U.S. Navy sailors exposed to radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster have been falling ill, even as the Defense Department insists that they were not exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Many of the sailors have now joined in a class action lawsuit against Fukushima operators and builders Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), Toshiba, Hitachi, Ebasco and General Electric.

Even if they wanted to -- which many do not -- the sailors would be unable to sue the Navy. According to a Supreme Court ruling from the 1950s known as the Feres Doctrine, soldiers cannot sue the government for injuries resulting directly from their military service

Kelp off Southern California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s urban coastline, according to a new scientific study.

Scientists from California State University, Long Beach tested giant kelp collected in the ocean off Orange County and other locations after the March, 2011 accident, and detected radioactive iodine, which was released from the damaged nuclear reactor.

The largest concentration was about 250-fold higher than levels found in kelp before the accident.

Fishermen in Fukushima Prefecture slammed Tokyo Electric Power Co. on Wednesday after it emerged that water containing cesium and other radioactive isotopes has been draining into the Pacific near the Fukushima No. 1 plant and that Tepco did nothing to prevent it despite learning of the leak last May.

“I don’t understand why (Tepco) kept silent even though they knew about it. Fishery operators are absolutely shocked,” Masakazu Yabuki, chief of the Iwaki fisheries cooperative, said at a meeting with Tepco officials.

Another radioactive water leak in the sea has been detected at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the facility’s operator TEPCO announced. Contamination levels in the gutter reportedly spiked up 70 times over regular readings.

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says it has detected high levels of radioactive substances in a drainage channel on the plant's premises on Sunday. The Tokyo Electric Power Company is investigating the cause.

TEPCO says the plant's alarm system went off around 10 AM. It showed a rise in radioactivity in the channel that leads to a nearby port.

Crew then discovers ‘island’ of tsunami debris — Never seen so much garbage in ocean before — TV: “Disturbing new images from Pacific… looks like islands of plastic” 1,000 miles from coast — 7 tons and 80 ft. long, can walk on it as if land

As the world’s nuke reactors begin to crumble and fall, the danger of a major disaster is escalating at the decrepit Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio.

Now the plant’s owners are asking the Ohio Public Utilities Commission to force the public to pay billions of dollars over the next 15 years to subsidize reactor operations.

But Davis-Besse’s astonishing history of near-miss disasters defies belief. Its shoddy construction, continual operator error and relentless owner incompetence would not be believed as fiction, let alone as the stark realities of a large commercial reactor operating in a heavily populated area.

With nowhere else to put it and workers constantly being exposed to it, radiation from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan has been ordered to be dumped into the ocean by Japanese regulators, according to new reports. This was just two days after a plant employee accidentally fell into one of the onsite storage tanks filled with radioactive water, resulting in his death.

According to the Star Tribune, the 55-year-old man died of multiple injuries after falling through an opening at the top of the 10-meter (33-foot) high tank. He was one of three men who was inspecting the tank at the time of the fall.

“There are individuals out there who are in very similar situations to myself… progressive muscle weakness that starts in their legs and starts to ascend. There are individuals out there who have developed different forms of cancer, leukemia, children of service members born with birth defects because of their service over there… A lot of these other individuals who are suffering [didn't] get a medical retirement… All too often, we’ve — each and every one of us — have run into doctors at some point who try to play it off that there’s nothing physically wrong us, and it’s all psychological.

A ship whose cargo of uranium concentrate spilled during bad weather at sea last month will likely be moved to the Port of Vancouver for cleanup, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission says.

They said the spilled uranium concentrate, also known as yellowcake, poses no risk to the ship's crew, the public or the environment.

Fukushima resident Chieko Shiina, supporter of the Fukushima Collaborative Clinic (translated by Carole Hisasue), Jan 24, 2015 (emphasis added):

JAEA ignored an alarm on a radioactive liquid waste tank for a year, allowing the waste to leak. The incident happened at the materials testing reactor in Ibaraki. NRA called the JAEA dysfunctional.

NRA also found that the Onagawa nuclear plant had over 4000 improper entries into inspection records at their #2 reactor. These included incorrect equipment information and even entries for equipment that didn’t exist. The company has not begun similar reviews for the other two reactors at the plant so there could be more of these kinds of failures.

Experts from the Russian national nuclear corporation Rosatom will create a demo water decontamination station this autumn to be used at the Japanese Fukushima nuclear plant, the project head of the subsidiary RosRAO, that deals with radioactive materials, Sergei Florya, told RIA Novosti Wednesday.

Virtually all of the rice harvested in Fukushima in 2014 – or some 360,000 tonnes – has been checked for radiation and met the national standards of less than 100 Becquerel’s per kilogram, Reuters reports.

Finance Minister Ali Hasan Khalil Monday said dangerous radioactive components found in industrial and kitchen items recently seized at the Beirut port and airport threaten the lives of Lebanese.

