StupidiNews!

• A 6.9 magnitude quake off Japan's east coast late Monday triggered tsunami warnings as officials are closely monitoring the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
• President-elect Donald Trump reiterated in an interview that he plans to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal on "day one" of his presidency.
• The crackdown on Kurds by Turkey's government continues as Ankara has issued an arrest warrant for the head of the Syrian Kurdish opposition party, a key US-backed rebel leader.
• Steven Mnuchin, the presumptive pick for Treasury Secretary, could face a brutal nomination hearing as Democrats attack him as one of the chief architects of the 2007 mortgage crisis.
• Canada has announced plans to require all the country's coal power plants to capture and store all carbon emissions or face being phased out by 2030.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature: Five Years Later

As I mentioned this morning, today is the anniversary of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, which resulted in tens of thousands dead, tens of thousands more displaced, and a nuclear plant meltdown that will continue to cause detrimental environmental effects for generations.

Reactor number one at Fukushima Daiichi is still so hot that five years later, robots still can't enter.

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site. 

Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-meter high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods in the quake and tsunami. 

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods, weighing hundreds of tonnes. Five robots sent into the reactors have failed to return. 

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco)  has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed. 

“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in an interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation.” 

The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods. 

But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said. 

Each robot has to be custom-built for each building.“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said.

And so the cleanup will continue, probably for the rest of the lives of the people there working to decontaminate the site now.  It's a massive environmental disaster that should have been the end, worldwide, of nuclear power technology.  It's not.  And there are hundreds more potential Fukushima meltdowns waiting to happen.  We do this to ourselves and see the results, and we still do it.

We only get one planet, and we've killed it multiple times over.

StupidiNews!

• New Mexico police are searching for two convicts who escaped from a prison transport van last night near the town of Artesia.
• Japan is marking the five-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 18,000 and caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown.
• A defector from Islamic State has delivered a flash drive with information on tens of thousands of supporters in 50 countries to a Sky News journalist in Britain.
• The founder of Russia Today news service who was found dead in a Washington DC hotel room last year was killed by blunt force trauma to the head, according to medical examiners.
• Nearly half of Americans surveyed mistakenly believe the Zika virus is fatal, rather than causing birth defects in children.

Cleanup On Aisle Daiichi

Meanwhile in Japan, yet another admission by the government of PM Shinzo Abe that the cleanup from 2011's nuclear disaster will take far longer than previously estimated...several years longer.

Radiation cleanup in some of the most contaminated towns around Fukushima's nuclear power plant is far behind schedule, so residents will have to wait a few more years before returning, officials said Monday. 

Environment Ministry officials said they are revising the cleanup schedule for six of 11 municipalities in an exclusion zone from which residents were evacuated after three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant went into meltdown following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The original plan called for completing all decontamination by next March. 

Nobody has been allowed to live in the zone again yet, though the government has allowed day visits to homes and businesses in some areas after initial decontamination efforts, said Shigeyoshi Sato, an Environment Ministry official in charge of decontamination. 

"We would have to extend the cleanup process, by one year, two years or three years, we haven't exactly decided yet," he said.

A little perspective about what constitutes an "unacceptable" government "disaster" when it comes to efforts to try to fix "huge problems" right?  Maybe the problems we're having over here aren't so bad in comparison, because THIS is what a disaster looks like, people.

Last Call For Rising Core Temperature

Meanwhile, at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster site, things aren't going real well with the whole "containment" thing two years later.

Radiation levels around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned.

Last week the plant's operator reported radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank into the ground.

It now says readings taken near the leaking tank on Saturday showed radiation was high enough to prove lethal within four hours of exposure.

The plant was crippled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour.

However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could only read measurements of up to 100 millisieverts.

The new recording, using a more sensitive device, showed a level of 1,800 millisieverts an hour.

The new reading will have direct implications for radiation doses received by workers who spent several days trying to stop the leak last week, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Tokyo.

In addition, Tepco says it has discovered a leak on another pipe emitting radiation levels of 230 millisieverts an hour.

