Containment vessel in 2nd reactor may have ruptured...more bad news (Japan)

By Hiroko Tabuchi and Keith Bradsher, New York Times, March 15, 2011
TOKYO — Japan’s nuclear crisis intensified again Wednesday, with Japanese authorities announcing that a containment vessel in a second reactor unit at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan may have ruptured and appeared to be releasing radioactive steam. That would be the second vessel to be compromised in two days.
The vessel had appeared to be the last fully intact line of defense against large-scale releases of radioactive materials from that reactor, but it was not clear how serious the possible breach might be.
The announcement came after Japanese broadcasters showed live footage of thick plumes of steam rising above the plant.
Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, said the government believed the steam was coming from the No. 3 reactor, where an explosion on Monday blew out part of the building surrounding the containment vessel.
The reactor has three layers of protection: that building; the containment vessel, and the metal cladding around fuel rods, which are inside the reactor. The government has said that those rods at the No. 3 reactor were likely already damaged.
A spike in radiation levels at the plant as the steam was rising forced some of the relatively few workers left at the plant to retreat indoors, suspending some critical efforts to pump water into several reactors to keep them cool.
Earlier in the morning, the company that runs the plant reported that a fire was burning at a different reactor, just hours after officials said flames that erupted Tuesday had been doused.
A government official at Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency soon after said that flames and smoke were no longer visible, but he cautioned that it was unclear if the fire, at the Reactor No. 4 building, had died out. He also was not clear if it was a new fire or if the fire Tuesday had never gone out.

How to help Japan

Médicins Sans Frontières
UNICEF
International Development and Relief Foundation
The Humanitarian Coalition made up of the following:  CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Quebec and Save the Children Canada

Here are some websites through which our readers can donate to the Japanese relief fund.
With the current conditions, another 6.2 quake in Tokyo overnight, and the sirens warning of another tsunami going off intermittently, as workers continue their search for bodies amid the rubble, and both a cloud and the spectre of radiation fallout looming over their society, they need al the help the rest of the world can offer.
Please be as generous as you can.

Obama redux (on Brooks' couch)

By David Brooks, New York Times, March 14, 2011
Prudence is always a nice trait in a leader, especially in the face of a thorny problem like Libya. At a time when the nation is anxious, Obama is coming across as a cautious and safe pair of hands. The man is clearly not going to do anything rash.

Politically, this is a style that seems to appeal to independents. Obama is not going to get sucked into a left-versus-right budget battle and see his presidency get washed away. On budget matters, he seems to be playing rope-a-dope — waiting for the Republicans to propose something courageous and foolhardy like entitlement reform, thus giving him an opening to step in as the bulwark against extremism. It’s likely that he can win the next election simply by force of personality, by overshadowing his opponent.
Yet this current cautious pose carries dangers, too. Eisenhower was president at a time when American self-confidence was at its zenith; Americans were content with a president who took small steps. Today, most Americans seem to think their country is seriously off course. They may have less tolerance for a president who leads cautiously from the back.
Prudence can sometimes look like weakness. Obama said his cautious reactions to the Libyan revolution amounted to “tightening the noose” around Qaddafi. Yet there is no evidence that Qaddafi is feeling asphyxiated or even discomforted. As he slaughters his opposition, Western caution looks like fecklessness.
Prudence is important, but Americans do have an expectation that their president will be the one out front, dominating the agenda, projecting strength and offering vision.
All in all, President Obama is an astoundingly complicated person. During the 2008 presidential campaign, and during the first two years of his term, I would have said that his troubling flaw was hubris — his attempts to do everything at once. But he seems to have an amazing capacity to self-observe and adjust. Now I’d say his worrying flaw is passivity. I have no confidence that I can predict what sort of person Obama will be as he runs for re-election in 2012.
The Brooks' piece attempts to position Obama between the rhetoric of both Presidents Eisenhower, in his farewell address, and John F. Kennedy's rousing appeal to ideals and action in his inaugural address.
Truth be told, Obama is in far different times and circumstances than either former president.
The hawks in military intervention in the Middle East seem to come, mostly from the Republican party. The hawks in the domestic budget conflict seem to come from both the Republican and the Tea parties, since there is considered space between the two, even though both groups dub themselves Republicans.
Hawks, like roman candles, will eventually burn out. The president is in this "thing" for the long haul, and everyone knows he can both "take centre stage, or the front of the parade," as he finally did on health care reform. Now they also know that he is certainly not "Bush III" in the sense that his hand is already on a pulled trigger, ready to fire first and find out why afterwards.
On the military/foreign policy front, there is a cauldron boiling in the Middle East and North Africa. The news from that front changes by the minute, certainly by the hour, especially around the Libyan dictator, The Arab League, the Saudis, and more recently the other remaining leaders who seem to have found both strength and confidence to beat back the rebels demanding their overthrow.
On the budget front, as he did on health care, he is waiting for some legitimate, serious and worthy proposals to come from the Congress, so that when he does enter the arena, he is not spinning his wheels, with those whose solitary aim is to "assure that he will be a one-term president". Those people are simply not to be easily trusted, and are not to be engaged unless and until they show a mature hand with proposals that are worth debating.
Bringing maturity, responsibility, insight and long-range thinking and planning to the budget process is something all Americans would like to see, and the president has the intellect, the gravitas and the stature to bring those things to the table. Without them, in fact, there likely be a government shut-down, from failed attempts by self-serving short-term thinking and acting.
When he does enter the budget stage of his presidency, rest assured that he will bring proposals and the option of compromise that will far exceed anything from his Republican opponents.
Stop attempting to dichotomize the president, into either "this" or "that"...and then call him complex, because he does not fit easily into one or other box.
The U.S., and the world could be served much less effectively, in such extraordinary times, with so many pots literally and figuratively boiling nearly over, than by such a "man of steel," as Tony Blair describes him in his autobiography, My Journey. I would only amend that description to include perhaps a crystal clear mind with a razor sharpness to it, and a constitution and ethic that transcends both politics and national dreams and aspirations. As he leads his people through patient self-confidence and deliberately not over-reaching is something the American people could do well to learn from; there is so much for the American people to learn from this outstanding man.
There is no equation or precedent for the convex of issues on the president's plate; there is only a single president, advised and counselled by an inordinately intelligent spouse, and a band of advisors each of whose capacity to advise is, undoubtedly, growing exponentially by the minute, as is their exhaustion just watching their leader;yet that observation must remain private.

