Fukushima’s forgotten souls
Photo taken on Feb. 22, 2017 shows a warning sign at Okuma near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan
March 11, 2018
by Jon Day
TOKYO, March 11 (Xinhua) — “Everyone used to call her ‘Grandma.’ She was one of the sweetest, kindest and most generous people you could ever hope to meet, especially under such appalling circumstances in Fukushima,” Kana Fujimoto, a Tokyo-based volunteer recalled, sadly.
The 31-year-old volunteer for the Save Minimisoma Project referred to a senior widow, who she came across, in the project hosting the victims of the massive earthquake and the ensuing tsunami and nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011.
However, “Grandma” has already passed away.
“She had a toothy smile that could warm you from the inside out, words of wisdom that would provide pause for thought in such a time of sheer turbulence and, there was always a handful of candy available to kids, whose lives had also been uprooted and turned upside down,” Fujimoto told Xinhua.
The project has run its course providing emergency relief supplies to the thousands who were somewhat unceremoniously dumped into small “temporary shelters” in Fukushima Prefecture comprising rows of camp-like wooden huts, since the disasters took place seven years ago.
A contingent of Tokyo-based volunteers like Fujimoto, joined with local outreach groups and continued their work since then.
In recent times, essentials such as food, fresh water and vegetables were no longer the priority and the majority of those placed in shelters had been moved into regular subsidized accommodation.
For the elderly victims of the disasters, however, the real crisis for them was still unfolding on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, with the ultimate conclusion being the very bleakest imaginable.
Many individuals and families from the hardest hit areas like Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima, even if they had to do a stint in temporary accommodation, through family and work connections had managed to restart their lives in other parts of the country.
“And while the disasters for many will forever haunt their memories, they’re safe in the knowledge that now, life is as normal as it can be and they are fully-functioning members of society,” anthropologist and sessional lecturer, Keiko Gono, told Xinhua recently.
“But for the elderly people who did not have the resources or the will, for that matter, to fully leave their hometowns and for some even on a psychological level, it meant they have been permanently displaced albeit physically and/or mentally,” Gono explained.
While it is hard to quantify because there is no pathology for “death by isolation,” “or death by loneliness,” she firmly believes that a staggering number of seniors passed away before their time simply due to a lack of social care, connection and sense of community.
For an 87-year old like “Grandma,” for example, to be told that she had no choice but to leave the home she built with her husband, the family farming business, the neighbors and broader community she so fondly associated with, and suddenly find herself in an emergency shelter resembling an internment camp, the psychological effects would be damaging beyond belief.
According to the latest statistics conducted between December and February this year, in the seven years after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, only 4 percent said they had recovered their community bonds, while just 15 percent from the hardest-hit areas said they had regained their communities, but only to some extent.
Gono explained that these numbers were probably just the tip of the iceberg, as typically speaking and as per Japanese culture and norms, Japanese seniors would be far less likely to complain about their situation if it meant a trouble to others.
This area has been one of the government’s biggest failings, and the phenomena of senior social isolation and death from loneliness have been allowed to slip through the cracks, said the anthropologist.
The fact that professional counseling and mental health services are woefully lacking for these seniors who have lost spouses, seen families relocate and barely visit, and, bluntly speaking, are utterly isolated with all dreams of ever returning to their homes dashed, is nothing less than shameful for the government here.
“Without serious intervention, these dear old people, through no fault of their own, will literally die alone,” Gono said.
The statistics underscore this seemingly forgotten social injustice.
The numbers of people who lost everything in the disasters and died alone after being placed in temporary housing hit a record-high just last year.
According to official accounts, 63 people living unattended lost their lives in temporary accommodation. Of those 52 were in Miyagi and 11 of the isolated deaths were in Iwate prefecture.
The number of unattended deaths, unfathomably, rose by 27 cases when compared to the previous year, according to the statistics.
Since the disasters in 2011, officials figures showed that 235 people died in complete isolation and more than 80 percent of these possibly preventable deaths happened to people aged over 60.
“Grandma did everything she could to help others. For a while she could do her own shopping and when her shopping arrived there was always an extra radish or some tangerines for her neighbors, snacks for the kids, and, perhaps, most importantly, a smile for everyone that seemed to say ‘you’ll be ok. We’ll be ok. We’re in this together’,” said Fujimoto.
“But the cruel irony of the situation was the older and more immobile Grandma became, the less people would see her. She was placed a long way from her friends, and if she didn’t have the energy to go to the local store, she could go weeks without any human interaction,” she explained.
Fujimoto added that there were a lot of good charities and outreach groups doing the very best they could to create inclusive environments, particularly for the youngest and the oldest who needed it most. But, funds were always short, and not all the volunteers lived in the area.
Fujimoto herself was commuting from Tokyo once or twice a week soon after the disaster, but had to scale back her volunteering due to the expense of traveling and her own family needs.
More recently, she managed to get there every other week as something was “different” about Grandma.
“She’d started saying things like she was lonely and wanted to be with her friends and that her husband had told her that she didn’t need to live like this and that he was waiting for her with a smile,” said Fujimoto.
“The last time I saw her, I could sense she could no longer battle the loneliness. From being such a vibrant community member to a forgotten soul was just not livable for her and heartbreaking for me,” she said.
A few minutes passed as Fujimoto wept silently for the loss of a life that had meant so much to her and many other people.
There should have been more care available. Similar-aged people could be housed together with carers helping them interact, she said.
“This country should have done better,” she said.
Stark health findings for Fukushima monkeys
March 11, 2018
By Cindy Folkers
Seven years after the Fukushima, Japan nuclear disaster began, forcing evacuations of at least 160,000 people, research has uncovered significant health impacts affecting monkeys living in the area and exposed to the radiological contamination of their habitat.
Shin-ichi Hayama, a wild animal veterinarian, has been studying the Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), or snow monkey, since before the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Now, his research has shown that monkeys in Fukushima have significantly low white and red blood cell counts as well as a reduced growth rate for body weight and smaller head sizes.
Hayama, who began his macaque research in 2008, had access to monkeys culled by Fukushima City as a crop protection measure. He continued his work after the Fukushima nuclear explosions. As a result, he is uniquely positioned to discover how low, chronic radiation exposure can affect generations of monkeys.
Japanese Macaque monkeys share close DNA with humans
The macaque is an old world monkey native to Japan, living in the coldest climates of all of the non-human primates. Like humans, macaques enjoy a good soak in the mountain hot springs in the region. It is even said that they have developed a “hot tub culture” and enjoy time at the pools to get warm during winter.
However, snow monkeys and humans share more than a love of hot springs. Human DNA differs from rhesus monkeys, a relative of the snow monkey, by just 7%. While that 7% can mean the difference between building vast cities to living unsheltered and outdoors, for basic processes like reproduction, these differences begin to fade. Consequently, what is happening to the macaques in Fukushima should send a warning about the implications for human health as well, and especially for evacuees now returning to a region that has been far from “cleaned up” to any satisfactory level.
Hayama’s research group has published two studies, each comparing data before and after the nuclear catastrophe began, and also between exposed and unexposed monkey populations. In a 2014 study, researchers compared monkeys from two regions of Japan, one group of monkeys from the Shimokita region, 400 Km north of Fukushima, and a second group of monkeys from contaminated land in Fukushima.
The monkeys in Fukushima had significantly low white and red blood cell counts. Other blood components were also reduced. The more a radioactive isotope called cesium was present in their muscles, the lower the white blood cell count, suggesting that the exposure to radioactive material contributed to the damaging blood changes. These blood levels have not recovered, even through 2017, meaning that this has become a chronic health issue.
Changes in blood are also found in people inhabiting contaminated areas around Chernobyl. Having a diminished number of white blood cells, which fight disease, can lead to a compromised immune system in monkeys as well as people, making both species unable to fight off all manner of disease.
