Toshiba says it may write down nuclear business, U.S. units probed, Reuters TOKYO | BY MAKIKO YAMAZAKI AND RITSUKO ANDO , 18 Mar 16, Japan’s Toshiba Corp (6502.T) said on Friday it was looking at whether it would need to write down its nuclear business given damage to the company’s credit profile after a $1.3 billion accounting scandal last year.
The electronics conglomerate also confirmed a report that U.S. authorities are probing accounting at its U.S. units, although its Westinghouse nuclear power subsidiary denied that its finances were under investigation.
Wanting to draw a line under the accounting scandal, Toshiba has sought to move on to streamlining its businesses, whose poor performances had been masked by years of false bookkeeping.
At a business strategy update on Friday, it unveiled an extra 3,000 job cuts, taking its planned total to 14,000 – a restructuring measure that comes on top of a $5.9 billion sale of its medical equipment unit as well as the sale of its home appliances business announced this week.
But the latest developments concerning its nuclear business and the probe highlight that its accounting woes are far from over…….
The Asahi newspaper reported earlier on Friday that Toshiba is considering a 200 billion yen ($1.8 billion) writedown for Westinghouse, fanning investor concerns that the value of assets and goodwill related to the unit were overstated.
Nuclear power has become less popular since Toshiba’s acquisition of Westinghouse in 2006, especially in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima disaster which prompted many countries to freeze nuclear energy expansion plans.
NPT and Nuclear Security Risks’ Exposed by Secret Plutonium Shipment: NGOs, March 18, 2016 Tokyo- (PanOrient News) “……..In total, Japan`s current stockpile is around 46,700 kg, of which 9,528kg is located in Japan, the remaining balance being stored in France and the UK. The shipment from Tokai port will reduce its stockpile to 9,197 kg. Less than 8kg is sufficient for one nuclear weapon. While the Tokai shipment consists of weapons grade plutonium, and the vast bulk of Japan`s remaining stockpile is designated reactor-grade plutonium, from a security and non proliferation perspective there is no practical distinction and reactor-grade plutonium is capable of being used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons — a point highlighted by Shigeru Ishiba, a former Liberal Democratic Party Defense Minister, when speaking in 2011 described Japan`s nuclear energy program as “a tacit nuclear deterrent”, the statement said.
Two reactors, Takahama 3 and 4, owned by Kansai Electric, began operation in January and February 2016 loaded with plutonium MOX fuel, with unit 3 operating with 24 assemblies containing 1,088kg of plutonium and unit 4 with 4 assemblies containing 184kg of plutonium. Unit 4 shutdown due to an electrical failure three days after start up, while unit 3 was forced to shutdown on March 10th following a court order. Both reactors remain shutdown and are subject of a court injunction preventing operation issued by the Otsu district court, Shiga prefecture on March 9th. They are expected to be non operational for many months. Of the 26 reactors under review by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), Ikata-3, Genkai-3 and Tomari-3 are all intended to operate with plutonium MOX fuel.
“On current plans, and if ever the Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant begins operation, Japan`s program could yield as much as 93,000kg by 2025 – most of which will remain unused. The reactor program in Japan is in crisis with no credible program for either restarting most reactors or using large amounts of this plutonium. If ever there was a time to abandon its current doomed nuclear energy policy, it is now. The Obama administration in its last year has an opportunity to step up and actively reduce the spiraling proliferation dynamic in East Asia – this should be top of the agenda in Washington instead of being ignored. The next step is to challenge the basis of the U.S.-Japan nuclear cooperation agreement which runs to 2018 – approval for Japan to continue acquiring plutonium must be reversed,” said Burnie.
The Department of Energy has no plans for final disposal of the Japanese plutonium, which will be added to the existing stockpile of 13 tons at the SRS, demonstrating that the shipment is largely a commercial dumping operation to secure funds for the beleaguered weapons material production site near Aiken, South Carolina, as pointed out by Savannah River Site Watch, the organizations said……. .http://www.panorientnews.com/en/news.php?k=2485
Biologist Timothy Mousseau has spent years collecting mutant bugs, birds and mice around Chernobyl and Fukushima. In a DW interview, he shares some surprising insights into the effects of nuclear accidents on wildlife.
DW: Professor Timothy Mousseau, did you collect these mutant firebugs [pictured at the top of the page]?
