Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Nearly ‘Ended The Japanese State’
This article from Russian publication ‘Sputnik News.It makes insightful poits about the collusion between the nuclear industry and government – in Japan, and the USA. But it’s a pity that the Russian media doesn’t shed light on the situation in Russia, which is probably just as bad – perhaps worse.
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Nearly ‘Ended The Japanese State’, Radioactive Waste Specialist Explains, Sputnik News, by Mohamed Elmaazi 12 Mar 21, 10 years ago, on 11 March 2011, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale triggered a tsunami that crashed into Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The effect of the resultant meltdown will continue to be felt for generations to come, although it could easily have been far worse, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear tells Sputnik.
United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report on Fukushima health effects -rushed, inadequate, inconsistent
Dr Ian Fairlie, 12 Mar 21, more https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/latest-unscear-report-on-the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-in-2011/ On March 9, the United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) published an advance copy of its latest (third) report on the health effects from the Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident which commenced on March 11, 2011. UNSCEAR 2020 Report – Annex B – Advance Copy
The report shows signs of having been rushed out as it is an advance copy and is unfinished. It states 23 electronic attachments with supplementary information on detailed analyses of doses to the public and their outcomes are currently in production and will be available soon on the UNSCEAR website.
I shall look at the Report in more detail when the additional information is published. However at the 10th anniversary of the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima in 2011, it’s necessary to have an initial look at the Report’s comments on contentious issues arising from the accident – (a) the number of expected fatal cancers and (b) the continuing controversy over the cause(s) of the large observed increases in thyroid cancers (TCs) in Japan since 2011.
On (a), the 2020 Report concludes that there are no observed ill health effects from the accident but this conclusion is inconsistent with UNSCEAR’s own estimates of high collective doses from the accident. Table 13 (page 72) of UNSCEAR’s 2020 report shows that, in the first 10 years after the accident, the whole body collective dose from the accident was 32,000 man Gy. When we apply the widely-accepted fatal cancer risk estimate of 10% per Gy to this figure, we see that about 3,000 fatal cancers will have occurred due to the accident, correct to one significant figure. The report’s strange, unscientific conclusion to the contrary is inconsistent with these estimates. The only assumption used here is that radiation’s dose-response relationship follows the linear-no-threshold model, as recognised and used by all the world’s radiation protection authorities.
On (b), the 2020 Report (page 107, para q) concludes that the sharp increase in observed thyroid cancers post-Fukushima was not due to thyroid intakes of iodine isotopes from the accident but due to increased surveillance.
However large collective doses to the thyroid are also published in UNSCEAR’s new 2020 report. In the first 10 years after the accident, the 2020 report states the collective thyroid dose to the Japanese population from the accident was 44,000 man Gy. Again, this is a high number, but the absence of an authoritative risk factor for thyroid cancer – especially among young children aged 0 to 4 who were exposed to both internal intakes of radioactive iodine plus external exposures to ground-deposited Cs-134 and C-137 means that reliable estimates of the actual numbers of thyroid cancer cases due to the accident are unfortunately not possible. The supplementary information yet to be released may enable such calculations to be made. However the large collective dose to the thyroid from Fukushima casts doubt on UNSCEAR’s conclusion that the observed increases are not due to the accident.
I would not be surprised to learn that the negative conclusions in the UNSCEAR 2020 Report might be a reason why an advance copy was rushed out in unfinished form before the anniversary of the Fukushima accident.
I add the caveat that the above analysis is a (second) draft and has not yet been fully peer-reviewed. However many requests have been made for views on the UNSCEAR’s 2020 report, so I’m publishing this quickly. Any errors which are pointed out will be corrected in a later post.
UN report claiming no connection between thyroid cancer and Fukushima disaster is not credible
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Beyond Nuclear 11th March 2021, A new UN report which dismisses the March. 11, 2011 Fukushima disaster as the cause of elevated rates of thyroid cancer in that region’s childrennleaves serious questions unanswered and appears to be a rush to press to maximize publicity around the nuclear accident’s 10th anniversary, concluded Beyond Nuclear today. An advance publication of a section of the 2020 United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report —Sources, effects and risks of ionizing radiation, Scientific Annex B, Advance Copy — claims that “a rise in thyroid cancer among children in the last decade was not related to increased radiation,” and nstead attributes the increases to more thorough and sophisticated testing.
