Rain fury: Floods batter North Indian states – nearly a foot of rain in 14 hours recorded
ABP News Bureau, 2023-07-23
North Indian states are reeling under severe monsoon mayhem as roads are flooded, rivers are flowing over the danger mark, and waterlogging is hindering all kinds of commute leaving residents helpless. After wreaking havoc in the hill states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, heavy showers in Maharashtra, and Gujarat have created a flood-like situation in the two states. Meanwhile, a cloudburst in Ladakh and a fresh spell of rain in Uttarakhand have raised the threat of a rise in the water level again in Delhi which has witnessed the worst flooding since 1978. Here are the latest updates on monsoon fury from across the country:
ABP News Bureau 2023-07-23
Hong Kong tightens radiation inspection of Japanese seafood imports
Hong Kong has started strengthening radiation inspections of seafood
imports from Japan, sources said Saturday, amid concerns in China over a
plan to discharge treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima
nuclear plant into the ocean. The tighter inspections started in mid-June
and customs clearance of Japanese seafood was delayed by about three hours
compared with earlier clearance times.
Hong Kong on Friday reiterated its
concerns over the water plan. The Japanese government has confirmed that
some shipments of Japanese seafood have been held up at China’s customs.
Hong Kong is Japan’s second-largest market for agricultural and fisheries
exports, while mainland China is its biggest.
Japan Times 22nd July 2023
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/07/22/national/hong-kong-food-fukushima-treated-water/
Cesium 180 times limit found in fish at Fukushima nuke plant 12 years after disaster.
July 19, 2023 (Mainichi Japan)
FUKUSHIMA — Radioactive cesium 180 times Japan’s legal maximum has been found in fish caught in the port at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, revealing that the March 2011 triple meltdown there continues to impact the local ecosystem.
The cesium in the black rockfish caught in May measured 18,000 becquerels per kilogram. The legal limit under the Food Sanitation Act is 100 becquerels per kg. According to plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Holdings Inc., the fish was captured inside the inner breakwater, close to the No. 1 to No. 4 reactors at the seaside plant, where decommissioning work continues.
When it rains, the rainwater streams into the “K drainage” — one of several drainpipes at the plant — after running through debris and over the ground, both contaminated with radioactive substances. It is then discharged into the station’s small port.
TEPCO claims that it has confirmed the cesium levels in the discharged rainwater are below the government criteria of 60 becquerels per liter for cesium-134 and 90 becquerels for cesium-137. But compared with other drainages at the plant, runoff with higher concentrations of radioactive materials has been discharged within the inner breakwater. The seabed sediment in the area was also found to contain cesium-137 up to 130,000 becquerels-plus per kilogram and cesium-134 up to 3,400 becquerels-plus as of the end of January this year………………………………………………………………..
……………………………………………………….”We urge that TEPCO take thorough measures to prevent radioactive materials from getting into the ocean, even within the port,” a fisheries federation official urged, refering to the black rockfish with more than 100 becquerels per kg caught in May at the nuclear complex’s port.
Toshihiro Wada, an associate professor of fish ecology at Fukushima University, said of the heavily contaminated fish, “It’s likely that cesium was concentrated within the fish from the food chain, confined as it is by the inner breakwater where radioactive substances have accumulated from the drainages flowing into the port.”
He continued, “Unless fundamental measures are taken to lower the concentrations of radioactive materials discharged from the ‘K drainage,’ fish surpassing the maximum will likely keep being found,” even as TEPCO has stepped up measures to prevent fish from getting away…………………………………
Radioactively contaminated water has been swelling daily at the plant as water injected to cool nuclear fuel debris that melted down in the 2011 disaster has been accumulating with groundwater and rainwater mixing into it. TEPCO processes the contaminated water using ALPS, or multi-nuclide removal equipment, and stores the treated water in tanks after reducing the radioactive levels apart from tritium, which is difficult to remove from water.
‘Set treated water aside’
The Japanese government plans to release treated water from the Fukushima plant into the ocean around the summer, after diluting it to get tritium concentrations below 1,500 becquerels per liter, or one-fortieth of the national standard. It plans to release the water about 1 kilometer offshore via an undersea tunnel.
“Unlike cesium, tritium does not concentrate in fish even if they ingest it, according to data,” associate professor Wada said. “Experimental results have shown that if treated water is put into regular seawater, the concentration (of tritium) is reduced. We need to consider (tritium) separately from cesium.”
