Tuesday, March 15, 2011
VIDEO BOM EXPLODES IN UTAN KAYU SEVERELY INJURES POLICE OFFICER
A bomb, disguised as a book, exploded in front of the Institute for Studies on the Free Flow of Information (ISAI) located in Utan Kayu, East Jakarta, at approximately 4:10 p.m.
The police were trying to secure the book when the explosion occurred. As a result, the East Jakarta chief detective Comr. Dodi Rahmawan suffered serious injuries.
“One hand of a police officer was blown off,” and employee at the ISAI, Ocim Muslim, said as reported by kompas.com.
The book was received by Ade Juniarti, an employee at the secretariat of the institute at approximately 10 a.m. Ade then contacted the police after noticing cables sticking out of the book, which was addressed to Liberal Islamic Network (JIL) activist Ulil Abshar Abdalla.
An employee of nearby radio station KBR68H named Nopik, was reportedly injured by shrapnel.
JAPANESE ORDERED INDOORS IN RADIATION LEAK CRISIS

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Radiation leaked from a crippled nuclear plant in tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan after a third reactor was rocked by an explosion Tuesday and a fourth caught fire in a dramatic escalation of the 4-day-old catastrophe. The government warned anyone nearby to stay indoors to avoid exposure.
In a nationally televised statement, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said radiation has spread from four reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Fukushima province, one of the hardest-hit in Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that has killed more than 10,000 people.
"The level seems very high, and there is still a very high risk of more radiation coming out," Kan said. "We are making utmost efforts to prevent further explosions and radiation leaks."
This is the worst nuclear crisis Japan has faced since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. It is also the first time that such a grave nuclear threat has been raised in the world since a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine exploded in 1986.
Kan warned there are dangers of more leaks and told people living within 19 miles (30 kilometers) of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex to stay indoors to avoid radiation sickness. Some 70,000 people had already been evacuated from a 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius and 140,000 remain in the zone for which the new warning was issued.
Three reactors at the power plant were in critical condition after Friday's quake, losing their ability to cool down and releasing some radiation. A fourth reactor that was unoperational caught fire on Tuesday and more radiation was released, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.
The fire was put out. Even though it was unoperational, the fourth reactor was believed to be the source of the elevated radiation release because of the hydrogen release that triggered the fire.
"It is likely that the level of radiation increased sharply due to a fire at Unit 4," Edano said. "Now we are talking about levels that can damage human health. These are readings taken near the area where we believe the releases are happening. Far away, the levels should be lower," he said.
"Please do not go outside. Please stay indoors. Please close windows and make your homes airtight. Don't turn on ventilators. Please hang your laundry indoors," he said.
"Thse are figures that potentially affect health. There is no mistake about that," he said.
He said a reactor whose containment building caught fire Monday has not contributed greatly to the increased radiation. The radiation level around one of the reactors stood at 400,000 microsiverts per hour, four timeshigher than the safe level.
Officials said 50 workers were still there trying to put water into the reactors to cool them. They say 800 other staff were evacuated. The fires and explosions at the reactors have injured 15 workers and military personnel and exposed up to 190 people to elevated radiation.
The death toll from last week's earthquake and tsunami jumped Tuesday as police confirmed the number killed had topped 2,400, though that grim news was overshadowed by a deepening nuclear crisis. Officials have said previously that at least 10,000 people may have died in Miyagi province alone.
Millions ofpeople spent a fourth night with little food, water or heating in near-freezing temperatures as they dealt with the loss of homes and loved ones. Asia's richest country hasn't seen such hardship since World War II.
Hajime Sato, a government official in Iwate prefecture, one of the hardest-hit, said deliveres of supplies were only 10 percent of what is needed. Body bags and coffins were running so short that the government may turn to foreign funeral homes for help, he said.
Though Japanese officials have refused to speculate on the death toll, Indonesian geologist Hery Harjono, who dealt with the 2004 Asian tsunami, said it would be "a miracle really if it turns out to be less than 10,000" dead.
The 2004 tsunami killed 230,000 people - of which only 184,000 bodies were found.
Harjono noted that many bodies in Japan may have been sucked out to sea or remain trapped beneath rubble as they did in Indonesia's hardest-hit Aceh province. But he also stressed that Japan's infrastructure, high-level of preparedness and city planning to keep houses away from the shore could mitigate its human losses.