Yeah, this seems like a bad thing.  Fukushima is leaking, containment has completely failed, and radioactive material has been getting into the ocean for two years now.  There doesn't seem to be any way to slow it down. either.  This stuff could burn for decades, guys.  By then, the damage to the Pacific rim is going to be devastating, not to mention to Japan itself.

The plant is just as lethal now as it was in 2011.  That's horrifying, but not shocking.  We'll keep up with this story as we have for the last 30 months.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama discussed a number of topics with Tonight Show host Jay Leno on Tuesday, including embassy closings, Edward Snowden, and more.
• A group of Virginia activists will be flying a giant Confederate battle flag over I-95 near Richmond, having leased land to do so from the state.
• Former President George W. Bush is expected to be released from the hospital today after a routine physical on Monday prompted heart surgery to place a stent in a blocked artery.
• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged full assistance to TEPCO officials in cleaning up radioactive water leaks from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
• Climate scientists say despite dwindling Himalayan glaciers, snow melt will continue to provide plenty of water to rivers like the Ganges and Yangtze.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Still Rising

Hey folks, a not-so-gentle reminder that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster didn't just go away because the US press stopped covering it.

A Japanese utility has said its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is likely to have leaked contaminated water into sea, acknowledging for the first time a problem long suspected by experts.

Experts have suspected a continuous leak since the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was ravaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. had previously denied contaminated water reached the sea, despite spikes in radiation levels in underground and sea water samples taken at the plant. Japan's nuclear watchdog said two weeks ago a leak was highly suspected, ordering TEPCO to examine the problem.

Surprise, after 28 months, TEPCO finally coming clean on the fact that radioactive water has leaked and most likely is probably still leaking into the Pacific.  Workers and cleanup crew there face serious health risks as a result.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, the operator of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, said Friday that about 2,000 people -- 10 percent of those who were part of the emergency crew involved in the cleanup after the plant’s meltdown in 2011 -- face an increased risk of thyroid cancer due to exposure to nuclear radiation.

And that risk continues to grow as the waters off the bay continue to be contaminated.  Little coverage on that, it seems.  But the problem's still there, folks.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature: Two Years Later

It's hard to believe today marks the second anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, but two years after the earthquake and tsunami flooded the plant, refugees are still coping with depression, anxiety, and pretty much full-blown PTSD.  Kenichi Togawa and his family are all too typical, as NPR's Geoff Brumfiel discovers.

At first they lived in a gymnasium in Kawamata town, about 30 miles away. For months, they slept in an open room with many other families and shared shower facilities and eating areas. People cut in line to get food, and others got angry when the kids played too loudly. "We were just like dogs and cats without chains," says Yuka, Kenichi's wife.

That was tough, but their current situation isn't much better. All five family members live in a tiny, temporary house that's roughly 300 square feet. Sixteen-year-old Rina says she often has arguments with her younger siblings, especially when they're settling down to sleep at night. "[The room's] just so small, we hit each other by mistake," she says.

Yuka is grateful to have a roof over her family's head, but she doesn't think of it as a home. "This is temporary," she says. "We leave our house in the morning and we come home and it's temporary. It's like floating in the air." She worries about her children. For now they are healthy, but she fears they may become sick from radiation exposure.

Kenichi is also having a tough time. He is more isolated now than he was before the accident. He spends hours each day playing video games. He has put on weight and drinks more than he used to. Other evacuees are doing worse. Many don't have jobs, and some have taken up drinking and gambling, according to Hiromi Yamamoto, an English teacher from Namie who fled to nearby Iwake City.

Public health officials believe that the stress and isolation the nuclear accident has caused may be more dangerous than the radiation itself. Big disasters are very difficult to recover from, says Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who has studied the emotional fallout from Hurricane Katrina. Over the course of years, mental health problems can get worse and worse. "If it's something that goes on for a long, long time as Katrina did, that's where you get into trouble," he says. "The Japanese situation looks like it might be a similar sort of thing."

