The Japanese government said Monday the process of removing melted fuel from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, considered the most difficult part of cleaning up the crisis-hit facility, will start in 2021.

Brussels has forged a trade deal with Japan that removes controls over radioactivity levels on foods produced on the island following the 2011 nuclear disaster, The Telegraph reports. As a result, Britain will soon be selling goods from the disaster-hit area including baby food, breakfast cereals, fish crustaceans, meat and green tea. Current plans do not allow for the contaminated products to be labelled, meaning consumers will not be aware the food contains traces of radioactive substances.

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
The Israeli government is aiming to increase the volume of Israel’s defence exports, reported Globes, which has revealed the main points of the plan for the first time.

The project, being overseen by the Defence Ministry’s International Defence Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) led by Brigadier General (Res.) Yair Kulas, will begin to be rolled out in early 2020.

According to Globes, the plan is based on “focused seminars for senior commanders in foreign armies”, Israeli military “assistance for promoting sales of Israeli weapons”, and “subsidising small and medium-sized defence companies seeking to sell arms around the world”.

Speaking this week, Kulas said that SIBAT favours a major expansion of agreements between countries, resulting in significant deals for the large defence companies, especially Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems.

Japan's industry ministry said Monday it would be safe to release water contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster into the ocean, stressing that the health risk to humans would be "significantly small."

Discharging the water into the Pacific Ocean over the course of a year would amount to between just one-1,600th and one-40,000th of the radiation that humans are naturally exposed to, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry told a government subcommittee on the issue.

Water used to cool the melted-down cores and groundwater near the disabled plant contains some radioactive materials, and is currently being collected and stored in tanks on the plant grounds.

But space is fast running out, and the government is exploring ways to deal with the water -- already more than 1 million tons and increasing every day.

Plant manager Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., or Tepco, plans to build more of the gigantic tanks to hold another 0.27 million tons, which is roughly the equivalent of 108 Olympic-size swimming pools. The new tanks are expected reach full capacity in four or five years. Each tank takes seven to 10 days to fill and holds between 1,000 to 1,200 tons of liquid, Tepco officials told reporters during a tour in February organized by the Japan National Press Club.

In March 2011, Fukushima No. 1 suffered three core meltdowns triggered by tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake, but the situation with the tanks indicates that Tepco has yet to get the facility under control.

The Los Angeles Times has a harrowing new story about Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Japanese forces invaded the small Pacific nation and its residents during World War I, and the United States did the same during World War II under that classic guise of "liberation." But the US was hardly acting altruistically, at the time nor since then. The islands' location made it a prime strategic military base in the Pacific. It was also isolated enough to make it a convenient nuclear testing site—if you disregarded the 72,000 people who lived there, of course.

The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant will have no choice but to release more than 1 million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, Japan’s environment minister said on Tuesday.

“The only option will be to drain it into the sea and dilute it”, Yoshiaki Harada said in a news briefing in Tokyo.

Residents of two northern Russian cities are stocking up on iodine that is used to reduce the effects of radiation exposure after a mysterious accident on a nearby military testing site, regional media reported.

The epicentre of the earthquake was located off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture at a depth of 50 kilometres.

A 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit north-eastern Japan at around 19:23 local time on Sunday, 4 August, according to the national meteorological service.

Today, nearly 70,000 tons of nuclear waste sits outside nuclear power plants across the country. For the last half-century, scientists and politicians have struggled to create a viable solution for permanent waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, located 90 miles outside Las Vegas. They've failed. As the political dust settles over Yucca, eyes turn to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico.

The nuclear fallout from a Russian submarine that was sunk off the coast of Norway roughly three decades ago has spiked dramatically over the past several years, and experts are scratching their heads trying to figure out why.

According to reports, the Soviet-era vessel, which currently sits at the bottom of the Barents Sea, is now emitting radiation at levels 100,000 times higher than normal, and substantially higher than what was detected 12 years ago when earlier readings were taken.

The Kosomolets, as the sub is called, was sunk back in 1989, which resulted in the deaths of 42 of the vessel’s 69 crew members. It now rests almost a mile deep, where it’s been degrading and presumably becoming increasingly less radioactive.

But for whatever reason, the sub is becoming more radioactive, with strange emissions occurring from one of the vessel’s ventilation holes, which experts say is kicking up “mysterious” dust clouds.

Last week southern California was hit with a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. The quake was the largest in the state in years. Thankfully no one was severely hurt or injured in the catastrophe but many people were rattled.

SOURCE: OIL PRICE
There is a large and growing contingency of pundits, politicians, and constituents in the United States who believe that leaning in to nuclear power is the nation’s best bet at meeting the carbon emissions reduction goals set by the Paris Agreement. Although the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement in June of 2017, polling shows that the majority of United States citizens still want the country to honor its Obama-era commitment to the Paris Agreement to combat global climate change.