The impact of the earthquake and tsunami on the world's third-largest economy helped drag down the share markets Monday, the first business day since the disasters. The benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average for a second day Tuesday, by 6.5 percent to 8,999.73, wiping out this year's gains while the broader Topix index lost 7.5 percent.
To lessen the damage, Japan's central bank injected $61.2 billion Tuesday into the money markets after pumping in $184 billion on Monday.
Initial estimates put repair costs in the tens of billions of dollars, costs that would likely add to a massive public debt that, at 200 percent of gross domestic product, is the biggest among industrialized nations.
In a bid to stop the reactors at the nuclear plant from melting down, engineers have been injecting seawater as a coolant of last resort.
Yuta Tadano, a 20-year-old pump technician at the Fukushima power plant, said he was on the second floor of an office building in the complex when quake hit.
"It was terrible. The desks were thrown around and the tables too. The walls started to crumble around us and there was dust everywhere. The roof began to collapse.
"We got outside and confirmed everyone was safe . Then we got out of there. We had no time to be tested for radioactive exposure. I still haven't been tested," Tadano told The Associated Press at an evacuation center outside the exclusion zone.
"We live about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the facility. We had to figure out on our own where to go," said Tadano, cradling his 4-month-old baby, Shoma. "I worry a lot about fallout. If we could see it we could escape, but we can't."
"Just because we are an evacuation center doesn't mean we are safe," said his sister-in-law Makiko Murasawa, 43.
The nuclear crisis has also raised global concerns about the safety of nuclear power at a time when it has seen a resurgence as an alternative to fossil fuels.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said the Japanese government has asked the agency to send experts to help.
The Dai-ichi plant is the most severely affected of three nuclear complexes that were declared emergencies after suffering damage in Friday's quake and tsunami, raising questions about the safety of such plants in coastal areas near fault lines and adding to global jitters over the industry.
Switzerland ordered a freeze on new plants, while Germany said it was suspending a decision to extend the life of its nuclear plants. The United States said it would try to learn from the Japanese crisis but that events would not diminish the U.S. commitment to nuclear power.
"When we talk about reaching a clean energy standard, it is a vital part of that," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
Meanwhile, 17 U.S. military personnel involved in helicopter relief missions were found to have been exposed to low levels of radiation after they flew back from the devastated coast to the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier about 100 miles (160 kilometers) offshore.
U.S. officials said the exposure level was roughly equal to one month's normal exposure to natural background radiation, and the 17 were declared contamination-free after scrubbing with soap and water.
As a precaution, the carrier and other 7th Fleet ships involved in relief efforts had shifted to another area, the U.S. said.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
JAPAN QUAKE COUSES EMERGENCIES AT 5 NUKE REACTORS

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Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday's powerful earthquake. Thousands of residents were evacuated as workers struggled to get the reactors under control to prevent meltdowns.
Operators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant's Unit 1 scrambled ferociously to tamp down heat and pressure inside the reactor after the 8.9 magnitude quke and the tsunami that followed cut off electricity to the site and disabled emergency generators, knocking out the main cooling system.
Some 3,000 people within two miles (three kilometers) of the plant were urged to leave their homes, but the evacuation zone was more than tripled to 6.2 miles (10 kilomeers) after authorities detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1's control room.
The government declared a state of emergency at the Daiichi unit - the first at a nuclear plant in Japan's history. But hours later, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. which operates the six-reactor Daiichi site in northeastern Japan, announced that it had lost cooling ability at a second reactor there and three units at its nearby Fukushima Daini site.
The government quickly declared states of emergency for those units, too. Nearly 14,000 people living near the two powr plants were ordered to evacuate.
Japan's nuclear safety agency said the situation was most dire at Fukushima Daiichi's Unit 1, where pressure had risen to twice what is consider the normal level. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that diesel generators that normally would have kpt cooling systems running at Fukushima Daiichi had been disabled by tsunami flooding.
Officials at the Daiichi facility began venting radioactive vapors from the unit to relieve pressure inside the reactor case. The loss of electricity had delayed that effort for several hours.
Plant workers there labored to cool down the reactor core, but there was no prospect for immediate success. They were temporarily cooling the reactor with a secondary system, but it wasn't working as well as the primary one, according to Yuji Kakizaki, an official at the Japanese nuclear safety agency.
