GroundTruth Films: Fukushima Diary
Signs covering Fukushima Station are a distraction from the fact that 100,000 people are still displaced in the Prefecture.
Burn clothes: Wear ‘em, toss ‘em. That’s the spirit in which Beth Balaban and I packed for our final filming trip to Fukushima for Son of Saichi. We also brought burn pillows, burn shoes, burn socks, burn slippers, burn blow up mattresses… Safe to say, nothing in our suitcases is coming home with us.
On our previous three trips we’ve stayed outside the evacuated contamination zone, traveling in and out for brief periods daily. This time we’re staying inside Yamakiya, a village evacuated after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdown five years ago. And even though radiation levels here aren’t of the sci-fi-turn-your-skin-neon-green variety, scientists we’ve talked to admit that even after being part of the nation’s $10 billion clean-up effort, it’s still not a place they’d want to live.
Yamakiya’s evacuation didn’t come right away after the March 2011 disaster. It came a few months later when prevailing winds and seasonal rainfall took a toxic road trip, traveling like the Shinkansen over hills and valleys, and along Rte. 114 past the home of Hidekazu Ouichi, a lifelong farmer and son of Saichi, a Hiroshima survivor.
We’re here now because Hidekazu got word from the government late last year that he could – finally – move back home April 1st. But when he picked us up from the Fukushima train station, we found out the government has changed its mind again about lifting the evacuation orders. No, they now say, he can’t move back until September.
He’s moving back anyway. Another 31 families are, too. (Most former residents are rejecting any offer to live here.)
On the 30-minute drive to Yamakiya, I realize I’m more worried about what’s measured in pixels and decibels than becquerels or microsieverts. There’s a television screen embedded in the dashboard of Hidekazu’s new Toyota, and Japan’s national obsession – cute, quirky mascots – are on full display. Eyes on the road, Hidekazu!
Now that he’s home, Hidekazu finds it hard to break his lifelong habits and those of his ancestors. The family farm has always been land to live off, always a place of sustenance, and it’s difficult for him to see it any other way.
That’s why we’re not surprised when he opens the freezer to show us feet from a wild boar he and his friends caught in the backyard. A ghost town for the past five years, this area became overrun with wild animals – especially boar which Hidekazu says have gotten so used to gallivanting around town that “they roam freely inside abandoned houses, and come right up like a dog and wag their tails at you.”
The boar pre-freezer.
The bad news is that wild boar – tasty as their feet might be – eat mushrooms which are among the most contaminated plants in Yamakiya’s forest. Cesium builds up inside the body of boars because of it. When Hidekazu tested this boar to see just how radiated it was, he measured 12,000 becquerels. (One becquerel is defined as the decay of one atom of a radioisotope per second. So if your Geiger counter detects the radiation of one decay coming from a sample – say, a boar – in one second, then that sample has one becquerel of radiation.) 12,000 becquerels is astronomically higher than the 500 allowed by the government.
Crew member and animator Christian Schlaeffer puts his Geiger counter to the frozen boar feet.
Hidekazu offered to cook the feet up for us for dinner. We politely declined.
Oh, who am I kidding? We told him he was crazy and there wasn’t a chance in hell we’d eat it, and neither should he! But if our previous trips have told us anything, it’s that Hidekazu will eventually convince us to eat or drink something that will surprise us and amuse him. I suspect it’s just a matter of time before the killer bee liquor comes out of the cabinet.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beth-murphy/groundtruth-films-fukushi_b_9605966.html
150 Fukushima No. 1 workers who got maximum radiation dose at start of crisis can now return to plant
Some 150 people who worked at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant whose cumulative radiation dose exceeded 100 millisieverts will be able to return to the facility starting April 1.
By law, nuclear plant operators are required to record and manage the radiation exposure of each worker over a five-year term to ensure their dosage doesn’t exceed safe limits.
According to Tokyo Electric Power Co., 150 Tepco workers and 24 subcontractor workers who dealt with the meltdown disaster that occurred right after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami were exposed to radiation exceeding the limit. As of March 1, 129 of the Tepco employees were still working at the utility. They were moved to other divisions based on the government directive.
Since the five-year term for the workers ended in March, Tepco said it hopes experienced hands will return to engage in the decommissioning of the plant to contribute to safety at the site.
But Tepco said it will not push them to return and said those who wish to go back will be managed under a new exposure regime designed to limit a worker’s lifetime radiation dosage to 1,000 millisieverts in line with recommendations made by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.
Last year, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare created the new regime, which requires nuclear plant operators to set individual limits for workers based on their age and past exposure to radiation.
Eurasian conflicts undermine nuclear security
Frozen Conflicts Undermine Nuclear Security http://www.eurasianet.org/node/78126
April 5, 2016 , by Richard Weitz The renewal of armed conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave can potentially have global ramifications, participants at the recent nuclear security summit in Washington cautioned.
A concern articulated in national progress reports prepared for the March 31-April 1 summit by several Eurasian governments was how corrosive the region’s ethnic and border disputes are to global nuclear security. The chaotic conditions that accompany such conflicts can make it easier for terrorists and criminal groups to get their hands on, and transport, nuclear or radioactive materials that can subsequently be used in a terror operation.
Warning that this situation “may lead to dire consequences not only for Ukraine, but for many European nations,” Ukrainian authorities called for “establishing international control over nuclear facilities that can be seized or damaged as a result of military actions.”
