Japan nuke plants ordered to beef up readiness

Reverberations jolted Japan on Saturday hours after the country's nuclear security agency prepared plant operators to beef up their earthquake-preparedness systems to put off a reappearance of the nuclear crisis roiling the county north of Tokyo.

There were no preliminary reports of damage from the magnitude-5.9 reverberations, and there was no risk of a tsunami similar to the one last month that crippled the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, causing Japan's worst-ever nuclear plant blow. Japan has been hit by a string of slighter quake since the scale 9.0 earthquake hit the country on March 11.

In the meantime, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, citing no sources, reported that a top secret plan to take to pieces Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the radiation-leaking Fukushima plant, was circulate within the government.

Full Story

Tokyo: Tap water not safe for infants

Tap water in Tokyo weathered two times on top of the limits for radioactive iodine careful safe for infants, officials said Wednesday amid growing concerns about food security in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami that crippled a nuclear power plant.

Levels of radioactive iodine in tap water at a water handling center in city center Tokyo that supplies much of the city's tap water limited 210 Becquerel’s per liter of iodine-131, administrators from the Tokyo Water Bureau said at a news symposium.

That amount is more than two times the optional limit of 100 Becquerel per liter for infants, the most vulnerable segment of the populace. Babies in Tokyo should not be fed tap water even though the level is not an urgent health risk for adults, officials said.

Full Story

useful links: transport rankings

US nuclear plants located near geologic faults

Two years previous to a huge coastal earthquake plunged Japan into a nuclear crisis, a geologic fault was exposed about a half-mile from a California seaside reactor — disturbing regulators who say not adequate has been done to measure the threat to the nation's most crowded state.

The state of affairs of the Diablo Canyon plant is not sole. Across the country, a spider's web of fault in the Earth's crust raises questions about earthquakes and security at aging nuclear plants, amplified by dreadful images from Japan, where nuclear reactors were crippled by a tsunami reason by a 9-magnitude quake.

The Indian Point Energy Center, for instance, lies near a blunder line 35 miles north of Manhattan; on Wednesday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo well thought-out a safety review at the plant.

Full Story

useful links: transport rankings

Obama defends nuclear energy

President Barack Obama on Tuesday protected the use of nuclear energy in the face of the calamity in Japan where a nuclear power plant leaked waves in the wake of a overwhelming earthquake and tsunami.

The president told Pittsburgh television station KDKA that all power sources have their downsides but that the U.S. — which gets 20 percent of its electrical energy from nuclear power — requirements to look at the full selection of them.

The president said amenities in the U.S. are very much monitor and built to resist earthquakes, even though nothing's dependable. Proponents of nuclear power fear their efforts to win over the public to the shelter of their manufacturing have been dealt a tremendous blow by the catastrophe in Japan.

"I think it is very significant to make sure that we are doing everything we can to cover the safety and efficiency of the nuclear amenities that we have," the president said in a second TV interview Tuesday, with KOAT in Albuquerque, N.M.

Full Story

useful links: transport rankings

Japanese ordered indoors in radiation leak crisis

Rays leaked from a crippled nuclear plant in tsunami devastated northeastern Japan after a third reactor was rocked by a detonation Tuesday and a fourth fixed fire in a dramatic growth of the 4-day-old disaster. The government warned anyone close to stay indoors to avoid introduction.

Tokyo also reported somewhat elevated emission levels but officials said the augment was too small to threaten anybody in the capital.

In a countrywide televised report, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said emission has multiply from four reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Fukushima territory, one of the hardest-hit in Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the consequent tsunami that has killed above 10,000 people.

"The level seems extremely high, and there is still an extremely high risk of more emission coming out," Kan said. "We are making utmost efforts to stop further explosions and emission leaks."

Full Story

useful links: transport rankings,

Flooding ravages large swaths of Asia

China – saviors lifted muddy bodies into trucks, and aid groups choked the road into the distant Chinese town where hundreds died and more than 1,100 were missing Monday from landslides reasoned by heavy rain that has flooded swaths of Asia and increase misery to millions.

In Pakistan, the United Nations said the government's approximation of 13.8 million people exaggerated by the country's worst-ever floods go beyond the joint total of three recent mega disasters — the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Saviors in hilly Indian-controlled Kashmir raced to rescue dozens of trapped foreign trekkers and find 500 people still absent in flash floods that have killed 140.

In China, the death toll bounded to 337 late Monday after Sunday's landslides in the northwestern region of Gansu — the deadliest occurrence so far in the country's worst flooding in a decade. A debris-blocked swollen river burst, swamping entire mountain villages in the county seat of Zhouqu and ripping homes from their basics.

full story

3.6-magnitude earthquake strikes Maryland

Head Barack Obama told the media Friday he did not feel the earthquake that upset parts of suburban Washington early in the morning. The uncommon quake, which struck about 5 a.m., was centered about 20 miles northwest of the capital, the U.S. Geological Survey said. It had a scale of 3.6 -- fairly mild by earthquake principles but stronger than any other quake to shake the region in the past 35 years, the agency said.

Steve Dolce, a CNN technical manager, said his house in Germantown, Maryland, "vibrated slightly" for about 10 seconds.

"I looked out the window ... wondered if it was a plane or something, then I checked my BlackBerry and saw a dozen e-mails alerting the small quake," he added.

The quake was the first with a scale of more than 3 near Washington since 1974, said Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center.

"This is a significant event for the region," she said.

Concerning an hour after the quake, Vaughan said, more than 5,500 people had reported feeling it across Maryland, in nearby Washington, and in states including West Virginia, Virginia and Delaware.

for more news about:3.6-magnitude earthquake strikes Maryland
view this site :Google updates

The international community's responsibility to Haiti

It is a dark anniversary the six-month mark since the earthquake that leveled vast swaths of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and nearby towns, killing well over 200,000 people.
Although the earthquake was promiscuously unhelpful, killing the good and the bad, the rich and the poor, those who motionless stay encamped in sprawling tent cities lashed by tropical rains in and approximately the capital now stand for the lowest and most disempowered strata of Haitian society. They are the Haitians who, for generations, have fled the scarcity of the countryside to its largest city in search of jobs that were not there and where only further struggle awaited them.

On a time when only 2% of a promised $5.3bn (£3.5bn) in renovation aid has materialized and an equally small amount of rubble has been unconcerned, it is worth pausing to retain information how economic policy in a very real way helped drive Haitians off their land and into the labyrinthine slums of Port-au-Prince, where so many of them died.

Read full story: The international community's responsibility to Haiti
view this site : Google updates