Japanese Government Officials Feast on Whale Meat to Protest World Court Ruling

In a show of defiance against a recent court ruling by the UN’s International Court of Justice, hundreds of Japanese government officials, lawmakers, and pro-whaling lobbyists attended a feast that consisted almost entirely of various whale meat delicacies. At the event, which was held on Tuesday near Japan’s parliament, the attendees all vowed to continue whale hunts despite the ruling. There was even a toast which involved everyone at the event cheering in unison, ”Whale!”

Even though Japan has already said it will cancel next season’s Antarctic expedition in light of the ruling, there are still two other expeditions, one along the country’s northern coast, and another in the northern Pacific, that could both continue as planned within the next few weeks. The average kill count for those programs is often around 300 minke whales each year.

Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told the meeting that hunting whales is a part of Japanese culture, and that it “has a policy of harvesting and sustainably using the protein source from the ocean, and that is unshakable.” While coastal whaling has been around since the 12th century, it’s fairly obvious that the Antarctic expeditions, which only started in the 1930s and often pull in more than 1,000 whales each year, are anything but sustainable.

The most likely scenario is that Japan will go ahead with its two other whaling programs, and although it could also try and redesign its scientific whaling program in the Antarctic, the chances of it being approved as legitimate are virtually zero. Should the other expeditions head out to sea, they are bound to meet a great deal of resistance, which would hopefully put an end to their renewed killing spree before it even begins.

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Osaka Tests Tokyo Dominance With Japan’s Tallest Skyscraper

Japan’s tallest building opened this week. Asia’s third-biggest metropolitan economy aims to lure tourists and stem businesses from moving to Tokyo.

Kintetsu Corp. (9041), one of the main rail operators in western Japan, spent 130 billion yen ($1.3 billion) and four years constructing the 300-meter (984-foot) Abeno Harukas skyscraper, according to the Osaka-based company. It will surpass the 296-meter Landmark Tower in Yokohama, about 20 miles south of central Tokyo.

The new 60-floor complex, which includes a Marriott International Inc. (MAR)hotel, and a separate proposal for a 500 billion-yen casino resort are the latest attempts to bolster the city’s economy. Rather than tall towers, the metro area of 11 million people may need business zones with fewer regulations, according to Rakuten Securities Economic Research Institute.

“The building will be a success, but total demand won’t improve,” said Masayuki Kubota, chief strategist at the institute. “Osaka should try special economic zones and create new businesses from those zones.”

Japan wants to spur growth by easing restrictions in test zones under economic reforms pushed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The government is considering measures from cutting corporate taxes to loosening building restrictions in the zones.

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Gadget Made up of Sophisticated Sensors & Camera to get a Sharks-Eye-View of the Ocean

Tagging sharks to monitor their movements is nothing new, in fact, through organizations like OCEARCH, it has helped us learn a lot more about the threatened species and their behavior. Now scientists have taken tagging a bit further by using a gadget made up of sophisticated sensors and a video camera to get a sharks-eye-view of the ocean.

Researchers at University of Hawaii and University of Tokyo created the rig to see where sharks are going, how they are getting there, and what they are doing once they reach their destinations.

“What we are doing is really trying to fill out the detail of what their role is in the ocean,” said Carl Meyer, an assistant researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. “It is all about getting a much deeper understanding of sharks’ ecological role in the ocean, which is important to the health of the ocean and, by extension, to our own well-being.”

The gadget has already disproved some misconceptions about the way sharks travel, for instance, they found that sharks used powered swimming more often than a gliding motion, which is contrary to what scientists previously thought. They also found that deep-sea sharks swim in slow motion compared to shallow water sharks.

“These instrument packages are like flight data recorders for sharks,” Meyer said. “They allow us to quantify a variety of different things that we haven’t been able to quantify before.”

“It has really drawn back the veil on what these animals do and answered some longstanding questions,” he added.

Next up for the research team is creating an ingestible device that would help them to understand the sharks’ diets and feeding patterns. The instruments track ingestion and digestion of prey and can help researchers understand where, when, what and how much sharks are eating.

Check out the video below to get a glimpse of that shark’s eye view:

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Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Leaks 100 Tons of Radioactive Water

Two and a half years after a near meltdown, the Fukushima nuclear power plant is still in trouble. The Nuclear Regulation Authority issued a new warning Wednesday, raising the severity level of the continuing leak from one to three on an international eight-point scale.

Ever since the devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake shook the area, the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has been subject to numerous leaks and controversies.

The alert comes as TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co) found at least 300 metric tons of radioactive water to have leaked from the site, with ‘hotspots’ found nearby. Workers are now scrambling to check an additional 300 tanks that currently contain contaminated water at the stricken nuclear power plant.

Each point on the International Atomic Energy Agencies eight-point scale of the scale represents a ten-fold increase in radiation, so a jump of two points is highly significant. The latest confirmed leak, from a tank which can hold up to 1,000 tonnes of water, hasn’t been stopped yet and TEPCO acknowledges that they have yet to identify the cause of the leak.

TEPCO has stated that there is no evidence that the contaminated water from these leaks has reached the ocean, but there is significant contamination to the soil in the area, which will need to be addressed. The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, has expressed a loss of confidence in Tepco’s ability to deal with the situation, and has stated that the government will be stepping in to take additional measures to address this continuing disaster.

Tepco has also been criticized for delaying the release of strontium-90 levels in local groundwater despite demands from regulators.

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Fukushima Wash-Up Rises Fear in the U.S. – Radiation Risks

Seaborne radiation from Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant will wash up on the West Coast of the U.S. this year.

