Massive amounts of radiation continue daily to enter Japan’s water and air, and the Pacific Ocean
Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen on Fukushima@5, Mar 7, 2016 (emphasis added): Massive amounts of radiation continue to enter Japan’s water and air, and the Pacific Ocean, daily… Due to its triple meltdowns and the unmitigable radioactive releases, Fukushima Daiichi will continue to bleed radiation into the Pacific Ocean for more than a century… There is no road map to follow with directions to stop the ongoing debacle…
Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen on KPFA, Mar 30, 2016: [Univ. of California] Berkeley’s nuclear program has been in the forefront of the pro-nuclear propaganda for decades, and since Fukushima has been aggressively downplaying the significance of it. So, whatever comes out of Berkeley, I just attribute to a very pro-nuclear faculty… [Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is] measuring 1,000 miles offshore [of the US West Coast] and… picking up 10 becquerels per cubic meter [Bq/m3]. At my point, that’s when my alarm bells go off is 10 [Bq/m3]… That plume is still coming, the Pacific is a huge place and to think that a disaster on the opposite side of the world can be detected and begin to contaminate California, I think that the monumental shattering conclusion [is] radiation knows no borders… So this ‘dilution is the solution to pollution’ is what I think Berkeley believes in. What you can be sure of is that somebody’s going to die from the radiation that’s in the Pacific, but you just won’t know who it is – and they’re counting on that. The nuclear establishment is saying, ‘Well, we can smear that out in a broader epidemiological study.’
Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen on CCTV, Apr 5, 2016: We’re looking at newspaper coverage from the last couple of weeks and it’s clear that the plant continues to hemorrhage.
Fairewinds Japan Speaking Tour Series No. 1, Feb 12, 2016:
- Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen: [T]he Fukushima power plants… continues to bleed into the Pacific every day. But what no one is paying any attention to is that the entire mountain range that runs 100 miles up and down this coast is also contaminated. And as much radiation is pouring out… into the Pacific from the mountain range because it’s so contaminated, as from the Fukushima site… in fact, they’ve got an entire state pouring radiation into the Pacific. So what’s in the Pacific? Off of California, they’re finding radiation at what I would consider significant levels… in a cubic meter of ocean water, they’re finding 10 radioactive decays every second… So a cubic meter of water, if you’re in a dark room, would have 10 flashes of light every second, and that’s going to go on for 300 years. So we have contaminated the biggest source of water on the planet, and there’s no way to stop it.
- Maggie Gundersen, founder of Fairewinds: So are you saying that the contaminated water problem is hopeless? Is there nothing we can do to slow it down?
- Arnie Gundersen: It used to be that scientists believed dilution is the solution to pollution. But I think we’re finding with the biggest body of water on the planet, that you can’t dilute this stuff. And we’re going to begin to see this bio-accumulation, which is all the fish that are in the ocean are going to uptake the cesium and the strontium and become more and more and more radioactive…
Radioactivity at buried tank up in Daiichi plant
The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says the level of radioactivity near one underground wastewater tank at the plant is more than 100 times earlier readings.
Tokyo Electric Power Company says the tanks were built 3 years ago to store highly radioactive wastewater produced within the crippled plant. But all of the tanks soon went out of use due to repeated leaks of contaminated water.
The utility pumped most of the water out of them, but has been checking radioactivity levels of groundwater near the tanks.
On Wednesday, equipment detected 8,100 becquerels of beta-ray-emitting radioactive substances per liter of water. On Thursday, it went up to 9,300 becquerels.
A week ago, the level was only 87 becquerels.
TEPCO says it doesn’t know why the sharp rise took place. It says some highly radioactive water remains in the tank, but it is isolated with waterproof measures.
TEPCO says it will continue to analyze groundwater samples around the tank, and also compare them with data on the contaminated water left in part of the tank.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20160408_03/
Very pertinent comments and photos from Ray Masalas regarding the said “buried tank”:
I see the Japanese media is once again lying to protect Tepco. These were not tanks. They were in ground pools with sloped sides that were dug on site, lined with thin poly and filled with highly radioactive water. {See pic below} With a lining as thick as 2 garbage bags they leaked into the ground fast. Whether they transfered these tons of radioactive water to steel tanks or not, I’ll leave up to you to believe or not believe. At the same time they were building enclosed concrete ditches running down the west hill to sea. From the flyover footage I’d guess that there were about a dozen of these pits up on the west hill.
Sept 013. One of the “tanks” they spoke of.
After they said that the transferred the radioactive water to steel tanks these empty pits magically got lids. My guess is that they dumped then refilled.
The enclosed concrete ditches running down to the sea were built at the same time. Dec 013
Children’s book connects stories of Fukushima and Chernobyl
A page from Shoko Nakazawa’s latest work depicts Natsuko about to part
with her pet piglet Momo.
Inspired by a letter sent to her by a young reader, author Shoko Nakazawa revived a past work and penned an entirely new illustrated children’s book on nuclear disasters in Fukushima and Chernobyl.
In 1988, Nakazawa’s “Ashita wa Hareta Sora no Shita de Bokutachi no Chernobyl” (Tomorrow, under a fair sky, our Chernobyl) was released by Choubunsha Publishing Co.
In the letter, a junior high school student in Yokohama who read the book after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant wanted to know how such an incident occurred when humans had surely learned of nuclear horrors from the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986.
The student asked what adults had done to prevent the Fukushima disaster. Because her 1988 book had long been out of print, Nakazawa, 63, first went about having it republished in summer 2011.
She also wrote a new work, recently published by Iwasaki Publishing Co., titled “Kobuta Monogatari Chernobyl kara Fukushima e” (A tale of piglets, from Chernobyl to Fukushima). The book sells for 1,300 yen, tax exclusive.
