Who Will Pay for Japan's Chernobyl?

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/26/japan-tepco-compensation-idUST...

Japan lower house committee clears nuclear compensation bill

TOKYO, July 26 | Tue Jul 26, 2011 4:55am EDT

TOKYO, July 26 (Reuters) - A lower house committee of Japan's parliament on Tuesday passed a bill to help Tokyo Electric Power pay billions of dollars in compensation to those hurt by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, ensuring a law will soon be in place to guarantee the utility's survival and finally get aid to victims. The cornerstone of the bill is the creation of an institution funded by Japanese nuclear plant operators to help Tepco with massive compensation payouts.

The incident has forced about 80,000 people to evacuate from the area around the plant and severely damaged sales of farm produce after radiation levels exceeding safety standards were detected in beef, vegetables and tea. Since the disaster, Tepco's corporate credit rating has fallen to junk status and the company in May reported a record net loss of 1.25 trillion yen ($16 billion) for the year that ended on March 31.

The compensation bill was drafted by the ruling Democratic Party of Japan but was revised following talks with the opposition to clearly establish the government's responsibility for compensation and dealing with the effects of the disaster. It is also far from certain how much the final bill could be for damage from the nuclear crisis, as the government and the utility are still struggling to bring the plant's reactors under control. After passage by the committee, the bill is now expected to be approved by a lower house plenary session later this week without much resistance, setting the stage for its enactment in August.

Japan $hould refer the HOT BEEF co$t$ to General Electric, TEPCO, Hitachi, To$hiba, $iemens, Areva and the Bankster$ that financed thi$ de$ign-flawed nuclear di$aster. The company executive$ and board$ of director$ $hould be held jointly and $everally liable for the damage$. It i$ time for thi$ gang of murderous$ thieve$ to ‘cough-up-the-blood-money’.

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/07/104274.html
TOKYO, July 21, Kyodo
The government will buy up all beef found to contain radioactive cesium at levels exceeding the allowable limit, and incinerate it, a senior farm ministry official said Thursday.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/society.html
Thursday, July 21, 2011 21:20 +0900 (JST)
NHK has learned that at least 1,400 beef cattle were shipped from 76 farms in 11 prefectures after being fed rice straw contaminated with radioactive cesium at levels higher than the government safety limit. The straw had been distributed by agents in Miyagi and farmers in Fukushima and Iwate prefectures, near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Investigations are now underway to identify distribution channels of the straw and cattle. The number of farms found to have fed the straw to their cattle may rise further.

thnx!!!

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http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2009/05/to-harvey-wasserman-why-shou...

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

To Harvey Wasserman: "Why should I trust anything you say?"

Wasserman asks: Who Will Pay for America's Chernobyl? Answer: No one – Because it can’t happen here.

The premise of Wasserman's article is erroneous. It is physically impossible for any U.S. nuclear power plant to explode like the Chernobyl reactor did. They are a completely different design that cannot run out of control and explode. And (unlike Chernobyl) all U.S. nuclear plants have heavily fortified containment buildings that are designed to withstand the worst case accident, nor can our reactors catch on fire. The fact is, Chernobyl can't happen here.

The worst thing you can do to a U.S. light water reactor - overheat the fuel and cause it to melt - is what happened at Three Mile Island 30 years ago. But the TMI accident had no impact on the health of the people or the environment around the facility because of all of the safety systems built into the plant. With all of the changes and additional safety measures made because of the lessons learned from TMI, it is very unlikely a similar accident will happen again.

Wasserman’s argument about millions of deaths and trillions of dollars lost is based on a discredited study. He stated that “the Sandia Laboratory's WASH-740 Report warned that a melt-down at an American reactor could permanently irradiate a land mass the size of Pennsylvania. The fiscal costs, like the potential death toll, were essentially inestimable.” The NRC issued a disclaimer on the Wash-740 study (that used nuclear bomb data and assumed no containment building) stating, "The NRC's most recent studies have confirmed that early research into the topic led to extremely conservative consequence analyses that generate invalid results for attempting to quantify the possible effects of very unlikely severe accidents.”

Wasserman’s statement that nuclear power plants have "a 40 year design span," is incorrect. They did not have a designed life span. When the plants were built is was recognized that like all machines, how long they would last depended on how well they were built, and how well they were maintained and operated. There were some who thought the plants might operate a century or more, and they may be right. The "104 rickety atomic reactors" he refers to operate at full power over 91 percent of the time. They are in fact, by far, the most reliable cost effective source of electricity in the nation because they were well built, and have been very well maintained and safely operated.

Considering the above are just a few examples of Mr. Wasserman’s many attempts to deliberately mislead readers in this article, one might ask Mr. Wasserman, "Why should I trust anything you say?"

Guest post by NEI's Tom Kauffman, former reactor operator at Three Mile Island.