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Gov’t scrapped proposed Fukushima tsunami simulation 9 yrs before crisis

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Tokyo – The government proposed to Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. that a simulation of tsunami waves striking Fukushima Prefecture be conducted nine years before the 2011 catastrophe that crippled its nuclear plant, but decided not to after the company objected, a document from an ongoing compensation suit showed Monday.
When the government’s earthquake research unit unveiled a long-term assessment in July 2002 saying that massive tsunami waves could occur anywhere along the Pacific coast in northeastern Japan, a now-defunct nuclear agency told the Fukushima plant operator the following month that a simulation of possible tsunami damage was needed, an agency official’s statement submitted to the Chiba District Court showed.
But Tepco rejected the proposal on the basis of research by a seismologist, according to Shuji Kawahara, the official of the defunct Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
The statement was presented in a lawsuit filed by nuclear disaster evacuees demanding compensation from the government and Tepco. The trial, along with other similar lawsuits filed nationwide, is focused on whether the government and Tepco were able to foresee the huge tsunami triggered by the 2011 earthquake and take preventive measures beforehand.
The magnitude-9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, resulting in a blackout at the plant and a consequent loss of reactor cooling functions. The plant suffered multiple meltdowns and hydrogen blasts.
According to Kawahara’s statement, the agency accepted Tepco’s rejection because the long-term assessment did not sufficiently show that a large tsunami was a realistic threat to the plant’s operation. The company also said it would give consideration to tsunami measures in the future.
Kawahara defended the agency’s response as legitimate under nuclear safety regulations in force at the time.
Tepco said it would not comment on matters related to ongoing court proceedings.

January 29, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

Evacuations after Severe Nuclear Accidents by Dr Ian Fairlie,

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Evacuations after Severe Nuclear Accidents by Dr Ian Fairlie, January 27, 2018:

This article discusses three related matters –

  1. The experience of evacuations during the Fukushima nuclear disaster
  2. Whether lengthy evacuations from large cities are feasible?
  3. Some emergency plans for evacuations in North America

(a) Introduction

If another severe nuclear accident, such as Windscale (in 1957), Chernobyl (1986) or Fukushima (2011) were to occur then the adverse health effects would primarily depend on wind direction and on the nature of the accident. The main responses to a nuclear disaster are shelter, evacuation and stable iodine prophylaxis. The most important, in terms of preventing future cancer epidemics, is evacuation. This article is based on North American evacuation plans. Little is known of UK emergency evacuation plans as few, if any, are publicly available.

In North American plans, if a severe nuclear accident were to occur, able citizens would be requested to leave designated evacuation/no entry zones under their own steam and to find accommodation with family and friends in uncontaminated areas. At the same time, Government authorities would evacuate prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, care homes and certain schools.

Little, if any, consideration seems to have been given to how long such evacuations would last. For example, the large majority of the 160,000 people who left or were evacuated from Fukushima Prefecture, Japan during the accident in March 2011 are still living outside the Prefecture. Many are living in makeshift shelters eg shipping containers or prefab houses.

At present, the Japanese Government is attempting to force evacuees (by withdrawing state compensation) to return to less contaminated areas, with little success. Currently, ~7 years after the accident, an area of about 1,000 square km is still subject to evacuation and no entry orders. This compares with the area of 2,700 square km still evacuated and subject to no or restricted entry at Chernobyl ~32 years after the accident.

(b) Experience of the Fukushima Evacuation

In 2015 and 2016, the author visited Fukushima Prefecture in Japan with international study teams. These study tours were informative as they revealed information about the evacuations that differed from official accounts by TEPCO and the Japanese Government. From many discussions with local mayors, councillors, local health groups and small community groups, the following information was revealed.

The most common figure cited for evacuees is 160,000, of which 80,000 were evacuated by the authorities and the rest left on their own, often on foot, cycles and carts. It took about two weeks to evacuate all parts of the initial 20 km (later 30 km) radius evacuation areas around the Fukushima reactors.

The main reason for the delays was that many roads in the Prefecture were jammed with gridlocks which sometimes lasted 24 hours a day, for several days on end on some roads. These traffic jams were partly due to the poor existing road infrastructure and partly due to many road accidents. These jams were of such severity that safety crews for the Fukushima nuclear station had to be moved in and out mostly by helicopter. All public transport by trains and buses ceased. Mobile telephone networks and the internet crashed due to massive demand.

Thousands of people either refused to leave their homelands or returned later. Older farmers often refused to leave their animals behind or be moved from their ancestral lands. In at least a dozen recorded cases, older farmers slaughtered their cow herds rather than leave them behind (dairy cows need to be milked daily): they then committed suicide themselves in several instances (see next section).

According to Hachiya et al (2014), the disaster adversely affected the telecommunications system, water supplies, and electricity supplies including radiation monitoring systems. The local hospital system was dysfunctional; hospitals designated as radiation-emergency facilities were unable to operate because of damage from the earthquake and tsunami, and some were located within designated evacuation zones. Emergency personnel, including fire department personnel, were often asked to leave the area.

At hospitals, evacuations were sometimes carried out hurriedly with the unfortunate result that patients died due to intravenous drips being ripped out, medicaments being left behind, the absence of doctors and nurses who had left, and ambulance road accidents (see next section). Many hastily-allocated reception centres (often primary schools) were either unable or ill-equipped to deal with seriously ill patients.