The two parts of the book involve little girls living in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Tanya lives in Chernobyl and has a pet piglet named Marumaru. Their peaceful life is turned upside down by the nuclear accident that forces all residents to evacuate.
Marumaru is left behind on the farm and time passes as the piglet waits for Tanya and her family to return. They never do.
The Fukushima portion involves a girl named Natsuko and her pet piglet Momo. They are also separated by the Fukushima nuclear accident.
A temporary lifting of the evacuation order allows Natsuko and her mother to return home. However, the mother does not recognize Momo, who is now filthy because no one was around to take care of the animal. The mother shooes the piglet away in a harsh voice.
The two parts of the book are connected because Natsuko’s mother had come to know Tanya when she visited Japan more than 20 years ago. Tanya even sent a letter to Natsuko’s mother in which she wrote, “Please do not forget us.”
During their short stay at home, the mother comes across that letter again and breaks down crying.
“I forgot everything.”
A key turning point in Nakazawa’s life was moving to Hiroshima from Nagoya before she entered junior high school. Most of her friends had parents who were hibakusha. Nakazawa herself was shocked when she saw the exhibit about the horrors of the atomic bombing at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
She is concerned about recent moves to resume operations at nuclear power plants around Japan.
“We are once again trying to forget,” she said. “I hope the book becomes a catalyst to rethink a civilization that exists upon something like ‘nuclear power’ that simply cannot co-exist with humans and nature.”
South Korean Gov’t opts not to disclose radiation test result of Japanese fishery goods
Japanese eel
Gov’t opts not to disclose radiation test result of Japanese fishery goods
The government has rejected calls to disclose the results of radiation level checks conducted on fishery goods caught near Japan, a civic group said Wednesday.
The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety on Tuesday dismissed the information disclosure request filed by the Lawyers for a Democratic Society, the group said.
“As the information is related to a case pending at the World Trade Organization, (the disclosure) could lead to a leakage of our strategy to Japan,” the ministry was quoted by the group as saying.
The lawyers association, however, countered that the reason provided by the authorities was groundless since the government has to submit its findings to the WTO and Japan anyways.
Tokyo filed a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization against Seoul’s import ban of its fishery goods.
South Korea has banned imports of all fishery products from eight Japanese prefectures, including Fukushima, where the 2011 earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of a nuclear reactor, marking the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster.
The import ban was imposed in September 2013 after reports that massive amounts of radioactive materials and contaminated water from the Fukushima reactor were being dumped in waters surrounding Japan. This caused serious safety concerns here, that not only affected Japanese imports but the local fishery sector as a whole. (Yonhap)
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20160406000394
S. Korea Will Not Share Fukushima Fish Tests
South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has rejected a petition from a civil society group to release the results of radiation testing on fish caught near Japan following the Fukushima Daiichi reactor meltdown.
In 2013, South Korea imposed a ban on the importation of fisheries products from eight Japanese prefectures near Fukushima. Tokyo objected, and petitioned the World Trade Organization for relief, claiming that the ban was unfair to Japanese exporters. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has already submitted the results of its testing to the WTO and to Japan as part of the dispute, and advocates claimed that it should be made public as well.
The ministry disagreed. “As the information is related to a case pending at the World Trade Organization (WTO), [it] could lead to a leakage of our strategy to Japan,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.
A study of radioactive cesium levels in fish off of Fukushima in 2011 by Pavel Povinec and Katsumi Hirose found that consuming 100 kg of the affected seafood per year (four times the Japanese annual average) would result in approximately the same radiation dose as the world average for background exposure – and roughly the same as the level of exposure from consuming the naturally occuring radioactive polonium in 100 kg of any other seafood.
“Radiation doses from ingestion of marine food are under control, and they will be negligible,” the authors concluded.
However, a study published in February by Hiroshi Okamuraa and Shiro Ikedab found that while radioactive cesium levels were overall quite low among most species in Japan, they were unequally distrubuted, with some much more likely to be contaminated than others, especially larger predators towards the top of the food chain. Additionally, effects are regional and vary between freshwater and marine species, the authors said: areas nearer and to the south of the reactor are more affected, and freshwater fish – notably whitespotted char and Japanese eel – are more likely to show higher levels of contamination.
http://maritime-executive.com/article/s-korea-will-not-share-fukushima-fish-tests
Fukushima+5, Part 7. These women are pissed.
The post-Fukushima period is generating oceans of data, but much of it is useless. These women generate their own, but also want more solid data than the government has been willing to provide.
By Mary Olson
Don’t get me wrong: These women are pissed! (My word not theirs.) And they have every right to express that, even in Japan, at least according to its constitution.
I cannot leave Japan without peeling back the layer of sticky rice and sweet bean paste that keeps the victims of Tepco’s iodine, cesium and strontium on their feet.
One woman from Fukushima, who I met in Kyoto, said to me: “I am not as good as a guinea pig! They take tests from a guinea pig, but they don’t even test me.” She has thyroid cancer. There is a bias, since Chernobyl, toward focusing on thyroid cancer in children as a radiation impact. This is in part since they have less of a prior history of exposures, but in fact, radioactive iodine can cause cancer in people of any age.
This woman is asking to be studied. For me there are long and interesting questions about the moral and ethical basis of studying any victim…but this woman wants data. The post-Fukushima period is generating oceans of data, but much of it is useless, either for a study, or for the victims. This woman tells me that readings from a “full-body count” measuring Becquerels in her body, taken at an evacuation center in 2011 was destroyed after two years. She cannot get it. It is gone. She is more than pissed.
