One Year Memorial

It's been exactly one year since I started this blog to update my family and friends on how I was doing after the March 11th quake. At 2:46pm many people in Japan paused to remember and pray for those who were affected by the quake and following tsunami. Also, I remain grateful that my family and friends here survived without harm.

From now on I still plan to keep up some posts on this blog every now and then. I may even start doing some posts not related to the quake as well. In the meantime, I would recommend checking out the Japan Times website to get current news from Japan (you can find it in the links column of this blog). Here's a summary of the one year quake memorial, much of the material I wanted to write myself on this blog, but Japan Times has already done a good job of it....

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120311x1.html

Just for a brief summary of my own, the people living in the affected areas have great resolve to rebuild their lives and communities, but the lack of people, funds and resources are making this task slow and difficult. Just getting rid of all the debris is turning out to be a colossal task. Aslo job opportunities for young people are scarce.

The Fukushima reactors that suffered meltdowns will take a projected 40 years to be fully taken care of, but it will be difficult to just find enough workers since there is a time limit of how long workers can be there because of the radiation exposure. Some nearby communities are cleaning up from the radioactive materials that were spread, but there's the question of where to put the radioactive debris. Some communities may never be able to return. By May all of Japan's nuclear reactors will be closed down because they are not getting the needed permission from the local communities to continue operation. It is unclear weather any of them will be restarted again.

Lastly, Japan is rethinking it's estimations for earthquake and tsunami preparedness. There was one especially sad incident where several people were gathered at a designated tsunami safety spot that was not high enough to save them. On this one year commemoration, a memorial was erected on that location that included a final message that when a disastrous earthquake strikes "Leave immediately and run as fast as you can to the highest place you can get to."

Cold weather and lots of snow

Up until the end of 2011 the winter weather in Japan had been very mild, but starting in January it became quite cold and heavy snows began.

In our part of Japan we don't get any snow except for maybe a small amount once a year which usually melts within a day. However, in northern Japan and areas along the western shore have been receiving record setting amounts of snow. In many places the snow is tw0 to three times the average snowfall with snow piling up as high as buildings.

At the Fukushima nuclear reactor site, pipes in reactor number 4 froze and leaked radioactive water from the spent fuel rod pool before it was discovered. According to the report, none of the water leaked outside of the building...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120202a3.html

Camera images from inside Fukushima reactor 2

There's finally been a bit more interesting news about the Fukushima reactor situation. (The following picture is what the reactor buildings currently look like from the outside.)
On Thursday, January 19th a camera was inserted through the wall of the reactor number 2 containment vessel to get images from within. The following diagram shows where the camera was inserted and the locations of where the images were taken.

One of the main reasons for looking into the reactor was to check the level of the water inside, and to check the general condition as well. These are the actual images from inside the reactor.

For more details on this story, please click on the following link to the Japan Times article on this subject...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120120a1.html

Here's another interesting article. A Japan based scientist group suggested using muon cosmic rays as a way to x-ray the interior of the reactors to determine the exact location of the melted nuclear fuel...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120120f1.html

Japan Times English Language Newspaper

For those of you who are interested in getting more news direct from Japan, I would like to recommend the homepage of the Japan Times newspaper. The Japan Times is a Japanese based newspaper which is written in English. The homepage articles may not be as in depth as the newspaper itself, but it's a great way to get current news from Japan.

The following is the link to the Japan Times...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/

You can also find this on the links column of this blog.

Year end update

Recently my schedule has changed somewhat and I haven't been able to keep up with as much of the Japanese news as I would like to, but here is a little info that I heard at the end of the year.

If I understood correctly, I believe that the last refugee shelter was closed on December 28th. Never the less, 350,000 people are living in temporary shelters. A lot of these communities are made up of residents from many different areas, so they are being encouraged to make bonds with their new neighbors.

After the quake many volunteers came to the affected areas to help the locals rebuild. Since then the number of volunteers has dropped quite a bit, but there are still people coming to help those in need. I just saw some footage of people helping a farmer pick plastic, glass and other bits of debris from his crop land.

The number of self defence force personnel being deployed has been reduced as well. This has worried some communities that have lost of lot of manpower for labor and police forces.

Work continues to clean up the Fukushima nuclear reactors. After the accident, there was talk of a "cold shutdown" planned to take place within the first nine months. That may have been achieved already, but at that time no one knew how badly the reactor cores had melted down. Last news I heard was for a 30 to 40 year plan to clean up the reactor cores. But this too is probably only a guess since it is not known yet how the core material will be disposed of. Not only that, the technology to do this does not even exist and needs to be developed. The following is a newspaper diagram explaining a proposed method of extracting the core material...

The most recent side effect of this disaster regards construction companies who unknowingly used concrete making ingredients which had been polluted with radiation. This has caused some streets and buildings to have been constructed with radioactive materials. Last I heard, this investigation is still under way, but residents in some of these places have been relocated. It sounds like last May there was a proposal for a government regulation on the radiation levels in construction materials, but somehow this regulation was never created.

There was one other unexpected occurrence related to the nuclear disaster. Because of the fear of radiation, many people started carrying around their own radiation detectors. There were actually a few incidents of people finding radioactive hot spots that were totally unrelated to the Fukushima disaster.

That's all I can think of to report on for this year. Happy New Year and lets hope for the best as Japan continues to rebuild in 2012.

Fukushima and Chernobyl Comparison

The nuclear disaster in Fukushima has been called the second worst nuclear disaster following Chernobyl. For the amounts of radiation released, the Fukushima disaster was quite serious, but in terms of radioactive material spread, Chernobyl was much worse. The following is a chart comparing the spread of radioactive cesium 137. It shows that the levels released from the Fukushima reactor were much less.

Tsunami pictures from the Fukushima Reactor

Here are a few images of the Fukushima nuclear reactor during the tsunami.