The Sendai nuclear power plant will become the first of Japan’s 48 commercial reactors to be restarted after they were all shut down since the Fukushima disaster in 2011
Little is reported in the media about the clean up after the Fukushima Power Plant disaster. After three years of cover-ups and misleading information, released to quell public fears, there is still reason to be wary. The danger is still very real.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011 is still impacting lives today. Over 120,000 people from the area are living in a nuclear limbo, according to the guardian. Once close-knit families are now forced to live apart in temporary housing complexes, many of the homes hastily thrown up in an effort to get people out of radiation “hot-spots.”
Japan’s population has been inundated with half-truths and sometimes, outright lies, concerning the progress being made in the clean-up efforts in Fukushima. For the thousands of workers tasked with the laborious details of doing the actual work, just knowing their efforts are inadequate must be mind-numbing.
Fukushima Daiichi’s manager, Akira Ono is the man in charge of the clean up efforts, and he admitted to the Guardian that there is little cause for optimism. No matter what the workers do, there is still a huge problem with contaminated water. Over 400 tons of groundwater flow every day from the hills outside the plant and into the basements where the three stricken reactors are located.
There, the water mixes with the coolant water being pumped in to keep the melted fuel from overheating and causing another nuclear accident. TEPCO says “most of the water” is pumped out into holding tanks, but ever-increasing amounts end up seeping into maintenance trenches, and then into the ocean. This has to be depressing for Ono and the men and women walking into the facility every day.
While Americans have been sitting back and ignoring the ongoing disaster that is Fukushima, other countries have taken notice. Germany and Italy are looking at the viability of continuing to depend on nuclear power, and are opting instead for other more eco-friendly sources. And surprisingly, the news media in other countries is also paying attention to what has been going on at the Fukushima power plant.
Arnold Gunderson, a former high-level nuclear industry executive, was cited in an article written in Al-Jazeera English, entitled “Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think,” in June, 2011. In the story, Gunderson is quoted as saying, the Fukushima disaster was “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind. Twenty nuclear cores have been exposed at Fukushima.” Gunderson also points out that the site’s many spent-fuel pools give Fukushima 20 times the radiation release potential of Chernobyl.
If people on the North American coast think they are safe from the effects of radiation from the Fukushima disaster, not only are they dreaming, but they are going to be in for a rude awakening. Yes, there were a few stories telling us the radiation levels reaching our west coast were “tiny amounts,” But how many additional infants are going to die, and how many more people, children and adults are going to end up with unexplained cancers before someone wakes up to what is happening?
And the American public needs to wake up right now. We have nuclear disasters just waiting to happen in our own back yard. From the Diable Canyon power plant in California, to the Cooper Nuclear Station near Brownville, Nebraska that was almost inundated with floodwaters in June, 2014, the list is getting longer and longer. The Nuclear Regulatory Committee has been forced to ease up on some regulations or just ignore them when it comes to helping power plants in the U.S. to meet what officials call “unnecessarily conservative” standards. Yes, ignorance is bliss. That is scary, folks,
The Advanced Liquid Processing System of the Fukushima No. 1 plant is seen Wednesday
Nov 16, 2014
More than three years into the massive cleanup of the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, only a tiny fraction of the workers are focused on key tasks such as preparing for the dismantling of the wrecked reactors and removing radioactive fuel rods.
Instead, nearly all the workers at Fukushima No. 1 are devoted to a single, enormously distracting problem: coping with the vast amount of contaminated water, a mixture of groundwater running into recycled water that becomes contaminated and leaks after being pumped into the reactors to keep their melted cores from overheating.
A number of buildings housing water treatment machines and hundreds of huge blue and gray industrial storage tanks to store the excess water are rapidly taking over the grounds at the plant, which saw three of its six reactor cores suffer meltdowns from the 3/11 quake and tsunami. Workers were still building more tanks during a visit to the complex Wednesday by a group of foreign media.
“The contaminated water is a most pressing issue that we must tackle. There is no doubt about that,” said Akira Ono, head of the plant. “Our effort to mitigate the problem is at its peak now. Though I cannot say exactly when, I hope things start getting better when the measures start taking effect.”
The numbers tell the story:
6,000 workers
Every day, about 6,000 workers pass through the guarded gate of Fukushima No. 1, located on the Pacific coast, two to three times more than when it was actually generating electricity.
