FUK-U-SHIMA: Radiation Spikes Reach Very Lethal Levels At Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant - Radiation Readings Are 18 Times Higher Than Previously Measured; New Photo Shows "Boiling Sea" Off Japan Coast Near Fukushima; Radioactive Plume Could Reach U.S. Waters By 2014; Contamination Could Pollute ENTIRE WORLD, At Least Pacific Ocean; Simulation Shows ENTIRE PACIFIC OCEAN Polluted By Radioactive Water In JUST 6 YEARS!

September 02, 2013 - JAPAN - The drip, drip, drip of bad news about Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant keeps going. There's been a sharp spike in radiation levels measured in the pipes and containers holding water at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.

Radiation Readings Are 18 Times Higher Than Previously Measured.

Japan's nuclear watchdog members, including Nuclear Regulation Authority members in radiation protection
suits, inspect contaminated water tanks at the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear
power plant in the town of Okuma, Fukushima prefecture on August 23, 2013.
(JAPAN POOL/AFP/Getty Images)

An operator at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan has said radiation readings are 18 times higher than previously measured. The staff member said they had found highly radioactive water dripping from a pipe used to connect two coolant tanks and that it had been patched up using tape.

The discovery of the pipe came a day after Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said it found new radiation hotspots at four sites around coolant tanks, with one reading at 1,800 millisieverts per hour - a dose that would kill a human left exposed to it in four hours. 

Last week the plant operator admitted 300 tonnes of toxic water had seeped out of one of the vast containers - one of around 1,000 on the site - before anyone had noticed. 

The facility was destroyed by a tsunami in March 2011

The spill sparked fears the toxic water may have seeped into the nearby ocean and was categorised as a Level 3 event, the most serious category since the meltdown itself. 

The plant was severely damaged in March 2011 following an earthquake and tsunami which killed thousands of people and displaced many more. 

In response to growing domestic and international criticism over Tepco's handling of the crisis, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised the world his government would play a greater role in stopping leaks of highly radioactive water. 

Water tanks at the plant.

"The accident in Fukushima cannot be left entirely to Tokyo Electric Power. There is a need for the government to play a role with a sense of urgency, including taking measures to deal with the waste water," he said. 

Mr Abe's pledge came as the world's nuclear watchdog urged Japan to explain more clearly what is happening at Fukushima and avoid sending "confusing messages" about the disaster. 


WATCH: Earth is softening and leaks are out of control.

Sky's foreign affairs correspondent Lisa Holland visited Fukushima on August 23 and was given access to government efforts to restore confidence in the crippled plant. 

She said there was little sign of life in the residential areas around the facility and spoke to people who said they will not go back to their homes until they have been told the truth about the dangers by ministers. - SKY News.

Photo Showing "Boiling Sea" Off Japan Coast Near Fukushima.

A Twitter photo showing a “boiling sea” off the coast of Japan, near the Fukushima nuclear power plant with radiation leaks, has gone viral online.So, why is the sea ‘boiling’? 



The answer can be found on the NaturalNews.com report. “After a 29-month cover-up, the Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) is now calling for international help and has all but admitted Fukushima's radiation leaks are spiraling out of control. In addition to the leaking water storage units that are unleashing hundreds of tons of radioactive water each day, Tepco now says 50% of its contaminated water filtration capability has been taken offline due to corrosion,” the news website published Tuesday. 

DemocracyNow.org posted that Japan’s nuclear regulator said Wednesday it has officially raised the radioactive water leak severity rating to Level 3 on the international scale for radiological releases. 

In an interview, nuclear energy industry expert Arnie Gundersen warned that the problem at Fukushima “is going to get worse.” - Cool Buster.

Fukushima's Radioactive Plume Could Reach U.S. Waters By 2014.

An Aug. 26 photo provided by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. shows Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan's economy,
trade and industry minister, in a red safety helmet at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant during inspections
of tanks holding contaminated water. TEPCO says it has found new radiation hotspots near tanks storing
toxic water, with one reading peaking at 1,800 millisieverts per hour. TEPCO via AFP - Getty Images

A radioactive plume of water in the Pacific Ocean from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which was crippled in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, will likely reach U.S. coastal waters starting in 2014, according to a new study. The long journey of the radioactive particles could help researchers better understand how the ocean’s currents circulate around the world. 

Ocean simulations showed that the plume of radioactive cesium-137 released by the Fukushima disaster in 2011 could begin flowing into U.S. coastal waters starting in early 2014 and peak in 2016. Luckily, two ocean currents off the eastern coast of Japan — the Kuroshio Current and the Kuroshio Extension — would have diluted the radioactive material so that its concentration fell well below the World Health Organization’s safety levels within four months of the Fukushima incident. But it could have been a different story if nuclear disaster struck on the other side of Japan. 