Some macaque babies in the Fukushima zone have smaller brains post nuclear disaster
Hayama followed up his 2014 study with another in 2017 examining the differences in monkey fetus growth before and after the disaster. The researchers measured fetuses collected between 2008 and 2016 from Fukushima City, approximately 70 km from the ruined reactors. Comparing the relative growth of 31 fetuses conceived prior to the disaster and 31 fetuses conceived after the disaster revealed that body weight growth rate and head size were significantly lower in fetuses conceived after the disaster. Yet, there was no significant difference in maternal nutrition, meaning that radiation could be responsible.
Smaller head size indicates that the fetal brain was developmentally retarded although researchers could not identify which part was affected. The mothers’ muscles still contained radioactive cesium as in the 2014 study, although the levels had decreased. These mothers had conceived after the initial disaster began, meaning that their fetuses’ health reflects a continuing exposure from environmental contamination. This study mirrors human studies around Chernobyl that show similar impacts as well as research from atomic bomb survivors. Studies of birds in Chernobyl contaminated areas show that they have smaller brains.
Although Hayama has approached radiation experts to aid with his research, he claims they have rejected it, saying they don’t have resources or time, preferring to focus on humans. But humans can remove themselves from contaminated areas, and many have chosen to stay away despite government policies encouraging return. Tragically, monkeys don’t know to leave, and relocating them is not under discussion, making study of radiation’s impact on their health vital to inform radiation research on humans, the environment, and any resettlement plans the government of Japan may have.
Hayama presented his work most recently as part of the University of Chicago’s commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the first man-made controlled nuclear chain reaction. His work follows a long, important, and growing line of research demonstrating that radiation can not only damage in the obvious ways we have been told, but in subtle, yet destructive ways that were unexpected before. The implications for humans, other animals, and the environment, are stark.
Cindy Folkers is the radiation and health specialist at Beyond Nuclear.
This woman is winning the fight for justice after Fukushima
11 March 2018
by Kazue Suzuki and Shaun Burnie
Evacuee and Fukushima survivor, Mrs. Kanno, returns to her abandoned house nearly seven years after the nuclear accident.
On the seventh anniversary of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear accident, our thoughts and deepest sympathies continue to be with the people of Japan.
Every one of the tens of thousands evacuees from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi triple reactor meltdown has a story to tell.
In our latest radiation survey we had the privilege to hear the experience of Mrs Mizue Kanno. As we entered the exclusion zone of Namie, Ms Kanno told us of the events seven years ago that were to change her life, her family and those of thousands of others.
Mrs Kanno was a social worker in Futaba less than 10 km from the nuclear plant. Eventually she made her way home after the devastating earthquake, and over the next few days thousands of people were evacuated to her home district of Tsushima. Families moved into her home. But soon they were warned by men in gas masks and protective clothing to get out immediately. The radioactive fallout from the nuclear plant, about 32 km away, had deposited high levels of contamination in this mountainous area of Namie.
Evacuee and Fukushima survivor, Mrs. Kanno, watches Greenpeace radiation specialists Mai Suzuki and Laurence Bergot measure for contamination around her home located in the exclusion zone of Namie, Fukushima prefecture.
Mrs Kanno now lives in western Japan, many hundreds of kilometres from her home in Fukushima. While she is a victim of nuclear power, she isn’t passive observer – instead she’s a female activist determined to tell her story. She campaigns across the Kansai region against nuclear power and for renewable energy.
Like thousands of other evacuees, she has joined lawsuits filed against the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and the Japanese government. Already found guilty in multiple court proceedings of being criminally negligent in failing to take measures to prevent the meltdown, TEPCO and the government can expect many more rulings against them.
Because of the support of Mrs Kanno and her friends and neighbours, Greenpeace has been able to conduct a wide ranging survey inside the exclusion zone of Namie, published in our report, Reflecting in Fukushima.
While our survey report is filled with microsieverts and millisieverts, it’s far more about the lives and the land of Mrs Kanno her family, friends and neighbours. http://www.greenpeace.org/japan/Global/japan/pdf/RefFksm_EN.pdf
Closed entrance to Shimo-Tsushima school in the exclusion zone of Namie, Fukushima prefecture, Japan.
Measuring thousands of points around homes, forests and farmland, it’s clear that this is an area that should not be opened to the public for many decades. Yet the government opened a main artery, route 114, while we were working in Namie.
One consequence is that people are stopping off and visiting areas high in radiation. At one house, radiation hot spots were over 11 microsieverts per hour (μSv/h) at one meter, and 137μSv/hat 10 centimetres. These levels are thousands of times the background level before the nuclear accident, and mean you’d reach your recommended maximum annual exposure in six days.
Yet, two people were working 10 meters away from the hot spot with no dosimeters or protective clothing. Mrs Kanno and our radiation specialists explained the levels of contamination and why it was necessary to take precautions.
In one zone in Obori, we measured radiation that would expose a decontamination worker to the 1 mSv/y limit in just 10 working days. The whole area is contaminated to varying high levels that will remain a threat into next century. How could the government be thinking of opening this area as early as 2023? More importantly, why?
It’s actually simple and wholly cynical. The Japanese government is desperate to restart nuclear reactors. Today only three are operating. Having areas of Japan closed to human habitation because of radioactive contamination is a very major obstacle to the government’s ambitions to operate 30-35 nuclear reactors. It’s a constant reminder to the people of Japan of the risks and consequences of nuclear power.
Yet, there are signs of positive change. Last month a panel of experts established by the Foreign Minister called for a mass scaling up of renewables, and warned of the risks from depending on coal plants and nuclear power. The voices of Mrs Kanno, the other thousands of Fukushima evacuees and the majority of people in Japan, and their demand for a different energy future, will be heard.
Greenpeace radiation specialist Laurence Bergot in Obori, Namie Town inside the highly contaminated exclusion zone in Namie, Fukushima prefecture, Japan
Throughout our time in Namie, as we visited the highly contaminated area of Obori and Tsushima – quiet, remote areas of natural beauty – Mrs Kanno told us about the life and traditions of families who for generations had supported themselves by farming. Now all of them are displaced and scattered across Japan. Yet the government is failing to even acknowledge their rights under domestic and international human rights law.
This week, we will be traveling to Geneva with mothers who are evacuees from Fukushima to the United Nations Human Rights Council session on Japan. The Japanese government has been under pressure to stop its violations of the human rights of Fukushima evacuees. Last week it accepted all recommendations at the UN to respect the human rights of Fukushima citizens. This included the German government recommendation to restore to a maximum annual public exposure of 1 mSv. This global safety standard has been abandoned by the Abe government.
The government’s decision is important, but now they need to be implemented if they are genuine in their commitments to the United Nations. On the 16 March this year, Mrs Kanno and other evacuees and their lawyers will attend the Tokyo high court for a ruling on Fukushima against TEPCO and the Government. One of the evacuee mothers, Akiko Morimatsu, together with Greenpeace, on the same day will speak at the United Nations to challenge the Japanese government to now fully apply the UN recommendations.
While we will be thousands of kilometers apart, we will be with Mrs Kanno on her day in court in Tokyo and she will be with us in Geneva. The Fukushima nuclear disaster has shattered lives but it has also brought us together determined to prevent such a terrible event from ever happening again and to transition Japan to a secure and safe energy future based on renewables.
Kazue Suzuki is an Energy Campaigner at Greenpeace Japan and Shaun Burnie is a Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace Germany
Japan marks seventh anniversary of 3/11 with moment of silence
Seven years after Fukushima nuclear disaster, more than 70,000 Japanese cannot return home. Many more are living in areas deemed at “acceptable” levels of radioactive contamination.