Azerbaijan’s report likewise observed that the unresolved Karabakh conflict means that “Azerbaijan is unable to provide proper border control along the substantial part of its borders.”
The nuclear security summit had a global scope, but Eurasia was one of the focus areas of the event. The presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine all attended the gathering.
The fighting in Karabakh erupted just hours after Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, each met separately with US Vice President Joe Biden on the margins of the summit. In identical language describing each meeting, Biden cautioned both presidents about the need for restraint.
Although representatives of Moldova were not at the summit, there have been reports of alleged Russian-linked smugglers attempting to exploit governance lapses and security gaps connected with the country’s separatist region of Transnistria to try to sell nuclear materials to suspected terrorist organizations. Elsewhere, Georgia’s breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have also been associated with reports of nuclear smuggling attempts.
Russian government has provided technical and financial assistance to fellow members of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Eurasian Economic Union to help address nuclear security threats. Despite supplying such assistance, Russian officials boycotted the Washington meeting and demanded an end to the summits, which have met every other year since 2010.
Richard Weitz is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at Hudson Institute.
Dangerous, pointless nuclear race in East Asia
The plutonium plans of each of the three East Asian countries, reinforced by worst-case assumptions about the intentions of the others, are further destabilizing an increasingly unstable region.
The ultimate goal, however, should be to end the costly, dangerous, pointless industry of plutonium separation. The U.S. has pursued that goal since 1974, when India used plutonium from its nominally civilian breeder reactor development program to launch a nuclear weapons program. Since that time, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and other countries have abandoned their reprocessing programs and the United Kingdom has decided to do so as well.
A Little-Known Nuclear Race Taking Place in East Asia Is Dangerous and Pointless http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-von-hippel/nuclear-race-asia_b_9609116.html 5 Apr 16 Frank von HippelSenior Research Physicist, Emeritus, Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University Fumihiko YoshidaVisiting Scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Plutonium was first produced and separated during America’s World War II nuclear weapons project. Its destructive power became apparent at the end of the war when, in one-millionth of a second, one kilogram of plutonium in the Nagasaki bomb fissioned and destroyed the city below.
Today, a number of countries — including France and Japan — are separating plutonium from the spent fuel of their reactors and building dangerous stockpiles of this weapon-usable nuclear material with no good economic purpose.
Japan, the only non-nuclear weapons state that separates plutonium today, has accumulated almost 50 metric tons. Last month, Japan shipped more than 700 pounds of mostly weapons-grade plutonium — enough for about 50 nuclear bombs — to a more secure location in the U.S. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been simultaneously pushing through a law to guarantee funding for a new spent fuel “reprocessing” plant designed to separate hundreds of tons of plutonium for use in reactor fuel.
Meanwhile, China’s new five-year plan includes a proposal to buy a reprocessing plant from France that will separate plutonium that will probably accumulate like Japan’s. And South Korea insists that it should have the same right to separate plutonium as Japan.
These plans and desires are troubling. As President Obama said during the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit, “We know that just the smallest amount of plutonium — about the size of an apple — could kill hundreds of thousands and spark a global crisis … We simply can’t go on accumulating huge amounts of the very material, like separated plutonium, that we’re trying to keep away from terrorists.”
Nuclear scientists working on weapons in the U.S. during World War II had a vision that plutonium could have a peaceful use. They proposed a plutonium “breeder” reactor that would convert uranium-238 into chain-reacting plutonium whose fission could power civilization for millennia. During the 1960s, this vision infected the global nuclear energy establishment. Since the 1970s, industrialized countries havespent about $100 billion on attempts to commercialize breeder reactors. Fortunately, this effort failed. We now understand the increased dangers of nuclear terrorism and proliferation that would have resulted had plutonium, a nuclear weapons material, become a commodity like petroleum. Conventional reactors are fueled by low-enriched uranium that is not usable in weapons.
In the absence of breeders, however, France has been continuing to separate plutonium and using it to fuel some of its conventional reactors; Japan has been trying less successfully to do the same.
The plutonium-uranium “mixed oxide” fuel produced in this way costs 10 timesmore than the low-enriched uranium that is the primary fuel for conventional reactors. But France’s government insists that Électricité de France continue to fund the bankrupt government-owned company AREVA to separate plutonium from EDF’s spent fuel. Meanwhile, Japan’s government is obliging its utilities to separate more plutonium as well. Globally, including failed plutonium programs in Russia and the United Kingdom, a surplus of more than 250 tons of plutonium — enough for 30,000 Nagasaki-type nuclear weapons — has been accumulated in civilian plutonium programs.
How can one explain the continuing interest in France, Russia, Japan, China and South Korea in separating plutonium? Institutional inertia is most of the answer in France and Russia but, in East Asia, the original use of plutonium — nuclear weapons — is also a factor. In South Korea, demands that the nation should have the right to be able to separate plutonium peak after North Korean nuclear tests. Security experts in Japan also increasingly justify its plutonium program as providing a latent nuclear deterrent against North Korea and China. China’s nuclear energy establishment is still enthralled with breeder reactors, but some analystsworry that China could use the reprocessing plant it plans to buy from France to quickly build up its nuclear weapons stockpile to the same scale as those of Russia and the United States.