The Japanese nuclear Katrina.  Cheery, eh?  And yet two years later, the reality is only now sinking in that the refugees from Fukushima will never be allowed to go back home.  I'd be depressed too.  Japan's government has basically failed here, even worse than we did with Katrina.

So who knows at this point what the real legacy of Fukushima will be?

Also, be sure to read over the rest of my Fukushima posts from 2011.  The problems are still there.  They will be there for a very, very long time.

Fukushima Jujitsu

The incoming administration of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is pulling the full flip flop on the country's post-Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster policy of eliminating nuclear reactors, and if anything, new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is eager to greenlight more reactors ASAP to make up for the country's power shortages.

Japan’s new leaders set to work Thursday on dismantling plans to rid the country of nuclear power by 2040, pledging to review a post-Fukushima policy.

The pro-business Liberal Democratic Party-led government also said they would give the green light to any reactors deemed safe by regulators, indicating shuttered power stations could start coming back online.

“We need to reconsider the previous administration’s policy that aimed to make zero nuclear power operation possible during the 2030s,” Toshimitsu Motegi told a news conference.

Shinzo Abe, who was elected as prime minister and unveiled his cabinet line-up on Wednesday, appointed Motegi as his economy, trade and industry minister, also in charge of supervising the nuclear industry.

Abe’s LDP won a landslide victory in the December 16 election, returning to power after a three-year break.

Despite anti-nuclear sentiment running high in Japan following the Fukushima disaster, parties opposing atomic energy made little impact at the ballot box.

Motegi said he was ready to give the go-ahead to resuming generation at nuclear power plants “if they are confirmed safe”.

Given that the LDP was swept back into power, Japan's voters are clearly far more worried about Japan's stagnant economy than nuclear safety.  To their credit, the LDP is already proposing big infrastructure projects to rebuild the damaged northeast coast of Japan and to put people to work immediately (something the US should emulate).  That stimulative rebuilding effort is going to include nuclear plants however.

I wish Japan would consider other power sources, but it's hard for me to complain when the US lacks the will to even try to rebuild anything at this point because the greatest country in the world "can no longer afford expensive boondoggles" like, you know, roads, bridges, schools and power lines.

StupidiNews!

• Information site WikiLeaks is releasing over 2 million emails from Syria's al-Assad regime since 2006, showing interesting dealings with Western nations.
• Two former Argentine dictators were given lengthy jail sentences for ordering police forces to take babies from leftist opponents in the late 70's and early 80's.
• Facing united world opposition, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says he is now willing to step aside as leader.
• Embattled Netflix is gaining in market value now that one analyst has determined the company's subscribers watch more online per month than TV and cable networks combined.
• A new report from Japan has determined that the country's nuclear regulators and TEPCO power concern both failed miserably in preventing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 44

Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, still a massive problem, still under-reported by our Village betters, still every data point we get on the extent of the disaster is "worse than previously thought."  And now some eight months plus after the accident, we get a clearer picture.

Molten nuclear fuel at Japan’s Fukushima plant might have eaten two thirds of the way through a concrete containment base, its operator said, citing a new simulation of the extent of the March disaster.

Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said their latest calculations showed the fuel inside the No. 1 reactor at the tsunami-hit plant could have melted entirely, dropping through its inner casing and eroding a concrete base.

In the worst-case scenario, the molten fuel could have reached as far as 65 centimetres (2 feet) through the concrete, leaving it only 37 centimetres short of the outer steel casing, the report, released Wednesday, said.

Until now, TEPCO had said some fuel melted through the inner pressure vessel and dropped to the containment vessel, without saying how much and what it did to the concrete, citing a lack of data.

“Almost no fuel remains at its original position,” TEPCO said in the report.

And we'll find out of course eight months from now that this "worst case scenario" was exceeded by reality.  This stuff doesn't cool off overnight, folks.  Remember, we took TEPCO's word that there was no meltdown originally, then a partial meltdown, now yeah, this stuff ate through two feet of concrete possibly and enough has gotten out into the Japanese countryside to seriously poison the surrounding area.  Yeah, this is the nightmare that just will not stop.

