Japan Radiation Leaks Feared as Nuclear Experts Point to Possible Coverup

 Nuclear experts have thrown doubt on the accuracy of official information issued about the Fukushima nuclear accident, saying that it followed a pattern of secrecy and cover-ups employed in other nuclear accidents. "It's impossible to get any radiation readings," said John Large, an independent nuclear engineer who has worked for the UK government and been commissioned to report on the accident for Greenpeace International.

"The actions of the Japanese government are completely contrary to their words. They have evacuated 180,000 people but say there is no radiation. They are certain to have readings but we are being told nothing." He said a radiation release was suspected "but at the moment it is impossible to know. It was the same at Chernobyl, where they said there was a bit of a problem and only later did the full extent emerge."

According to some reports, 17 helicopter crewmen helping in rescue efforts were contaminated with low-level radiation, but Japanese officials declined to comment.

The country's government has previously been accused of covering up nuclear accidents and hampering the development of alternative energy.

In a newly released diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks, politician Taro Kono, a high-profile member of Japan's lower house, tells U.S. diplomats that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry – the Japanese government department responsible for nuclear energy – has been "covering up nuclear accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry."

In 2008, Kono told them: "The ministries were trapped in their policies, as officials inherited policies from people more senior to them, which they could then not challenge." 

He mentioned the dangers of natural disasters in the context of nuclear waste disposal, citing Japan's "extensive seismic activity, and abundant groundwater, and [he] questioned if there really was a safe place to store nuclear waste in the 'land of volcanoes.'"

"What we are seeing follows a clear pattern of secrecy and denial," said Paul Dorfman, co-secretary to the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters, a UK government advisory committee disbanded in 2004.

"The Japanese government has always tended to underplay accidents. At the moment the Japanese claims of safety are not to be believed by anyone. The health effects of what has happened so far are imponderable. The reality is we just do not know. There is profound uncertainty about the impact of the accident."

The Japanese authorities and nuclear companies have been implicated in a series of coverups. In 1995, reports of a sodium leak and fire at Japan's Monju fast breeder reactor were suppressed and employees were gagged. In 2002, the chairman and four executives of Tepco, the company that owns the stricken Fukushima plant, resigned after reports that safety records were falsified.

Can U.S. Nuclear Plants Handle a Major Natural Disaster?

by John Sullivan, Special to ProPublica

As engineers in Japan struggle to bring quake-damaged reactors under control, attention is turning to U.S. nuclear plants and their ability to withstand natural disasters.

 

As seen here, Hurricane Gustave damaged the River Bend Nuclear Generation Station in St. Francisville, La. (NRC photo provided by Union of Concerned Scientists) Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has spent years pushing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission toward stricter enforcement of its safety rules, has called for a reassessment. Several U.S. reactors lie on or near fault lines, and Markey wants to beef up standards for new and existing plants.
"This disaster serves to highlight both the fragility of nuclear power plants and the potential consequences associated with a radiological release caused by earthquake related damage," Markey wrote NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko in a March 11 letter.