The plutonium plans of each of the three East Asian countries, reinforced by worst-case assumptions about the intentions of the others, are further destabilizing an increasingly unstable region.
The United States cannot dictate to any of these countries. But it has a lot of leverage by virtue of being South Korea and Japan’s most important military ally and its agreements on peaceful nuclear cooperation with both.
In the recently completed negotiations over the renewal of the U.S.-Republic of Korea Agreement for Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation, the two countries kicked the issue of South Korea’s demand for the right to reprocess spent fuel down the road by launching a joint 10-year study of the “feasibility” of South Korea’s proposed program.
If the U.S. cannot convince France to hold off selling a reprocessing plant to China, it should at least insist that, as a part of the deal, both countries commit to “just-in-time” plutonium separation — that is, no stockpiling.
The ultimate goal, however, should be to end the costly, dangerous, pointless industry of plutonium separation. The U.S. has pursued that goal since 1974, when India used plutonium from its nominally civilian breeder reactor development program to launch a nuclear weapons program. Since that time, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and other countries have abandoned their reprocessing programs and the United Kingdom has decided to do so as well.
The U.S. must continue to press the holdouts.
India upset, but Obama maintains concern over nuclear arsenal in South Asia
Despite India’s criticism, White House says Obama stands by concern over nuclear arsenal in South Asia, DNA, 5 Apr 2016 White House says US favours reduction of tension between India and Pak.
A day after India criticised Barack Obama for asking it to reduce its nuclear arsenal, the White House said the President stands by his concerns over nuclear and missile developments in South Asia.
“The President’s comments were motivated by the concern that we have about nuclear and missile developments in South Asia. In particular, we’re concerned by the increased security challenges that accompany growing stockpiles, particularly tactical nuclear weapons that are designed for use on the battlefield,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters. “These systems are a source of concern because they’re susceptible to theft due to their size and load of employment.
Essentially, by having these smaller weapons, the threshold for their use is lowered and the risk that a conventional conflict between India and Pakistan, could escalate to include the use of nuclear weapons,” he said…….
On Friday, Obama had identified South Asia in particular India and Pakistan as one area where there is a need to be progress in the area of nuclear security and reduction of nuclear arsenal. India reacted strongly to Obama’s comments. http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report-despite-india-s-criticism-white-house-says-obama-stands-by-concern-over-nuclear-arsenal-in-south-asia-2198484
In total denial of the low-dose internal irradiation effects
Another marvelous spin propaganda article minimizing the dangers of the radiation in Fukushima, from the Asahi Shimbun.
If you watch that press conference from the beginning to the end, you may have different impression about their work. They do not pay any attention to the effect of the low-dose internal irradiation. Such omission being very convenient to promote the fallacy that life in Fukushima is very safe.
Haruka Onodera, a third-year student at Fukushima High School, holds a news conference with University of Tokyo professor Ryugo Hayano at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo on Feb. 8.
Fukushima students reach out to tell truth about radiation
Struck by ignorance about the 2011 nuclear disaster, high school science club members in Fukushima Prefecture enlisted the help of fellow students around Japan and abroad for a comparative study on radiation doses.
The results surprised even those living in the prefecture that hosts the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
“The individual doses (of external radiation exposure in high school students) were almost equal inside and outside of Fukushima Prefecture, and in European areas,” Haruka Onodera, 18, said in English at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ) in Tokyo on Feb. 8.
A German correspondent asked her, “Would you declare Fukushima now safe?”
“Actually, we didn’t measure the doses in people living in the contaminated areas, so we can’t say all of Fukushima is safe,” Onodera answered, often pausing in thought in the middle of her words and phrases. “But I hope we will send (personal dosimeters) to contaminated areas and help do risk management for people living there in the future.”
Onodera, a third-year student of Fukushima High School and member of the physics and radiation division of the school’s Super Science Club, also showed explanatory slides at the FCCJ news conference titled, “Fukushima and radiation monitoring. The goal of the project is to show the realities of Fukushima Prefecture to the rest of the world.
The club’s physics and radiation division started the project in summer 2014. It involved 216 high school students and teachers in Japan and abroad carrying personal dosimeters for two weeks.
Six high schools in Fukushima Prefecture–Fukushima, Adachi, Aizu Gakuho, Iwaki, Asaka and Tamura–and another six located elsewhere in Japan–including in Gifu, Kanagawa, Nara and Hyogo prefectures–were involved in the project.
They were joined by 14 high schools from France, Poland and Belarus.
According to the measurements taken by the students, the annual radiation doses in Fukushima Prefecture ranged between 0.63 and 0.97 millisievert. For elsewhere in Japan, the range was from 0.55 to 0.87 millisievert, while in Europe, the annual doses were between 0.51 and 1.1 millisieverts.
The similar levels of external doses are believed to be partly attributable to the lower level of natural background radiation in Fukushima Prefecture compared with that in western Japan. That finding came from an analysis of a database on the radioactive content of soil in areas surrounding the different high schools across Japan.
Onodera, who was seated next to Ryugo Hayano, a professor of physics with the University of Tokyo, at the FCCJ news conference, had also presented the study results last year to a workshop of high school students in France and a conference on Fukushima foodstuffs held on the sidelines of an international food exposition in Italy.
