The Japanese government is allowing residents to relocate back to nuclear radiation-stricken areas near its Fukushima nuclear plant despite calls from the United Nations to bring down radiation levels first before exposing women and children to the environment.

Following the powerful tsunami that left 18,000 Japanese citizens dead or missing in March 2011, the island nation also had to contend with the partial meltdown of several light-water nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, once among the 15 largest nuclear plants in the world.

Baskut Tuncak, United Nations special rapporteur on hazardous substances and waste, said Thursday that people felt they were "being forced to return to areas that are unsafe, including those with radiation levels above what the government previously considered safe," AFP reported.

The only promise that is new about the promised peace plan is the way it will be forced on the Palestinians: no one has promised that the plan itself will be new. With Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the outside—brought onside with the promise of continued military aid despite their crimes against humanity and violations of international law and the Palestinians weakened by being silenced, economically crushed and stripped of any friends to help them, the United States and Israel are now free to attempt to impose a peace plan on the Palestinians.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is being tight-lipped about an “unusual event” which occurred at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant last Saturday which forced a “hot shutdown” of both the plant’s Generation IV-type reactors 1 and 2.
The NRC classified the emergency as an “unusual event” but provided little to no details on the situation.

Additionally, the NRC reports that weather conditions from Tropical Storm Florence are currently preventing workers from accessing the plant.

The two reactor Brunswick nuclear plant on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina may be critically threatened by flooding from hurricane Florence. The nuclear plant has a sea wall designed to withstand 22 feet of flooding according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The National Weather Service in Wilmington NC reported on Thursday that the Cape Fear River is expected to crest at up to 22 feet on Tuesday Sept. 17 swollen by hurricane Florence storm surge and downpours.

The seawall was constructed following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan after a tsunami overtopped the sea wall and damaged plant electric power and controls leading to catastrophic meltdowns and release of radiation.

The advisory also warns military activities linked to the bloody conflict in Syria have been ramped across Iran's airspace.

Tensions between Tehran and Washington are running high following Donald Trump’s controversial decision to pull out of the landmark Iran nuclear deal re-introduce economic sanctions last month.

Flight Service Bureau, which provides safety information on airspace to airlines, said "without seeming alarmist", the deteriorating relationship between the US and Iran must be taken into account when planning flights in Iran's airspace.

Radioactive particles from the Fukushima disaster have been detected in – of all places – California wines.

Inspired by tests conducted in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, researchers at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS, decided to test a series of California wines dating between 2009 and 2012. They looked for traces of radioactive particles, specifically cesium-137, a man-made isotope.

Smithsonian.com reported on the team’s findings:

Their findings, newly published in the pre-print online journal Arxiv, suggest that currents and atmospheric patterns carried radioactive particles across the Pacific, where they settled on grapevines growing in California’s wine regions. The team writes that bottles produced following the nuclear meltdown contain increased levels of cesium-137, with the cabernet revealing double the amount of pre-Fukushima radiation.

As the White House convenes a policy meeting on Iran Thursday involving senior Pentagon officials and cabinet advisers under national security adviser John Bolton, and after a week of intense saber-rattling by President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani, a new bombshell report by Australia's ABC says the White House is drawing up plans to strike Iran's alleged nuclear facilities as early as next month.

Senior figures in the Australia's Turnbull government have told the ABC they believe the US is prepared to bomb Iran's nuclear capability. The bombing could be as early as next month. —ABC report

The Pennsylvania Department of Health is stepping up efforts to protect people who live near nuclear power plants.

The health department will distribute free potassium iodide tablets on Aug. 9 to those who live, work or attend school within a 10-mile radius of one of the state's five nuclear power plants.

More than 60 studies have shown increases of childhood leukemia around nuclear facilities worldwide. Despite this finding, there has never been independent analysis in the US examining connections between childhood cancer and nuclear facilities. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had tasked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to conduct such a study, but then withdrew funding, claiming publicly that it would be too expensive.

Radioactive levels are increasing in wine from California's Napa Valley, thanks to the radioactive cloud that drifted from the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
Researchers from the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan (CNRS) in France tested California wine from before and after the Fukushima disaster and found there was double the amount of cesium-137 in its Cabernet Sauvignon after the 2011 tsunami caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors to leak.

The radioactive cloud released by the plant drifted all the way to California’s Napa Valley. There, trace amounts of cesium-137 made its way into the vineyard grapes.

The levels varied depending on the wine, researchers found, with Cabernet Sauvignon reds having a higher amount and rosé having the least.

We wish we could say this is from The Onion but it's a now viral story that's but the latest representation of extreme government incompetence in handling deadly radioactive materials. Two Department of Energy security officials tasked with transporting deadly substances left plutonium in the back of their Ford Expedition, where it was promptly stolen from a Marriott parking lot in San Antonio.