On a recent workday, about 100 workers were dismantling a makeshift roof over one of the reactor buildings, while about a dozen others were removing fuel rods from a cooling pool. Most of the rest were dealing with contaminated water-related work, said Tatsuhiro Yamagishi, a spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.
The work threatens to exhaust the supply of workers for other tasks, since they must stop working when they reach annual radiation exposure limits. Experts say it is crucial to reduce the amount and radioactivity of the contaminated water to decrease the risk of exposure to workers and the environmental impact before the decommissioning work gets closer to the highly contaminated core area.
40 years
The plant has six reactors, three of which were offline when disaster struck on March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake that triggered huge tsunami that swept into the plant and knocked out its backup power and cooling systems, leading to core meltdowns in the three active reactors.
Decommissioning and dismantling all six of the reactors is a delicate, time-consuming process that includes removing the melted fuel from a highly radioactive environment as well as all the extra fuel rods, which sit in cooling pools situated at the top of the reactor buildings.
The entire job still requires finding out the exact conditions of the melted fuel debris and developing remote-controlled and radiation-resistant robotics to deal with them, and the work is expected to take at least 40 years.
500,000 tons
The main problem is an abundant inflow of groundwater into the contaminated water that doubles the volume and spreads it to vast areas of the compound. Workers have jury-rigged a pipe-and-hose system to continuously pump water into the reactors to cool the clumps of melted fuel inside.
The water becomes contaminated upon exposure to the radioactive fuel, and much of it pours into the reactor and turbine basements, and maintenance trenches that extend to the Pacific Ocean. The plant recycles some of the contaminated water as cooling water after partially treating it, but groundwater is also flowing into the damaged reactor buildings and mixing with contaminated water, creating a huge excess that needs to be pumped out.
So far, more than 500,000 tons of radioactive water have been stored in nearly 1,000 large tanks that workers have built, which now cover most of the sprawling plant premises. After a series of leaks from the storage tanks last year, they are now being replaced with costlier welded tanks.
That dwarfs the 9,000 tons of contaminated water produced during the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the United States. In that incident, it took 14 years for the water to evaporate, said Lake Barrett, a retired U.S. nuclear regulatory official who was part of the early mitigation team there and has visited Fukushima No. 1.
“This is a much more complex, much more difficult water management problem,” Barrett said.
¥10 trillion
An estimated ¥2 trillion will be needed just for decontamination and other mitigation of the water problem. Altogether, the entire decommissioning process, including compensation for area residents, reportedly will cost about ¥10 trillion.
All this for a plant that will never produce a kilowatt of energy again.
The work threatens to exhaust the supply of workers for other tasks, since they must stop working when they reach annual radiation exposure limits. About 500 workers are digging deep holes in preparation to build a taxpayer-funded ¥32 billion underground “frozen wall” around the four reactors and their turbine buildings to try to keep the contaminated water from seeping out.
Tepco is developing systems to try to remove most radioactive elements from the water. One, the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), has been trouble-plagued, but utility officials hope to achieve a daily capacity of 2,000 tons when it enters full operation next month. Officials hope to be able to treat all contaminated water by the end of March, but that is far from certain.
The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant faces another challenge in its effort to address radioactive water at the complex.
It says highly contaminated water may still be flowing from reactor buildings into adjacent underground tunnels even after a work to stem the flow ended.
The water in the tunnels is believed to be leaking into the sea. Tokyo Electric Power Company plans to pump the tainted water out of the tunnels and fill them with cement.
To prepare for the process, the firm began work in April to stem the flow of radioactive water between the reactor buildings and the tunnels. It involved freezing some of the water as well as plugging the gaps with filler materials.
TEPCO finished the work on November 6th. But workers found that water levels in the reactor buildings and the tunnels are still linked. They note this suggests that the flow of radioactive water between them may not have been stopped.
TEPCO officials say that if the situation doesn’t improve, they may start filling the tunnels with cement even before they finish removing contaminated water.
Tanks storing contaminated water are seen at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant
in Fukushima Prefecture on Nov. 12.
November 13, 2014
OKUMA, Fukushima Prefecture–More than three years into the massive cleanup of Japan’s tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant, only a tiny fraction of the workers are focused on key tasks such as preparing for the dismantling of the broken reactors and removing radioactive fuel rods.