Two second-year students of the Super Science Club–Minori Saito, 17, and Yuya Fujiwara, 17–gave a talk at a workshop organized in Date, Fukushima Prefecture, by the International Commission on Radiological Protection late last year.
First- and second-year students who are members of the club, joined by eight high school students from France, visited peach farmers and shiitake mushroom growers in Fukushima Prefecture in summer last year. It was part of a program for studying the current state of Fukushima from diverse views.
The students wanted to address global audiences after they were shocked by how little was known about the actual state of Fukushima Prefecture.
“Can humans live in Fukushima?” a French high school student asked the Fukushima students over Skype as part of an international exchange program in 2014.
That prompted the Japanese students to determine the actual situation on their own, and compare it with circumstances elsewhere in Japan and abroad. Hayano advised them to undertake the endeavor when he visited Fukushima High School to give a talk.
The findings of the study were surprising. Most of the Fukushima students expected the doses in Fukushima would be the highest, even by a large margin.
The students also studied how behavior affected the dose levels.
The Fukushima High School students were being exposed to lower radiation levels when they were at school than when they were at home. They believe the school’s concrete buildings provided a more effective shield from radiation sources than the wooden houses did.
By contrast, students attending Ena High School in Gifu Prefecture were exposed to more radiation when they were at school, where granite, containing radiation sources, is used in the buildings.
Their analysis results were published in November in a British scientific journal on radiological protection. Onodera was involved in writing the research paper.
“The experience has brought home to me how important it is to address reality objectively and scientifically,” she said.
Onodera said she was growing more interested in basic sciences and dreams of doing research on molecular biology at university.
“We hope to solicit help from people in evacuation zones within Fukushima Prefecture, and from high schools in countries we have yet to address, in further broadening our study,” said Takashi Hara, a teacher and adviser to the science club’s physics and radiation division.
‘Ice Wall’ Is Japan’s Last-Ditch Effort To Contain Fukushima Radiation
Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is illuminated for decommissioning operation in the dusk in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, in this aerial view photo taken by Kyodo March 10, 2016, a day before the five-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster.
• The nearly mile-long structure consists of underground pipes designed to form a frozen barrier around the crippled reactors.
• The $312 million system was completed last month, more than a year behind schedule.
• Nearly 800,000 tons of radioactive water are already being stored onsite.
Japanese authorities have activated a large subterranean “ice wall” in a desperate attempt to stop radiation that’s been leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant for five years.
The wall consists of a series of underground refrigeration pipes meant to form a frozen soil barrier around the four reactors that were crippled during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
Construction of the $312 million government-funded structure was completed last month, more than a year behind schedule, the Associated Press reports. The nearly mile-long barrier is intended to block groundwater from entering the facility and becoming contaminated.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, which owns the plant, activated the system Thursday, a day after obtaining approval from Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority.
In a video detailing the ice wall’s design, TEPCO said the technology has been successfully used to prevent water intrusion during the construction of tunnels, but this is the first time it has been used to block water from entering a nuclear facility.
“We will create an impermeable barrier,” the company said, “by freezing the soil itself all the way down to the bedrock that exists below the plant. When groundwater flowing downhill reaches this frozen barrier it will flow around the reactor buildings, reaching the sea just as it always has, but without contacting the contaminated water within the reactor buildings.”
TEPCO says the ice wall will be activated in stages over the next several months and is one of several measures the company is taking to reduce the amount of water being contaminated on the site.
Nearly 800,000 tons of radioactive water are already being stored in more than 1,000 industrial tanks at the nuclear plant, according to the AP.
While hopes are high that the ice wall will prove successful in stopping additional radioactive water from seeping into the Pacific Ocean, Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, urged caution.
“It would be best to think that natural phenomena don’t work the way you would expect,” he told reporters Wednesday, according to the AP report.
The activation of the ice wall comes just weeks after a TEPCO official reported that robots designed to access the dangerous interior of the plant and seek out the melted fuel rods were “dying” from the high levels of radiation.
The video below details how the ice wall is expected to work.
Telling the Story of Fukushima
Different Approaches to Remembering 3/11 at the Prefecture’s Museums
Five years after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami touched off a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the disaster is no longer just a current event—it is also a part of Japan’s history. But how should that history be told? Government and civil society groups have different answers, and they are starting to emerge in a battle of museums.
A Tale of Two Museums
In a flurry of caption writing and message tweaking, Fukushima prefectural government officials are currently putting the finishing touches on a major new exhibit about the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Starting this summer, the exhibit will be permanently displayed at the ¥20 billion Fukushima Prefectural Center for Environmental Creation in the town of Miharu. Plans are in the works to send every fifth-grade student in the prefecture on a field trip to view it. The goal, according to the organizers, is to “address the worries and concerns of Fukushima residents, further understanding of radiation and environmental problems, and deepen awareness of environmental recovery.”
Some 40 kilometers away, in a small post-and-beam hall in the city of Shirakawa, a group of local citizens are planning a very different kind of exhibit. Their displays focus on the ways in which the government exacerbated the disaster and disregarded the rights of Fukushima residents in its aftermath. They will be exhibited at the Nuclear Disaster Information Center, which was built in 2013 using ¥30 million yen in donations from the public, with the goal of ensuring Fukushima and its lessons are not forgotten.