“Customs officers at the Beirut port and the Beirut airport have confiscated industrial and kitchen goods that contain dangerous radioactive material [that threaten] public health,” Khalil revealed at a news conference.

Ukraine's energy minister, Vladimir Demchyshyn, said that the accident posed no risk.

"There is no threat ... there are no problems with the reactors," Demchyshyn said at briefing, adding the accident affected the power output system and "in no way" was linked to power production itself.

Demchyshyn said that the reactor would be restarted December 5.

The first thing most people don’t realize is that geiger counters are location sensitive. They are calibrated against the background radiation for a specific location. This means that if you take a geiger counter and move just a mile away, the background radiation itself could be different and the measurement inaccurate. Known background radiation is the Zero point on a calibrated geiger counter.

Second and as important is that all sensitive measurement tools need to be calibrated and certified to be useful. Sensitive tools go out of calibration by themselves over time. After Fukushima, a new normal needs to be considered.

Attempts to use nuclear fuel from the US manufacturer Westinghouse inside reactors of the Czech Republic’s Soviet-designed Temelin nuclear power plant in the past repeatedly caused many unexpected situations and problems, the provider of Russian fuel assemblies for Czech NPPs, ALTA, told TASS.

“In particular, such incidents occurred at Hungary’s Paks NPP and the Czech Republic’s Temelin,” the company said. “Europe still remembers that and advises its counterparts in other countries not to repeat their mistakes by replacing the nuclear fuel specifically designed for this type of reactors with unauthorized substitutes.”

Citizen activists have made it happen. The number of licensed U.S. commercial reactors is now under 100 where once it was to be 1,000.

Decades of hard grassroots campaigning by dedicated, non-violent nuclear opponents, working for a Solartopian green-powered economy, forced this reactor’s corporate owner to bring it down.

Vermont Yankee is the fifth American reactor forced shut in the last two years.

One of the reactors at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant has automatically shut down after a glitch. This is the second halt in operations in recent weeks at the plant in Ukraine’s southeast, which covers at least one fifth of the country’s power needs.

“Unit 6 at Zaporizhzhya NPP was disconnected from the network by the automatic system that prevents damage to the generator. The reactor is running at 40 percent of nominal power,” the plant’s official website says stressing that radiation at the facility is equal to the natural background, which is 8-12 microroentgen/hour.

This accident took place on Sunday morning at 05:59 am local time (03:59 GMT). Causes are still being investigated, while the Energy Ministry hopes to restart the unit in the coming days. The remaining five reactors continue to generate an estimated 4,530 MW.

Fukushima prefecture has been conducting regular checkups of over 360,000 people who were in Fukushima in March 2011 and were age 18 or under when the nuclear crisis struck. As WSJ reported in August, a study by researchers in Fukushima prefecture found 57 minors in the prefecture have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer so far and another 46 are showing symptoms that suggest they may also have the disease. Today, as The Japan Times reports, four more children are suspected of suffering from thyroid cancer in the latest survey bringing the total to 107 out of 385,000 now surveyed. This is dramatically higher than the normal "between 5 to 11 cases per million people," that Okayama University professor Toshihide Tsuda cites for national statistics between 1975 and 2008.

As The Japan Times reports,

Tepco said Saturday it has finished removing all fuel rods from the spent-fuel pool in the shattered reactor 4 building at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, in a rare piece of positive news from the decommissioning process.

An unidentified drone has been spotted hovering over a Belgian Nuclear power plant, prompting an investigation. The Doel nuclear plant has just been repaired and reopened after an incident considered to be sabotage caused millions in damages.

"We can confirm that the East Flanders prosecutor's office has opened an investigation into a drone flight over the Doel nuclear plant," a spokesman for the investigation told Belga news agency.

The plant's operator, GDF-Suez unit Electrabel disclosed the incident on Saturday. "We will not provide further information for the time being," the spokesman added.

The United States government recently argued in court filings that the state of Washington’s request of $18 billion over 14 years to address the nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site should be rejected based on expense.

[D]ocuments obtained by The New Mexican… raise questions about the stability of dozens of other nuclear waste drums that were in the same chamber as the drum that ruptured [after a] chemical reaction… Radiation leaked into the air, and temperatures in the underground chamber peaked at nearly 1,600 degrees… One internal lab report described the [contents] as similar to plastic explosives… Investigators believe the organic material may be one reason temperatures in the chamber rose so high… Internal emails… detail concerns about the stability of drums… exposed to the extreme temperatures… June 17 draft of a LANL report… suggested the high temperatures may have made other nuclear waste drums in the chamber more unstable than ever…

Mikhail Gashev, the first deputy chairman of the Ukrainian State Inspection of Nuclear Regulations, said last week that he signed three fundamental documents regarding supplies of upgraded nuclear fuel TBC-WR from US company Westinghouse.

