A vice foreign minister apologized after an exhibition in Ethiopia about the Fukushima nuclear disaster was scrapped following complaints from the Japanese Embassy that the content was “inappropriate.”
The exhibition, planned by volunteers of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), was supposed to be part of the Japan Festival held in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on Oct. 31, 2015.
The festival, jointly hosted by the Japanese Embassy, JICA and other entities to promote a better understanding of Japan, went off as scheduled in the east African nation. But the exhibition about the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was called off after the embassy warned that it might withdraw its participation in the event.
Vice Foreign Minister Seiji Kihara on March 16 apologized for having completely shut the door on the Fukushima exhibition.
“It is important to make known the actual situation in the disaster-hit areas, including Fukushima, so we should have continued our discussions with the aim of holding the exhibition,” Kihara said at a meeting of the Lower House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
JICA’s volunteers, including members of the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers, conceived the idea for the Fukushima exhibition.
An official of the Japanese Embassy, however, criticized the content, telling the volunteers, “It is inappropriate at a time when the central government is working hard to dispel groundless rumors regarding the disaster.”
JICA also said it received an e-mail from the embassy that said, “If the exhibition is one that runs counter to the policies of the central government, such as by taking an ‘anti-nuclear’ stance, it would be difficult for us to jointly host the event.”
After the e-mail was received, JICA’s local office agreed to cancel the exhibition, JICA said.
AP,Mar 10, 2016 (emphasis added): Fukushima ‘Decontamination Troops’ Often Exploited, Shunned — The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant… They were simply labeled “decontamination troops” — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside… One laborer… said he was instructed never to talk to reporters… Minutes after chatting with some workers in Minamisoma, Associated Press journalists received a call from a city official warning them not to talk to decontamination crews… [W]orkers have developeddiabetes, cerebral and respiratory problems… local hospital intern Toyoaki Sawano said in a medical magazine last month… Hideaki Kinoshita, a Buddhist monk who keeps the unidentified laborers’ ashes at his temple [said] “There is no end to this job… Five years from now, the workers will still be around. And more unclaimed ashes may end up here.”
Mainichi, Mar 7, 2016: Experts divided on causes of high thyroid cancer rates among Fukushima children — A total of 166 children in Fukushima Prefecture had been either diagnosed with thyroid cancer or with suspected cases of cancer… “Compared to the estimated prevalence rates based on the country’s statistics on cancer, which are shown in data including regional cancer registration, the level of thyroid cancer detection is several dozen times higher(in children of Fukushima Prefecture),” said the final draft for the interim report compiled by the prefectural government’s expert panel on Feb. 15… [T]wo teams both concluded that the number of cancer cases found in Fukushima children was “about 30 times” that of national levels [and] agree that the “30 times higher (than the national occurrence rates)” is unexplainable. At the moment, the most likely theories for such a high rate of cancer detection are the “overdiagnosis theory” held by [the team led by Shoichiro Tsugane, a member of the Fukushima government’s expert panel] and the “radiation effect theory” that [the team led by Okayama University professor Toshihide Tsuda] supports… Tsugane is not completely denying the effects of radiation in children’s cancer… [Tsuda] argues that radiation exposure is the main cause of the high prevalence of cancer in children [and] because the spread of cancer cells to lymph nodes and other tissues could be seen in 92 percent of patients, Tsuda believes thatoverdiagnosis makes up 8 percent of the patients at most…
RT, Mar 11, 2016: ‘Shocking how many people died in Fukushima‘ – documentary director… Authorities in Japan want locals to think “nothing happened,” documentary director Jeffrey Jousan told RT. “The government prints the number of people who died as a result of the 2011 disaster in the newspapers… the (death toll) amounts to 300-400 people in each prefecture, but in Fukushima it is over 8,000 people… It is shocking… to see [how] many people have died in Fukushima”… [I]t is still unclear how many people have succumbed to or suffer from radiation-caused cancer diseases directly linked to the crippled plant.
Fukushima Keeps Fighting Radioactive Tide 5 Years After Disaster, NYT By JONATHAN SOBLE MARCH 10, 2016 TOKYO — Of the thousands of workers who have answered the help-wanted ads at Fukushima Daiichi, the ruined and radioactive nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan, the part-time lettuce farmer and occasional comic-book artist Kazuto Tatsuta must be among the least likely.
“I needed a job,” Mr. Tatsuta, 51, recalled of his decision in 2012 to accept work at the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents.
His duties included welding broken water pipes and inspecting remote-controlled robots that survey radioactive hot spots. And his comic strips, once populated with baseball players and gangsters, now tell stories of middle-aged, blue-collar men like himself who do the grunt work at Fukushima, some of whom find a sense of purpose and belonging they lacked in the outside world.
“It’s secure. You’re not going to get laid off there,” Mr. Tatsuta said. “But you’re also working for a goal.”
Five years after a powerful earthquake and tsunami struck, causing three reactors at Fukushima to melt down, that goal is the focus of a colossal effort at once precarious and routine. A veneer of stability at the plant masks a grueling, day-to-day battle to contain hazardous radiation, which involves a small army of workers, complex technical challenges and vexing safety trade-offs.
Fukushima has become a place where employees arrive on company shuttle buses and shop at their own on-site convenience store, but where they struggle to control radiation-contaminated water and must release it into the sea. Many of the most difficult and dangerous cleanup tasks still lie ahead, and crucial decisions remain unsettled………
The duration of the cleanup also creates the risk of labor shortages, he said, especially in jobs requiring special skills. Japan’s population is shrinking and, with the future of nuclear power uncertain, many young people are unwilling to stake careers on the industry.
For now, Fukushima is bustling with about 7,000 workers, much more than before the disaster and twice as many as two years ago. The town of Iwaki to the south has become a kind of workers’ village. At dawn, vans and buses line up to ferry workers to the plant via staging areas where they don protective white Tyvek suits, radiation monitors and gas masks.