These two projects represent divergent understandings of how the Fukushima nuclear disaster should be remembered. Given their vastly unequal resources and reach, they also raise questions about the appropriate role of government in memorializing the disaster that rocked Japan and the world five years ago.
“People who have suffered from the Fukushima disaster have doubts about whether a public facility like the Center for Environmental Creation can truly communicate the lessons of an accident for which the national and prefectural governments bear partial responsibility,” says Gotō Shinobu, an associate professor at Fukushima University, who is involved in planning the alternative exhibit in Shirakawa.
A Familiar Story
The quiet battle over historical interpretation that is playing out in Fukushima has a precedent in the seaside city of Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, the site of one of the most devastating industrial disasters in world history. Thousands of people living in the area were killed or severely sickened by mercury after Chisso Corporation dumped industrial waste from its chemical plant into the bay over the course of several decades, contaminating fish and shellfish and poisoning the people who ate them. Fifty years later, public and private museums in the area are still telling different versions of that history.
One version can be found at the Minamata Disease Municipal Museum, which was established in 1993 with the goal of “handing down the lessons and experiences of Minamata Disease,” according to its mission statement. Videos and panels in the ¥6 billion facility relate the history and science of the disaster, and victims are on hand to share their personal experiences. But Endō Kunio, a board member and employee of the nonprofit victims’ support organization Sōshisha, says the museum fails to communicate the disaster’s true lessons. “Simply lining up events does not equate to history,” he says. “The facts of what happened are there, but the museum doesn’t say much about their meaning.”
Since 1988, Sōshisha has run its own museum, which displays fishing gear, protest flags, and other artifacts in a converted mushroom-cultivation shed. Among its founding principles is the goal of recording the struggles of the victims and the culpability of government and industry. “Our starting point is the perspective that Minamata Disease resulted from criminal activities on the part of Chisso Corporation and the national government,” says Endō. That perspective has shaped the low-budget museum into a symbol of resistance against the sanitization of painful historical events.
Fukushima Fault Lines
The divide in Fukushima falls along similar lines. The exhibit at the prefectural center will include a timeline of events since the meltdowns, a “radiation lab” explaining the science of radiation and measures to reduce exposure, and a large display on efforts to increase renewable energy and sustainability in the prefecture, according to an overview released last year. Although the exhibit advocates for a “Fukushima that does not depend on nuclear power,” reporting by the Tokyo Shimbun has pointed out that its planning board included several members with close ties to the nuclear industry.
In 2014, shortly after planning began, a citizen’s group with antinuclear leanings called the Fukushima Action Project sent a letter to the prefectural authorities expressing concern over the exhibit. The group requested, among other things, that the center not minimize the health risks of radiation. Since then, FAP representatives have met eight times with prefectural officials to discuss the content of the exhibits. According to meeting transcripts posted on the group’s website, they expressed concerns this January that the exhibit still does not adequately address the severe and ongoing water pollution caused by the disaster or the huge amounts of radioactive waste generated by the cleanup.
Fukushima prefectural officials, meanwhile, note that the exhibit does not touch on government or industry culpability, the fact that radiation exposure limits were raised after the disaster, or the pollution and waste problems because “these issues are not pertinent to the goals of the exhibit.” The facility’s goal, they explain, is “supporting educational activities related to radiation and the environment”; in response to public concerns about the exhibit, they state only that the exhibit content was determined by a panel of experts.
Nagamine Takafumi, the director of the Nuclear Disaster Information Center, is also deeply skeptical about the public museum. “We believe the goal of the Fukushima Prefectural Center for Environmental Creation is to create a myth of radiation safety,” he said. He and his colleagues are currently planning two permanent exhibits for their center. One, designed by Fukushima University’s Gotō, will compare global teaching materials on nuclear power and highlight the Ministry of Education’s pronuclear bias before the disaster. The other will examine the failure of all but a few municipalities in Fukushima to distribute potassium iodide pills immediately after the accident, which would have lowered residents’ risk of developing thyroid cancer.
A Third Perspective
Another private, but less politically driven, museum operates from an outbuilding at an abandoned school in the village of Kawauchi, about 25 kilometers inland from the nuclear plant. Called the Kangaeru Shirōkan, which translates roughly to “a museum for feeling, thinking, and understanding,” the free facility displays protective bodysuits, radiation meters, photographs, town newsletters, and other artifacts of the meltdown.
The museum was founded in 2012 by Nishimaki Hiroshi, a local journalist who moved to the area from Saitama Prefecture nine years ago. He says that in the months following the disaster, he wanted to do something constructive, but felt immobilized by the scale and complexity of the meltdown’s aftermath. When novelist and longtime friend Taguchi Randy suggested he open a museum, he acted on the idea.
The displays include scant explanatory text, and Nishimaki is rarely on site to act as a guide. His says his goal is simply to present the reality as locals have experienced it so that it will not be forgotten. “The government does bear some responsibility for what happened, but I don’t think of the displays as a way to attack them,” he says. Still, he has avoided government funding in order to maintain complete freedom in what he exhibits.
An Inevitable but Unequal Divide
It is hardly surprising that views of environmental catastrophe differ in private and public museums. Government actors partially responsible for a disaster are unlikely to be objective in planning a museum to memorialize it, and civic organizations that include disaster victims are equally unlikely to put aside their own experiences when interpreting the same events. In the case of the Fukushima disaster, divergent views on nuclear power further shape the messages presented in museums.
