By Jessica Corbett Japan’s new environmental minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, called Wednesday for permanently shutting down the nation’s nuclear reactors to prevent a repeat of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, comments that came just a day after Koizumi’s predecessor recommended dumping more than one million tons of radioactive wastewater from the power plant into the Pacific Ocean. […]
Captured by an underwater robot on Saturday, footage released by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. (Tepco) shows for the first time what appears to be melted nuclear fuel inside one of the destroyed Fukushima reactors in Japan. According to the Japan Times: “This is the first time Tepco has found something likely […]
By Dahr Jamail Former nuclear industry senior vice president Arnie Gundersen, who managed and coordinated projects at 70 U.S. atomic power plants, is appalled at how the Japanese government is handling the Fukushima nuclear crisis. “The inhumanity of the Japanese government toward the Fukushima disaster refugees is appalling,” Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 45 […]
By Lauren McCauley A wildfire broke out in the highly radioactive “no-go zone” near the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant over the weekend, reviving concerns over potential airborne radiation. Japanese newspaper The Mainichi reported that lightning was likely to blame for sparking the fire Saturday on Mount Juman in Namie, which lies in the Fukushima […]
By Yuko Yoneda Six years ago, more than 15,000 people perished and tens of thousands of people’s lives changed forever. Northeastern Japan was hit by a massive earthquake, followed by an enormous tsunami that wiped out coastal towns one after another. In the days that followed came the horrifying news: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors […]
By Whitney Webb The first photos of the wild boars that have come to dominate the abandoned streets of towns near the site of the 2011 Fukushima disaster have emerged as government-led teams begin to cull the boar population to make way for the expected return of the towns’ former residents. Radiation Levels at #Fukushima […]
By Whitney Webb While media attention has largely drifted away from the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in the years since the disaster, a recent and disturbing development has once again made Fukushima difficult if not impossible to ignore. On Feb. 2, Tokyo Electric Power Company or TEPCO, quietly released a […]
Nearly six years after the initial explosion caused a catastrophic meltdown at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan, the situation has suddenly taken a drastic turn for the worst. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company which owns and operates the now defunct power plant, announced Thursday that radiation inside […]
By Paul Brown There have been three well-documented major nuclear accidents in the last 60 years, each one accompanied by official lies and cover-ups. There have been other less well-known serious accidents that have been so effectively hushed up that decades later there are only the sketchiest details available. The legacy of these disasters is […]