Even once a reactor is shut down, radioactive byproducts give off heat that can ultimately produce volatile hydrogen gas, melt radioactive fuel, or even breach the containment building in a full meltdown belching radioactivity into the surroundings, according to technical and government authorities.
Despite plans for the intentional release of radioactivity, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the 40-year-old plant was not leaking radiation.
"With evacuation in place and the ocean-bound wind, we can ensure the safety," Edano said at a televised news conference early Saturday.
It was unclear if the elevation of radioactivity around the reactor was known at the time he spoke.
The outside measurement of radiation at Daiichi was far below the allowed limit for a year, other officials said, reporting that it would take 70 days standing at the gate to reach the yearly limit.
Dr. Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician who runs a disaster preparedness institute at Columbia University, said the reported level of radiation outside the plant would not pose an immediate danger, though it could lift the rate of thyroid cancer in a population over time.
However, he called the reported level inside the plant extraordinarily high, raising a concern about acute health effects. "I would personally absolutely not want to be inside," he said.
While the condition of the reactor cores was of utmost concern, Tokyo Electric Power Co. also warned of power shortages and an "extremely challenging situation in power supply for a while."
The Daiichi site is located in Onahama city, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo. The 460-megawatt Unit 1 began operating in 1971 and is the oldest at the site. It is a boiling water reactor that drives the turbine with radioactive water, unlike pressurized water reactors usually found in the United States. Japanese regulators decided in February to allow it to run another 10 years.
The temperature inside the reactor wasn't reported, but Japanese regulators said it wasn't dropping as quickly as they wanted.
Kakizaki, the safety agency official, said the emergency cooling system is intact and could kick in as a last line of defense. "That's as a last resort, and we have not reached that stage yet," he added.
Defense Ministry official Ippo Maeyama said dozens of troops trained for chemical disasters had been dispatched to the plant in case of a radiation leak, along with four vehicles designed for use in atomic, biological and chemical warfare.
Technical experts said the plant would presumably have hours, but probably not days, to try to stabilize things.
Leonard S. Spector, director of the Washington office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said loss of coolant is the most serious type of accident at a nuclear power plant.
"They are busy trying to get coolant to the core area," said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The big thing is trying to get power to the cooling systems."
High-pressure pumps can temporarily cool a reactor in this state with battery power, even when electricity is down, according to Arnold Gundersen, a nuclear engineer who used to work in the U.S. nuclear industry. They can open and close relief valves needed to control pressure. Batteries would go dead within hours but could be replaced.
The IAEA said "mobile electricity supplies" had arrived at the Daiichi plant. It wasn't clear if they were generators or batteries.
It also was not immediately clear how closely the reactor had moved toward dangerous pressure or temperature levels. If temperatures were to keep rising to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it could set off a chemical reaction that begins to embrittle the metallic zirconium that sheathes the radioactive uranium fuel.
That reaction releases hydrogen, which can explode when cooling water finally floods back into the reactor. That was also concern for a time during the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.
If the reactor temperature keeps reaches around 4,000 degrees, the fuel could melt outright, and the reactor could slump right into the bottom of the containment building in a partial meltdown. Then the crucial question would be whether the building would stay intact.
"The last line of defense is that containment - and that's got to hold," Gundersen said. If it doesn't, the radioactive load inside the reactor can pour out into the surroundings.
The plant is just south of the Miyagi prefecture, which was the region hardest hit by the quake. A fire broke out at another nuclear plant in that area in a turbine building at one of the Onagawa power reactors. Smoke poured from the building, but the fire was put out. Turbine buildings of such boiling water reactors, though separate from the reactor, do contain radioactive water, but at much lower levels than inside the reactor. A water leak was reported in another Onagawa reactor.
No radioactive releases were reported in any of the other affected plants.
As Japan is one of the most seismically active nations in the world, it has strict sets of regulations designed to limit the impact of quakes on nuclear power plants. These standards call for constructing plants on solid bedrock to reduce shaking.
As one of the most seismically active countries in the world, Japan has strict sets of regulations designed to limit the impact of quakes on nuclear power plants. These standards call for building plants on solid bedrock to reduce shaking.
Even so, 10 of Japan's 54 commercial reactors were shut down because of the quake, and Tokyo Electric Power said it had to reduce power generation. Japan gets about 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear power.
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