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.
India’s big move into solar is already paying off CNN Money by Huizhong Wu @CNNTech March 7, 2016: India’s massive bet on solar power is paying off far earlier than anticipated.
The price of solar power has plummeted in recent months to levels rivaling that of coal, positioning the renewable source as a viable mainstream option in a country where 300 million people live without electricity.
Solar prices are now within 15% of coal, according to KPMG. If current trends hold, the consultancy predicts electricity from solar will actually be 10% cheaper than domestic coal by 2020.
And that could turn out to be a conservative forecast. At a recent government auction, the winning bidder offered to sell electricity generated by a project in sunny Rajasthan for 4.34 rupees (6 cents) per kilowatt hour, roughly the same price as some recent coal projects.
“Solar is very competitive,” said Vinay Rustagi of renewable energy consultancy Bridge to India. “It’s a huge relief for countries like India which want to get more and more solar power.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made access to electricity a top priority, and has set the goal of making 24-hour power available to all 1.3 billion Indians. Currently, even India’s biggest cities suffer from frequent power outages…..http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/07/technology/india-solar-energy-coal/index.html
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.
Nuclear Power Corp. may seek higher tariff from regulator
India may shut two of its oldest reactors almost five decades after they went into operation as power tariffs aren’t keeping pace with maintenance costs, according to Sekhar Basu, secretary at the Department of Atomic Energy.
The first two reactors at Tarapur, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Mumbai at India’s western coast, suffer frequent maintenance shutdowns that make them unprofitable, Basu said in a phone interview. They earn about 0.89 rupees (1 cent) for every kilowatt hour of electricity produced, which isn’t enough to sustain operations. Nuclear plants in India received an average tariff of 2.78 rupees per kilowatt hour in the year ended March 2015, according to the Department of Atomic Energy.
“We are pouring in money into the reactors rather than making income from them,” Basu said. “At the current tariff, it’s become unviable to run the two reactors and we may be forced to shut them down if the tariff is not increased.”
Basu didn’t provide details on the timing of a possible decommissioning, a process that can take decades and generate thousands of tons of radioactive waste. Nuclear Power Corp., the nation’s sole operator of nuclear power plants, may approach the electricity regulator for a tariff increase when operations become unsustainable, Basu said.
Liability Law
Nuclear Power spokesman N. Nagaich couldn’t be reached on his office phone for a comment. Sanjeev Kumar, chairman at Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Co., which buys power from the reactors, didn’t respond to phone calls and a text message sent on his mobile phone.
The boiling water reactors, which can produce 160 megawatts each, were supplied by General Electric Co. and started operating in 1969, marking India’s foray into nuclear energy. India plans to raise atomic power capacity more than ten-fold by 2032 as part of its clean-energy drive. The expansion plans have been complicated by the nation’s liability law. The statute, which exposes plant equipment suppliers to accident claims, is borne out of concerns over nuclear safety……..http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-15/india-mulls-shutting-oldest-nuclear-plants-amid-mounting-costs
For sure such gibberish pseudo-scientific study, totally biased, must have been financed by the nuclear lobby to completely whitewash the Japanese Government failure to take the necessary real measures to adequately and effectively protect the eastern Japan population ( 50 millions people) from the effects of the March 2011 Fukushima explosions’ radioactive plumes, then from the radionuclides loaded gases released by Fukushima Daiichi for the past 5 years continuously contaminating the people, their living environment, plus their food and water supply.
Furthermore it chooses deliberately to ignore all the scientific studies made in the past 50 years about the harmful effects of radiation on various living species.
At the time on March 2011, the US Embassy in Tokyo had advised the Japanese Government to evacuate all the population within a 50-mile radius zone. To not avail as the Japanese Government chose to evacuate only within a 12 to 19-mile radius zone , evacuating in the end only 160,000 residents instead of the 2 millions residents as advised by the US Embassy.
A gate is shut at the evacuation zone in Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, on Feb. 14. In such places, the scars are still obvious and many evacuees who fled are unwilling to return.
Fukushima evacuations were not worth the money, study says
LONDON – The costs of evacuating residents from near the Fukushima No. 1 plant and the dislocation the people experienced were greater than their expected gain in longevity, a British study has found.
The researchers found that at best evacuees could expect to live eight months longer, but that some might gain only one extra day of life. They said this does not warrant ripping people from their homes and communities.
