Mas Ekki, saya tunggu email Mas Ekki, nanti saya forward ke milist2 tercinta. Janji deh.
Wassalam, Djoko Japan nuclear plant logs a third radiation leak July 22, 2007 *The New York Times* KASHIWAZAKI, Japan Troubles at a Japanese nuclear power plant damaged by an earthquake on Monday continued Thursday when the plant's operator reported that it had detected a third radiation leak. In a statement, Tokyo Electric Power, the operator, said that it had found tiny amounts of radioactive material in an exhaust filter at the plant, which was shut down Monday during a magnitude-6.8 earthquake near this city in northwestern Japan. The material was detected Wednesday, meaning it might have leaked a day or two after the earthquake, Tokyo Electric said. The company said the amount of radioactive material was too small to pose a health risk. Still, the discovery is sure to add to criticism of Tokyo Electric, which has repeatedly apologized for delays and mistakes in reporting the extent of damage at the plant. The company said the force of the earthquake set off a string of accidents, including a spill of slightly radioactive water and an earlier leak of radioactive material into an exhaust filter. *July 22, 2007* *Japan rejects IAEA help at nuclear plant - Kyodo* *By Jane Barrett* TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan has turned down an offer of help from the U.N. nuclear watchdog following last week's quake which damaged the world's biggest nuclear power plant, media reported on Saturday. Authorities closed down the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant indefinitely after Monday's 6.8 magnitude quake in northwestern Japan caused radiation leaks there. The quake also killed ten people and flattened hundreds of houses. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had offered to send in inspectors, urging Japan to share lessons from the incident. But Kyodo news agency reported sources as saying Japanese nuclear safety authorities would work by themselves to deal with problems at the plant for the time being, leaving room for possibly seeking an IAEA inspection at a later date. The governor of Niigata prefecture, where the quake occurred, said IAEA inspectors should come visit the site. "Withholding an invitation may breed an unintended notion that there may be something wrong," Governor Hirohiko Izumida, was quoted as saying by Kyodo. He added Japan should host an IAEA team "as soon as possible to show to the world what has happened". The leaks have renewed fears about the safety of the nuclear industry, which supplies about one third of Japan's power. Television showed officials from Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the closed plant, meeting a local government team at the facility on Saturday. TEPCO has acknowledged that the tremor was stronger than the plant, whose first reactor came on stream more than 20 years ago, had been designed to withstand. Troubled Japanese nuclear plant cites 50 malfunctions following killer quake *Associated Press* (July 17, 2007) KASHIWAZAKI, Japan - The world's largest nuclear power plant suffered a barrage of malfunctions such as burst pipes, water leaks and radioactive waste spillage when it was hit by a powerful earthquake in northwestern Japan, the plant's operator announced Tuesday. The admission of further trouble at the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant near the epicenter of Monday's quake and delays in notifying the public triggered outrage among anti-nuclear activists and criticism from top officials. Tokyo Electric Power Co. said a total of 50 cases of malfunctioning and trouble had been found at the plant, the world's largest in terms of power capacity, since Monday's magnitude 6.8 quake, which killed at least nine people and injured another 1,000. The company said it was still inspecting the plant's reactors, and that it could find further problems. Four of the plant's seven reactors were running at the time of the quake, and they were all shut down automatically by the plant's anti-quake safety mechanism. TEPCO spokesman Kensuke Takeuchi called the malfunctions "minor troubles" and said they posed no danger to the outside environment or to public health. Cases included minor fires such as one at an electrical transformer that burned for two hours after the quake, broken pipes and water leaks, including one that flushed 1,200 liters of water containing radioactive material into the sea, the company said in a statement. In five of the reactors, major exhaust pipes were knocked out of place and TEPCO was investigating whether they had leaked radioactive materials, the statement said. Earlier Tuesday, TEPCO said about 100 drums containing low-level nuclear waste fell over during the quake, some of the lids open. The company also said a small amount of radioactive materials cobalt-60 and chromium-51 had been emitted into the atmosphere from an exhaust stack. The spate of problems and TEPCO's delay in announcing them fanned concern Tuesday over the safety of Japan's nuclear power plants, which have suffered a string of accidents and cover-ups amid enduring doubts about their ability to withstand powerful earthquakes. Japan's worst nuclear accident killed two workers and exposed hundreds of others to radiation at Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo, in September 1999. "They raised the alert too late. I have sent stern instructions that such alerts must be raised seriously and swiftly," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters of TEPCO on Tuesday. "Those