Fairewinds’ Arnie Gundersen dubbed this sort of urban particulate “Dark Matter” and often found that it contains radioactive particles. It’s not clear if these were directly deposited by a plume from the Fukushima meltdown or were perhaps released by post-tsunami incineration of debris.
I feel (or maybe project) other women would explode if they could, but they hold it together for their children.
This is the “triple bind” created by Tepco’s allies in the Japanese federal and (most) state governments:
First: One’s entire life is disrupted by radioactive contamination; any official support comes through cooperation;
Second: One’s children (and some Mamas) are having symptoms of radiation impact but the doctors are told* not to identify radiation in any diagnosis;
Third: The official message from over 400 government-paid Post-Tepco Meltdown staff psychologists is: the only harm to the children will come from the mother’s anxiety about radiation, which is unfounded, and results in stress to her and her family. Stress is bad.
This last point we can all agree on, but the word “stress”, has been appropriated by the “There is No Problem, the Radiation is Safe” story line. Now “stress” means a mother who is no longer cooperative with a government that would require her to move home to Fukushima Prefecture and support the use of local foods in the school lunch program, or face personal condemnation. There is no one to buy her home if she chooses not to.
This makes it a quadruple bind.
I support these Mamas by carefully, and slowly, stating, at each speaking event that if I were a mother I would leave contaminated zones and take my children with me. This does not touch, however, the incredible pressure on them from all sides to conform to the official line; talk about stress!
At one last Tokyo “Mama Meeting” or “tea party” as we have called the sessions with women concerned about radiation, these Mamas are not refugees. They are women monitoring hot spots here in Tokyo.
One woman has four children who bop in and out, cared for on the side. This mom is not at all happy with me, or maybe anyone from the U.S., having anything to say about her situation. I quickly shift to listen-mode and agree with her often. Another mom is much younger. She has done quite a bit of reading and has decided that internal emitters from food contamination are her big concern. I agree with her too. Another mom is interested in learning how to clean up hot spots…and has produced detailed maps with photos of her detector reading as high as 126 millirems per hour on hot spots at a park in Tokyo. Her readings in the same area were repeated over many months.
This group seems more engaged and active than any other Mama Tea Party group I have met with. The feeling fits with the large NGO events that I am doing at the end of this trip. The same day as the Tea Party I went on to the National Diet Building to speak at a large (and lively) event hosted by the Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center, which covered it here.
During this tea party it slowly begins to dawn on me that the bottom of pretty much the entire Japanese food chain is aquatic. I have a dim memory of hearing decades ago, when a U.S. fast-food chain selling fried chicken opened in Japan for the first time, it did not pass the “quality” check done by the chain’s U.S. corporate executives. The chicken tasted like fish. The eggs I have been eating for the past 2 weeks in Tokyo also taste, faintly, of fish. I share this with the Mama concerned about food. Color drains from her face. It is overwhelming to think of meats, dairy and eggs being at risk from possible radioactive sea-water contamination. She says “It makes me tired.” I say “yeah, especially when you factor in fish-fertilizer and all the soy products.”
So, in the end, we know, we all live in Fukushima…
My last day in Japan I was thinking about the old adage that Crisis = Opportunity. Years ago (1999), I traveled to Australia to help fight a global nuclear waste dump called the “Pangea Project” that was targeting Australia for all the world’s irradiated fuel rods. Over breakfast in Perth, in the home of a Green Party member of the Australian Parliament, I ventured an opinion: “The Pangea Project is an existential threat to your nation. You should work for a Constitutional Amendment to ban international waste from entering your waters or your land.” I was truly shocked, as a naive American, to hear the reply: “Australia does not have a constitution.” Unfortunately this ugly global dump threat has reared its head, targeting Australia again. (NIRS Action Alert coming soon!)
Here, now, in Japan, once again, in my view: this nation is facing an existential threat from radioactivity. So, I ask Steve Leeper, one of my hosts, “Does Japan have a constitution?” Steve explains that it does, the Peace Constitution, written post-WWII, by an American woman (under the aegis of a famous US General.). Established in 1947, under U.S. Occupation.
As I scan the Constitution of Japan, it is amazing how detailed it is in enunciating the rights of individuals…though ‘Free Speech’ appears as Article 21, not “first amendment.” I have often felt in these past weeks a common thread between my Japanese friends and my friends back home, south of the Mason/Dixon Line. It hits me: they are both warrior people who fought hard and had to accept defeat. From the same victor: Yankees.
Freedom cannot be given. It must be taken. I sincerely hope that the Mama’s rise, peacefully, to claim the provisions of this constitution (or a new one) for themselves, their children, and all of Japan.
BIG CRISIS = BIG OPPORTUNITY.
*Medical suppression: I heard first-hand accounts from three physicians. One at a prestigious clinic refused to take the “hint” that he should not mention radiation in his diagnoses of patients and had his hospital privileges revoked. Two other women doctors in private practice are persevering in their care for all their patients, including those with symptoms clearly from radiation exposure. One of them openly calls their medical association as “sell-outs” to the “nuclear mafia.” I met these doctors, but I am not “naming these names…” and that is a comment too.
http://safeenergy.org/2016/04/05/japan-diary-2016-fukushima5-part-7/
Health Situation in Fukushima – Arnie Gundersen
Excerpt 1
Arnie Gundersen: “I’ve been reflecting a lot over the last week and a half about what the trip meant to me personally and what I learned… The first thing is [the people are] terribly concerned about their country and concerned about their children… The second thing is the inhumanity of the Japanese government, the Japanese utilities and the Japanese banks toward their own population. I’m just appalled at how the power structure in Japan is ignoring what its people want and basically ramming nukes down the throat of their population… I think [the media sources in Japan] still feel pressure under that State Secrets Act. Nobody wants to push too hard against [Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s] administration. As a matter of fact, one of Abe’s prime key ministers came out and said twice now that if… the media doesn’t say what the administration wants them to say, they’re going to pull their licenses.”
