Related to this article - Water level was only 60cm from the bottom in reactor 2

It was 60cm in reactor 2, but it is worse in reactor 1. Japan nuclear energy safety organization analyzed the water level from the connection of the amount of nitrogen injected to PCV and the air pressure of PCV.
The result is that the water level is only 40cm from the bottom of the container vessel though they inject 6 tones of water per hour.

The pipes to connect PCV and torus room got holes of several cm diameter. All the water injected leak from the holes and flow into the basement floor of the reactor building. It flows to the basement floor of the turbin building beside the reactor building through the pipes and cables.

The thickness of PCV is 30mm, but the pipes to torus room are only 7.5mm thick. Tepco used to assume the water level was 1.8m but it turned out to be wrong as always. Tepco plans endoscope operation to know the temperature of inside of the PCV by the end of this year.

A violent rainstorm has caused flooding and power cuts in north-eastern France, with one person found dead in their home, French media report.

The equivalent of up to six weeks' rain fell in three hours on Nancy and the surrounding area on Monday night.

Emergency services have been called out 648 times, with floodwater reaching two metres (6.6ft) in some areas. Some 4,100 homes were left without power, several roads were shut and three schools were closed.

A firefighter was seriously injured when his vehicle collided with a coach. Two coach passengers were lightly hurt in the incident in Nancy, French radio reported.

At least 21 people have died and scores of others have gone missing after flash floods triggered by torrential rains destroyed thousands of homes in two provinces in northern Afghanistan, officials have said.

It was reported on Sunday that the floods left thousands of people homeless on Saturday after it struck the provincial capitals of Sari Pul and Takhar.

In Sari Pul, 19 people were killed and about 60 people went missing after the floods hit. Rescuers have searched for survivors across the city, said Sayed Faizullah Sadat, the national disaster director of the city.

He also said that 1,000 houses were destroyed and 10,000 people were forced to find shelter in mosques, schools and a teacher-training center.

Date-Time:
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 00:00:33 UTC

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 03:00:33 AM at epicenterTime of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
42.686°N, 23.009°E

Depth:
9.4 km (5.8 miles)

Region:
BULGARIA

Distances:
24 km (14 miles) W of SOFIA, Bulgaria

73 km (45 miles) N of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
115 km (71 miles) SE of Nis, Serbia

141 km (87 miles) NNE of Strumica, Macedonia

Across the United States the exploitation of gas and oil from shale rocks using Halliburton's hydraulic fracturing technology continues amid rising disasters. Unregulated drilling practices, rendered legal by the "Halliburton Loophole" engineered in 2005 by Vice President Dick Cheney, have had staggering health and environmental effects. Lured by the prospect of reducing oil dependence, President Obama has adopted an ambivalent approach, which ultimately yields ground to industry. With the same expectancy, countries all around the world have joined the shale-gas craze, arguing that if the U.S. has been "fracking" it must be safe. Energy independence would undoubtedly represent a game changing opportunity for many countries, but at what cost?

There is a global rush to embrace a new source of extracting hydrocarbons from the Earth. From Germany to Poland and France, from China and above all in the USA where the technique of hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks is most developed, governments and major oil companies are producing huge volumes of gas.

A number of energy importing countries around the world are planning a major investment in extracting natural gas from their shale rock formations. The most ambitious plans are coming from China and from Poland in the EU.

The US Government's Department of Energy together with a Washington energy consultancy has just released a mammoth global report estimating resources of shale gas. Significantly, the report estimates that the largest untapped shale gas reserves worldwide lie in China. The study puts Poland and France at the top of the shale gas list in the EU. The rest of Europe they estimate simply lacks the geology where substantial shale rock is present.¹

Even in Germany some cash-strapped states are seriously looking at Shale gas. ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company is planning major projects in the densely-populated North-Rhein Westphalia region. The company's head for Central Europe, Gernot Kalkoffen in a recent interview stated, "Germany is most definitely an interesting market. We cannot achieve the energy strategy shift without gas." ExxonMobil estimates shale gas is potentially available in six of Germany's 16 states.² The US Energy Department estimates that Germany could have some 8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas, three years' total consumption. Citizen protest groups and Parliamentary skepticism about health and safety of shale gas so far is braking a German shale gas bonanza.³ Not only ExxonMobil but also BASF's Wintershall, Gaz de France, BNK Petroleum from the US and a daughter of Britain's Royal Dutch Shell are salivating over German shale gas prospects.

A strong and unusually shallow earthquake struck northern Italy over the weekend, fracturing pavement, sending torrents of brick and rubble raining down from buildings, and killing seven people. The powerful shaking was a first for the region in centuries - and fairly surprising to seismologists.

Data indicate the magnitude-6.0 quake, which struck just after 4 a.m. local time on Sunday (May 20), just north of Bologna, was a thrust quake - the type of earthquake caused when two tectonic plates smash together - yet it occurred at a depth of just 3 miles (5 kilometers).