Much confusion resulted when school children were being bussed home, while their parents were trying to reach schools to collect their children. Government officials, doctors, nurses, care workers, police, firepersons, ambulance drivers, emergency crews, teachers, etc faced the dilemma of whether to stay at their posts or return to look after their families. In the event, many emergency crews refused to enter evacuation zones for fear of radiation exposure.

Stable iodine was not issued to most people. Official evacuation plans were either non-existent or inadequate and, in the event, next to useless. In many cases, local mayors took the lead and ordered and supervised evacuations in their villages without waiting for orders or in defiance of them. Apparently, the higher up the administrative level, the greater the levels of indecision and lack of responsibility.

In the years after the accident, the longer-lasting effects of the evacuations have become apparent. These include family separations, marital break-ups, widespread depression, and further suicides. These are discussed in a recent publication (Morimatsu et al, 2017) which relates the sad, often eloquent, stories of the Fukushima people. They differ sharply from the accounts disseminated by TEPCO.

(c) Deaths from evacuations at Fukushima

Official Japanese Government data reveal that nearly 2,000 people died from the effects of evacuations necessary to avoid high radiation exposures from the Fukushima disaster, including from suicides http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/topics/main – cat2/sub – cat2 – 1/20141226_kanrenshi.pdf

The uprooting to unfamiliar areas, cutting of family ties, loss of social support networks, disruption, exhaustion, poor physical conditions and disorientation resulted in many people, in particular older people, apparently losing their will to live. www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/uploaded/attachment/62562.docx

The evacuations also resulted in increased levels of illnesses among evacuees such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus and dyslipidaemia (Hasegawa, 2016), psychiatric and mental health problems (Sugimoto et al, 2012), polycythaemia- a slow growing blood cancer (Sakai et al, 2014 and 2017), cardiovascular disease (Ohiro et al, 2017), liver dysfunction (Takahashi A et al, 2017) and severe psychological distress (Kunii et al, 2016).

Increased suicide rates occurred among younger and older people following the Fukushima evacuations, but the trends are unclear. A 2014 Japanese Cabinet Office report stated that, between March 2011 and July 2014, 56 suicides in Fukushima Prefecture were linked to the nuclear accident. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/26/national/social-issues/fukushimas-high-number-disaster-related-suicides-likely-due-nuclear-crisis-cabinet-office/#.Vcstm_mrGzl

(d) Should evacuations be ordered?

The above account should not be taken as arguments against evacuations as they constitute an important dose-saving and life-saving strategy during emergencies. Instead, the toll from evacuations should be considered part of the overall toll from nuclear accidents.

In future, deaths from evacuation-related ill-heath and suicides should be included in assessments of the fatality numbers from nuclear disasters. http://www.ianfairlie.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Summing-up-the-Effects-of-the-Fukushima-Nuclear-Disaster-10.pdf

For example, although about 2,000 deaths occurred during and immediately after the evacuations, it can be calculated from UNSCEAR (2013) collective dose estimates that about 5,000 fatal cancers will arise from the radiation exposures at Fukushima, ie taking into account the evacuations. Many more fatal cancers would have occurred if the evacuations had not been carried out.

There is an acute planning dilemma here: if evacuations are carried out (even with good planning) then illnesses and deaths will undoubtedly occur. But if they are not carried out, even more people could die. In such situations, it is necessary to identify the real cause of the problem. And here it is the existence of NPPs near large population centres. In such cases, consideration should be given to the early closure of the NPPs, and switching to safer means of electricity generation.

(e) Very Large Cities: Evacuations for lengthy periods?

If another severe nuclear accident were to occur, the death toll would depend on wind direction and whether the reactors were close to large cities. For example, Pickering NPP is located 20 miles from Toronto in Canada with an urban population of ~5 million; Indian Point NPP in the state of New York US is located 30 miles from New York City (~9 million); and Dungeness NPP is located 50 miles from London, UK (~9 million). These nuclear stations are just major examples of nuclear power stations located relatively close to urban centres, especially in the UK, US, and France.

If the worst were to occur and radioactive plumes from a severe nuclear accident reached large cities, would it be feasible to evacuate them quickly, and would it be feasible to do so for lengthy periods? There appears to be little literature on these questions, but it is expected that severe logistical problems would exist with the timely evacuation of millions of residents, workers and visitors from major cities,

(d) US Evacuation Plans after nuclear accidents – viability?

In the US, viable evacuation plans are a legal NRC requirement for continued reactor operation. But “viability” has often been a contentious legal issue in the past. http://articles.latimes.com/1987-02-07/news/mn-1732_1_davis-besse.

For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, this issue was at the centre of court battles at the Davis Besse reactor in Ohio and the Seabrook nuclear power station in New Hampshire. It played a critical role in the shutdown of the Shoreham reactor on Long Island, New York state. http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/14/us/around-the-nation-court-delays-license-for-ohio-nuclear-plant.html?mcubz=3.

After a major 1986 earthquake damaged the Perry reactor in Ohio on the north shore of Lake Erie, the then Ohio Governor, Richard Celeste, sued the US NRC to delay its issuance of the plant’s operating license on the grounds of the non-viability of evacuation of large population centres nearby. The US population within 80 km of Perry nuclear station was 2,300,000. Canadian populations would have been affected but were not included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Nuclear_Generating_Station#cite_note-7

An Ohio state commission concluded evacuation of nearby large cities during a disaster at Perry was not possible. http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2011/09/perry_nuclear_reactors_risk_of.html

 (e) Evacuation plans in Canada

In Canada, the Ontario Government has been developing evacuation plans for the Pickering nuclear station near Toronto since 1980, but whether the feasibility of such plans has kept up with the significant population growth around the station over 40 years is an open question.