An unidentified man offers prayers and a bouquet on Arahama Beach in Sendai’s Wakabayashi Ward early Sunday morning as Japan observed the seventh anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Mar 11, 2018
At 2:46 p.m. on Sunday, Japan observed a moment of silence to mark the seventh anniversary of the mega-quake and tsunami that left about 18,000 people dead or missing while triggering the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
The anniversary of the calamity on March 11, 2011, arrived as about 73,000 people from the disaster-hit areas have yet to return to their hometowns.
They include about 34,000 people from Fukushima Prefecture, who have no choice but to live outside the prefecture due to the radioactive contamination caused by the three reactor core meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 power station.
The death toll from the magnitude 9 Great East Japan Earthquake, subsequent tsunami and prolonged aftershocks had reached 15,895 as of Friday, the National Police Agency said, adding that 2,539 officially remain unaccounted for.
As of Feb. 13, over 53,000 of the 73,000 evacuees were living in government-funded temporary housing or public or private rental housing across the country, while nearly 20,000 were living with relatives or acquaintances, according to the Reconstruction Agency. The remaining 271 are hospital patients.
On Sunday a Tokyo memorial ceremony organized by the government was attended by Prince Akishino and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, along with representatives of the survivors in the hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, and other guests.
“Is it already seven years? Or, is it only seven years? I don’t know. Even though I think about it often, there are no answers in my heart,” Hideko Igarashi, a 70-year-old survivor from Fukushima Prefecture, said in her speech at the ceremony.
“We should not forget what we have learned from the disaster,” the woman from Soma said. “I sincerely pray for the peace and comfort of the victims and offer my most profound condolences.”
Abe said he believes the reconstruction projects in the Tohoku region are steadily making progress.
“More than 70,000 people are still living as evacuees, and many people continue to endure troubled uncomfortable lives seven years later,” Abe said. “When I think of the despair of those who lost beloved members of their families and friends in the disaster, I am overwhelmed even now with deep sorrow.”
“In areas that were affected by the earthquake and tsunami, the restoration of infrastructure closely related to everyday life is nearly complete, while 90 percent of the new homes required after the disaster are expected to be completed by this spring,” he added. Many of the tsunami-hit areas have been cleared of debris, and some areas are preparing raised areas for new homes to mitigate the risk of future tsunami damage. But despite the progress in these large, long-term construction projects, many evacuees have run out of patience and given up any hope of returning to their hometowns, opting to settle inland.
Abe also noted that evacuation orders are gradually being lifted in areas tainted by the triple core meltdown triggered by the tsunami-linked blackout at Fukushima No. 1, which is managed by Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings.
Reconstruction Minister Masayoshi Yoshino said during a press briefing Wednesday in Tokyo that more than 80 percent of the farmland in the area is available for planting again, and that over 90 percent of the fish-processing facilities affected have reopened. While echoing Abe’s remarks about steady progress, Prince Akishino expressed his feelings about those still struggling under difficult conditions.
“The government, local authorities nationwide and large numbers of people, both in Japan and abroad, have offered support in many ways,” he said.
“As a result, we have made progress in various areas such as construction and relocation of housing to higher ground, the resumption of industrial operations, improvement in living conditions, and the provision of new disaster prevention facilities,” the prince said.
“It is important that the hearts of the people remain with the afflicted for many years to come in order to ensure that each and every one of those who are in difficult situations will not be left behind and will be able to live in peace and good health, and that reconstruction will continue to make steady progress,” he said.
Seven years on, no end in sight for Fukushima’s long recovery
March 11, 2018
Japan faces myriad challenges to decommissioning and decontamination
Removing nuclear fuel from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant will take 30 to 40 years, ‘Tepco says’.
TOKYO — After helping shape nuclear policy in post-Fukushima Japan, Shunichi Tanaka, a former chief of the country’s nuclear watchdog, took on another tough assignment — moving to a village still struggling from the 2011 nuclear disaster to help with its recovery effort.
In February, Tanaka, who chaired the Nuclear Regulation Authority until last September, became a reconstruction adviser in the tiny village of Iitate, Fukushima Prefecture. Like many in surrounding localities, Iitate residents were ordered to evacuate after a powerful earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, led to meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings’ Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. To date, only around 10% of residents have returned.
“It won’t be easy to make life like it was before the disaster,” Tanaka said. Nonetheless he will help the village move forward by offering advice on nuclear decontamination and the ongoing dangers of radiation. He also acts as a go-between for the village and the national government.
“I’m a jack of all trades,” he says.
Shunichi Tanaka, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority.
In his former role at the NRA, Tanaka spearheaded an overhaul of Japan’s nuclear regulatory scheme, setting tough new standards for nuclear power operations intended to prevent another Fukushima-like accident. To date, 12 reactors have cleared the new standards. And yet the public remains largely distrustful of nuclear power — a problem Tanaka believes he can address by building up trust in the areas directly affected by the Fukushima disaster.
Challenges in that region, however, remain immense, none more so than decommissioning the damaged power plant. This involves the unprecedented feat of removing and safely storing the plant’s nuclear fuel, part of which has melted and escaped from the reactors it originally powered.
Back in September, Tepco and the national government reaffirmed their previous timeline for the cleanup, estimating the decommissioning process would take 30 to 40 years to complete. But the herculean nature of this task is becoming increasingly apparent. Nuclear fuel is too radioactive for humans to approach even when wearing protective gear, and must be handled by remotely controlled robots. But precision machinery is sensitive to radiation, and developing technology able to withstand conditions at the Fukushima site has proved intensely challenging.
“I truly cannot say” whether decommissioning can be wrapped up on a 30- to 40-year timeline, and “it is important to be honest,” said Hajimu Yamana, head of the government-backed Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation.
The process is also extremely costly. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2016 pegged costs such as decommissioning and victims’ compensation related to the disaster at 21.5 trillion yen ($202 billion at current rates), nearly double its initial estimate of 11 trillion yen.
Work to remove and store melted fuel, set to begin as soon as 2021, and assorted other decontamination tasks could pile on additional expenses, depending on how they progress. The Japan Center for Economic Research believes the real cost could be as high as 70 trillion yen. Much of this would be borne by taxpayers, who require a convincing explanation of why costs are so high.
Decontaminating the soil poses another thorny problem. Roughly 640,000 cu. meters of contaminated soil, divided into 1-cu.-meter packages, has been delivered to an interim government storage facility between October and January. Yet up to 22 million cu. meters of contaminated earth remains to be treated in Fukushima Prefecture alone, a far larger amount than can be adequately handled at the current pace of work.
The government has not even locked down the roughly 1,600 hectares of land needed to complete the facility, which is itself only a temporary solution. Tokyo has pledged that Fukushima Prefecture will not be the final resting place for any of this soil, and looks to move it to a more permanent home elsewhere within 30 years. But even initial steps toward choosing such a site remain to be taken.
“It would be difficult and unrealistic to ask other prefectures to shoulder the burden,” Tanaka said. He has proposed decontaminating the soil and using it to fill in wetlands, turning them into farmland or meadowland that would provide a living for residents returning to evacuated areas. An influx of foreign engineers working on decommissioning the Fukushima plant could also give rise to new industry. But whatever plans emerge, the highest and most important hurdle could be simply getting started.
‘Citizen scientists’ track radiation seven years after Fukushima
11th March 2018
Safecast now has around 3,000 devices worldwide and data from 90 countries
Japanese priest Sadamaru Okano is one of the ‘citizen scientists’ collecting radiation readings in the Fukushima region.
JAPAN – Beneath the elegant curves of the roof on the Seirinji Buddhist temple in Japan’s Fukushima region hangs an unlikely adornment: a Geiger counter collecting real-time radiation readings.
The machine is sending data to Safecast, an NGO born after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster that says it has now built the world’s largest radiation dataset, thanks to the efforts of citizen scientists like Seirinji’s priest Sadamaru Okano.