And over a year later and after what appears to be a ham-handed investigation that was prematurely shut down perhaps for fear of public embarrassment, authorities still have no clue as to the whereabouts of what the government admits are "bomb-usable materials".

A concrete dome holding the radioactive waste of 43 nuclear explosions is leaking into the ocean, veterans have warned.

The Enewetak Atoll was used by the US government to test 30 megatons of weapons – equivalent to 2,000 Hiroshima blasts – between 1948 and 1958.

More than 8,000 people, including US troops, would later work to clean up these Pacific islands, shifting 110,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris into a blast crater.

This 30-foot-deep crater on Runit Island would then be entombed in a concrete dome, 350 feet across and 16 inches thick.

But now, with the dome weathered by decades of exposure, it's feared that rising seas and storms could see radiation leaking into the ocean.

A new, shocking report by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP), Harvard University, and the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy discovered that the US nuclear power industry could be on the verge of a collapse — a reality that many have yet to realize.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), “US nuclear power: The vanishing low-carbon wedge” examined 99 nuclear power reactors in 30 states, operated by 30 different power companies. As of 2017, there are two new reactors under construction, but 34 reactors have been permanently shut down as many plants reach the end of their lifespan.

People who live near the Tihange nuclear power plant in Belgium’s Wallonia region have serious concerns about the safety of the station which has experienced several shutdowns in recent years.

The station’s operator, Engie-Electrabe, found “instability” in the reinforced concrete ceiling of the reactor’s armored bunker during a planned check that started on March 30, the newspaper Soir reported on Thursday.

According to the newspaper, company specialists also determined that the “anomalies” in the reinforced concrete had been there since the time the bunker was built.

TEPCO is conducting an independent geological survey to confirm the absence of active faults in Aomori Prefecture, where it wants to resume the construction of a Fukushima-type nuclear plant, frozen following the 2011 disaster.
“It’s necessary to form a consortium for building a nuclear plant that is excellent in safety, technology and economy,” TEPCO President Tomoaki Kobayakawa said in Tokyo, announcing the decision to conduct a survey of the Aomori Prefecture nuclear site.

READ MORE: Fukushima operator turned down tsunami simulation plan 9yrs before disaster

The Higashidori Nuclear Power Plant hosts two adjoining sites administered by Tohoku Electric Power Company and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). While Tohoku Unit 1 began commercial operations in December 2005, TEPCO never got a chance to finish their unit, the construction of which began only in January 2011. All activity at the site has ceased since the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown.

In the early stages of research, before Dimona existed, there were accidents that exposed scientists to lethal levels of radiation. Some of them died and their names are known (though not well). Less known is that Dimona had a series of accidents - the most serious in 1966 - that exposed hundreds of its workers to similarly lethal doses.

Avner Cohen, the world’s leading scholar of the Israeli nuclear programme, told me that in the first 20-25 years the processes used to protect workers were primitive and sloppy. Mistakes were common, often not intentionally, but because relatively little was known about the proper handling of radioactive materials. In some cases, documentation was fabricated.

Beneath the elegant curves of the roof on the Seirinji Buddhist temple in Japan's Fukushima region hangs an unlikely adornment: a Geiger counter collecting real-time radiation readings.

The machine is sending data to Safecast, an NGO born after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster that says it has now built the world's largest radiation dataset, thanks to the efforts of citizen scientists like Seirinji's priest Sadamaru Okano.

Like many Japanese, Okano lost faith in the government after the nuclear meltdown seven years ago.

"The government didn't tell us the truth, they didn't tell us the true measures," he told AFP, seated inside the 150-year-old temple.

A major wildfire is sweeping through the Chernobyl nuclear disaster area. The authorities have deployed dozens of fire trucks as firefighting aircraft bombard the radioactive exclusion zone with massive amounts of water.

The fire inside the Chernobyl 'dead zone,' which is now part of Ukraine, started on Tuesday morning, when dry grass was ignited, local emergency services said in a statement. The wildfire subsequently reached a forest, where up to 10 hectares (24 acres) are now in flames.

Some 29 vehicles and 126 personnel have been dispatched at the scene, with several planes and helicopters dropping water from the sky on the area engulfed by wildfire.

The zone saw another large blaze last year, which scorched 25 hectares (60 acres) of land.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it's also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum, a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo - and it's a miracle it hasn't run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it's also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum , a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo - and it's a miracle it hasn't run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

A reactor at EDF Energy’s (EDF.PA) Hunterston B nuclear power plant in Scotland will remain offline for additional safety checks after cracks were found in its core, Britain’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) said.