“You think of it as totally normal work,” said Mr. Tatsuta, who asked to be identified only by his pen name to avoid being blacklisted by the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company……….
For workers at the site, radiation is a constant enemy — though many see it more as a threat to their livelihoods than their lives. Government regulations forbid cleanup workers to be exposed to too much radiation, and when they hit the limits, they risk being laid off or reassigned to lower-paying jobs.
“If you go over the radiation limits, you can’t work,” Mr. Tatsuta said. “You’re always calculating how to keep the dose low.”
The temptation to cheat can be strong, for both workers and their managers. A government examination of Tokyo Electric’s safety practices in 2013 found that it had underreported the radiation exposure of a third of the workers whose records were reviewed. The company says it has since tightened reporting procedures……..http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/11/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-disaster.html?_r=0
Fukushima’s ground zero: No place for man or robot BY AARON SHELDRICK AND MINAMI FUNAKOSHI , Reuters, Mar 11, 2016 The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima’s nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean “ice wall” around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site……
Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods, weighing hundreds of tonnes. Five robots sent into the reactors have failed to return.
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) 9501.t, has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed.
“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant,” Naohiro Masuda, Tepco’s head of decommissioning said in an interview. “The biggest obstacle is the radiation.”
The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.
But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said.
Each robot has to be custom-built for each building.“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said. ………
ICE WALL
Tepco is building the world’s biggest ice wall to keep groundwater from flowing into the basements of the damaged reactors and getting contaminated.
First suggested in 2013 and strongly backed by the government, the wall was completed in February, after months of delays and questions surrounding its effectiveness. Later this year, Tepco plans to pump water into the wall – which looks a bit like the piping behind a refrigerator – to start the freezing process.
The Science and Technology Ministry of Japan will work together with the French National Research Agency and the United States Department of Energy.
The United States will work with Japan to develop new technologies to deal with the incredible amounts of radioactive waste being generated by decommissioning and decontamination activities.
France will help develop new robotic and remote-control equipment that will survive the extreme levels of radiation in the crippled reactor buildings.
The agreement between the three nations will also enhance the cooperation between governments.
For sure such gibberish pseudo-scientific study, totally biased, must have been financed by the nuclear lobby to completely whitewash the Japanese Government failure to take the necessary real measures to adequately and effectively protect the eastern Japan population ( 50 millions people) from the effects of the March 2011 Fukushima explosions’ radioactive plumes, then from the radionuclides loaded gases released by Fukushima Daiichi for the past 5 years continuously contaminating the people, their living environment, plus their food and water supply.
Furthermore it chooses deliberately to ignore all the scientific studies made in the past 50 years about the harmful effects of radiation on various living species.
At the time on March 2011, the US Embassy in Tokyo had advised the Japanese Government to evacuate all the population within a 50-mile radius zone. To not avail as the Japanese Government chose to evacuate only within a 12 to 19-mile radius zone , evacuating in the end only 160,000 residents instead of the 2 millions residents as advised by the US Embassy.
A gate is shut at the evacuation zone in Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, on Feb. 14. In such places, the scars are still obvious and many evacuees who fled are unwilling to return.
Fukushima evacuations were not worth the money, study says
LONDON – The costs of evacuating residents from near the Fukushima No. 1 plant and the dislocation the people experienced were greater than their expected gain in longevity, a British study has found.
The researchers found that at best evacuees could expect to live eight months longer, but that some might gain only one extra day of life. They said this does not warrant ripping people from their homes and communities.
The team of experts from four British universities developed a series of tests to examine the relocations after the Fukushima crisis and earlier Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
After a three-year study, the academics have concluded that Japan “overreacted” by relocating 160,000 residents of Fukushima Prefecture, even though radioactive material fell on more than 30,000 sq. km of territory.
“We judged that no one should have been relocated in Fukushima, and it could be argued this was a knee-jerk reaction,” said Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at Bristol University. “It did more harm than good. An awful lot of disruption has been caused However, this is with hindsight and we are not blaming the authorities.”
The team used a wide range of economic and actuarial data, as well as information from the United Nations and the Japanese government.
In one test, an assessment of judgment value, the researchers calculated how many days of life expectancy were saved by relocating residents away from areas affected by radiation.
They compared this with the cost of relocation and how much this expenditure would impact the quality of people’s lives in the future.
From this information, they were able to work out the optimal or rational level of spending and make a judgment on the best measures to mitigate the effects of a nuclear accident.
Depending on how close people were to the radiation, the team calculated that the relocations added a period of between one day to 21 days to the evacuees’ lives.
But when this was compared with the vast amounts of money spent, the academics came to the conclusion that it was unjustified in all cases.
In some areas, they calculated that 150 times more money was being spent than was judged rational.
Thomas adds, the tests do not take into account the physical and psychological effects of relocating, which have been shown to have led to more than 1,000 deaths among elderly evacuees.
Other studies have also found that once people have lived away for a certain period of time it can become increasingly difficult to persuade them to return.
After Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, around 116,000 people were initially relocated away from the disaster zone.
Looking back on the incident, the team judged it was only worthwhile to relocate 31,000 people because they would have lost in excess of 8.7 months in life expectancy had they remained.
However, for the rest of the 116,000 people, it would have been a more rational decision to keep them where they were, given that their average loss of life was put at three months.
Four years later, a further 220,000 people were relocated from areas close to Chernobyl. Researchers found this unjustified.
Thomas says the loss in life expectancy following a nuclear accident has to be put into context alongside other threats all people face.
For example, it has been claimed that the average Londoner will lose about 4½ months in life expectancy due to high pollution levels.
Thomas concludes governments should carry out a more careful assessment before mounting a relocation operation of at least a year. A temporary evacuation could be a good idea while authorities work out the risk from radiation, he said.