Timothy Mousseau: Yes, the firebugs are really an eye-opener. My research partner Anders Moller and I were visiting Chernobyl on April 26, 2011. We were wandering around Pripyat collecting flowers, to study their pollen, when Anders reached down to the ground and pulled up this little bug with red and black markings. He said: “Tim, look, it’s a mutant – it’s missing an eye spot!”
From then on we started collecting these little bugs in each place we visited, from the most contaminated parts of the Red Forest to relatively clean areas in abandoned villages. Eventually we had several hundred of these little critters. It was very obvious that deformed patterns were much more prevalent in areas of high contamination.
This is just one of many similar anecdotes about the deformed critters of Chernobyl. Literally every rock we turn over, we find a signal of the mutagenic properties of the radiation in the region.
A pair of great tit birds collected near Chernobyl – left is normal, the individual on the right has a facial tumor
Is there a threshold of radiation below which there’s no effect?
The impact of radiation on rates of mutation, cancer and mortality varies a good deal by species. But statistically, there’s a simple relationship with dose. Small dose, small effect; big dose, big effect. There doesn’t appear to be a threshold below which there’s no effect.
Interestingly, organisms living in nature are much more sensitive to radiation than lab animals – comparing mice raised in labs and mice in the wild, exposed to identical levels of ionizing radiation, the mortality rate among wild mice is eight or 10 times that of lab mice. It’s because lab animals are protected from most stressors – like cold or hunger.
Are plants and trees affected too?
Yes, we’ve collected a lot of deformed pollen. Seen a lot of deformed trees, too. Pines often show growth-form abnormalities, even in normal areas with no radionucleotide contamination. Sometimes it’s an insect infestation, sometimes a hard freeze at the wrong time – you can find such anomalies anywhere.
But in contaminated areas of Ukraine, we have a correlation between frequency of abnormality and the Chernobyl event. It’s pretty strong evidence. There was a recent paper showing a very similar phenomenon in Fukushima. The trees there are very young, but will likely also be twisted up in knots 30 years from now!
Mousseau’s field crew collecting pollen and insect samples on the left, with the Chernobyl reactor in the distance. Right, a mutant pine tree at Chernobyl
What are the long-term effects of radiation on animal or plant species in contaminated areas? They’ve had their genomes altered. Will mutants persist?
Well, in the long run, no. The thing is, some background rate of mutations happens constantly in every species, even in uncontaminated areas – albeit at a much lower rate than in areas contaminated by nuclear accidents. So most genetic variants have been tried already. The great majority are either neutral or slightly deleterious. If a mutation had any benefit to offer, it would already be there in the population.
So the long-term effect of nuclear accidents on biodiversity is … none?
Yes, that’s right. Over evolutionary time, we expect that populations will return to normal after the mutagen disappears. Radionucleotides decay, hot sites eventually cool down, mutations become less frequent again, and healthy animal and plant populations recolonize the sites. So the genetic status quo ante returns – except if mutations have occurred that permanently enhance fitness, but that’s very rare.
Mousseau (left) and colleague Anders Moller recording measurements in the field at Chernobyl
Some mutations might persist for a while if they’re adaptive during the hot phase. For example, there’s selection for animals whose cells produce a higher antioxidant load, which makes them more resistant to the effects of ionizing radiation. But that protection comes at a metabolic cost. After radiation levels die down, those variants will be selected back out of the population.
Where things get complicated is when the harmful mutations are recessive, that is, when it takes two copies [one for each chromosome] for the expression of the mutation. Many mutations fall into this category. They can accumulate in populations because they’re not expressed until two copies come into the same individual [one from the mother, the other from the father].
Because of this, populations can be affected by such mutations for many generations even after the mutagen is removed, and also, via dispersal, in populations that were never affected by the mutagen.
How can radioactive contamination interact with other problems that affect ecosystems, like habitat loss or climate change?
Certainly climate change is an additional stressor that is likely to interact with radiation to affect populations. We have demonstrated that while swallows in most places have moved their breeding dates forward in response to warming, in the Chernobyl area they are actually delayed. We hypothesize that this is due to the stress from the radioactive contaminants.
The Red Forest near Chernobyl in Ukraine presents a high risk of fire, as a lack of bacteria prevents the trees from decaying
The biggest fear at present is related to the observation of hotter and drier summers in Ukraine, and the resulting increase in number and size of forest fires. Last summer there were three large fires, and one of them burned through some very contaminated areas.