Ageing reactors generate just over 20 percent of Britain’s power but almost half of this capacity, including Hunterston, is due to go offline by 2025, prompting the government to plan new plants.

The Republic of Serbia appears to be making moves that would ultimately open the door to holding NATO responsible for the significant spike in cancer illnesses and deaths which followed NATO’s bombing of Serbia with depleted uranium shells.

President of the Serbian Parliament Maja Gojkovic drafted a resolution in parliament that would establish a commission charged with investigating the impact of the NATO bombing in 1999 on the health of citizens and the environment, with particular emphasis on the effects caused by the use of depleted uranium shells.

Previously, the Italian parliament, recognized that NATO’s use of these nuclear waste tainted weapons were the primary cause of illness and death for Italian NATO soldiers in the occupied southern Serbian region of Kosovo. Serbian officials are in an active conversation with the Italians, whose findings may better inform any Serbian investigation.

A small amount of radioactive, weapons-grade plutonium has gone missing from a university in Idaho.

Idaho State University was using the radioactive chemical element, which was about the size of a 10p piece, for research.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the university could not account for about a 30th of an ounce (one gram) of the material, which is used in nuclear reactors and to make nuclear bombs.

One of the nuclear reactors at the Hunterston B nuclear power plant in Scotland could remain offline until the end of the year, after fresh cracks expanding at a higher rate were discovered in the graphite blocks forming its core.

Reactor 3 at the aging Hunterston B nuclear power station on the West coast of Scotland was initially taken offline on March 9 for a routine inspection, during which the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) found new “keyway root cracks” in the reactor core. On Wednesday, operator EDF Energy announced that the reactor could remain offline for months until the problem is fixed.

“The inspections confirmed the expected presence of new keyway root cracks in the reactor core and also identified these happening at a slightly higher rate than modeled,” EDF Energy said. “While Hunterston B Reactor 3 could return to operation from the current outage, it will remain offline” until the company addresses safety concerns.

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the “second worst” nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima are estimated to be between 5.6 and 8.1 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Professor Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the report’s Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News then, “Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has estimated that about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the updated 2016 TORCH Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels. [1] (A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. The “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels.)

The country’s Environment Ministry wants to use the radiation-tainted material to rebuild a number of roads in the region that was devastated by a tsunami in 2011.

But the proposal has sparked fury among residents over fears they could be poisoned by the soil.

A briefing about the plans on Thursday saw angry scenes erupt, with locals in the city of Nihonmatsu yelling about how the roads will be “contaminated”.

Authorities have been desperately trying to convince people that it will be safe, saying the soil will be buried under clean earth that will “block” any harmful radiation.

Due to an increased level of radiation in the given block, maintenance works in the reactor have been most recently handicapped, but the maintenance company says there is no need to worry.

The reactor cooling system at the Doel nuclear power station has suffered a leak, although no danger is posed to the personnel or to the environment, the operating company Engie-Electrabel reported Saturday.

"A minor water efflux has been spotted in a reserve pipe line of the cooling system. The efflux is rather small, we are still well below the mark which would cause an automatic switch-off of the reactor. It does not affect security," the company’s representative noted.

Two groups of Chinese researchers have reportedly confirmed a risk from radioactive exposure to their countrymen after a North Korean nuclear test site appeared to have partially collapsed.

North Korea's Mount Mantap has contained every known nuclear test in the country: the Punggye-ri nuclear test site sits under it in a network of tunnels. After a thermonuclear device was tested in early September 2017, seismic activity at the mountain was recorded in the form of a 6.3-magnitude earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey's findings, while the China Earthquake Networks Center detected a 3.4 magnitude follow-up quake.

Almost immediately, it was reported that the mountain had experienced a tunnel collapse, although with some uncertainty. Now, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that Chinese researchers have confirmed that the mountain collapsed on itself.

The United States is struggling to handle the excessive amounts of plutonium generated at the cores of its many retired nuclear reactors, according to a new report, raising fears that it might end up in the wrong hands.

Today, there are some 54 metric tons of surplus plutonium stored in nuclear facilities the US Department of Energy operates around the country, according to Reuters.

In Pantex, a plant located near Amarillo, Texas, the surplus plutonium has long exceeded the 20,000 cores, also known as “pits,” that regulations allow such facilities to store in their temporary storage facility.

That means a mishap in the process, which is mostly done manually by contract workers, can trigger massive nuclear explosions.

While in the past the US simply used the leftover plutonium to produce more nuclear munitions, it is now obliged under a 2010 treaty with Russia to keep its arsenal under 1,550 warheads.

