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On Sunday, over 17,000 people took to the streets of Tokyo to let their government know they’ve had it with nuclear power. It was an unusual display of mass disgruntlement in the Japanese capital, but these are unusual times. Residents walked through the neighborhood of Koenji – reportedly the birthplace of Japanese punk – with [...]
(UPDATED) Japanese officials announced on Tuesday morning that they were planning to raise the event level at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from 5 to the maximum level of 7, the highest on the international scale for nuclear incidents and the same level assigned to the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. The [...]
On Friday, Japan faced another round of assessing the damage from a massive aftershock — the strongest in over 400 in the last month — that struck off the north coast late last night. At least three people were killed in the quake and more than 140 injured, and as of Friday evening, millions in [...]
Each day seems to bring more news of the huge challenges facing the emergency workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As if adding insult to injury, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake hit the region on Thursday. Though Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) reported no serious incidents as a result of the quake, the tremor [...]
There was good news of a sort for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Congress on Wednesday. The Senate voted down several bills that would have blocked the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. That collection included one bill—co-sponsored by Republican Senators James Inhofe and Mitch McConnell—that would have [...]
Emergency workers on Tuesday managed to stem a leak of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean by injecting a mixture of liquid glass and a hardening agent into Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima power plant. It was a minor victory in what will certainly be a prolonged battle to safely cool fuel and [...]
In the safe, sanitized world of nuclear industry brochures, this was surely not supposed to happen: As it struggles to keep four reactors from melting down and thousands of spent fuel assemblies from blowing up, Tepco announced today that it has been forced to dump 11,000 tons of low-level radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. [...]
I’m on my way to Orange County, California, for the 2011 Fortune Brainstorm Green conference. I’ll be moderating panels on the scalability of green energy, and the fate of green capital. One my panelists for the later meeting will be Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, a national network of investors, environmental organizations and public [...]
For a few hours this weekend, you could almost cut the outrage with a knife, as reports leaked out that BP, whose Macondo oil well spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico last year, was looking for permission to resume drilling at 10 undersea locations in the Gulf (a complete [...]
Sawdust. It’s not the first thing most people would choose to put between themselves and highly contaminated radioactive water. But a mixture of sawdust — ogakuzu in Japanese — with chemicals and shredded newspaper is precisely what nuclear safety authorities and power plant officials turned to in trying to plug a 8-inch crack in a [...]