Public and private projects of historical interpretation can in this sense complement one another. Yet there is little chance the majority of the public will be exposed to both perspectives. As Gotō points out, the budget of the public museum is over 600 times that of the private one he is involved with, and visits to the private museum are not a part of any official school curriculum.
Last year, national and local officials met to discuss another large, government-funded museum focused on the nuclear disaster, this one planned to open on the prefecture’s coast some time in the coming decade. Although they haven’t asked, Minamata’s Endō has a piece of advice for them.
“It is all-important that the story of what happened be told by the people who live in that place,” he says. “When government officials and civil society groups interpret for them, it becomes something different.”
Contaminated water, fuel extraction stand in way of decommissioning Fukushima plant
The Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) is seen in September, 2012
With about five years having passed since the start of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster, nuclear workers still lack a method of treating the around 1,000 tanks of contaminated water stored on site, and the start of work to remove melted nuclear fuel from the plant remains at least five years away.
“Until the contaminated water issue is solved, decommissioning of the reactors remains far off. We have to stop the water,” says Tetsuo Ito, professor of nuclear energy safety engineering at the Kinki University Atomic Energy Research Institute. Akira Ono, chief of the Fukushima plant, says, “We’re still at step one” of the decommissioning process, which is estimated to take until 2041 to 2051.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the plant’s owner, is treating the contaminated water with its Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), which can remove 62 varieties of radioactive material. However, ALPS cannot remove radioactive tritium, and because of this the treated water is stored in tanks. Tritium is extremely difficult to separate from water, because even if one of the hydrogen atoms in a water molecule is replaced by tritium, the chemical properties such as the boiling point barely change.
Pipes for an underground frozen wall to block contaminated water leakages are seen on the landward side of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, on Feb. 23, 2016.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has advised that tritium-containing water be released into the ocean, because its effect on the human body is very limited. Tritium-containing water is created even during the normal operation of a nuclear power plant, and it is released into the ocean in accordance with waste-disposal standards. However, there is local opposition to doing this at the Fukushima plant because of worries about its effects on the reputation of the local fishing industry, and no decision has been made on what to do with the water.
Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years, so storing the water until the radiation naturally lessens is another option, but there is the risk of leaks during that time if the tanks’ conditions deteriorate.
As for decommissioning the plant reactors, at the end of 2011 the national government put together a roadmap that estimated the decommission work would take 30 to 40 years. To decommission the No. 1 through 3 reactors at the plant, 1,573 units of spent fuel will have to be removed from the spent fuel pools of these reactors, and 1,496 units’ worth of fuel that melted from the reactors will have to be removed. Safe removal of the melted fuel represents the largest problem.
A wall constructed on the seaward side of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant to prevent leakages is seen on Sept. 24, 2015.
The national government and TEPCO intend to decide on a plan for the fuel’s extraction in the first half of fiscal 2018, and start extraction efforts at one of the reactors within the year 2021. Toyoshi Fuketa, a member of the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), argues that nuclear fuel that is too difficult to take out should be stored on-site, saying, “There is the option of just removing as much (of the melted fuel) as possible, and hardening the rest (to seal off its radiation).”
The cost for decommissioning the reactors is already estimated at 2 trillion yen, and this could grow if the decommissioning schedule is delayed.
While the No. 1 through 3 reactors at the plant were shut down at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, they lost all power due to the proceeding tsunami and, with no way to cool the nuclear reactors, they experienced a meltdown. The tsunami measured at up to 15.5 meters, and emergency underground power supplies were flooded and failed to function.
Tanks for holding contaminated water are seen on the grounds of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, on Nov. 5, 2015
The No. 1 reactor was equipped with a cooling system called Reactor Core Isolation Cooling (IC), but this didn’t activate, and on March 12 at 3:36 p.m. the No. 1 reactor suffered a hydrogen explosion. Then, on March 14 at 11:01 a.m. the No. 3 reactor also experienced a hydrogen explosion. The No. 4 reactor was already offline at the time of the disaster for a regular inspection, but hydrogen from the adjacent No. 3 reactor leaked in, and it suffered a hydrogen explosion as well at 6:14 a.m. on March 15. The No. 2 reactor was not hit by a hydrogen explosion, but among the No. 1 through 3 reactors it is thought to have leaked the most radiation. The disaster is rated a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the same as the Chernobyl disaster.
Masao Yoshida, the late chief of the Fukushima plant who headed up the frontline disaster-response efforts, testified to a government panel investigating the disaster, “We (who were on-site) imagined it as the destruction of eastern Japan. I really thought we were dead.”
Four reports on the disaster were put together, from the national government, the Diet, TEPCO and elsewhere in the private sector. They differ on points such as why the IC in the No. 1 reactor did not activate. The Diet probe raised the possibility that the IC system’s piping was damaged in the earthquake, but the national government’s investigative panel denied that earthquake damage was the cause. Due to the high radiation levels in the reactor buildings, there has not yet been an on-site investigation to better understand what happened.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160403/p2a/00m/0na/010000c
Plutonium from Japan to be disposed of underground in New Mexico
U.S.-bound plutonium that has recently been shipped out of Japan will be disposed of at a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico after being processed for “inertion” at the Savannah River Site atomic facility in South Carolina, according to an official of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
“The plutonium will be diluted into a less sensitive form at the SRS and then transported to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for permanent disposal deep underground,” said Ross Matzkin-Bridger in charge of the operation at the NNSA, a nuclear wing of the Department of Energy.