We have predicted that such events could pose a significant threat to both human populations and the environment via re-suspension and deposition of radionuclides in the leaf litter and plant biomass.
In addition to the threat of catastrophic wildfire spreading nuclear contamination, birds and mammals also move around. Do they absorb radioactive elements in their food and water in contaminated sites, carry them elsewhere, thus dispersing the contamination more widely?
Do animals move radionuclides? Yes! I did a study years ago that showed very significant amounts of radionuclides are exported every year by birds. But it seems unlikely that the amount is enough to cause measurable health effects – unless you’re eating the birds. It is known that some people living outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are getting very significant doses from hunting the contaminated wild boar that leave the zone.
Mouse with cataract collected near Chernobyl – the more radioactive the site, the higher the frequency of defects
This year marks five years since the Fukushima accident, and 30 years since Chernobyl. How long will the contaminated zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima be mutagenic and dangerous?
Chernobyl was a nuclear fire and ongoing fission event for 10 days, with strontium, uranium and plutonium isotopes strewn into the landscape. They have long half-lives, so many areas will remain hazardous for centuries, even thousands of years.
Fukushima was largely a cesium event, and cesium radionucleotides have a relatively short half-life. The area will mostly naturally decontaminate itself within decades, at most within a couple hundred years.
Timothy Mousseau is a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of radionucleotide contamination from nuclear accidents on wild bird, insect, rodent, and plant populations.
Judge Hideki Kanazawa, third from right in the front row, walks through an area evacuated due to radiation while wearing protective clothing, near the homes of plaintiffs in a lawsuit over the nuclear disaster, in Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture, on March 17, 2016.
FUKUSHIMA–Fukushima District Court judges inspected the houses of three evacuated plaintiffs on March 17 in connection with a lawsuit filed against the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. over the nuclear disaster.
It marked the first visit by judges to evacuation zones regarding litigation concerning the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, which was caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
Called “Nariwai Sosho” (livelihood suit), the lawsuit has about 4,000 plaintiffs seeking consolation money and the restoration of their former lives that were lost because of the nuclear accident.
What was gleaned from the on-site inspections will be used as evidence in the trial.
The plaintiffs had called for the judges to visit the affected sites and hear their explanations to assess the scope of damage of the nuclear disaster.
The inspections involving about 50 people, which were closed to the media, started at 10:45 a.m. and ended around 4:30 p.m.
Three judges, including Presiding Judge Hideki Kanazawa, first visited the home of Sadatoshi Sato, a 68-year-old who raised livestock before the disaster, in Namie.
Other plaintiffs, government officials and TEPCO representatives accompanied the judges. All participants wore white protective suits and masks.
At Sato’s home, the judges viewed empty cattle sheds. Sato had been raising about 150 cattle when the nuclear accident unfolded, but most of them starved to death while he was evacuating. Sato also took the judges to the site where the dead cattle were buried.
“I want the judges to give a thoughtful ruling so that the dead cattle would rest in peace,” Sato told reporters after the inspection.
The judges also visited the homes of 67-year-old Yuji Fukuda in Futaba and a woman in Tomioka who had been operating a piano school out of her house before the nuclear accident.
Fukuda’s house is in a difficult-to-return zone about 4 kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. He showed the judges his once-thriving garden. He also told them about a local store that is now desolate.
“I told the judges from the bottom of my heart that I am not the only one who has suffered,” Fukuda said. “I had wanted the judges to come sooner. But my hope has finally come true.”
Judges clad in protective gear visit Fukushima in class action suit
FUKUSHIMA — Judges from the Fukushima District Court donned protective gear to make an on-site visit on March 17 to towns evacuated due to high radiation levels, as they deliberate a class action lawsuit over the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Some 3,900 people who lived in Fukushima Prefecture and adjacent prefectures at the time of the meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant have sued the government and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. for compensation and a restoration of their hometowns to their pre-disaster state. According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, the March 17 visit is the first time that a court handling a lawsuit over the Fukushima disaster has made an on-site visit.
The visit consisted of around 50 people, including three judges and lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the defendants. They went to three evacuated towns, Futaba, Namie and Tomioka, where they looked inside the homes of plaintiffs, thrown into disorder by scavenging animals and full of strewn furniture and bad odors. They also walked by JR Futaba Station, now unmanned and silent.