Like many Japanese, Okano lost faith in the government after the nuclear meltdown seven years ago.
“The government did not tell us the truth, they did not tell us the true measures,” he told AFP, seated inside the 150-year-old temple.
Okano was in a better position than most to doubt the government line, having developed an amateur interest in nuclear technology two decades earlier after learning about the Chernobyl disaster.
To the bemusement of friends and family, he started measuring local radiation levels in 2007, so when the disaster happened, he had baseline data.
“The readings were so high… 50 times higher than natural radiation,” he said of the post-disaster data.
“I was amazed… the news was telling us there was nothing, the administration was telling us there was nothing to worry about.”
That dearth of trustworthy information was the genesis of Safecast, said co-founder Pieter Franken, who was in Tokyo with his family when the disaster hit.
Franken and several friends had the idea of gathering data by attaching Geiger counters to cars and driving around.
“Like how Google does Street View, we could do something for radiation in the same way,” he said.
“The only problem was that the system to do that did not exist and the only way to solve that problem was to go and build it ourselves. So that is what we did.”
A geiger counter operated by the Safecast group is attached to a fence near the stricken Dai-ichi power plant
Making informed choices
Within a week, the group had a prototype and began getting readings that suggested the 20 kilometre (12 mile) exclusion zone declared around the Fukushima plant had no basis in the data, Franken said.
“Evacuees were sent from areas with lower radiation to areas with higher radiation” in some cases, he said.
The zone was eventually redrawn, but for many local residents, it was too late to restore trust in the government.
Okano evacuated his mother, wife and son while he stayed with his flock.
But a year later, based on his own readings and after decontamination efforts, he brought them back.
He learned about Safecast’s efforts and in 2013 installed one of their static counters on his temple, in part to help reassure worshippers.
“I told them: we are measuring the radiation on a daily basis… so if you access the (Safecast) website you can choose (if you think) it’s safe or not.”
Forty kilometres away, in the town of Koriyama, Norio Watanabe was supervising patiently as his giggling teenage pupils attempted to build basic versions of Safecast’s Geiger counter.
Dressed in blazers and tartan skirts, the girls pored over instructions on where to place diodes and wires.
Watanabe has been a Safecast volunteer since 2011, and has a mobile Geiger counter in his car.
In the days after the disaster evacuees flocked to Koriyama, which was outside the evacuation zone, and he assumed his town was safe.
“But after I started to do the measurements, I realised there was a high level of risk here as well,” he said.
Japanese teacher Norio Watanabe works with Safecast to teach his pupils how to measure radiation
‘You can’t ignore it’
He sent his children away, but stayed behind to look after his mother, a decision he believes may have contributed to his 2015 diagnosis with thyroid cancer.
“As a scientist, I think the chance that it was caused by the Fukushima accident might be 50-50, but in my heart, I think it was likely the cause,” he said.
His thyroid was removed and he is now healthy, but Watanabe worries about his students, who he fears “will carry risk with them for the rest of their lives.”
“If there are no people like me who continue to monitor the levels, it will be forgotten.”
Safecast now has around 3,000 devices worldwide and data from 90 countries. Its counters come as a kit that volunteers can buy through third parties and assemble at home.
Because volunteers choose where they want to measure at random and often overlap, “they validate unknowingly each other’s measurements,” said Franken, and anomalies or exceptions are checked by Safecast staff.
The NGO is now expanding into measuring air pollution, initially mostly in the US city of Los Angeles during a test phase.
Its radiation data is all open source, and has been used to study everything from the effects of fallout on wildlife to how people move around cities, said Franken.
He says Safecast’s data mostly corroborates official measurements, but provides readings that are more relevant to people’s lives.
“Our volunteers decide to measure where their schools are, where their workplaces are, where their houses are.”
And he believes Safecast has helped push Japan’s government to realise that “transparency and being open are very important to create trust.”
“The power of citizen science means that you can’t stop it and also that you can’t ignore it.”
Fukushima ice wall yields limited benefit for its cost
March 11, 2018
$322m barrier is less effective than lower-tech measures in fighting contamination
Tepco has surrounded the reactors at its Fukushima Daiichi plant with a wall of frozen earth.
TOKYO — Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings faces the question of whether the so-called frozen soil wall built to contain contamination at its damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant justifies its high cost.
The 1.5km barrier of frozen earth, which cost 34.5 billion yen ($322 million) to build using taxpayer money, is supposed to keep groundwater out of the plant’s four reactor buildings. Multiple reactors suffered core meltdowns following the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. Any water that enters must undergo decontamination, though it is not possible to remove all the radioactive material the water takes up.
Tepco, as the utility is widely known, has said that the barrier has reduced the amount of new contaminated groundwater by 95 tons a day. This suggests that the wall accounts for just one-quarter of recent reductions: Around 110 tons of groundwater were contaminated daily in the three months through February, compared to roughly 490 tons daily before the frozen barrier was created. Freezing of earth around the buildings began in March 2016, and was nearly complete last November.
The utility has said a variety of external factors make those numbers difficult to compare directly, and it plans to release a more detailed analysis as soon as next week. “The frozen soil wall is working,” said Naohiro Masuda, chief decommissioning officer for the Fukushima plant. Some of the tanks to store contaminated water are rendered unnecessary, and “this is huge in monetary terms,” he said.
Others beg to differ. “It is hard to believe” the barrier is “contributing as much as it cost to build,” said Masashi Kamon, professor emeritus at Kyoto University. Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has also raised questions about the barrier’s effectiveness relative to its cost.
Lower-tech measures also in place to prevent contamination, such as wells that pump water out of the ground surrounding the plant, have proven more effective than the frozen barrier. But Tepco plans to keep the wall in place, at an annual cost of more than 1 billion yen, until the groundwater contamination problem is resolved.
Decommissioning Fukushima reactors will take time but progress continues
In this July 27, 2017 file photo, contaminated water storage tanks are seen on the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant grounds, in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture
March 11, 2018
Over the past year, clumps appearing to be melted fuel debris have been found inside three reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)’s Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant — which will soon mark seven years since being struck by disaster, on March 11.
However, the specific properties of the fuel debris remain unclear, and the decision on how to go about extracting the material has been delayed. The mammoth task of decommissioning the nuclear power plant, which is expected to take 40 years, is moving at a sluggish pace.
Removing the debris is the most difficult part of the decommissioning process. During an internal probe of nuclear containment vessels at the site, which involved robots, debris-like clumps were discovered in the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors, and sand-like sediment was found spread across the bottom of the No. 1 reactor. However, the specific properties and distribution of the debris has not yet been ascertained.
In September 2017, the government and TEPCO re-examined its decommissioning operation schedule. Initially, it was planned that the reactor which would undergo decommissioning first, as well as the method, would be decided by the end of the first half of fiscal 2018. However, the decision was delayed until the end of fiscal 2019 due to a lack of information concerning the situation inside the reactors, as well as the debris.
Meanwhile, as part of countermeasures against contaminated water, an ice wall designed to block the flow of underground water has almost been completed. In addition, a sub-drain well that pumps away subterranean water has been reinforced. As a result, the volume of underground water flowing into the buildings housing the reactors has been reduced from roughly 400 metric tons per day, which was the figure immediately after the outbreak of the disaster, to about 80 tons per day — indicating that there has been some progress regarding the “entrance” policy designed to reduce the volume of contaminated water generated at the site.
However, the “exit” policy, designed to dispose of treated water after most of the radioactive materials have been removed from the contaminated water, is still up in the air. The major issue concerning this policy is that the radioactive material tritium (tritiated hydrogen) cannot be removed, in principle, from treated water.
Tritium is something that appears in the natural world. Based on the fact that it has been flowing out into the sea from nuclear facilities across the globe, the Nuclear Regulation Authority stresses that Fukushima’s treated water containing tritium should be diluted and flushed out into the sea. However, due to fears that this could damage the reputation of the local fishing industry, the government and TEPCO continue to keep the treated water stored in tanks.