In the future, Thomas would like to see more real-time information made available to the public on radiation levels in order to avoid hysteria and bad planning.
On a plus note, the team found that other remedial measures — decontaminating homes, deep ploughing of soil and bans on the sales of certain food products — were far more effective.
Thomas has already discussed his findings with colleagues at the University of Tokyo and he is keen that his findings can help better quantify the risks from radioactive leaks.
The project was sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Britain’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. It was intended to give advice for nuclear planners both in Britain and India.
The research team comprised specialists from City University in London, Manchester University, the Open University and Warwick University.
TOKYO – The Japanese government will team up with experts in the United States and France to develop brand new technologies to collect melted fuel from crippled reactors at Fukushima, an official said Monday.
Removal of the melted rods at the nuclear plant, which was wrecked by a tsunami five years ago, is one of the biggest challenges of the mammoth cleanup, a huge project expected to take up to four decades.
Scientists have long warned the technology required for the complex — and potentially dangerous — task does not yet exist, and would have to be invented.
Entombing the uranium rods in concrete and effectively abandoning the site — as was done after the meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 — has been ruled out by the Japanese government as politically unacceptable, leaving innovation as the only possible solution.
Japan’s science and technology ministry said it would work with the US Energy Department and the French National Research Agency on the project — a key step towards eventual decommissioning, which is expected to begin in 2021.
“This is the first basic research led by the government designed to help decommission Fukushima Daiichi after TEPCO worked together with its partners overseas at the private level,” a ministry official said, referring to the operator of the plant.
Under the plan, the US side will help Japan develop equipment and technology to manage and dispose of highly-radioactive waste produced from the decommissioning work, the official said.
France will cooperate with Japan in developing remote-control technology, including robotic and image processing expertise that can withstand high-radiation environments, he said.
The Japanese government plans to finance the projects by spending part of its “Fukushima technology development budget” worth 3.0 billion yen ($26.4 million).
IAEA marine experts and Japanese scientists collect water samples in coastal waters near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station
The BBC has been excelling itself in its deliberate understatement of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, writes Chris Busby. While calling in pseudo experts to say radiation is all but harmless, it’s ignoring the science that shows that the real health impacts of nuclear fallout are around 1,000 times worse than claimed.
I am so ashamed of the BBC. It seems, as an institution, to be supporting and promulgating an enormous lie about the health effects of radioactive pollution. And not providing any balanced scientific picture.
On the 5th Anniversary of the catastrophe we saw Prof Geraldine Thomas, the nuclear industry’s new public relations star, walk through the abandoned town of Ohkuma inside the Fukushima exclusion zone with BBC reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.
She was described as “One of Britain’s leading experts on the health effects of radiation”. Thomas is of the opinion that there is no danger and the Japanese refugees can come back and live there in the ‘zone’. Her main concern was how untidy it all was: “left to rack and ruin”, she complained, sadly.
At one point Rupert pulled out his Geiger Counter and read the dose of 3 microSieverts per hour. “What does that mean”, he asked, “how much radiation would it give in a year to people who came back here?”
Thomas replied, “About an extra milliSievert a year which is not much considering you get 2mSv a year from natural background. The long term impact on your health would be absolutely nothing.”
Now anyone who has a calculator can easily multiply 3 microSieverts (3 x 10-6 Sv) by 24 hours and 365 days. The answer is 26 mSv (0.026Sv) not “about 1mSv” as the “leading expert on the health effects of radiation” told the dumbfounded viewers.
Any real expert would not have made such a stupid mistake. But this woman is not a real expert, her CV shows she has published almost nothing in the way of original research, so we must ask how it is the BBC come to take her seriously.
Those who hate nothing so much as the truth
This recalled the day the first reactor exploded in 2011. I was in London, and the BBC asked me to come into the studio and comment. Also there was a nuclear industry apologist, Dr Ian Fells. Like Gerry Thomas he was unconcerned about the radiation: the main problem for him was that the lifts would not work. People would have to climb stairs, he complained.
I said then on that first day that this was a serious accident like Chernobyl but he and all the stooges that followed him told the viewers that it was no problem, not like Chernobyl, hydrogen explosion, no breach of containment pressure vessels etc. Some months later, looking back, it is clear I was correct on every point, but I never was invited back to the BBC.
I visited Japan, took sophisticated measuring equipment, obtained vehicle air filters, spoke to the Japanese people and advised them to take Calcium tablets to block the Strontium-90. My vehicle air filter measurements showed clearly that large areas of north east Japan were seriously contaminated including Tokyo.
This was too much for the nuclear industry: I was attacked in the Guardian newspaper by pro-nuclear Pauline-converted George Monbiot in an attempt to destroy my credibility. One other attacker was Geraldine Thomas. What she said then was as madly incorrect then as what she is saying now. But the Guardian would not let me respond.
The important evidence for me in the recent BBC clip is the measurement of dose given by Rupert’s Geiger counter, 3microSieverts per hour (3μSv/h). Normal background in Japan (I know, I measured it there) is about 0.1μSv/h. So in terms of external radiation, Ruperts’s measurement gave 30 times normal background.
Fukushima: we have a very serious problem
Is this a problem for health? You bet it is. The question no-one asked is what is causing the excess dose? The answer is easy: radioactive contamination, principally of Caesium-137. On the basis of well-known physics relationships we can say that 3μSv/h at 1m above ground represents a surface contamination of about 900,000 Bq per square metre of Cs-137. That is, 900,000 disintegrations per second in one square metre of surface.
And note that they were standing on a tarmac road which appeared to be clean. And this is 5 years after the explosions. The material is everywhere, and it is in the form of dust particles which can be inhaled. Invisible sparkling fairy-dust that kills hang in the air above such measurements.