In a new book named "Deadly Dust - Made in the USA: Uranium Weapons Contaminating the World" German author Frieder Wagner gives a detailed account of how the US has contaminated vast territories using depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and the cover-up strategy of the military, industry and governments, as well as those in the media and politics.

According to Edinburgh Live, the reactors have what is called keyway root-cracking, where the graphite moderator cores in the reactors develop cracks leading to instabilities. In turn, this could lead to a major nuclear accident.

The reactors have been closed since October 2018 as a result of the fault, but EDF Energy, who own the plant, are making a case for turning them back on.

Although the probability of a meltdown is still low, the consequences could be severe, and would result in the evacuation of both Glasgow and Edinburgh due to radioactive contamination.

In an official announcement 5th June, the Department said labeling high-level waste as low level will save US$40 billion in cleanup costs across the US' entire nuclear weapons complex. Under the plan, material that's languished for decades in nuclear weapons production sites in Washington, Idaho and South Carolina would be taken to low-level disposal facilities in Utah or Texas.

We first want to thank Fox News for FINALLY reporting on a subject that has been highly censored by the mainstream media for the past 5+ years, the situation in Fukushima, Japan is completely out of control. While Fox News recently reported that radiation levels at Fukushima were now at ‘unimaginable levels’ more than 5 years after the disastrous earthquake and tsunami struck, as Steve Quayle asked in an SQNote he left while linking to that story, why has the mainstream media been silent all of this time?

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has sounded the alarm over a giant concrete dome built 40 years ago in the Marshall Islands to contain radioactive waste from Cold War-era atomic tests.

According to Guterres, the dome – which houses approximately 73,000 cubic meters of debris on Runit island, part of the Enewetak Atoll – may be leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean, as the porous ground underneath the 18? thick dome was never lined as originally planned. It was constructed in the crater formed by the 18-kt Cactus test.

The US has failed to prevent the Runit Dome temporary nuclear waste storage site from leaking into the ocean, leaving the inhabitants of Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands and cleanup workers with an array of health problems.

“There was never any lining put in that dome,” Ernest Davis, an Enewetak Atoll cleanup veteran, told RT, noting that the US government apparently had never planned to replace the temporary dome with a permanent containment structure that would be properly sealed from radiation leaks. “Nobody said anything about going back in and removing it or making it permanent. We were told that it was permanent.”

“I don't think it was ever [the US government’s] intention to further clean up the island. It was too costly,” Brooke Takala Abraham, who lives in the Marshall Islands, told RT.

The operator of Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant has begun removing nuclear fuel from a building housing one of the reactors that melted down after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Remotely controlled equipment is lifting fuel rods from a storage pool near reactor number three.

The delicate work at the contaminated site is expected to take two years.

The next phase of the huge clean-up at reactor three will be to remove molten nuclear fuel that remains deep inside.

A spokeswoman for the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said the operation to remove the fuel had been delayed by earthquake debris inside the building as well as other technical issues.

Reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant were damaged by hydrogen explosions caused by the earthquake and tsunami. Three reactors melted down.

In a new book named "Deadly Dust - Made in the USA: Uranium Weapons Contaminating the World" German author Frieder Wagner gives a detailed account of how the US has contaminated vast territories using depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and the cover-up strategy of the military, industry and governments, as well as those in the media and politics.

Radioactive contamination from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant hit by a tsunami in 2011 has drifted as far north as waters off a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait, scientists said on Wednesday.

Members of a local gang in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro recently fired on police officers who were escorting a convoy of trucks transporting uranium to a nearby nuclear plant.

The Tuesday attack took place as the convoy and security detail drove past the gang-controlled Frade community, which is located some 19 miles from Angra dos Reis and the Angra 2 nuclear plant, the fuel's destination.

Eletrobras Eletronuclear, Brazil's government-run nuclear agency, explained in a statement that the series of events unfolded at roughly 12 p.m. local time after the police escort heard nearby gunshots. As a precaution, officers positioned themselves along the highway in order to guarantee the safety of the transport.

With heavy rainfall inundating the US Midwest, nuclear power plants risk being flooded. However, the plants continue to operate at full power, resulting in the potential for “unnecessary, extremely high risk” accidents, according to Kevin Kamps, the Radioactive Waste Watchdog at the organization Beyond Nuclear.

"In Nebraska alone, you've got the Offutt Air Force Base, which is the home of the [US] Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear arsenal of the US, and it's largely flooded," Kamps told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear hosts Brian Becker and Nicole Roussell.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford issued a statement Monday denying weekend media reports that the US plans to leave around 1,000 troops in Syria, saying the reports are “factually incorrect.”