Excerpt 2
Arnie Gundersen: “The one thing I learned when I was in the resettlement communities [of people evacuated due to the Fukushima nuclear crisis] is that they’ve all been told that there will be no resettlement communities by the time the Olympics start. The plan is to move people back into their homes in the contaminated areas, or to move them somewhere else in Japan to permanent homes”… (Maggie Gundersen, founded of Fairewinds Energy Education:) “I was devastated when I saw some of the pictures that you took in Japan… these temporary housings just look like military barracks on bare pavement… And now to hide the radiation, extensive radiation, that’s there and re-depositing in the already cleaned areas from snowmelt, flooding, and rain — and to say it’s okay and send everyone back is a death sentence to all these families and children and grandchildren.”
Excerpt 3
Arnie Gundersen: Yeah, let me get back to the first thing I said about the inhumanity toward their own people. We had doctors tell us when they treated somebody for radiation illness, if they put radiation illness on the hospital forms, the government refused to pay. So doctors were literally going out of business because they were doing their job and treating people. But the other thing I learned on the last day of the trip was that there’s a huge spike in the death rates within Fukushima Prefecture for young children compared to what it was in previous years. But that story has been stifled by the Japanese medical and government agencies. Nobody’s publishing the data that the Japanese have been publishing for years leading up to the disaster. So where are the death data on Fukushima Prefecture? And the answer is it hasn’t been published because the Japanese government doesn’t want it out there. When you control the medical community, the epidemiological data that you need to prove a case is really, really difficult. I think Fairewinds did a good job in the time we were over there getting sample data with a group of scientists that may affect the way the world looks at the disaster. But the other half of that is, you’ve got to get the doctors on board to report honestly what they’re seeing. And the medical community is even more under the thumb of the Abe regime than is the press. It’s very depressing.” … (Maggie Gundersen:) “I want to let you know that Arnie and other scientists are working on some really significant studies from samples that scientists have taken in Japan… Fairewinds will be participating in a report that will be issued on this and we will keep you up to date. It takes time to do this testing, but as soon as it’s ready, it will be publicized.”
http://www.fairewinds.org/podcast//put-on-a-happy-face-japan-speaking-tour-series-no-4-1
Freezing of soil near Fukushima plant going well, says TEPCO
Rainwater is discharged from newly constructed drainage outlets into the plant’s harbor during a media tour at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on April 4.
The freezing of soil around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant to block the flow of groundwater is proceeding “largely smoothly,” the plant operator said April 4.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. started making a frozen underground wall in late March around the No. 1 to No. 4 reactors at the plant, which suffered a triple meltdown triggered by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
The final part of the construction process to freeze the soil was unveiled to the media for the first time April 4 during a visit to the site by Yosuke Takagi, state minister of the economy.
To build the frozen soil wall to prevent groundwater flowing into the four reactor buildings and becoming contaminated with radioactive substances, the utility inserted 1,568 pipes to a depth of 30 meters and 1 meter apart.
The company is now circulating liquid with a temperature of minus 30 degrees through the pipes to first freeze the soil on the side of the sea so as not to drastically change the groundwater level at the plant.
As of April 4, the soil temperature had dropped to minus 4 to 6 degrees at some locations, according to TEPCO.
“While we need to keep making efforts to control the temperature deliberately, we can say that the project is proceeding largely smoothly so far,” the company spokesman said.
The utility also unveiled new drainage outlets for the K drainage channel to discharge water into the plant’s harbor and block it from being released into the outer ocean.
The construction of the new outlets was completed March 28. Radiation-contaminated rainwater coming through the K drainage channel had previously often flown into the outer ocean when it rained.
GroundTruth Films: Fukushima Diary
Signs covering Fukushima Station are a distraction from the fact that 100,000 people are still displaced in the Prefecture.
Burn clothes: Wear ‘em, toss ‘em. That’s the spirit in which Beth Balaban and I packed for our final filming trip to Fukushima for Son of Saichi. We also brought burn pillows, burn shoes, burn socks, burn slippers, burn blow up mattresses… Safe to say, nothing in our suitcases is coming home with us.
On our previous three trips we’ve stayed outside the evacuated contamination zone, traveling in and out for brief periods daily. This time we’re staying inside Yamakiya, a village evacuated after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdown five years ago. And even though radiation levels here aren’t of the sci-fi-turn-your-skin-neon-green variety, scientists we’ve talked to admit that even after being part of the nation’s $10 billion clean-up effort, it’s still not a place they’d want to live.
Yamakiya’s evacuation didn’t come right away after the March 2011 disaster. It came a few months later when prevailing winds and seasonal rainfall took a toxic road trip, traveling like the Shinkansen over hills and valleys, and along Rte. 114 past the home of Hidekazu Ouichi, a lifelong farmer and son of Saichi, a Hiroshima survivor.
We’re here now because Hidekazu got word from the government late last year that he could – finally – move back home April 1st. But when he picked us up from the Fukushima train station, we found out the government has changed its mind again about lifting the evacuation orders. No, they now say, he can’t move back until September.
He’s moving back anyway. Another 31 families are, too. (Most former residents are rejecting any offer to live here.)
On the 30-minute drive to Yamakiya, I realize I’m more worried about what’s measured in pixels and decibels than becquerels or microsieverts. There’s a television screen embedded in the dashboard of Hidekazu’s new Toyota, and Japan’s national obsession – cute, quirky mascots – are on full display. Eyes on the road, Hidekazu!