The particles are not just of Caesium-137. They contain other long lived radioactivity, Strontium-90, Plutonium 239, Uranium-235, Uranium 238, Radium-226, Polonium-210, Lead-210, Tritium, isotopes of Rhodium, Ruthenium, Iodine, Cerium, Cobalt 60, the list is long.
The UN definition of radioactively contaminated land is 37,000Bq / square metre, and so, on the basis of the measurement made by the BBC reporter, the town of Ohkuma in the Fukushima zone (and we assume everywhere else in the zone) is still, five years after the incident, more than 20 times the level where the UN would, and the Soviets did, step in and control the population.
But the Japanese government want to send the people back there. It is bribing them with money and housing assistance. It is saying, like Gerry Thomas, that there is no danger. And the BBC is giving this criminal misdirection a credible platform. The argument is based on the current radiation risk model, that of the International Commission on Radiological Protection the ICRP.
Last month, my German colleagues and I published a scientific paper in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Health and Toxicology. It uses real-world data from those exposed to the same substances that were released by Fukushima to show that the ICRP model is wrong by 1,000 times or more.
This is a game changing piece of research. But were we asked to appear on the BBC, or anywhere else? No. What do our findings and calculations suggest will have happened in the five years since the explosions and into the future? Let’s take a look at what has happened since 2011.
And this is only the beginning …
The reactors are still uncontrolled five years after the explosions and continue to release their radioactive contents to the environment despite all attempts to prevent this. Concerning the melted fuel, there is no way to assess the condition or specific whereabouts of the fuel though it is clearly out of the box and in the ground. Robots fail at the extremely high radiation levels found.
Ground water flowing through the plant is becoming contaminated and is being pumped into storage tanks for treatment. High radiation levels and debris have delayed the removal of spent fuel from numbers 1, 2 and 3 reactor buildings. TEPCO plans to remove debris from reactor 3 and this work has begun. Then they are hoping to remove the fuel rods out of reactors 1 and 2 by 2020 and the work on removing debris from these 2 reactors has not begun yet.
Much of the radioactivity goes into the sea, where it travels several hundreds of km. up and down the coast destroying sea life and contaminating intertidal sediment. The radionuclides bind to fine sediment and concentrate in river estuaries and tidal areas like Tokyo Bay.
Here the particles are resuspended and brought ashore to be inhaled by those living within 1km of the coast. From work done by my group for the Irish Government on the contaminated Irish Sea we know that this exposure will increase the rate of cancer in the coastal inhabitants by about 30%.
The releases have not been stopped despite huge amounts of work, thought and action. The treated water is still highly radioactive and cannot yet be released. An ice wall designed to stop the flow of water getting to the plant is still not operational and the Japanese Nuclear regulator still has not given the go-ahead.
‘Son of Fukushima’ waiting to happen
This may be wise because an environment report showed that use of the ground water caused rapid subsidence and can destabilise the structures of the reactors. That is a real problem on site with 3 heavy spent fuel pools still full and largely inaccessible. Collapse of the buildings would lead to coolant loss and a fire or even explosion releasing huge amounts of radioactivity.
So this is one nightmare scenario: ‘Son of Fukushima’. A solid wall at the port side may have slowed the water down but diverting the water may cause problems with the ground water pressure on site and thus also threaten subsidence. Space for storing the radioactive water is running out and it seems likely that this will have to be eventually spilled into the Pacific.
Only 10% of the plant has been cleaned up although there are 8,000 workers on site at any one time, mostly dealing with the contaminated water. Run-off from storms brings more contamination down the rivers from the mountains. There are millions of 1-ton container bags full of radioactive debris and other waste which has been collected in decontamination efforts outside the plant and many of these bags are only likely to last a handful of years before degrading and spilling their contents. Typhoons will spread this highly contaminated contents far and wide.
TEPCO are also burning waste from the plant in a single incinerator. Further afield, contamination efforts to clean up the homes and roads are hampered by the torrential rains that are increasing because of global warming; the rain is bringing large amounts of contaminated soil back into these areas as well as the contaminated leaves and pollen from the forest areas that TEPCO are unable to clean.
Far off the shore there are natural areas that act as nurseries for many species of sea life. It has been found that intertidal marine species such as anemones, sponges, crustaceans, worms and bivalves within 30 km of the damaged reactors have disappeared altogether because of the 300 tons of highly radioactive water a day flowing out of the plant into the sea.
This water contains large amounts of tritium, making it radioactive; the effects of tritium on the larval stages of marine invertebrates has been studied in the UK. It was found at the University of Plymouth that levels involving doses of less than 1mSv of tritium inhibited the development.
Going global
Radioactivity from Fukushima has now migrated across the Pacific and is appearing on the West Coast of the USA. The scientific community there, like Gerry Thomas, subscribe to the flawed ICRP model, and since the levels of Caesium-137 measured are low, (maybe 10Bq/cubic metre of sea water), they say that there will be no health effects. But like Thomas they are wrong.
The problem is that ‘dose’ cannot be used to assess risk from internal radioactive particles. Dose is an average over large masses of tissue: but cancer begins in a single cell or local community of cells and these particles from Fukushima cause massive local doses. This is why there have been countless web reports of marine mammals with patchy sores or localised tumours. The question of the ongoing effect of this Fukushima radioactivity on the Pacific biota far from Japan remains open.
The effects on wild creatures in Japan are clear and have been studied. There have been peer-reviewed reports of genetic damage in birds and in insects; a major scientist studying these genetic effects at Fukushima and in the Chernobyl affected areas also is Tim Mousseau.
But whilst he can study plants and animals, no-one can study humans. There is a kind of closure on such data, with the Japanese government controlling it. The government is more interested in getting Fukushima ready for the Olympics and is using financial and cultural pressure to move families back into contaminated zones.