That’s raising concerns among some Americans including the residents of the San Francisco Bay Area city of Fairfax, which passed a resolution on Dec. 6 calling for more testing of coastal seafood.

At the same time, oceanographers and radio-logical scientists say such concerns are unwarranted given existing levels of radiation in the ocean.

The runoff from the Japanese plant will mingle with radiation released by other atomic stations, such as Diablo Canyon in California. Under normal operations, Diablo Canyon discharges more radiation into the sea, albeit of a less dangerous isotope, than the Fukushima station, which suffered the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

“There’s a point to be made that we live in a radioactive world and the ocean just has radioactive isotopes in it,” said Ken Buesseler, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution inMassachusetts, who forecasts the Fukushima plume will arrive in the U.S. early this year. “People have a limited knowledge of radioactivity.”

Leaking Groundwater

At Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501)’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi station, where three reactors melted down after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, about 300 metric tons of contaminated groundwater seep into the ocean each day, according to Japan’s government.

Between May 2011 and August 2013, as many as 20 trillion becquerels of cesium-137, 10 trillion becquerels of strontium-90 and 40 trillion becquerels of tritium entered the ocean via groundwater, according to Tokyo Electric.

Cesium isotopes, which emit flesh-penetrating gamma rays, are among the most dangerous radionuclides emitted by the plant, said Colin Hill, an associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

Strontium-90, which mimics calcium, increases the exposure risk for humans by remaining in the bones of fish for extended periods. While tritium is less radiologically intense than cesium and passes through fish faster than strontium, it can also contaminate sea creatures that encounter the isotope in high levels, Hill said.

Not Happy

Water exposed to radiation from the Fukushima plant would reach the U.S. at levels at least 100 times lower than the U.S.’s drinking water threshold, Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Allison Macfarlane said at a Dec. 6 briefing in Tokyo.

The assurances haven’t eased concerns for some. “I’m terrified,” Doreen Jean Dempski, a children’s book author, said by phone from her home more than 5,000 miles across the Pacific from Fukushima in Carpinteria, California. “My boyfriend is a surfer and he spends hours a day in the water.”

Sharing Dempski’s worries are the Fairfax city council, which passed the coastal testingresolution, and more than 127,000 signatories to an online petition calling for a United Nations’

takeover of part of the Fukushima cleanup. South Korea has already banned imports of fish from Japan’s northern Pacific coast.

Fukushima radiation is being erroneously blamed for everything from sea-lion deaths to sickened polar bears, according to an editorial this week in Canada’s Times Colonist newspaper.

Risk Expectations

Part of the issue is general concern about radiation, and the startling amounts that are released into the environment by the 435 nuclear power plants operating worldwide as of Jan. 3. Measurements that puzzle the public — becquerels, rems, curies and sieverts — don’t aid transparency. And, worse, scientists disagree on the health risks from low-dose radiation exposure.

A report on the Fukushima disaster by the World Health Organization in February last year estimated increased cancer risk for those in the most contaminated areas around the plant, but not elsewhere in Japan. However, the report also notes that better understanding of the effects of low-dose radiation may alter risk expectations from the Fukushima accident.

Less than 100 miles up the coast from Dempski’s home, Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s Diablo Canyon plant in San Luis Obispo discharged 323 million liters of water into the Pacific in 2012, or about 870 tons a day, according to data from the company on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s website. That’s equivalent to 130 Olympic swimming pools and more than twice the daily amount leaking from Fukushima.

Inadvertent Contact

That water contained 3,670 curies of tritium, or 136 trillion becquerels, according to the company, almost three-and-a-half times the amount released from the Fukushima plant into the ocean in the period starting May 2011. The plant also discharged cesium-137, though at lower levels than Fukushima, while its output of strontium-90 is below detectable levels.

Diablo Canyon’s discharges are regulated by the NRC and the plant complies with its licensing requirements, PG&E spokesman Blair Jones said in an e-mail. Total liquid discharges from Diablo Canyon in 2012 were 0.0165 percent of what the NRC allows, Jones said.

The radioactivity in plant wastewater comes from inadvertent contact between the isotopes and cooling water pumped through nuclear plants.

“Tritium is produced when a reactor is operating,” Jones said. “Fukushima is not operating so naturally the tritium levels are lower when compared to Diablo Canyon.”

Rick Castello, a San Luis Obispo-based project manager for a technology company, said by phone that he was unaware of the discharges from the nearby nuclear plant. He also harbors concerns about the approaching radiation from Fukushima.

“It’s not like I think official sources would be intentionally hiding information from the people,” he said by phone. “But sometimes we just don’t know.”

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Japan Prepares to Launch Giant Net into Orbit to Sweep up Space Debris

In late February, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is teaming up with a fishing equipment company to test out an unusual approach to fighting space junk: a satellite equipped with a 300-meter magnetic net that will sweep up the man-made debris hovering in low Earth orbit. The net is only 30 cm wide when unspooled, and it is composed of a highly flexible metal fiber. When the net is launched into space, it will use a magnetic field to attract pieces of orbiting debris.

Over the course of a year, the collected space junk will sink lower and lower, eventually burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. If this test proves successful, a kilometer-long version has already been fabricated for future use. Jaxa is currently figuring out how to use space craft to attach these nets to larger pieces of space debris, like old rocket engines or broken satellites. A functioning system could be deployed as early as 2019.

Currently experts estimate there are 100 million bits of junk floating around the Earth. 22,000 of those pieces of space debris are believed to measure 10 cm or longer, potentially threatening satellites and the International Space Station. Most of the debris is made up of discarded parts of degrading satellites and old rockets.

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