Instead, nearly all the workers at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant are devoted to an enormously distracting problem: a still-growing amount of contaminated water used to keep the damaged reactors from overheating. The amount has been swelled further by groundwater entering the reactor buildings.
Hundreds of huge blue and gray tanks to store the radioactive water, and buildings holding water treatment equipment are rapidly taking over the plant, where the cores of three reactors melted following a 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Workers were building more tanks during a visit to the complex on Nov. 12 by foreign media, including The Associated Press.
“The contaminated water is a most pressing issue that we must tackle. There is no doubt about that,” said Akira Ono, head of the plant. “Our effort to mitigate the problem is at its peak now. Though I cannot say exactly when, I hope things start getting better when the measures start taking effect.”
The numbers tell the story.
6,000 WORKERS
Every day, about 6,000 workers pass through the guarded gate of the Fukushima No. 1 plant on the Pacific coast–two to three times more than when it was actually producing electricity.
On a recent work day, about 100 workers were dismantling a makeshift roof over one of the reactor buildings, and about a dozen others were removing fuel rods from a cooling pool. Most of the rest were dealing with the contaminated water, said Tatsuhiro Yamagishi, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that owns the plant.
The work threatens to exhaust the supply of workers for other tasks, since employees must stop working when they reach annual radiation exposure limits. Experts say it is crucial to reduce the amount and radioactivity of the contaminated water to decrease the risk of exposure to workers and the environmental impact before the decommissioning work gets closer to the highly contaminated core areas.
40 YEARS
The plant has six reactors, three of which were offline when disaster struck on March 11, 2011. A magnitude-9.0 earthquake triggered a huge tsunami which swept into the plant and knocked out its backup power and cooling systems, leading to meltdowns at the three active reactors.
Decommissioning and dismantling all six reactors is a delicate, time-consuming process that includes removing the melted fuel from a highly radioactive environment, as well as all the extra fuel rods, which sit in cooling pools at the top of the reactor buildings. Workers must determine the exact condition of the melted fuel debris and develop remote-controlled and radiation-resistant robotics to deal with it.
Troubles and delays in preparatory stages, including the water problem and additional measures needed to address environmental and health concerns in removing highly radioactive debris from atop reactor buildings that exploded during meltdowns, have pushed back schedules on the decommissioning roadmap. Recently, officials said the government and TEPCO plan to delay the planned start of fuel removal from Units 1 and 2 by about 5 years.
The process of decommissioning the four reactors is expected to take at least 40 years.
500,000 TONS
The flow of underground water is doubling the amount of contaminated water and spreading it to vast areas of the compound.
Exposure to the radioactive fuel contaminates the water used to cool the melted fuel from inside, and much of it leaks and pours into the basements of the reactors and turbines, and into maintenance trenches that extend to the Pacific Ocean. Plans to freeze some of the most toxic water inside the trench near the reactors have been delayed for at least 8 months due to technical challenges.
The plant reuses some of the contaminated water for cooling after partially treating it, but the additional groundwater creates a huge excess that must be pumped out.
Currently, more than 500,000 tons of radioactive water is being stored in nearly 1,000 large tanks which now cover large areas of the sprawling plant. After a series of leaks last year, the tanks are being replaced with costlier welded ones.
That amount dwarfs the 9,000 tons of contaminated water produced during the 1979 partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the United States. At Three Mile Island, it took 14 years for the water to evaporate, said Lake Barrett, a retired U.S. nuclear regulatory official who was part of the early mitigation team there and has visited the Fukushima plant.
“This is a much more complex, much more difficult water management problem,” Barrett said.
10 TRILLION YEN
An estimated 2 trillion yen ($18 billion) will be needed just for decontamination and other mitigation of the water problem. Altogether, the entire decommissioning process, including compensation for area residents, reportedly will cost about 10 trillion yen, or about $90 billion.
All this for a plant that will never produce a kilowatt of energy again.
About 500 workers are digging deep holes in preparation for a taxpayer-funded 32 billion yen ($290 million) underground “frozen wall” around four reactors and their turbine buildings to try to keep the contaminated water from seeping out.
TEPCO is developing systems to try to remove most radioactive elements from the water. One, known as ALPS, has been trouble-plagued, but utility officials hope to achieve its daily capacity of 2,000 tons when they enter full operation next month following a final inspection by regulators.
