by his supporters on the Capitol was a capstone of his presidency — lawless, an attack on democracy, a U.S. counterpart of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s.
It was a horror representative of his tenure.
Thank heavens and thanks to successful and hard political work, he will in days be out of office. And there must be criminal prosecutions on the state and local levels as well the federal level, which he’ll likely try to wrangle out of with a pardon.
There must be consequences to his horrendous term in office.
“An American Tragedy” was the title of a piece by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, right after Election Day 2016. “The election of Donald Trump,” Remnick wrote, “is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” There would be “miseries to come”– and there have been.
Remnick warned against an “attempt to normalize” the election of Trump. “Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader”, “a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right…a flim-flam man” with “disdain for democratic norms.”
The attack on the Capitol by the Trumpsters was an attempt at a coup to undo a presidential election in which a record number of voters came out to dump Trump and elect Joe Biden.
It was an act of insurrection incited by Trump.
As he tweeted to followers on December 20th — “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Yes, and indeed it was wild.
And then, in a speech in front of The White House on Wednesday, addressing his backers who had arrived, said: “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue…and we’re going to the Capitol.” He added: “You have to be strong.”
His call was preceded by his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, proclaiming “let’s have trial by combat.”
Giuliani, who took an oath to be an attorney and adhere to rule of law, represented Trump in many courts in challenges to his election defeat with claims that judges found totally untrue–but Giuliani opted instead, in violation of that oath, for “trial by combat.”
Remnick warned about an “attempt to normalize” Trump, but so much of media have engaged in “both sides-ing” the situation, as Julie Hollar of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has written.
When a person tells an out-and-out lie, there is no journalistic obligation to “balance” a story with a falsehood
And Trump, The Washington Post report has recorded, has uttered more than 20,000 falsehoods in his term in office.
And then there have been the Trump disinformation machines led by Fox -about which Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would smile.
But this is far more than a media problem.
Trump tapped into a vein of racism and other poisons in the United States.
He soon will be out of The White House but Trumpism, so horribly, will still be here.
“You have to summon an act of will, a certain energy and imagination, to replace truth with the authority of a con man like Trump,” George Packer wrote in the current issue of The Atlantic.
Trump’s “barrage of falsehoods — as many as 50 daily in the last fevered months of the 2020 campaign — complemented his unconcealed brutality,” writes Packer.
“Two events in Trump’s last year in office broke the spell of his sinister perversion of the truth,” he says: COVID-19 and a free election.
“The beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation for the first time on the subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into a political weapon — it was too personal and frightening, too real. As hundreds of Americans died and the administration flailed between fantasy, partisan incitement, and criminal negligence, a crucial number of Americans realized that Trump’s lies could get someone they love killed,” says Packer.
He continues: “The second event came on November 3”– the election.
And that is what Trump and his followers who attacked the Capitol sought to undo. And, on the same day, Trump enablers in Congress were trying to undo it by having the votes of the Electoral College denied.
“The election didn’t end his lies — nothing will…But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump,” Packer concluded.
Yes, most Americans still want democracy, but the history of authoritarian takeovers shows that a relatively small group of fanatics can beat the majority.
And we still are left with those toxic issues that Trump capitalized on.
Another component here is the enabling of Trump by all those Republicans.
Margaret Sullivan wrote a piece earlier this week in The Washington Post, headed “We must stop calling Trump’s enablers ‘conservative.’ They are the radical right.”
She wrote: “These days the true radicals are the enablers of President Trump’s ongoing attempted coup: the media bloviators on Fox News, One America and Newsmax who parrot his lies about election fraud; and the members of Congress who plan to object on Wednesday to what should be a pro forma step of approving the electoral college results, so that President-elect Joe Biden can take office peacefully on Jan. 20.
“But instead of being called what they are, these media and political figures get a mild label: conservative. Instead of calling out the truth, it normalizes; it softens the dangerous edges,” she continued. “It makes it seem, well, not so bad. Conservative, after all, describes politics devoted to free enterprise and traditional ideas. But that’s simply false. Sean Hannity is not conservative. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama are not conservative. Nor are the other 10 (at last count) Senators who plan to object” to the Electoral College vote.
She notes Tim Alberta wrote on Politico that “‘There is nothing conservative about subverting democracy.’ He suggests ‘far right’ as an alternative descriptor. Not bad. But I’d take it a step further, because it’s important to be precise. I’d call them members of the radical right.
“Members of the radical right won’t like this, of course. They soak in the word ‘conservative” like a warm bath.”
“On Jan. 20, we can still presume Trump will be gone from the White House,” she writes. “But his enablers and the movement that fostered him, and that he built up, will remain. That’s troubling. We should take one small but symbolic step toward repairing the damage by using the right words to describe it. It would be a start.”
Journalist Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, says Trump “will be in our history books as a dark, dark stain unlike any president of the United States.” And he investigated Nixon.
Karl Grossman antinuke
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