nuclear-news

The enormous volume of waste is much more than the disaster areas can handle. So, in an apparent attempt to return this region to some semblance of normal life, the plan is to spread out the waste to as many communities across the country as will take it.

At the end of September, Tokyo signed an agreement to accept 500,000 metric tons of rubble from Iwate Prefecture, one of eight prefectures designated for cleanup under a new nuclear decontamination law passed on January 1. The law allows for much of the radioactively contaminated rubble to be incinerated, a practice that has been underway at least since the end of June.

But the sheer amount of radioactive rubble is proving difficult to process. The municipal government of Kashiwa, in Chiba Prefecture to the west and south of Tokyo, recently shut down one of its main incinerators, because it can’t store any more than the 200 metric tons of radioactive ash it already has that is too contaminated to bury in a landfill.

According to the California-based Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN), burning Fukushima’s radioactive rubble is the worst possible way to deal with the problem. That’s because incinerating it releases much more radioactivity into the air, not only magnifying the contamination all over Japan but also sending it up into the jet stream. Once in the jet stream, the radioactive particles travel across the Northern Hemisphere, coming back down to earth with rain, snow, or other precipitation. Five days after the Fukushima meltdowns began, radioactive fallout from the disaster reached the West Coast of the United States. Approximately a week later, Fukushima fallout was measured as far away as France.

In October, the journal Nature reported that the Japanese government’s initial estimates of radiation from Fukushima were substantially less than what Scandinavian researchers calculated from a global network of radiation monitoring stations that the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization uses to detect nuclear weapons tests.

Radiation used to be a word that evoked serious concern in a lot of people. However, the nuclear industry and its supporters have done a masterful job in allaying public fears about it. They do this in significant part by relying on outdated and highly questionable data collected on Japanese atom bomb survivors, while at the same time ignoring and dismissing inconvenient but much more relevant evidence that shows the actual harmful effects of radiation exposure from nuclear accidents. Author Gayle Greene explains this well in a recent article here. In their attempt to win the public over to their viewpoint, nuclear proponents even trot out the dubious theory of radiation hormesis, which says that low doses of radiation are actually good for you, because they stimulate an immune response. Well, so does something that causes an allergic reaction. But I digress…

Fukushima’s Unending Fallout

Fetuses in utero, infants, and young children—all of whom have quickly dividing cells—as well as the elderly and people with compromised immune systems are most vulnerable to radiation exposure. “Official” sources like the Environmental Protection Agency and the UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Air Monitoring Station consistently downplay the health effects of the fallout. In fact, the EPA was so confident that Fukushima fallout would not be a problem for U.S. citizens that it stopped its specific monitoring of fallout from Fukushima less than two months after the meltdowns began.

But neglecting to monitor the fallout will not make it go away. In fact, another enormous problem with radioactive contamination is that it bioaccumulates in the environment, which means it concentrates as it moves up the food chain. (Think of mercury in fish.) Because many radionuclides are so long-lived, this can be a problem for a very long time. For example, the U.K. is only nowconsidering lifting restrictions on the remaining 334 sheep farms in Wales that are still prohibited from selling any meat because of contamination from the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986.

In this video, FFAN member Kimberly Roberson points out that the first disaster at Fukushima Daiichi following the earthquake and tsunami was accidental: “However, by burning the millions of tons of radioactive rubble, it’s going to provide a brand new humanitarian crisis.” She observes that this crisis—“transgenerational DNA damage that’s passed well into the future”—is additional and intentional, and that everything possible must be done to stop it.

Roberson’s point is well taken. However, the desperate yearning among the Japanese to get past this disaster combined with the uncharted territory of dealing with a triple-whammy catastrophe of this magnitude—earthquake, tsunami, and three nuclear meltdowns—seems to be clouding their vision. The truth is, a nuclear disaster offers no easy or good choices. But some, like vaporizing the radionuclides throughout the atmosphere, will unnecessarily prolong the danger to the people and environment of Japan and spread the pain far and wide. http://whowhatwhy.com/2012/01/20/fukushima-update-why-we-should-still-be-worried/#ixzz1k8A3T2DJ