Officials hope to treat all contaminated water by the end of March, but that is far from certain.
OKUMA, Fukushima Prefecture–In preparation for clearing debris and eventually removing nuclear fuel from inside, Tokyo Electric Power Co. on Nov. 10 temporarily removed another panel from the canopy covering a damaged reactor building at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Debris inside the building were visible from the opening, which is 40 meters long and 14 meters wide, equivalent to one-third the size of the entire roof.
The first of the six canopy panels was removed on Oct. 31.
The utility has been spraying the inside of the reactor building with liquid anti-scattering resin since Oct. 22 to prevent radioactive materials from being stirred up during the dismantling work. The interior of the building will be checked throughout this month.
TEPCO also plans to keep a close eye on radioactivity levels inside the plant grounds and will notify local municipalities if any abnormalities are recorded.
The removed roof panels will be reinstalled as early as within this month, and their full-scale removal is expected to begin in March 2015.
Japan’s nuclear watchdog disputed the farm ministry’s assertion that radioactive substances churned up by debris removal work at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant contaminated distant rice paddies last year.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority announced at a commissioners’ meeting Oct. 31 its estimate that 110 billion becquerels of radioactive materials spread as a result of cleanup at the No. 3 reactor building on Aug. 19, 2013.
This figure is lower than the 130 billion to 260 billion becquerels estimated by the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., in August.
Radiation readings rose significantly during debris removal that day, with radioactive substances found to have contaminated plant workers about 500 meters from the reactor building.
However, NRA Commissioner Toyoshi Fuketa emphasized, “The affected area of the fallout was within the nuclear plant compound.”
“While it is difficult to simulate the spread of radioactive substances (outside the plant), it is unlikely that the debris cleanup caused the contamination (of the rice paddies),” Fuketa said.
The nuclear facility was ravaged by the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and ensuing tsunami, triggering a triple meltdown.
The NRA arrived at the figure of 110 billion becquerels by analyzing radiation levels recorded at monitoring posts north-northwest of the plant on the day in question.
Radioactive fallout on this scale constitutes a Level 0 incident on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
Earlier, the farm ministry pointed to the possibility that radiation from the plant had spread to rice paddies in Minami-Soma more than 20 kilometers away, and called on TEPCO to take preventive measures in its debris removal work.
During the NRA meeting, some experts noted that despite the NRA’s estimate, it is unlikely that factors other than debris cleanup at the plant could have caused such high levels of radioactive fallout at the rice farms.
“From a broader perspective, the Fukushima No. 1 plant is responsible for the contamination,” one participant said.
A panel is lifted by crane at the No. 1 reactor building of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant
in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, on Oct. 31
November 01, 2014
OKUMA, Fukushima Prefecture–Tokyo Electric Power Co. has removed part of the canopy above a reactor building at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant to gauge the effects of anti-scattering agents pumped inside.
It was the first time in three years that debris inside the No. 1 reactor building was visible from the outside. The structure, which was destroyed in a hydrogen explosion a day after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, was covered with the canopy in October of that year.
The removal on Oct. 31 of one of six panels that make up the canopy is the initial stage in work to remove debris and nuclear fuel from inside the structure.
TEPCO drilled holes into the panel, which measures 42 meters by 7 meters and weighs 32 tons, on Oct. 22. It then sprayed anti-scattering resin inside to prevent radioactive substances from stirring up into the air.
The panel was removed to survey the effects of the resin.
The work was performed by a large crane that slowly hoisted the panel and lowered it to the ground, taking about one hour and 40 minutes.
The panel is scheduled to be returned by the end of November. TEPCO plans to start dismantling the entire canopy on a full-fledged basis in March 2015.
The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) announced on Oct. 30 that removal of melted fuel from the No. 1 reactor at the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant would be delayed by five years, until fiscal 2025.
They also announced that work to remove spent fuel from a cooling pool will not begin until fiscal 2019, two years later than originally planned. The delays are the result of the removal of debris and the installation of cranes taking longer than expected.
The announcement marks the first delays in the decommissioning schedule. TEPCO said, however, that the move would not result in an overall delay to the decommissioning process, which is expected to take 30 to 40 years.