The team of experts from four British universities developed a series of tests to examine the relocations after the Fukushima crisis and earlier Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
After a three-year study, the academics have concluded that Japan “overreacted” by relocating 160,000 residents of Fukushima Prefecture, even though radioactive material fell on more than 30,000 sq. km of territory.
“We judged that no one should have been relocated in Fukushima, and it could be argued this was a knee-jerk reaction,” said Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at Bristol University. “It did more harm than good. An awful lot of disruption has been caused However, this is with hindsight and we are not blaming the authorities.”
The team used a wide range of economic and actuarial data, as well as information from the United Nations and the Japanese government.
In one test, an assessment of judgment value, the researchers calculated how many days of life expectancy were saved by relocating residents away from areas affected by radiation.
They compared this with the cost of relocation and how much this expenditure would impact the quality of people’s lives in the future.
From this information, they were able to work out the optimal or rational level of spending and make a judgment on the best measures to mitigate the effects of a nuclear accident.
Depending on how close people were to the radiation, the team calculated that the relocations added a period of between one day to 21 days to the evacuees’ lives.
But when this was compared with the vast amounts of money spent, the academics came to the conclusion that it was unjustified in all cases.
In some areas, they calculated that 150 times more money was being spent than was judged rational.
Thomas adds, the tests do not take into account the physical and psychological effects of relocating, which have been shown to have led to more than 1,000 deaths among elderly evacuees.
Other studies have also found that once people have lived away for a certain period of time it can become increasingly difficult to persuade them to return.
After Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, around 116,000 people were initially relocated away from the disaster zone.
Looking back on the incident, the team judged it was only worthwhile to relocate 31,000 people because they would have lost in excess of 8.7 months in life expectancy had they remained.
However, for the rest of the 116,000 people, it would have been a more rational decision to keep them where they were, given that their average loss of life was put at three months.
Four years later, a further 220,000 people were relocated from areas close to Chernobyl. Researchers found this unjustified.
Thomas says the loss in life expectancy following a nuclear accident has to be put into context alongside other threats all people face.
For example, it has been claimed that the average Londoner will lose about 4½ months in life expectancy due to high pollution levels.
Thomas concludes governments should carry out a more careful assessment before mounting a relocation operation of at least a year. A temporary evacuation could be a good idea while authorities work out the risk from radiation, he said.
In the future, Thomas would like to see more real-time information made available to the public on radiation levels in order to avoid hysteria and bad planning.
On a plus note, the team found that other remedial measures — decontaminating homes, deep ploughing of soil and bans on the sales of certain food products — were far more effective.
Thomas has already discussed his findings with colleagues at the University of Tokyo and he is keen that his findings can help better quantify the risks from radioactive leaks.
The project was sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Britain’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. It was intended to give advice for nuclear planners both in Britain and India.
The research team comprised specialists from City University in London, Manchester University, the Open University and Warwick University.
TOKYO – The Japanese government will team up with experts in the United States and France to develop brand new technologies to collect melted fuel from crippled reactors at Fukushima, an official said Monday.
Removal of the melted rods at the nuclear plant, which was wrecked by a tsunami five years ago, is one of the biggest challenges of the mammoth cleanup, a huge project expected to take up to four decades.
Scientists have long warned the technology required for the complex — and potentially dangerous — task does not yet exist, and would have to be invented.
Entombing the uranium rods in concrete and effectively abandoning the site — as was done after the meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 — has been ruled out by the Japanese government as politically unacceptable, leaving innovation as the only possible solution.
Japan’s science and technology ministry said it would work with the US Energy Department and the French National Research Agency on the project — a key step towards eventual decommissioning, which is expected to begin in 2021.
“This is the first basic research led by the government designed to help decommission Fukushima Daiichi after TEPCO worked together with its partners overseas at the private level,” a ministry official said, referring to the operator of the plant.
Under the plan, the US side will help Japan develop equipment and technology to manage and dispose of highly-radioactive waste produced from the decommissioning work, the official said.
France will cooperate with Japan in developing remote-control technology, including robotic and image processing expertise that can withstand high-radiation environments, he said.
The Japanese government plans to finance the projects by spending part of its “Fukushima technology development budget” worth 3.0 billion yen ($26.4 million).
IAEA marine experts and Japanese scientists collect water samples in coastal waters near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station
The BBC has been excelling itself in its deliberate understatement of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, writes Chris Busby. While calling in pseudo experts to say radiation is all but harmless, it’s ignoring the science that shows that the real health impacts of nuclear fallout are around 1,000 times worse than claimed.