According to Gashev “the fuel will be delivered to the South-Ukrainian NPP in December and uploaded into the third power unit of the plant in late December or early January.”

Sergei Kondratyev, a senior expert with the Russian Institute for Energy and Finance, voiced concern last week over the sharp switch from Russian-to US-produced nuclear fuel as it could pose a threat to the safety of Ukrainian nuclear power plants, which were built in the Soviet Union era.

In an interview with ITAR-TASS Kondratyev said that Ukraine’s decision to switch to the US-produced upgraded nuclear fuel did not take into account technical characteristics and peculiarities of the Soviet-built NPPs.

Officials with the Energy Department and Nuclear Waste Partnership, the private consortium that operates the repository, say they are taking abundant precautions to ensure their workers and the public are safe.

But emails and documents obtained by The New Mexican describing safety assessments in May, June and July raise questions about the stability of dozens of other nuclear waste drums that were in the same chamber as the drum that ruptured. More recent WIPP safety assessments have not been released, even to the union representing more than 300 WIPP workers.

Regional authorities in Japan have approved the restart of the idle nuclear power plant at Sendai, paving the way for a revival of the nuclear industry three years after it was shut down in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

The southern Kagoshima prefecture has voted to back a move by a local township to restart the two-reactor Sendai plant.

BOONE DAM STABILITY ISSUES… “TVA conducted a briefing for government officials… after discovery of a sink hole near the base… water and sediment [has been] found seeping from the river below the dam. TVA is continuously monitoring the dam… The dam is located upstream of all three TVA nuclear sites… The NRC Senior Resident Inspector was notified. The licensee is evaluating this event for potential impact on the design basis flooding level.”

There was a confirmed uranium hexafluoride release at Honeywell Works in Metropolis, IL at 8pm tonight. Sirens have sounded and Honeywell guards have told people to shelter in place, close windows, and turn off A/C.

The Dukovany nuclear power plant in the southern Czech Republic has halted operations of two of its reactors after a pipe in the facility’s cooling system started to leak.

The Wednesday shutdown was necessary as the repair was likely to take more than three days, which is allowed under safety regulations, the plant’s operator, Czech electricity company CEZ said.

The leaking in the technical water system, which is used for cooling the important technical and safety devices at the plant, was discovered Monday, the company said.

Oct. 20 inspection of [Tennessee's Boone] dam revealed a sink hole… Six days later, an uncommon occurrence happened when seepage was found near the location of the sink hole at the base of the dam.

Thirty billion dollars in funding for roads, bridges and thousands of new homes in areas devastated by the tsunami in Japan three and a half years ago is still languishing unspent in the bank. That means Keiko Abe is heading into a fourth winter of sub-zero temperatures in a cramped, temporary dwelling that is succumbing to the elements.

Scientists warned that an earthquake could take out Fukushima. The Japanese ignored the warning … and even tore down the natural seawall which protected Fukushima from tidal waves.

Fukushima is getting worse. And see this and this.

Have the Japanese learned their lesson? Are they decommissioning nuclear plants which are built in dangerous environments?

Of course not!

Instead, they’re re-starting a nuclear plant near a volcano which is about to blow …

Prosecutors must decide this week whether to charge Tokyo Electric Power Co. executives over their handling of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear disaster, in a process that could drag the company into criminal court.

The judicial review is unlikely to see Tepco executives go to prison, legal experts say, but rehashing details of the meltdowns and explosions that followed the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami will cast a harsh light on the struggling utility and will not help Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s unpopular effort to restart the nation’s idled reactors.

New cracks found in the core of the Hunterston-B nuclear reactor could threaten operator EDF's plans to extend the Scottish power station's life.

The ship holds more than 2,000 gallons of diesel fuel and authorities are concerned it could interfere with the course of other vessels as it drifts through shipping lanes. A Coast Guard cutter was headed out to the ship on Thursday with plans to fire cannons loaded with high explosive rounds to sink the vessel.

...

The Japan earthquake triggered the world's worst nuclear crisis since the Chernobyl accident in 1986, but Alaska state health and environmental officials have said there's little need to be worried that debris landing on Alaska shores will be contaminated by radiation.

Japan's reconstruction minister has hinted unofficially that some areas near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant may have to be declared off-limits indefinitely.

Following the introduction of new safety regulations in Japan, several types of food have been found to contain radioactive cesium above the legal limit.

Stricter health standards for staple foods such as vegetables and rice were introduced on Sunday. Permissible levels of radioactivity were reduced from 500 to 100 becquerels per kilogram.

Health ministry officials said bamboo shoots harvested in the Kisarazu and Ichihara regions east of Tokyo were contaminated with 120 and 110 becquerels of radioactive Cesium per kilogram respectively.