Now that he’s home, Hidekazu finds it hard to break his lifelong habits and those of his ancestors. The family farm has always been land to live off, always a place of sustenance, and it’s difficult for him to see it any other way.
That’s why we’re not surprised when he opens the freezer to show us feet from a wild boar he and his friends caught in the backyard. A ghost town for the past five years, this area became overrun with wild animals – especially boar which Hidekazu says have gotten so used to gallivanting around town that “they roam freely inside abandoned houses, and come right up like a dog and wag their tails at you.”
The boar pre-freezer.
The bad news is that wild boar – tasty as their feet might be – eat mushrooms which are among the most contaminated plants in Yamakiya’s forest. Cesium builds up inside the body of boars because of it. When Hidekazu tested this boar to see just how radiated it was, he measured 12,000 becquerels. (One becquerel is defined as the decay of one atom of a radioisotope per second. So if your Geiger counter detects the radiation of one decay coming from a sample – say, a boar – in one second, then that sample has one becquerel of radiation.) 12,000 becquerels is astronomically higher than the 500 allowed by the government.
Crew member and animator Christian Schlaeffer puts his Geiger counter to the frozen boar feet.
Hidekazu offered to cook the feet up for us for dinner. We politely declined.
Oh, who am I kidding? We told him he was crazy and there wasn’t a chance in hell we’d eat it, and neither should he! But if our previous trips have told us anything, it’s that Hidekazu will eventually convince us to eat or drink something that will surprise us and amuse him. I suspect it’s just a matter of time before the killer bee liquor comes out of the cabinet.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beth-murphy/groundtruth-films-fukushi_b_9605966.html
150 Fukushima No. 1 workers who got maximum radiation dose at start of crisis can now return to plant
Some 150 people who worked at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant whose cumulative radiation dose exceeded 100 millisieverts will be able to return to the facility starting April 1.
By law, nuclear plant operators are required to record and manage the radiation exposure of each worker over a five-year term to ensure their dosage doesn’t exceed safe limits.
According to Tokyo Electric Power Co., 150 Tepco workers and 24 subcontractor workers who dealt with the meltdown disaster that occurred right after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami were exposed to radiation exceeding the limit. As of March 1, 129 of the Tepco employees were still working at the utility. They were moved to other divisions based on the government directive.
Since the five-year term for the workers ended in March, Tepco said it hopes experienced hands will return to engage in the decommissioning of the plant to contribute to safety at the site.
But Tepco said it will not push them to return and said those who wish to go back will be managed under a new exposure regime designed to limit a worker’s lifetime radiation dosage to 1,000 millisieverts in line with recommendations made by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.
Last year, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare created the new regime, which requires nuclear plant operators to set individual limits for workers based on their age and past exposure to radiation.
In total denial of the low-dose internal irradiation effects
Another marvelous spin propaganda article minimizing the dangers of the radiation in Fukushima, from the Asahi Shimbun.
If you watch that press conference from the beginning to the end, you may have different impression about their work. They do not pay any attention to the effect of the low-dose internal irradiation. Such omission being very convenient to promote the fallacy that life in Fukushima is very safe.
Haruka Onodera, a third-year student at Fukushima High School, holds a news conference with University of Tokyo professor Ryugo Hayano at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo on Feb. 8.
Fukushima students reach out to tell truth about radiation
Struck by ignorance about the 2011 nuclear disaster, high school science club members in Fukushima Prefecture enlisted the help of fellow students around Japan and abroad for a comparative study on radiation doses.
The results surprised even those living in the prefecture that hosts the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
“The individual doses (of external radiation exposure in high school students) were almost equal inside and outside of Fukushima Prefecture, and in European areas,” Haruka Onodera, 18, said in English at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ) in Tokyo on Feb. 8.
A German correspondent asked her, “Would you declare Fukushima now safe?”
“Actually, we didn’t measure the doses in people living in the contaminated areas, so we can’t say all of Fukushima is safe,” Onodera answered, often pausing in thought in the middle of her words and phrases. “But I hope we will send (personal dosimeters) to contaminated areas and help do risk management for people living there in the future.”
Onodera, a third-year student of Fukushima High School and member of the physics and radiation division of the school’s Super Science Club, also showed explanatory slides at the FCCJ news conference titled, “Fukushima and radiation monitoring. The goal of the project is to show the realities of Fukushima Prefecture to the rest of the world.
The club’s physics and radiation division started the project in summer 2014. It involved 216 high school students and teachers in Japan and abroad carrying personal dosimeters for two weeks.
Six high schools in Fukushima Prefecture–Fukushima, Adachi, Aizu Gakuho, Iwaki, Asaka and Tamura–and another six located elsewhere in Japan–including in Gifu, Kanagawa, Nara and Hyogo prefectures–were involved in the project.
They were joined by 14 high schools from France, Poland and Belarus.
According to the measurements taken by the students, the annual radiation doses in Fukushima Prefecture ranged between 0.63 and 0.97 millisievert. For elsewhere in Japan, the range was from 0.55 to 0.87 millisievert, while in Europe, the annual doses were between 0.51 and 1.1 millisieverts.
The similar levels of external doses are believed to be partly attributable to the lower level of natural background radiation in Fukushima Prefecture compared with that in western Japan. That finding came from an analysis of a database on the radioactive content of soil in areas surrounding the different high schools across Japan.
Onodera, who was seated next to Ryugo Hayano, a professor of physics with the University of Tokyo, at the FCCJ news conference, had also presented the study results last year to a workshop of high school students in France and a conference on Fukushima foodstuffs held on the sidelines of an international food exposition in Italy.