But according to Dr. Ian Fairlie, a leading radiation scientist, the doses delivered by the Fukushima disaster — and as established by UNSCEAR’s own estimates— would be high enough to cause thyroid cancer among exposed children. Dr.Fairlie asserts the report’s conclusion, that “the increase…is not the result of radiation exposure”, is
“scientifically unsound..[and] inconsistent with UNSCEAR!s own estimates of high collective doses to the thyroid published in its 2012 and 2013 reports.”–http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2021/3/11/un-report-claiming-no-connection-between-thyroid-cancer-and.html |
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Every hour, Fukushima reactor 2 emits more than 10,000 times the yearly allowable dose for radiation workers
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Fukushima today: “I’m glad that I realized my mistake before I died.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Thomas A. Bass | March 10, 2021 ”………..What we know about nuclear disasters at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and elsewhere comes primarily from modelling what is known as the “source term”—the types and amounts of radioactive material that were in a reactor’s core and then released to the environment by an accident. These models are revised as we learn more about the prevailing winds and other factors but are still only models; ideally, one wants to examine the reactors’ cores themselves. Unfortunately, even 10 years later, no one can get close to Fukushima’s reactor cores, and we do not even know precisely where they are located. As recently as December 2020, Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) announced “extremely serious” developments at Fukushima that were far worse than previously thought, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported. TEPCO had discovered that the massive shield plugs covering the reactors were emitting 10 Sieverts of radiation per hour—a lethal dose for humans (though it should be noted that reactor cores are normally examined by robots, unless these, too, are destroyed by radiation). Because Fukushima now has more contaminated material at higher doses than previously estimated, “this will have a huge impact on the whole process of decommissioning work,” said NRA chairman Toyoshi Fuketa. The effective dose of radiation required to sicken or kill you is measured in Sieverts, a unit named after Rolf Sievert, the Swedish physicist who first calibrated the lethal effects of radioactive energy. A dose of 0.75 Sieverts will produce nausea and a weakened immune system. (Sieverts are used to measure the relative biological damage done to the human body, while becquerels and curies are units that describe the amount of radiation emitted by radioactive material.) A dose of 10 Sieverts will kill you, if absorbed all at once. A dose somewhere in-between 0.75 and 10 Sieverts gives you a fifty-fifty chance of dying within 30 days. Guidelines for workers in the nuclear industry limit the maximum yearly dose to 0.05 Sieverts, or 50 milliSieverts—the equivalent of five CT scans, says Harvard Health Publishing. (This is a high figure compared to the 1 milliSievert per year that is considered acceptable for the general public; a physicist familiar with the industry explained that the thinking is that workers in the nuclear energy industry are implicitly being paid to take on the risk.) So how many Sieverts are currently being produced by Fukushima’s melted reactors? The latest reading from reactor No. 2 is 530 Sieverts per hour. This means that every hour the heart of the reactor is emitting more than 10,000 times the yearly allowable dose for radiation workers…… https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/fukushima-today-im-glad-that-i-realized-my-mistake-before-i-died/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThursdayNewsletter032021&utm_content=NuclearRisk_Bass_03102021 |
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Radiation from Fukushima meltdown collects in timber in affected region
Japanese government hopes that not-yet-designed robots might clean up Fukushima nuclear mess
clean up Daiichi and revitalize Fukushima Prefecture, once known for everything from seafood to sake. The effort will take so long that Tepco and government organizations are grooming the next generation of robotics experts to finish the job.
https://www.cnet.com/features/for-fukushimas-nuclear-disaster-robots-offer-a-sliver-of-hope/
Fukushima nuclear accident costs so far $188billion, projected final costs of $740 bn.
David Lowry’s Blog 10th March 2021, Pediatrician Dr Alex Rosen, a leading figure in the German branch of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) said it was “luck and divine intervention” that wind from the west blew most of the radiological releases out over the Pacific Ocean, meaning the Fukushima accident released more radioactivity to the oceans than the Chernobyl accident and all the nuclear weapons tests together.Buffett Institute for Global Affairs located in Evanston, Illinois, and the Bulletin for the Atomic Scientists, based in Chicago, to launch a new international interdisciplinary collaborative study on “Nuclear Disaster Compensation: Lessons from Fukushima: Interviews with Experts and
Intellectuals, edited by anthropology professor Hirokazu Miyazaki.
http://drdavidlowry.blogspot.com/2021/03/nuclear-fuk-ed.html
Impossible timetable set for returning Fukushima nuclear site to ‘greenfield”
Greenpeace 11th March 2021, Nine months after the triple reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichinuclear plant in March 2011, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) announced that decommissioning of the site will be completed within 30-40 years.