Dunford presented the current planned “residual force” as 200, saying that this hadn’t changed since February. The US announced 200 would stay on February 21, but on February 22 officially increased that number to 400.

It’s not clear from Dunford’s statement where the “incorrect” aspect of the new report, which came out of a Wall Street Journal, exists. That report suggested that the 1,000 figure was not yet finalized, but was being discussed. Dunford’s comments didn’t include any details on what is actually being discussed, but just that nothing was finalized.

Not even the icy wind blowing in from the coast seems to bother the men in protective masks, helmets and gloves, playing their part in the world’s biggest nuclear cleanup.

Away from the public gaze, they remove the latest of the more than 1,000 black sacks filled with radioactive soil and unload their contents into giant sieves. A covered conveyor belt carries the soil to the lip of a huge pit where it is flattened in preparation for the next load. And there it will remain, untouched, for almost three decades.

It is repetitive, painstaking work but there is no quick way of addressing arguably the most controversial physical legacy of the triple meltdown that occurred eight years ago at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Eight years on, radioactivity is spewing out of Fukushima unchecked after highly publicized efforts by the nuclear industry and regulatory authorities to block radioactive leakage have been quietly dropped following repeated failures. TEPCO has given up on seeking novel methods to halt the outflow of radioactive waste-water from its destroyed nuclear-power plant, while robot forays into the burnt-out reactors have proven useless for any practical purpose, with no serious effort any longer to remove and safely contain melted nuclear fuel. The promises from the global nuclear industry to come up with solutions to decontaminate water, block the steady stream of radionucleotides into the Pacific, and repair the Fukushima No.1 plant have proven to be idle promises cast to the tritium-laced offshore wind.

The disappointing truth about the illusive "power" of the Ukrainian army has once again surfaced ...

On the air of Lutsk TV channel "AVERS" Viktor Krivtsun, a former soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who took part in the operation near Ilovaisk, told that in combat in August 2014, an infected Soviet armored vehicle was transferred from the Chernobyl zone

In 2017 a 69-year-old man living with pancreatic cancer was treated with nuclear medicine to shrink his tumor, but sadly died three days later and was cremated. New research suggests his remains may have spread radioactivity.

The man was treated by radioactive injection, and the dose of lutetium Lu 177 dotatate was still in his body when he was cremated, as staff at the hospital where he was treated were unaware of how badly his condition had deteriorated before it was too late.

While the administration of these drugs is tightly controlled and monitored, what happens after the treatment – especially when patients eventually die – is an entirely different story, as showcased in this particular case study by the Mayo Clinic. More than half of deceased Americans are cremated at present.

Dateline: Planet Earth, 24th July, 2013

The map(s) formerly above, dated from April 2011. They've been "disappeared." So, I've invited an image of Dr. Strangelove. Meanwhile, unreported but ongoing, the Fukushima reactors continue in meltdown, with explosions of Plutonium, etc. from the MOX-fuel reactor No. 3. All into the global Jet Stream and rad-cess into the Pacific Ocean. Problem is monstrous; Let's talk solutions.

The UN has been adopting resolutions condemning the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights for decades; however Tel Aviv hasn't changed its policies and is continuing to exercise sovereignty over the disputed territory, including holding municipal elections.

Secretary-General of the UN Antonio Guterres has presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council based on Syrian accusations against Israel's action in the Golan Heights, saying that Israel has been burying "nuclear waste with radioactive content in 20 different areas populated by Syrian citizens" in the occupied territory. Most of the waste has allegedly been dumped in the area near Al-Sheikh Mountain.

According to the report, this puts "the lives and health of Syrians in the occupied Syrian Golan in jeopardy" and violates the 4th Geneva Convention.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon dismissed as “utter nonsense” a United Nations charge that Israel had buried radioactive nuclear waste in the Golan Heights.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres included that allegation in a report his office prepared for the UN Human Rights Council’s 40th session, which is set to open in Geneva on Monday and run through March 22.

Most people think they have to die to go to hell but that is not true anymore. Today, in the mainstream press, they announced the existence of a hell hole in Japan at the destroyed nuclear power station at Fukushima. We have a hot spot on our planet that has never been imagined before and in the face of it human technology is helpless.

At the levels of radiation now being found a Fukushima, a robot would be able to operate for less than two hours before it was destroyed. And Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences said medical professionals had never even thought about encountering this level of radiation in their work.

Tourists, employees and children on tours were exposed to radiation from uranium sitting in the Grand Canyon's museum collection building for nearly two decades, according to the park's safety manager.

