Mercer Releases 2011 Cost of Living Survey

- Luanda in Angola is the world’s most expensive city for expatriates
- Karachi is the cheapest city in the world
- The top 10 ranked cities dominated by Africa, Asia and Europe - - 9 of the top 10
- London drops one place to rank 18
- Singapore and São Paolo join the top 10 list
- New York drops five places to rank 32
- Los Angeles drops 22 places to rank 77
- Tokyo remains in 2nd place
- Moscow is in 4th place
- Osaka comes in at 6th
- Hong Kong drops to 9th

Karachi (214) is ranked as the world’s least expensive city, and the survey found that Luanda, in the top place, is more than three times as costly as Karachi. Recent world events, including natural disasters and political upheavals, have impacted the rankings for many regions through currency fluctuations, cost inflation for goods and services and volatility in accommodation prices.

The most expensive city in Asia is Tokyo (2), followed by Osaka (6). Singapore (8) has joined the list of the world’s top 10 most expensive cities and is followed by Hong Kong (9). Nagoya (11) in Japan is up eight places whereas Seoul (19) is down five. Other highly ranked Asian cities are Beijing (20), Shanghai (21), Guangzhou (38), Shenzhen (43) and Taipei (52).

“Most Asian cities have moved up in the ranking as availability for expatriate accommodation prices is limited and demand is high."

Currency fluctuations, inflation, political instability and natural disasters are all factors that influence the cost of living for expatriates. It is essential that employers understand their impact, for cost-containment purposes, but also to ensure they retain talented employees by offering competitive compensation packages." To view Mercer's Cost comparison between 21 major cities worldwide please click here, and for a comparison between 21 U.S. cities please click here. Further information can be found here;

I think it is very obvious that deflationary Japan is high on the rankings due the the very strong yen to the dollar, pound and euro, and not due to the demand for accommodation.......

More Than Japan Housing, More Than Japan Cars and Furniture, More than Japan Serviced Apartments, More Than Japan Destination Services, More Than Japan License Conversion, More Than Japan Information!

The H&R Group is MORE THAN RELOCATION!
www.morethanrelo.com

Leadership in Relocation: What's Holding You Back?

I read this book, and it was so good that I have summarized it for everyone!

Here are 10 bold steps that define gutsy leaders in relocation; thanks to Robert J. Herbold.



1. Devise a Demanding Game Plan to Confront Reality
You need to lay out a clear vision, develop aggressive strategies to achieve that vision and select actionable measures so that you know you are achieving the strategies. As the old saying goes “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, so you must measure the vision to make sure the job is getting done, and also make sure that your strategies are actually helping to achieve the vision. If they are not, you may need to change them.

2. Staff For Success
You must maintain a high-quality performance appraisal system. This makes every member of your organization aware of his or her strengths or weaknesses, and maintains a track record over months and years that enable you to defend any decision to move poor performers out. You need to confront poor performance early, and you want to stretch and challenge your best people to prepare them for crucial needs when they arise. It is also advisable to move your people around every 2-3 years.
Use employee surveys to help determine, which managers are strong leaders and which are struggling, and in general to gauge whether you have the right team to achieve your game plan.

3. Clean Up The Sloppiness
You must keep systems and processes as simple as possible. The systems must be robust and not allow endless exceptions, but you also need to make sure they don’t become complicated and complex. Ideally, one person should be held responsible for each process or system, as sharing the burden makes it difficult to keep accountability. You want to have minimal layers of management with maximum spans (up to 8 people per manager?).

4. Institutionalize Tight-Fisted Cost Control
Keep any budgets under your control under constant pressure. Always be looking for ways to decrease cost to less expensive vendors or by outsourcing to another part of the world. Consider outsourcing non-strategic activities, but make sure to choose the right location for strategic activities. You must know your budget well, and you must kill obvious cost mistakes or unsuccessful projects as soon as possible.

5. Insist on Functional Excellence
You must maintain strong functional excellence in areas such as finance and accounting, HR, tax, general administration, etc. Functional excellence comes from driving simplicity, efficiency and effectiveness in the company through these functional areas. Not taking this seriously, or not having strong functional management that challenges business units can fragment the overall efforts of the company or put your company at risk. This means considering not only costs, but safety, worker health and general risk management. Staff in these positions should be tough and stubborn, principled and always strive for simplicity and be on the outlook for new trends.
Furthermore, operations should be given enough flexibility to operate on their own and not be too centralized. There should always be good focus placed on the projects operations is committed to; you don’t want to take on so many projects that there is no focus, Focused projects should be lead by your best people, but they should not further burden already burdened groups. Clearly define what the focus is and report it back often to your employees.