The No. 1 reactor houses 392 fuel rods in its cooling pool, while melted fuel remains in the nuclear pressure vessel and reactor containment vessel. In a meeting on Oct. 30, the government and TEPCO decided to adopt a two-step process with separate measures to remove fuel from the cooling pool and melted fuel. First, a cover will be installed on the top floor of the reactor building. After a special crane for the fuel pool removes fuel, then workers will use a container and crane setup to remove melted fuel. The government and TEPCO say that they chose this method because there are many unknown factors in the removal of melted nuclear fuel, and because they hope to remove the fuel from the cooling pool at an early stage.
At the No. 1 reactor, preparations began this month to remove a cover designed to prevent the spread of radioactive materials, so that debris could be removed from the top floor. This process itself was delayed by six months. Because of this, and the fact that the two-step process is laborious, it is believed the government and TEPCO decided to delay the start of fuel removal work.
At the No. 2 reactor, meanwhile, since radiation levels are high and decontamination of the reactor building is difficult, officials have decided to reconsider the method of removing nuclear fuel. Officials are set to decide on a method in fiscal 2016, but there is a high possibility that removal work will fall behind schedule.
In August, work at the No. 3 reactor was suspended after a large piece of debris fell into the cooling pool while debris was being removed from around the pool’s edge. Officials plan to remove fuel from the pool next fiscal year, but the outlook for this work is unclear.
It is expected that work to remove fuel from the No. 4 reactor pool will be completed this year.
The decommissioning schedule was established under the Democratic Party of Japan-led administration in December 2011. It was revised in June last year, accelerating the removal of melted fuel by up to a year and a half.
The disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, triggered by the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, resulted in core meltdowns at reactor Nos. 1-3. Nuclear fuel has passed through the reactor pressure vessels, and caused damage to the containment vessels. The government and TEPCO plan to fill the containment vessels with water and remove about 450 metric tons of melted fuel. But it remains unknown where the melted fuel actually lies. Furthermore, officials have located only two damaged areas in the containment vessels of the three reactors.
In the Three Mile Island meltdown in the United States, it took six years before the removal of melted fuel was begun, though the pressure vessel was not damaged. Fukushima presents conditions that are far more difficult, and it is unclear when the work can be completed.
Contrary to expectation, bypass water project increased a part of the groundwater level, from Tepco’s report released on 9/25/2014.
On 9/16/2014, Tepco compared the groundwater level at 3 sub-drains beside the reactor buildings to the water level before bypass water project.
As a result, in 2 sub-drains the recent water levels didn’t show significant improvements from the regression line based on the data from 4/1/2012 to 5/20/2014, which Tepco concluded that “Water level decreased at least by 10 ~ 15cm due to bypass water project”.
In the 3 rd sub-drain, the recent water levels were above the regression line for some reason, which means the water level went higher than before. Regarding this data, Tepco stated “No decrease of groundwater level was observed” however Professor, Okamoto from Tokyo University, a member of contaminated water task force commented Tepco should clearly state the water level INCREASED due to the bypass project.
The exact cause is not identified yet, however Tepco simulated groundwater bypass would end up gathering water from the surrounding areas in 2013 by themselves.
The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company are to revise the timetable for decommissioning the No.1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The current timetable calls for the process of removing spent fuel assemblies from the storage pool to begin in fiscal 2017, and removing melted fuel to begin 3 years later.
Government and TEPCO officials are now planning to delay the start of removing spent fuel units until fiscal 2019, or by 2 years, and the start of removing melted fuel till 2025, or by 5 years.
Radioactive rubble which has accumulated inside the No.1 reactor building is hampering fuel removal efforts.
Workers began dismantling the cover of the building this month to remove the debris.
But full-fledged work to dismantle the cover will not take place until March of next year, already resulting in a delay of more than 6 months.
To remove the spent fuel and melted fuel, separate facilities, such as cranes, must be set up on top of the reactor building. This would take more time.
The current timetable says complete decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi plant with 4 damaged reactors will take 30 to 40 years.
Residents of Shioya Town, Tochigi Prefecture, have petitioned the Environment Ministry to drop a site in their town from consideration to host a facility for storing radioactive waste.
The site in Shioya, north of Tokyo, is one of five the government wants to build permanent storage facilities on for designated waste. The waste is material from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident that has radiation levels exceeding 8,000 becquerels per kilogram.
The mayor of Shioya and the leader of a group of residents handed their petition to State Minister of the Environment Yasuhiro Ozato at the ministry in Tokyo on Wednesday.