involved should repent their actions," he told reporters in Tokyo. Masanori Hamada, a professor of earthquake engineering at Tokyo's Waseda University, said the quake showed the government should push to increase the quake-resistance standards at the country's 55 reactors, which provide a third of the country's electricity. "It's unthinkable that water leaks and fire could be triggered so easily," said Hamada. "TEPCO must provide a full explanation to the public." The plant in Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, 135 miles northwest of Tokyo, eclipsed a nuclear power station in Canada's Ontario as the world's largest power station when it added its seventh reactor in 1997. The Japanese plant, which generates 8.2 million kilowatts of electricity, has been plagued with mishaps. In 2001, a radioactive leak was found in the turbine room of one of the reactors. The plant's safety record and its proximity to a fault line prompted nearby residents to file a series of lawsuits claiming that the government had failed to conduct sufficient safety reviews when it approved the plant's construction in the 1970s. In 2005, a Tokyo court threw out a lawsuit filed by 33 residents, saying there was no error in the government safety reviews. The court also denied that the seismic fault under the plant could result in an accident during a major quake. Environmentalists blasted Japan's reliance on nuclear energy as irresponsible in a nation with such a vulnerability to powerful quakes. "This fire and leakage underscores the threat of nuclear accidents in Japan, especially in earthquake zones," said Jan Beranek, an official at Greenpeace International in Amsterdam. "In principle, it's a bad idea to build nuclear plants in earthquake-prone areas." In addition to the nine declared dead, one person was missing and another 13,000 quake victims were crowding emergency shelters Tuesday night as rescue workers rushed to locate any survivors amid new fears of landslides. Victims were largely concerned with securing enough food, water and shelter for the night, but some said the threat of a devastating accident at the nuclear power plant was always at the back of their minds. "Whenever there is an earthquake, the first thing we worry about is the nuclear plant. I worry about whether there will be a fire or something. We have no information, it's really frightening," said Kiyokazu Tsunajima, who spent the first night sleeping in his car, afraid an aftershock might collapse his damaged house. The initial quake, which hit the region at 10:13 a.m. (0113GMT) was centered off the coast of Niigata, 260 kilometers (160 miles) northwest of Tokyo. Tsunami warnings were issued, but the resulting waves were too small to cause damage. The Japanese Meteorological Agency put the initial quake's magnitude at 6.8, while the U.S. Geological Survey said it was 6.7. --- Associated Press Writers Hiroko Tabuchi and Kozo Mizoguchi contributed to this report in Tokyo. 22 July 2007 20:45 Fear and fury in shadow of Japan's damaged nuclear giant By David McNeill in Kashiwazaki Published: 21 July 2007 One wonders what the pitch was: building the planet's largest nuclear power plant on one of its most seismically unstable plots of real estate. Yet, somehow here the plant squats on the outskirts of this town of 93,000 people, a seven-reactor, 8,200 megawatt monster, ringed by roads that are cracked and buckled from this week's deadly earthquake. Inside, in the seconds after the quake - which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale - struck under the sea just 12 miles away, pipes burst, drums of radioactive waste toppled and monitors stopped working. A fire broke out and burnt for two hours, and 1,200 litres of contaminated water sloshed into the sea. When Tsunehisa Katsumata, the president of Tokyo Electric (Tepco), the utility giant that runs the plant, surveyed the damage, he reportedly called it "a mess". Those reactors are now idle, threatening power shortages throughout the peak energy-demanding summer months and forcing the Trade minister, Akira Amari, to request yesterday that business users cut electricity consumption. Hiroshi Aida, the mayor of Kashiwazaki, invoked a little-used emergency order to shut them down because he considered them "a threat to the safety of the public". He then sent cars equipped with loudspeakers around the town to reassure everyone he had been "tough" with Tepco. Some said he wasn't tough enough. "I wish the plant wasn't here," lamented a local resident, Koji Yamada. "But now that it is we have to live with it and hope the government keeps us safe." The locals have argued about its merits since it was announced amid a blaze of publicity and national pride in 1969. Demonstrations, petitions and court cases were a regular feature of life here as the reactors went online between 1985 and 1997. But now the most common local reaction to questions about the plant is shikata-ga-nai, - It can't be helped. "Most people who live here keep a wary eye on the plant, the way they would a dangerous neighbour," says Paul Woodcock, a Briton who teaches in the town. "They just hope it stays calm." Over the years, a total of $2bn (£1bn) in government money has been pumped into Kashiwazaki, estimates Mr Aida. "The plant contributes a lot to the area, but we only want it here if it can guarantee the safety of the people here," he says. "We must be assured of this before it is reopened." Privately, the Mayor is said to be furious at Tepco's bungling after the quake. Japan's biggest power company