I am so ashamed of the BBC. It seems, as an institution, to be supporting and promulgating an enormous lie about the health effects of radioactive pollution. And not providing any balanced scientific picture.
On the 5th Anniversary of the catastrophe we saw Prof Geraldine Thomas, the nuclear industry’s new public relations star, walk through the abandoned town of Ohkuma inside the Fukushima exclusion zone with BBC reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.
She was described as “One of Britain’s leading experts on the health effects of radiation”. Thomas is of the opinion that there is no danger and the Japanese refugees can come back and live there in the ‘zone’. Her main concern was how untidy it all was: “left to rack and ruin”, she complained, sadly.
At one point Rupert pulled out his Geiger Counter and read the dose of 3 microSieverts per hour. “What does that mean”, he asked, “how much radiation would it give in a year to people who came back here?”
Thomas replied, “About an extra milliSievert a year which is not much considering you get 2mSv a year from natural background. The long term impact on your health would be absolutely nothing.”
Now anyone who has a calculator can easily multiply 3 microSieverts (3 x 10-6 Sv) by 24 hours and 365 days. The answer is 26 mSv (0.026Sv) not “about 1mSv” as the “leading expert on the health effects of radiation” told the dumbfounded viewers.
Any real expert would not have made such a stupid mistake. But this woman is not a real expert, her CV shows she has published almost nothing in the way of original research, so we must ask how it is the BBC come to take her seriously.
Those who hate nothing so much as the truth
This recalled the day the first reactor exploded in 2011. I was in London, and the BBC asked me to come into the studio and comment. Also there was a nuclear industry apologist, Dr Ian Fells. Like Gerry Thomas he was unconcerned about the radiation: the main problem for him was that the lifts would not work. People would have to climb stairs, he complained.
I said then on that first day that this was a serious accident like Chernobyl but he and all the stooges that followed him told the viewers that it was no problem, not like Chernobyl, hydrogen explosion, no breach of containment pressure vessels etc. Some months later, looking back, it is clear I was correct on every point, but I never was invited back to the BBC.
I visited Japan, took sophisticated measuring equipment, obtained vehicle air filters, spoke to the Japanese people and advised them to take Calcium tablets to block the Strontium-90. My vehicle air filter measurements showed clearly that large areas of north east Japan were seriously contaminated including Tokyo.
This was too much for the nuclear industry: I was attacked in the Guardian newspaper by pro-nuclear Pauline-converted George Monbiot in an attempt to destroy my credibility. One other attacker was Geraldine Thomas. What she said then was as madly incorrect then as what she is saying now. But the Guardian would not let me respond.
The important evidence for me in the recent BBC clip is the measurement of dose given by Rupert’s Geiger counter, 3microSieverts per hour (3μSv/h). Normal background in Japan (I know, I measured it there) is about 0.1μSv/h. So in terms of external radiation, Ruperts’s measurement gave 30 times normal background.
Fukushima: we have a very serious problem
Is this a problem for health? You bet it is. The question no-one asked is what is causing the excess dose? The answer is easy: radioactive contamination, principally of Caesium-137. On the basis of well-known physics relationships we can say that 3μSv/h at 1m above ground represents a surface contamination of about 900,000 Bq per square metre of Cs-137. That is, 900,000 disintegrations per second in one square metre of surface.
And note that they were standing on a tarmac road which appeared to be clean. And this is 5 years after the explosions. The material is everywhere, and it is in the form of dust particles which can be inhaled. Invisible sparkling fairy-dust that kills hang in the air above such measurements.
The particles are not just of Caesium-137. They contain other long lived radioactivity, Strontium-90, Plutonium 239, Uranium-235, Uranium 238, Radium-226, Polonium-210, Lead-210, Tritium, isotopes of Rhodium, Ruthenium, Iodine, Cerium, Cobalt 60, the list is long.
The UN definition of radioactively contaminated land is 37,000Bq / square metre, and so, on the basis of the measurement made by the BBC reporter, the town of Ohkuma in the Fukushima zone (and we assume everywhere else in the zone) is still, five years after the incident, more than 20 times the level where the UN would, and the Soviets did, step in and control the population.
But the Japanese government want to send the people back there. It is bribing them with money and housing assistance. It is saying, like Gerry Thomas, that there is no danger. And the BBC is giving this criminal misdirection a credible platform. The argument is based on the current radiation risk model, that of the International Commission on Radiological Protection the ICRP.