6. Create a Culture of Innovation
You must highly value Innovation. The book refers to “Commodity Hell”; that you never know when your competition is going to launch their next product that will drive your product into commodity hell and you end up competing on price only. To avoid commodity hell and everything depending on price, you need to continuously innovate ideas that make your products exciting and distinctive in the market place. You must communicate the goal of innovation regularly, you must encourage and inspire innovation and you must reward innovation.
Fresh thinking should be rewarded also. However, you do want to define success as being fresh ideas and excellence in execution and you should only reward innovations that have a measurable impact.

7. Demand Accountability and Decisiveness; Avoid Consensus
You should set clear accountability, goals and measures for innovation. However, you want to get away from consensus decision making. You need to clearly make certain people accountable for innovation; put one person in charge. Carefully define what success looks like and agree on the measurement of success, then keep the focus on impact not on internal politics. Some input you receive will be useful, other input could be just to protect the status quo or someone’s position, so you need someone accountable that can work through all of this. However, when you discover that something is not working, you must kill it quickly; once again, not with consensus decision-making.

8. Exploit Inflection Points
This is making use of opportunities that arise due to changes in laws, technology, etc. It is the ability to “trend spot” and find new ways to bring things to market or find an emerging customer trend. Be the first company in your industry to do things; make this part of your culture, and encourage early experimentation.

9. Value Ideas from Anywhere
Everyone should be on the lookout for ideas. Create a culture whereby ideas are shared from the top to bottom of your organization. One important part of collecting ideas is visiting and observing your clients to understand their likes, dislikes, habits and practices. You must understand your customer’s experiences.

10. Shake Up the Organization
In order to be innovative, your organization needs to be flexible and ready to change. You can’t afford your organization to become convinced that everything is OK and there is no need to change. So, you
- Shouldn’t let people get set in their ways- often you need to insert fresh talent to remedy stagnant situations
- Shouldn’t always make the obvious choice; surprise people a little with staffing decisions
- Should always try to evolve and encourage your employees to use new technologies or learn them, etc.
You need to continuously reorganize around your new efforts.

I highly recommend this leadership book; http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Holding-You-Back-Leaders/dp/0470639016

On The Ground in Japan: What am I seeing in the relocation industry?

Here is what I am seeing from the viewpoint of a relocation company active in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. After the quake, temporarily many people left. Many overseas, many to Osaka. After GW, most came back; we even had people leaving from Nagoya, but most came back. Looking at international schools as one good indicator, you will see that 90% or more are now back; some nationalities being a little more conservative than others. The German school in Tokyo, for example, didn't open back up for sometime after the quake. But overall, you are seeing 90- 95% of people back.

Now here we are in June. June / July / August is the busiest relocation season. There are always lots of people leaving Japan during this period. Don't forget this! Even without the quake, in any year there is significant movement during this time; some years more than others, and sometimes more inbound than outbound, and vice-versa. The net trend is that outbound is up. Talk to moving companies and they will tell you it is a record year. Yes, there are more people leaving this year than normal. Many are leaving a little earlier than they would have. However, amongst this we are also seeing people coming to Tokyo also. Real estate is moving. If you don't put an application on popular properties immediately, someone else gets the property and you miss out. There is inbound activity, so it is not all outbound!

Now, we are seeing resistance from families. This is too be understood considering the nuclear issues. Some are leaving their families at home or somwhere else for the interim. Some companies are choosing to send more single and married employees without children, or more senior members.

With regard to Osaka and companies moving their headquarters, there maybe one or two companies that have moved their plans forward quickly. However, on the ground there is no evidence or sign of a huge influx of companies into Osaka, nor Nagoya. Companies are certainly talking more about contigency plans and spreading the risk, and there are definately companies seeking information on the options, but any rumor that hordes of companies are deciding to get out of Tokyo and set up in Osaka is completely unfounded right now.

