MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Andy Johnson, CTVNews.ca – “More than a year after a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a massive nuclear disaster, experts are warning that Japan isn’t out of the woods yet and the worst nuclear storm the world has ever seen could be just one earthquake away from reality.

The troubled Reactor 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is at the centre of this potential catastrophe.

Reactor 4 — and to a lesser extent Reactor 3 — still hold large quantities of cooling waters surrounding spent nuclear fuel, all bound by a fragile concrete pool located 30 metres above the ground, and exposed to the elements.

A magnitude 7 or 7.5 earthquake would likely fracture that pool, and disaster would ensue, says Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with Fairewinds Energy Education who has visited the site.

The 1,535 spent fuel rods would become exposed to the air and would likely catch fire, with the most-recently added fuel rods igniting first.

The incredible heat generated from that blaze, Gundersen said, could then ignite the older fuel in the cooling pool, causing a massive oxygen-eating radiological fire that could not be extinguished with water.

‘So the fear is the newest fuel could begin to burn and then we’d have a conflagration of the whole pool because it would become hotter and hotter. The health consequences of that are beyond where science has ever gone before,’ Gundersen told CTVNews.ca in an interview from his home in Vermont…

Highly radioactive cesium and strontium isotopes would likely go airborne and ‘volatilize’ — turning into a vapour that could move with the wind, potentially travelling thousands of kilometres from the source.

The size of those particles would determine whether they remained in Japan, or made their way to the rest of Asia and other continents.

‘And here’s where there’s no science because no one’s ever dared to attempt the experiment,’ Gundersen said. ‘If it flies far enough it goes around the world, if the particles stay a little bigger, they settle in Japan. Either is awful.'” Read more.

Twin quakes rock Japan near Fukushima – “Japan was hit by two shallow earthquakes in the space of just eight minutes on Sunday, one of them measuring a strong 6.2-magnitude, but there were no reports of damage and no tsunami alert. The 6.2-magnitude quake struck at 4:20pm (0720 GMT) off Japan’s northeast Pacific coast, the national meteorological agency said, followed by a tremor with a reading of 5.7 at 4:28pm. The US Geological Survey estimated the magnitude of the first quake at 6.0. The depth of both quakes was about 10 kilometres, the agency said.” Read more.

“(NaturalNews) Japanese officials are currently engaging in talks with Russian diplomats about where tens of millions of Japanese refugees might relocate in the very-likely event that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility’s Reactor 4 completely collapses. According to a recent report by EUTimes.net, Japanese authorities have indicated that as many as 40 million Japanese people are in ‘extreme danger’ of radiation poisoning, and many eastern cities, including Tokyo, may have to be evacuated in the next few weeks or months to avoid extreme radiation poisoning.

As we continue to report, the situation at Fukushima is dire, to say the least. Reactor 4 is on the verge of complete collapse, which would send radioactive nuclear fuel from thousands of fuel rods directly into the atmosphere. These fuel rods, after all, are already exposed to the open air, but the full release of their fuel would cause not only a regional catastrophe, but also a global nuclear holocaust.

‘A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant’s No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be ‘the weakest link’ in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster,’ reported the Mainichi Daily News recently.

‘The worst-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.'” Read more.

West coast of Japan 10 times more contaminated than mandatory evacuation zone in Belarus – “Following up this article..1.4 μSv/h of alpha ray in Niigata 500,000Bq/kg of cesium was measured on the roof of Yamagata university, announced in Yamagata prefectural disaster committee on 5/30/2011. It was the dust accumulated around the drain on the roof of the university building. Yamagata prefecture is on the west coast of Japan, thought to be relatively less contaminated than east coast.(100km away from Fukushima plants). Though it was measured one year ago, evacuation order has not been given out. As a reference though this is not natural soil, comparing it with the contamination level in Belarus in the same way as this, it’s 10 times higher than the mandatory evacuation limit.” Source – Fukushima Diary.

Japanese MD: Contamination from Fukushima Daiichi now spreading all over world — There may be radiation damage in other countries (Video – Part 1 of 4) – “You might think radiation is a domestic issue, but actually, radiation contamination is now spreading all over the world. There is contamination of the ocean, and also of the atmosphere. This is an issue not only of Japan, but there may be radiation damage in other countries, caused by the Fukushima power plant accident.We should not stay silent to this situation.”

Reuters – “Charles Dallara, who as head of the International Institute of Finance (IIF) spent months in Athens negotiating the largest ever sovereign debt restructuring, also said he had seen evidence that more people were moving their cash out of Greece.