Last month, my German colleagues and I published a scientific paper in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Health and Toxicology. It uses real-world data from those exposed to the same substances that were released by Fukushima to show that the ICRP model is wrong by 1,000 times or more.
This is a game changing piece of research. But were we asked to appear on the BBC, or anywhere else? No. What do our findings and calculations suggest will have happened in the five years since the explosions and into the future? Let’s take a look at what has happened since 2011.
And this is only the beginning …
The reactors are still uncontrolled five years after the explosions and continue to release their radioactive contents to the environment despite all attempts to prevent this. Concerning the melted fuel, there is no way to assess the condition or specific whereabouts of the fuel though it is clearly out of the box and in the ground. Robots fail at the extremely high radiation levels found.
Ground water flowing through the plant is becoming contaminated and is being pumped into storage tanks for treatment. High radiation levels and debris have delayed the removal of spent fuel from numbers 1, 2 and 3 reactor buildings. TEPCO plans to remove debris from reactor 3 and this work has begun. Then they are hoping to remove the fuel rods out of reactors 1 and 2 by 2020 and the work on removing debris from these 2 reactors has not begun yet.
Much of the radioactivity goes into the sea, where it travels several hundreds of km. up and down the coast destroying sea life and contaminating intertidal sediment. The radionuclides bind to fine sediment and concentrate in river estuaries and tidal areas like Tokyo Bay.
Here the particles are resuspended and brought ashore to be inhaled by those living within 1km of the coast. From work done by my group for the Irish Government on the contaminated Irish Sea we know that this exposure will increase the rate of cancer in the coastal inhabitants by about 30%.
The releases have not been stopped despite huge amounts of work, thought and action. The treated water is still highly radioactive and cannot yet be released. An ice wall designed to stop the flow of water getting to the plant is still not operational and the Japanese Nuclear regulator still has not given the go-ahead.
‘Son of Fukushima’ waiting to happen
This may be wise because an environment report showed that use of the ground water caused rapid subsidence and can destabilise the structures of the reactors. That is a real problem on site with 3 heavy spent fuel pools still full and largely inaccessible. Collapse of the buildings would lead to coolant loss and a fire or even explosion releasing huge amounts of radioactivity.
So this is one nightmare scenario: ‘Son of Fukushima’. A solid wall at the port side may have slowed the water down but diverting the water may cause problems with the ground water pressure on site and thus also threaten subsidence. Space for storing the radioactive water is running out and it seems likely that this will have to be eventually spilled into the Pacific.
Only 10% of the plant has been cleaned up although there are 8,000 workers on site at any one time, mostly dealing with the contaminated water. Run-off from storms brings more contamination down the rivers from the mountains. There are millions of 1-ton container bags full of radioactive debris and other waste which has been collected in decontamination efforts outside the plant and many of these bags are only likely to last a handful of years before degrading and spilling their contents. Typhoons will spread this highly contaminated contents far and wide.
TEPCO are also burning waste from the plant in a single incinerator. Further afield, contamination efforts to clean up the homes and roads are hampered by the torrential rains that are increasing because of global warming; the rain is bringing large amounts of contaminated soil back into these areas as well as the contaminated leaves and pollen from the forest areas that TEPCO are unable to clean.
Far off the shore there are natural areas that act as nurseries for many species of sea life. It has been found that intertidal marine species such as anemones, sponges, crustaceans, worms and bivalves within 30 km of the damaged reactors have disappeared altogether because of the 300 tons of highly radioactive water a day flowing out of the plant into the sea.
This water contains large amounts of tritium, making it radioactive; the effects of tritium on the larval stages of marine invertebrates has been studied in the UK. It was found at the University of Plymouth that levels involving doses of less than 1mSv of tritium inhibited the development.
Going global
Radioactivity from Fukushima has now migrated across the Pacific and is appearing on the West Coast of the USA. The scientific community there, like Gerry Thomas, subscribe to the flawed ICRP model, and since the levels of Caesium-137 measured are low, (maybe 10Bq/cubic metre of sea water), they say that there will be no health effects. But like Thomas they are wrong.
The problem is that ‘dose’ cannot be used to assess risk from internal radioactive particles. Dose is an average over large masses of tissue: but cancer begins in a single cell or local community of cells and these particles from Fukushima cause massive local doses. This is why there have been countless web reports of marine mammals with patchy sores or localised tumours. The question of the ongoing effect of this Fukushima radioactivity on the Pacific biota far from Japan remains open.