Specifically, Markey raised questions about a reactor design the NRC is reviewing for new plants that has been criticized for seismic vulnerability. The NRC has yet to make a call on the AP1000 reactor, which is manufactured by Westinghouse. But according to Markey, a senior NRC engineer has said the reactor’s concrete shield building could shatter "like a glass cup" under heavy stress.
The New York Times reported last week that the NRC has reviewed the concerns raised by the engineer, John Ma, and concluded that the design is sufficient without the upgrades Ma recommended. Westinghouse maintains that the reactor is safe.
Boiling water reactors, like the ones hit by the Japanese earthquake, are built like nested matroyshka dolls.
The inner doll, which looks like a gigantic cocktail shaker and holds the radioactive uranium, is the heavy steel reactor vessel. It sits inside a concrete and steel dome called the containment. The reactor vessel is the primary defense against disaster -- as long as the radiation stays inside everything is fine.
The worry is that a disaster could either damage the vessel itself or, more likely, damage equipment that used to control the uranium. If operators cannot circulate water through the vessel to cool the uranium it could overheat and burn into radioactive slag -- a meltdown.
Reports say a partial meltdown is suspected in two of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, which was hit by the 8.9 magnitude quake and ensuing tsunami.
Reactors have multiple layers of equipment to make sure this never happens. But last year, Markey asked Congress's investigative agency, the Government Accountability Office, to look into a long list of nuclear safety issues, including earthquake and flood protection.
Markey cited the 2007 Chuetsu earthquake (6.6 magnitude) that hit the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. The quake started a fire, spilled some low-level radioactive waste and damaged equipment that was not critical to the reactor. It led Japanese regulators to reassess earthquake danger near the plant, and Markey wanted GAO to see whether NRC had been on top of earthquake risk in the U.S.
He also listed a few cases in which other natural disasters had damaged nuclear plants, like a 1998 tornado that knocked out power to the Davis-Besse plant outside Toledo, Ohio, or Hurricane Andrew, which knocked out power to the Turkey Point plant south of Miami site for five days in 1992. In 2008, Hurricane Gustav damaged the River Bend Nuclear Generation Station in St. Francisville, La. 
At both Davis-Besse and Turkey Point, the plants' emergency diesel generators kept the equipment running until crews fixed the power lines.
News reports have said the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station went to backup diesel power after the quake but lost it, along with the ability to keep cooling water flowing.
Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Reuters that U.S. reactors don't have adequate backup power. "We do not believe the safety standards for U.S. nuclear reactors are enough to protect the public today," he told the news agency.
NRC spokesman David McIntyre said the agency was not granting interviews about the Japan quake. He pointed to the agency's website, which does have a lot of information on the seismic issues.
For instance, NRC regulations require that every plant is built to survive an earthquake larger than the strongest ever recorded in the area. The agency says it periodically updates earthquake estimations as more detailed information becomes available.
Most recently, the NRC spent five years reassessing earthquake risk for nuclear plants in the Midwest and eastern United States. The results of the study, which were released last September, confirmed that the plants were built to withstand the heaviest quake likely for their area.
However, the NRC found that the risk of earthquake was greater than expected in some areas, so the agency plans further research.
In an NRC meeting on earthquake safety last September, Torrey Yee, an engineer for the San Onofre nuclear plant near San Diego, said designers evaluate two levels of earthquakes: the maximum possible quake for a site; and an "operating basis" quake, usually about half of the maximum strength.
The critical structures and equipment at the plant are built to withstand the maximum quake, and the plant has to shut down for inspection if it sustains a quake higher than the operating basis.
The 104 commercial reactors in the United States produce 20 percent of the nation's power.

Bank Of America Anonymous Leak Alleges 'Corruption And Fraud'

A group called Anonymous has released material relating to mortgages issued by a major US bank.

by Ryan McCarthy

The WikiLeaks-allied hacker group Anonymous has posted a series of emails purported to be from a former Bank of America employee, which the organization says prove "corruption and fraud" at the nation's largest bank.
 
 
In a release announced with the Twitter hashtag #BlackMonday, Anoymous posted the emails on the site BankofAmericasuck.com, where an emailer who identifies himself as an ex-Bank Of America employee airs a number of grievances against his former employer. The website's availability was up and down early Monday morning, potentially due to high traffic. The e-mails could not be independently verified.
In a statement to Reuters on Sunday, a Bank of America spokesman said the emails are simply clerical and administrative errors. ""We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue," the spokesman told Reuters.
Bank of America did not immediately return multiple calls on Monday.
The claims of the person purporting to be a former employee appear to begin with so-called "forced-place insurance," in which a mortgage borrower who doesn't maintain an insurance policy on their home has a policy "placed" for them by their insurer.


