Japan will allow investigators from the UN nuclear watchdog to inspect a nuclear power station damaged last week by a powerful earthquake in order to address international safety concerns, an official said yesterday.
The Japanese government had first told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it did not need help for now, but then came under pressure from local authorities to allow inspections.
An official from Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said a date had not yet been set, although the Nikkei Shimbun reported that four IAEA inspectors would visit the nuclear site as soon as early next month.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said joint studies on nuclear safety would help not only Japan but other countries prone to earthquakes.
"It will be important for Japan and the IAEA to work together and to analyze the results carefully," he told a news conference. "We will cooperate with the IAEA and will probably be making the inspections together."
The decision came as Niigata Prefecture estimated economic losses from the July 16 magnitude-6.8 temblor at ?1.5 trillion (US$12.37 billion), of which ?700 billion was linked to the closure of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant.
The July 16 earthquake triggered a wave of malfunctions and damage at the plant, including a fire that charred an electrical transformer, planks that toppled into a pool of spent nuclear fuel and the knocking over of some 400 barrels of atomic waste. The problems were capped by news that radioactive water had sloshed out of a tank and was flushed out to sea, and that radioactive material was vented into the air in two separate instances.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei offered last Thursday to send in inspectors but Tokyo rejected the offer saying it could handle the safety check on its own.
Meanwhile, a 47-year-old factory worker who was severely burned in a fire at his casting factory in Kashiwazaki following the quake died yesterday, officials said, bringing the number of fatalities to 11.
More than 1,000 people were injured by the quake.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS