Nuclear power-not clean, not renewable – Bill Gates is wrong
Bill Gates is wrong about nuclear power http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/english_editorials/984773.html
By Cho Chun-ho, professor of atmospheric sciences at Kyung Hee University Feb.28,2021 To prevent the climate crisis, we need to reorient our energy grids from fossil fuels to solar and wind power. Some argue we should also expand nuclear power, since nuclear plants don’t emit carbon dioxide.
Automobile accidents cause many fatalities, but people keep driving cars because of social inertia. But an accident at a nuclear plant would create damage on a scale that would exceed whatever benefits we derive from nuclear power.
As of 2018, cleanup from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant had cost 236 trillion won (US$213.37 billion). But even that wasn’t enough to deal with the radioactive wastewater that Japan now intends to dump into the ocean. Most of that cost is being borne not by the company operating the nuclear plant but by taxpayers.
There’s not a government on earth that can deal competently with an accident at a nuclear plant. Even Japan’s meticulously designed safety net was helpless before such an accident.
Furthermore, the cost of generating nuclear power has gone up 26% in the past ten years. Part of that price hike results from the need to prevent previously unconsidered risks, such as the Fukushima accident. Another issue is that demand for nuclear reactors has been recently falling around the world, pushing nuclear power out of the market.
In the book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” Bill Gates argues that nuclear power is ideal for responding to climate disaster because it’s the only emissions-free source of energy that can be supplied continuously around the clock.
In 2020, a team of researchers led by Benjamin Sovacool, a professor at the University of Sussex, published a paper in the journal Nature Energy analyzing renewable energy and nuclear energy’s impact on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The relationship between renewable energy and nuclear power is mutually exclusive: one tends to crowd out the other.
Over the past ten years, the cost of solar and wind power has fallen by 89% and 70%, respectively. That’s because renewables have been the focus of technological innovation, which has entailed a huge amount of investment.
In 2020, the International Energy Agency declared that solar power was the cheapest source of electricity. In countries that have focused investment on renewables, renewable energy holds an advantage in the market even when governments reduce or totally eliminate subsidies.
Solar and wind power accounted for 72% of power capacity added around the globe in 2019. As renewables’ share of the energy mix increases, nuclear power — which is inflexible because output cannot be adjusted — has become a headache for the energy regime.
Multinational firms such as Apple, Google and Microsoft are pushing their suppliers to provide parts that are completely made with renewable energy — which doesn’t include nuclear power.
Nuclear power may be a low-carbon source of energy, but it’s not renewable because of the nuclear waste it produces. We can’t have both nuclear power and renewable energy because they rely on different paradigms. So which one are we going to choose?
USA’s continuing nuclear waste debacle blamed on government contractors
 Steven Chu Blames Government Contractors For Ongoing Nuclear Waste Debacle, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2021/02/28/steven-chu-blames-government-contractors-for-ongoing-nuclear-waste-debacle/?sh=4ec11b8131ebJeff McMahonSenior ContributorThe United States continues to struggle with legacy military nuclear waste, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu said, because the contractors making billions from it have opposed a better solution. “If you had a small R&D program that could find a much better, cost-effective way of doing it wouldn’t it be worth it?” Chu asked during a Stanford University webinar last month. “Okay, $6 billion—What’s a good R&D program? Ten percent? Five percent? “It was being nibbled down to $100,000,” he said of his effort to fund R&D during his tenure as Obama’s first energy secretary. “It’s like in the third or fourth decimal place because the contractors who had these huge grants didn’t want better ways, and they just wanted the billion per year coming to the State of Washington, going into Tennessee, going to South Carolina, literally, because it greased the economy.” Chu doesn’t identify the contractors by name, but major contractors in those states include Bechtel, managing the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington; UCOR, managing cleanup at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee; and Areva, which absorbed the company that during Chu’s tenure pursued the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) designed to process waste in South Carolina. Bechtel, Areva and UCOR’s parent company, Amentum—have extensive lobbying activities recorded in disclosure forms. I was able to reach representatives from Bechtel and Areva, but they were unable to offer comment on the weekend.
Chu is a professor of physics and molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University and was president in 2020 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He won the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and is credited by President Obama with designing on a napkin the technology that capped the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. |
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Influence of Biden administration brings peaceful push between India, China, Pakistan
India’s sudden peace push with nuclear rivals China, Pak shows Biden impact, Business Standard, 27 Feb 21, The detente in South Asia shows all three countries responding to initiatives from the Biden administration After a year of some of the worst fighting on India’s frontiers with Pakistan and China, all three countries are suddenly talking peace as they wait to see how President Joe Biden will shift policy in the region.
India and China’s top diplomats on Thursday discussed plans to disengage troops from their Himalayan border, which last year saw the deadliest clashes since the 1970s. The phone call between Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, which stretched for more than an hour, came shortly after India and Pakistan released a rare joint statement by senior army officials announcing a halt in operations along their border.
The moves reduce tensions in one of Asia’s top flashpoints, where three nuclear-armed countries regularly challenge each other’s territorial claims. While India and Pakistan have fought three wars since Britain left the subcontinent and barely have any trade, tensions between New Delhi and Beijing escalated last year to the point where Prime Minister Narendra Modi banned hundreds of Chinese apps and slowed investment approvals.
The Biden administration welcomed the announcement on reimplementing the 2003 ceasefire agreement, which it had advocated. “When it comes to the US role, we continue to support direct dialogue between India and Pakistan on Kashmir and other issues of concern,” US State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.
Previous moves toward peace between India and Pakistan, including a statement in May 2018 after an escalation of cross-border shelling, have dissipated quickly. Whether they can actually build on this and move toward a more permanent peace remains an open question, but at least for the moment the shifting geopolitical winds are providing a seemingly rare opportunity to talk instead of fight.
“It eases the pressure,” Najmuddin Shaikh, Pakistan’s former foreign secretary and ambassador to nations including the U.S., said by phone when asked about the ceasefire. “Essentially what needs to come ahead is what has been proposed — that there be a resumption of dialogue.” https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/india-s-sudden-peace-push-with-nuclear-rivals-china-pak-shows-biden-impact-121022600628_1.html
Labour’s nuclear weapons stance needs a rethink
Labour’s nuclear weapons stance needs a rethink, Guardian, Richard Norton-Taylor
London 28 Feb 21,
Readers respond to the shadow defence secretary’s announcement that his party’s commitment to Trident is ‘non-negotiable’
You report (Labour to state ‘non-negotiable’ support for UK’s nuclear weapons, 25 February) that the shadow defence secretary, John Healey, says his party’s commitment to nuclear weapons is “non-negotiable”, seemingly taking a harder line even than successive Conservative governments, which have at least supported talks on multilateral nuclear disarmament.
The new Labour leadership in its rhetoric seems more frightened of being accused at home of being weak on defence than a nuclear attack by a foreign power. For years, Whitehall analysts have considered a pandemic more likely than any real threat of a nuclear attack. Yet for years, ministers and opposition frontbenchers ignored the former while exaggerating the latter. Trade union leaders, meanwhile, back a new Trident missile programme and spending more than £200bn on unusable weapons, citing the need to preserve highly skilled jobs. Yet Britain has had to bank on French engineers for civil nuclear power stations of which Britain now appears to be in dire need. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/28/labours-nuclear-weapons-stance-needs-a-rethink
Jeremy Corbyn – Britain Should Join Nuclear Ban Treaty and Scrap Nukes.
Jeremy Corbyn – Britain Should Join Nuclear Ban Treaty & Scrap Nukes. https://labouroutlook.org/2021/02/27/jeremy-corbyn-britain-should-join-nuclear-ban-treaty-scrap-nukes/, 27th February 2021 “From coronavirus to environmental destruction to economic inequality, we face threats that the war machine cannot fix, & can only worsen.”Jeremy Corbyn used a speech at the Stop the War Coalition AGM today to make the case for the labour movement taking a stand against nuclear weapons and US-led wars of intervention.
Speaking to Labour Outlook he said, “The public consensus is changing. One hundred and twenty countries have signed the Treaty on the Prevention of Nuclear Weapons at the UN this year.”
In his speech at the AGM, Jeremy pointed out how three out of five people in the UK think we should join them, and four out of five people support a total ban on all nuclear weapons globally.
Jeremy added, “Something else has happened. People have begun to understand where the real threats to our security are.
From coronavirus to environmental destruction to economic inequality, we face threats that the war machine cannot fix, and can only worsen.”
Yesterday saw Labour members across the country oppose the Party’s leadership decision to say support for nuclear weapons was not negotiable, including Emma Dent Coad and Diane Abbott MP in interviews with this publication.
Making Waves — Beyond Nuclear International
The original peace boat sets sail again
Making Waves — Beyond Nuclear International
8% of Japanese consumers still hesitate to buy Fukushima food products
At their own risk and peril. There is no acceptable safe threshold when it comes to radioactive contamination.
Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori (left) promotes peaches from the prefecture in the city of Fukushima in July.
Feb 28, 2021
About 8.1% of consumers in Japan still hesitate to buy food products from Fukushima Prefecture almost 10 years after the March 2011 nuclear disaster, a survey by the Consumer Affairs Agency has shown.
Although the figure is the lowest since the survey started in February 2013, the finding is “very regrettable,” Shinji Inoue, minister for consumer affairs and food safety, said after the survey was released Friday. “Safety has been secured” for produce from Fukushima, he added.
The latest survey, the 14th of its kind, was carried out online on Jan. 15-19, with answers received from 5,176 people in their 20s to 60s mainly in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
The share of respondents who hesitate to buy food products from Fukushima has been on the decline since hitting 19.6% in the August 2014 survey, and fell below 10% for the first time in the latest survey.
Fukushima is home to Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 plant, the site of the triple meltdown disaster triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.
According to the survey, the share of respondents who hesitate to buy food products from Iwate, Miyagi or Fukushima prefectures dropped to a record low of 6.1%, down from 6.4% in the previous poll in February 2020. The three prefectures were hit hardest in the disaster.
A record high 62.1% of respondents said they do not know that checks for radioactive substances have been conducted on food products from disaster areas. The figure has been rising since standing at 22.4% in the first survey.
An official said the agency will continue efforts to not only boost the share of people who are aware of radiation checks but also offer all of the information available about radioactive substances in food products.https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/02/28/national/fukushima-products-survey/
Tepco finishes nuclear fuel removal from Fukushima reactor pool
The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant’s No. 3 reactor
Feb 28, 2021
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. said Sunday it has removed all 566 nuclear fuel assemblies from the spent fuel pool of the No. 3 reactor at its Fukushima No. 1 plant.
It is the first time that fuel removal has been completed for any of the three reactors that suffered meltdowns in the March 2011 accident at the plant in Fukushima Prefecture.
The fuel removal operation at the No. 3 reactor began in April 2019.
On Sunday, the company using remote control devices moved the last six assemblies to a common storage facility within the plant premises. A large covering was placed over the upper part of the No. 3 reactor building to prevent radioactive substances from being scattered.
Tepco planned to start the fuel removal from the No. 3 reactor building as early as late 2014, but delayed the schedule repeatedly as it faced difficulty getting rid of debris left by the explosion in the building.
The operation also took more time than expected due to machinery malfunction issues.
The removal of 1,533 fuel assemblies from the No. 4 reactor building was completed in December 2014.
Tepco aims to finish pulling all fuel assemblies out of other reactor buildings by the end of 2031, including the No. 1 building, where a lot of debris is scattered about, and the No. 2 building, where radiation levels are particularly high.https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/02/28/national/tepco-fukushima-no-1-radiation-3-11-tsunami-earthquakes-fukushima/
All spent fuel finally removed from reactor at Fukushima plant
Steel frames remain exposed on the wall facing north at the No. 3 reactor building at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, showing the impact from a hydrogen explosion in March 2011.
February 28, 2021
Hazardous work to remove all spent nuclear fuel from a reactor storage pool at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant was finally completed Feb. 28, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
It marked the first time for any of the storage pools at the three stricken reactors to be emptied out, and came less than two weeks before the 10th anniversary of the triple meltdown at the nuclear complex in Fukushima Prefecture northeast of Tokyo.
The two-year effort involved the removal of all the 566 spent fuel units left in the pool in the No. 3 reactor’s building.
Completion of the removal work at the No. 3 reactor building, severely damaged by a hydrogen explosion during the meltdown, eased concerns about the overall safety of the embattled plant.
The No. 3 reactor’s storage pool is situated on an upper floor of the building, posing a danger due to fears of another powerful earthquake damaging the structure and jeopardizing TEPCO’s ability to cool them.
Spent fuel needs to be kept cool as it emits high levels of radiation and decaying heat.
The utility planned to move the spent fuel from the No. 3 reactor’s pool to a shared pool for storage on the grounds of the plant to ensure the spent fuel can be safely managed.
The removal work got under way in April 2019 after rubble and other debris were cleared away. A special crane with a robotic arm was used to lift the spent fuel.
Operators worked remotely during the removal process from an operational center 500 meters away because of high radiation readings inside the reactor building.
The work was marred by a flurry of malfunctions in the equipment and the crane soon after the project got started.
The challenge was further complicated by rubble and debris in the pool that distorted the handles of some of the spent fuel units.
During the last stretch of the removal work, operators picked up the pace by working in shifts around the clock.
The remaining six units were transferred to the shared pool on Feb. 28. The development came roughly three years after the government and TEPCO announced an initial roadmap for the work in December 2011.
The removal of spent fuel from the No. 4 reactor building was completed in late 2014. The No. 4 reactor had been shut down for maintenance prior to the disaster triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
With regard to the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors, which went in meltdown after the quake and tsunami disaster knocked out cooling systems, a combined 1,000 spent fuel units remain in their storage pools.
TEPCO is aiming at starting the removal work at the two reactors in fiscal 2024 or beyond.
Apart from the spent fuel, 800 to 900 tons of melted nuclear fuel remain in the No. 1 through No. 3 reactors.
INTERVIEW: Kan Had Not Assumed Nuclear Accident before 2011
Februay 27, 2021 Tokyo, Feb. 27 (Jiji Press)–Looking back at the March 2011 nuclear accident, former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he had thought that a nuclear accident would never occur in Japan and admitted that he was wrong in the assumption.
“Before the disaster, I had thought that a nuclear accident would not take place, but I was wrong,” Kan, a lawmaker of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, told Jiji Press in a recent interview. “(Japan) should scrap all nuclear plants,” he said.
“I feel grave responsibility for the death of many elderly people and people suffering illnesses when they took refuge in the early stages of the accident,” said Kan, who was prime minister at the time of the triple meltdown accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s <9501> Fukushima No. 1 plant, stricken by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
“The biggest problem” that the government faced in addressing the nuclear accident was that “correct information did not come” from TEPCO, the former Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency or the former Nuclear Safety Commission.
On his much-criticized visit to the stricken plant in Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan, on the day after the accident, Kan said he made the visit as he thought that he would not be able to capture the situation at the plant. https://jen.jiji.com/jc/eng?g=eco&k=2021022700560
Fukushima disaster: Is TEPCO nuclear plant still a safety risk?
Ten years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. has been criticized for failing to learn safety lessons.
A seismograph at the Fukushima Daiichi plant malfunctioned during a recent earthquake
Februay 26, 2021
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, is facing renewed criticism that it has failed to learn the lessons of the 2011 disaster there.
Next month marks the 10-year anniversary of the massive earthquake and tsunami that caused meltdowns in three nuclear reactors.
Opponents of nuclear power and other civic groups are calling for greater transparency in TEPCO’s operations. They cite a number of issues as evidence that TEPCO is still falling short of its responsibilities, including a significant security breach recently at one of the company’s plants.
It was discovered in early February that an employee at TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in northern Japan had used a colleague’s identity card to enter the central control room after misplacing his own pass.
The incident, which happened five months earlier, was not reported to the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) until a quarterly meeting in late January on the grounds that it was not considered a major breach of security.
The NRA disagreed and concluded that the unauthorized entry by the worker into the nerve center of the plant “affected security.” TEPCO was ordered to make improvements.
Fukushima’s earthquake problem
The fallout from that incident was worsened after a serious earthquake on February 13 shook northeast Japan, including the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Seismologists said the magnitude 7.3 tremor was the largest to strike Japan since April 2011 and was actually the latest aftershock from the Great East Japan Earthquake nearly a decade ago.
TEPCO admitted a short while later that seismometers installed in two of the reactor buildings broke down last year and had not been repaired.
In addition, a report to the NRA confirmed that the earthquake caused radioactive water to slosh over the edges of containment tanks at the site, while the water level around two of the reactors has fallen.
That could indicate that the tremor enlarged existing fissures in the surrounding concrete or created new ones, enabling the escape of water that is needed to keep the reactors cool and prevent the release of more radioactivity into the atmosphere.
A hard-hitting editorial in the Asahi newspaper after the security breach at the Niigata plant said the incident “raised doubts” about TEPCO’s “fitness to operate nuclear power plants.”
“The utility must thoroughly reexamine every conceivable issue and raise its workers’ safety awareness to prevent missteps, once and for all,” it added.
In a statement issued to DW, TEPCO said it was “addressing” the issue of the malfunctioning seismometers, which may have failed in July due to heavy rain.
“We are now working to restore the system as soon as we can,” the company said.
TEPCO excuses ‘not acceptable’
Hajime Matsukubo, secretary general of the Tokyo-based Citizens’ Nuclear Information Centre, said the excuses of a company charged with decommissioning four damaged reactors that caused the second-worst nuclear disaster in history are “not acceptable.”
“The way that the company is managing things suggests to me that they have not learned their lessons from the March 2011 disaster,” he said.
This 2011 TV image shows the aftermath of an explosion at the plant
“TEPCO says it is ready, for example, to resume operations at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, but now we have this very serious security breach,” he added.
“I agree that the company has made great strides with the technology that is being developed to contain the situation at the Fukushima plant and to decommission those damaged reactors, but there are too many human errors creeping into their operations,” said Matsukubo.
“They cannot fully manage these sites and, I would say, they do not have the capabilities to manage nuclear facilities.”
Azby Brown, lead researcher for the nuclear monitoring organization Safecast Japan, agrees that the company has made progress in the decommissioning work, but says that errors keep cropping up.
“A lot of things they are doing very well, because this is a hugely challenging operation, so we have to give them credit for that, but there are still some gaping holes that management really needs to plug if they want to begin to rebuild public trust,” he said.
“They have all the appropriate security regulations in place, but then we see things like this happening,” he said. “It’s almost as if there is an institutional allergy to transparency and informing the regulators immediately a problem occurs and then addressing that problem. And that is not helping their reputation at all.”
Increase in radiation
The company’s errors have immediate implications, he says, as monitoring equipment installed at sea off the plant detected a small increase in highly radioactive caesium in the days after the earthquake, indicating that water had indeed escaped from the site and was dispersing into the ocean.
And that coincided with the announcement that a black rockfish caught off the prefecture by a fishermen’s collective had caesium levels five times above the government’s permitted levels.
