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Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Worker error causes Fukushima leak


Today's post from the BBC.

This aerial photo shows the storage tank, fifth from left at left plot, which was found to be overflowing, at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant at Okuma town in Fukushima prefecture,...

Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has a new leak of radioactive water after workers overfilled a storage tank, its operator says.

The workers miscalculated the tank's capacity as it was tilted on unlevel ground, plant operator Tepco said.

It said around 430 litres (100 gallons) of water may have leaked from the tank, and could have flowed into the sea.

The plant has experienced several leaks since being crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

One of the largest leaks took place in August, when Tepco discovered a leak of at least 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water at a different part of the plant.

The latest leak was discovered by workers late on Wednesday.

Tepco official Masayuki Ono said: "We would like to apologise that we have to announce that we've had another leak in our tanks today."

"This is partly because we've had to fill our tanks to the brim in order to deal with the difficult management of rain water overflow following [a typhoon]," he added.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that Tepco had failed to deal with the leaks successfully.

"It's actually leaking so of course we can't say that [Tepco] have been properly dealing with the issue. It should not be leaking at all," he said.

The 2011 disaster knocked out cooling systems to the nuclear plant's reactors, three of which melted down.

Water is now being pumped in to cool the reactors, but storing the resultant large quantities of radioactive water has proved a...


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Found on

Exercise 'can be as good as pills'

Medication can be replaced by exercise reports the the BBC. Today's post is shared from bbc.org.

Exercise can be as good a medicine as pills for people with conditions such as heart disease, a study has found.

The work in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) looked at hundreds of trials involving nearly 340,000 patients to assess the merits of exercise and drugs in preventing death.

Physical activity rivalled some heart drugs and outperformed stroke medicine.

The findings suggest exercise should be added to prescriptions, say the researchers. 
Man preparing to jog

Experts stressed that patients should not ditch their drugs for exercise - rather, they should use both in tandem.

Too few adults currently get enough exercise. Only a third of people in England do the recommended 2.5 hours or more of moderate-intensity activity, such as cycling or fast walking, every week.

In contrast, prescription drug rates continue to rise.

There were an average of 17.7 prescriptions for every person in England in 2010, compared with 11.2 in 2000.

For the study, scientists based at the London School of Economics, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute at Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine trawled medical literature to find any research that compared exercise with pills as a therapy.

They identified 305 trials to include in their analysis. These trials looked at managing conditions such as existing heart disease, stroke rehabilitation, heart failure and pre-diabetes.

When they studied the data as a whole, they found exercise and drugs were comparable in terms of death rates.

But there were...


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