Welcome to the Ides of March

From Wikipedia
The Ides of March (Latin: Idus Martii) is the name of 15 March in the Roman calendar, probably referring to the day of the full moon. The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other months.[1] The Ides of March was a festive day dedicated to the god Mars and a military parade was usually held. In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was stabbed (23 times) to death in the Roman Senate led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and 60 other conspirators.

On his way to the Theatre of Pompey (where he would be assassinated), Caesar saw a seer who had foretold that harm would come to him not later than the Ides of March. Caesar joked, "Well, the Ides of March have come", to which the seer replied "Ay, they have come, but they are not gone."[2] This meeting is famously dramatized in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned to "beware the Ides of March".

Pools holding spent nuclear rods..'worse than meltdown' (expert)

By William J. Broad and Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times, March 14, 2011
Even as workers race to prevent the radioactive cores of the damaged nuclear reactors in Japan from melting down, concerns are growing that nearby pools holding spent fuel rods could pose an even greater danger.
The pools, which sit on the top level of the reactor buildings and keep spent fuel submerged in water, have lost their cooling systems and the Japanese have been unable to take emergency steps because of the multiplying crises.
Experts now fear that the pool containing those rods from the fourth reactor has run dry, allowing the rods to overheat and catch fire. That could spread radioactive materials far and wide in dangerous clouds.
The pools are a worry at the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because at least two of the three have lost their roofs in explosions, exposing the spent fuel pools to the atmosphere. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.
If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools did indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.
“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”
A spokesman for the Japanese company that runs the stricken reactors said in an interview on Monday that the spent fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini plants had been left uncooled since shortly after the quake.
This story, like so many others, seems to keep jumping out at us from multiple directions and sources, getting worse by the hour. We were, and still are, very concerned about the exposure of the nuclear core reactors, that could meltdown, and now there is a real danger from the spent nuclear rods, sitting in pools on the top of the reactor buildings, also without appropriate cooling, leaving them vulnerable to their own fire and the resulting radioactive comtamination.