“The dilution process involves mixing the plutonium with inert materials that reduce the concentration of plutonium and make it practically impossible to ever purify again,” he told Kyodo News in a recent phone interview.
The official made the remarks ahead of the latest Nuclear Security Summit, sponsored by President Barack Obama, which began Thursday in Washington.
The fourth such meeting of world leaders is focused on how to secure weapons-usable nuclear materials all over the globe. The summit started after Obama’s 2009 speech in Prague, in which he called for “a world without nuclear weapons” and for which he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize later that year.
At the previous summit in the Netherlands in March 2014, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed to return plutonium and highly enriched uranium upon request from the Obama administration, which is seeking to strengthen control of nuclear materials.
The removal of 331 kilograms of plutonium and hundreds of kilograms of HEU from the Fast Critical Assembly, a research facility located in the village of Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, was completed before the Nuclear Security Summit kicked off.
Japan received the plutonium and HEU fuels from the United States, Britain and France from the late 1960s to early 1970s for research purposes in the name of “Atoms for Peace.”
The nuclear fuel delivery, however, has generated controversy in South Carolina since it was reported that it was en route to the U.S. government-run SRS facility in the state.
South Carolina is “at risk of becoming a permanent dumping ground for nuclear materials,” Gov. Nikki Haley said in a recent letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, calling for the freight to be stopped or rerouted.
The final disposal at the WIPP, as described by Matzkin-Bridger, may defuse these local concerns in South Carolina.
The WIPP is a repository — about 660 meters underground — for permanently storing nuclear waste created by the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons program.
“The Department of Energy has signed a Record of Decision to implement our preferred option to prepare 6 metric tons of surplus plutonium from the SRS for permanent disposal at the WIPP near Carlsbad, New Mexico,” Matzkin-Bridger explained. “This includes all foreign plutonium that we bring to the United States under our nonproliferation programs.”
The HEU from Japan’s FCA will be “down-blended” to low enriched uranium at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to the official. In the future, LEU will be used for research purpose at research reactors both in the U.S. and Japan, possibly including the FCA.
“This project was accomplished on an accelerated timeline well ahead of schedule, thanks to the hard work and strong cooperation from both sides,” said a U.S.-Japan joint statement released Friday on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit.
“It furthers our mutual goal of minimizing stocks of HEU and separated plutonium,” the document added, emphasizing the importance of the operation in strengthening nuclear security.
In the statement, the Japanese government made a new pledge to remove and transfer HEU fuels from the Kyoto University Critical Assembly (KUCA), another Japanese research institute, to the United States for down-blending and “permanent threat reduction.”
“If the KUCA’s HEU reactor is successfully converted to a LEU unit, it will have a significant meaning for other reactors in the U.S. and European nations, which are pursuing to convert reactors for LEU,” Hironobu Unesaki, a professor at Kyoto University, said. “The KUCA could provide academic outputs for future LEU conversion process worldwide.”
Officials and specialists in both nations have praised the bilateral cooperation, which aims to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism through securing sensitive materials.
However, the materials recently transferred from Japan are only the tip of the iceberg. Currently, Japanese utilities possess over 47 metric tons of separated plutonium, which is equivalent to about 6,000 nuclear bombs.
At the last Nuclear Security Summit two years ago, Abe restated the nation’s international promise not to possess any plutonium that it has no use for. But the country’s stockpile of the nuclear material has since slightly increased.
A recent court injunction to suspend the operation of two plutonium-consuming reactors in Fukui Prefecture has made a solution for the plutonium problem more elusive.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/02/national/politics-diplomacy/plutonium-japan-disposed-underground-new-mexico/#.Vv80Iiraw3k.facebook
Fukushima Daiichi Contaminated Waste to Be Recycled into Construction Materials
Japan to Recycle Waste Collected during Fukushima Decontamination
TOKYO – The Japanese government announced Wednesday it will recycle the material collected during the decontamination of the Fukushima nuclear plant for construction purposes if radiation levels are found to be sufficiently low.
The government plans to store the waste collected from the radiation-affected region and use it as construction material in places outside the prefecture in northeastern Japan, within 30 years, reported state broadcaster NHK.
According to the country’s environment ministry, residue showing less than 8,000 becquerel per kg could be used in future to pave roads, build anti-tsunami walls and in other public works.
Over 90 percent of the material, accumulated since the 2011 disaster, could be re-used if the contaminated elements are removed, according to the authorities, who are, however, yet to develop the technology to separate waste with high radiation levels.
Currently, Fukushima authorities store the radioactive waste at two depots close to the plant, which can store up to 30 million tons.
The waste will remain at these storage sites for the next 30 years, to be later transferred to a definitive storage place, whose location remains to be determined, and to be used in public works if cleared of high radiation levels.
The Fukushima crisis has been the worst nuclear accident in history after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.
The nuclear plant, which suffered a meltdown in the aftermath of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck the country on March 11, 2011, is now being dismantled, a task that will take at least four decades to complete.