Japan is also exporting radioactive produce, and is using trade agreements to bully countries into accepting these poisons on the basis of the ICRP model. I was in Korea a few months back as an expert witness in a radiation case involving high levels of thyroid cancer near their nuclear sites. I was told about Japan using international trade laws to force its contaminated foods on to the Koreans, who were measuring the radioactivity and sending the stuff back. So watch out for radioactive items from Japan.
So what’s the evidence?
Let’s look at the only real health data which has emerged to see if it gives any support to my original estimate of 400,000 extra cancers in the 200km radius. Prof Tsuda has recently published a paper in the peer reviewed literature identifying 116 thyroid cancers detected over three years by ultrasound scanning of 380,000 0-18 year olds.
The background rate is about 0.3 per 100,000 per year, so in three years we can expect 3.42 thyroid cancers. But 116 were found, an excess of about 112 cases. Geraldine says that these were all found because they looked: but Tsuda’s paper reports that an ultrasound study in Nagasaki (no exposures) found zero cases, and also an early ultrasound study also found zero cases. So Geraldine is wrong. The thyroid doses were reported to be about 10mSv. On the basis of the ICRP model, that gives an error of about 2,000 times.
From the results of our new genetic paper we can safely predict a 100% increase in congenital malformations in the population up to 200km radius. In an advanced technological country like Japan these will be picked up early by ultrasound and aborted, so we will not actually see them, even if there were data we could trust.
What we will see is a fall in the birth rate and increase in the death rate. We know what has been happening and what will happen; we have seen it before in Chernobyl. And just like Chernobyl, the (western) authorities are influenced by or take their lead from the nuclear industry: the ICRP and the International Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA) which since 1959 has taken over from the World Health Organisation as the responsible authority for radiation and health (Yes, really!).
They keep the lid on the truth using stupid individuals like Geraldine Thomas and, by analogy with New Labour: New BBC. Increasingly I could say ‘New Britain’ as opposed to the Great Britain of my childhood, a country I was proud of where you could trust the BBC. I wonder how the reporters like Rupert can live with themselves presenting these lies.
Fukushima is far from being over, the deaths have only just begun.
Chris Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia. See also: chrisbusbyexposed.org, greenaudit.org and llrc.org.
Study cited @ 1:40 re regional natural background dose rate of 0.05 uSv/y
Malins et al (2016). Evaluation of ambient dose equivalent rates influenced by vertical and horizontal distribution of radioactive cesium in soil in Fukushima Prefecture. Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 151 (2016) 38e49 http://pubmed.gov/26408835
Study cited @ 3:58
Mozdarani et al (2002). Chromosomal aberrations in lymphocytes of individuals with chronic exposure to gamma radiation. Arch Irn Med, 5(1): 32-36.http://www.ams.ac.ir/AIM/NEWPUB/13/16…
Study cited @ 4:24
Zakeri & Assaei (2004). Cytogenetic monitoring of personnel working in angiocardiography laboratories in Iran hospitals. Mutat Res. 2004 Aug 8;562(1-2):1-9. http://pubmed.gov/15279825
Study cited @ 4:48
Kendall et al (2013). A record-based case-control study of natural background radiation and the incidence of childhood leukaemia and other cancers in Great Britain during 1980-2006. Leukemia. 27(1): 3–9. http://pubmed.gov/22766784
Study cited @ 5:08
Spycher et al (2015). Background ionizing radiation and the risk of childhood cancer: a census-based nationwide cohort study. Environ Health Perspect, 123(6), 622-8. http://pubmed.com/25707026 Spycher’s graphs are in nSv/h, which is nanosieverts per hour and which I converted for this video to microsieverts per hour by the rule: 100 nSv = 0.1 µSv.
@ 8:04, BBC concedes that 122 Chernobyl deaths estimate is misleading http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-…
BBC: “Two viewers (one of them writing on behalf of 55 co-signatories, most of them academics from a variety of disciplines) complained that the item seriously understated the likely death toll (in relation to both Chernobyl and Fukushima) and, by ignoring scientific opinion which favoured higher estimates.”
Estimate of Chernobyl deaths @ 8:47 from
European Environmental Agency (2013). Late lessons from early warnings: science, precaution, innovation. EEA Report 1/2013, Chap 18, p. 435, European Environmental Agency, Copenhagen. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications…
“The Fukushima disaster is not over and will never end.
The radioactive fallout which remains toxic for hundreds to thousands of years covers large swaths of Japan will never be ‘cleaned up’ and will contaminate food, humans and animals virtually forever.” -Dr. Helen Caldicott [1]
Nuclear expert Arnold Gundersen called it, “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.”[2]
It’s been five years since a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility resulting in three meltdowns and the release of copious amounts of radioactive debris into the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean.[3]
Mainstream press reports do not seem to reflect the severity of this ongoing disaster. For example, on the eve of the five year anniversary, Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, virtually ignored the radiation concerns. The report stated that there were “zero deaths or cases of radiation sickness as a result of radiation exposure” and attributed this low mortality to “the quick-thinking, preventative actions taken by the Japanese government.” [4]
Such reporting is misleading. As Gundersen explained in a June 2011 interview:
“One cigarette doesn’t get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can’t measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April (2011).” [5]
We know that radioactive Plutonium 239 has escaped into the ocean from Fukushima. According to Dr. Helen Caldicott, a single microgram of this toxic substance can cause leukemia and bone cancers. [6]
Not only has the mainstream media failed to address these environmental perils, it has also failed to adequately report on the extent of the cover-up by Japanese, U.S. and international authorities. In a 2014 article for Counterpunch, State University of New York/College of New York journalism professor Karl Grossman detailed the Japanese government’s efforts to defend the nuclear industry at the expense of the welfare of the public. For instance, the Japanese government increased the maximum allowable radiation exposure level from 1 mSv (millisievert) per year to 20 mSv per year, allowing authorities to reduce the number of required evacuations.