Plaintiff Yuji Fukuda, 67, who evacuated from Futaba and is now living in the city of Iwaki, said after the visit, “The judges understood that we are continuing to suffer from being driven from our towns and having to leave our homes and properties unattended.”
At his cow barn, Sadatoshi Sato, 68, livestock farmer and plaintiff from Namie, explained to the judges how most of the around 150 cattle he kept had died from starvation after the town was evacuated.
The plaintiffs in the case are seeking 20 million yen in compensation each for 40 people who lived in areas that are under evacuation order. They are also seeking a reduction in radiation doses to pre-disaster levels, and payment of 50,000 yen per month to each plaintiff for the duration until this happens.
This radiation dose monitoring post, installed about 21 kilometers from the Sendai nuclear power plant in Satsuma-Sendai, Kagoshima Prefecture, can only measure radiation doses up to 80 microsieverts per hour.
The head of the Nuclear Regulation Authority on March 16 criticized an Asahi Shimbun story on radiation dose monitors around the Sendai nuclear power plant, saying it is misleading to residents near nuclear facilities.
The NRA demanded that The Asahi Shimbun explain the news-gathering process that led to the March 14 story headlined, “Half of the radiation dose monitoring posts around the Sendai nuclear power plant cannot measure levels that serve as criteria for evacuation,” in the vernacular Asahi Shimbun.
“(The article) is criminal in the sense the content fanned unnecessary anxieties among municipalities hosting nuclear power plants and people living around them,” Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of NRA, said.
The article, carried in the morning edition, said 22 of the 48 monitoring posts installed in the area between 5 kilometers and 30 km from the Sendai plant in Kagoshima Prefecture can only measure radiation doses up to 80 microsieverts per hour. That means these posts are incapable of measuring doses of 500 microsieverts per hour, the criterion for judgments on issuing evacuation orders to residents immediately after a nuclear accident.
“It is not a problem that only half of the monitoring posts can measure (500 microsieverts) and the other half cannot do so,” Tanaka said. “What is important is whether those monitoring posts are sufficient for us to judge (whether to order evacuations) through monitoring.”
On the evening of March 15, the NRA released a statement on its website, saying, “There is a possibility that (the article) will cause misunderstandings.”
The statement said monitoring posts that can accurately measure low radiation doses and monitoring posts that can measure high radiation doses are installed in combination, so the mechanism to judge whether to issue evacuation orders has been “put in place.”
The NRA statement also said, “We recognize that it is important to continuously enhance monitoring systems for emergencies.”
In addition, the NRA took issue with a comment from the nuclear watchdog that appeared in the article.
“Our staff never said what was written,” the NRA said.
It demanded that The Asahi Shimbun explain whether the comment was a fact.
The Asahi Shimbun carried the article to enhance local governments’ evacuation systems as much as possible.
“As for the article, (our reporters) interviewed NRA executives several times,” the newspaper said in a statement.
* * *
Asahi’s stance on the issue
The Asahi Shimbun believed that, in the case of radiation doses rising sharply after an accident at a nuclear power plant, 500 microsieverts per hour will become an important barometer on whether to immediately evacuate residents living in the area between 5 km and 30 km from the plant.
Therefore, the newspaper focused on whether equipment that can measure 500 microsieverts per hour has been put in place.
After the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co., the government revised its guidelines to deal with nuclear disasters. The government decided that people living within a radius of 5 km from a nuclear plant would have to evacuate immediately if an accident occurs.
For people living in the area between 5 km and 30 km from the plant, the government decided that they would have to stay indoors, and a judgment would be made on whether to issue evacuation orders to them after checking the radiation doses measured by monitoring posts.
The government decided that if a level of 20 microsieverts per hour continues for an entire day, it will instruct those residents to evacuate within a week. However, if the radiation doses reach 500 microsieverts per hour, the government will instruct them to evacuate immediately.
This year, The Asahi Shimbun asked 21 prefectures that are obliged to compile evacuation measures for residents about the installation of monitoring posts in the area between 5 km and 30 km from a nuclear plant.
With the exception of Kagoshima Prefecture, where the Sendai nuclear plant is located, 20 prefectures have installed or plan to install monitoring posts that can measure up to 500 microsieverts per hour in all or most of the spots.
