White Ships from Valinor, by Ted Nasmith

In an edition of Planet Waves two weeks ago, I mentioned a piece of writing called Akallabeth by J.R.R. Tolkien. Well by dumb luck we found a lovely audio presentation read by the British actor Martin Shaw. Here it is — Akallabeth: The Downfall of Numenor, in an audio presentation lasting 70 minutes. This is Tolkien’s version of the story of Atlantis. Please bookmark this!

Japan says no plan to expand nuclear evacuation zone

Tokyo – The Japanese government said Thursday that it had no immediate plans to expand a 20-kilometre evacuation zone around a damaged nuclear power station that is leaking radiation despite a recommendation to do so by the global nuclear watchdog.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Tokyo would instead reinforce radiation monitoring of soil.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suggested overnight that the country consider evacuating Iitate village, about 40 kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, after the agency found amounts of radioactive iodine in the soil there that exceeded its health limits.

The village is not only outside the evacuation zone around the plant, which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but it is also beyond the 30-kilometre zone in which people have been advised to stay indoors.

In the soil contamination in Iitate, IAEA experts found radioactivity from iodine-131 at 25 megabecquerel per square metre of soil, more than double the agency’s evacuation threshold of 10 megabecquerel, an unnamed IAEA source said.

‘The first assessment indicates that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded,’ senior IAEA official Denis Flory told reporters.

It was the highest level measured among nine communities located 25 to 60 kilometres away from the reactors, which are located 250 kilometres north-east of Tokyo.

‘They should really think about evacuating,’ the source said of the village of 7,000 people.

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Even before Three Mile Island, a group of nuclear engineers had proposed that filtered vents be attached to buildings around reactors, which are intended to contain the gases released from overheated fuel. If the pressure inside these containment buildings increased dangerously — as has happened repeatedly at Fukushima — the vents would release these gases after the filters greatly reduced their radioactivity.

France and Germany installed such filters in their plants, but the [United States] Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined to require them. Given the influence of America’s example, had the commission demanded the addition of filtered vents, they would likely have been required worldwide, including in Japan.

More recently, independent analysts have argued, based on risk analyses done for the commission, it is dangerous for the United States to pack five times more spent fuel into reactor cooling pools than they were designed to hold, and that 80 percent of that spent fuel is cool enough to be stored safely elsewhere. It would also be more expensive, however, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission followed the nuclear utilities’ lead and rejected the proposal.The commission has even fought relentlessly for decades against proposals — and more recently a Congressional requirement — to distribute potassium iodide pills beyond the 10-mile emergency zones around American reactors, arguing that the probability of a large release of radioactivity was too low to justify the expense. And yet the American Embassy in Tokyo is handing out potassium iodide pills to Americans 140 miles from the Fukushima plant.

–Nuclear physicist Frank von Hippel. He is a Princeton professor and co-chairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. From 1993 to 1994 he was responsible for national security issues in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Whenever you advise a ruler in the way of Tao, counsel him not to use force to conquer. For this would only cause resistance”
-Lao Tzu

If there is anything to astrology, the big picture will endow our time with the opportunity to end conflict and unify humanity, one person at a time, one day at a time. The coming days will bring this lesson home from several points in history, courtesy of Mars, Neptune and the New Moon, which is the unifying locus of the astrology.

Mars will enter the sign it traditionally rules a day before Sunday’s New Moon, also in Aries. For Neptune into Pisces, it’s the day after. Both events are a big deal, and both are part of something bigger: A confluence of events surrounding the time and location where one lunation cycle ends and the next begins. The theme is moving from opposition into unity.

It’s been a long time since Mars has been in Aries, since the last day of May 2009. It’s been nearly a century and a half since Neptune was last in Pisces; Abraham Lincoln’s 53rd birthday in 1862, to be exact. Over the course of the next several days they both come home to the signs they are most closely identified with.

The conjunction of the Sun and Moon this coming Sunday is not only closure on their most recent opposition. It is the other side of the space-time coin. The ‘super’ Full Moon was about geometric orientation in space. Earth was the focal point of a grand mutable cross. One axis connected the nearest and furthest points of the lunar orbit (perigee and apogee) which were, respectively, conjunct with the Moon and Sun at the time. The other axis of the cross was the line of opposition between the lunar nodes. Because of the players and their orientations, it was an arrangement that had some of the spatial qualities of an eclipse.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Taurus weekly of March 19, 2004

You need to get through an emotional bog and you’ll be fine. This one comes stamped with the “what am I doing with my life” DNA marker. This may in fact be a crisis of rather large proportions right now; I would not be surprised if you were dealing with a sense of failure and sacrifice that you suddenly realise is rather old. For many reasons, you are getting the point this time around. But you must squarely address the question of sacrifice. Why is it such an important concept? Whose idea is it? I assure you — it’s nothing original. But to get beyond it, you need to be vigilant about what you believe.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Today, tens of thousands of tons of irradiated fuel sits in spent fuel pools across America. At many sites, there is nearly ten times as much irradiated fuel in the spent fuel pools as in the reactor cores. The spent fuel pools are not cooled by an array of highly reliable emergency cooling systems capable of being powered from the grid, diesel generators, or batteries. Instead, the pools are cooled by one regular system sometimes backed up by an alternate makeup system.

The spent fuel pools are not housed within robust concrete containment structures designed to protect the public from the radioactivity released from damaged irradiated fuel. Instead, the pools are often housed in buildings with sheet metal siding like that in a Sears storage shed. I have nothing against the quality or utility of Sears’ storage sheds, but they are not suitable for nuclear waste storage.

The irrefutable bottom line is that we have utterly failed to properly manage the risk from irradiated fuel stored at our nation’s nuclear power plants. We can and must do better.

– David Louchbaum (testifying this week before the U.S. Senate)
Union of Concerned Scientists

From The Guardian

The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site.

The warning follows an analysis by a leading US expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it.

Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have “lost the race” to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.

Workers have been pumping water into three reactors at the stricken plant in a desperate bid to keep the fuel rods from melting down, but the fuel is at least partially exposed in all the reactors.

At least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel “lower head” of the pressure vessel around reactor two, Lahey said.

Here’s a little debate from earlier today on Democracy Now! titled, “‘Prescription for Survival’: A Debate on the Future of Nuclear Energy.” In one corner: George Monbiot, British journalist and author. He is a columnist with the The Guardian (U.K.) and most recently wrote the article “Why Fukushima Made Me Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power.” I had posted the link to this article a week or two ago and Eric referred to it in last week’s podcast. In the other corner: Helen Caldicott, world-renowned anti-nuclear advocate, author and pediatrician. She has spent decades warning of the medical hazards posed by nuclear technologies. She is the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

I’m glad Monbiot is anti-coal, but how is that suddenly the only alternative to nuclear energy in the 21st century? By the way, you can make the video full-screen by clicking in the lower-right corner. – amanda

Earnie Saker of Saker Guitars, under the Pike Plan in Kingston, NY, plays a G & L 1500-USA bass. G & L was the third company founded by Leo Fender -- a small company with a loyal following. Photo by Eric.

Link to Saker Guitar Works