Their draft plans have involved many Government Departments and hundreds of individuals. See https://www1.toronto.ca/city_of_toronto/office_of_emergency_management/files/pdf/nuclear_rsp.pdf

https://www.emergencymanagementontario.ca/english/beprepared/ontariohazards/nuclear/nuclear_plan_pickering.html

https://www.emergencymanagementontario.ca/english/beprepared/ontariohazards/nuclear/provincial_nuclear_emergency_response_plan.html#P2618_168284

However, the matter of evacuation is relatively undeveloped: future detailed plans remain to be drawn up by local governments in and near Toronto. This is perhaps unsurprising given the difficulties involved, but it appears that many issues remain to be resolved. For example,

  • How long would it take to untangle traffic jams exiting the city?
  • How long it would take for drivers to reach their emergency vehicles and school buses?
  • Would emergency crews enter contaminated zones to deal with accidents?
  • What happens when residents refuse to leave?
  • How to deal with residents who return?
  • How lomg would evacuations last? Months, years,  decades?

Another issue is what happens when people, who are asked not to leave, decide to evacuate?  In 1979, during the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg in Pennsylvania US, evacuation requests were made for approximately 3,500 vulnerable older people, children and pregnant women. The result was 140,000 immediately fled the area, thus creating large traffic jams which impeded the evacuations of vulnerable people. (Ziegler and Johnson, 1984).

The Canadian plans reveal that, in the event of a severe accident, evacuation will be for a radius of 20 km from the NPPs (in the direction of the plume). This differs from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s two emergency planning zones around NPPs – a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of 16 km, concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination. Secondly, an ingestion and direct radiation pathway zone of 80 km, primarily concerned with ingestion of contaminated foods/ liquids and ground radiation from deposited Cs-137. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Nuclear_Generating_Station#cite_note-6

(f) Conclusions

The experiences of Japanese evacuees after Fukushima discussed above are distressing to read. Their experiences were terrible, so much so that it requires Governments of large cities with nearby NPPs to reconsider their own situations and to address the question… what would happen if radioactive fallout heavily contaminated large areas of their city and required millions of residents to leave for long periods of time, eg several decades?

And how long would evacuations need to continue….weeks, months, years, or decades? The time length of evacuations is usually avoided in the evacuation plans seen so far. In reality, the answer would depend on Cs-137 concentrations in surface soils. The time period could be decades, as the half-life of the principal radionuclide, Cs-137, is 30 years. This raises the possibility of large cities becoming uninhabited ‘ghost’ towns like Tomioka, Okuma, Namie, Futaba, etc in Japan and Pripyat in Ukraine.

This bleak reality is hard to accept or even comprehend. However it is a matter that some Governments need to address after Fukushima.

Wheatley et al (2017) comprehensively examined the historical records of 216 nuclear accidents, mishaps and near-misses since the mid-1950s. They predicted the future frequencies and severities of nuclear accidents and concluded both were “unacceptably high”. Wheatley et al (2016) also concluded that the relative frequency with which nuclear events cascaded into nuclear disasters remained large enough that, when multiplied by their severity, the aggregate risk to society was “very high”. It is unsurprising that, after Fukushima, several major European states including Germany and Switzerland have decided to phase-out their nuclear reactors.

References

Hachiya M, Tominaga T, Tatsuzaki H, Akashi M (2004) Medical Management of the Consequences of the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident. Drug Dev Res. 2014 Feb;75(1):3-9.

Hasegawa A, Ohira T, Maeda M, Yasumura S Tanigawa K (2016) Emergency Responses and Health Consequences after the Fukushima Accident; Evacuation and Relocation. Clin Oncol (R Coll Radiol) 2016 Apr;28(4):237-44.

Kunii Y et al and Mental Health Group of the Fukushima Health Management Survey(2016) Severe Psychological Distress of Evacuees in Evacuation Zone Caused by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident: The Fukushima Health Management Survey. PLoS One. 2016 Jul 8;11(7).

Morimatsu A; Sonoda M; M.A.; M.K.; Edited by Fields, L (2017) “Seeking Safety: Speeches, Letters and Memoirs by Evacuees from the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. https://redkimono.org/fukushima-memoirs/

Ohira T and Fukushima Health Management Survey Group (2017) Changes in Cardiovascular Risk Factors After the Great East Japan Earthquake. Asia Pac J Public Health (2017) Mar;29(2_suppl):47S-55S.

Sakai A and Fukushima Health Management Survey Group (2017) Persistent prevalence of polycythaemia among evacuees 4 years after the Great East Japan Earthquake: A follow-up study. Prev Med Rep. 2017 Jan 12;5:251-256

Sakai A, Ohira T, Hosoya M, Ohtsuru A, Satoh H, Kawasaki Y, Suzuki H, Takahashi A, Kobashi G, Ozasa K, Yasumura S, Yamashita S, Kamiya K, Abe M (2014) Life as an evacuee after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident is a cause of polycythaemia: the Fukushima Health Management Survey. BMC Public Health 2014 Dec 23;14:1318.

Sugimoto S Krull S Nomura T Morita and M Tsubokura (2012) The voice of the most vulnerable: lessons from the nuclear crisis in Fukushima, Japan. Bull World Health Organ. 2012 Aug 1; 90(8): 629–630.