Elston 'Swede' Stephenson, the park's safety, health and wellness manager, warned of possible health consequences to staff and the public from three five-gallon buckets of uranium ore which he claims were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit from 2000 until June 18, 2018, according to AZ Central.

Stephenson revealed the information in a rogue email to staff after bosses failed to issue any information on the exposure for eight months, he claims.

He believes top management are now involved in a cover-up operation, saying he has been cut off from all information about the exposure.

In his email, Stephenson wrote: 'If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition.'

In truth, the cataclysm was born of the planned economy and communist bureaucracy itself.

For this was an empire of falsified statistics, of unattainable deadlines easily beaten by corner-cutting, sullen indifference to individual responsibility, terror at conveying bad news to superiors and chains of toadying yes-men clinging to their comfortable party privileges. They made the disaster at Chernobyl almost inevitable.

On Wednesday, operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) sent a remote-controlled probe to the bottom of the plant's No. 2 reactor and lifted five small pieces of radioactive debris two inches.

"We were able to confirm that the fuel debris can be moved," said spokeswoman Yuka Matsubara, adding "We accomplished the objective of this test."

Matsubara says tht TEPCO plans to move more debris by next March.

Police have not yet ascertained how the radioactive substance ended up in a scrap yard, but said they are investigating the case "from all possible angles."

India's Central Crime Station (CCS) has recovered an unspecified quantity of a missing radioactive isotope of Cesium-137 (CS-137) which was reported missing from a facility belonging to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) in Rajamahendravaram, Andhra Pradesh.

Over 126,000 barrels of radioactive material are stored in the Asse mine in Lower Saxony, a state in northwest Germany bordering the North Sea, a fact that has many locals - as well as the global anti-nuke community - frustrated.

Manfred Kramer, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, lives close to the Asse salt mine in which the decaying waste is stored and — while acknowledging that politicians are finally beginning to take notice — has long protested against having radioactive waste in the old mine, Tekportal reported.

"It's nice that she's finally coming," Kramer said, referring to Environment Minister Svenja Schulze's upcoming visit to the mine, which was originally used for the extraction of potash salt until 1965. "Soon she'll have been in office for a year. It sure took a while!" he quipped, according to Deutsche Welle.

Weapons-grade plutonium from South Carolina was secretly shipped to a nuclear security site in Nevada months ago despite Nevadans' protests, the Department of Energy revealed on Wednesday.

The Justice Department notified a federal judge in Reno that the government trucked in the radioactive material to store at a site 70 miles north of Las Vegas before Nevada asked a court to block the move in November.

Five-year prison terms were sought Wednesday for three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. for their alleged failure to prevent the Fukushima nuclear disaster triggered by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
At the Tokyo District Court, court-appointed lawyers acting as prosecutors said if the three had collected information properly and prepared necessary safety measures it would have been possible to predict the massive tsunami and prevent the disaster.

Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78, chairman of the company at the time of the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, and Ichiro Takekuro, 72, and Sakae Muto, 68, both former vice presidents, have pleaded not guilty, arguing the tsunami was unforeseeable and the disaster would have occurred even if they had implemented preventive measures.

A final hearing for the defense will be held next March.

Donald Trump is the Ugly American incarnate. More so than even Dick Cheney or George Bush the Younger. His boorish manners and in-your-face self-promotion puts to shame the servile European, Japanese and other spittle-lickers who have profited from their associations with Washington at the expense of their compatriots. These would-be friends of Washington have nowhere to hide from the disgrace Trump metes out to them before their own peoples. All of this is good and necessary medicine to set the world on its way towards a multipolar future. Far more than we “American dissidents” have been able to muster.

Therefore, I can only say “godspeed” to Donald Trump in the New Year 2019. May he willy-nilly continue to do God’s work.

In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles—site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.

The field laboratory operated 10 experimental reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.

Last night, the Woolsey fire burned the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a former nuclear and rocket engine testing site. Footage from local television showed flames surrounding rocket test stands, and the fire’s progress through to Oak Park indicates that much of the toxic site burned.

A statement released by the California Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) said that its staff,

“do not believe the fire has caused any releases of hazardous materials that would pose a risk to people exposed to the smoke.”

The statement failed to assuage community concerns given DTSC’s longtime pattern of misinformation about SSFL’s contamination and its repeated broken promises to clean it up.

While families, firefighters and first responders inhale potentially radioactive and toxic chemicals in this awful smoke, the DTSC says it has no evidence that the smoke is unusually dangerous. This is an agency that has repeatedly lied to us, minimized risk from the Santa Susana Field Lab and broken every promise ever made regarding the clean up. Why would we trust them when the lab is on fire – especially now that we know the fire actually began at Santa Susana?