Prefectural government officials said that in the accident in Fukushima, the area of high radiation doses spread widely and that it is a matter of course that the monitoring posts can measure up to 500 microsieverts.
Others said that making it possible to measure up to 500 microsieverts will lead to relief and safety of the prefecture’s people.
Officials of prefectural governments have made such remarks because of the accident that occurred at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Radiation doses could differ drastically in spots that are several kilometers away.
In the initial stage of the Fukushima disaster, measuring radiation doses while moving in a car was inadequate due to a shortage of gasoline and other reasons.
In a complex disaster combined with an earthquake or other factors, there is a possibility that measuring equipment cannot be transported because of damage to roads.
The 48 monitoring posts that are installed in the area between 5 km and 30 km from the Sendai nuclear plant are positioned so that they can be used to make judgments on evacuations from each district.
As for the Sendai nuclear plant, an NRA official in charge of the issue revealed to The Asahi Shimbun this month that when the government “approved” the evacuation system around the plant in 2014, prior to the restarts of its reactors, a then division chief of the NRA strongly asked the Kagoshima prefectural government to expand its monitoring system.
As for the current situation of monitoring systems, the NRA is also looking into the installation and capabilities of monitoring posts around nuclear power plants throughout the country.
Reuters, Mar 11, 2016 (emphasis added): 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… The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now… Tepco has been developing robots [to] negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.
Reuters, Mar 9, 2016: Five years on, melted fuel rods still spew radiation…
DW, Mar 11, 2016: The melted nuclear fuel and the destroyed pressure vessel in the nuclear reactors 1 to 3 continue to be major problems… “So far, nobody knows what exactly happened in there and how to solve it,” [Heinz Smital, a nuclear physicist] told DW. “Until now, there is no solution to recover the melted fuel rods from the reactors.”
News Corp Australia, Mar 11, 2016: Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it is impossible to extract and remove deadly melted fuel rods… [Tepco is] grappling with the fact that they don’t have the technology to find missing melted fuel rodsin three reactors at the plant. The rods melted through containment vessels in the reactors.
Guardian, Mar 11, 2016: [It’s] the most daunting task the nuclear industry has ever faced: removing hundreds of tons of melted fuel from the plant’s stricken reactors… something no nuclear operator has ever attempted… Of greatest concern, though, is reactor 1, where the fuel may have burned through the pressure vessel, fallen to the bottom of the containment vessel and into the concrete pedestal below – perhaps even outside it – according to a report by the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning… Masuda and Tepco engineers who spoke to the Guardian conceded that they still didn’t know where the fuel is located. “To be honest, we don’t know exactly where the fuel is”… Masuda said… “No one has ever done what we’re doing”…
Miles O’Brien, PBS correspondent: What about the melted fuel in the reactor cores? They aren’t even sure where it all is.
Lake Barrett, Tepco advisor: Is it in one big vertical lump on the floor underneath it? Or did it come down and flow like lava in a volcano and move out to the sides? We don’t know yet… Nothing of this magnitude [i.e. the attempt to remove Fukushima’s melted fuel] has ever been done by mankind…
Interview with nuclear engineer Hiroaki Koide (translation by Prof. Robert Stolz, transcription by Akiko Anson), published Mar 8, 2016: We simply do not know where the core is or in what state it is… [The government and TEPCO] are convinced that the melted core fell through the bottom of the pressure vessel and now lie at the bottom of the containment vessel―basically piling up like nuggets of the melted core [See Lake Barrett’s statement above]. There’s no way this would be the case. (Laughs)… It should have been scattered all over the place… Though the containment vessel is made of steel, if the melted core has come in contact with that steel, just as it ate through the floor of the pressure vessel, it could possibly have melted through the containment vessel… There are situations in which the containment vessel can suffer a melt-through. I think this likely has already happened.
NAOKI ASANUMA, Nikkei staff writer, Tokyo 17 Mar 16, Five years after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that caused reactors to melt down at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, Japan’s nuclear energy policy remains in disarray. On March 9, the Otsu District Court in Shiga Prefecture ordered Kansai Electric Power to halt the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at its Takahama nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture, after taking issue with the power company’s safety protocols regarding earthquakes and tsunamis. The order is the first of its kind suspending the operation of a reactor in service in Japan and has raised questions about who among the many stakeholders — utilities, the central government, local authorities, regulators, residents and courts — has the power to start or stop them.