Shioya has a population of about 12,000. But the petition was signed by about 173,000 people from across Japan.
Residents and their supporters claim a permanent storage facility would threaten the town’s water supply and accelerate population decline.
State Minister Ozato said he takes the residents’ and signatories’ concerns seriously. He stressed the importance of smooth communication and exchange of views over those concerns.
The representative of the residents’ group said that he expects the State Minister to understand that the signatures show how strongly people feel about the government’s plan.
The Environment Ministry plans to hold a meeting of the prefecture’s mayors on November 9th to win support for the permanent storage facility.
Shioya is expected to reiterate their opposition to the plan.
October 28, 2014
TEPCO has hidden the truth about the Fukushima nuclear disaster and now drip feeds information so the public can get ready for the next piece of bad news, James Corbett, editor, The Corbett report, told RT’s In the Now show.
Journalist Jun Hori has quit NHK, the Japanese state broadcaster saying that his network restricted what he could say about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and moved more slowly than others to report how far the radiation was spreading. RT:Has TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) gotten away with hiding information from the public? James Corbett: TEPCO has lied obfuscated and covered up the truth about what they knew about, or know about what is going on at sites since day one. And of course this goes back to the very beginning of the disaster when they knew within 72 hours that three of the reactors at the Fukushima No.1 plant site were in full melt down. In fact that they did not reveal to the public for almost three months after that event took place. And from there it only continues. We have cover-ups about the amount of radiation that has been released. TEPCO had to revise its original estimate up 250%. We have had cover up of the fact that there was and continues to be 300 tons of radioactive water flooding through the site. That wasn’t really revealed to the public until the summer of 2013, two years after the event took place. Cover-up after cover-up continuously being revealed and only very much later after the fact. I think TEPCO certainly has gotten away with an awful lot. Their practice seems to be, I am not sure if this is a coordinated strategy, but it certainly seems to be that it reveals information in dribs and drabs over long periods of time so that the public has time to be acclimatized to the last piece of bad news before the next one hits them.
RT:How tight is TEPCO with the Japanese government? JC: Technically TEPCO has now been nationalized with the Japanese government being the largest stakeholder. So there is a direct Japanese government stake in the company. That is obviously a situation which creates a type of direct relationship between the company and the government in which obviously the interest of the government and interest of the company are directly tied financially. It creates a very worrying situation and the government has attempted to reform the nuclear regulatory agency here in Japan and attempted to set up a separate division of TEPCO for taking care of decontamination of the sites specifically. But arm’s length institutions or agencies like that are supposed to have oversight over this process aren’t really anything more than just a buffer between what is essentially the same thing now: the Japanese government/ TEPCO which are really wedded at the hip. RT:Are you suggesting that the revelations from this disaster and the implications have not really caused tougher control over the industry? JC: They certainly haven’t it at this point. In fact, what we have seen is the shutdown of all of the other reactors in the country for maintenance and none of those reactors have been turned on as of now. What we are seeing right now is that the struggle that is taking place between protesters and the Japanese government over the restart of those reactors. What has taken place since Fukushima has been the renewal of guidelines regarding safety measures for some of these plants. But there is a lot of concern that these measures that are now being used as the guidelines for whether or not a plant is within the safe operating limits – [are] equally as flimsy as those regulations that allowed the Fukushima plant to operate in the incredibly precarious position that it was operating in. There is still a lot of concern over the nuclear regulatory agency here and the fact that a lot of the members have taken outright bribes of various sorts from the nuclear industry. It seems that the long standing ties between the nuclear industry and the Japanese government here in Japan hasn’t really been shaken and they continue to have … influence over the Japanese government’s policy on nuclear energy.
Source: RT http://rt.com/op-edge/200107-fukushima-japan-tepco-nuclear-disaster/
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says the cover of a building housing the No.1 reactor has been damaged.
Tokyo Electric Power Company says a strong gust of wind moved a machine at around 8:30 AM Tuesday, creating a triangular shaped hole about 1 meter wide and 2 meters long.
TEPCO has been using machinery suspended from a crane to spray chemicals into holes. This is to prevent the dispersal of radioactive dust when dismantling the cover.
The operator says no significant changes in radiation levels were seen at the compound, but work has been suspended.
Officials say the wind speed at the time was about 7 kilometers per hour, which is well below the 36-kilometer-per-hour standard required to suspend work. They say a sudden gust may have moved the machinery.