Meanwhile, 8% of Japan's land mass is contaminated by radiation.  That's just what they're admitting to.

That trillion dollar estimate of mine still stands.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 43

Time for another update on Japan and the fallout from Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and the latest figures from Japan's science ministry are devastating: some 8% of Japan's total land mass has been irradiated, including basically all of Fukushima prefecture, as well as significant parts of neighboring Gunma and Tochigi prefectures.

Japan’s science ministry says 8 per cent of the country’s surface area has been contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

It says more than 30,000 square kilometres of the country has been blanketed by radioactive cesium.

The science ministry defines places with a concentration of more than 10,000 becquerels per square meter as “areas affected by the nuclear accident”….  The science ministry fine-tuned its methods by subtracting levels of naturally existing background radiation.

This is pretty grim and devastating stuff.  Fukushima is going to be uninhabitable for generations and there's basically nothing anyone can do about it to fix it.  At some point Japan is going to have to bite the bullet and just write the prefecture off, and I don't think that will be long in the offing.

My heart goes out to Japan.  They're going to need a lot of help to get through this.

Last Call

From the Fukushima Daiichi files comes this set of images from the plant.  Japan is eager to show off how "safe" the plant is right now but the reality is the plant could take a generation or longer to clean up.

While radiation emissions have dropped significantly since the 11 March earthquake and tsunami, workers continue to operate in highly dangerous conditions.

Towns near Fukushima have responded cautiously to plans to build temporary storage sites for massive quantities of radioactive debris generated by the accident.

Almost eight months after the start of the crisis the government says the facilities will not be ready for at least another three years. In the meantime, towns will have to store the contaminated waste locally, despite health concerns.

To reach its target of halving radiation levels within two years the government will have to remove large quantities of soil. Scraping 4cm of topsoil from contaminated farmland in Fukushima prefecture would create more than 3m tonnes of waste, says the agriculture ministry, enough to fill 20 football stadiums.

Once completed, the storage facilities would hold soil and other contaminated waste for up to 30 years, local reports said.

"We have been aiming to start cleaning up as soon as possible," Toshiaki Kusano, an official in Fukushima city, told Reuters. "To do so we need to talk about where to store the waste, but we have not been able to answer the question residents are asking: how long it was going to stay there?"

I still stick by my estimate of a trillion dollars to clean this mess up completely.  Now we have a decent idea of the timeframe to go along with it.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 42

The Fukushima Daiichi disaster continues to define 2011 in Japan, and six months after the tsunami hit, tens of thousands are still homeless and demanding answers.

Shouts fill a room at a temporary housing complex where seven officials, kneeling in their dark suits, face 70 or so tenants who were forced to abandon their homes near the Fukushima nuclear plant after some of its reactors went into meltdown after the March 11 quake struck.

"We don't know who we can trust!" one man yelled in the cramped room where the officials were trying to explain the hugely complex procedures to claim compensation.

"Can we actually go back home? And if not, can you guarantee our livelihoods?"

About 80,000 people were forced to leave their homes by the nuclear crisis.

While the owner of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co, has made temporary payments to some victims, it was only last month that it finally began accepting applications for compensation.

But the procedure is so complicated that it seems to just make things worse.

After claimants have read a 160-page instruction manual, they then have to fill in a 60-page form and attach receipts for lodging, transportation and medical costs.

"It's too difficult. I'm going to see how it goes. I don't want to rush and mess up," said Toshiyuki Owada, 65, an evacuee from Namie town, about 20 km (12 miles) away from the plant.

One hundred sixty pages just for the instructions to fill out the compensation form.  You'd think TEPCO and the Japanese government were making it as difficult as possible in order for the hundreds of thousands of people affected by this mess to get compensation, especially since they could be on the hook for a trillion or so.