Two second-year students of the Super Science Club–Minori Saito, 17, and Yuya Fujiwara, 17–gave a talk at a workshop organized in Date, Fukushima Prefecture, by the International Commission on Radiological Protection late last year.
First- and second-year students who are members of the club, joined by eight high school students from France, visited peach farmers and shiitake mushroom growers in Fukushima Prefecture in summer last year. It was part of a program for studying the current state of Fukushima from diverse views.
The students wanted to address global audiences after they were shocked by how little was known about the actual state of Fukushima Prefecture.
“Can humans live in Fukushima?” a French high school student asked the Fukushima students over Skype as part of an international exchange program in 2014.
That prompted the Japanese students to determine the actual situation on their own, and compare it with circumstances elsewhere in Japan and abroad. Hayano advised them to undertake the endeavor when he visited Fukushima High School to give a talk.
The findings of the study were surprising. Most of the Fukushima students expected the doses in Fukushima would be the highest, even by a large margin.
The students also studied how behavior affected the dose levels.
The Fukushima High School students were being exposed to lower radiation levels when they were at school than when they were at home. They believe the school’s concrete buildings provided a more effective shield from radiation sources than the wooden houses did.
By contrast, students attending Ena High School in Gifu Prefecture were exposed to more radiation when they were at school, where granite, containing radiation sources, is used in the buildings.
Their analysis results were published in November in a British scientific journal on radiological protection. Onodera was involved in writing the research paper.
“The experience has brought home to me how important it is to address reality objectively and scientifically,” she said.
Onodera said she was growing more interested in basic sciences and dreams of doing research on molecular biology at university.
“We hope to solicit help from people in evacuation zones within Fukushima Prefecture, and from high schools in countries we have yet to address, in further broadening our study,” said Takashi Hara, a teacher and adviser to the science club’s physics and radiation division.
‘Ice Wall’ Is Japan’s Last-Ditch Effort To Contain Fukushima Radiation
Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is illuminated for decommissioning operation in the dusk in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, in this aerial view photo taken by Kyodo March 10, 2016, a day before the five-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster.
• The nearly mile-long structure consists of underground pipes designed to form a frozen barrier around the crippled reactors.
• The $312 million system was completed last month, more than a year behind schedule.
• Nearly 800,000 tons of radioactive water are already being stored onsite.
Japanese authorities have activated a large subterranean “ice wall” in a desperate attempt to stop radiation that’s been leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant for five years.
The wall consists of a series of underground refrigeration pipes meant to form a frozen soil barrier around the four reactors that were crippled during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
Construction of the $312 million government-funded structure was completed last month, more than a year behind schedule, the Associated Press reports. The nearly mile-long barrier is intended to block groundwater from entering the facility and becoming contaminated.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, which owns the plant, activated the system Thursday, a day after obtaining approval from Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority.
In a video detailing the ice wall’s design, TEPCO said the technology has been successfully used to prevent water intrusion during the construction of tunnels, but this is the first time it has been used to block water from entering a nuclear facility.
“We will create an impermeable barrier,” the company said, “by freezing the soil itself all the way down to the bedrock that exists below the plant. When groundwater flowing downhill reaches this frozen barrier it will flow around the reactor buildings, reaching the sea just as it always has, but without contacting the contaminated water within the reactor buildings.”
TEPCO says the ice wall will be activated in stages over the next several months and is one of several measures the company is taking to reduce the amount of water being contaminated on the site.
Nearly 800,000 tons of radioactive water are already being stored in more than 1,000 industrial tanks at the nuclear plant, according to the AP.
While hopes are high that the ice wall will prove successful in stopping additional radioactive water from seeping into the Pacific Ocean, Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, urged caution.
“It would be best to think that natural phenomena don’t work the way you would expect,” he told reporters Wednesday, according to the AP report.
The activation of the ice wall comes just weeks after a TEPCO official reported that robots designed to access the dangerous interior of the plant and seek out the melted fuel rods were “dying” from the high levels of radiation.
The video below details how the ice wall is expected to work.
Telling the Story of Fukushima
Different Approaches to Remembering 3/11 at the Prefecture’s Museums
Five years after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami touched off a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the disaster is no longer just a current event—it is also a part of Japan’s history. But how should that history be told? Government and civil society groups have different answers, and they are starting to emerge in a battle of museums.
A Tale of Two Museums
In a flurry of caption writing and message tweaking, Fukushima prefectural government officials are currently putting the finishing touches on a major new exhibit about the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Starting this summer, the exhibit will be permanently displayed at the ¥20 billion Fukushima Prefectural Center for Environmental Creation in the town of Miharu. Plans are in the works to send every fifth-grade student in the prefecture on a field trip to view it. The goal, according to the organizers, is to “address the worries and concerns of Fukushima residents, further understanding of radiation and environmental problems, and deepen awareness of environmental recovery.”
Some 40 kilometers away, in a small post-and-beam hall in the city of Shirakawa, a group of local citizens are planning a very different kind of exhibit. Their displays focus on the ways in which the government exacerbated the disaster and disregarded the rights of Fukushima residents in its aftermath. They will be exhibited at the Nuclear Disaster Information Center, which was built in 2013 using ¥30 million yen in donations from the public, with the goal of ensuring Fukushima and its lessons are not forgotten.
These two projects represent divergent understandings of how the Fukushima nuclear disaster should be remembered. Given their vastly unequal resources and reach, they also raise questions about the appropriate role of government in memorializing the disaster that rocked Japan and the world five years ago.
“People who have suffered from the Fukushima disaster have doubts about whether a public facility like the Center for Environmental Creation can truly communicate the lessons of an accident for which the national and prefectural governments bear partial responsibility,” says Gotō Shinobu, an associate professor at Fukushima University, who is involved in planning the alternative exhibit in Shirakawa.