The effects on wild creatures in Japan are clear and have been studied. There have been peer-reviewed reports of genetic damage in birds and in insects; a major scientist studying these genetic effects at Fukushima and in the Chernobyl affected areas also is Tim Mousseau.
But whilst he can study plants and animals, no-one can study humans. There is a kind of closure on such data, with the Japanese government controlling it. The government is more interested in getting Fukushima ready for the Olympics and is using financial and cultural pressure to move families back into contaminated zones.
Japan is also exporting radioactive produce, and is using trade agreements to bully countries into accepting these poisons on the basis of the ICRP model. I was in Korea a few months back as an expert witness in a radiation case involving high levels of thyroid cancer near their nuclear sites. I was told about Japan using international trade laws to force its contaminated foods on to the Koreans, who were measuring the radioactivity and sending the stuff back. So watch out for radioactive items from Japan.
So what’s the evidence?
Let’s look at the only real health data which has emerged to see if it gives any support to my original estimate of 400,000 extra cancers in the 200km radius. Prof Tsuda has recently published a paper in the peer reviewed literature identifying 116 thyroid cancers detected over three years by ultrasound scanning of 380,000 0-18 year olds.
The background rate is about 0.3 per 100,000 per year, so in three years we can expect 3.42 thyroid cancers. But 116 were found, an excess of about 112 cases. Geraldine says that these were all found because they looked: but Tsuda’s paper reports that an ultrasound study in Nagasaki (no exposures) found zero cases, and also an early ultrasound study also found zero cases. So Geraldine is wrong. The thyroid doses were reported to be about 10mSv. On the basis of the ICRP model, that gives an error of about 2,000 times.
From the results of our new genetic paper we can safely predict a 100% increase in congenital malformations in the population up to 200km radius. In an advanced technological country like Japan these will be picked up early by ultrasound and aborted, so we will not actually see them, even if there were data we could trust.
What we will see is a fall in the birth rate and increase in the death rate. We know what has been happening and what will happen; we have seen it before in Chernobyl. And just like Chernobyl, the (western) authorities are influenced by or take their lead from the nuclear industry: the ICRP and the International Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA) which since 1959 has taken over from the World Health Organisation as the responsible authority for radiation and health (Yes, really!).
They keep the lid on the truth using stupid individuals like Geraldine Thomas and, by analogy with New Labour: New BBC. Increasingly I could say ‘New Britain’ as opposed to the Great Britain of my childhood, a country I was proud of where you could trust the BBC. I wonder how the reporters like Rupert can live with themselves presenting these lies.
Fukushima is far from being over, the deaths have only just begun.
Chris Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia. See also: chrisbusbyexposed.org, greenaudit.org and llrc.org.
India’s Former Nuclear Regulator Says, Govt Might Be , CounterCurrents By Kumar Sundaram 13 March, 2016 Indiaresists.comThe retired chief of India’s nuclear regulator, Dr. A Gopalakrishnan has sent out an urgent note in which he has cautioned that a ‘loss of coolant accident(LOCA)’ might be underway in Gujarat’s Kakrapar Nuclear Power Station(KAPS). A LOCA accidents is the most serious accident that can happen in nuclear plants and it might lead to the meltdown of the reactor fuel core.
The same reactor had a major accident in 1994 when floodwaters drowned Kakrapar. The floodgates meant to release excess water could not be opened and the water kept increasing–which could lead to a major accident–but it was prevented with the efforts of local engineers. Mr. Manoj Mishra, a worker in the power station then who blew whistle on that accident was terminated by the NPCIL. He was denied justice even by the Supreme Court in India which bought the NPCIL’s argument that he cannot be a whistle-blower as he did not have technical degrees. Mr. Mishra had years of experience in the reactor and he was a strong leader of the workers’ union.
Kakrapar is situated not very far from the Vansda-Bharuch earthquake faultline running through Gujarat, which has experienced several major earthquakes.
Exactly on the 5th anniversary of Fukushima, a leak has been reported in the Unit-1 of the Kakrapar Nuclear Power Station near Surat in Gujarat.
Here is the note by Dr. Gopalakrishnan:
The Kakrapar Unit-I nuclear reactor in Gujarat is undergoing a moderately large leakage of heavy water from its Primary Heat Transport (PHT) system since 9.00 AM on March 11,2016. From the very limited information released by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) of the government , as well as from the conversations I had with press people who have been in touch with nuclear officials, few inferences can be drawn.