The decision appeared to repudiate safety regulations born out of an exhaustive debate among experts, as well as inspections at the Takahama plant that lasted more than two years. Kansai Electric now assumes the strongest earthquake that could hit Takahama would produce a ground acceleration of 700 gal, or galileo units, up from its previous assessment of 550 gal. But that failed to satisfy the court, which held that investigations of active fault lines and other safety aspects were not thorough enough. The ruling also rejected the utility’s argument that it had taken tsunami risks under careful consideration.
Kansai Electric shut down the No. 3 reactor the day after the court order, leaving Japan with only two reactors in operation — the No. 1 and No. 2 units at Kyushu Electric Power’s Sendai plant, in Kagoshima Prefecture. The No. 4 reactor at Takahama was already shut down due to problems that occurred soon after it was reactivated in February.
Prior to the ruling, the restart of nuclear reactors had followed a formula of sorts: A power company receives the nod from the Nuclear Regulation Authority after examinations based on the regulator’s new safety standards. The central government then helps local governments of areas within a 30km radius of the plant prepare evacuation plans. After the local governments give their consent, the reactor is then fired up. The formula was upset, however, by 29 Shiga residents living outside the 30km radius, who asked the Otsu court for an injunction.
In handing down its ruling, the court said efforts by Kansai Electric and the Nuclear Regulation Authority to understand the causes of the Fukushima meltdown were insufficient.
“Japan has learned nothing from the Fukushima accident,” said Yotaro Hatamura, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, who served as chairman of a government-appointed committee to investigate the disaster. “The reactivation [of reactors] represents nothing but irresponsibility.”
While the Strategic Energy Plan worked out by the government in 2014 calls for reducing reliance on nuclear power “as much as possible,” it positions nuclear energy as an “important baseload power source.” But with lawsuits demanding the suspension of nuclear plants and petitions seeking provisional halts proliferating, a new question in the wake of the Otsu ruling is whether nuclear plants can serve that purpose, given that they may suddenly cease to operate.
The “best mix” of energy sources for 2030, projected by the government last year, puts the ratio of nuclear power at 20% to 22%. Former Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Yoichi Miyazawa said Japan “needs to operate some 35 reactors,” suggesting the difficulty of achieving the target. In a survey by The Nikkei, 60% of people said the reactivation of nuclear power plants should not be promoted.
At the Fukushima plant itself, officials cite progress with the cleanup work.
The outcome of this Tepco’s investigating Tepco will be for sure just another “We are very sorry” accompanied by three deep bows down the road…
A third party investigative panel set up by Tokyo Electric Power Co. held its first meeting Thursday to examine how the utility reached its conclusion on meltdowns at its Fukushima plant in the 2011 nuclear crisis after the company admitted recently it could have made an judgment sooner than it did.
“Local people in Fukushima are still having a difficult time even five years after the accident,” Yasuhisa Tanaka, a lawyer and chairman of the panel, said ahead of the meeting. He is also former chief justice of the Sendai High Court.
“As it has been pointed out that Tokyo Electric didn’t provide enough information, we have to address various issues including how information should be provided.”
The three-member panel, including two other lawyers, was established after TEPCO said last month it failed to use its internal operation manual that contains criteria for judging core meltdowns after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on March 11, 2011.
TEPCO could have determined that nuclear core meltdowns occurred at the plant three days after the complex was crippled, based on the manual that defines meltdowns as damage to more than 5 percent of a reactor core.
But the utility initially just said reactors cores had been damaged and did not acknowledge the meltdowns until May 2011, even as analysis of the plant’s situation showed some reactors had damage to more than 5 percent of their reactor cores as of March 14 that year.
Early in the crisis, the company said there was no basis to determine reactor core meltdowns.
Later analysis found that the No. 3 unit had damage to 30 percent of its reactor core and that 55 percent of the No. 1 reactor’s core was damaged, both as of March 14, 2011.
TEPCO said in late February this year that it discovered the manual while investigating how it responded to the Fukushima disaster at the request of Niigata Prefecture. The power company aims to restart a nuclear power plant in the prefecture.
Earlier this month, TEPCO President Naomi Hirose offered an apology over the revelation that the company underestimated the severity of the accident at a meeting of the House of Councillors Budget Committee.