Takahashi A et al and Fukushima Health Management Survey Group (2017) Effect of evacuation on liver function after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident: The Fukushima Health Management Survey. J Epidemiol 2017 Apr;27(4):180-185.

UNSCEAR (2013) Levels and effects of radiation exposure due to the nuclear accident after the 2011 great east-Japan earthquake and tsunami. United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation . New York.

Weinisch K, Brueckner P (2015) The impact of shadow evacuation on evacuation time estimates for nuclear power plants. J Emerg Manag. 2015 Mar-Apr;13(2):145-58.

Wheatley S, Sovacool B, Sornette D (2016) Reassessing the safety of nuclear power. Energy Research & Social Science Volume 15, May 2016, 96-100.

Wheatley S, Sovacool B, Sornette D (2017) Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents. Risk Anal. 2017 Jan;37(1): 99-115.

Ziegler DJ and Johnson JH (1984) Evacuation Behaviour In Response To Nuclear Power Plant Accidents. The Professional Geographer Volume 36, 1984 – Issue 2 Pages 207-215.

http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/evacuations-severe-nuclear-accidents/

Another article from Ian Fairlie from August 2015 deserves another read:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201508201025992771/

January 29, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | 2 Comments

72nd financial payment for Tepco: 2.7 billion dollars

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72nd financial payment for Tepco: more than 8,000 billion yen loaned without interest
Tepco announces that it has received the 72nd financial payment from the government support structure which gives it money for compensation: 293.5 billion yen (2.7 billion dollars at the current rate). This amount is about 10 times higher than the last time and this money is loaned without interest.
Tepco has already received a total of 8,032.1 billion yen (73.6 billion dollars at the current rate) if we take into account this payment and this will not be enough.

January 29, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , , | Leave a comment

The corium of reactor 2 of Fukushima Daiichi is clearly visible

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Fukushima Blog by Pierre Fetet
Translation Hervé Courtois
 
It has been almost seven years since this deadly magma was created thanks to the imbecility of men. 7 years that we talk about it without ever really seeing it. And now Tepco, in January 2018, unveils, for the first time and in a very discreet manner, some very telling images of the corium of Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor 2.
 
Above illustration: screenshot made from a Tepco video
 
At first, all the media published again the photos provided by Tepco, where one sees for example a piece of a fuel assembly’s handle. It was deduced that the rest had melted but nothing more could be said.
 
In a second time, 3 days later, Tepco added a video of 3min34 that shows a selection of footage filmed inside the containment. In this video, we see very precisely corium flows that have solidified on metal structures under the reactor vessel.
 
The camera that filmed this hyper-radioactive material was designed to support 1000 Sieverts. But this device can not hide the ionizing radiation that forms many random clear points on the film.
 
The men who manipulated the probe outside the containment were certainly irradiated because the dose rate is still very high in the reactor. But Tepco has not yet released this information.
 
To summarize in images what happened in March 2011, the corium of reactor 2 passed through the reactor vessel, then made a 1 m wide large hole in the platform just below the reactor vessel:
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Source Tepco
Then it continued on its way encountering obstacles, forming stalactites in various places:
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4
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Screenshots of the Tepco video
Finally, it spread to the bottom of the containment by cutting into the concrete. And there, we lose track because the investigations could not go further.
 
Has it gone far off the ground plate ? Did it join the toric pool by the pipes connecting the enclosure and the pool?
Let’s not forget that an explosion was heard by technicians on March 15, 2011 at 6:10 from reactor 2. Steam explosion?
Do not forget that the water that is injected continuously to cool the corium does not fill the enclosure because it is no longer intact.The water is permanently contaminated by the corium, before reaching the bottom of the plant and the groundwater. Let’s not forget that this moving groundwater flows into the Pacific, despite the ice wall, which is not perfectly watertight.
 
It will be observed that Tepco has not yet dared to provide a picture of the hole in the reactor vessel. It’s like the explosion of reactor 4, there are things that are better not to be disclosed because they tarnish the image of civil nuclear.
 
In the same manner, the people in charge of communication preferred to broadcast uncertain images on the 19th of January rather than these very interesting images which I extracted from the video.
 
Certainly, robotics in a radioactive environment has made real progress, but that hides the reality: we have not yet invented the machines that can dismantle the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. And the forty years promise to complete this dismantling will certainly be insufficient.
 
Let’s not forget that there are all in all 3 coriums to recover and 3 swimming pools full of fuel to empty.
 
While Tepco “amuses” us with its technique, Tepco hopes to release 1 million tons of radioactive water in the Pacific that its has collected on the site, as if this ocean had not already suffered enough. It also makes it possible to forget the thousands of people suffering from thyroid disorders or other various pathologies due to radioactivity and the tens of thousands of displaced people who are being forced to return to contaminated territories.
 
Let’s wait for the big communication from TEPCO: the athletes of 2020 (Tokyo Olympics) must be amazed by the Japanese hyper-technicality so as to forget the basic dangers of ambient radioactivity.
 

January 28, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | 1 Comment

Simple Error or Calculated Revisionism?

From Majia’s Blog
I was reading a Mainichi news story this morning on airborne radiation levels near Fukushima Daiichi, which remain quite elevated.