Till 7.00 PM on March 12,2016 , the DAE officials have no clue as to where exactly the PHT leak is located and how big is the rate of irradiated heavy water that is leaking into the reactor containment . However, some reports indicate that the containment has been vented to the atmosphere at least once , if not more times , which I suspect indicates a tendency for pressure build up in that closed space due to release of hot heavy water and steam into the containment housing . If this is true, the leak is not small , but moderately large , and still continuing. No one confirms that any one has entered the containment (in protective clothing) for a quick physical assessment of the situation , perhaps it is not safe to do so because of the high radiationfields inside . When NPCIL officials state that the reactor cooling is maintained , I believe what they may be doing is to allow the heavy water or light water stored in the emergency cooling tanks to run once-through the system and continue to pour through the leak into the containment floor through the break .
All this points to the likelihood that what Kakrapar Unit-1 is undergoing is a small Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) in progress. It is most likely that one or more pressure tubes (PT) in the reactor (which contain the fuel bundles) have cracked open , leaking hot primary system heavy-water coolant into the containment housing . ……….
. It may be possible that , having built more than 20 PHWRs , NPCIL and AERB in recent years have become overconfident and relaxed their strict adherence to this Aging Management Program , which might have been the reason for the current accident.
Let me caution the reader that the above conjecture is based on bits and pieces of reliable and not so reliable information gathered from different people close to the accident details and in positions of authority. Future detailed evaluation may or may not prove my entire set of conclusions or part of them to be not well-founded. But , technical experts are compelled to put out such conjectures because of the total lack of transparency of the Indian cilvilian nuclear power sector and the atomic energy commission (AEC) , the Dept. of Atomic Energy (DAE) , the NPCIL and the AERB . Public have a need to know and , therefore , the AEC and its sub-ordinate organizations need to promptly release status reports on the progressing safety incident which could affect their lives , to alleviate their concerns and anxieties . It is a series of such lapses in communication over the years which has built up the ever-increasing trust deficit in the DAE system among the general public. All future plans for expanding the civilian nuclear power sector should be put on hold until a truly independent nuclear safety regulator is put in place , who is not controlled by the AEC or the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) , who will then be answerable to openly communicating with the public on all civilian nuclear power matters.
Study cited @ 1:40 re regional natural background dose rate of 0.05 uSv/y
Malins et al (2016). Evaluation of ambient dose equivalent rates influenced by vertical and horizontal distribution of radioactive cesium in soil in Fukushima Prefecture. Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 151 (2016) 38e49 http://pubmed.gov/26408835
Study cited @ 3:58
Mozdarani et al (2002). Chromosomal aberrations in lymphocytes of individuals with chronic exposure to gamma radiation. Arch Irn Med, 5(1): 32-36.http://www.ams.ac.ir/AIM/NEWPUB/13/16…
Study cited @ 4:24
Zakeri & Assaei (2004). Cytogenetic monitoring of personnel working in angiocardiography laboratories in Iran hospitals. Mutat Res. 2004 Aug 8;562(1-2):1-9. http://pubmed.gov/15279825
Study cited @ 4:48
Kendall et al (2013). A record-based case-control study of natural background radiation and the incidence of childhood leukaemia and other cancers in Great Britain during 1980-2006. Leukemia. 27(1): 3–9. http://pubmed.gov/22766784
Study cited @ 5:08
Spycher et al (2015). Background ionizing radiation and the risk of childhood cancer: a census-based nationwide cohort study. Environ Health Perspect, 123(6), 622-8. http://pubmed.com/25707026 Spycher’s graphs are in nSv/h, which is nanosieverts per hour and which I converted for this video to microsieverts per hour by the rule: 100 nSv = 0.1 µSv.
@ 8:04, BBC concedes that 122 Chernobyl deaths estimate is misleading http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-…
BBC: “Two viewers (one of them writing on behalf of 55 co-signatories, most of them academics from a variety of disciplines) complained that the item seriously understated the likely death toll (in relation to both Chernobyl and Fukushima) and, by ignoring scientific opinion which favoured higher estimates.”
Estimate of Chernobyl deaths @ 8:47 from
European Environmental Agency (2013). Late lessons from early warnings: science, precaution, innovation. EEA Report 1/2013, Chap 18, p. 435, European Environmental Agency, Copenhagen. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications…