(Japanese original by Riki Iwama, Fukushima Bureau, and Hideyuki Kakinuma, Iwaki Local Bureau) https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20230718/p2a/00m/0na/019000c?fbclid=IwAR2R-0GtuaSlHvGQZ13yqRzQdZ1HUr3RNu4yHWzLBLytboJldZs2eMLHmxM
China’s blanket radiation testing could spell trouble for Japanese seafood imports
Japan Times, BY ERIC JOHNSTON, STAFF WRITER, 19 jul 23
China has begun testing all seafood imports from Japan for radiation, Japanese media reported Wednesday, in a move that could create further diplomatic headaches for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
The news comes ahead of Japan’s plan to begin releasing treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant into the sea. It follows a July 7th announcement by China’s customs agency that seafood products from 10 prefectures, including Fukushima, would continue to be banned due to radiation concerns.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters in Tokyo on Wednesday that there have been cases where some Japanese seafood exports are being held up by Chinese customs. The reason for this is seen as a result of China’s tightened radiation inspections in response to the planned release of treated water from the nuclear power plant…………. (subscribers only) more https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/07/19/national/china-radiation-test-japan-seafood-trouble/
Japan to Release 1.3 Million Tonnes of Water Used During Fukushima Nuclear Accident
The water used to cool damaged reactor cores from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in March 2011.
David Krofcheck, The Wire 16 Jul 23
“…………………………………………This year the Japanese government plans to release 1.3 million tonnes of water – used to cool the damaged reactor cores from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in March 2011 – into the Pacific Ocean
Between 2011-2013, approximately 300,000 tonnes of untreated wastewater had already flowed into the ocean off Fukushima. These first two years were the most dangerous time because long-lived heavy nuclei, like cesium-137, strontium-90 and shorter-lived iodine-131, from nuclear fission in the reactors ended up in the ocean.
Since 2013, the stored water has also accumulated flushed seawater goundwater which leaked into the three damaged reactor cores.
The big challenge is how to manage 1.3 million tonnes of unsafe radioactively-tainted water………………………………………………………………………….
“As Low As Reasonably Achievable” or ALARA – filtering out the nuclear fission nuclei from the stored wastewater may be the best that can be done. The ALARA approach to reduce nuclear fission nuclei released resulted in a 2013 effort to develop and employ an advanced liquid processing system, or ALPS. A series of filters was designed to remove 62 fission nuclei leaving both tritium and carbon-14 in the water. It only partially worked.
Potentially, this water could be run through more cycles of the ALPS before extra dilution and later release into the ocean.
The other 30% of treated water could also be diluted with seawater by factors of several hundred to one thousand and then released into the ocean. Any remaining tritium from the Fukushima reactor may find its way into the food chain as organically bound tritium via build-up in underwater plants and organisms.
The second option for managing the Fukushima water was to hold it on site in an ever-increasing number of tanks.
If the water is properly filtered to leave only tritium and carbon-14, then the natural decay of tritium can be used to reduce overall radioactivity. Since the radioactive half-life of tritium is 12.4 years, holding the water in tanks for seven half-lives, about 85 years, would reduce the tritium content to less than 1% of its current value. This option leaves the carbon-14 which would still roughly have the same radioactivity due to its 5,730-year half-life.
However, storing a tremendous volume of water for an entire human lifespan has never been tried. Even more water and storage tanks would need to be added as decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor cores proceeds. This is problematic.
A third option was to evaporate the water on land near Fukushima.
A 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island Nuclear Station in the United States resulted in a similar radioactive water storage problem. About 9,300 tonnes of tritiated water, about 140 times less than that currently held in the Fukushima storage tanks, was electrically evaporated over two years. The tritium was released into the atmosphere, resulting in a radiation dose to people in the surrounding area of about one-hundredth of the natural background radiation.
Japan and TEPCO would need to deal with even larger amounts of water and tritium emitted into the atmosphere if the 30-year timeline for the reactor core clean-up is followed……………….. https://thewire.in/environment/japan-to-release-1-3-million-tonnes-of-water-used-during-fukushima-nuclear-accident
China says Japanese govt’s fund subsidizing local fishing industry ‘hush money’
The Chinese Embassy in Japan said the fund the Japanese government has set aside to subsidize the fishing industry in Fukushima area is “hush money,” which shows the Fukushima discharge plan is really “problematic.”
It’s reported that Japan has set up a special fund of 80 billion yen (around $581 million) to subsidize the fishing industry in Fukushima, which will be damaged by the discharge of nuclear-contaminated water.
It must be pointed out that the Japanese side’s move only compensates the affected domestic industries and ignores the safety and interests of its neighbors and the people of Pacific island countries, said a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Japan, according to an announcement on the embassy’s website on Thursday.