It is my view that over the next 12- 24 months some companies will choose to spread their risk and move operations around a little. However,
1. As time goes by the focus on spreading the risk will shift to the next "crisis" or the next "priority" and a high percentage of talks will stop just there AND
2. The economy in Japan is not in good shape, and therefore when many of these companies do the cost analysis and see the size of the bill to move their operations (moving offices is the easy part..... moving employees away from where their families and homes are is more difficult) many talks will stop right there too. This is off course assuming that as time goes by that the reactor issues are slowly brought under control. I would be interested in hearing of others predictions.....

The H&R Group is MORE THAN RELOCATION!

www.morethanrelo.com

Relocation Volume By Country in 2010

A recent survey by Cartus shows that the relocation volume to Japan has dropped away a little since 2006. According to the Cartus survey, Japan used to sit in 6th place in the world in terms of global relocation volume, but in the 4 years since 2006, Japan has dropped to 9th place.

Of those countries in the top 10 in 2010, the countries who have jumped up positions are Singapore, India (both of whom were in the top ten in 2010 but are now ranked higher) and Hong Kong that has jumped into the top 10 from 11th position in 2006.

Dropping out of the top 10 is France, and then dropping out of the list of 25 countries entirely is Saudi Arabia, Austria and Thailand.

New to the list of 25 countries with the most relocation volume is Panama, South Korea and Poland.

Read more here!! http://mwne.ws/mUpX4t

Let’s move Japan’s capital to Tohoku!

I have borrowed this entry on a discussion board dated May 14, 2011 from Shigehiko Togo, Former Correspondent of the Washington Post Tokyo Bureau, as I really liked this out of the box initiative (his entry is in italics). Japan will probably never do it, but this is the kind of thinking Japan needs in this age.
　
Based on the experience which Japan has suffered by the 3.11 disasters, how about relocating our capital to Tohoku, Northeast area of the Honshu island?

There are three reasons why I am writing this.

First, from safety perspective:

From southern Chiba Prefecture toward Miyazaki Prefecture coast of the Pacific, three major gigantic quakes parallel to the Honshu islands are anticipated by scholars. The possibility of an earthquake with an epicenter directly under Tokyo is often discussed.
The future possibility of a big earthquake in Tohoku, both plate type and active fault type should be seriously examined by scholars but after 3.11, isn’t it Tohoku itself an area relatively safe from earthquake and tsunami disasters in coming next several centuries ?
Furthermore, we now know from the experiences of 3.11, where are the areas relatively safe or more dangerous within Tohoku regarding earthquake and tsunami disasters, including the danger caused and to be caused by nuclear reactors.
These are the reasons why I think it is adequate to propose Tohoku as a place of new capital of Japan from safety point of view.

Second, from recovery perspective:

Needless to say, if we will relocate the capital in Tohoku, it will be the very core of the recovery project. Both material and mental impact will be tremendous. The scale of the project will be immense. It will be incomparable to any of already proposed plans by the national and local governments, parties and city planners etc.

Third, from historical perspective:

Looking back the history of Japan, I think we cannot deny the fact that some political group or tribe located in the Kyushu island had moved toward east and located its political and cultural center in Kansai area sometimes in an ancient days. Since then, many capitals such as Fujiwara, Nara or Kyoto had been located in Kinki area in Kansai. After the Meiji Restoration, the capital again moved toward east and Edo became Tokyo, which literally means something like “East Center”.
Tohoku area was never a center of Japan. By moving the capital again toward east, can’t we say that for the first time in history, all Japanese islands would have fulfilled its historical responsibility?

I will try to write down a concrete plan of how to realize this proposal so that it would not end just as a dream.
The relocation must start as a step of recovery project, must take a step by step process and must maintain a reasonable relation with Tokyo.
Now, what is a capital for the Japanese. In one word, that is a place where the Emperor resides. So the construction and the declaration of the new capital must start by moving the Imperial Palace to Tohoku. The Palace includes the residence of Their Majesties, imperial office and the Three Holy Shrines.

Diets, governments, other national functions and diplomatic core would move eventually with careful balance between the existing Tokyo. From that perspective, it may be desirable if the new capital would be placed somewhere not too distant from Tokyo.
The basic character of the new city will be “coexistence with nature” and “revival of Japanese tradition” as is already stated in many proposals. We should not try to rebuild gigantic buildings such as in Kasumigaseki in Tokyo. It should be designed based on a concept of “low rise buildings in a forest”. I expect scientists, engineers and construction companies to develop a new material for housing, a light, tenacious and not too expensive one in harmony with maximum utilization of wood and other “natural” resources.

