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.