As a result, the amount of radioactive water stored at the site, including the treated water, has risen to about 1.05 million tons, and the number of tanks has increased to roughly 850. The government has set up a committee looking into how to dispose of the treated water, but consensus has not yet been reached.
Meanwhile, with regard to the extraction of fuel from pools of spent nuclear fuel, removal is planned from the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors in fiscal 2023, three years later than initially scheduled, and from the No. 3 reactor sometime around mid-FY2018. Special cranes are being installed to prepare for the job.
7 years after 3/11 / Fukushima towns face uncertainty
March 11, 2018
The reconstruction effort in Fukushima Prefecture, where an accident took place seven years ago at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, is entering a crucial time as municipalities where evacuation orders have been lifted ramp up efforts to encourage residents to return.
Yet the essentials of life such as employment, infrastructure and welfare are intertwined in complex ways. Restoring residents’ everyday lives, which were upended by the disaster, requires resolving multiple problems simultaneously.
Uncertain new industries
The national government is undertaking a project called the Fukushima innovation coast plan, which seeks to concentrate new industries like renewable energy in the prefecture’s coastal areas.
One important part of this is the Fukushima Robot Test Field being built in Minamisoma and Namie. The facility aims to develop unmanned vehicles and heavy machinery robots for use in practical situations such as disaster areas, and a part of it is set to open next fiscal year. Total construction costs are estimated at ¥15.5 billion.
Numerous large-scale projects aimed at rebuilding industries and creating jobs are under way in the prefecture. However, not everything is going as planned.
The Fukushima Medical Device Development Support Center, built with ¥13.4 billion in state funds, opened in Koriyama in November 2016. The center is equipped to handle everything from research and development to safety testing, and to provide support for personnel training and expanding markets.
Major makers have had production bases in the prefecture since before the nuclear disaster, so the prefectural government wanted the center to serve as a symbol of recovery.
However, in fiscal 2017, the center was only used for 50 projects, less than one-third of what was anticipated. These generated ¥39 million in income, also much less than the ¥300 million that was expected. The center is now ¥600 million in the red, twice what was anticipated.
“We want to support it, but honestly, our own facilities are enough,” a representative of a major manufacturer said.
An official at the prefecture’s section in charge of industrial creation said, “Maybe we worried too much about drawing up policies that stood out, and were too optimistic in our income and expenditure projections.” Right from the start, the center is having to reexamine its operations.
Almost all the industries that are being promoted to aid Fukushima’s recovery are in the field of cutting-edge technology. Coastal residents who made their living farming and fishing remain uncertain whether they could find work if they returned to their hometowns. People need to be shown the benefits of returning.
The evacuation orders that were issued in 11 municipalities were lifted in nine municipalities by last spring, apart from sections where returning is considered difficult. As of March 1, the population of the areas where evacuation orders were lifted was about 11,000 people, only 15 percent of the number before the nuclear disaster. Maintaining public services could become untenable.
Five towns of eight municipalities that surround the nuclear plant — Hirono, Naraha, Tomioka, Okuma, and Futaba — have formed a water company association. Income from water charges in fiscal 2016 was one-fourth of pre-disaster levels. Compensation from Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings was used to make up for the shortfall.
“If the compensation payments are cut off, we’ll be forced to raise rates five years later. Will residents accept that?” A person in charge of the matter said.
The pace of recovery differs depending on the town.
Of these five towns, only Hirono was not issued evacuation orders. “So far, we’ve been right there alongside them. It’s tough to say, ‘That will harm us, so count us out,’” a senior Hirono official said.
However, if the five towns’ interests conflict in a serious way, there may be no way to avoid talks on breaking up or reorganizing the water company association.
7 years later, why hasn’t Japan learned from Fukushima?
10 Mar 2018
Cancer rates in children are sky high, radioactive rubbish is piling up and radiation levels are rising. Yet the government bails out the plant’s operator – even as it announces a profit and plans to resume seaside operations
Seven years after the worst natural disaster to strike Japan in living memory, a handful of people whose homes, schools and livelihoods were in villages that were directly beneath the plume of radioactivity that escaped from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were this week permitted to return briefly to their communities. Media coverage has shown families picking through the interiors of their abandoned homes and collecting keepsakes to remind them of their lives before March 11, 2011, when a magnitude 9 earthquake off north-east Japan triggered a series of massive tsunami that caused widespread devastation in coastal regions and wrecked the nuclear plant.
Officially, more than 18,000 people died in the triple disaster. Of that total, the remains of 2,546 have never been recovered.
Wakana Kumagai, 7, visits the spot in Miyagi prefecture where her house once stood, before it was washed away by the March 11, 2011 tsunami.
Most of the returnees smiled dutifully for the cameras, but radiation levels are still too high for anything but a fleeting visit and they were soon bused out of an area that the Japanese government still classifies as the “difficult to return to zone”.
The bittersweet images have been eclipsed, however, by the sort of unrelentingly bad headlines with which Fukushima has long been synonymous. On Monday, an investigative committee set up by the prefecture announced that cases of thyroid cancer diagnosed in Fukushima children had risen to 152 in 590,000. A Japanese epidemiologist named Toshihide Tsuda published a paper in 2015 saying the usual rate is a maximum of three cases per million. Officially, however, the cancers are not being linked to the disaster.
Radioactive soil and debris in black vinyl bags continues to pile up in Tomioka, a town adjacent to the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Radioactive soil and debris in black vinyl bags continues to pile up in vast storage facilities across the prefecture and Greenpeace has issued a study in which it states that radiation levels in the communities of Iitate and Namie have actually risen since they were last measured in 2016, despite the government’s effort to decontaminate the region.
For Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the operator of the nuclear plant, the headlines have been arguably worse. The company’s press releases about progress in work to solve a multitude of problems at the site – from cleansing contaminated water to safely removing fuel rods and developing techniques to eventually safely recover the melted nuclear fuel – are being completely overlooked.
Instead, the focus in the last week has been on a much-vaunted and, at 34.5 billion yen (HK$2.56 billion), very expensive “ice wall” that was meant to freeze the soil around the damaged reactors and prevent more ground water seeping into the basement levels. It has managed to slow the flow by half, but 95 tons of water still gets through every day.
People living in temporary housing in the northeastern Japan city of Minamisoma mark the anniversary of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
In court in late February, it emerged that Tepco had in 2008 asked an official at a subsidiary to downplay the likely size of a tsunami in the region. The expert on tsunami modelling was giving testimony in a trial for three former executives of the company who have been charged with professional negligence resulting in death and injury, and said he was initially asked to lower the possible size of a tsunami by changing his calculations. When he refused, his prediction was not accepted by the company.
Even now, critics say, the company is failing to learn its lessons. “Tepco is completely ignoring its responsibilities to the people of Japan and nothing highlights that more than the efforts they are going to in order to resume operations at their Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, which is right on the Sea of Japan and has been hit by earthquakes in the past,” said Aileen Mioko-Smith, a campaigner with Green Action Japan. “They should have learned it is going to take half a century, if not more, to clear up the mess at Fukushima and they should have realised the cost of that work continues to rise. Instead they have learned the government will continue to bail them out, whatever happens.”
A mourner in Sendai marks the anniversary of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Mioko-Smith said a combination of “pig-headedness” in the boardroom and government support effectively meant the company had failed to change and was still focused on doing business the “old way” and making money.
She said despite accepting billions of yen in support from the government, all of which comes from the nation’s taxpayers, the company had announced a profit in the last financial year and gave its shareholders a dividend.
“They know that they are indestructible and that the government will always bail them out, so they can take as many risks as they like,” she said. “They have not learned the lessons of Fukushima because the government has not forced them to learn those lessons.”
