Posts tagged Japan
How polluted is the ocean near Daiichi Japan? — rogerwhart
Timely of you to ask.
From today’s New York Times.
Two years after a triple meltdown that grew into the world’s second worst nuclear disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater that workers are struggling to contain.
Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported:
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501)’s discovery of leaks in water storage pits at the wrecked Fukushima atomic station raises the risk the utility will be forced to dump radioactive water in the Pacific Ocean…
…While the company has since built a makeshift sealed cooling system, underground water is breaching basement walls at a rate of about 400 tons a day and becoming contaminated, according to Tepco’s estimate.
The company has two options, reports Bloomberg. One is to build above ground storage facilities but with 400 tons of contaminated water pouring in a day, it can only build so much. The second option, which Bloomberg says the company is hesitant to do but isn’t ruling out, is to dump the water into the ocean.
Back in November, Nature had this to say:
The Fukushima disaster caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen. A new model presented by scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts estimates that 16.2 petabecquerels (1015 becquerels) of radioactive caesium leaked from the plant — roughly the same amount that went into the atmosphere.
Most of that radioactivity dispersed across the Pacific Ocean, where it became diluted to extremely low levels. But in the region of the ocean near the plant, levels of caesium-137 have remained fixed at around 1,000 becquerels, a relatively high level compared to the natural background. Similarly, levels of radioactive caesium in bottom-dwelling fish remain pretty much unchanged more than 18 months after the accident…
…a fresh analysis by oceanographer Jota Kanda at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology suggests that not one source, but three, are responsible. First, radioactivity from the land is being washed by rainfall into rivers, which carry it to the sea. Second, the plant itself is leaking around 0.3 terabecquerels (1012 becquerels) per month, he estimates.
But Kanda thinks that the third source, marine sediment, is the main cause of the contamination. Around 95 terabecquerels of radioactive caesium has found its way to the sandy ocean floor near the plant.
Becquerels? That would be a unit of radioactivity. To get at the science of all this, we suggest you ask this guy. — Michael
Have a question? Ask away.
Image: Satellite view of Daiichi, Japan (indicated by the red pin), via Google Maps.
Google Street View Captures Fukushima Ghost Town
Via The New York Times:
The eerily empty streets of Namie, a town deep in the evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, are featured in the latest images captured by Google for its Street View mapping project.
The scene is wrenching: houses flattened by the earthquake and now abandoned for fear of radiation; rows of empty shutters on a boulevard that once hosted Namie’s annual autumn festival; ships and debris that still dot a landscape laid bare by the 50-foot waves that destroyed its coastline more than two years ago.
Namie’s 21,000 residents are still in government-mandated exile, scattered throughout Fukushima and across Japan. They are allowed brief visits no more than once a month to check on their homes.
Over at Lat Long, the Google Maps blog, Tamotsu Baba, the town’s mayor, writes:
Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering. But in Namie-machi time stands still. With the lingering nuclear hazard, we have only been able to do cursory work for two whole years. We would greatly appreciate it if you viewed this Street View imagery to understand the current state of Namie-machi and the tremendous gravity of the situation.
Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forebearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children. It has become our generation’s duty to make sure future generations understand the city’s history and culture—maybe even those who will not remember the Fukushima nuclear accident. We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster.
Image: Screenshot, Google Street View from Namie-machi, Fukushima, Japan.
Less than an hour after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the country’s phone system was at capacity and Japanese citizens were unable to contact their loved ones or emergency hotlines. What did the Japanese do? They turned to Twitter. Dick Costolo, chief executive of Twitter, discusses how Twitter saved lives that day, in this video from The Economist’s Ideas Economy events series.
It is as if someone sat at a desk and wrote a novel about a research idea.
The Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists in a report on Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii who fabricated 172 papers over the past 19 years. Science Insider, A New Record for Retractions?
Via Science Insider:
Among other problems, the panel, set up by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists, could find no records of patients and no evidence medication was ever administered…
…The panel focused on 212 of 249 known Fujii papers. It tried to review the raw data, laboratory notebooks, and records on the patients or animal subjects involved. Committee members also interviewed relevant people.
Among the 172 papers judged bogus, the report claims that 126 studies of randomized, double-blind, controlled trials “were totally fabricated.” The committee identified only three valid papers. For another 37 papers, the panel could not conclusively determine if there had been fabrication.
FJP: Wow.
Would You Like a Side of Testicle with That
We started the day with a freaky fish, we end with a freaky meal.
Via CalorieLab (click through not recommended for the squeamish):
On Sunday, April 13, Tokyo illustrator Mao Sugiyama (who goes by the nickname “HC”), publicly seasoned and braised his own genitals on a portable gas cartridge burner, and then served them to five eager diners who each paid about $250 for the meal (a sixth was a no-show). The genitals had been returned to the asexual Sugiyama, frozen and double-bagged in plastic, following elective genital removal surgery on his 22nd birthday in early April.
After initially considering eating them himself, Sugiyama offered the meal on Twitter in mid-April to the first person willing to pay 100,000 yen (about $1,250). But after the notoriety that his tweet caused, he organized a public banquet, dubbed “Ham Cybele – Century Banquet,” at the “Asagaya Loft A” event space in the Suginami Ward of Tokyo. “Century” in Japanese is a homophone for the Japanese word for “genitals”; “Ham Cybele” refers to the Anatolian mother goddess, prefixed with an appropriate word for tough meat to create a phrase whose initials match Sugiyama’s artist name of HC…
…The five genital eaters comprised a 32-year-old male manga artist (there for “research”), a 30-year-old white-collar couple (who were “curious”), an attractive 22-year-old woman (who wondered how it would feel), and 29-year-old event planner Shigenobu Matsuzawa, who tweeted before the event, “It’s a once in a lifetime chance, so I decided on the spur of the moment to do it.”
