Cigarette butts found in radioactive areas of power plant
The Tokyo Electric Power Co said Wednesday that cigarette butts were found in areas where radiation should be strictly controlled at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture on 18 occasions in fiscal 2006 and in nine cases in fiscal 2007. The nuclear plant suffered a fire and radioactive leakage following the magnitude-6.8 earthquake on July 16, stirring public concerns over its safety.

Picture above is from Andy’s blog. Please check out his blog. It is not an actual sign from the nuclear plant or from Japan. However, I think they need to post a sign like this inside the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant.

Chris Salzberg has an excellent entry at Global Voices regarding the recent problems at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant:

Japan: Ground Zero at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa

Of particular note in this entry are comments by Diet Member Kondo Masamichi of the Social Democratic Party that Chris has translated from Japanese to English.

Kondo Masamichi actual site is here. If you check out his site you can see many photos of damaged caused by the earthquake. Of particular interest is his photos at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, a couple of which were used for previous entries at this blog.

In my first entry reviewing the news about the Kashiwazaiki-Kariwa Nuclear Plant, I discussed the issue as to whether or not the plant had been designed to meet a quake of the severity that hit on July 16. It is clear the plant was not.

Now, let’s deal with a another issue. Was the plant ready to deal with any fires that might break out as a result of an earthquake?

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Let’s review the recent news about the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant.

This will take more than one entry, so in this entry let’s focus on one issue. Was the plant prepared for an earthquake on the scale of the one that hit it on July 16?

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Update: This entry was first posted on June 26. In early June about 10,000 police files were leaked onto the Internet. This included many violations of individual privacy, for example the names of rape victims and so on. According to the Yomiuri, the officer who leaked the files has been fired:

Cop who leaked data via Winny dismissed
The Metropolitan Police Department dismissed a 26-year-old senior policeman at Kitazawa Police Station on Friday for leaking MPD investigative data on about 10,000 cases to the Internet via Winny file-sharing software on his private computer.The MPD also reprimanded a 33-year-old police sergeant who supervised the fired officer with a 10 percent pay-cut for one month for letting him copy the data …      

While I am glad to see strong actions taken in this area, I want to point out that so long as actions like this are ad hoc and arbitrary, they will not solve the problem. There needs to be a system set up of random audits to check individual computers along and with pre-determined punishments for those who don’t respect the relevant privacy rules.
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Recently a very popular story in Japan was that of cardboard secretly mixed in with minced meat and then put into dumplings. The story involved a pretty tiny outfit probably only catering to local people. Not only this, but this happened in China not Japan.

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Here is a good piece from the Japan Times about the current problems with the pension fund.

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Comment:

In this week’s computer leakage news, an unusual double strike — 14,598 students and files from Self-Defense Force’s Gifu Air Base in Kakamigahara get leaked simultaneously from the same computer. What will they do for an encore?

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Fresh Opinion:

2007/06/22 — Reading the news this morning the biggest question is if any one violated the law. I’m guessing that in an obvious sense, no one did. There’s probably no law that was specifically broken. Analysts are saying that spa safety measures are a weak spot in government regulation. So there probably was no specific criminal negligence. To build a case I think the police would have to show there were clear industry safety standards that weren’t being followed, but that might not even be the case. Now, as long as the company was following the law, do they bear some kind of responsibility for what happened? Should the government bear responsibility for not having had safety laws in place? I’m guessing that safety laws encourage unscrupulous businesses owners to only follow the letter of the law, while self-regulation actually encourages real compliance to promote safety. Let’s see what happens …

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