|
|
In the past few days, two pieces of good news have floated to the surface from the morass of Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis. No, nothing has really improved at Fukushima; in fact, things have turned out to be worse inside Reactor 1 than TEPCO thought. (Read more about that over on Global Spin.) But! Japan’s [...]
Krista Mahr posted a great item this morning on Japan’s decision to stop building new nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Atomic power already supplies some 30% of Japan’s electricity—considerably larger than nuclear’s share in the U.S.—and the Japanese government had plans on table to add another 14 reactors and up nuclear’s [...]
After two months of near silence, Japan’s government has seemingly awoken from its slumber and kicked into high damage-control gear. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Naoto Kan, whose administration has come under fire for its slow and opaque response to the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima, made two surprise announcements. First, that he would forgo his [...]
Yesterday the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with an early summary of a new report projecting the future of renewable energy. As with many international studies of the sort, readers were free to use parts of the results towards whichever conclusion they’d already reached on alternative power and climate change. Optimistic [...]
A major new report looking at over three decades of data in the UK has found no evidence that young children living near nuclear power plants face an increased risk of developing leukemia. However, the report looked only at nuclear power plants during normal operation and so the findings cannot be used to predict the [...]
Chubu Electric Power Company agreed on Monday to suspend operations at the controversial Hamaoka nuclear power plant, three days after Prime Minister Naoto Kan made an unprecedented request for the company to shut down the plant, citing safety concerns. Like the beleaguered Daiichi Fukishima nuclear power plant further north, Hamaoka is located in highly seismic [...]
That’s an old fashioned. Looks pretty good, right? I thought so. Old fashioneds can be made with whisky, which brings me to my real point — an interesting article by Kirsty Scott in the Guardian this week. In Speyside, home to half of Scotland’s whisky distilleries, a project is underway to use the by-product of [...]
A U.S. medical group has slammed the Japanese government and senior nuclear adviser Toshiso Kosako has tearfully resigned over the levels of radiation exposure Tokyo says are safe for students at elementary and junior high schools in Fukushima prefecture. In a statement quoted by Kyodo news agency, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) says the exposure limit [...]
FUKUSHIMA — A Geiger counter isn’t something you ever want to know how to use. It’s definitely not something you want to need. Not that it’s an intimidating piece of equipment – the one I used last week in Japan was roughly the size of a mobile phone circa 1998. Our Terra MKS-05, made in [...]
Assessing the full impact of Japan’s crisis has been a moving target since the first minutes after the 9.0 earthquake struck on March 11. So it’s with a cautious sense of optimism that Sunday’s news from Tokyo Electric and Power Company (TEPCO) – that the crippled power plant could be in cold shut down before [...]