BREAKTHROUGH BY DRONE
Tepco employees give members of the media a tour of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
A British-built drone that entered the No 3 reactor building at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant late last month, is helping scientists to plot radiation levels for the first time since its meltdown.
Seven years after one of the worst nuclear accidents in history, radiation in three of the six reactor buildings is still too high for humans to tolerate and Tepco, the operator of the plant, has had limited success with conventional robots entering the structures.
Tepco is now using a small unmanned aerial vehicle called Riser (Remote Intelligent Survey Equipment for Radiation) that was developed by Blue Bear Systems Research, based in Bedfordshire. Riser is the first drone to have flown into the building since the plant was hit on March 11, 2011, by a magnitude-9 earthquake and a tsunami estimated to have been 14 metres high.
“Tepco came to us not long after the incident at Fukushima and we briefed them on what Riser can do,” said Ian Williams-Wynn, director of operations for Blue Bear Systems. “Initially, they said they were going to go away and make something similar themselves, but a few years later they came back to us and said they needed our technology after all.”
The No 3 reactor building at Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Measuring 92cm by 81cm and weighing less than 10kg, Riser is equipped with cameras and a dosimeter to measure radiation. The vehicle does not rely on GPS for guidance but instead uses a series of lasers to determine its position and to build up a picture of the obstacles that now litter the inside of the structure.
“Tepco knows what the rooms inside the building used to look like but they have no idea what that terrain looks like now,” Williams-Wynn said. “There will be fallen piping, collapsed walls and electrical wiring hanging from the ceilings, all of which Riser will have to navigate. These are really challenging problems but we believe this can be part of the solution.”
A conventional remote-controlled robot that entered the structure in July took images of what experts believe are some of the reactor’s fuel rods after they were exposed to air and melted through the containment vessel, releasing lethal amounts of radiation. Tepco needs to know the exact location of the debris that has fused together on the lowest levels of the building before a plan can be devised to safely remove the melted fuel. That process is scheduled to begin in 2021 and experts believe it may take a further 40 years before the site is rendered completely safe.
The three undamaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi have already been shut down and the cost of the entire decommissioning process is estimated at 8 trillion yen (US$75.4 billion).
7 years after 3/11 / Public servants face massive workload
Officials of the town government of Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, work past 10 p.m. on March 2.
March 10, 2018
The work of local government officials of municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture has significantly changed in the seven years since the accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. This is because a large number of residents and officials in the affected municipalities were forced to evacuate.
The government officials have struggled with unprecedented types of duties — such as those concerning the return of residents, which has not progressed smoothly — and dealing with other accumulated tasks all at the same time. However, the future of their hometowns remains unclear.
In Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, later this month it will be one year since an evacuation order was lifted.
In the central part of the town, where the evacuation order was lifted, a small number of residents have slowly trickled back. However, the number of residents as of the end of January was only 490. This is 2.3 percent of the town’s population before the nuclear accident, which numbered 21,000.
In addition, about 100 of the current residents are local officials who live in apartments rented by the municipal government. Many of them live alone, separated from their families, who have become accustomed to living in the places they evacuated to.
The officials live this way partly because they need to be able to quickly respond to emergencies, such as new natural disasters. There is also a huge volume of work, which they cannot handle if they commute to the government offices from outside the town.
Five industrial complexes are concurrently being developed in the town. To encourage more residents to return home, it is necessary to create a large number of jobs.
This project is a task the officials have never undertaken before, as Namie is a small municipality whose core industries were agriculture and fishing.
One of the officials said, “Even one such project would have been a huge task that we might experience only once in a decade or two, [but] we are doing this work in as many as five locations.”
Another official said, “This would never have happened before the nuclear plant accident.”
The town government officials travel around the nation for purposes such as negotiating with evacuated landowners to purchase their land plots, and asking companies to set up business bases in the town.
The officials are also dispatched to eliminate wild boars, the number of which has rapidly increased while residents have been absent. They also need to arrange repairs to damaged roads, public facilities and agricultural water systems.
At night, lights are seen only in the windows of the town government office, while most of the town is in darkness.
The fiscal condition of the town government is almost totally different from before the nuclear disaster. Its finances rely almost entirely on the central government’s budget.
As many of the town’s residents have not been able to sufficiently rebuild their daily lives, measures to reduce or exempt them from residential tax have continued. Therefore, the percentage of the town government’s municipal tax revenues against its total revenue fell drastically, from 25 percent to 1 percent.
Administrative work in municipalities where the number of residents continues to be zero also presents a special situation.
In the case of Okuma in the prefecture, where an evacuation order remains in place across the whole town, the town government relocated its offices to nearby municipalities. For example, its section in charge of reconstruction policy is in a satellite office in Aizuwakamatsu in the prefecture. Its section for welfare-related work is in a satellite office in Iwaki in the prefecture, as about 4,600 town residents live in Iwaki as evacuees.
Town government officials in the satellite office in Iwaki, who are usually busy assisting elderly residents who live in temporary housing units, make 300-kilometer round trips to Aizuwakamatsu every week for meetings with other officials and other work purposes.
There are times when officials head to the town of Okuma to observe decontamination work to remove radioactive substances. In these job reports, the officials write “Okuma” as the destination of their business trips. An official in his 50s expressed the sadness he feels when he writes such reports, saying, “I wonder which municipal government I belong to.”
There are municipalities where the wounds caused by the tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake have still not healed.
In Minamisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, 36 town government officials, including experienced public servants working in the personnel section, died or went missing.
In addition, the records of government officials’ qualifications, credentials and job evaluations were lost. An official in charge of this issue lamented that “managing the organization [of the town government] became difficult, and it has been adversely affecting the morale of our workplaces.”
In Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, the town government lost 39 people to the disaster. They included the mayor and eight senior officials at the section chief level.
Though younger town government officials were promoted, they do not have experience in supervising junior staff. Currently, those who joined the town government after the Great East Japan Earthquake account for half of all officials.
One of the senior officials said, “If we fail in fostering human resources, it will directly result in delays in reconstruction.” Many other senior officials share the same sense of crisis.
Civil engineering and construction work that began in the year of the disaster, such as raising land heights, relocating residential areas to higher ground, and building coastal levees, has progressed in visible ways.
However, survivors and local government officials in disaster-hit areas have the feeling that these reconstruction projects are somehow frustrating and lopsided.
A labor union conducted a survey of employees of municipal governments that were affected by the nuclear plant accident, with spaces in which respondents were asked to freely write down their feelings.
The written replies included, “For the past seven years I have never once felt free from unease,” and “I don’t know when our reconstruction efforts will end.”
Fukushima Ice Wall Failing, Water Seepage Into Nuclear Reactors Still A Problem
March 9th, 2018 by James Ayre
The “ice wall” that Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) put in place a few years ago, with the intent of stopping water seepage into the basements of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, isn’t functioning as advertised (so to speak).
Going on an analysis performed by Reuters (using Tepco data), since the ice wall became “operational” — towards the end of August 2017 — an “average of 141 metric tonnes a day of water has seeped into the reactor and turbine areas.”
What that means is that after the ice wall was deemed to be fully operational that the flow of groundwater into the areas in question actually increased — as the previous 9 months (before August 2017) had seen an average of 132 metric tonnes a day of groundwater seepage.
Considering how expensive the ice wall was to put into place, and Tepco’s assurances to skeptics that the approach would be effective, this is very notable, to say the least.
As a result of this failure, large quantities of groundwater are continuing to flow into the basements of the Fukushima nuclear power plants, and there mingle with the extremely radioactive material present there.
Arguments are of course being made by Tepco officials, though, that since groundwater flows have lessened over the last few years that the ice wall is working (in conjunction with various pumps and drains), but considering the figures discussed above, effectiveness is certainly limited.
