Virginia turns into political Chernobyl, now attorney general admits, sort of, to blackface

The governor's med-school yearbook shows somebody in blackface on his page, for which Democrats everywhere have said he must resign.

Next in line is the Lt. Gov., a black man accused of sexual assault by a woman about whom the Lt. Gov. is reported to have recently said, "F*ck that bitch".

Next in line is the Attorney General, who has come out admitting to appearing in "brown make-up" when he was 19, reporting which the NYT is taking flak for underreporting the facts of blackface, nevermind the Attorney General is.

Not sure who is next in line, but from the look of things, this might take a while.

 And to think a chink started it all.

Japan poised to rise from the dead: nuclear plants finally to begin restart after 2011 Fukushima disaster

The Japan Times reports here:

The Nuclear Regulation Authority is moving toward the first reactor restart under its new safety requirements since the Fukushima disaster started, giving impetus to bond sales by utilities as borrowing costs plunge. ...

“The fact that the government is in favor of restarting reactors is positive because it shows a firm commitment toward the electric power companies,” said Yasuhiro Matsumoto, the senior manager for the financial services industry at ABeam Consulting Ltd. “Once one restart is approved, others will come one after another, and the pace may quicken. You can’t approve one but turn down others.” ...

All 48 of Japan’s functioning commercial reactors are idled for safety checks after a tsunami wrecked Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 plant on March 11, 2011, and caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.

Radiation From Fukushima Accident Revised Up In New Report

CNN.com reports here:

Japan's largest utility said Thursday that more radiation than previously thought was released into the atmosphere in March 2011, in the days after the nuclear disaster that followed an earthquake and tsunami. TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co.) estimates about 900,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials were released between March 12 and March 31, according to Japan's Kyodo news agency. ... In one town in the Fukushima area, the estimated thyroid doses to infants are within a dose band of 100 to 200 millisieverts (mSv), the preliminary report said. This level of radiation exposure could be associated with an increased likelihood of developing cancer. However, in the rest of Japan, the estimated thyroid doses are within a dose band of 1 to 10 mSv, the report said. Outside the country, the estimated thyroid doses are less than 0.01 mSv, and are usually far below this very low level, it said.

PBS.org had a fuller report here, comparing the accident's severity to Chernobyl and assessing the health consequences of the radiation releases:

Tokyo Electric, the plant’s operator, said on Thursday that reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant released approximately 900,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances into the air in the immediate aftermath of the March 2011 accident. By comparison, approximately 5.2 million terabecquerels of total radiation were emitted in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. ... In terms of the accident’s health implications, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday that the amount of radiation released fell below cancer-causing levels in nearly all of Japan. Outside of “no-go zones” in Fukushima prefecture, residents were exposed to radiation levels between 1 millisievert and 10 millisieverts, the W.H.O. said. The annual average amount of exposure from naturally occurring background radiation is 2.4 mSv globally, according to the report ... . Cumulative exposure to 100 mSv is generally thought to raise a person’s risk of cancer death by 0.5 percent.

Reuters.com reports here that Namie and Iitate were the two towns hardest hit:

In a preliminary report, independent experts said that people in two locations in Fukushima prefecture may have received a radiation dose of 10-50 millisieverts (mSv) in the year after the accident at the power station operated by TEPCO. ... The areas estimated to have received the highest doses of radiation were Namie town in Futaba county and Iitate village in Soma county, northwest of the stricken plant, the report said. Infants in Namie were thought to have received thyroid radiation doses of 100-200 mSv, it added. The thyroid is the most exposed organ as radioactive iodine concentrates there and children are deemed especially vulnerable.

Follow the labels at the end of this post for this blog's reporting on the accident from the beginning.

Radioactivity 150 Miles From Vermont's Troubled, Aging Yankee Nuclear Plant Blamed on Atmospheric Testing in 1940s and 1950s, and on Chernobyl

Strontium-90 has been found in bass far from Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, according to this story:

Now, new tests of bass caught 150 miles away in northwestern Vermont and outside the area affected by the plant's groundwater show similar levels of Strontium-90, said William Irwin, chief of the Vermont Health Department's radiological division.

The likely source, rather than Vermont Yankee, is residue from above-ground nuclear testing in the 1940s and 1950s and the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in the Soviet Union in 1986, he said.


This report puts it as follows:

Irwin said Lake Carmine, in Enosburg Falls, is about as far away from Yankee as you can get and still be in the Green Mountain State.

"The results are that cesium-137 and strontium-90 in Lake Carmi fish is in the same range as Connecticut River fish," said Irwin. "We take this as some evidence that all fish in Vermont are likely to have radioactive cesium and strontium at these levels and that, as we've hypothesized, it is from nuclear weapons fallout and the releases of Chernobyl. All of us are glad to have proof and not just conjecture."


The similar levels of radioactive contamination suggest that the reasons for shutting down an aging plant like Vermont's Yankee Nuclear are distinct in this case, not the least of which is that the design is identical to the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power plants which melted down after the earthquakes and tsunami in March 2011.

Fukushima Reactor 2 Basement Puddle Emitting 1000 mSv/hour

An astounding number, which amounts to 1 Sievert per hour, from a puddle.

Half of that is 500 mSv/hour, previously reported in the air over one of the reactors. That's the amount in a hour an American can expect to absorb in a life. Now double that, in an hour.

Just two hours exposed to radiation at 1 Sievert per hour is sometimes fatal, while 8 Sieverts is most definitely fatal. Chernobyl threw off 50 Sieverts near the destroyed core in just ten minutes.

The report comes from Kyodo News today, here:

The concentration level is 10 million times higher than that seen usually in water in a reactor core, according to plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.  Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman for the government's nuclear safety agency, said the figure is ''quite high'' and ''likely to be coming from the reactor.'' ...

The radioactivity at the surface of the puddle at the No. 3 unit was 400 millisieverts per hour. ...

According to the latest data released Sunday, radioactive iodine-134, a substance which sees its radiation release reduced to about half in some 53 minutes, existed in water at the No. 2 reactor's turbine building at an extremely high concentration of 2.9 billion becquerels per 1 cubic centimeter.

The water also contained such substances as iodine-131 and cesium-137, known as products of nuclear fission, and thus leading to speculation that it may have come through pipes that connect the reactor vessel and turbines, where steam from the reactor is normally directed to for electricity generation.

The pool of water at the No. 4 reactor's turbine building included radioactive substances, but the concentration level was not as high as at the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 buildings, the data showed.