A Familiar Story
The quiet battle over historical interpretation that is playing out in Fukushima has a precedent in the seaside city of Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, the site of one of the most devastating industrial disasters in world history. Thousands of people living in the area were killed or severely sickened by mercury after Chisso Corporation dumped industrial waste from its chemical plant into the bay over the course of several decades, contaminating fish and shellfish and poisoning the people who ate them. Fifty years later, public and private museums in the area are still telling different versions of that history.
One version can be found at the Minamata Disease Municipal Museum, which was established in 1993 with the goal of “handing down the lessons and experiences of Minamata Disease,” according to its mission statement. Videos and panels in the ¥6 billion facility relate the history and science of the disaster, and victims are on hand to share their personal experiences. But Endō Kunio, a board member and employee of the nonprofit victims’ support organization Sōshisha, says the museum fails to communicate the disaster’s true lessons. “Simply lining up events does not equate to history,” he says. “The facts of what happened are there, but the museum doesn’t say much about their meaning.”
Since 1988, Sōshisha has run its own museum, which displays fishing gear, protest flags, and other artifacts in a converted mushroom-cultivation shed. Among its founding principles is the goal of recording the struggles of the victims and the culpability of government and industry. “Our starting point is the perspective that Minamata Disease resulted from criminal activities on the part of Chisso Corporation and the national government,” says Endō. That perspective has shaped the low-budget museum into a symbol of resistance against the sanitization of painful historical events.
Fukushima Fault Lines
The divide in Fukushima falls along similar lines. The exhibit at the prefectural center will include a timeline of events since the meltdowns, a “radiation lab” explaining the science of radiation and measures to reduce exposure, and a large display on efforts to increase renewable energy and sustainability in the prefecture, according to an overview released last year. Although the exhibit advocates for a “Fukushima that does not depend on nuclear power,” reporting by the Tokyo Shimbun has pointed out that its planning board included several members with close ties to the nuclear industry.
In 2014, shortly after planning began, a citizen’s group with antinuclear leanings called the Fukushima Action Project sent a letter to the prefectural authorities expressing concern over the exhibit. The group requested, among other things, that the center not minimize the health risks of radiation. Since then, FAP representatives have met eight times with prefectural officials to discuss the content of the exhibits. According to meeting transcripts posted on the group’s website, they expressed concerns this January that the exhibit still does not adequately address the severe and ongoing water pollution caused by the disaster or the huge amounts of radioactive waste generated by the cleanup.
Fukushima prefectural officials, meanwhile, note that the exhibit does not touch on government or industry culpability, the fact that radiation exposure limits were raised after the disaster, or the pollution and waste problems because “these issues are not pertinent to the goals of the exhibit.” The facility’s goal, they explain, is “supporting educational activities related to radiation and the environment”; in response to public concerns about the exhibit, they state only that the exhibit content was determined by a panel of experts.
Nagamine Takafumi, the director of the Nuclear Disaster Information Center, is also deeply skeptical about the public museum. “We believe the goal of the Fukushima Prefectural Center for Environmental Creation is to create a myth of radiation safety,” he said. He and his colleagues are currently planning two permanent exhibits for their center. One, designed by Fukushima University’s Gotō, will compare global teaching materials on nuclear power and highlight the Ministry of Education’s pronuclear bias before the disaster. The other will examine the failure of all but a few municipalities in Fukushima to distribute potassium iodide pills immediately after the accident, which would have lowered residents’ risk of developing thyroid cancer.
A Third Perspective
Another private, but less politically driven, museum operates from an outbuilding at an abandoned school in the village of Kawauchi, about 25 kilometers inland from the nuclear plant. Called the Kangaeru Shirōkan, which translates roughly to “a museum for feeling, thinking, and understanding,” the free facility displays protective bodysuits, radiation meters, photographs, town newsletters, and other artifacts of the meltdown.
The museum was founded in 2012 by Nishimaki Hiroshi, a local journalist who moved to the area from Saitama Prefecture nine years ago. He says that in the months following the disaster, he wanted to do something constructive, but felt immobilized by the scale and complexity of the meltdown’s aftermath. When novelist and longtime friend Taguchi Randy suggested he open a museum, he acted on the idea.
The displays include scant explanatory text, and Nishimaki is rarely on site to act as a guide. His says his goal is simply to present the reality as locals have experienced it so that it will not be forgotten. “The government does bear some responsibility for what happened, but I don’t think of the displays as a way to attack them,” he says. Still, he has avoided government funding in order to maintain complete freedom in what he exhibits.
An Inevitable but Unequal Divide
It is hardly surprising that views of environmental catastrophe differ in private and public museums. Government actors partially responsible for a disaster are unlikely to be objective in planning a museum to memorialize it, and civic organizations that include disaster victims are equally unlikely to put aside their own experiences when interpreting the same events. In the case of the Fukushima disaster, divergent views on nuclear power further shape the messages presented in museums.
Public and private projects of historical interpretation can in this sense complement one another. Yet there is little chance the majority of the public will be exposed to both perspectives. As Gotō points out, the budget of the public museum is over 600 times that of the private one he is involved with, and visits to the private museum are not a part of any official school curriculum.
Last year, national and local officials met to discuss another large, government-funded museum focused on the nuclear disaster, this one planned to open on the prefecture’s coast some time in the coming decade. Although they haven’t asked, Minamata’s Endō has a piece of advice for them.
“It is all-important that the story of what happened be told by the people who live in that place,” he says. “When government officials and civil society groups interpret for them, it becomes something different.”