‘There has been a pick up of deposit flight from Greece,’ Mr Dallara told reporters, but added he thought this could be stabilised ‘once you get a new government in place, if that government reaffirms its intention to remain in the euro zone’.

He was speaking on a visit to Ireland, which followed Greece into an international bailout in 2010 but has been far more successful in boosting exports to keep the economy afloat while slashing government spending.

Policymakers have begun to speak openly of the risk that Greece, now in its fifth year of recession, might leave the euro. Mr Dallara said the costs of a Greek exit would be so severe that Europe has to find a palatable way of solving their woes.

‘I think that it (a Greek exit) is possible, but I wouldn’t call it inevitable and I wouldn’t even call it likely because the costs for Greece, for Europe and for the global economy are likely each in their own way to be immense,’ Mr Dallara said in a speech.” Read more.

Euro crisis: Run on nationalised Spanish bank sees customers withdraw €1BILLION… as French government slashes its own pay by 30% – “A €1billion run on a recently nationalised Spanish bank has sparked further fears that the 17-nation eurozone is about to implode. European markets fell as fears of a continent-wide contagion from goverment-less Greece’s economic crisis also spread. Shares in Bankia, Spain’s fourth biggest bank formed in 2010 through a merger of seven struggling regional savings institutions, today plummeted by 27 per cent. The pan-European FTSE 300 index was down 0.9 per cent at 984.22 points by 10.26.am, close to a four-and-a-half-month low of 983.95 points reached yesterday. Spain’s benchmark IBEX index fell nearly 2 per cent to its lowest level since mid-2003. It came following a report in El Mundo newspaper that its customers had withdrawn more than €1billion from their accounts over the past week.” Read more.

European Central Bank halts operations with some Greek banks – “BERLIN/FRANKFURT – The European Central Bank has stopped providing liquidity to some Greek banks as they have not been successfully recapitalised, euro zone central bank sources said on Wednesday. The ECB declined to comment on the news, which sent the euro lower against the dollar. Concern is growing in Greece and among investors that the country may have to leave the euro zone.” Read more.

PRWeb – “Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III (US Army Ret.), President of the Natural Solutions Foundation, an international NGO (non-governmental organization), released a 27 minute public service Estimate of Situation about Fukushima, Japan focusing on the immediate threat to the Northern Hemisphere emanating from the highly radioactive ruins of the 5 Fukushima nuclear reactors. The video is available without charge at http://www.GeneralBert.com.

Gen. Stubblebine’s prognosis is dire: ‘When the highly radioactive Spent Fuel Rods are exposed to air, there will be massive explosions releasing many times the amount or radiation released thus far. Bizarrely, they are stored three stories above ground in open concrete storage pools. Whether through evaporation of the water in the pools, or due to the inevitable further collapse of the structure, there is a severe risk. United States public health authorities agree that tens of thousands of North Americans have already died from the Fukushima calamity. When the final cataclysm occurs, sooner rather than later, the whole Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable.’

General Stubblebine details in his riveting video the amounts of radioactive materials that will be propelled across the Pacific and across the United States if the Fukushima reactor structures (especially Spent Fuel Pool Number 4) collapse. With over 15,000 ‘spent fuel rods’ on the site, the Fukushima reactors have accumulated one of the largest stockpiles of these dangerous, intensely radioactive materials on the planet. No remediation work is being done at the site; there is no official remedial planning or disaster preparation. No private remediation, or public discussion of the need for it, is permitted by the Government of Japan under its new suppression of nuclear discussion laws.

The Natural Solutions Foundation joins seventy Japanese NGOs(1) in calling upon the Secretary General of the United Nations and Prime Minister of Japan last month to coordinate emergency action to shore-up critical structures now at imminent risk of collapse. It has been variously estimated(2), that a relatively mild earthquake (i.e., 5.0 or greater on the Richter Scale) will collapse the previously damaged Spent Fuel Rod holding tank of Unit No. 4, containing 85 times the amount of radioactive Cesium137 contained in Chernobyl’s now-entombed reactor. An estimated 1Million Europeans are believed to have died as a direct result of that radiation emission following the nuclear explosion of Chernobyl.

The US Government’s statistics document an excess death rate of 20,000 US residents, mostly healthy infants, in the first 9 months following the multiple nuclear events at Fukushima.” Read more.