We’re eating vegetarian this evening.
Photographs from Fukushima
Last week we wrote about Japan’s Memory Salvage Project, a beautiful volunteer initiative that seeks to restore some of the 750,000 found photographs collected in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami.
If you’re in New York next month, Aperture is exhibiting some of the images as part of a show that started in Japan and then moved to Los Angeles.
In an interview with the New Yorker, project lead Munemasa Takahashi explains:
After the disaster occurred, the first thing the people who lost their loved ones and houses came to look for was their photographs. Only humans take moments to look back at their pasts, and I believe photographs play a big part in that. This exhibit makes us think of what we have lost, and what we still have to remember about our past.
The photographs will be on display at the Aperture Foundation from April 2 through April 27.
The Memory Salvage Project
When Japanese defense forces cleared debris from the 2011 tsunami, they came across 750,000 photographs that they collected and saved.
Now a group of volunteers called the Memory Salvage Project is cleaning and restoring each photo, one by one.
Images: Stills from a video by the Discovery Channel. Click through to watch.
Select an image to embiggen.
Want Someone to Shut Up? There's a (Non-Lethal) Gun for That
Japanese researchers have created a non-lethal gun that silences people up to 100 feet away.
Via Extreme Tech:
The gun has two purposes, according to the researchers: At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking — but its second application is a lot more chilling.
The researchers were looking for a way to stop “louder, stronger” voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.” In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce “proper” conversations.
The gun works by using a directional mic to capture the offending voice and then rebroadcasting the audio back to them with directional speakers. The reported effect is similar to talking on the phone when there’s an echo. As we hear the delayed feedback our brains get jammed.
This Day in History: Executive Order 9066 & Japanese Internment Camps
On February 19, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 allowing the US military to create domestic exclusion zones and remove people from them.
“Within days,” the Los Angeles Times reminds us, “the military began removing all Japanese Americans and Japanese from the West Coast.
“Within months, about 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans – almost two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens –were moved to internment camps scattered through eastern California, Arizona and other Western States.”
The LA Times Framework blog has a great slideshow of the images they published at that time.
Images: Lead image is a sign notifying people of Japanese descent to report for relocation, via Wikipedia. Photos via the LA Times Framework blog.
One of These is Not Like the Other
Photo tampering is nothing new. Over the last 10 years astute observers caught news organizations and politicians doctoring images. Take for example, Reuters and the manipulated photos it published by Adnan Hajj during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict; conservative operatives releasing a doctored photo in 2004 of John Kerry and Jane Fonda together at an anti-war rally; or any number of photos found in glossy magazines.
Even Adobe recognizes the troubles Photoshop can cause and in 2008 started work on a photo authentication plugin.
If only it were so easy.
In this video we see a new Japanese pop sensation, Aimi Eguchi of the girl band AKB 48. Thing is, she isn’t real.
Via Singularity Hub:
This past Sunday, Ezaki Glico, the candy company which aired the commercial, confirmed what many of AKB 48’s fans had come to suspect: Aimi Eguchi wasn’t real. The new group member, it turns out, was a computer-generated composite of the real band members. Her pretty face was actually made up of the “best features” of six other members: her eyes, nose, mouth, hair/body, face outline and eyebrows were not flesh-and-blood, but cut-and-paste.
Can’t tell who in the video is fake? Click through to see who Aimi is and how Ezaki Glico created the new composite character.
Before, meet After
The Daily Mail is running a series of before and after pictures of Japan’s cleanup efforts three months post-tsunami.
Above: A ship swept away by the raging torrents lies among other debris on March 12, left, while a man on a bicycle pedals past a pedestrian on the same road June 4, 2011 in Miyako, Iwate Prefecture, north-eastern Japan.
Evacuation center. Japan.
Fukushima now has its own unmanned remote-controlled mascot
This little guy right here? He’s a T-Hawk drone, a little unmanned remote-controlled flying thingamajig, built by Honeywell, that engineers used to get an up-close view of the situation inside the damaged Fukushima reactors. It can shoot both normal pictures as well as infrared shots. Plus, if you own one of these, you’ll be the coolest kid on your block. Engineers say that they’ll have some photos to share with the world on Monday. But we want them now! source
Facebook Group Fact Checks Italian Media
A Facebook Group called Giappone Shinjitu (Japan Truth) currently has some 1,300 members combating what they believe is Italian media sensationalism and distortion of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
Via the European Journalism Center:
Its purpose resembles that of the website Wall of Shame, where people can report inaccurate, speculative or sensationalist articles on the earthquake and the ensuing nuclear crisis.
“Now we have the chance to check facts,” said Giappone Shinjitsu group founder Paola Teresa Ghirotti, a photographer specialising in Japanese matters and a member of the Italian Association for Japanese Studies (Aistugia). Along with some of the 1200 followers of the group, Ghirotti began to crosscheck articles in order to verify the consistency of the news reported in the Italian media. According to their findings, “the names of the people [quoted in the articles] were real but they were attributed to different people,” she said. For instance, the name of a Japanese company spokesman recently found in an article by the Associated Press became a fireman in an Italian article, according to the list of inconsistencies published by the group.
Fun Fact: I was once interviewed by a Russian magazine about Internet technology and innovation. When the article came out, the story opened with me walking out of a newly opened Apple store in Manhattan with a purchase or two in my hands.
This had never happened.
When I asked the writer what was up she said that the editors created the anecdote to make me more interesting.
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