initially failed to report the leak, then admitted that it was 50 per cent bigger than previously announced. The company has a history of cover-ups. Earlier this year, it admitted falsifying inspection data 200 times at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa and other reactors going back decades. This week it emerged that the International Atomic Energy Agency warned the plant managers two years ago that its fire-prevention measures were inadequate. After Monday's quake, Mr Amari warned that such scandals "could make people lose their trust in nuclear power". He has given the country's top nuclear power companies a week to tighten up plant operations. It is not difficult to understand his concern. Japan has 55 of the world's 440-odd operating reactors, which supply about one-third of the country's energy needs, and another 11 in construction or planned. The government's national energy policy aims to bury the "Hiroshima and Nagasaki syndrome" and raise the proportion of nuclear-generated electricity to 40 per cent. Japan aims, in the words of one commentator, to become "a nuclear superstate". (One of the byproducts of this policy is an enormous and growing stock of plutonium - 45 tonnes, or enough to build thousands of the bombs that levelled Nagasaki in 1945. By 2020, Japan could have 145 tonnes of plutonium - more than in the US nuclear arsenal, according to one recent estimate.) That puts the world's second-largest economy at odds with much of the developed world. The contribution of nuclear power to global energy demand fell by one per cent to 16 per cent in the decade to 2003. While the US, Britain and much of Europe froze their nuclear programmes, resource-poor Japan kept building, driven by the dream of energy self-sufficiency. But that strategy has now been dealt a huge blow. Japanese nuclear plants are designed to withstand a 6.5 quake, but the construction regulations are 25 years old and new rules issued this year recommended an upgrade to 6.7. Insiders suggest that a quake resistance of 7.0. The new regulations may demand that geologists identify quake faults active up to 130,000 years ago, a reaction to the stunning revelation that the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant sat atop an active fault. "The logic of nuclear power is that the companies want to reduce the costs of earthquake-resistant design as much as possible," says the anti-nuclear academic Professor Tetsuji Imanaka. "That leaves a lot of room for underestimating the risks." As the quake hit on Monday, a gravestone in a village a few miles away toppled and smashed. The grave belonged to the former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, Japan's postwar master of pork-barrel politics and an early proponent of energy self-sufficiency. To add to the richly symbolic turn of events, Tanaka helped broker the Kashiwazaki plant. "Perhaps Tanaka-san now regrets his decision," said one local. Japan Nuclear-Site Damage Worse Than Reported Kyodo, via Reuters Tsunehisa Katsumata, second from right, the president of Tokyo Electric Power, bowed in apology to Hiroshi Aida, left, the mayor of Kashiwazaki, for errors in reporting quake damage at a nuclear plant. By MARTIN FACKLER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/martin_fackler/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Published: July 19, 2007 KASHIWAZAKI, Japan<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/japan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>, July 18 The Japanese operator of a nuclear power plant stricken by an earthquake earlier this week said Wednesday that damage was worse than previously reported and that a leak of water was 50 percent more radioactive than initially announced. For the third time in three days, Tokyo Electric Power apologized for delays and errors in announcing the extent of damage at the plant in this northwestern coastal city, which was struck Monday by a magnitude 6.8earthquake. The company also said that tremors had tipped over "several hundred" barrels of radioactive waste, not 100 as it reported Tuesday, and that the lids had opened on "a few dozen" of those barrels. Tokyo Electric said it had found some 50 problems at the plant caused by the earthquake, including loose exhaust ducts and damaged pipes. In a statement, the company said it had miscalculated the level of radioactivity of the leaked water, 317 gallons of which flowed into the Sea of Japan. However, it said the water's level of radioactivity was still far too low to harm the environment. Television scenes showed Tokyo Electric's president, Tsunehisa Katsumata, bowing low in apology during a visit to the area on Wednesday. "We will start an investigation from the ground up," he pledged. The company's slow pace in revealing the plant's problems has brought criticism from Japanese all the way up to the prime minister and fed public fears about the safety of nuclear power. On Wednesday, the mayor of Kashiwazaki, Hiroshi Aida, chimed in, ordering the plant to stop operations until safety could be ensured. The troubles at the plant raise questions about nuclear power at a time when resource-poor Japan must compete for oil and gas with hungry neighbors like China and India. Japan has embraced nuclear power as an alternative to energy imports from the Middle East, but revelations that Monday's earthquake exceeded the Kashiwazaki plant's design limits raised concerns about reactor safety in this earthquake-prone country. Also on Wednesday, the death toll from the earthquake rose to 10 after