At the end of the last century, the government had seriously examined to move the Diet from Tokyo and construct a city of 100.000 populations. As for the candidate area, one, Tochigi and Fukushima group and another, Aichi and Gifu group had been nominated. The fee was estimated to be about four trillion yen. If we would move the capital in Tohoku, it will be sure to cost more, but recent estimations of the recovery fee from 3.11 disasters indicates that the amount would not be unreachable. It should be necessary that the central government would take a strong leadership such as prohibition of land speculation and temporal restriction of private right.

Ken Matsumoto, an active businessman who lives in Ishinomaki City in Miyagi Prefecture who runs a precision machines factory which was heavily damaged by the tsunami of 3.11, strongly asserts that the recovery must take place from a bottom up energy of local inhabitants. But for the new capital idea, he said “Our place, Tohoku was never a center of Japan. It will be a historical miracle if the capital would move here. Nothing would encourage us more than that. It would stimulate for sure all Japanese people to stand and to work for the new dream.”

In the media, I have seen and heard, Yoshimi Watanabe, President of Your Party(Minna-no-To) mentioning about the relocation of the capital. Their party homepage writes that the Diet should move to Fukushima Prefecture. Jitsuro Terashima, a prominent scholar-commentator referred to the partial relocation of the capital to Tohoku. But as far as I know, there are no serious, comprehensive proposition on this subject.

More Than Japan Housing, More Than Japan Cars and Furniture, More than Japan Serviced Apartments, More Than Japan Destination Services, More Than Japan License Conversion, More Than Japan Information!

The H&R Group is MORE THAN RELOCATION!

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The Situation in Japan- Friday 8th April

This information is a few days old, as I have been travelling, but as I have done several times already, please allow me to share with you the UK's Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir John Beddington's of April 7th. It is a good overview, and shows that things are slowly getting better with regard to the nuclear plant issue;

Fukushima:Overview
Sir John begun the briefing by saying that we should not relax completely on the subject of Fukushima - the situation is still serious – but that there has been significant progress. This “progress” is the reason why the FCO travel advice was relaxed last night. Sir John explained that the Japanese have now established power to the nuclear plant and are using fresh water to cool the reactors. These two facts, coupled with the natural progressive decay of iodine, mean that any effects of radiation are significantly reduced. From time to time, Sir John went on, there will be small releases of radiation into the environment, but this will be nothing like the radiation produced by the meltdown of a reactor or an explosion in a fuel pond. TEPCO is now injecting nitrogen into the main containment unit – mainly unit 1 – in order to cut down the possibility of hydrogen based explosions. Sir John says that the UK supports this move and urged that people should not be alarmed by resultant steam that will sometimes emit from the plant. This is a natural side effect of the hydrogen injections. In summary, the practical actions taken by the Japanese – connecting power and using fresh water – coupled with the natural processes of iodine 131 decaying, mean that the situation at Fukushima is improving in general. Sir John assured that the threat of radiation to the Tokyo region has significantly reduced.

Q: Can you say something about the continuing concerns about food and water from the area?
Sir John and his colleagues from the UK’s Health Protection Industry and the Department of Health, reiterated that significant amounts of radiation have been released into the water, and that seafood from the Fukushima area should not be eaten; the risk to Tokyo has disappeared. People are urged to take their lead from the guidance of the Japanese government.

Land contamination
The briefing went on to cover the issue of land contamination – there are high concentrations of radioactivity on agricultural land. It might be possible for people to live in certain areas, but the soil there might be contaminated for months or years to come. Sir John and colleagues continued: the Japanese will put legislation in place to make sure that food from these areas does not get into the food chain. We were reminded that it is “still early days” but that Japanese regulations are more stringent than those of other countries.

Q: There is concern over milk, eggs, dairy products, etc. Is there anything you can say about that?
Sir John reinforced the fact that the Japanese will continue to test food, and that their regulations are stringent; this means that any detection of radiation will quickly become apparent. The primary concern was radioactive iodine; cesium getting onto the soil is also an issue. But the latter is easy to detect and regulate, it was assured. Milk may be banned in a wider area, even in areas that people can live quite safely, but this is yet to be announced.

Q: Can you explain more about the Nitrogen injections by TEPCO?
Sir John explained that these will go on for a few more days. He continued: reactors are surrounded by containment vessels. At present, the potential for explosions is being kept as low as possible, so there is a drop in the chances of explosive activity. The Japanese are moderating the situation.