The company is claiming that, based on computer models, the ice wall is reducing groundwater flow into the reactors by around 95 tonnes a day, compared to 2 years ago.
Reuters provides more information:
“The groundwater seepage has delayed Tepco’s clean-up at the site and may undermine the entire decommissioning process for the plant, which was battered by a tsunami 7 years ago this Sunday. Waves knocked out power and triggered meltdowns at 3 of the site’s 6 reactors that spewed radiation, forcing 160,000 residents to flee, many of whom have not returned to this once-fertile coast.
“Though called an ice wall, Tepco has attempted to create something more like a frozen soil barrier. Using ¥34.5 billion ($324 million) in public funds, Tepco sunk about 1,500 tubes filled with brine to a depth of 30 meters (100 feet) in a 1.5-kilometre (1-mile) perimeter around 4 of the plant’s reactors. It then cools the brine to minus 30° Celsius (minus 22° Fahrenheit). The aim is to freeze the soil into a solid mass that blocks groundwater flowing from the hills west of the plant to the coast.”
It should be realized that the more groundwater seepage there is into the areas in question, the more radioactive water there is to eventually deal with — or not deal with, as may be the case.
To date, the radioactive water at the Fukushima site has either been lost to the wider environment or is stored in large tanks at the facility. These storage tanks now total more than a thousand, and store over 1 million tonnes of radioactive water. Tepco has warned that it will run out of space at the site to store this water by as soon as early 2021. What happens then?
“I believe the ice wall was ‘oversold’ in that it would solve all the release and storage concerns,” commented Dale Klein, the former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the head of an external committee that’s advising Tepco on safety issues, to Reuters.
“The hydrology of the Fukushima site is very complicated and thus the exact water flow is hard to predict, especially during heavy rains.”
This reality was made especially clear last October when a typhoon affected the region, and 866 tonnes a day of groundwater flowed into the nuclear reactors for the duration.
The Reuters coverage provides a bit more:
“However, a government-commissioned panel on Wednesday offered a mixed assessment of the ice wall, saying it was partially effective but more steps were needed…In addition to the building costs, the ice wall needs an estimated 44 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year to run, enough to power about 15,000 typical Japanese homes.
“Meanwhile, Tepco must decide how to cope with the growing volume of water stored on site. The purification process removes 62 radioactive elements from the contaminated water but it leaves tritium, a mildly radioactive element that is difficult to separate from water. Not considered harmful in low doses, tritium is released into oceans and rivers by nuclear plants around the world at various national standard levels.
“But local residents, particularly fishermen, oppose ocean releases because they fear it will keep consumers from buying Fukushima products. Many countries, including South Korea and China, still have restrictions on produce from Fukushima and neighboring areas.”
That’s not to say that such releases won’t be the eventual outcome, as they are one of the primary options now being considered by a government-commissioned task force working on the problem.
As far as whether the water in question actually does “only” contain radioactive tritium, that remains an open question as Tepco has yet to allow third-party testing of the store “purified” water in question. Without third-party testing, who actually knows what’s in it?
As a reminder here, the Fukushima nuclear disaster effectively began 7 years ago on Sunday and is quite obviously still ongoing. A vast amount of money has already been spent working to contain the nuclear material and contamination at the Fukushima site, but the reality remains that a vast amount more will have to be spent over the coming decades. The area itself will effectively remain unfit for human habitation indefinitely regardless of containment and remediation work.
7 Years On: Fukushima Aims to Lure Young People with New Industries
Fukushima, March 9 (Jiji Press)–Fukushima Prefecture aims to attract young people with new industries that will help realize a society without dependence on nuclear power, Masao Uchibori, governor of the northeastern Japan prefecture, said in an interview.
Some 50,000 Fukushima residents remain evacuees seven years after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent triple meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Holding Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
“By eventually reviving areas where still entry is basically prohibited due to high radiation levels near the plant, I want to make Fukushima a home where residents can live with a smile,” the governor said.
“The prefecture has been aggressively introducing renewable energy in order to become a society that doesn’t depend on nuclear power,” he added.
On the situation in which the population of Fukushima, particularly in the severely afflicted coastal region, is declining fast, Uchibori said he aims to raise the prefecture’s fertility rate to at least 2.0.
Clearing the Radioactive Rubble Heap That Was Fukushima Daiichi, 7 Years On
March 9, 2018
By Tim Hornyak
The water is tainted, the wreckage is dangerous, and disposing of it will be a prolonged, complex and costly process.
Seven years after one of the largest earthquakes on record unleashed a massive tsunami and triggered a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials say they are at last getting a handle on the mammoth task of cleaning the site before it is ultimately dismantled. But the process is still expected to be a long, expensive slog, requiring as-yet untried feats of engineering—and not all the details have yet been worked out.
When the disaster knocked out off- and on-site power supplies on March 11, 2011, three of the cooling systems for the plant’s four reactor units were disabled. This caused the nuclear fuel inside to overheat, leading to a meltdown and hydrogen explosions that spewed out radiation. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), responded by cooling the reactors with water, which continues today. Meanwhile thousands of people living in the surrounding area were evacuated and Japan’s other nuclear plants were temporarily shut down.
In the years since the disaster and the immediate effort to stanch the release of radioactive material, officials have been working out how to decontaminate the site without unleashing more radiation into the environment. It will take a complex engineering effort to deal with thousands of fuel rods, along with the mangled debris of the reactors and the water used to cool them. Despite setbacks, that effort is now moving forward in earnest, officials say. “We are still conducting studies on the location of the molten fuel, but despite this we have made the judgment that the units are stable,” says Naohiro Masuda, TEPCO’s chief decommissioning officer for Daiichi.
Waterworks
Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion. The Japan Center for Economic Research, a private think tank, said the cleanup costs could mount to some $470 billion to $660 billion, however.
Under a government roadmap, TEPCO hopes to finish the job in 30 to 40 years. But some experts say even that could be an underestimate. “In general, estimates of work involving decontamination and disposal of nuclear materials are underestimated by decades,” says Rod Ewing, a professor of nuclear security and geological sciences at Stanford University. “I think that we have to expect that the job will extend beyond the estimated time.”
The considerable time and expense are due to the cleanup being a veritable hydra that involves unprecedented engineering. TEPCO and its many contractors will be focusing on several battlefronts.
Water is being deliberately circulated through each reactor every day to cool the fuel within—but the plant lies on a slope, and water from precipitation keeps flowing into the buildings as well. Workers built an elaborate scrubbing system that removes cesium, strontium and dozens of other radioactive particles from the water; some of it is recirculated into the reactors, and some goes into row upon row of giant tanks at the site. There’s about one million tons of water kept in 1,000 tanks and the volume grows by 100 tons a day, down from 400 tons four years ago.
To keep more water from seeping into the ground and being tainted, more than 90 percent of the site has been paved. A series of drains and underground barriers—including a $325-million* supposedly impermeable “wall” of frozen soil—was also constructed to keep water from flowing into the reactors and the ocean. These have not worked as well as expected, though, especially during typhoons when precipitation spikes, so groundwater continues to be contaminated.
Despite the fact contaminated water was dumped into the sea after the disaster, studies by Japanese and foreign labs have shown radioactive cesium in fish caught in the region has fallen and is now within Japan’s food safety limits. TEPCO will not say when it will decide what to do with all the stored water, because dumping it in the ocean again would invite censure at home and abroad—but there are worries that another powerful quake could cause it to slosh out of the tanks.