the body of a 76-year-old man was found near a collapsed Buddhist temple. City officials said they did not expect the count to rise much higher, as most of the city's 93,500 residents had been accounted for. City officials said some 9,000 people remained in refugee shelters, though many are expected to return to their homes after the city fully restores electricity on Wednesday. Water and natural gas supplies remain severed. On Wednesday, many of Kashiwazaki's streets remained blocked by toppled houses, and major roads had buckled and cracked from the force of the earthquake. In the city's center, entire rows of shops had collapsed, and a large karaoke entertainment center leaned precariously over a street. The owner of a photography shop, Akio Yoshino, 53, said the earthquake had been strong enough to scatter heavy glass display shelves across his store like "pieces spilled from a chess board." "If I had not been outside having a cigarette just at that moment, I'd be dead now," he joked dryly, as his hands visibly shook. "Smoking saved my life." The earthquake also made itself felt on Japan's car industry. Toyota announced Wednesday that it would temporarily halt production at domestic plants later this week because the earthquake had destroyed the Kashiwazaki factory of Riken Corporation, a supplier of piston rings. Jul 20, 6:27 AM EDT Official Criticizes Japan Nuke Plant By JUNJI KUROKAWA Associated Press Writer KASHIWAZAKI, Japan (AP) -- Failure to follow procedure was to blame for the latest leak from a nuclear power plant damaged in this week's earthquake in northwestern Japan, a top government official said Friday. Tokyo Electric Power Co. said radioactive material was leaking from an exhaust vent as late as Wednesday night, two days after the plant suffered a near-direct hit by Monday's quake, which killed 10 people and injured more than 1,000. TEPCO announced Friday that a check the previous night at the plant, 135 miles northwest of Tokyo, confirmed the vent leak had stopped. The embattled operator of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant - the world's largest in terms of capacity - already had announced a barrage of leaks and malfunctions, and said the latest might have been caused by workers failing to follow rules and turn off a fan inside the building. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said the trade and industry minister would issue a further "stern warning" to TEPCO. "This is an error of not implementing the manual," Shiozaki said when questioned about the latest exhaust vent leak. TEPCO and nuclear regulators have stressed the amounts of radioactivity leaked were extremely low and posed no threat to the environment or local residents. The announcement of the leak came a day after officials issued similar assurances about other damage at the plant - including a fire, burst pipes and waste spillage. The seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant shut down automatically when the quake hit, and the plant has been ordered closed indefinitely while inspections and repairs are carried out to assure it can be restarted safely. TEPCO has warned the closure of the key nuclear reactor could trigger a power shortage in the summer months. The Tokyo-based company has asked six other power companies in Japan to consider providing emergency electricity to prepare for a surge in demand as people turn up their air conditioners in the summer heat. All six companies said they would cooperate in providing power and TEPCO is also considering restarting oil and gas plants, TEPCO officials said late Thursday. The government has urged the operators of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors - which supply one-third of Japan's energy - to speed up safety checks for earthquake resistance, a top concern in the temblor-prone nation. Officials at the Kashiwazaki plant acknowledged they had not foreseen such a powerful quake hitting the facility. They also repeatedly underreported its impact after it hit. After initially saying the quake had caused 50 separate types of minor damage or leaks, TEPCO upped that estimate to 63. Referensi: http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070722/NEWS01/707220402/1002/NEWS01 http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/7/22/worldupdates/2007-07-22T000559Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-285934-1&sec=worldupdates http://uaelp.pennnet.com/news/display_news_story.cfm?Section=WireNews&Category=HOME&NewsID=150058 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2788602.ece http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/world/asia/19japan.html?ex=1342497600&en=ce277098ff5e7da8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/J/JAPAN_QUAKE?SITE=WSPATV&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-07-19-06-12-07 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ===================================================== Pojok Milis Komunitas FPK: 1.Milis komunitas FPK dibuat dan diurus oleh pembaca setia KOMPAS 2.Topik bahasan disarankan bersumber dari KOMPAS dan KOMPAS On-Line (KCM) 3.Moderator berhak mengedit/menolak E-mail sebelum diteruskan ke anggota 4.Kontak moderator E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5.Untuk bergabung: [EMAIL PROTECTED] KOMPAS LINTAS GENERASI ===================================================== Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Forum-Pembaca-Kompas/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Forum-Pembaca-Kompas/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
