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Nearly half of the officers responsible for maintaining and operating nuclear-armed missiles at a Montana base have been implicated in a widening cheating investigation, a sign of deep cultural and command problems in the nuclear force, the leader of the Air Force said Thursday.
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said at a Pentagon news conference that 92 of 190 launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base had been suspended because of the investigation into the sharing of answers on a proficiency test last year.
For the first time since the Air Force disclosed the cheating scandal this month, officials acknowledged that the cheating stemmed from a climate of fear created by commanders, who decided which officers on launch crews would be promoted based on whether they scored perfectly on monthly tests.
"I believe that we do have systemic problems," James said. "The need for perfection has created a climate of undue stress and fear."
The number of implicated officers has nearly tripled since Jan. 15, when the Air Force announced that 16 had shared text messages with answers to a monthly missile proficiency test and that 17 others were aware of the suspected cheating but took no action...
Coligny wrote:Talk aboot a dead end job...
92 of 190 launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base had been suspended because of the investigation into the sharing of answers on a proficiency test last year.
The bulk of the radiation measurements taken at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 power plant since March 2011 will be reviewed because they were taken improperly and are probably too low, Tokyo Electric Power Co. revealed.
“We are very sorry, but we found cases in which beta radiation readings turned out to be wrong when the radioactivity concentration of a sample was high,” Tepco spokesman Masayuki Ono told a news conference Friday. Materials known to emit beta rays include strontium-90, which causes bone cancer.
The announcement follows Tepco’s finding Thursday that a groundwater sample it had taken from a well at the No. 1 plant last July contained a record-high 5 million becquerels of strontium-90 per liter instead of 900,000 becquerels.
Ono described the data up for review as “massive” and said the utility plans to start the review from the beginning of the nuclear crisis in March 2011 up to October last year, when it started preparing manuals on proper measurement procedure.
Among the data that need to be examined are the readings for around 300 tons of water that inexplicably vanished from a storage tank in August last year. Tepco had detected 80 million becquerels per liter of beta radiation from the leak, part of which is believed to have ended up in the Pacific.
Tepco blamed the measuring errors on what it calls the “counting miss” phenomenon, which occurs in sensors when radioactivity in a sample is too high. In such cases, the proper procedure is to dilute the water sample so the sensors can correctly detect the radioactivity.
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It's Nuclear Regulation Authority's turn to be bullish on nuclear power plants in Japan awaiting NRA's approval to restart, now that the Tokyo gubernatorial election ended with the result interpreted as great endorsement of Prime Minister Abe's policies across the board.
NRA accepted the conclusion of the experts that the fractured zones inside the Ooi Nuclear Power Plant compound are not active faults.
IparryU wrote:For those who can understand German:
http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/kanalueb ... en,-drohen
Taro Toporific wrote:Controversial headline of South Korean magazine angers Japanese readers
RocketNews24 2014/02/10
...The February issue of the Korean-language version of popular men’s magazine MAXIM featured a front cover headline that read “How to date Japanese women who haven’t been exposed to radiation.”
yanpa wrote:Why does TEPCO need an office in London?
Russell wrote:Maybe they need an office in London for Internationalization and PR...
Wage Slave wrote:Wasn't a lot of used Japanese nuclear fuel sent for reprocessing in the UK and then sent back to Japan for re-use. I seem to remember a row when some of it arrived back in Japan not fully reprocessed.
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