Q: Parents and children have returned to school in Toyko – should they receive iodine tablets?
Iodine should only be taken when a radioactive plume comes overhead, Sir John said, so the need to take it is probably over. Common sense tells us that there is no need for iodine at present. Sir John expressed that you shouldn’t take these tablets unless it is suggested by Japanese authorities. The UK is not recommending that people take them. David Fitton from the British Embassy in Tokyo said that the Embassy is still providing the tablets to those who would like them, but that this operation is being kept under review.

Q: Why is “new” iodine 131 not being produced in the reactors?
It just isn’t, Sir John said. Iodine is only produced when a reactor is producing electricity. When reactors are switched off, all iodine will start decaying and the amounts will naturally go down. There is no iodine in the storage ponds at all, he assured.

Q: For people who are volunteering in the quake affected area, is the 80km exclusion zone still in force?
Sir John said that the UK will be reviewing this at the next SAGE meeting. At present they are monitoring the worst case scenarios, including the impact of bad weather conditions, and calculating what the likely dosages would be. Sir John and his team will then provide advice into COBRA; it is a “work in progress”.

Q: The amounts of radiation dumped into the ocean seemed large, are there implications for seafood on a larger scale?
They do seem like large volumes but in relation to the size of the Pacific Ocean they are miniscule, said Sir John. From a practical perspective, larger scale impact is enormously unlikely because the Pacific Ocean is so large. Sir John assured that the Japanese are monitoring levels in fish and food and have banned produced from the region.

Q: Any comments on the ongoing seismic activity in Eastern Japan?
Sir John acknowledged that aftershocks are natural after such a major earthquake, but that their intensity will decay over time. Sir John stated that he is a biologist and not a geologist. The conclusion of today’s briefing was that “things are getting better” and that the Japanese are now making progress on what is a difficult problem.

Stay calm! Our thoughts, prayers, and hopes for a quick recovery are with all those who have been affected by this crisis.

What Really Happened at Fukushima

This is the best account I have seen of the events at Fukushima. Sorry guys and gals, Tokyo and the rest of the world are not about to be affected. This is a "local" nuclear disaster...... This is an E-mail from the Dean of the University of Washington College of Engineering to the students - March 17

*What happened at Fukushima*
I will try to summarize the main facts. The earthquake that hit Japan was 5 times more powerful than the worst earthquake the nuclear power plant was built for (the Richter scale works logarithmically; the difference betweenthe 8.2 that the plants were built for and the 8.9 that happened is 5 times,not 0.7). So the first hooray for Japanese engineering, everything held up.

When the earthquake hit with 8.9, the nuclear reactors all went intoautomatic shutdown. Within seconds after the earthquake started, the controlrods had been inserted into the core and nuclear chain reaction of theuranium stopped. Now, the cooling system has to carry away the residual heat. The residual heat load is about 3% of the heat load under normaloperating conditions.

The earthquake destroyed the external power supply of the nuclear reactor. That is one of the most serious accidents for a nuclear power plant, and accordingly, a “plant black out” receives a lot of attention when designingbackup systems. The power is needed to keep the coolant pumps working. Sincethe power plant had been shut down, it cannot produce any electricity byitself any more. Things were going well for an hour. One set of multiple sets of emergency. Diesel power generators kicked in and provided the electricity that was needed.

Then the Tsunami came, much bigger than people had expected when building the power plant. The tsunami took out all multiple sets of backupDiesel generators. When designing a nuclear power plant, engineers follow a philosophy called“Defense of Depth”. That means that you first build everything to withstand the worst catastrophe you can imagine, and then design the plant in such away that it can still handle one system failure (that you thought could never happen) after the other. A tsunami taking out all backup power in oneswift strike is such a scenario. The last line of defense is putting everything into the third containment, that will keep everything, whateverthe mess, control rods in our out, core molten or not, inside the reactor.When the diesel generators were gone, the reactor operators switched to emergency battery power.

The batteries were designed as one of the backups to the backups, to provide power for cooling the core for 8 hours. And they did. Within the 8 hours, another power source had to be found and connected tothe power plant. The power grid was down due to the earthquake. The diesel generators were destroyed by the tsunami. So mobile diesel generators were trucked in. This is where things started to go seriously wrong. The external power generators could not be connected to the power plant (the plugs did not fit). So after the batteries ran out, the residual heat could not be carried away any more.