Practically, the people of Japan were told that some time between 2041 and 2051, the site would be returned to ‘greenfield.’ In the past decade, the complexity and scale of the challenge at the Fukushima Daiichi site has become slowly clearer. The decommissioning task at the Fukushima Daiichi site is unique in its challenge to society and technology. But still, the
official time frame for TEPCO’s Road Map for decommissioning remains that set in 2011.
1.2 million tonnes of contaminated water and nowhere to put it – Fukushima’s continued legacy
Japan grappling with 1.2 million tonnes of contaminated water and nowhere to put it Japan has a crisis on its hands at the site of the country’s worst natural disaster. One challenge it faces has been deemed near-impossible. NZ Herald, Rohan Smith– 11 March 21,
On the site of Japan’s nuclear disaster, 10 years on from the meltdown that changed the world forever, authorities are grappling with impossible choices.
Today marks a decade since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Towns surrounding the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi plant have long since been abandoned but the fallout from the March 11, 2011 event is far from over.
Every single day, 100 tonnes of groundwater seeps into one of the broken reactor basements at the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
That’s a problem because the water is mixing with radioactive debris and needs to be treated and stored. But TEPCO has more than 1.2 million tonnes of contaminated water sitting in storage tanks that are very quickly running out of capacity.
Estimates suggest the tanks will reach overflow point next year. And one of the choices on the table for Japanese authorities is hugely unpopular and potentially devastating: Release more than 1 million tonnes of the treated radioactive water into the sea.
On the site of Japan’s nuclear disaster, 10 years on from the meltdown that changed the world forever, authorities are grappling with impossible choices.
It is not the only problem that needs solving. There is a far more dangerous situation unfolding in several of the plant’s damaged reactors.
The plan is to decommission the plant by 2051.
Pictures from abandoned properties in the original exclusion zone show weeds growing around homes that were vacated in a hurry. …. more https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/japan-grappling-with-12-million-tonnes-of-radioactive-water-and-nowhere-to-put-it/33TKZUD6JM4GHFJSMIBZ3WZKVY/
Part of Tomioka, 6 miles from Fukushima, is still a no-go zone
Daily Mail 10th March 2021, Part of the town of Tomioka, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, is still a no-go zone 10 years after
a meltdown sent radioactive fallout over the area. The no-go zone is about
12% of the town, but was home to about one-third of Tomioka´s population
of 16,000. It remains closed after the rest of the town in northeastern
Japan was reopened in 2017. Only those with official permission from the
town office can enter the area for a daytime visit.
The thought of the Olympics – the only hold-up to emptying contaminated water to the ocean.
Washington Post 6th March 2021, Beside the ruins of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, more than 1,000 huge metal tanks loom in silent testament to one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, the meltdown of three nuclear reactors 10 years ago this month. The tanks contain nearly 1.25 million tons of cooling water from the 2011 disaster and groundwater seepage over the years — equivalent to around 500 Olympic-size swimming pools — most of it still dangerously radioactive.
Running out of space to build more tanks, the government wants to gradually release the water into the sea — after it has been decontaminated and diluted — over the next three decades or
more. Even though a formal decision has yet to be announced, the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) have insisted that an ocean release is their preferred solution and that it is perfectly safe.
The only thing holding them back appears to be the Olympics and the bad publicity it could
generate before the Games begin in July, experts say. The idea of releasing the water has infuriated Fukushima’s fishing community, only now getting back on its feet after taking a battering in the wake of the 2011 disaster and the subsequent ocean contamination. Also angry is South Korea, even though it is more than 600 miles away across the sea.
Isolated and alone — Beyond Nuclear International
Suguru’s story reveals bullying, ostracization and government whitewash
Isolated and alone — Beyond Nuclear International
A teenager’s account of the Fukushima ordeal https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/3219596582 By Linda Pentz Gunter, 7 Mar 21,Ten years after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, how has the Japanese government responded and what is it like for the people affected, still struggling to return their lives to some semblance of normality? Here is how things look:
- Manuals are being distributed in schools explaining that radioactivity exists in nature and is therefore not something to be afraid of.