"It is kind of surprising that it's that shallow, because it's pretty far from the plate boundary," said Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "Normally we expect things to get deeper as they move northward," he told OurAmazingPlanet.

Shallow shaking

The quake hit about 470 miles (750 km) north of the plate boundary - the place where the two colliding plates meet - which runs along the sole of Italy's "boot."

It is here that the African plate is plowing slowly northward, crashing into the Eurasian plate.

Caruso explained that the shallower a quake, the more damage it can cause. "If a quake is 500 kilometers deep, and you're right on top of it, you're going to feel it a lot less strongly than if it's 5 kilometers deep," he said. "As the seismic energy moves through the ground some of it is dissipated."

The strong quake rocked an area with a long history of earthquakes, yet one that has kept relatively quiet for hundreds of years.

"There has not been a whole lot of action in that area," Caruso said. "The fact that they do have records of earthquakes going back a couple thousand years shows this area hasn't been seismically active for a long time," he said.

Thousands of people were displaced by the quake, and many people spent the night in tents hurriedly erected on soccer fields.

Akio Matsumura is a former UN diplomat who is very worried about the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi power plants in Japan.

He believes the highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies at the plants present a clear threat to the people of Japan and the world, noting that Reactor 4 and the nearby common spent fuel pool contain over 11,000 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies, many of which are exposed to the open air.

"The cesium-137, the radioactive component contained in these assemblies, present at the site is 85 times larger than the amount released during the Chernobyl accident. Another magnitude 7.0 earthquake would jar them from their pool or stop the cooling water, which would lead to a nuclear fire and meltdown. The nuclear disaster that would result is beyond anything science has ever seen. Calling it a global catastrophe is no exaggeration," writes Matsumura in a new article sounding the alarm on what he says is a very bad moon rising.

Matsumura is puzzled. He says if political leaders really understand the situation and the potential catastrophe, "I find it difficult to understand why they remain silent."

Costa Rica's National Seismological Network has upgraded the color threat level to yellow of Turrialba Volcano, in the province of Cartago east of the capital.

A statement issued by Raúl Mora-Amador, coordinator of Seismology, Volcanology and Geophysical Exploration at the University of Costa Rica, indicates a threat level of yellow means that the National Seismological Network believes an eruption is "probable" in a matter of days, weeks or a few months.

The upgrade in the threat level is due to "important changes in seismic activity of Volcano Turrialba associated with the movement of fluids, gas and magma beneath the surface, different from that observed in past years," Mora-Amador's statement says.

Earthquake Information
Japan Meteorological Agency

17:50 JST 20 May 2012 17:42 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.1 2
17:27 JST 20 May 2012 17:21 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.4 2
16:54 JST 20 May 2012 16:49 JST 20 May 2012 Ibaraki-ken Hokubu M3.3 1
16:38 JST 20 May 2012 16:28 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.7 2
16:32 JST 20 May 2012 16:20 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M6.2 3
14:57 JST 20 May 2012 14:52 JST 20 May 2012 Fukushima-ken Oki M3.6 1
12:56 JST 20 May 2012 12:49 JST 20 May 2012 Niigata-ken Chuetsu-chiho M1.8 1
04:24 JST 20 May 2012 04:17 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M4.8 1
04:20 JST 20 May 2012 04:14 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.4 1
04:11 JST 20 May 2012 04:05 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.8 3
03:36 JST 20 May 2012 03:31 JST 20 May 2012 Akita-ken Nairiku-hokubu M2.8 1
01:23 JST 20 May 2012 01:18 JST 20 May 2012 Aki-nada M3.3 1
23:27 JST 19 May 2012 23:22 JST 19 May 2012 Ibaraki-ken Hokubu M3.3 1
23:25 JST 19 May 2012 23:20 JST 19 May 2012 Miyagi-ken Oki M3.9 1
09:14 JST 19 May 2012 09:09 JST 19 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M4.8 1
07:41 JST 19 May 2012 07:36 JST 19 May 2012 Miyagi-ken Oki M3.4 1
07:02 JST 19 May 2012 06:57 JST 19 May 2012 Ibaraki-ken Nambu M3.1 1
06:37 JST 19 May 2012 06:32 JST 19 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M4.7 1
06:28 JST 19 May 2012 06:23 JST 19 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.1 2

Date-Time:
Sunday, May 20, 2012 at 07:19:55 UTC

Sunday, May 20, 2012 at 05:19:55 PM at epicenterTime of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
39.597°N, 143.242°E

Depth:
10 km (6.2 miles)

Region:
OFF THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN

Distances:
179 km (111 miles) E of Morioka, Honshu, Japan

181 km (112 miles) SE of Hachinohe, Honshu, Japan

251 km (155 miles) ESE of Aomori, Honshu, Japan

532 km (330 miles) NE of TOKYO, Japan