Contaminated water, fuel extraction stand in way of decommissioning Fukushima plant
The Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) is seen in September, 2012
With about five years having passed since the start of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster, nuclear workers still lack a method of treating the around 1,000 tanks of contaminated water stored on site, and the start of work to remove melted nuclear fuel from the plant remains at least five years away.
“Until the contaminated water issue is solved, decommissioning of the reactors remains far off. We have to stop the water,” says Tetsuo Ito, professor of nuclear energy safety engineering at the Kinki University Atomic Energy Research Institute. Akira Ono, chief of the Fukushima plant, says, “We’re still at step one” of the decommissioning process, which is estimated to take until 2041 to 2051.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the plant’s owner, is treating the contaminated water with its Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), which can remove 62 varieties of radioactive material. However, ALPS cannot remove radioactive tritium, and because of this the treated water is stored in tanks. Tritium is extremely difficult to separate from water, because even if one of the hydrogen atoms in a water molecule is replaced by tritium, the chemical properties such as the boiling point barely change.
Pipes for an underground frozen wall to block contaminated water leakages are seen on the landward side of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, on Feb. 23, 2016.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has advised that tritium-containing water be released into the ocean, because its effect on the human body is very limited. Tritium-containing water is created even during the normal operation of a nuclear power plant, and it is released into the ocean in accordance with waste-disposal standards. However, there is local opposition to doing this at the Fukushima plant because of worries about its effects on the reputation of the local fishing industry, and no decision has been made on what to do with the water.
Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years, so storing the water until the radiation naturally lessens is another option, but there is the risk of leaks during that time if the tanks’ conditions deteriorate.
As for decommissioning the plant reactors, at the end of 2011 the national government put together a roadmap that estimated the decommission work would take 30 to 40 years. To decommission the No. 1 through 3 reactors at the plant, 1,573 units of spent fuel will have to be removed from the spent fuel pools of these reactors, and 1,496 units’ worth of fuel that melted from the reactors will have to be removed. Safe removal of the melted fuel represents the largest problem.
A wall constructed on the seaward side of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant to prevent leakages is seen on Sept. 24, 2015.
The national government and TEPCO intend to decide on a plan for the fuel’s extraction in the first half of fiscal 2018, and start extraction efforts at one of the reactors within the year 2021. Toyoshi Fuketa, a member of the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), argues that nuclear fuel that is too difficult to take out should be stored on-site, saying, “There is the option of just removing as much (of the melted fuel) as possible, and hardening the rest (to seal off its radiation).”
The cost for decommissioning the reactors is already estimated at 2 trillion yen, and this could grow if the decommissioning schedule is delayed.
While the No. 1 through 3 reactors at the plant were shut down at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, they lost all power due to the proceeding tsunami and, with no way to cool the nuclear reactors, they experienced a meltdown. The tsunami measured at up to 15.5 meters, and emergency underground power supplies were flooded and failed to function.
Tanks for holding contaminated water are seen on the grounds of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, on Nov. 5, 2015
The No. 1 reactor was equipped with a cooling system called Reactor Core Isolation Cooling (IC), but this didn’t activate, and on March 12 at 3:36 p.m. the No. 1 reactor suffered a hydrogen explosion. Then, on March 14 at 11:01 a.m. the No. 3 reactor also experienced a hydrogen explosion. The No. 4 reactor was already offline at the time of the disaster for a regular inspection, but hydrogen from the adjacent No. 3 reactor leaked in, and it suffered a hydrogen explosion as well at 6:14 a.m. on March 15. The No. 2 reactor was not hit by a hydrogen explosion, but among the No. 1 through 3 reactors it is thought to have leaked the most radiation. The disaster is rated a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the same as the Chernobyl disaster.
Masao Yoshida, the late chief of the Fukushima plant who headed up the frontline disaster-response efforts, testified to a government panel investigating the disaster, “We (who were on-site) imagined it as the destruction of eastern Japan. I really thought we were dead.”
Four reports on the disaster were put together, from the national government, the Diet, TEPCO and elsewhere in the private sector. They differ on points such as why the IC in the No. 1 reactor did not activate. The Diet probe raised the possibility that the IC system’s piping was damaged in the earthquake, but the national government’s investigative panel denied that earthquake damage was the cause. Due to the high radiation levels in the reactor buildings, there has not yet been an on-site investigation to better understand what happened.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160403/p2a/00m/0na/010000c
Fukushima Daiichi Contaminated Waste to Be Recycled into Construction Materials
Japan to Recycle Waste Collected during Fukushima Decontamination
TOKYO – The Japanese government announced Wednesday it will recycle the material collected during the decontamination of the Fukushima nuclear plant for construction purposes if radiation levels are found to be sufficiently low.
The government plans to store the waste collected from the radiation-affected region and use it as construction material in places outside the prefecture in northeastern Japan, within 30 years, reported state broadcaster NHK.
According to the country’s environment ministry, residue showing less than 8,000 becquerel per kg could be used in future to pave roads, build anti-tsunami walls and in other public works.
Over 90 percent of the material, accumulated since the 2011 disaster, could be re-used if the contaminated elements are removed, according to the authorities, who are, however, yet to develop the technology to separate waste with high radiation levels.
Currently, Fukushima authorities store the radioactive waste at two depots close to the plant, which can store up to 30 million tons.
The waste will remain at these storage sites for the next 30 years, to be later transferred to a definitive storage place, whose location remains to be determined, and to be used in public works if cleared of high radiation levels.
The Fukushima crisis has been the worst nuclear accident in history after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.
The nuclear plant, which suffered a meltdown in the aftermath of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck the country on March 11, 2011, is now being dismantled, a task that will take at least four decades to complete.
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=2408901&CategoryId=12395
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
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
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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