We're seeing the method to this madness, and it's saddening to see Japan take a page from the Bush playbook.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 41

Another check of the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster finds plant owner TEPCO in serious jeopardy, on the hook for around $50 billion dollars in compensation to people who lived near the plant.  As the first compensation checks go out this week, it's only a matter of time before TEPCO is nationalized by the crushing weight of their own massive failures.

Masato Muto, 40, works for the Tokyo Electric Power Co. in a rented one-story building. Only a clock and a calendar hang on the office walls, and most days, only angry people come through the front door.


The nuclear evacuees who come to this Tepco branch office in Fukushima prefecture are greeted two ways. First, by a letter from the company president — taped to a whiteboard by the entrance — that apologizes for the “great inconvenience” and “anxiety” caused by “the accident.” Next, by an employee like Muto, one of the 1,700 Tepco workers dispatched to centers in Fukushima to help people collect payments for their lost jobs and homes — provided they first fill out the 60-page application form.

Seven months after the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, Tepco, which operated the facility, owes $50 billion in compensation to the tens of thousands who lived close to the nuclear plant. The payments could send the company into bankruptcy, a government panel recently said. At minimum, they will handcuff the utility giant for years, forcing it to cut jobs, sell its assets, and perhaps raise electricity rates for its 29 million customers. 

I've long said that the total cost of Fukushima Daiichi will top the $1 trillion mark when all is said and done, not to mention untold thousands of lives.   TEPCO is not long for this Earth as a company, and Japan, already mired in a second lost decade economically, may not rise from the ashes of this disaster for a generation.

The prestige of working for Tepco is now gone, and so are many of the perks. It once operated resorts and sponsored clubs for its employees; Muto was once a running back on the American football team. But since the disaster Tepco has booked $23 billion in losses. Economists say the company will either go bankrupt — a likely scenario if its idled nuclear reactors don’t re-start — or carry for years the baggage of debts to evacuees and lenders.

Either way, said Tatsuo Hatta, an economist from Gakushuin University, “it’s a funeral company.”

And sadly, a lot of other funerals will precede TEPCO's demise, as well as follow it.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 40

Still plenty of unintended consequences from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, at this point we're starting to see heavily irradiated crops show up some distance away from the blast zone.

Japan found the first case of rice with radioactive materials far exceeding a government-set level for a preliminary test of pre-harvested crop, requiring thorough inspection of the rice to be harvested from the region, the farm ministry said late on Friday.

The ministry said radioactive caesium of 500 becquerels per kg was found in a sample of the pre-harvested rice in Nihonmatsu city, in Fukushima Prefecture, 56 km (35 miles) west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering the world's worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.

The ministry said the Fukushima Prefecture will expand the inspection spots nearly ten-fold to around 300 areas.

It is the first case in Japan of rice containing radioactive caesium exceeding 200 becquerels per kg, a level which requires further thorough testing of the area for the harvested rice. 

If this level of radiation is being found in new crops some 35 miles from the plant and six months after the disaster, it's a pretty good bet there's going to be continued problems with irradiated crops for some time into the future.  How many tons of irradiated crops are being missed by spot inspections?

I've said before the total cost of this disaster will be into the trillion dollar range, and the more signs like this we see, the higher that bill will be in the end.

This will be a generational disaster for Japan.

Last Call

It's arguably one of the worst jobs in the world I can think of right now, and it's about to become vacant:  Japan's Prime Minister.

The race to pick Japan's sixth leader in five years appeared on Friday to be shaping up as a battle between the most popular contender and a rival backed by a party powerbroker, although with five candidates in play, the outcome was hard to call.


Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who came under fire for his response to the massive March tsunami and the radiation crisis it triggered, stepped down as ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) leader, clearing the way for the Democrats to pick a successor on Monday.

"I want to make every effort to realize a society that does not rely on nuclear power," Kan told a news conference. Kan's proposed energy policy shift is backed by most voters, but he was unable to parlay that public support into popularity.

Six Prime Ministers in five years?  C'mon, that's not just unstable, that's ridiculous.  Japan's economic problems aside, the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster is still ongoing, and the next PM is going to have to be the one stuck with quarantining a healthy chunk of the northern part of the country for the next hundred years.