“This will surely arouse stronger doubts and condemnation from the international community,” said the embassy spokesperson.
The Japanese side should immediately halt the Fukushima discharge plan, consult with all stakeholders and the international community, dispose of nuclear-contaminated water in a scientific, transparent and safe manner, and stop transferring the risk of nuclear pollution to all mankind, the embassy spokesperson said.
How the world’s most radioactive man cried blood while his skin melted as he was kept alive in 83-day nightmare after horror accident at Japanese nuclear power plant
- Hisashi Ouchi, 35, became the world’s ‘most radioactive man’ in 1999
- He was the worst affected by Japan’s 1999 Tokaimura nuclear accident
- Ouchi – reportedly left with ‘melted skin’ and ‘crying blood’ – died after 83 days
Daily Mail , By MATTHEW COX, 14 July 2023
A Japanese nuclear disaster on September 30, 1999, was the world’s worst since Chernobyl, and left the world’s ‘most radioactive’ man with ‘melted skin.’
That victim was Hisashi Ouchi, a worker at the uranium processing plant in Tokaimura – 70 miles northeast of Tokyo – who was exposed to a massive dose of radiation resulting in severe burns.
This was to be the first of 83 days of unimaginable suffering in critical condition for the 35-year-old who died on December 21, after begging doctors to stop treating him months earlier.
The accident was a result of a series of fatal mistakes while he and his colleagues were preparing uranium for use as reactor fuel in the privately-run plant, including carrying the uranium in buckets, and not wearing appropriate protective equipment.
Technicians Ouchi and Masato Shinohara, with supervisor Yutaka Yokokawa, were speeding up the conversion process by putting 16kg of uranium in a vat which had a maximum limit of 2.4kg, when a chain-reaction was caused as Ouchi was ‘draped over’ the tank.
He was exposed to 17 Sieverts of radiation – for comparison, emergency responders at Chernobyl were exposed to 0.25 – over double what is seen as a lethal dose.
That is also the record amount of radiation in any living person, making him the most irradiated man ever, sometimes referred to as the world’s ‘most radioactive.’
He and his co-workers reported seeing a blue flash above the vat, the indication that a reaction similar to that inside an atomic bomb has happened, releasing deadly neutron radiation.
The colleagues rapidly lost consciousness as alarms blared inside the plant and radiation levels shot to 4,000 times typical levels.
The surrounding area was evacuated, with many not having even been aware that the unassuming building was a nuclear facility.
Ouchi was rushed to the University of Tokyo Hospital, where doctors found that he had almost no white blood cells and was in need of extensive skin grafts and multiple blood transfusions.
Local reports at the time claimed that he was also left ‘crying blood,’ and begged doctors to stop treating him.
However, he was resuscitated after multiple heart attacks on his 59th day in hospital.
Ouchi eventually died on December 21, 1999, and a few months later in April 2000 Shinohara, his fellow technician, died of multiple organ failure aged 40………………………. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12299235/How-worlds-radioactive-man-cried-blood-kept-alive-83-day-nightmare.html
12 years on, Fukushima’s citizen-scientists continue to test local fish for radioactive substances.
2 In a white coat and gloves, Ai Kimura is cutting up a fish sample at the
Tarachine lab, about an hour’s drive from the now-crippled Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s eastern coast.
Four times a year, Ms Kimura and her team of volunteers collect samples of fish from the waters around the plant. They have been doing this since the lab was founded in
2011, just months after a devastating tsunami flooded the reactors, causing
a radiation leak. Except Ms Kimura is not a scientist – and neither are any
of the women who run the non-profit lab, whose name Tarachine is derived
from the term for “mother” in old Japanese.
Shaken after the tsunami, Ms Kimura says locals started the lab to find out what was safe to feed their children because it was hard to come by information on the risks of
radiation. So they asked technical experts to train them on how to test for
radioactive substances and log the readings, raised funds and began
educating themselves. It was the decision of a shattered community that
never thought an accident at the nuclear power plant was possible.
Now, 12 years on, they again find themselves struggling to trust the Japanese
government as it insists it’s safe to release treated radioactive water
from the plant into the Pacific Ocean.
BBC 13th July 2023
Asia is rowing about Fukushima nuclear wastewater
1A dozen years after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant, it still
casts a pall over life in Japan. Many of over 100,000 residents evacuated
from around the nuclear plant at the time of the accident remain displaced.
Abroad, Fukushima’s legacy is now exacerbating the region’s bilious,
disputatious and grievance-laden geopolitics.