“There are various questions such as why (the company) wasn’t able to use the manual and why it took so long to discover it. We hope (the panel) will conduct strict investigations and we will take measures” based on the outcome, Hirose said Thursday prior to the meeting.
TEPCO will disclose the outcome of discussions at the panel as soon as they are concluded.
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.
For example the evacuation plan from Satsuma-Sendai in case of an nuclear accident at the Sendai nuclear plan is totally unrealistic, due to many reasons.
The most important one is that the roads and transports available in that area would quickly cause a bottleneck into which evacuating people would become trapped with no real possiblity of a fast evacuation out.
A man is checked for radiation doses during an evacuation drill in Kagoshima in December 2015 in preparation for an accident at the Sendai nuclear power plant in neighboring Satsuma-Sendai.
Nearly half of the radiation monitoring posts installed for issuing evacuation orders around the Sendai nuclear power plant in Kagoshima Prefecture have been found unable to perform the required function.
Twenty-two of the 48 monitoring posts around Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai plant can only measure airborne radiation levels up to 80 microsieverts per hour, far below the 500-microsievert threshold that triggers immediate evacuation orders, according to a survey by The Asahi Shimbun.
The survey also found that monitoring devices have not been installed at many of the designated locations around Kansai Electric Power Co.’s Takahama nuclear power plant, where two reactors were restarted in January and February.
The two reactors, however, are now out of service again in line with a recently issued court injunction.
These findings mean there are insufficiencies in the way to obtain crucial data for deciding on whether to evacuate local residents from areas around these nuclear plants during severe accidents.
Despite these serious safety lapses, reactors at the two plants were brought online. How seriously do the utilities, central and local governments take the safety of residents?
Nearby local governments that are in a position to monitor nuclear accidents by using these devices should ask the utilities to suspend reactor operations at least until useful radiation measuring instruments have been installed at all the posts.
Following the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, the central government revised its guidelines on responding to nuclear disasters.
The revised guidelines mandate immediate evacuations of residents within 5 kilometers of a nuclear plant where a serious accident has taken place. Residents living between 5 km and 30 km from an accident-stricken plant will be required to stay indoors while the central government decides whether to order evacuations based on radiation levels detected by the monitoring posts.
Immediate evacuations will be ordered if radiation levels reach 500 microsieverts per hour. If radiation levels rise to and stay at 20 microsieverts per hour for an entire day, residents will be ordered to evacuate within a week. In both cases, the central government will issue the orders.
If the network of radiation monitoring posts fails to function properly, evacuation decisions for specific areas could be delayed or misguided.
With financial support from the central government, local governments concerned are required to install these monitoring posts. It is baffling why the local governments that host the two plants consented to the reactor restarts despite the insufficient monitoring installations.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority should not be allowed to shirk responsibility for the matter by claiming that dealing with issues related to the evacuations of residents is not part of its mandate.
The SPEEDI radioactive fallout-forecasting system failed to work properly during the Fukushima nuclear crisis. So the NRA decided to replace the SPEEDI system with networks of monitoring posts to measure radiation levels around nuclear plants for making evacuation decisions.
The NRA should be the one that checks if the posts will be workable in actual accidents.
Even the stricter nuclear safety standards cannot completely eliminate the risk of accidents. That makes it vital to make adequate preparations based on the assumption that nuclear disasters can occur.
The belated acceptance of this internationally common premise doesn’t amount to much if such a lax attitude is taken toward evacuations.
The principle that local governments should take the responsibility to protect local residents from various disasters is reasonable to a certain extent.
However, as far as nuclear disasters are concerned, this principle should not allow the central government to avoid playing a key role and shuffle off its responsibility.
The system needs changes so that the effectiveness of evacuation plans will be sufficiently checked by the central government and especially by the NRA, which has the necessary expertise.
Such reforms will prevent the restarts of reactors under such inadequate evacuation conditions by ensuring central government inspections in addition to safety checks by the local governments concerned.
In some disasters, individuals can make their own decisions concerning their safety. But a nuclear accident is not one of them.
Both the central and local governments should play far greater roles and assume far more important responsibilities in nuclear accidents than in other kinds of disasters.
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.
7pm Central Time (8pm ET, 6pm MT, 5pm PT) UTC – 5 From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
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