Dr. Michio Kaku, Physicist: Unit 2 completely liquified, 100% liquification of uranium core — “We’ve never seen this before in the history of nuclear power” – “The Fukushima reactor is on a knife’s edge … we could have a disaster much worse, many times worse, than Chernobyl … Unit 2, we now know, completely liquified. We have never seen this before in the history of nuclear power, a 100% liquification of a uranium core… Unit 4, on the other hand, has an even worse problem, and that is it’s a spent fuel pond that is totally uncovered because of a hydrogen gas explosion that took place last year. There are 1,500 rods that could be exposed to the air and then set off another spent fuel pond with 6,000 rods. All together there are 11,000 rods in the Fukushima site that could be tipped over, slight earthquake, slight explosion could set the whole reactor back into motion.” Listen to full radio interview.

“Financial markets are hastily making preparations for a Greek exit from the euro after a day of political and economic turmoil ended with Europe’s policy elite admitting for the first time that it may prove impossible to keep the single currency intact.

With attempts in Athens to form a government after last week’s election looking increasingly doomed, European leaders abandoned their taboo on talking about the possibility that Greece might have to leave the euro.

Shares, oil, and the euro were all sold heavily on Monday in anticipation that anti-austerity parties would garner support in a second Greek election likely to be held next month, bringing the row between Greece and its European creditors to a climax.

Critical talks are scheduled to continue in Athens between all party leaders, although President Karolos Papoulias’s decision to prolong the negotiations came despite widespread signs the talks were heading towards collapse. He has until Thursday, when the Greek parliament reconvenes, to broker a deal.

The British chancellor, George Osborne warned that the prospect of Greece crashing out of the euro was damaging economies across Europe.

Uncertainty over the future of struggling eurozone nations was having a ‘real impact’ on growth, he said…

Markets are braced for figures due out on Tuesday to show that the eurozone is officially in a double dip recession, and fear that the events of the past few days will intensify the slump.” Read more.

Greece Faces Big Debt Payment Tuesday: Now What? – “As if the Greek situation wasn’t messy enough, a missing paragraph from a key legal document is throwing a wrench into a debt deadline. Greece has a 436 million euro principal repayment due Tuesday. So far, the country has not decided what to do. Under normal Greek-debt contracts, if Greece doesn’t pay, it would have only a seven-day grace period. But experts who have pored over all of this have found that one of the key paragraphs from the normally boiler-point language is missing. As a result, Greece will have a 30-day grace period, leading to the possibility of an extended, ‘Will they?’ or ‘won’t they?’ drama.” Read more.

The Market Oracle – “… All of the weak euro-zone countries are waking up to the fact that they have been in a state of denial because they are NOT Germany they cannot compete against Germany and therefore are only delaying the inevitable by remaining in a currency union with Germany that ensures their economies are also in a state of slow motion death spiral of economic collapse. In which respect they are in fact making the economic pain of their populations far worse as a consequence of dragging out economic collapse over many years rather than months as would have been the case had they had their own currencies and money printing presses such as that deployed by the UK that has successfully used smoke and mirrors inflation to mask the truth that Britain is in a far worse state in terms if indebtedness than most of the euro-zone countries.

Greece exiting the Euro-zone would crash the banking system as banks across the euro-zone start to fail domino style as a consequence of their direct exposure to 400 billion of Greek debt and counterparty risks which will put immediate pressure on all of the other weak Euro-zone members, with Spain and Portugal the next targets for exit as a consequence of these countries being on the same unserviceable debt fuelled economic collapse trajectories as Greece. In my opinion Spain and Portugal will both exit the Euro-zone within 6 months of Greece leaving so depending on the timing of Greece’s exit Spain and Portugal could also both leave the the eurozone this year…

The wild card is Germany for as I originally speculated over 2 years ago (May 2010). Germany may decide to alleviate pressure on the rest Eurozone by planning its own exit. However all this would amount to a desperate belated attempt to buy more time to slow down the rate of collapse of the Euro-zone so as to allow the financial system to better survive a breakup of the whole eurozone.” Read more.

Here’s How The Whole Eurozone Could Unravel In Just A Matter Of Months – “Paul Krugman has a gloomy post this evening explaining how quickly the whole Euro could unravel. It basically goes like this: Greece leaves the euro ‘very possibly next month.’ That would lead to a massive run on Italian and Spanish banks. There would be massive borrowing from the ECB to prevent a banking collapse. At which point Germany has to decide: Shoulder a major burden for the debts of Spain/Italy, etc., or let it all go. He concludes: ‘And we’re talking about months, not years, for this to play out.’ –  Read more.