Local fishermen, whose livelihoods were devastated by the nuclear accident, have been carrying out limited test fishing since June 2012 and had been hoping this year to resume small-scale shipments of fish to market if they were able to prove to inspectors that all the fish being caught were safe to consume.
The revelations surrounding TEPCO’s latest problems is unlikely to reassure the public that produce from much of northeast Japan is safe to buy.
https://www.dw.com/en/fukushima-disaster-is-tepco-nuclear-plant-still-a-safety-risk/a-56713519
Last 6 assemblies Stored in Containers; Nuclear Fuel Removal from Unit 3 Pool at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to End
Nuclear fuel being lifted by a fuel handling machine. A monitor screen shows a lot of small debris in the pool, at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, April 15, 2019.
February 26, 2021
The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) stored the last six nuclear fuels in special containers in the spent fuel pool at the Unit 3 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on April 26. Although the work began in April 2019, it will be completed earlier than the target of the end of March 2021. A total of 566 nuclear fuels, 514 spent and 52 unused, were stored in the pool. (Shinichi Ogawa)
This is the second reactor to have nuclear fuel removed from its spent fuel pool, following the Unit 4 reactor (1,535 nuclear fuels) which finished in December 2014. This is the first time for Units 1-3, which suffered a core meltdown (meltdown).
The initial plan was to start removing the nuclear fuel from the Unit 3 reactor by the end of 2002, but the high radiation dose became a barrier to the work. A dome-shaped cover was installed on top of the building to prevent radioactive materials from spreading outside. TEPCO had indicated plans to start removing the radioactive materials in November 2006, but due to a series of problems with cranes and other equipment, the work was postponed for inspection and replacement of parts.
According to the plan presented by the government and TEPCO, the removal of nuclear fuel from the pool is scheduled to start in FY2015-28 for Unit 1 (392 nuclear fuels) and in FY2012-26 for Unit 2 (615 nuclear fuels).
Radiation criteria sow confusion for evacuees
Workers decontaminate a road in a special reconstruction district in the town of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture, in October. | FUKUSHIMA MINPO
February 26, 2021
Traffic was lighter on the Joban Expressway in the Futaba district in Fukushima Prefecture during the New Year holiday, with people avoiding traveling back to see their relatives due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Roadside signs show the radiation levels of areas near the no-go zones put in place after meltdowns in 2011 at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, reflecting the fact that, even after 10 years, Fukushima residents are unable to return to their homes.
The no-go zones, which are considered uninhabitable for the foreseeable future due to high radiation levels, stretch through six Fukushima towns and villages: Tomioka, Okuma, Futaba, Namie, Katsurao and Iitate. Parts of those zones are now designated as special reconstruction districts, where the government will concentrate its decontamination efforts so that residents can return to their homes in the future.
A decade after the tsunami-triggered nuclear disaster, decontaminating the areas damaged by the fallout is a crucial part of the reconstruction that will pave the way for evacuees to come back to their homes and resume the life they had before the disaster.
But two figures of radiation exposure levels — 20 millisieverts a year and 1 millisievert a year — that the government provides as safety criteria are causing confusion among residents, triggering criticism of what could be called a double standard.
One of the criteria for the government to lift evacuation orders is whether the area’s annual cumulative radiation level has become 20 millisieverts or below, based on a recommendation from the nongovernmental International Commission on Radiological Protection.
When there is a nuclear disaster similar to that at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the ICRP recommends that annual radiation exposure should be limited to between 20 to 100 millisieverts immediately after the disaster. It then recommends the exposure is lowered to between 1 to 20 millisieverts during the reconstruction period.
As the minimum recommended exposure level right after a disaster, the 20 millisieverts mark became the radiation level yardstick for the central government to order the evacuation of a certain area after the nuclear meltdowns.
Meanwhile, the government has set up a long-term decontamination goal of reducing the radiation levels of contaminated areas to an annual 1 millisievert and below. This is to keep a lifetime exposure level below 100 millisievert — the level at which it starts to affect one’s health.