Economist 13th July 2023
https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/07/13/asia-is-rowing-about-fukushima-nuclear-wastewater
Indonesia Warns Nuclear Weapons Put Southeast Asia a ‘Miscalculation Away’ From Disaster
Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi urged nuclear weapons states to join ASEAN’s regional nuclear-free zone.
The Diplomat, By Edna Tarigan and Niniek Karmini, July 12, 2023
Indonesia’s top diplomat warned Tuesday of the threat posed by nuclear weapons, saying that Southeast Asia is “one miscalculation away from apocalypse” and pressing for world powers to sign a treaty to keep the region free from such arms.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi raised the alarm ahead of a two-day summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which started later Tuesday in Jakarta. The agenda would spotlight Myanmar’s deadly civil strife, continuing tensions in the South China Sea, and efforts to fortify regional economies amid the global headwinds set off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Later in the week, the 10-nation bloc will meet Asian and Western counterparts, including U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Chinese foreign policy overseer Wang Yi.
The U.S.-China rivalry is not formally on ASEAN’s agenda but looms large over the meetings of the bloc, an often-unwieldy collective of democracies, autocracies, and monarchies, with some members split over allegiances either to Washington or Beijing.
“We cannot be truly safe with nuclear weapons in our region,” Marsudi told fellow ASEAN ministers. “With nuclear weapons, we are only one miscalculation away from apocalypse and global catastrophe.
In 1995, ASEAN states signed a treaty that declared Southeast Asia’s commitment to be a nuclear weapon-free zone, one of five in the world. However, Marsudi lamented that none of the world’s leading nuclear powers have signed on to the pact and called for renewed efforts to convince those states to sign up. “The threat is imminent, so we can no longer play a waiting game,” she said………………………………………………………………….more https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/indonesia-warns-nuclear-weapons-put-southeast-asia-a-miscalculation-away-from-disaster/
Dumping Doubts: Releasing Fukushima’s Waste Water
Australian Independent Media, July 13, 2023, Dr Binoy Kampmark
Nothing said from the nuclear industry can or should be taken for face value. Be it in terms of safety, or correcting defects or righting mistakes; be it in terms of construction integrity, there is something chilling about reassurances that have been shown, time and again, to be hollow.
The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) disaster has forever stained the Japanese nuclear industry. Since then, the site has been marked by over 1,000 tanks filled with contaminated water that arises from reactor cooling. The attempts by the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc (TEPCO) to decommission and clean the plant has also seen a daily complement of 150 tons arising from groundwater leakage into the buildings and systems involved in the cooling process.
According to Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority, the gradual 1.3 million or so tons kept in those tanks into the Pacific over three decades is something that can be executed without serious environmental consequences. This was a view that was already entertained in 2021, expressing confidence that the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) being used in cleaning the contaminated water would be effective. Of primary concern here is the presence of a radioactive form of hydrogen called tritium, the presence of which is a challenge to remove.
There are various questions arising from this, not least the assumption that the levels of radioactivity arising from tritium will be significantly reduced by 1/40th of regulatory standards through the use of seawater. But as has been pointed out by such scientists as Ken Buesseler, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress and Antony M. Hooker, there are also nontritium radionuclides that “are generally of greater health concern as evidenced by their much higher dose coefficient – a measure of the dose, or potential human health impacts associated with a given radioactive element, relative to its measured concentration, or radioactivity level.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency neither recommends nor endorses the plans – a curious formulation that does little for confidence……………………………………….
the inherent clandestine air that has surrounded TEPCO, scepticism should not only be mandatory but instinctive. Why not, ask such voices as Hooker and Buesseler, consider other disposal methodologies, such as solidifying the ALPS treated wastewater within concrete? No, counter the Japanese authorities, citing insuperable technical and legal problems. https://theaimn.com/dumping-doubts-releasing-fukushimas-waste-water/
Japan’s Radioactive Fukushima Water Release – Media Propaganda, Reports from Vanuatu in South Pacific
Nuclear Hotseat, 12 July 23
SPECIAL REPORTS:
With Japan’s pending release of 1.3 million tons of Tritium-contaminated radioactive water from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approval of that plan, it is time for an examination of the issues behind this wrongheaded assault upon people and the environment. To find out various hidden aspects of the issue, Nuclear Hotseat provides five separate segments.
Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter considers that the IAEA’s vested interest in promoting nuclear power should disqualify the agency as a nuclear safety watchdog.Marine Biologist Tim Deere-Jones takes on the whistleblower leak of an internal IAEA document from June 21, which shows collusion between the agency and the government of Japan over how the announcement of approval of the water release was to be handled to minimize public fear and response. Japan has dismissed the document as a “fraud;” neither TEPCO nor IAEA has said anything else. What’s the bigger story?Filmmaker Philippe Carillo (The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story) lives in Vanuatu and talks about Japan’s campaign to propagandize south Pacific journalists into only believing the talking points they’ve been fed and not to look further.