What struck me about the reported story is the assertion that the government set the radiation exposure level at 1 millisievert a year after the accident:

Airborne Radiation Near Fukushima Nuke Plant Still Far Higher Than Gov’t Max. (Jan 18, 2018) The Mainichi https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180118/p2a/00m/0na/020000c

Following the March 2011 triple meltdown, the government set a long-term radiation exposure limit of 1 millisievert per year, which breaks down to an hourly airborne radiation dose of 0.23 microsieverts.  The NRA took airborne radiation readings in the Fukushima Prefecture towns of Futaba, Okuma, Namie and Tomioka, and the village of Katsurao. The highest reading registered in the previous year’s survey was 8.89 microsieverts per hour, in Katsurao.

What I find confusing and disconcerting is the fact that the government set the radiation level after the accident at 20 millisieverts a year, not 1.

Was a simple error involved in the reporting here? Or is revisionism under way?

One way I’ve seen propaganda operate over the last five years is for an untruth to be planted and repeated over and over again until it becomes part of the public record as a “truth.”

Yet, the 20 millisievert a year limit has circulated widely in the media as well and will be difficult to replace (e.g., see here https://theconversation.com/acceptable-risk-is-a-better-way-to-think-about-radiation-exposure-in-fukushima-56190).

Was this an error or is it something else entirely?

http://majiasblog.blogspot.fr/2018/01/simple-error-or-calculated-revisionism.html

 

January 27, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , | Leave a comment

Fukushima Unit 2 in the News Again

From Majia’s Blog

TEPCO tells us they have identified the remains of “part of a nuclear fuel assembly” scattered at the bottom of unit 2’s containment vessel:

CHIKAKO KAWAHARA January 20, 2018 Melted nuclear fuel seen inside No. 2 reactor or at Fukushima plant. The Asahi Shimbun http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201801200017.html

A remote-controlled camera captured what appears to be melted fuel inside a reactor of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. The released footage showed pebble-like nuclear fuel debris and part of a nuclear fuel assembly scattered at the bottom of a containment vessel, located just below the pressure vessel.

Where is the rest of the fuel?

Fukushima’s reactor 2 held quite a bit more than a single fuel assembly. According to a November 16 report by TEPCO titled, ‘Integrity Inspection of Dry Storage Casks and Spent Fuel at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station,’ as of March 2010 the Daini site held 1,060 tons of spent uranium fuel. The total spent uranium fuel inventory at Daiichi in March 2010 was reported as 1,760 tons. The 2010 report asserts that approximately 700 spent fuel assemblies are generated every year. The report specifies that Daiichi’s 3,450 assemblies are stored in each of the six reactor’s spent fuel pools. The common spent fuel pool contains 6291 assemblies.

Unit 2 has been in the news. Last February, Akio Matsumura described a potential catastrophe at Unit 2:

Akio Matsumura (2017, February 11). The Potential Catastrophe of Reactor 2 at Fukushima Daiichi: What Effect for the Pacific and the US? Finding the Missing Link, http://akiomatsumura.com/2017/02/the-potential-catastrophe-of-reactor-2-at-fukushima-daiichi.html, accessed November 20, 2017

It can hardly be said that the Fukushima accident is heading toward a solution. The problem of Unit 2, where a large volume of nuclear fuels remain, is particularly crucial. Reactor Unit 2 started its commercial operation in July 1974. It held out severe circumstances of high temperature and high pressure emanating from the March 11, 2011, accident without being destroyed. However, years long use of the pressure vessel must have brought about its weakening due to irradiation. If it should encounter a big earth tremor, it will be destroyed and scatter the remaining nuclear fuel and its debris, making the Tokyo metropolitan area uninhabitable.

Unit 2 has been in the news because of persistent high radiation levels. In Feb 2017, TEPCO reported measuring radiation levels of 530 SIEVERTS AN HOUR (10 will kill you) and described a 2-meter hole in the grating beneath unit 2’s reactor pressure vessel (1 meter-square hole found in grating):

Radiation level at Fukushima reactor highest since 2011 disaster; grating hole found. The Mainichi, February 2, 2017, http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170202/p2g/00m/0dm/087000c

TOKYO (Kyodo) — The radiation level inside the containment vessel of the No. 2 reactor at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex stood at 530 sieverts per hour at a maximum, the highest since the 2011 disaster, the plant operator said Thursday.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. also announced that based on image analysis, a hole measuring 2 meters in diameter has been found on a metal grating beneath the pressure vessel inside the containment vessel and a portion of the grating was distorted.

…The hole could have been caused by nuclear fuel that penetrated the reactor vessel as it overheated and melted due to the loss of reactor cooling functions in the days after a powerful earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 hit northeastern Japan.

According to the image analysis, about 1 square meter of the grating was missing. 

This extraordinarily high radiation in unit 2 was reported by the Japanese media in January 2017 as presenting a barrier to the decommissioning timeline:

MASANOBU HIGASHIYAMA (January 31, 2017) Images indicate bigger challenge for TEPCO at Fukushima plant. The Asahi Shimbun, http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201701310073.html

If confirmed, the first images of melted nuclear fuel at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant show that Tokyo Electric Power Co. will have a much more difficult time decommissioning the battered facility.

The condition of what is believed to be melted fuel inside the No. 2 reactor at the plant appears far worse than previously thought.

…High radiation levels have prevented workers from entering the No. 2 reactor, as well as the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors at the plant.

UNIT 2 HISTORY

Looking back at testimony by Masao Yoshida, Fukushima’s plant manager, and media coverage of that testimony, I see that unit 2 was identified as posing the greatest immediate risk, although the explosion at unit 3 was clearly larger (this discrepancy is perplexing).  Here is an excerpt of the testimony published by the Asahi Shimbun:

Yoshida feared nuclear ‘annihilation’ of eastern Japan, testimony shows. (September 12, 2014) THE ASAHI SHIMBUN http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201409120034

Plant manager Masao Yoshida envisioned catastrophe for eastern Japan in the days following the outbreak of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, according to his testimony, one of 19 released by the government on Sept. 11. . . .