Footage of the NYC Press Conference May 4th 2012 – “Dr. Junro FUSE, Internist and head of Kosugi Medical Clinic near Tokyo, Japan (in Japanese with English interpretation) ‘According to the numbers released by [Japan Gov’t] the amounts in a town called Nihonmatsu… are 300,000 becquerels per square meter. Never the less this has not designated as evacuation site. The current measurements of the soil there are showing 12 mega [million] becquerels per square meter. But what’s happening is the people are just carrying out their lives as normal. This is one piece of evidence showing how the government is under-measuring the radiation. This fact has not been reported by the Japanese mass media.” Read more.

Head of Medical Clinic: Radiation already causing health problems around Tokyo — Highly contaminated areas have led to physiological damage – “Dr. Junro FUSE, Internist and head of Kosugi Medical Clinic near Tokyo, Japan (in Japanese with English interpretation) ‘… There are hot spots even within the Tokyo Metropolitan Area that have actually already led to physiological problems/damage… We do have hotspots in Tokyo Metropolitan Area that have led to these physiological disorders — some of the disorders that have been observed are as shown here. Things like diarrhea, nasal bleeding, headache, eczema and so forth. We are expecting thyroid disorders in children, but also cancers (bladder, leukemia, lung), diabetes….” Read more.

By Dr. Mark Sircus – “I wish everything I am reporting on were not true, or at least were less true than it appears. It does seem that Japan is in the process of contaminating the entire Pacific Ocean via continued uncontrolled releases of radioactivity at Fukushima.

After low-balling initial estimates of radiation releases, the Japanese authorities now acknowledge that substantial amounts of radioactive material leaked from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors.[1]

The nuclear disaster in Japan has released radioactive isotopes that have poisoned the country’s soil, food, and water.

The fallout is being rapidly taken up by living things and passed up the food chain with airborne radioactive isotopes reaching around the world but especially in the northern hemisphere where most of the radioactive particles will settle.

Most Americans have no idea what is happening. But within days of the accident at Fukushima radioactive contaminants were detected at monitoring stations in the Pacific Coast states.

Nearly 1% of the ‘hot’ sulfur released from the plant is estimated to have traversed the Pacific to reach southern California beaches.[2]…

It is extremely difficult and painful to entertain the thought that the future of the northern hemisphere—and perhaps even the habitability of the entire planet—is being brought into question. I am not a lone wolf saying this anymore for the story has touched the edge of the mainstream.

The story of the nuclear waste pools was just published in the Huffington Post. I imagine many do read that publication and what they read there should shake people up pretty good.” Read more.

Tested: 119 of 132 people test positive from sampling survey of radioactive substances in urine in Iwate – “Iwate prefecture conducted sampling survey of radioactive substances in urine in Ichinoseki city and Oshu city. The result published on 3/2/2012 shows cesium was measured from 119 of 132 people (90.1%). The highest reading was 6 Bq/L.” Read more.

Tested: Fukushima Gov’t: Over 35% of young people tested have thyroid cysts or nodules – “Peace Philosophy Centre posted the results and Fukushima Diary has the summary translation: ‘In March, Fukushima government conducted thyroid test for under 18 in 13 cities and towns such as Minamisoma city, Namiemachi, Iidatemura, Tomiokamachi etc.. The result shows thyroid nodules ( 5.0mm) or cyst (20.0mm) were seen in 13,460 from 38,114 people (35.3%). Compared to their pre-test result of January, it increased from 29.7% to 35.3%. (↑ 5.6%)” Read more.

By Elliott Freeman – “A nuclear watchdog official told RT News that the ongoing crisis at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan could become a ‘global catastrophe’, echoing warnings from other experts.

Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste watchdog with Beyond Nuclear, described the potential nightmare to ‘The Big Picture’ host Thom Hartmann, stating that if the pools of nuclear fuel at the plant caught on fire, the area would become so radioactive that the entire containment operation would have to be permanently abandoned.

Mitsuhei Murata, the former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland, also expressed grave concerns about what would happen if the damaged building that houses Reactor 4 collapsed. According to the Huffington Post, he explained to the Swiss House of Councilors last month that should such an event occur, it would adversely affect the thousands of spent nuclear fuel rods nearby, which are dangerously exposed to air.” Read more.

Flashback: Expert on Asahi TV: If Unit 4 pool gets a crack from quake and leaks, it would be the end for Tokyo – “Most discussion of the No. 4 spent fuel pool has focused on an earthquake causing the pool to collapse. This video [you may need to enable subtitles] is different because it reveals: 1. A crack, rather than the collapse of the pool itself, can be the end of Tokyo, 2. The quake that could put a crack in the pool and be the end of Tokyo does not have to be a large one, 3. The sense of shock when people in Japan are made aware of this information for the first time” Read more.