Therefore, the government stipulated the annual 1 millisievert exposure level in its reconstruction policy plan for Fukushima approved by the Cabinet in July 2012. The Environment Ministry aims to keep radiation levels in the special reconstruction district under 1 millisievert as a long-term goal.
However, the no-go zones had been above 50 millisieverts on an annual basis immediately after the nuclear meltdowns. The radiation level is on the decline with natural attenuation of radioactive cesium as well as weathering effects, but there are still patches with high radiation levels.
Even within the no-go zones, there is no easy way to carry out decontamination. Typically it is done by mowing lawns, raking up fallen leaves, washing down roads and other surfaces with a high-pressure water hose, and wiping off the walls and roofs of buildings and housing.
“It’s not easy to bring down radiation levels to 1 millisievert or below just with decontamination,” said an Environment Ministry official in charge.
In Article 1 of the radiation decontamination legislation established after the nuclear disaster, it is stipulated that the purpose of decontamination is to “minimize the health risks of radioactive exposure as much as possible.”
Despite the criteria for easing evacuation orders and the long-term goal on bringing down radiation levels, it is unclear how the government can lower radiation levels to 1 millisievert after evacuation orders are lifted for no-go zones.
The two figures are creating a confusion among local residents, who are torn between the desire to return to their homes and concerns over the radiation level.
“I won’t feel safe until annual radiation levels are below 1 millisievert,” one resident said, while another said, “Can you say for sure that an annual exposure of 20 millisieverts won’t affect our health in the future?”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/02/26/national/fukushima-radiation-criteria/
Quake shifts 53 water tanks at Fukushima plant
February 26, 2021
The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says it has found that 53 tanks storing radioactive wastewater were shifted from their original locations by a powerful earthquake earlier this month. But it says there have been no leaks from the tanks.
Tokyo Electric Power Company inspected 1,074 tanks after a magnitude-7.3 quake struck off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture on February 13.
TEPCO discovered that 53 tanks had moved from their original locations by 3 to 19 centimeters.
TEPCO treats the water used to cool molten nuclear fuel at the damaged reactors before storing it in tanks. But the water still contains radioactive substances.
The company says it also found that five sections of piping connecting the tanks shifted more than the limit recommended by the manufacturer.
But it says it has so far found no cracks or other abnormalities in the piping. It plans to conduct further examinations.
TEPCO also laid out a plan to repair two seismometers at the No.3 reactor building next month.
It came to light on Monday that the devices went out of order partly because of heavy rain last July. As a result, they were unable to collect data when the quake struck.
1.This Month
So far, the nuclear lobby has bought the hearts and minds of governments, but has not won the hearts and minds of the people. In a propaganda war, as in all wars, truth is the first victim. But there are many journalists and others out there who will counter the lies of the nuclear industry.
Today, across the world, the nuclear industry is unpopular. It is particularly unpopular with women, and with indigenous peoples. It’s unpopular with those who have suffered from it, such as the veterans who attended nuclear bomb tests, and the ‘downwinders’ who suffered from those same tests. It’s unpopular with families afflicted with cancer from uranium mining. It’s unpopular with Ukrainians and Japanese whose lives have been disrupted by nuclear disasters.
he nuclear industry is also unpopular higher up in the social food chain. Many academics, economists, scientists, and doctors are concerned about the dangers of all kinds that are intrinsic to the nuclear industry.
So who does like the nuclear industry? – careerists in the nuclear industry, careerists in politics, academia, careerists in the Murdoch media, highly paid uranium workers, communities that exist only because of mining, – (the latter can’t really afford not to support it).
The nuclear industry, following in the footsteps of the tobacco and asbestos industries will now blanket its servant mass media, and any other possible avenues – such as education, and politics, – with propaganda.
The main focus of the nuclear lobby’s propaganda? This will now be CLIMATE ACTION .
They’re spending an awful lot of money on this. Despite this huge investment in deception, the nuclear lobby is not winning.
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