. . . In his testimony, Yoshida described the condition of the No. 2 reactor at the Fukushima plant between the evening of March 14, 2011, and the next morning: “Despite the nuclear fuel being completely exposed, we’re unable to reduce pressure. Water can’t get in either.”

Yoshida recalled the severity of the situation. “If we continue to be unable to get water in, all of the nuclear fuel will melt and escape from the containment vessel, and radioactive substances from the fuel will spread to the outside,” he said. Fearing a worst-case scenario at the time, Yoshida said, “What we envisioned was that the entire eastern part of Japan would be annihilated.”

You can read more excerpts from the 400-pages of testimony published by the Asahi Shimbun, which both applauds and critiques the panel investigation of the disaster that produced the testimonies:

The Yoshida Testimony: The Fukushima Nuclear Accident as Told by Plant Manager Masao Yoshida The Asahi Shimbun http://www.asahi.com/special/yoshida_report/en/

Although the panel interviewed as many as 772 individuals involved, it failed to dig deep into essential aspects of the disaster because it made it a stated policy that it would not pursue the responsibility of individuals.

What is true about unit 2? Yoshida provides this account from the article cited immediately above:

At around 6:15 a.m. on March 15, 2011, four days after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, a round table presided by Yoshida in an emergency response room on the second floor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant’s quake-proof control center building heard two important reports, almost simultaneously, from front-line workers.

One said that pressure in the suppression chamber, or the lower part of the containment vessel for the No. 2 reactor, had vanished. The other said an explosive sound had been heard.

Question: Well, this is not necessarily in the No. 2 reactor, but sometime around 6 a.m. or 6:10 a.m. on March 15, pressure in the No. 2 reactor’s suppression chamber, for one thing, fell suddenly to zero. And around the same time, something …

Yoshida: An explosive sound.

http://majiasblog.blogspot.fr/2018/01/fukushima-unit-2-in-news-again.html

January 27, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

FUKUSHIMA: Where are the People? – Arnie Gundersen on the Ongoing Human Toll of the Nuclear Disaster

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Please go listen his week’s feature on Nuclear Hotseat podcast:
 
Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds Energy Education, focuses on the human toll inflicted by the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. Recorded December 2, 2017, at DePaul University, at an event sponsored by Chicago’s Nuclear Energy Information Service, or NEIS.
 
http://nuclearhotseat.com/2018/01/24/fukushima-where-are-the-people-arnie-gundersen-on-the-ongoing-human-toll-of-the-nuclear-disaster-nh-344/

January 24, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

FUKU B.S.

Are we stupid enough to forget that Tepco has always been lying since day one and that for now 7 years ?
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Yesterday I was amazed to see a website which has been covering the Fukushima disaster for the past 7 years, suddenly for the first time complaining that Tepco is withholding some of the meltdown data collected during Tepco’s recent probe inside Fukushima reactor 2.
Amazed because that particular website has been posting now for the past 7 years only reposts of Tepco’s official reports as if those were the holy truth, never before questioning Tepco’s data to be reliable or not…
Come on where have you been ? All the serious Fukushima watchers who followed closely this ongoing disaster since its beginning know one sure fact:
Tepco has always been lying, that since day one. Lying twisting the facts and numbers, lying by omission, sometimes photoshopping their released photos and editing their video footages.
Those Tepco’s released reports have always been just the sweetened B.S. version that Tepco feeds us, wants us to swallow hook and sinker.
Their damage control, hired advertising and P.R. company, Dentsu corporation, coaching them to write and schedule those B.S. reports to cover-up the hard facts and numbers and to cushion the unsettled ongoing disaster facts to the eyes of the general public, locally, nationwide and internationally.
The nuclear industry has always been a lying business, covering up the hard facts and lying to the public. In that Tepco is no different than the other corporations involved in that harmful business. But since Tepco has been lying abundantly non-stop for now 7 years, it has developed it to an art form level, and for that Tepco rightly deserves the Pinocchio award of the nuclear industry.
A reminder, there is no independent commission on location, all the data coming out of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant site are what they agree to feed us, after being properly vetoed by Tepco, the IAEA, the Japanese government, and Dentsu. So all the main stream media articles have the same one and unique source : Tepco.
So any information released by Tepco should be considered tainted and biased.
Tepco cannot successfully filter the accumulated radioactive water on site but it does efficiently filter all informations coming out from there, diluting the truth with lies so as  to cover up the real gravity of the situation on location.
Right from the beginning Tepco always lied, and still does, and I believe that Tepco will not change its modus operandi.
Only a fool would fully believe those Tepco’s B.S. reports to be true, as if they were Holy Bible, and keep reposting them helping thus to build Tepco’s credibility.
That website has been wasting 7 years helping Tepco to spread its B.S.
Such time would have been more usefully spent if used to spread the voices of the Fukushima victims on location and of the Tohoku residents organizing themselves to measure the radiation that they have now to live with.
It took that blogger on that website 7 years to finally notice that Tepco was witholding data ? Come on, stop being a moron !

