Free Republic

Rolling electric power blackouts afflicted as many as 2 million California residents last week as a heat wave gripped the Golden State. (It's apparently eased up for now.) At the center of the problem is that power demand peaks as overheated people turn up their air conditioning in the late afternoon just as solar power supplies cut off as the sun goes down. In addition, output from California's wind farms was erratic. Currently, about 33 percent of California's electricity comes from renewable sources as mandated by state law. Until this summer, California utilities and grid operators were able to purchase...

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused Fukushima's nuclear plant to melt down prompted the Japanese goverment to evacuate a huge area as dangerous radiation spread. The evacuated region, which was carved up into several zones based on how the radiation spread, has become home for a wide range of wild animals that apparently found a way to thrive amid the desolation despite the radiation. “Over time, some wildlife species have responded favorably to the absence of humans, even in the presence of high radiation levels, resulting in a rewilding of the evacuation zones,” Thomas Hinton, a radioecologist at the...

Wildlife like the Japanese serow... are flourishing in the exclusion zone around the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan, images from remotely-operated cameras have revealed Wildlife ecologist James Beasley of the University of Georgia, in the US, and colleagues used a network of 106 remote cameras to capture images of the wildlife in the area around the Fukushima Daiichi power plant over a four-month period. Taking more than 267,000 photos, the cameras captured images of more than 20 species — among which were foxes, Japanese hares and pheasants. 'Our results represent the first evidence that numerous species of wildlife are now...

At the levels of radiation now being found a Fukushima, a robot would be able to operate for less than two hours before it was destroyed. And Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences said medical professionals had never even thought about encountering this level of radiation in their work. The accident is enormous in its medical implications. Through future years, too long to contemplate, we will witness an epidemic of cancer as people inhale the radioactive elements, eat radioactive vegetables, rice and meat, and drink radioactive milk and teas. Year by year, decade through relentless decade, the radiation will build...

Lake Barrett: It's even a bigger project in my view. But there's a will here to clean this up as there was a will to put a man on the moon. And these engineering tasks can be done successfully. Lesley Stahl: Why not just bury this place? Why not do what they did at Chernobyl? Just cover it up, bury it, and just leave it here all-- you know, enclosed? Lake Barrett: Number one this is right next to the sea. We're 100 yards from the ocean. We have typhoons here in Japan. This is also a high earthquake zone....

An out-of-control bushfire blazing through south-west Sydney could hit the nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, and spot fires have broken out at the Holsworthy military barracks. The bushfire, which jumped Heathcote Road and has already burnt through 980 hectares of land, is still out of control and being spread by strong winds. Greg Allan, a spokesman for NSW Rural Fire Service, told Daily Mail Australia suburbs in the north-east of the fire were their current concern, with residents in Pleasure Point, Sandy Point, Illawong, Menai and Bangor expected to be hit by an ember attack. 'We are advising residents in...

An estimate suggests that the underground ice wall around the damaged reactor buildings in Fukushima has only a limited effect in preventing groundwater from being contaminated. The 1.5 kilometer barrier of frozen earth is formed by circulating coolant in pipes. It is designed to block groundwater from flowing into the damaged buildings. 500 tons of water used to be tainted with radioactive substances every day. Tokyo Electric Power Company estimates that the ice wall is helping to reduce the amount of new contaminated water by about 95 tons a day. It notes that the figure rises to about 380 tons...

The operator of Fukushima's crippled nuclear power plant has released fresh images of the wreckage inside a damaged reactor, showing broken metal parts and debris that could be melted fuel. Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) inserted a special camera into one of the plant's three melted-down reactors on Friday, a company spokesman said, as part of its efforts to dismantle the disaster-hit facility in northeastern Japan. Images captured by the camera and released late Friday show rubble spread over the bottom of the unit, including part of a fuel container and rock-like fragments that could contain melted nuclear fuel.

Earlier robots had failed, getting caught on debris or suffering circuit malfunctions from excess radiation. But the newer version, called the Mini-Manbo, or “little sunfish,” was made of radiation-hardened materials with a sensor to help it avoid dangerous hot spots in the plant’s flooded reactor buildings. ... After three days of carefully navigating through a shattered reactor building, the Manbo finally reached the heavily damaged Unit 3 reactor. There, the robot beamed back video of a gaping hole at the bottom of the reactor and, on the floor beneath it, clumps of what looked like solidified lava: the first images...

