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“I know I’m in the presence of the community,” Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) said to a room of mainly Black women who gathered at Washington D.C.’s Walter E. Lee Convention Center on Wednesday for the first day of the 2019 Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference. Her opening remarks helped to kick-off a powerful 3-hour event in which thought leaders, political leaders, and engaged citizens alike, convened to unpack the findings of the newest study conducted by Black Women’s Roundtable and ESSENCE Magazine. Before digging into the research, Bass made it clear that going into 2020 Black women need...

IAEA Briefing on Fukushima Nuclear Accident (20 April 2011, 16:00 UTC) Presentation: On Wednesday, 20 April 2011, the IAEA provided the following information on the current status of nuclear safety in Japan: 1. Current Situation Overall, the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains very serious, but there are early signs of recovery in some functions, such as electrical power and instrumentation. Changes to Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Status The IAEA receives information from a variety of official Japanese sources through the Japanese national competent authority, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). Additional detail is provided...

Fukushima Nuclear Accident Update Log [Updates of 8 April 2011] IAEA Briefing on Fukushima Nuclear Accident (8 April 2011, 15:00 UTC) Presentation: Summary of Reactor Status On Friday, 8 April 2011, the IAEA provided the following information on the current status of nuclear safety in Japan: 1. Earthquake of 7 April The IAEA confirms that an earthquake occurred in Japan at 14:32 UTC, 7 April. The IAEA International Seismic Safety Centre has rated it as a 7.1 magnitude, revised from an initial 7.4 magnitude. The epicenter of the earthquake was 20 km from the Onagawa nuclear power plant and approximately...

FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR ACCIDENT THE KEESE SCHOOL OF CONTINUING EDUCATION MURRAY E. MILES MARCH 24, 2011 I PLANT PRIMER The three other talks I have given to Keese School each took about a year to prepare. You all get to judge the effect of my having only 48 hours to prepare for this talk. You have to be very careful in an emergency phase about what to believe. I have used many written sources and some by phone to get to the stage today where I can finally put together a reasonably credible analysis. This is day 13. Some of what...

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station says 3 of the plant's 6 reactors were shaken on March 11th by tremors exceeding forces they were designed to withstand. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, says reactor No.2 suffered the largest horizontal ground acceleration of 550 gals, which is 26 percent stronger than the reactor's design limit. TEPCO says the readings were 548 gals at the No.5 reactor, about 21 percent higher than its design limit; and 507 gals at the No.3 reactor, topping the capacity by about 15 percent. The power company says the strength of...

A U.S. simulation exercise conducted about 30 years ago of what would happen at a boiling-water reactor if all power sources were lost eerily matches what has unfolded at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. While the simulation demonstrated the dangers of losing all power sources, Japan's nuclear authorities took the optimistic position that power transmission lines and other power sources would be restored quickly. The simulation was conducted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1981 and 1982. A report was later submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which used the report's findings to establish safety regulations....

Tokyo Electric Power Company says it will review all data on radiation leaked from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, citing errors in a computer program. The utility says it found errors in the program used to analyze radioactive elements and their levels, after some experts noted that radiation levels of leaked water inside the plant were too high....

The mayor of Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, a city subject to a government directive for its residents to stay indoors to avoid radioactive fallout from a nuclear plant crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, has begun appealing to the world over the ''injustice'' of such an instruction. Speaking in a roughly 11-minute English-subtitled video posted on the video-sharing site Youtube on March 24, Katsunobu Sakurai said the government's directive has made life extremely difficult for local residents. ''Even volunteers and those delivering relief supplies have no choice but to enter (the city) at their own risk,'' said a grim-looking...

Workers at the disaster-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan say they expect to die from radiation sickness as a result of their efforts to bring the reactors under control, the mother of one of the men tells Fox News. The so-called Fukushima 50, the team of brave plant workers struggling to prevent a meltdown to four reactors critically damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, are being repeatedly exposed to dangerously high radioactive levels as they attempt to bring vital cooling systems back online. Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My...

TOKYO – In planning their defense against a killer tsunami, the people running Japan's now-hobbled nuclear power plant dismissed important scientific evidence and all but disregarded 3,000 years of geological history, an Associated Press investigation shows. The misplaced confidence displayed by Tokyo Electric Power Co. was prompted by a series of overly optimistic assumptions that concluded the Earth couldn't possibly release the level of fury it did two weeks ago, pushing the six-reactor Fukushima Dai-ichi complex to the brink of multiple meltdowns. Instead of the reactors staying dry, as contemplated under the power company's worst-case scenario, the plant was overrun...