January 24, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 2: new investigation

Tepco has just released the results of an investigation made in the containment of reactor 2. Nothing really new, apart from a found assembly element, we are waiting for radioactivity measurements now.
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A new 10-hour investigation was conducted in the Fukuishima Daiichi reactor 2 containment enclosure, according to a report released by Tepco on January 19, 2018. However, Tepco does not indicate the date of the operation. The images and measurements were taken using a 13 meter probe with a camera. TEPCO will only broadcast the radioactivity measurements later.
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Photo: an assembly element was found
According to this document, TEPCO gives two main informations:
– The entire bottom of the base of the reactor base is covered with deposits of sandy and clay.
– Some fuel assembly components have fallen to the base of the reactor base and are considered fuel debris.
As usual, Tepco does not use the word “corium”. It does not speak more about the radioactive environment of the place which is lethal (a last year made measure at this place was 530 Sieverts) but promises to return soon. I will update this page when the information falls.
The deposit of sandy and clay types is what is at the bottom of the enclosure and which had already been spotted last year around the pedestal. This vase prevents a clear view of the bottom of the enclosure because the slightest movement of the camera, the water is troubled.
For the first time, Tepco discloses a diagram showing the inside of the reactor pedestal. We see :
– an upper platform, which was already known, which allows access to control rods located just below the reactor vessel. This, according to the February 2017 report, is pierced with a hole 1 meter in diameter. It is the mass of the corium coming from the tank during the meltdown that made this hole.
– an intermediate platform that Tepco claims has not been piereced (but the diagram does not show it in full)
– An annular lower platform bordering the wall of the pedestal, which Tepco also claims that it has no hole. But, same remark, the diagram shows only half.
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The piece of assembly that emerges very clearly from a pile of various materials is an upper tie plate. It is surmounted by a bar (“bail handle”), a kind of handle for moving the assembly using an articulated arm. This photo makes it possible to deduce that at least one whole assembly has passed through the tank, which implies that the tank has a hole of at least the width of an assembly (approximately 50 cm). The probe has certainly taken pictures of this hole but Tepco do not release them.

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Type of assembly element found on the lower platform of the No. 2 reactor pedestal.
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This element is the upper part that we see for example in these assemblies of the reactor pool
Toshiba’s probe, during its presentation in Yokohama, December 22, 2017. The telescopic arm carries a panoramic camera.
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Here are the photos of the interior of the BR2 containment building released by Tepco on January 19, 2018:
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Here are some pages from the report on the same date:
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Tepco’s full report of 19 January 2018

[pdf] HANDOUTS_180119_01-E

Source : http://www.fukushima-blog.com/2018/01/reacteur-2-de-fukushima-daiichi-nouvelle-investigation.html

Special thanks to Pierre Fetet of the Fukushima Blog

Translation Hervé Courtois (Dun Renard)

January 21, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , , | 2 Comments

TEPCO claims to have found ‘fuel debris’ in No. 2 reactor

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TEPCO finds ‘fuel debris’ in No. 2 reactor
 
The operator of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says it has found what looks like fuel debris in the plant’s No. 2 reactor.
The nuclear accident occurred in March, 2011.
 
Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, on Friday looked inside the containment vessel of the No. 2 reactor.
 
TEPCO confirmed, for the first time, the existence of chunks that are believed to be a mixture of melted nuclear fuel and parts of bindings.
 
The company plans to determine how to remove the debris based on the results of the investigation.
 
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20180119_34/

January 19, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

Is Japan ready to trust Tepco with nuclear power again?

The nuclear operator has been granted permission to restart two of its reactors on the Sea of Japan coast, revenues from which it needs to offset massive compensation payments stemming from the Fukushima disaster
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Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station.
At a quiet end-of-year meeting, Japan’s nuclear power regulators recently gave the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) official permission to restart two of its nuclear reactors on the Sea of Japan coast – reactors which have been idle for the better part of ten years.
This was not the first time the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) had approved a restart – it has okayed 12 reactors, owned by four utilities, since coming into being in 2013. But it was the first time the authorities had openly questioned a utility’s competence to operate a reactor – any reactor.
The authority added “eligibility” to its list of concerns – meaning Tepco’s eligibility to run a nuclear plant. “Tepco is different from other power companies,” said former chairman Shunichi Tanaka.
Tepco isn’t just any utility. It owned and operated the four reactors destroyed in the March 11, 2011 “triple disaster” of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima prefecture. It also owns seven undamaged reactors on the opposite side of Japan, which it desperately wants to begin producing power – and revenue – to offset its enormous liabilities.
The nuclear authority’s actions are the first approvals it has extended to operators of boiling water reactors, or BWRs – the same type of reactor that suffered multiple meltdowns in the Fukushima accident. BWRs also have some safety concerns that are unique to them. About half of Japan’s 40-odd currently-operable nuclear power plants are BWRs.
The seven Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plants on the Sea of Japan coast constitute the largest commercial nuclear power complex in the world. Each is capable of producing enough electricity to light up a small city. They were shut down after the 2007 earthquake and then shut down again after 3/11.
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Signs from an anti-nuclear protest against the Japanese government in Tokyo.
 