Fukushima Daiichi..worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl

By Hiroku Tabuchi, David E. Sanger and Keith Bradsher, New York Times, March 15, 2011
TOKYO — Japan’s nuclear crisis verged toward catastrophe on Tuesday after an explosion damaged the vessel containing the nuclear core at one reactor and a fire at another spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to statements from Japanese government and industry officials.
In a brief address to the nation at 11 a.m. Tokyo time, Prime Minister Naoto Kan pleaded for calm, but warned that radiation had already spread from the crippled reactors and there was “a very high risk” of further leakage. Fortunately, the prevailing winds were sweeping most of the plume of radioactivity out into the Pacific Ocean, rather than over populated areas.
The sudden turn of events, after an explosion Monday at one reactor and then an early-morning explosion Tuesday at yet another — the third in four days at the plant — already made the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl reactor disaster a quarter century ago.
It would seem that the Prime Minister's primary goal, throughout the last four or five days, has been to maintain calm, even at the expense of full disclosure. Now, however, he has no choice...and the facts are so horrendous as to be even more overwhelming than everything we have heard so far.
Already, even before this latest information, various countries had either mothballed or cancelled nuclear reactor projects and others were re-considering their commitment to nuclear power.
However, before we get ahead of ourselves, there is a human tragedy in Japan, for which the world may not be fully prepared. On PBS' New Hour with Jim Lehrer, a UN spokewoman indicated that Japan had accepted aid workers and rescue teams from 15 countries, with another 17 waiting to move in. In her words, another 40-plus countries have offered, and the UN's job is to co-ordinate these offers and to deploy them, according to the needs of the Japanese people and government.
What is still a little shocking, to this observer, is that the world does not have a cadre of forces, humanitarian forces, like military forces, from many countries, that could be deployed to such catastrophes. The military component, while disciplined and trained, is not the same as humanitarian "troops" trained in a far different discipline, with different equipment and different persepctives. Lester Pearson, then Foreign Affairs Minister proposed, and the world accepted a Peace-keeping Mission under the UN in the Suez Crisis of 1957.
Now, a half-century later, the world's needs are calling out for an internationally funded and staffed "crisis response" cadre of trained personnel who would be capable of serving in English and many other languages, who would not be an NGO, but rather a sanctioned, approved and monitored agency, perhaps under the UN aegis, whose personnel would eliminate the various nuanced agendas of the various countries, for which there is really no time or latitude in such situations.
Individual countries, with specific expertise, will attempt to serve admirably, without a command structure, without a co-ordinating structure and without a mandate that can be monitored and deployed as the needs evolve.
In the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. designated a single person, to take charge of the BP oil deluge, since it was their territory and their disaster. That team accessed experts from many countries, companies and universities around the world. However, advance planning would indicate the need to bring emergency humanitarian forces together from around the world, train them in the various kinds of humanitarian emergencies that develop, fund them, and perhaps keep them on stand-by, as if in a reserve force, for such occasions as these.
This would not eliminate the need for the NGO's, but it would remove the various agendas that attend to the NGO's as their primary motivation and funding base.
And this from the Editorial, New York Times, March 15, 2011
The unfolding Japanese tragedy also should prompt Americans to closely study our own plans for coping with natural disasters and with potential nuclear plant accidents to make sure they are, indeed, strong enough. We’ve already seen how poor defenses left New Orleans vulnerable to Hurricane Katrina and how industrial folly and hubris led to a devastating blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But it is not only the U.S. that needs to re-think both its preparedness and its oversight, it is also the world community that needs to be ready, both to sacrifice a little sovereignty and to engage more fully in prevention monitoring and in disaster management.

Quaddafi sets sights on Benghazi while U.N. talks No-Fly Zone

By Anthony Shadid and Kareem Fahim, New York Times,  March 14, 2011
AJDABIYA, Libya — Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi cranked up military and psychological pressure on the rebels on Monday, offering amnesty to those who surrendered their weapons but bombing a strategic linchpin in the east and invading a rebel-held town in the west.
Government warplanes launched fresh strikes against this anxious town on the doorstep of the opposition capital, Benghazi, and almost abreast of a highway crucial to recapturing the eastern border and encircling the rebels with heavy armor and artillery.
Residents of Zuwarah, an isolated city near the Tunisian border in the west, told Reuters that the pro-Qaddafi forces that surrounded them three days before had taken control. “Zuwarah is in their hands now,” said one resident, Tarek Abdallah. “They control it and there is no sign of the rebels. They are now in the center — the army and the tanks.”
The developments came against a background of quickening diplomatic debate over possible outside help for the Libyan rebels, who have made increasingly anxious pleas for intervention that have, so far, produced none. The United Nations Security Council took up the contentious question of a no-flight zone on Monday, but no decision was reached.
Clearly, the tide is, or perhaps has, turned, in favour of the Libyan dictator, as the rebels fall back in retreat. In parallel actions, the Saudis moved a phalanx of military vehicles into Bahrain to help quell the uprising there, and the leader of Yemen, formerly on the defensive, has moved to offence. The people in Egypt are growing impatient with the interim military government's tardiness in providing necessary reforms.
And what we thought, only a few days ago, was a tilting of the landscape in favour of the uprisings for democratic governments in Tunisia, in Yemen, in Egypt, perhaps even in Jordan and latterly in Libya is now bringing a push-back of resistance from those currently holding power.
With Obama's "Quaddafi must go" declaration already on the table, now the U.S. and the rest of the global community are facing a serious loss of face, should the freezing of his assets, outside Libya, and the sanctions within the country together prove inadequate to bring him down.