Nuclear, Japan Nuclear Crisis | featured news

Parents in Tokyo have been told that the city's tap water is not safe for babies to drink after radiation from Japan's earthquake-hit nuclear plant affected the capital's water supply.

In the wake of Japan's nuclear disaster, all milk, milk products, fresh vegetables and fruit from one of four prefectures closest to the quake-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will be prevented from entering the United States, a spokesperson for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.

A top Japanese official acknowledged Friday that the government was overwhelmed by the scale of last week's twin disasters, slowing its response ...

Gregory Jaczko, head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says the crisis is worse than Japanese officials appear to be letting on. 'This is a situation where people may be called in to sacrifice their lives,' he says of the crew working there.

It seems too impossible to believe, but according to reports from CNN, Reuters and the AP tonight, the last workers at the Fukashima-Daiichi reactors have been withdrawn from the scene, halting efforts to continue cooling partially melted fuel rods with ocean water. Just a day earlier 750 more workers had been removed. Exhaustion, radiation exposure, hopelessness–we don’t yet know the reason for this latest move. Earlier in the day new fires, explosions and clouds of smoke or steam were spotted. Maybe the evacuation means that the worst of the danger is over (how else could they leave?) — but that doesn’t seem likely.

What a bone-headed move. There’s nothing wrong with the 7 nuclear plants that German Chancellor Angela Merkel decreed would be shut down. Just last fall Germany decided to extend the lives of these plants, which provide roughly 10% of Germany’s electricity. With solar and wind entirely unscalable, how’s Germany going to make up the electric deficit? Either by ramping up the use of fossil-fuel burning plants (and importing more natural gas from Russia) or importing power from its neighbors–like nuke-friendly France.

The last thing Japan needed was more bad news on its threatened nuclear reactors. But Monday and early today, that's just what this nation got.