The Honorable Andrew Solomon Napuat, a Member of Parliament for Vanuatu, an island nation in the south Pacific, explains how his country and others have been manipulated to not speak out against the water release or risk “friendly” relations with Japan…………… https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/japan-radioactive-fukushima-water-dump/?_thumbnail_id=11643
Failed Fukushima Fixes Falling Like Dominoes
CounterPunch BY JOHN LAFORGE, 6 July, 23
“……………………………………………………………………Tepco’s cost-avoidance on its sea wall was only the first in a string of failures that have followed like dominos. The corruption led in July 2022 to convictions of four top Tepco executives for negligence and a fine of $95 billion.
In the 12 years since the meltdowns, Tepco’s disaster response efforts, always heralded as fixes, have been a series of hugely expensive failures: the “advanced” wastewater filter system “ALPS” has failed; the buried “ice wall” groundwater barrier has failed; containers made for the radioactive sludge produced by ALPS have failed; and plans to deal with millions of tons of collected debris — now kept in plastic bags — are being fiercely resisted by Japanese citizens.
Tons of cooling water is still being poured every day into Fukushima’s triple reactor wrecks to keep the hot melted fuel from again running amok. Additionally, groundwater gushes through the reactors’ foundations’ countless cracks and breaks caused by the staggering earthquake into what’s left of the structures’ sub-floors. All this water becomes highly radioactive as it passes over and through three giant masses — totaling at least 880 tonnes — of melted and mangled uranium and plutonium fuel.
You read that right. Fukushima’s destroyed reactor No. 3 was using fuel made partly of plutonium (see below), and so plutonium contaminates not just the ground and cooling water running over the melted fuel, but the ALPS apparatus, its filters, the containers used to store the radioactive sludge extracted by ALPS, and of course the sludge itself. You would think that the word plutonium would appear occasionally in news coverage of this ongoing disaster.
Failed ALPS means million-tonne do-over
Tepco’s jerry-rigged system dubbed Advanced Liquid Processing System or ALPS has never worked as planned. As early as 2013 the machinery was stalled. “The ALPS system failed to reduce radioactive elements, as claimed by the owner,” Power Technology, reported June 2, 2021.
Tepco has repeatedly said ALPS would remove 62 radioactive materials — all but tritium and carbon-14 from the continuously expanding volume of wastewater. Documents on a government committee’s website show that of 890,000 tonnes of water held at Fukushima, 750,000 tonnes, or 84 percent, contain higher concentrations of radioactive materials than legal limits allow, according to Reuters, Oct. 11, 2018. Among the long-lasting and deadly isotopes picked up by the water runs that through melted fuel wreckage are cesium, strontium, cobalt, ruthenium, carbon-14, tritium, iodine, plutonium, and at least 54 others.
In a June 14 op/ed for the China Daily, Shaun Burnie, the Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia, reported that the ALPS “has been a spectacular failure” and noted that:
“About 70 percent or 931,600 cubic meters of the wastewater needs to be processed again (and probably many more times) by the ALPS to bring the radioactive concentration levels below the regulatory limit for discharge. Tepco has succeeded in reducing the concentration levels of strontium, iodine, and plutonium in only 0.2 percent of the total volume of the wastewater, and it still requires further processing. But no secondary processing has taken place in the past nearly three years. Neither Tepco nor the Japanese government [have] said how many times the wastewater needs to be processed, how long it will take to do so, or whether the efforts will ever be successful. Greenpeace reported on these problems and why the ALPS failed nearly five years ago, and none of these issues has been resolved.”
Consequently, Tepco says it will re-filter over 70 percent of the 1.37 million tonnes of wastewater stored in giant tanks on site. Approximately 875,000 tons of contaminated water must be put through the system again, a process that will leave behind more of the highly radioactive and corrosive waste sludge.
Hoping to slow the rush to dumping, Ryota Koyama, a professor at Fukushima Univ. in Japan, said in an interview with China Media Group last May, “If the Japanese government or the Tokyo Elec Power Co really wants to discharge contaminated water into the sea, they need to explain in more detail whether the nuclides have really been removed.”