Fuel Mop-Up
A second major issue at Fukushima is how to handle the fuel¾the melted uranium cores as well as spent and unused fuel rods stored at the reactors. Using robotic probes and 3-D imaging with muons (a type of subatomic particle), workers have found pebbly deposits and debris at various areas inside the primary containment vessels in the three of the plant’s reactor units. These highly radioactive remains are thought to be melted fuel as well as supporting structures. TEPCO has not yet worked out how it can remove the remains, but it wants to start the job in 2021. There are few precedents for the task. Lake Barrett—director of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant during its decommissioning after a partial meltdown at the Middletown, Pa., facility in 1979—says TEPCO will use robots to remotely dig out the melted fuel and store it in canisters on-site before shipping to its final disposal spot. “This is similar to what we did at Three Mile Island, just much larger and with much more sophisticated engineering because their damage is greater than ours was,” Barrett says. “So although the work is technically much more challenging than ours was, Japan has excellent technological capabilities, and worldwide robotic technology has advanced tremendously in the last 30-plus years.”
Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany, doubts the ambitious cleanup effort can be completed in the time cited, and questions whether the radioactivity can be completely contained. Until TEPCO can verify the conditions of the molten fuel, he says, “there can be no confirmation of what impact and damage the material has had” on the various components of the reactors—and therefore how radiation might leak into the environment in the future.
Although the utility managed to safely remove all 1,533 fuel bundles from the plant’s unit No. 4 reactor by December 2014, it still has to do the same for the hundreds of rods stored at the other three units. This involves clearing rubble, installing shields, dismantling the building roofs, and setting up platforms and special rooftop equipment to remove the rods. Last month a 55-ton dome roof was installed on unit No. 3 to facilitate the safe removal of the 533 fuel bundles that remain in a storage pool there. Whereas removal should begin at No. 3 sometime before April 2019, the fuel at units No. 1 and 2 will not be ready for transfer before 2023, according to TEPCO. And just where all the fuel and other radioactive solid debris on the site will be stored or disposed of long-term has yet to be decided; last month the site’s ninth solid waste storage building, with a capacity of about 61,000 cubic meters, went into operation.
As for what the site itself might look like decades from now, cleanup officials refuse to say. But they are quick to differentiate it from the sarcophagus-style containment of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in the Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. Whereas the Chernobyl plant is sealed off and the surrounding area remains off-limits except for brief visits—leaving behind several ghost towns—Japanese officials want as many areas as possible around the Daiichi site to eventually be habitable again.
“To accelerate reconstruction and rebuilding of Fukushima as a region, and the lives of locals, the key is to reduce the mid- and long-term risk,” says Satoru Toyomoto, director for international issues at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Nuclear Accident Response Office. “In that regard, keeping debris on the premises without approval is not an option.”
Fukushima: A Human-Made Disaster Brought on by Bad Faith
March 9, 2018
by John Laforge
“Nearly seven years after the triple reactor meltdowns, this unique nuclear crisis is still underway,” Greenpeace International’s Shaun Burnie wrote in a blogpost last December. The word “unique” is an understatement but true. The March 11, 2011 meltdowns are the world’s first combined earthquake-tsunami-reactor catastrophe. Moreover, while other power reactors have run out-of-control, melted down and contaminated large areas, never before have three simultaneously suffered mass earthquake damage, station black-outs, loss-of-coolant and complete meltdowns.
The consequences of its meltdowns-cubed are uniquely over three times deeper, broader and more expensive than anyone was prepared to handle. In the days following the initial quake, tsunami(s), and explosions, the head of the emergency response said, “There is no manual for this disaster.” Managers have had to invent, design, develop and implement the recovery whole cloth. Evacuation was so haphazard that on August 9, 2011, one local mayor accused the government of murder.
The crisis is ongoing in many ways: radioactively contaminated water is still pouring into the Pacific Ocean (permanently contaminating and altering sea life which bio-accumulates and bio-concentrates the radioactivity); radioactive gases and perhaps even “hot particles” are still wafting out of destroyed reactor structures and waste fuel pools; the constant threat of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan puts millions of gallons of radioactive waste water now stored near the shore in tanks at risk of spilling; and the dangerous work of collecting radioactive soils, leaves and tree trimmings from farmlands, school yards, parks and gardens continuously adds to vast collections of 1-ton radioactive waste bags.
The government estimates that 30 million cubic meters of this collected rad waste — a nearly unimaginable 29 million tons — will eventually require burial, incineration or re-use in road-building. The disaster is ongoing because the dangerous radiation exposures endured by the workers in these disaster response jobs is cumulative and irreversible — and the work will continue for 3 centuries or so. This is because: 1) cesium-137, one of the principle pollutants spewed by the meltdowns, takes 300 years to decay to other isotopes; and 2) in spite of the gigantic amount of contaminated material that’s been scrapped together and bagged — at over 1000 Temporary Storage Sites and elsewhere at 141,000 locations across Fukushima — the effort covers “only a small fraction of the total landmass of radioactively contaminated areas,” as Greenpeace’s Burnie reports. The “largest areas of significant contamination [are] the forested mountains of Fukushima,” Burnie notes, and will continue for three centuries to re-contaminate the soil down-wind and down-river, “through weathering processes and the natural water and lifecycle of trees and rivers.”
Fukushima’s endless radiation effects — from thyroid cancers, to contaminated sea food, from poisoned pregnancies to irradiated clean-up workers — should be the final insult from nuclear power and weapons. And they will be if the general public wises up to the unacceptable risks of continuing to operate nuclear reactors.
In “Fukushima Meltdown” the first scholarly book to appear on the incident, author Takashi Hirose dashed off a grim warning after having published books and articles warning of the terrible danger of nuclear power since the 1980s. His cautions are more important now than ever, because commercial media will this week repeat the tragic-comic assurances that “no one died,” that Fukushima’s “released radiation was less than Chernobyl,” and that “nuclear power is clean.”
Natural disasters will never disappear, Takashi wrote, and there is no way of putting an end to earth quakes and tsunamis. “However, the Fukushima Disaster is neither a natural disaster nor ordained by fate. It is a human-made disaster brought about by bad faith.” In his terrifying 150 pages, Takashi methodically proves the case that the Fukushima catastrophe “was easily predictable and preventable.” In a nutshell, two principle government and corporate lies demonstrate how bad faith brought about the worst reactor accident in history. Exposing and rejecting these lies can prevent another meltdown.
Initially the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) asserted over and over that “there is no crisis” and even that “there will be no radiation release.” A month after the start of the disaster, the government admitted that radiation gushing to the sea and spewing to the atmosphere was at the same level as Chernobyl (the 1986 reactor disaster in Ukraine). Author Takashi calls this use of disinformation “as terrifying as what is happening at the actual site.” “From day one I had been saying that huge amounts of radiation were sure to be escaping.… From day one the situation had reached the highest level for nuclear accidents, Level 7, and from day one the government knew this, but it concealed that information from the people, thus causing far more people to be irradiated than otherwise would have been the case.”
The other glaring example of bad faith has been Tepco’s repeatedly saying, “We could not imagine that a once-in-a-thousand-years earthquake might come,” and further that “the tsunami was beyond our expectation.” These are lies. The destroyed Fukushima reactors were hit by an easily imaginable 14-meter tsunami. In 1896, the Meji-Sanriku quake’s tsunami reached 38.2 meters on the Iwate coast not far from Fukushima; the 1933 Hokkaido quake caused a 28.7 meter tsunami. Indeed, since the late 1970s experts have warned that a disaster like Fukushima was possible. In the late 1990s, seismology professor Ishibashi Katsuhiko at Kobe Univ. coined an explicit new term meaning “nuclear-power-plant-earthquake-disaster.” Because Prof. Ishibashi’s many books on the subject are well-known, “it is impossible that his warnings were unknown to the officials of Tepco,” who just want to dodge criminal charges.
The lessons for the 99 faulty reactors in this country and the other 300 around the world are clear enough. It’s absurd to put reactors near earthquakes or volcanoes or anywhere near the water. And, as Takashi says, “The people responsible for the horror of this nuclear accident are the people who promoted nuclear power.”
1 This Month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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