Devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan 12 March 2011

I've been requested by the Creator of this group to see if I can get any news or updates on the situations going on. I know myself and some of the people here have had 'disagreements' over the years, but in light of this disaster, that's a petty non-issue. So, here goes...

Alot of the major news outlets in my area atleast are (to some extent justifyably) mostly paranoid about the radiation and condition of the power plants, and (predictably) have stopped focusing on the humanitarian crisis. The Power plants ARE a main concern, Three workers at the Fukushima-1 power plant were hospitalized due to accidental exposure to Radioactive water and minor radiation burns. Radioactive Iodine, Cesium, Ruthenium, and Tellurium were detected from seawater sample collected in the sea surrounding the power station. And the stuff is going to drift on ocean currents all over the place, but will probably be sufficiently diluted as to be of little harm beyond the immediet area.

Then of course people are considering the problem of what to do with all of the now radioactive seawater that was being pumped INTO the reactor as coolant (It seems the coolant pumps on atleast 3 of the reactors are still nonfunctional, seawater injection is the only thing keeping them from melting down completely). They were considering pumping it into an oil tanker and holding it temporarily. Ofcourse perminant disposal of the water is going to be a problem, though mixing it with boric acid or other neutron-absorbing compounds can mitigate alot of the radioactives, but for that much water it's not going to be easy.

In light of this, alot of people aren't covering the humanitarian crisis and anything other than the power plant, but there's a huge amount of humanitarian aid pouring in and many of Japan's disaster response plans seem to have paid off. A lot of the highways are being cleared, most of the rail lines are operating again (that I know of), and they've restored water service to at least 460,000 homes; probably more by this point.

Another Grim detail is there are several thousand bodies still in the radioactive zone. They won't allow them to be moved due to potential spread of radiation, and they can't bury them due to the potential for soil contamination. The situation with the reactor isn't getting a whole lot better. All in all it's still a very bad situation.

One problem is even I'm finding it sort of difficult to find reliable live sources (honestly, most of my info has come off of Wikipedia and the links supplied there). Alot of the media outside Japan is focusing on the Nuclear Crisis or Libyan War. So I'd ask if anyone can help with reliable sources (or better yet, translate Japanese) would be willing to help keep things up to date and I'll edit any new info into this and subsiquent posts. Thank you.

~The Watsas.