Ice wall also melts
Tepco intended to reduce the volume of groundwater gushing into the reactor building foundations by digging a $350 million “ice wall” into the earth between the destroyed reactors and the mountains behind. The company placed 1,568 heavy pipes filled with coolant 90 feet deep. It was to freeze the ground to form a deep impenetrable barrier, diverting groundwater to either side of the destroyed six-reactor Fukushima complex and prevent it seeping inside. It has failed to do so, The Guardian reported. In 2016, the Times of London reported that the scheme had only a “minor impact” on the volume of groundwater rushing in, which at the time still averaged 321 tonnes a day. Tepco announced then that it would retrofit the system and fix the leaks, but Science/The Wire reported in January 2022 that the company had admitted that its ice wall was “partially” melting. About 150 tonnes per day still gushes in.
Filtered sludge burning through containers
The ALPS filter has produced over 4,000 large containers filled with highly radioactive slurry and sludge left from the treatment.
Like the use of the word “advanced” in the name of the failed ALPS machinery, the cylinders used for the caustic, highly radioactive sludge are called “High Integrity Containers” or HICs, but in fact they are made of plastic and have degraded far faster than Tepco anticipated.
By March 2, Tepco had filled 4,143 containers, according to the daily Asahi Shimbun. At 30 cubic feet each, the cylinders now store a total of about 124,290 cubic feet of the highly radioactive sludge that will soon require expensive repackaging and, eventually, isolation from the biosphere for thousands of years.
Over two years ago, on June 8, 2021, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) announced that 31 of the containers had “exceeded their lifespans” and were corroded badly enough by the harsh toxic material that they must be replaced. The NRA also warned that another 56 cylinders would need replacing within two years.
Japan’s Mainichi newspaper reported that the government regulators blamed Tepco for “underestimating the radiation the 31 plastic cylinders were exposed to.” The company then claimed it would start moving the contents to new containers.
The Asahi Shimbun reported April 27, 2023, that the HICs must be stored in concrete boxes that can block radiation evidently being emitted by the HICs. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14883115
Rad waste to be dumped, deregulated
As early as next month, Japan intends to begin dispersing 1.37 million tonnes of contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The government has steadfastly ignored fierce local and international opposition to the plan from the fishing community, marine scientists, Pacific Island nations, environmentalists, South Korea, and China. So far only South Korean politicians have suggested bringing international legal action against the dumping.
Since the 2011 meltdowns spewed radioactive materials broadly across Japan’s main island, some 14-million tonnes of cesium-contaminated soil, leaves, and debris have been scraped from the ground and stored in one-tonne bags. Citizens are struggling desperately prevent authorities from using the radioactive waste in road building or burning it in incinerators. The bags are currently stacked in tens of thousands of piles all over the region.
Even more protest was raised last February 10 when the NRA said it would allow Tepco to severely weaken its monitoring of the wastewater’s radioactivity. The NRA said would but the number of radioactive elements to be measured from 64 to 34.
The environment minister of Hong Kong — a coastal metropolis of 7.5 million people — charged in June that Japan is “violating its obligations under international law and endangering the marine environment and public health.” Minister Tse Chin-wan wrote in the daily Ta Kung Pao that Hong Kong would “immediately prohibit imports of seafood caught off the coast of Fukushima prefecture.”
Plutonium Spread Long Distances from Fukushima
Very few reports of the Fukushima catastrophic releases of radiation have mentioned plutonium contamination. Yet plutonium was used in fuel rods in Fukushima’s reactor number 3 which was destroyed by meltdown and several hydrogen explosions. Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known to science, and fine particles are far more biologically hazardous than larger particles.
Following the March 14, 2011 explosion, experts worried about the release of extremely dangerous radioactive substances, and then a week later, on March 21 and 22, Tepco announced that it had detected plutonium in soil collected from its compound. (Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster, Takashi Hirose, Asahi Shimbun Publications, 2011, p. 51)
Now, studies published in the journals Science of the Total Environment, Nov. 15, 2020, and Chemosphere, July 2023, report that researchers found that cesium and plutonium “were transported over long distances,” and that deposits of them were recorded in “downtown Tokyo,” about 142 miles from the meltdowns.
According to the authors, very high concentrations of radioactive cesium were released during the accident as particles referred to as “cesium-rich micro-particles” (CsMPs). The researchers say CsMPs they found are mainly composed of silicon, iron, zinc, and cesium, and minor amounts of radioactive tellurium, technetium, molybdenum, uranium, and plutonium.
The studies, involving scientists from six countries and led by Associate Professor Satoshi Utsunomiya, a researcher at Kyushu University, found that “plutonium was included inside cesium-rich micro-particles that were emitted from the site.”
Radioactive CsMPs released from Fukushima are a potential health risk through inhalation. “Given the small size of the particles, they could penetrate into the deepest parts of the lung, where they could be retained,” Utsunomiya wrote. “The route of exposure of greatest concern is inhalation,” the authors reported, because plutonium, lodged in the lungs, can “remain for years.”