In his free internet e-book, independent journalist Patrick Henry has unveiled an even more comprehensive account of multi-agency involvement in a cover-up of the severity of the situation. Among his discoveries were NOAA tracking of major 60 kilometre mile long plumes of radioactive clouds along the Japanese coast and officials statements acknowledging Spent Fuel Pools #3 and #4 “going dry.”
On the occasion of this anniversary, the Global Research News Hour brings listeners two related interviews on the topic of Fukushima and lessons learned.
The first interview is with Linda Pentz Gunter, international specialist for the environmental advocacy group ‘Beyond Nuclear.’ In this conversation, Gunter addresses the question of whether nuclear is being seriously explored as an alternative to the climate-ravaging fossil fuel industry. She also outlines aspects of the Fukushima cover-up, and why international bodies and media are failing to hold nuclear and government agencies to account.
In the final half hour, Portland-based Mimi German, Earth activist and founder of Radcast.org, speaks more about the cover-up, the nuclear situation in the U.S. and the consequences for society and all life on earth.
As for the scale of the [Fukushima] accident… we simply don’t know… all the measuring equipment was destroyed at the time of the accident…
The Japanese government has reported estimates [of] 1.5×10^16 Becquerels of Cs-137, which would make it a release of 168 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bombing. And this is only material released into the atmosphere…
But I myself think the government’s numbers are an underestimate. Various experts and institutes from around the world have offered several of their own estimates… some two or three times higher than the government’s numbers. According to these other estimatesI think that the release of Cs-137 into the atmosphere could be around 500 times the Hiroshima bombing.
What has been washed into the sea… is likely not much different from the levels released into the atmosphere. Even today we are unable to prevent this release. And so if we combine the amount of Cs-137 released in the air and the ocean together, we get an estimate several hundred times the Hiroshima levels. And some estimates suggest the Fukushima accident could be as much as one-thousand Hiroshimas…
The amount released into the atmosphere from the explosion during the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant was 800 to 1000 times the Hiroshima levels. Put simply, these estimates place Fukushima on par with Chernobyl…
[T]he radioactive material released from Fukushima has been dispersed across the globe… everyone on earth has been exposed to additional radiation… An increase in cancer will be the result…
Not a single nuclear expert or policy maker ever seriously considered the possibility of an accident like this… I had been commenting on the possibility, referring to some results of simulations. But still I would have thought the kind of disaster that happened at Fukushima was some kind of impossible nightmare―yet it actually happened. It was like the worse nightmare becoming a reality… all those pronuclear people surely never gave it a moment’s thought. And so when it actually happened, no one had thought about, let alone built a system to deal with it.
Asia-Pacific Journal, Mar 2016: As we learn in this wide-ranging and important interview [with Hiroaki Koide], the accident often referred to as 3/11 was enormous and in many ways unprecedented. The full scope of the disaster is still unknown, but is clearly on the scale of Chernobyl, placing the amount of radioactive material released… up to 1,000 times the Hiroshima bombing of 1945.
Merchandise remains strewn on the floor of a convenience store in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, after the Great East Japan Earthquake shook the town on March 11, 2011
Fukushima towns co-hosting nuclear plant frozen in time
In Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, a peek inside a convenience store revealed merchandise strewn all over the floor, with the large clock in the back frozen at 2:46 p.m., when a magnitude-9.0 temblor struck five years ago.
Inside the newsstand placed at the entrance of the store, located along the prefectural road, was the March 11, 2011, edition of newspapers, which were discolored.
No signs of people were seen in Okuma and Futaba, the towns co-hosting the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 12, the fifth anniversary of the first hydrogen explosion that occurred at the nuclear complex.
The only movement that could be glimpsed was the occasional passing of vehicles to and from the plant, which is preparing for decommissioning work.
Okuma and Futaba have been evacuated since the onset of the nuclear crisis following the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.
Residents have no idea if and when they can ever return to live in their homes since the municipalities are designated in the off-limits zone due to high radiation levels.
Remnants of the disaster still loom over the towns five years later.
In Okuma, pieces of broken walls and window glass were scattered on the street near JR Ono Station, which used to be the busiest area of the town, although the street was cleared to some extent to let vehicles pass through.
The only sound that could be heard was one that a zinc sign made as it swung in the occasional breeze.
Neighboring Futaba was also like a ghost town. Laundry was seen through the window still hanging inside one of the damaged structures in the center of Futaba, five years after it was set out to dry.
In full protective gear, members of a Ground Self-Defense Force unit in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, are seen before they began trying to contain the crisis unfolding at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 12, 2011.
Government reluctant to specify SDF role in nuclear crisis
When the specter of meltdowns loomed at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in March 2011, the legal responsibility fell to Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator, to contain the crisis.
But as TEPCO employees became overwhelmed, Self-Defense Forces members and Tokyo firefighters were quickly sent to the site at the “request” of the prime minister.
Five years later, there is still no clear delineation of responsibility for the SDF and firefighters to be dispatched or to the extent of their involvement in the event of a nuclear emergency.
The government, the secretariat of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, which crafted new regulations for nuclear plants after the Fukushima disaster, the SDF and the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, which oversees corps of firefighters across the nation, each has differing views.
“Our understanding is that operators of nuclear power plants are presumably prepared (to tackle a nuclear emergency) in line with the world’s most stringent regulations,” said a Defense Ministry official, referring to the nation’s new regulations. “We do not believe that SDF members will be able to do what goes beyond the capability of nuclear power plant operators.”
On March 11, the fifth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, the government declared in a report after a meeting of Cabinet members related to nuclear energy that it will “bear the responsibility for dealing with” a nuclear accident.
The report mentioned the use of “tactical squads” such as the SDF and fire departments to address the situation.
However, what were described as their operation to contain an emergency in the report was “transportation of materials” and other efforts. It has yet to be determined as to what extent the SDF, fire departments and other squads should be prepared to help contain a nuclear contingency in terms of equipment and operations.