“The environmental impact could have been worse if the contaminated water would have been released in another oceanic environment in which the circulation was less energetic and turbulent,” said Vincent Rossi, an oceanographer and postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Spain. 

Fukushima’s radioactive water release has taken its time journeying across the Pacific. By comparison, atmospheric radiation from the Fukushima plant began reaching the U.S. West Coast within just days of the disaster back in 2011. 

Tracking radioactivity’s path 

The radioactive plume has three different sources: radioactive particles falling out from the atmosphere into the ocean, contaminated water directly released from the plant, and water that became contaminated by leaching radioactive particles from tainted soil. 


The release of cesium-137 from Fukushima in Japan’s more turbulent eastern currents means the radioactive material is diluted to the point of posing little threat to humans by the time it leaves Japan’s coastal waters. Rossi worked with former colleagues at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Australia to simulate the spread of Fukushima’s radioactivity in the oceans — a study detailed in the October issue of the journal Deep-Sea Research Part 1. 

Researchers averaged 27 experimental runs of their model — each run starting in a different year — to ensure that the simulated spread of the cesium-137 as a "tracer" was not unusually affected by initial ocean conditions. Many oceanographers studying the ocean’s currents prefer using cesium-137 to track the ocean currents because it acts as a passive tracer in seawater, meaning it doesn't interact much with other things, and decays slowly with a long half-life of 30 years. 

“One advantage of this tracer is its long half-life and our ability to measure it quite accurately, so that it can be used in the future to test our models of ocean circulation and see how well they represent reality over time,” Rossi told LiveScience. “In 20 years' time, we could go out, grab measurements everywhere in the Pacific and compare them to our model.”

Journey across the Pacific Rim 

The team focused on predicting the path of the radioactivity until it reached the continental shelf waters stretching from the U.S. coastline to about 180 miles (300 kilometers) offshore. About 10 to 30 becquerels (units of radioactivity representing decay per second) per cubic meter of cesium-137 could reach U.S. and Canadian coastal waters north of Oregon between 2014 and 2020. (Such levels are far below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s limits for drinking water.) 

By comparison, California’s coast may receive just 10 to 20 becquerels per cubic meter from 2016 to 2025. That slower, lesser impact comes from Pacific currents taking part of the radioactive plume down below the ocean surface on a slower journey toward the Californian coast, Rossi explained. 

A large proportion of the radioactive plume from the initial Fukushima release won't even reach U.S. coastal waters anytime soon. Instead, the majority of the cesium-137 will remain in the North Pacific gyre — a region of ocean that circulates slowly clockwise and has trapped debris in its center to form the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” — and continue to be diluted for approximately a decade following the initial Fukushima release in 2011. (The water from the current power plant leak would be expected to take a similar long-term path to the initial plume released, Rossi said.) 

But the plume will eventually begin to escape the North Pacific gyre in an even more diluted form. About 25 percent of the radioactivity initially released will travel to the Indian Ocean and South Pacific over two to three decades after the Fukushima disaster, the model showed. - Huffington Post.

Contamination Could Pollute Entire World, At Least Pacific Ocean.

Joel Legendre, RTL (French radio network): We hear that what happened in Fukushima, what is ejected from there – cesium and those things – might eventually pollute the whole world, at least the Pacific Ocean, the eastern coast of Japan, the Japan Sea coast. One concern people have all around the world is to know: Might it effect more than the east coast of Japan?...

Hirohiko Izumida, Governor of Niigata Prefecture: ...Levels [of radioactive contamination detected in food in Niiagata Prefecture] went up as a result of Fukushima, and I believe that most likely throughout the world similar trends have been observed.

WATCH: Press Conference with Hirohiko Izumida, Governor of Niigata Prefecture.

Simulation Shows ENTIRE PACIFIC OCEAN Polluted By Radioactive Water In JUST 6 YEARS.

This graphic shows the gradual contamination of the Pacific Ocean due to leaks of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

The simulation, which was run by a German marine research institute, shows the ENTIRE Pacific waters being polluted by radioactive water in just six years.

Although the results failed to grab attention when first released last year, experts now fear that the hypothesis may become a scary reality, after the Japanese government recently admitted that some 3-hundred tons of radioactive water have leaked into the ocean everyday.

Mitsuhei Murata, a former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland: “TEPCO recently admitted to leaks of radioactive water. The amount is much greater than what the simulation had taken into account [10 petabecquerels of Cs-137].” - Arirang.


 WATCH: Radioactive water may contaminate entire Pacific Ocean in 6 years.