- The government is considering getting rid of radiation monitoring posts as these send the wrong message at a time of “reconstruction”.
- The Oversight Committee for Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey is discussing the possibility of stopping thyroid inspections at schools because they stress children out and overburden teachers and staff.
Depression and suicide rates among young people from Fukushima are likely to be triggered by being called “germs” and by being seen as “contaminated”.
- Those who speak out about radiation are more stigmatized today than they were 10 years ago.
- Those who “voluntarily” evacuated, recognizing that the so-called protection standards were not adequate for their region, are often ostracized from their new communities. They are seen as selfish for abandoning their homeland, friends and families “just to save themselves” and are bullied as parasites living on compensation funds, even though the “auto-evacuees” as they are known, received none.
- Those forced to evacuate are also bullied if they do not now return, accused of not trusting the government and its assertions that it is safe to do so.
- The taboo against speaking out for proper radiation protection and for compensation has grown worse as the rescheduled Olympics loom for this summer and Japan is determined to prove to the world it has fixed the radiation problem and beaten Covid-19.
- On March 1, 2021, it took three judges all of 30 seconds to dismiss a case brought by 160 parents and children who lived in Fukushima prefecture at the time of the nuclear accident, and known as the Children’s Trial Against Radiation Exposure. The class action suit sought 100,000 yen per person in damages from the government and the prefecture, due to the psychological stress brought on by the lack of measures to avoid radiation exposure after the accident.
These are some of the realities uncovered by France-based Japanese activist, Kurumi Sugita, as she interviewed those affected and began to compile a graphic short story about her findings, entitled Fukushima 3.11 and illustrated by French artist, Damien Vidal. The booklet is produced by the French NGO, Nos Voisins Lontains 3.11 (Our Distant Neighbors 3.11).
Fukushima 3.11, a long-form cartoon strip, is told in the first person by the youngest of Sugita’s interview subjects, Fukushima evacuee, Suguru Yokota, who was 13 at the time of the nuclear disaster.
Suguru was also one of the plaintiffs in the Children’s Trial, and noted after the devastating dismissal, just days before the Fukushima disaster’s 10th anniversary, that “we cannot give up” and that “the court hasn’t issued a legitimate verdict.”
In 2012, Sugita had traveled to Japan with a research project she helped create, financed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research where she worked, to set up an investigation into Japan’s nuclear victims. A list of 70 interview candidates was put together.
“I met Suguru in 2013 in Sapporo where he was living alone after he moved there from Fukushima,” said Sugita. “I also interviewed his mother and they were interviewed once a year over six years.”
A schoolboy at the time of the accident, the book follows Suguru’s account of his experiences. He encounters the refusal by his uncle to believe the dangers in the early days of the accident, “a typical denial case,” says Sugita, and he is ostracized at school where he is the only pupil to wear a mask.
Suguru’s only respite comes when his mother, who is equally alert to the radiation risks, sends him on a “radiation vacation” to Hokkaido, the first time he encounters peers who share his concerns.
Back at school and feeling isolated and alone, Suguru studies at home instead, eventually leaving the region for a different high school and then college.
The book weaves in essential information about radiation risks, and the clampdowns by the Japanese government, which withdrew support for auto-evacuees claiming, as Suguru relates it, that “these families are not victims. They are responsible for their fate.”
The book was first published in the magazine, TOPO, whose audience is predominantly teenagers and which reports on topics of current interest.
“It appealed to us to address an audience interested in world events, but not exclusively the nuclear issue,” said illustrator Vidal. “We thought our comic strip could be read by all those — and not necessarily just teenagers — who want to understand what the consequences of the nuclear accident were, and how it affected the inhabitants of Fukushima Prefecture.”
The book vividly brings home the psychological and emotional pain suffered by those who chose to recognize the true dangers posed by the Fukushima disaster, as well as the financial hardships and fracturing of families. And it exposes the depths of deliberate denial by authorities, more interested in heightened normalization of radiation exposure in the name of commerce and reputation.