When the crisis unfolded at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant following the magnitude-9.0 quake and tsunami, a team of five Ground Self-Defense Force members in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, was tasked with sending cooling water to the overheating No. 1 reactor on March 12, 2011.
The troops had to work amid rising radiation levels at the site, which was a quagmire from the mountain of wreckage left by the quake and tsunami. After the work was forced to be temporarily halted by the hydrogen explosion at the No. 1 reactor that day, the team had to return to work to inject cooling water into the reactor.
When it became obvious that TEPCO could no longer handle such a severe accident on its own, firefighters and police were also deployed to the plant to keep sending water into the reactors.
While the SDF sprayed water from above, firefighters, police and the SDF worked together to direct a spray from the ground.
The law on special measures concerning nuclear emergency preparedness, established in 1999, stipulates the responsibility for containing an emergency lies with the operator of a nuclear facility.
Under the current setup, even if an SDF unit or firefighters are deployed to the site, their activities are to be limited to offering “assistance” to workers grappling with the accident.
In April, the exposure limit to radiation of workers responding to a nuclear emergency will be raised to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts, in light of the Fukushima disaster.
But the cap will only be applied to workers at a nuclear power plant as well as inspectors from the secretariat of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, not SDF members or firefighters.
According to the Defense Ministry, it does not envisage an operation to address a nuclear accident under its directives on responding to a nuclear disaster.
SDF members, in fact, have not conducted drills to deal with such an accident since the SDF’s fleet does not include a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or similarly powered submarine. Japan does not possess nuclear weapons, either.
The government’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency, too, is reluctant to take on the responsibility.
The new regulations concerning nuclear facilities, which took effect in 2013, require plant operators to have in place a number of fire trucks tasked with sending water to reactors in the event of an accident.
“It is clear that plant operators are now capable of carrying out the kind of work that firefighters were involved in the Fukushima accident,” said an agency official.
In the Fukushima disaster, the deployment of SDF members and firefighters was based on the request from the prime minister, who heads a task force on responding to a nuclear disaster.
Although the Defense Ministry and Fire and Disaster Management Agency keeps a distance from a deployment of their members in the event of a future nuclear accident, the NRA’s secretariat does not.
“If a contingency gets out of the control of the operator, the government might be forced to get involved to contain the accident,” said an official with the NRA secretariat.
17,000 items wait for owners in Fukushima lost and found center
NAMIE, Fukushima Prefecture–In a former gift shop along National Route 6, more than 17,000 items are housed here in a lost and found facility, including disfigured school backpacks, discolored stuffed animals and stained photos.
They are belongings found in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami and waiting to be returned to their rightful owners.
On March 11, the fifth anniversary of the twin disasters, a 26-year-old man and his family stopped by on their way back from a visit to the family grave.
The man picked up a photo holder and carefully sifted through the pictures.
“I am looking for photos from my childhood,” said the man, who has been evacuating in Iwaki, in the prefecture, after his house in Namie was swept away by the tsunami.
The lost and found center, called “The center to display mementoes,” was converted from the former gift facility.
In addition to photos and school backpacks, it houses toys and decorative articles, items that were not broken.
People cleaned them and stored each article with a note mentioning the date and location of the discovery.
While similar lost and found facilities were set up in Miyagi and Iwate, the two other prefectures hardest hit by the 2011 quake and tsunami, shortly after the disaster, the one in Namie just opened in summer 2014.
It was because work to retrieve what was left under debris had been delayed due to the fallout from the disaster at the nearby Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Evacuees in the town with a population of about 19,000 remain displaced today.
Visitors to the lost and found facility numbered about 3,200 and about 1,600 pieces have been returned to their owner.
Noboru Kawaguchi, 66, who serves as a guide at the facility, is one of those who were reunited with pieces they treasured.
Kawaguchi, who commutes from Soma, a city 30 kilometers north of Namie, had discovered his photos there.
“I have lost everything in the tsunami,” he said, referring to the loss of his parents and his house. “I am always so touched by a visitor discovering something here, as it happened to me.”
Although many similar facilities in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures have closed over time, the center in Namie will remain open at least through spring next year.
Five years ago an earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a tsunami and a series of meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Kaori Suzuki’s home is nearby – determined to stay, but worried about her children’s health, she and some other mothers set up a laboratory to measure radiation.
A woman in a white lab coat puts some yellow organic material on a slide, while grey liquid bubbles in vials behind her. Other women, one of them heavily pregnant, discuss some data on a computer screen. A courier delivers a small parcel which is opened and its contents catalogued.
But this is no ordinary laboratory. None of these women trained as scientists. One used to be a beautician, another was a hairdresser, yet another used to work in an office. Together they set up a non-profit organisation – Tarachine – to measure radiation in the city of Iwaki, 50km (30 miles) down the coast from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Kaori Suzuki, the lab’s director, shows me a list of results. “This is the level of strontium 90 in Niboshi, dried small sardines, from the prefecture of Chiba,” she says.
“What about this food?” I ask, pointing out a high number.
“Mushrooms have higher levels [of radiation]. The government has forbidden people from eating wild mushrooms, but many people don’t care, they take them and eat,” she says.
The lab mainly measures the radioactive isotopes caesium 134 and 137, and collects data on gamma radiation. Strontium 90 and tritium were only added to the list in April last year. “Since they emit beta rays we weren’t able to detect them until recently. Specific tools were necessary and we couldn’t afford them,” says Suzuki. Thanks to a generous donation, they now have the right equipment.
Five years ago, Suzuki knew nothing about radiation. She spent her time looking after her two children and teaching yoga. The earthquake on 11 March 2011 changed everything.