At this point the plant operators begin to follow emergency procedures thatare in place for a “loss of cooling event”. It is again a step along the “Depth of Defense” lines. The power to the cooling systems should never have failed completely, but it did, so they “retreat” to the next line of defense. All of this, however shocking it seems to us, is part of the day-to-day training you go through as an operator, right through to managing a core meltdown. It was at this stage that people started to talk about core meltdown. Because at the end of the day, if cooling cannot be restored, the core willeventually melt (after hours or days), and the last line of defense, thecore catcher and third containment, would come into play.

But the goal at this stage was to manage the core while it was heating up, and ensure that the first containment (the Zircaloy tubes that contains thenuclear fuel), as well as the second containment remain intact andoperational for as long as possible, to give the engineers time to fix the cooling systems. Because cooling the core is such a big deal, the reactor has a number of cooling systems, each in multiple versions (the reactor water cleanups ystem, the decay heat removal, the reactor core isolating cooling, thestandby liquid cooling system, and the emergency core cooling system). Which one failed when or did not fail is not clear at this point in time.

So imagine a pressure cooker on the stove, heat on low, but on. Theoperators use whatever cooling system capacity they have to get rid of as much heat as possible, but the pressure starts building up. The priority now is to maintain integrity of the first containment (keep temperature of the fuel rods below 2200°C), as well as the second containment, the pressure cooker. In order to maintain integrity of the pressure cooker (the second containment), the pressure has to be released from time to time. Because theability to do that in an emergency is so important, the reactor has 11 pressure release valves. The operators now started venting steam from time to time to control the pressure.

The temperature at this stage was about550°C. This is when the reports about “radiation leakage” starting coming in. I believe I explained above why venting the steam is theoretically the same as releasing radiation into the environment, but why it was and is not dangerous. The radioactive nitrogen as well as the noble gases do not pose a threat to human health. At some stage during this venting, the explosion occurred. The explosiontook place outside of the third containment (our “last line of defense”), and the reactor building. Remember that the reactor building has no function in keeping the radioactivity contained.

It is not entirely clear yet what has happened, but this is the likely scenario: The operators decided to vent the steam from the pressure vessel not directly into the environment, butinto the space between the third containment and the reactor building (to give the radioactivity in the steam more time to subside). The problem isthat at the high temperatures that the core had reached at this stage, watermolecules can “disassociate” into oxygen and hydrogen – an explosive mixture. And it did explode, outside the third containment, damaging thereactor building around. It was that sort of explosion, but inside thepressure vessel (because it was badly designed and not managed properly bythe operators) that lead to the explosion of Chernobyl. This was never a risk at Fukushima. The problem of hydrogen-oxygen formation is one of the biggies when you design a power plant (if you are not Soviet, that is), so the reactor is built and operated in a way it cannot happen inside the containment. It happened outside, which was not intended but a possible scenario and OK, because it did not pose a risk for the containment.

So the pressure was under control, as steam was vented. Now, if you keep boiling your pot, the problem is that the water level will keep falling and falling. The core is covered by several meters of water in order to allow for some time to pass (hours, days) before it gets exposed. Once the rodss tart to be exposed at the top, the exposed parts will reach the critical temperature of 2200 °C after about 45 minutes. This is when the first containment, the Zircaloy tube, would fail. And this started to happen. The cooling could not be restored before there was some (very limited, but still) damage to the casing of some of the fuel. The nuclear material itself was still intact, but the surrounding Zircaloyshell had started melting. What happened now is that some of the by products of the uranium decay – radioactive Cesium and Iodine – started to mix with the steam. The big problem, uranium, was still under control, because theuranium oxide rods were good until 3000 °C. It is confirmed that a very small amount of Cesium and Iodine was measured in the steam that wasreleased into the atmosphere.It seems this was the “go signal” for a major plan B.

The small amounts of Cesium that were measured told the operators that the first containment on one of the rods somewhere was about to give. The Plan A had been to restoreone of the regular cooling systems to the core. Why that failed is unclear. One plausible explanation is that the tsunami also took away / polluted all the clean water needed for the regular cooling systems. The water used in the cooling system is very clean, demineralized (like distilled) water. The reason to use pure water is the above mentionedactivation by the neutrons from the Uranium: Pure water does not get activated much, so stays practically radioactive-free. Dirt or salt in the water will absorb the neutrons quicker, becoming more radioactive. This has no effect whatsoever on the core – it does not care what it is cooled by. But it makes life more difficult for the operators and mechanics when theyhave to deal with activated (i..e. slightly radioactive) water.