The Fukushima Daiichi Incident 1. Plant Design 2. Accident Progression 3. Radiological Releases 4. Spent Fuel Pools 5. Sources of Information Dr. Matthias Braun PEPA4-G, AREVA-NP GmbH

Radiation risk nothing like Chernobyl, expert says The U.S. government may have overreacted in setting an 80-km radius no-go zone for U.S. citizens near the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, an expert on radiation and cancer immunology said Tuesday in Tokyo. U.S. hematologist Robert Gale, who treated Chernobyl exposure victims in 1986, said the current exclusion zone by the Japanese government that covers a 20-km radius around the plant is already "conservative." "There is no solid reason for the U.S. government to suggest a wider evacuation," considering the current level of microsieverts detected in the region, he said. Gale was...

Plant operators evacuated workers from Japan's tsunami-stricken nuclear complex Monday after gray smoke rose from one of its reactor units, the latest of persistent troubles in stabilizing the complex after it was damaged in a quake and tsunami. Smoke rising from the spent fuel storage pool of the plant's Unit 3 prompted the evacuation, Tokyo Electric Power Co. spokesman Hiroshi Aizawa said. The problem-plagued Unit 3 also alarmed plant officials over the weekend with a sudden surge of pressure in its reactor core.

Engineers had run a power line to the Fukushima Daiichi plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo, from the country's electrical grid Friday night, but connecting it to the buildings at the facility has been a bigger problem than anticipated. Workers have been able to spend only limited amounts of time in the facility to make the connections, and engineers have had to laboriously go through and check all the circuitry before power is turned on to ensure that a surge of current does not create more problems than it solves. Officials of the company had said they hoped to get...

Latest news from Japan: From the BBC- 1456: Tepco says it may start pouring water from a helicopter over Fukushima Daiichi's reactor four in the next few days, to cool the spent-fuel pool. 1439: A 30km (18 mile) no-fly zone is in place around Fukushima, says the IAEA. 1436: The IAEA says Monday's blast at Fukushima may have affected the integrity of the containment vessel - there are fears of more serious radioactive leaks if happen. 1435: Following earlier reports, it appears there has been more than one strong aftershock in Japan - AP reports two tremors measuring over 6.0...

Kan raps Tokyo Electric's handling of nuclear crisis TOKYO, March 15, Kyodo Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Tuesday strongly criticized Tokyo Electric Power Co. for its handling of the earthquake-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. ''The TV reported an explosion. But nothing was said to the premier's office for about an hour,'' a Kyodo News reporter overheard Kan saying during a meeting with executives of the power company at its head office. ''What the hell is going on?'' Kan strongly ordered the company not to withdraw its employees from the power plant, which has been facing a series of...

Japan’s turbulent history of war and natural catastrophe has already given the world a terrifying vocabulary of death: tsunami, kamikaze, Hiroshima. But the country now stands on the brink of unleashing its most chilling phrase yet: genpatsu-shinsai – the combination of an earthquake and nuclear meltdown capable of destroying millions of lives and bringing a nation to its knees. The phrase, derived from the Japanese words for “nuclear power” and “quake disaster”, is the creation of Katsuhiko Ishibashi, Japan’s leading seismologist and one of the Government’s top advisers on nuclear-quake safety. He said that the world may never know how...

In Stricken Fuel-Cooling Pools, a Danger for the Longer Term By WILLIAM J. BROAD and HIROKO TABUCHI Published: March 14, 2011 Even as workers race to prevent the radioactive cores of the damaged nuclear reactors in Japan from melting down, concerns are growing that nearby pools holding spent fuel rods could pose an even greater danger. The pools, which sit on the top level of the reactor buildings and keep spent fuel submerged in water, have lost their cooling systems and the Japanese have been unable to take emergency steps because of the multiplying crises. The threat is that the...

Seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko claimed that an accident was likely and that plants have 'fundamental vulnerability' The timing of the near nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi could not have been more appropriate. In only a few weeks the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear plant disaster ever to affect our planet – at Chernobyl in Ukraine. A major core meltdown released a deadly cloud of radioactive material over Europe and gave the name Chernobyl a terrible resonance. This weekend it is clear that the name Fukushima came perilously close to achieving a similar notoriety. However, the real...

Why Worry? Japan's Nuclear Plants at Grave Risk From Quake Damage Ishibashi Katsuhiko August 11, 2007 I had warned that a major earthquake would strike the Chuetsu region around Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, and about the fundamental vulnerability of nuclear power plants. The 6.8 magnitude temblor of July 16 caused considerable damage to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), proving me right. In the 40 years that Japan had been building nuclear plants, seismic activity was, fortunately or unfortunately, relatively quiet. Not a single nuclear facility was struck by a big quake. The government, along...