The problem with forced-place insurance, as Felix Salmon noted in November, comes when a mortgage servicer owns an insurer. This can allow for highly inflated premiums and inadequate policies forced upon borrowers without their knowledge.
The emailer's accusations involve Balboa Insurance, a company that Bank of America acquired in its purchase of Countrywide Financial in 2008 and recently sold to the QBE Group, an Australian insurer. Balboa is a market leader in forced-place insurance.
The following section appears to be the main thrust of the emails:

"My name is (Anonymous). For the last 7 years, I worked in the Insurance/Mortgage industry for a company called Balboa Insurance. Many of you do not know who Balboa Insurance Group (soon to be rebranded as QBE First by Australian Reinsurance Company QBE according to internal communication sent to all Balboa associates) is, but if you’ve ever had a loan for an automobile, farm equipment, mobile home, or residential or commercial property, we knew you. In fact, we probably charged you money…a lot of money…for insurance you didn’t even need. Balboa Insurance Group, and it’s largest competitor, the market leader Assurant, is in the business of insurance tracking and Force Placed Insurance (aka Lender Placed Insurance, FOH, LPI, etc). What this means is that when you sign your name on the dotted line for your loan, the lienholder has certain insurance requirements that must be met for the life of the lien. Your lender (including, amongst others, GMAC, Aurora Loan Services [a subsidiary of Lehman Bros Holdings], IndyMac Federal Bank [a subsidiary of OneWest Bank], Saxon, HSBC, PennyMac [a collection agency started by former Countrywide Home Loans executive Stan Kurland after CHL and Balboa were sold to BAC], Downey Savings and Loans, Financial Freedom, Select Portfolio Services, Wells Fargo/Wachovia, and the now former owners of Balboa Insurance themselves…Bank of America) then outsources the tracking of your loan with them to a company like Balboa Insurance.
Balboa makes some money by charging these companies to track your insurance (the payment of which is factored into your loan). If you do not meet the minimum insurance requirements set by your lienholder, Balboa Insurance places a force placed insurance policy on your loan. You are sent a letter telling you that you do not have insurance, and your escrow account is then adjusted for the inflated premium of a full coverage policy placed by Balboa’s insurance tracking group, run by Steven Ramsthel, Sr Vice President of Loan Tracking Operations & Customer Care at Balboa Insurance Group, as seen on his LinkedIn profile below..
How is Balboa able to charge such inflated premiums and get away with it?
It’s all very simple.
First, when you call in to customer service, for say, GMAC, you’re not actually speaking to a GMAC employee. You’re actually speaking to a Bank of America associate working for Balboa Insurance who is required by their business to business contract with GMAC to state that they are, in fact, an employee of GMAC. The reasoning is that if you do not realize you’re speaking to a Bank of America/Balboa Insurance employee, you have no reason to question the validity of the information you are receiving from them. If you call your insurance agent and ask them for the lienholder information for your GMAC/Wells Fargo/etc lien (home or auto) you will be provided with their name, but the mailing address will be a PO Box at one of Balboa’s 3 main tracking locations (Moon Township/Coreaopolis, PA, Dallas/Ft Worth, TX, or Phoenix/Chandler, AZ)

The scope of these emails, according to their author, reaches far beyond poor customer service. In the email below, the author claims the bank's actions go much further, extending to what would seem to be extreme disorganization, or an allegedly willful intent to obscure Balboa's management of customer insurance policies.

The post includes what appear to be internal Balboa emails containing communications about mismatched -- and possibly deleted -- loan file numbers in Balboa's system.
In one email, a Balboa employee wonders about creating "huge red flags" for auditors over a change in record keeping, adding that it "just doesn't seem right to me."
When asked by Anonymous about his motivation for revealing this information, the author writes: "The only reason I'm doing this is because they already took everything from me…these people are still employees and have bills to pay and think it's illegal to expose fraud at this bank… Nobody wants to end up like me hiding out in my house having to talk to police officers and lawyers. Nobody will stand up until they see me in the traditional news. That's my short term goals right now."