“I’ve never experienced so much shaking before and I was very scared. Right from the moment it started I had a feeling that something might have happened to the nuclear plant,” she says. “The first thing I did was to fill up my car with petrol. I vividly remember that moment.”
The authorities evacuated the area around the nuclear plant – everyone within a 20km (12-mile) radius was told to leave, and those who lived up to 30km (18 miles) away were instructed to stay indoors. Despite living outside the exclusion zone, Suzuki and her family fled and drove south. The roads were congested with cars and petrol stations ran dry.
“We didn’t come back home until the middle of April and even then we wondered if it was safe to stay,” says Suzuki. “But my husband has his own business with 70 employees, so we felt we couldn’t leave.”
Although radiation levels in Iwaki were officially quite low, the “invisible enemy” was all people could talk about. Conversations with friends changed abruptly from being about children, food and fashion, to one topic only: radiation. “You can’t see, smell or feel it, so it is something people are afraid of,” says Suzuki.
Above all, people didn’t know what was safe to eat.
“It was a matter of life and death,” she says.
Fukushima is farming country and many people grow their own vegetables. “People here love to eat home-grown food and there’s a strong sense of community with people offering food to their friends and neighbours,” says Suzuki. This caused a lot of anxiety. “A difficult situation would arise where grandparents would be growing food, but younger mothers would be worried about giving it to their children.”
Suzuki formed the group “Iwaki Action Mama” together with other mothers in the area. At first they organised demonstrations against nuclear power, but then they decided on a new tactic – they would learn how to measure radiation themselves.
They saved and collected $600 (£420) to buy their first Geiger counter online, but when it arrived the instructions were written in English, which none of them understood. But they persevered and with the help of experts and university professors, organised training workshops. Soon they knew all about becquerels, a unit used to measure radiation, and sieverts, a measure of radiation dose. They would meet at restaurants and cafes to compare readings.
Becquerels and Sieverts
•A becquerel (Bq), named after French physicist Henri Becquerel, is a measure of radioactivity
•A quantity of radioactive material has an activity of 1Bq if one nucleus decays per second – and 1kBq if 1,000 nuclei decay per second
•A sievert (Sv) is a measure of radiation absorbed by a person, named after Swedish medical physicist Rolf Sievert
In November 2011 the women decided to get serious and set up a laboratory. They raised money and managed to buy their first instrument designed specifically to measure food contamination – it cost 3 million yen (£18,500, or $26,400).
They named the laboratory Tarachine, after a strong female character in Japanese theatre who speaks the language of Samurai warriors. “We felt as though we were on the front line of a battlefield,” says Suzuki. “When you’re at war you do what you have to do, and measuring was the thing we felt we had to do.”
Today Tarachine has 12 employees, and more work than it can handle. People bring in food, earth, grass and leaves from their backyards for testing. The results are published for everyone to see. At first the lab was able to provide results after three or four days, but its service has become so popular it can’t keep up. “We have so many requests now that it can take three months,” says Prof Hikaru Amano, the lab’s technical manager.
Amano confesses he was surprised that a group of amateurs could learn to do this job so accurately, but says it is important work.
People began to mistrust the nuclear contamination data provided by the government and by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which manages the nuclear plant, he says.
About 100 so-called “citizen laboratories” have since sprung up, but Tarachine is unusual because it monitors both gamma and beta rays – most can only measure gamma rays – and because it tests whatever people want, whether it’s a home-grown carrot or the dust from their vacuum-cleaner.
The government does take regular readings from fixed points in Fukushima prefecture. It also check harvests and foods destined for the market – for example, all Fukushima-grown rice is required to undergo radiation checks before shipping.
But “if you want to know the level of strontium and tritium in your garden, the government won’t do this measurement,” says Suzuki. “If you decide to measure it yourself, you’ll need 200,000-250,000 yen (£1,535, or $2,200) for the tests, and ordinary people can’t afford to pay these costs. We have to keep doing this job so that people can have the measurements they want.” Tarachine only charges a small fee – less than 2,000 yen (£12, or $17).
Mother of two Kaori Suzuki now spends much of her time at the laboratory
Tarachine also provides training and equipment to anyone who wants to do their own measurements. “Some of the mothers measure soil samples in their schools. It’s fantastic, they really have become quite skilled at doing this,” says Suzuki.
And the group keeps an eye on children’s health. It runs a small clinic where doctors from all over Japan periodically come to provide free thyroid cancer check-ups for local children. Since screening began, six months after the meltdown, 166 children in Fukushima prefecture have been diagnosed with – or are suspected of having – thyroid cancer. This is a far higher rate than in the rest of the country, although some experts say that’s due to over-diagnosis.
And for parents who want to give their children a break from the local environment, Tarachine even organises summer trips to the south of the country.
Suzuki’s own life has changed dramatically since 2011. “I was just a simple mother, enjoying her life. But ever since I started this, I’ve been spending most of my time here, from morning to night,” she says. “I must admit, sometimes I think it would be really nice to have a break, but what we are doing is too important. We’re providing a vital service.
“If you want to have peace of mind after an accident like the Fukushima one, then I believe you need to do what we’re doing.”
An addition to this article, thanks to Beverly Findlay-Kaneko:
The article missed an important point that has news value. Tarachine is trying to expand their health clinic to include more services, including cataract screening for children. This video is in Japanese, but you can see what the inside of their operation looks like.
By 3/4/2016, Masuda, Fukushima plant decommissioning chief commented in the interview with a local newspaper company that they need to consider discharging the contaminated water to the Pacific.
The newspaper company is Kahoku shimpo.
Due to the high amount and the increasing speed, Tepco and the government of Japan cannot remove tritium from contaminated water. The government of Japan is to release a strategy plan by the end of this month.
Masuda said, he is aware that discharging the tritium water is one of the options after dilution.
The entire volume of tritium does not change even after dilution however it was not asked at least in the published part of the interview.
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