Utsunomiya summed up his team’s work saying, “It took a long time to publish results on particulate [plutonium] from Fukushima … but research on Fukushima’s environmental impact and its decommissioning are a long way from being over.”
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/06/failed-fukushima-fixes-falling-like-dominoes/
Terrible truths about nuclear energy exposed
“We are all seeing a global political agreement centred in the UN organisations, tie IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], the World Health Organisation… All the international agencies are whitewashing what is happening in Fukushima.
By Karl Grossman | 11 July 2023 https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/terrible-truths-about-nuclear-energy-exposed,17704
A NEW documentary titled The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story is a powerful, moving, informative film that is superbly made. Directed and edited by Philippe Carillo, it is among the strongest ever made on the deadly dangers of nuclear technology.
Australians featured in the film are Dr Helen Caldicott, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and John Keane, professor of politics at the University of Sydney. Carillo is a resident of the nation of Vanuatu, 1,750 kilometres northeast of Australia.
The documentary begins with the words of U.S. President John F Kennedy from 1961:
“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by an accident, or miscalculation or by madness.”
It then goes to the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan after it was struck by a tsunami. Its backup diesel generators kicked in but “did not run for long,” notes the documentary. That led to three of the six plant reactors exploding – and there’s video of this – “releasing an unpreceded amount of nuclear radiation into the air”.
“Fukushima is the world’s largest ever industrial catastrophe,” then says Professor John Keane. He says there was no emergency plan and, as to the owner of Fukushima, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), with the accident its CEO “for five nights and days… locked himself inside his office”.
Meanwhile, from TEPCO, there was “only good news” with two Japanese government agencies also “involved in the cover-up” — the Nuclear Industry Safety Agency and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
“Japanese media was ordered to censor information. The Japanese Government failed to protect its people,” the documentary relates.
Yumi Kikuchi of Fukushima, since a leader of the Fukushima Kids Project, recalls:
“On TV, they said that ‘it’s under control’ and they kept saying that for two months. The nuclear power plant had already melted and even exploded but they never admitted the meltdown until May. So, people in Fukushima during that time were severely exposed to radiation.”
Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer and now a principal of Fairewinds Energy Education in Burlington, Vermont in the United States, speaks of being told by Naoto Kan, the Prime Minister of Japan at the time of the accident, that “our existence as a sovereign nation was at stake because of the disaster at Fukushima Daichi”.
Kan then appears in the documentary and speaks of “manmade” links to the disaster.
The documentary tells how Kan, following the accident, became “an advocate against nuclear power… ordered all nuclear power plants in Japan to shut down for safety” and for the nation “to move into renewable energy”.
Subsequently, “a nuclear advocate”, Shinzo Abe, became Japan’s Prime Minister.
Yoichi Shimatsu, a former Japan Times journalist, appears in the film and speaks of “the cruelty, the cynicism of this government”. He speaks of how in the accident’s aftermath, “nearly every member of Parliament and leaders of the major political parties”, along with corporate executives, “moved their relatives out of Japan”.
He says:
“Shanghai is the largest Japanese community outside Japan now… while these same people [had been] telling the people of Fukushima ‘go home’, ten kilometres from Fukushima, ‘go home, it’s safe’, while their families are overseas in Los Angeles, in Paris, in London and in Shanghai.”
“If it’s safe, why they left?” asks Kikuchi.
Gundersen says:
At Fukushima Daichi, the world is already seeing deaths from cancer related to the disaster…There’ll be many more over time. [There has been a] huge increase in thyroid cancer in the surrounding population.
Unfortunately, the Japanese Government is not telling us all the evidence. There’s a lot of pressure on the scientists and the medical community to distort the evidence so there’s no blowback against nuclear power.
There is a section in the documentary on the impacts of radioactivity which includes Dr Caldicott discussing the impacts of radiation on the body and how it causes cancer.
She states:
There is no safe level of radiation. I repeat, there is no safe level of radiation. Each dose of radiation is cumulative and adds to your risk of getting cancer and that’s absolutely documented in the medical literature.
The nuclear industry says, well, there are ‘safe doses’ of radiation and even says a little bit of radiation is good for you and that is called the theory of hormesis. They lie and they lie and they lie.
Maggie Gundersen, who was a reporter and then a public relations representative for the nuclear industry and, like her husband Arnie, became an opponent of nuclear power, speaks of how nuclear power derives from the World War II Manhattan Project program to develop atomic weapons and post-war so-called “Atoms for Peace” push.