Even as early as October 2011, an announcement is made that “rice produced in Fukushima Prefecture will supply school canteens again.” We see Suguru and his mother watching this news on their television, then the name-calling Suguru faces in school for bringing his own lunch. He is shown in the strip being called a “hikokumin”, which, explains Suguru, “is a really insulting word, used during the Second World War. It refers to people who are not worthy of being Japanese citizens.”
But that stigma has only become worse with time, Sugita says.
These days people are name-called “hoshano”. “Hoshano”（放射能) means radioactivity, but with a different Chinese character（放射脳) it means “radioactive brain – or brain contaminated by the fear of radioactivity”, she explains. And that is the slur in common circulation now.
Nevertheless, the book ends on a hopeful note. “Today,” concludes Suguru on the closing page, “I know I’m not alone. I hope other voices will be heard in Japan and around the world.”
It’s easy to say “never again.” But in order to ensure it, we must all continue to raise our voices, joining Suguru’s and others yearning to be heard.Read the English language version of Fukushima 3.11 on line for free. A version is also available in French. Hard copies (in French only), may be ordered from Nos Voisins Lontains 3.11 for 8€ plus shipping costs.
Fukushima Daiichi 2011-2021 — Beyond Nuclear International
Greenpeace report reveals deception and abuse
Fukushima Daiichi 2011-2021 — Beyond Nuclear International
The following is the Executive Summary from the new Greenpeace report. Download the full report.
As a result of a catastrophic triple reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on 11 March 2011, several tens of thousands of square kilometres in Fukushima Prefecture and wider Japan were contaminated with significant amounts of radioactive caesium and other radionuclides. The first Greenpeace radiation expert team arrived in Fukushima on 26 March 2011, and Greenpeace experts have since conducted 32 investigations into the radiological consequences of the disaster, the most recent in November 2020.
This report, the latest in a series, chronicles some of our principal findings over recent years, and shows how the government of Japan, largely under prime minister Shinzo Abe, has attempted to deceive the Japanese people by misrepresenting the effectiveness of the decontamination programme as well as the overall radiological risks in Fukushima Prefecture. As the latest Greenpeace surveys demonstrate, the contamination remains and is widespread, and is still a very real threat to long term human health and the environment.
The contaminated areas comprise rice fields and other farmland, as well as a large amount of forest. Many people who lived in these areas were employed as farmers or in forestry. Residents gathered wood, mushrooms, wild fruits and vegetables from the mountain forests, and children were free to play outdoors in the woodlands and streams. Since the disaster, tens of thousands of people have been displaced from their ancestral lands. The harm extends far beyond the immediate threat to health – as well as destroying livelihoods, it has destroyed an entire way of life.
Because of the government’s actions, many thousands of evacuees have been forced to make an impossible choice: to return to their radioactively contaminated homes or to abandon their homes and land and seek to establish a new life elsewhere without adequate compensation. This amounts to economic coercion and may force individuals and families to return against their will due to a lack of financial resources and viable alternatives. Given that these people lost their livelihoods, communities, and property as a result of a nuclear disaster they had no part in creating, this is grossly unjust.
Key findings………..https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/3219595498
Most 2011 quake, Fukushima crisis survivors back ending nuclear power
March 6, 2021 (Mainichi Japan) TOKYO (Kyodo) — About four in five survivors of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis in northeastern Japan support abolishing nuclear power generation immediately or gradually, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday nearly 10 years after the disaster.
Some 30 percent of respondents said all nuclear power plants should be abolished immediately, with 52 percent supporting phasing out nuclear power and eventually eliminating it.
The poll conducted in November in the three hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima had 300 respondents and found that only 15 percent were in favor of restarting nuclear reactors and relying on them in the future.
Following a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit on March 11, 2011, the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant owned by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. suffered meltdowns.
Decommissioning work continues to prove difficult and evacuation orders are still in place in some areas around the complex a decade after the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
All reactors in Japan were halted after the nuclear crisis but some have resumed operations in recent years under stricter safety regulations. The government aims for renewable energy to account for 50-60 percent of overall electricity by 2050 while relying on 30-40 percent from thermal power and nuclear energy.
By prefecture, 40 percent of respondents in Fukushima supported an immediate exit from nuclear energy, higher than 27 percent in Iwate and 24 percent in Miyagi.