I don't see how the next PM will last more than a year, frankly.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 39

Please pay no attention to the ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan and the fact that thousands of people will basically never be able to return to their homes near the still radioactive Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Broad areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could soon be declared uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, after a government survey found radioactive contamination that far exceeded safe levels, several major media outlets said Monday.


The formal announcement, expected from the government in coming days, would be the first official recognition that the March accident could force the long-term depopulation of communities near the plant, an eventuality that scientists and some officials have been warning about for months.

Lawmakers said over the weekend — and major newspapers reported Monday — that Prime Minister Naoto Kan was planning to visit Fukushima Prefecture, where the plant is, as early as Saturday to break the news directly to residents. The affected communities are all within 12 miles of the plant, an area that was evacuated immediately after the accident.

The government is expected to tell many of these residents that they will not be permitted to return to their homes for an indefinite period. It will also begin drawing up plans for compensating them by, among other things, renting their now uninhabitable land. While it is unclear if the government would specify how long these living restrictions would remain in place, news reports indicated it could be decades. That has been the case for areas around the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine after its 1986 accident. 

So yeah, Japan is washing its hands of a 12-mile radius around the plant...and the place is still hot.  Who knows how much larger the no-go zone could get say, six months or a year from now?  All land in 25 miles?  50 miles?  This thing isn't over by a long shot, and only now is the government admitting that being in 12 miles of the plant is uninhabitable by humans.  Who's going to live 13 miles from the plant?

This disaster just keeps on in its horror...and will for decades to come.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 38

By no means is the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster even close to over.  With radiation levels still pegging the needle at 10 Sieverts an hour this week (a lethal dose in just 10-20 minutes) and in reality probably much higher than that, no wonder Japan has now fired the country's top nuclear safety officials.  The BBC:

Three men in charge of nuclear power safety and policy have been sacked amid the ongoing crisis at the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Japan's Trade and Industry Minister, Banri Kaieda, said the three senior officials would be held responsible for mishandling the plant and its problems.

The Fukushima plant, hit by the tsunami in March, is still leaking radiation.

The crisis has also brought to light the close links between the government and the power industry.

Those sacked are the head of the nuclear safety agency, Nobuaki Terasaka, the head of the agency for natural resources and energy, Tetsuhiro Hosono, and the vice minister for economy, trade and industry, Kazuo Matsunaga.

Mr Kaieda, who played a key role in handling the Fukushima crisis, has also said he plans to resign to take responsibility.

But he has not said when he will do so, despite a tearful confrontation with opposition lawmakers.

Is it any wonder why beef and produce bans continue to increase from the stricken area?

The Japanese government, fighting a quake-triggered nuclear plant crisis, Tuesday extended its beef cattle shipment ban to Tochigi prefecture in that region.

The action was taken as radiation emissions have continued from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in nearby Fukushima Prefecture, which was crippled by the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said it was decided to ban shipments from Tochigi after some cattle raised there were found to be contaminated with radioactive cesium, Kyodo News reported.

The government already has suspended beef cattle shipments from Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate prefectures.

More and more prefectures and more and more Japanese citizens will find themselves facing dangerous levels of radiation as the months roll by.  This disaster will define a generation in that country.  When the Japanese people have finally had enough, things will get truly uglyand will do so quickly.

StupidiNews!

• Secret Service agents safely detained a man who jumped the White House fence on Tuesday, he had been involved with efforts to gain entry before.
• Stores in Norway have withdrawn PC games from store shelves that were a favorite of accused terrorist Anders Brevik.
• A new seaport expansion in Bellingham, Washington has citizens looking forward to new jobs, but the cargo of coal to fuel Chinese power plants is causing major controversy.
• Japanese lawmakers have approved 2 trillion yen in funding for compensation of funding for victims of the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
• California's identity theft law has been successfully used to prosecute a juvenile who stole another student's Facebook account to leave embarrassing fake messages.