Faced with the post-3.11 reality of government (and corporate) policy that protects economic and security interests over public health and well-being, the majority of the 2 million inhabitants of Fukushima Prefecture are either unconscious of or have been encouraged to accept living with radioactive contamination…

A leaked report has raised new fears that Mururoa Atoll, the site of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, is in danger of collapsing. The French government, since 2010, has kept secret that Mururoa Atoll, the site of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, is in danger of collapsing, according to Mururoa e Tatou (MET), the Nuclear Association in French Polynesia.

The Nuclear Association’s president, Roland Oldham, told Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat program that radioactive material could be released into the Pacific Ocean if the atoll were to collapse. (Listen to the report here.) French nuclear safety official, Marcel Jurien de la Graviere, suggested that people on nearby Tureia Atoll could be exposed to radiation 300 times the level in France. If the atoll collapses there could be international ramifications.

Seven decades after making key portions of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are being exposed to radiation as they tear down buildings that helped create the nation's nuclear arsenal.

Dozens of workers demolishing a plutonium processing plant from the 1940s have inhaled or ingested radioactive particles in the past year, and even carried some of that radiation into their vehicles, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The incidents have prompted the federal government, along with state regulators, to halt the demolition of the sprawling Plutonium Finishing Plant until a safety plan can be developed.

The contamination has also shaken confidence in a massive cleanup of Hanford, the nation's most polluted nuclear weapons production site.

The US mining industry has asked the supreme court to overturn an Obama-era rule prohibiting the mining of uranium on public lands adjacent to the Grand Canyon.

The National Mining Association (NMA) and the American Exploration and Mining Association (AEMA) filed petitions on Friday asking the court to reverse the 2012 ban on new uranium mining claims on more than 1 million acres of public land surrounding Grand Canyon national park.

In December, the ninth circuit court of appeals upheld the ban after a legal challenge by the industry, to the relief of environmental groups and Native American tribes in northern Arizona.

Nuclear power is often billed as clean base-load electrical energy. However, few if any nuclear power proponents mention the unintended consequences or the externalized costs associated with this technology to support the unsustainable U.S. lifestyle. A crucial part of this story is told by Native Americans.

I have included three shocking, detailed articles outlining these unintended consequences impacting the Native Americans in South Dakota and neighboring states -- in particular the Cheyenne River radiation poisoning from nearby uranium mining impacting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

This remarkable video shows Yoichi on a bicycle sneaking into the Fukushima radiation danger zone, risking his life to investigate the hidden nuclear weapons plant in the destroyed Fukushima NPP. He produced this video as solid proof that there was MUCH more underway at Fukushima than just generating electricity.

As we learned early on, much of the nuclear releases from Fukushima was being transported eastward by the North Pacific current and the northern jetstream, much of that abetted by years of official tolerance of unchecked venting and wastewater releases. The groundwater outflows were and still are being enabled by the media myth of an “ice wall”, an expensive boondoggle that provided cover for the release of reactor coolant from the Fukushima storage tank farm. The so-called isotope-filtration equipment from AREVA and Kurion of Hanford were ineffective. For all the numbers games played by the “experts”, tossing out round-ball estimates, there’s been no containment of nuclear contamination in Japan, which soon proved itself again to be an eager exporter, this time of radioactive steel, used cars, motorbikes and bicycles.

American sailors on the USS Ronald Reagan were exposed to radiation from Fukushima. Many are sick. Some have died. Why can’t they get justice?

Free distribution of iodine tablets has started in Belgium as a precautionary measure in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, the Belgian Pharmaceutical Association told Sputnik on Tuesday.

Starting from Tuesday, every Belgian citizen can come to a pharmacy and get free iodine pills, the association said. This move is part of the government's nuclear safety policy.

Before March 6, only those living within 20 kilometers (12 miles) from nuclear sites were entitled to receive the medication free of charge, while now the area of distribution has been increased to 100 kilometers (62 miles).

Radiation levels at houses and nearby areas in a Fukushima village remain around three times higher than the target set by the government despite cleanup work following the 2011 nuclear crisis, an environmental group said Thursday.

In some areas among tens of thousands points where Greenpeace Japan conducted surveys in the village of Iitate and town of Namie last September and October, the levels of radioactivity were higher than the previous survey in 2016, the group said.

WHERE IS THE RADIOACTIVE CESIUM COMING FROM THAT IS BEING FOUND IN US PATIENTS?

Nuclear Expert: Largest amount of Fukushima radiation fell on US West Coast and Pacific — “Why don’t we hear complaints from US?”… Officials are criminals and trying to cover it up — Public must be aware even more radiation is coming… “People need to realize impact of contamination on them”
http://enenews.com/nuclear-expert-largest-amount-fukushima-radiation-f...

Where is the radioactive cesium contamination coming from that is being found in US patients? Here is a clue!