New research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that radioactive cesium from the Fukushima nuclear power plant is collecting in the sands and groundwater along a 60-mile (100-km) stretch of coastline near the facility. Cesium-137 is a radioactive isotope of cesium (a soft, silvery-gold metal) that’s formed by nuclear fission and potentially fatal to humans when exposed to high concentrations. The scientists who led the study, Virginie Sanial of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Seiya Nagao of Kanazawa University, say the levels of radiation “are not of primary concern” to public health, but that...

A powerful 6.2 magnitude earthquake has struck off the coast of Japan near Fukushima. Details of the extent of the damage have not yet emerged regarding the quake which hit 281km South East of Kamaishi. The depth of the earthquake, which struck at 2.37am local time, was measured at 10km.

Hurricane Harvey made land fall in Texas this week and the flooding was historic. What is shaping up to be the most costly natural disaster in American history, the storm has left refineries shut down, interrupted wind and solar generation, caused a constant worry about gas explosions, and caused a chain of events that led to explosions and fires at the Arkema chemical plant that is only the beginning. The two nuclear reactors at the South Texas Project plant near Houston were operating at full capacity despite wind gusts that peaked at 130 mph as the Hurricane made landfall. The...

“From the pictures taken today, it is obvious that some melted objects came out of the reactor. This means something of high temperature melted some structural objects and came out. So it is natural to think that melted fuel rods are mixed with them,” said Takahiro Kimoto, a Tepco spokesman. “In that sense, it is possible that the melted objects found this time are melted fuel debris or probably around it,” he said, saying the utility will think about how they can be analyzed to determine if they are the former fuel rods. This is the first time Tepco has...

Despite the objections of local fishermen, the tritium-tainted water stored at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant will be dumped into the sea, a top official at Tokyo Electric says. “The decision has already been made,” Takashi Kawamura, chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., said in a recent interview with the media. Tritium typically poses little risk to human health unless ingested in high amounts, and ocean discharges of diluted volumes of tritium-tainted water are a routine part of nuclear power plant operations. This is because it is a byproduct of nuclear operations but cannot be filtered out...

Despite the objections of local fishermen, the tritium-tainted water stored at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant will be dumped into the sea, a top official at Tokyo Electric says. “The decision has already been made,” Takashi Kawamura, chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., said in a recent interview with the media. Tritium typically poses little risk to human health unless ingested in high amounts, and ocean discharges of diluted volumes of tritium-tainted water are a routine part of nuclear power plant operations. This is because it is a byproduct of nuclear operations but cannot be filtered out...

Maybe if these idiot scientists weren't so incompetent, or maybe if they were honest, they would admit this is not unusual, but the result of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe that occurred in 2011. "I decided to share the photographs I took last year in Japan… these photos cannot adequately convey the scientific and human impact of the worst industrial cataclysm in the history of the world… [R]adioactive isotopes will be extreme hazards for 250,000 years, of course no one knows when it will end." - Arnie Gundersen. http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-worst-industrial-cataclysm-in-history-of-world-nuclear-engineer-arnie-gundersen/5580249

Tainted water inside a reactor containment vessel at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has shown a radiation level enough to kill a person within 40 minutes

A remote-controlled cleaning robot sent into a damaged reactor at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant had to be removed Thursday before it completed its work because of camera problems most likely caused by high radiation levels. It was the first time a robot has entered the chamber inside the Unit 2 reactor since a March 2011 earthquake and tsunami critically damaged the Fukushima Da-ichi nuclear plant. Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it was trying to inspect and clean a passage before another robot does a fuller examination to assess damage to the structure and its fuel. The second robot, known as...

Radiation inside one of the damaged reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power facility has reached an “unimaginable” level according to experts. Because so much nuclear material from Fukushima escaped into the Pacific Ocean, there are many scientists that believe that it was the worst environmental disaster in human history, but most people in the general population seem to think that since the mainstream media really doesn’t talk about it anymore that everything must be under control. Unfortunately, that is not true at all. In fact, PBS reported just last year that “it is incorrect to say that Fukushima is under...

The radiation levels at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant are now at "unimaginable" levels. Adam Housley, who reported from the area in 2011 following the catastrophic triple-meltdown, said this morning that new fuel leaks have been discovered. He said the radiation levels - as high as 530 sieverts per hour - are now the highest they've been since 2011 when a tsunami hit the coastal reactor. "To put this in very simple terms. Four sieverts can kill a handful of people," he explained. He said that critics, including the U.S. military in 2011, have long questioned whether Tokyo Electric...