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=2408901&CategoryId=12395
India’s planned 12 new nuclear reactors are not economically viable – report
New Report Claims India’s 12 New Nuclear Reactors Are Economically Unviable http://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/31/new-report-claims-indias-12-new-nuclear-reactors-economically-unviable/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IM-cleantechnica+%28CleanTechnica%29 March 31st, 2016 by Joshua S Hill
A new report published by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has concluded that India’s plans to build 12 new nuclear reactors is economically unviable.
According to the new report (PDF), published this week by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), India’s current plans to build 12 new nuclear-powered plants is not only economically unviable, but fraught with risk, as the plants are intended to be a “first-of-its-kind” design that is untested. As such, the development of the nuclear power plants would likely result in numerous delays and technical problems.
David Schlissel, IEEFA’s director of resource planning analysis, concludes that the proposed nuclear plants, designed by Toshiba-Westinghouse and General Electric-Hitachi, and planned for the Mithi Virdi and Kovvada complexes, “are neither economically nor financially viable.” The plans intend for the 12 plants to be built across two separate sites in India. Six would be sited at Mithi Virdi in Gujarat, and would use the new Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design — which Schlissel notes has already “run into technical problems and significant cost increases and schedule delays” in other locations where the design is already under construction. The other six new plants, intended to be developed in Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh, would use GE’s Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) design, and would be the first country in the world to develop this particular design.
“They would take much longer than expected to build, they would result in higher bills for ratepayers, and, if they are built, they might not work as advertised,” Schlissel said.
The report also noted that the development of the new nuclear power plants would come at the expense of solar, leading the author to conclude that India would do well to instead direct that money and effort into developing solar resources. “Investing in new solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity would be a much lower-cost, significantly less environmentally harmful and far more sustainable alternative to the Mithi Virdi and Kovvada projects,” Schlissel said.
Among the report’s specific findings:
- Capital costs of the 12 plants would far exceed those of comparable solar-energy projects and, barring long-term and probably unsustainable government subsidies, consumers will pay more for electricity from the plants than they would for solar energy
- The first new reactors in the expansions at Mithi Virdi and Kovvada will take 11 to 15 years to build, if approved, even assuming the projects manage to avoid likely delays. None of the new reactors at Mithi Virdi and Kovvada would generate any power for the electric grid until sometime between 2029 and 2032. The remaining units at each project are unlikely to be completed, if approved, until late in the 2030s
- Even without likely time-and-cost overruns, both projects would require massive investment over the next two decades, ranging from Rs. 6.3 lakh crores (US $95 billion) to 11.3 lakh crore rupees (US $170 billion). It is unlikely that the Indian government would be able to simultaneously support other electricity-sector expansions, including in renewable resources and energy-efficiency programs
- Both projects, if approved, would probably be slowed by lengthy land-acquisition delays, complicated liability issues, lags associated with new-technology difficulties and compliance with the country’s “Make in India” policy
“All of these can be expected to lead to substantial, and perhaps indefinite, delays and significant increases in capital costs, possibly even far beyond those we have assumed in our analyses,” Schlissel said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping urges international co-operation on nuclear security
Chinese president charts course for strengthening global nuclear security system, New China WASHINGTON, April 1 (Xinhua) –– Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday urged countries around the world to increase national input and expand international cooperation so as to further firm up the global nuclear security architecture.
He made the appeal in a speech delivered here at the opening plenary of the fourth Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) and titled “Strengthen Global Nuclear Security Architecture and Promote Global Nuclear Security Governance.”
A FOUR-PRONGED PROPOSAL
In his speech, Xi noted that the NSS process has provided a major boost to international nuclear security, including developing common goals, establishing key priorities and mapping out the blueprint for the future.
However, he pointed out, new threats and challenges keep emerging in the security field, the root causes of terrorism are far from being removed, and nuclear terrorism remains a grave threat to international security.
“A more robust global nuclear security architecture is the prerequisite for the sound development of nuclear energy,” he said.
Recalling that he envisioned the building of a global nuclear security system featuring fairness and win-win cooperation at the third NSS in The Hague in 2014, Xi laid out a four-pronged proposal for the international community to make fresh efforts.
Countries across the world need first to step up political input and stick to the direction of addressing both symptoms and root causes, said the Chinese president.
“As national leaders, we have the responsibility to ensure that nuclear security gets adequate attention,” he said, adding that only with a solution that addresses both symptoms and root causes can the world “remove the breeding ground of nuclear terrorism at an early date.”……..http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-04/02/c_135245822.htm
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Multiple rivers in Fukushima Prefecture have radioactive sediments
Radioactive sediment found in Fukushima rivers Zee News , April 1, 2016 – Tokyo: Japanese researchers have detected relatively high levels of radioactive substancesin sediment in multiple rivers running through Fukushima prefecture, the media reported on Friday. The prefectural government in January surveyed the density of radioactive materials in soil and other sediment that has accumulated on the bottoms and banks of 72 rivers in the prefecture, public broadcaster NHK reported…..
The researchers found up to 54,500 becquerels per kg of radioactive substances in the Maeda river in Futaba town, where the plant is situated, and 39,600 becquerels in the Hiru river in Fukushima city. They also detected more than 10,000 becquerels at five other locations in four municipalities…….
The prefectural government plans to study restricting access to rivers with high concentrations of radioactive materials.
It also plans to urge the central government to remove contaminated soil and other sediment. http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/radioactive-sediment-found-in-fukushima-rivers_1871348.html
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