Hiromi Suzuki, a 59-year-old evacuee from Namie, close to the crippled nuclear plant, said consumers remain concerned that fish from Fukushima may be contaminated with radiation…..https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210306/p2g/00m/0na/065000c
Fukushima nuclear decommissioning not really under control- persistent highly radioactive debris remains
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FOCUS: Decades-long challenge to scrap Fukushima plant by 2051 in a bind. By Junko Horiuchi, KYODO NEWS – Mar 1, 2021 The decades-long challenge to scrap the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, crippled by the massive earthquake and tsunami disaster that struck northeastern Japan in 2011, is becoming more complex as recent remote-controlled probes have highlighted just how damaged the reactors are.Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., operator of the six-reactor nuclear complex, aims to scrap the plant between 2041 and 2051. But critics have cast doubts on the schedule, citing not only the extremely high radiation levels, but problems associated with delayed probes and underdeveloped robots and other technology needed to extract an estimated nearly 900 tons of melted fuel debris.
Decommissioning of the plant, scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, is crucial for Japan if it wants to stick to using nuclear power safely and show the world that the nuclear crisis is under control. “It is likely that the roadmap will not be completed as scheduled,” said Tetsuro Tsutsui, a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, a group comprising academics and nuclear experts. He added the “melted debris is mixed with fractured parts of buildings and concrete material and is highly radioactive, making it hard for robots to clear the debris.” The scrapping of the plant involves the daunting decision on how to dispose of the huge amount of radioactive waste left as a byproduct. This has been made worse as no municipality offered to become the final disposal site when the plant was operating………. “Nearly 10 years have passed following the Fukushima accident but with respect to the long decommissioning process, we are still hovering around the start line. We have a long journey ahead,” said Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori in a recent briefing. “The most difficult step is the safe and stable retrieval of the debris but we don’t know what state it is in,” he added. Despite the use of computer simulations and small-scale internal probes using remote cameras, data is scarce about the exact locations and other details of the melted fuel — crucial information to determine the retrieval methods and develop the appropriate technology and robots. Robotic probes at the Nos. 2 and 3 units have captured images of large amounts of material that appear to be melted fuel, but attempts so far have been unsuccessful at the No. 1 unit.
TEPCO opted to start the fuel removal at the No. 2 unit as it has the best grasp of the internal conditions there but no time frame has been set for the two other units In a setback for retrieval efforts, the company said in late December removing melted fuel from the No. 2 unit would be delayed from its initial starting period in 2021 by at least a year as the coronavirus pandemic has stalled the development in Britain of a robotic arm to be used for the extraction. That robotic arm, however, can only extract a few grams of melted fuel debris at a time. To completely remove the hundreds of tons of melted fuel from the reactor larger machinery is required, experts say. In another development that may affect the decommissioning process, a Nuclear Regulation Authority study group said in January a high concentration of radioactive cesium is likely to have accumulated in the lids of the containment vessels for the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors. The regulator’s findings in a new interim report draft on the Fukushima accident came as a shock because it was previously believed that most of the radioactive material remained at the bottom of the reactors in the form of melted nuclear fuel debris…….. TEPCO, whose biggest shareholder is the Japanese government, has not given an estimate of the costs for the debris removal, which would add to the 8 trillion yen ($75 billion) already forecast for the decommissioning process. The utility and the government have also been grappling with the buildup of radioactive water, which is generated in the process of cooling the meltdown reactors……… According to Yasuro Kawai, another member of the commission, the government’s decision to release treated water into the sea is in fact the government’s attempt to minimize the impact of the Fukushima crisis and say dismantling work is on track. “But the roadmap is nothing but pie in the sky,” he said. The commission says it is more logical to keep the debris inside the reactors than to retrieve it and suggests constructing a shield around the reactors and postpone taking out the melted fuel until 100 years or 200 years later when radioactive activity levels have decreased. |
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1 This Month
10 March A LIVE WEBINAR THE REAL EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR POWER
What the Industry Isn’t Telling Us
1:00 PM Mountain, 2 pm Central, 3 pm Eastern. Live on the Keepers of the Water Facebook page
18 March Webinar @ 1 PM EST: An Assessment of SMR Projects: The Case of Canada
register for the zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_o8BIIOUvQ2ONJR1nta65DQ#/registration
of the week – STOP SMALL MODULAR REACTORS IN CANADA
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