Gundersen says in becoming a nuclear industry spokesperson, “the things I was taught weren’t true”. The notion, for example, that what is called a containment at a nuclear plant is untrue because radioactivity “escapes every day as a nuclear power plant operates” and in a “calamity” is released massively.
As to economics, she cited the claim decades ago that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter”.
The president of Fairewinds Energy Education says:
Regarding the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power, she says “there is literally no technology” to safeguard it for the many years it remains lethal. “It does not exist.”
As to international oversight, the documentary presents the final version of the Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation issued in 2014 which finds that the radiation doses from Fukushima ‘to the general public during the first year and estimated for their lifetimes are generally low or very low… The most important effect is on mental and social well-being’.
Shimatsu says it is not only in Japan but on an international level that the consequences of radioactive exposure have been completely minimised or denied:
“We are all seeing a global political agreement centred in the UN organisations, tie IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], the World Health Organisation… All the international agencies are whitewashing what is happening in Fukushima. We take dosimeters and Geiger counters in there, we see a much different story.”
In Germany, says Maggie Gunderson, “the politicians chose” to do a study to substantiate that no health impacts “happened around nuclear power plants… But what they found was the radiation releases cause significant numbers of childhood leukemia”.
A summary of that 2008 study comes on the screen. The U.S. followed up on that research, she says, but recently “the [U.S.] Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was not going to do that study,” that “it doesn’t have enough funding; it had to shut it down”. She said the real reason was that it was producing “data they don’t want to make public”.
Beyond the airborne releases of radiation after the Fukushima accident, now, says the documentary, there is the growing threat of radioactivity through water that has and still is leaking from the plant as well as more than a million tons of radioactive water stored in a thousand tanks built at the plant site.
After the accident, TEPCO released 300,000 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Now there is no land for more tanks, so the Japanese Government, the documentary relates, has decided, starting this year, to dump massive amounts of radioactive water over a 30-year period into the Pacific.
Arnie Gundersen speaks of the cliché that “the solution to pollution is dilution,” but with the radiation from Fukushima being sent into the Pacific, there will be “bio-accumulation” — with vegetation absorbing radiation, little fish eating that vegetation and intensifying it and bigger fish eating the smaller fish, further bio-accumulating the radioactivity. Already, tuna off California have been found with radiation traced to Fukushima. With this planned further and yet greater dispersal, thousands of people “in the Pacific basin will die from radiation,” he says.
Andrew Napuat, a member of the Parliament of Vanuatu, an 83-island archipelago in the Pacific, says in the documentary:
“We have the right to say no to the Japan solution. We can’t let them jeopardise our sustenance and livelihood.”
Vanuatu, along with 13 other countries, has signed and ratified the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.
As the documentary nears its end, Arnie Gundersen says that considering the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986, and now the three Fukushima meltdowns in 2011, there has been “a meltdown every seven years roughly”.
He says:
“Essentially, once every decade the world needs to know that there might be an atomic meltdown somewhere.”
And, he adds:
“The nuclear industry is saying they want would like to build as many as 5,000 new nuclear power plants.”
(There are 440 in the world today.)
Meanwhile, he says:
“Renewable power is no longer alternative power. It’s on our doorstep. It’s here now and it works and it’s cheaper than nuclear.”
The cost of producing energy from wind, he says, is three cents a kilowatt hour, for solar, five cents and for new nuclear power plants, 15 cents. Nuclear “makes no nuclear economic sense”.
Maggie Gundersen says, with tears in her eyes:
“I’m a woman and I feel it’s inherent for us as women to protect our children, our grandchildren, and it’s our job now to raise our voices and have this madness stop.”
Philippe Carillo, who worked for 14 years in Hollywood and who since 2017 has lived in Vanuatu, has worked on several major TV documentary projects for the BBC, 20th Century Fox and French National TV as well as doing independent productions. He says he made The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story to “expose the nuclear industry and its lies”.
His previous award-winning documentary, Inside the Garbage of the World, has made changes regarding the use of plastic.
The Fukushima Disaster, The Hidden Side of the Story can be viewed at Amazon (UK and U.S.), Apple TV, iTunes, Google Play and Vimeo on demand.
1 This Month
10 March A LIVE WEBINAR THE REAL EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR POWER
What the Industry Isn’t Telling Us
1:00 PM Mountain, 2 pm Central, 3 pm Eastern. Live on the Keepers of the Water Facebook page
18 March Webinar @ 1 PM EST: An Assessment of SMR Projects: The Case of Canada
register for the zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_o8BIIOUvQ2ONJR1nta65DQ#/registration
of the week – STOP SMALL MODULAR REACTORS IN CANADA
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