But Plan A had failed – cooling systems down or additional clean waterunavailable – so Plan B came into effect. This is what it looks like happened: In order to prevent a core meltdown, the operators started to use sea water to cool the core. I am not quite sure if they flooded our pressure cookerwith it (the second containment), or if they flooded the third containment, immersing the pressure cooker. But that is not relevant for us. The point is that the nuclear fuel has now been cooled down. Because the chain reaction has been stopped a long time ago, there is only very little residual heat being produced now. The large amount of cooling water that has been used is sufficient to take up that heat. Because it is a lot of water,the core does not produce sufficient heat any more to produce anysignificant pressure. Also, boric acid has been added to the seawater. Boric acid is “liquid control rod”. Whatever decay is still going on, the Boronwill capture the neutrons and further speed up the cooling down of the core.The plant came close to a core meltdown. Here is the worst-case scenario that was avoided: If the seawater could not have been used for treatment, the operators would have continued to vent the water steam to avoid pressure buildup. The third containment would then have been completely sealed to allow the core meltdown to happen without releasing radioactive material. After the meltdown, there would have been a waiting period for the intermediate radioactive materials to decay inside the reactor, and all radioactive particles to settle on a surface inside the containment. The cooling system would have been restored eventually, and the molten corecooled to a manageable temperature. The containment would have been cleaned up on the inside. Then a messy job of removing the molten core from the containment would have begun, packing the (now solid again) fuel bit by bit into transportation containers to be shipped to processing plants. Depending on the damage, the block of the plant would then either be repaired or dismantled. Now, where does that leave us? My assessment:

§ The plant is safe now and will stay safe.. § Japan is looking at an INES Level 4 Accident: Nuclear accident with local consequences. That is bad for the company that owns the plant, but not for anyone else.

§ Some radiation was released when the pressure vessel was vented. All radioactive isotopes from the activated steam have gone (decayed). A very small amount of Cesium was released, as well as Iodine. If you were sitting on top of the plants’ chimney when they were venting, you should probablygive up smoking to return to your former life expectancy. The Cesium and Iodine isotopes were carried out to the sea and will never be seen again.

§ There was some limited damage to the first containment. That means that some amounts of radioactive Cesium and Iodine will also be released into the cooling water, but no Uranium or other nasty stuff (the Uranium oxide doesnot “dissolve” in the water). There are facilities for treating the cooling water inside the third containment. The radioactive Cesium and Iodine willbe removed there and eventually stored as radioactive waste in terminal storage.

§ The seawater used as cooling water will be activated to some degree. Because the control rods are fully inserted, the Uranium chain reaction is not happening. That means the “main” nuclear reaction is not happening, thus not contributing to the activation. The intermediate radioactive materials(Cesium and Iodine) are also almost gone at this stage, because the Uranium decay was stopped a long time ago. This further reduces the activation. The bottom line is that there will be some low level of activation of the seawater, which will also be removed by the treatment facilities.

§ The seawater will then be replaced over time with the “normal” coolingwater

§ The reactor core will then be dismantled and transported to a processingfacility, just like during a regular fuel change.

§ Fuel rods and the entire plant will be checked for potential damage. This will take about 4-5 years.

§ The safety systems on all Japanese plants will be upgraded to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami (or worse)

§ (Updated) I believe the most significant problem will be a prolonged power shortage. 11 of Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors in different plants wereshut down and will have to be inspected, directly reducing the nation’snuclear power generating capacity by 20%, with nuclear power accounting forabout 30% of the national total power generation capacity.. I have not looked into possible consequences for other nuclear plants not directly affected. This will probably be covered by running gas power plants that are usually only used for peak loads to cover some of the base load as well. I am not familiar with Japan’s energy supply chain for oil, gas and coal, and what damage the harbors, refinery, storage and transportation networks have suffered, as well as damage to the national distribution grid. All of thatwill increase your electricity bill, as well as lead to power shortages during peak demand and reconstruction efforts, in Japan.

§ This all is only part of a much bigger picture. Emergency response has to deal with shelter, drinking water, food and medical care, transportation and communication infrastructure, as well as electricity supply. In a world of lean supply chains, we are looking at some major challenges in all of these areas.

" Thank you.