TEPCO has notified the central and local governments and is considering what steps to take. Officials say they don’t know when work can resume, or whether this problem will affect Thursday’s plan to remove part of the cover on a trial basis.
Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says the levels of radioactive cesium in the compound’s groundwater at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant fluctuated greatly last week.
TEPCO detected the highest concentration of cesium in samples of water taken from 2 monitoring wells near a reactor building on Wednesday.
One well had 428,000 becquerels of cesium per liter of water, while the other contained 458,000 becquerels.
But only 2 days later, the reading in the first well had dropped to 5,200 becquerels, or one-eightieth of the level detected on Wednesday. The concentration in the other well stood at 470 becquerels, or about one-one-thousandth of the previous quantity.
TEPCO says these wells are connected underground with other wells that are highly contaminated. So the operator believes cesium poured into them with this month’s heavy rains and then flowed out with the underground water.
The utility says this problem cannot be fundamentally solved because the area around the wells thought to be the source of the contamination has extremely high radiation levels and cannot be decontaminated.
The 2 wells are among those from which tainted groundwater is pumped and discharged into the sea after being decontaminated.
But TEPCO has suspended the operation and is considering whether to resume the work.
October 20, 2014
2,800 ~ 11,000 Bq/m3 of Strontium-90 have been detected from pumped water around Reactor 1 and 3, according to Tepco.
On 10/1/2014, Tepco released nuclide analysis data of groundwater. The tested groundwater was pumped up from the facilities called “sub-drain” located beside Reactor 1 ~ 4.
These “sub-drains” were originally to reduce groundwater volume to flow into the basement of each reactor building, however abandoned because of the high level of contamination after 311. Tepco is trying to restart using these sub-drains to pump up highly contaminated water and to discharge to the sea.
(cf, Tepco to pump up highly contaminated groundwater for potential discharge today / Drainage plan submitted to NRA.
The samples were taken this September and last September. From the sample near Reactor 1, 11,000 Bq/m3 of Strontium-90 was detected last September. From the sample near Reactor 3, 2,800 Bq/m3 of Strontium-90 was measured this September.
These readings were not checked by third party organizations, so the actual density can be higher than announced.
Either way, the data shows groundwater contamination is spreading from around the reactor buildings to the outside of the port. (cf, Strontium-90 detected outside of Fukushima port / Highest reading in front of Reactor 4 too.
MOSCOW, October 18 (RIA Novosti), Ekaterina Blinova – Radiation levels at Japan’s notorious Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant jumped after the plant was hit earlier this month by two typhoons: Phanfone and Vongfong.
“The back-to-back weather disturbance typhoons Vongfong and Phanfone had triggered the elevated radiation quantities at the plant,” writes the International Business Times, citing NHK, Japan’s state-run media outlet.
According to Japan’s JIJI agency, levels of cesium, a radioactive isotope that causes cancer, are three times higher than their previously registered rates and are currently 251,000 becquerels per liter, while levels of tritium, another dangerous isotope, have grown as high as 150,000 becquerels.
Tepco’s (Tokyo Electric Power Co.) spokesperson emphasized that heavy rainfall triggered by Typhoon Phanfone had apparently impacted Fukushima’s groundwater.
“In addition, materials that emit beta rays, such as strontium-90, which causes bone cancer, also shattered records with a reading of 1.2 million becquerels,” JIJI agency pointed out, adding that the wells that groundwater samples had been taken from were located close to the nuclear plant’s port in the Pacific.
Asahi Shimbun underscores that Tepco’s task of decontaminating all the radioactive water stored at the Fukushima No. 1 plant by the end of this fiscal year will be “increasingly difficult” to accomplish.
“According to a Tepco estimate made in February, the amount of highly contaminated water should have been reduced to 300,000 tons by about now, but the water cleaning procedure is currently a month behind the original schedule,” the media outlet stresses.
Asahi Shimbun reveals that another problem is that the groundwater flow into the plant’s reactor building is increasing the amount of highly radioactive water by 400 tons a day. Although the corporation claims that it has succeed in reducing the influx by 130 tons a day due to its various counter-measures and its “underground water bypass project,” these estimations have not been verified, the media source notes. The ambitious water-decontamination plans have yet to be completed and it remains to be seen when Tepco will be able to accomplish its task.
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