Tepco’s management is eager – to say the least – to get at least the two reactors (Units 6 and 7) approved and on-line in order to produce revenues that will offset the massive compensation payments stemming from the disaster, and to cover the cost of imported fossil fuels.
Returning at least two reactors to operations would yield about 200 billion yen (US$1.8 billion) in added revenues. It has been a part of the utility’s business plan almost from the time of the accident, without much expectation – until late last month – that it could be realized.
Tepco’s President Tomoaki Kobayakawa testified before the authority several times last summer, reassuring the commissioners of Tepco’s commitment to safety. He also said he would see the decommissioning of the Fukushima plants “through to the end.”
He turned the question of competence around by insisting that his utility needs the revenue from operating the two K-K plants so that it can fulfill its responsibilities to the Fukushima safety and decommissioning project.
“It seems Tepco’s response on competency is to shift the focus to ‘financial competency,’” said Caitlin Stronell of the Citizens Nuclear Information Center. In any event, the authority seemed persuaded enough to give a green light to a restart, despite the lingering fears from the Fukushima disaster.
Tepco says approximately 6,000 staff and contract workers are laboring at the Kashiwazaki plant, or almost as many workers as are employed in the decommissioning activities at Fukushima. Among other safety features, they have erected a 50 meter-high seawall to guard against future tsunamis.
Hydrogen re-combiners have been installed to prevent a repeat of the hydrogen explosions that rocked the Fukushima Daiichi units. They have also stored 20,000 tons of water in a nearby hilltop reservoir to provide cooling water using gravity, rather than diesel pumps, to keep cores from melting in any loss-of-coolant accident.
Tepco’s operations on the Sea of Japan were compromised in 2007, when the site was hit by the Chuetsu Earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter Scale.
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That earthquake caused relatively little structural damage and never came close to a Fukushima-style meltdown. However, it was discovered that the severity of the quake exceeded the design criteria, which resulted in a lengthy shutdown for all seven reactors as Tepco struggled to meet stricter rules.
The utility was in the process of bringing three reactors back on-line when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in March 2011, putting the big seven out of operation once again and eventually shutting down all of Japan’s commercial reactors.
Successive governors of Niigata prefecture have taken a very cautious position on restarting any of the K-K plants. Three-term Governor Hirohiko Izumida always maintained that he would not approve any restart until the exact causes of the Fukushima disaster are fully known. His recently elected successor, Ryuichi Yomeyama, has the same policy.
This will continue to be an issue for Tepco, for in this area of policy, the national government follows the advice of the governor.
http://www.atimes.com/article/japan-ready-trust-tepco-nuclear-power/

January 18, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

Airborne radiation near Fukushima nuke plant still far higher than gov’t max

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In this July 27, 2017 file photo, contaminated water storage tanks are seen on the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant grounds, in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture.
 
Airborne radiation in “difficult to return” zones around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant was as high as around 8.48 microsieverts per hour as of summer last year, according to data presented by the government nuclear watchdog on Jan. 17.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) released the results of the July-September 2017 measurements at a regular meeting on the day. The highest reading was taken in Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture — one of the municipalities hosting the Fukushima No. 1 plant.
Following the March 2011 triple meltdown, the government set a long-term radiation exposure limit of 1 millisievert per year, which breaks down to an hourly airborne radiation dose of 0.23 microsieverts.
The NRA took airborne radiation readings in the Fukushima Prefecture towns of Futaba, Okuma, Namie and Tomioka, and the village of Katsurao. The highest reading registered in the previous year’s survey was 8.89 microsieverts per hour, in Katsurao.
Some of the NRA members at the Jan. 17 meeting pointed to study results showing that human exposure doses are relatively small compared to airborne doses. Regarding the calculation that an annual dose of 1 millisievert is equivalent to hourly exposure of 0.23 microsieverts, NRA Chairman Toyoshi Fuketa stated, “That was decided right at the start of the nuclear disaster, so it can’t be helped that it’s a cautious number.” He added, “If we don’t revise (that calculation) properly, it could hinder evacuees’ return home.”

January 18, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | 1 Comment

Tepco to resume attempt to probe damaged reactor at Fukushima No. 1 plant

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The operator of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has said it will resume late this week a survey of the crippled No. 2 reactor using a telescopic arm, hoping to obtain images of melted nuclear fuel.
In Friday’s survey, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. aims to investigate the area beneath the reactor’s pressure vessel, through which nuclear fuel is believed to have melted. The step is needed to help develop a plan for removing the fuel for the ultimate decommissioning of the plant.
Tepco, in announcing the move on Monday, said it will insert a 13-meter long pipe at the bottom of the pressure vessel and then deploy a camera at the tip of the pipe to film the bottom of the outer primary containment vessel, where fuel is believed to have accumulated.
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The device will also measure the temperature and radioactivity levels in the area. The survey is expected to take one day.
In January last year, an inserted camera with a limited view captured possible melted fuel in the interior of the No. 2 reactor.
The following month, Tepco attempted a survey using a scorpion-shaped robot inside the unit, but the effort ended in failure due to a technical flaw.
Nearly seven years after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that wrecked the plant, details of the damage to the reactors remain largely unknown due to high levels of radiation.
Reactors 1, 2 and 3 at the four-reactor plant suffered core meltdowns due to a loss of cooling water in the world’s worst nuclear crisis since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

January 18, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

Should GE’s Mark 1 Nuclear Reactor Be Recalled Worldwide Like a Faulty Unsafe Automobile?

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The following news piece represents the fifth in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to the continuously-unfolding crisis on the ground at Fukushima Daiichi in eastern Japan. The transcript is as follows:

Josh Cunnings (Narrator): Good evening and thanks for joining us at the EnviroNews USA news desk for the fifth segment in our 15-part mini series, Nuclear Power in Our World Today. In our previous episodes, we explored several Manhattan-era messes in the United States, but tonight, we begin by discussing the troublesome situation on the ground at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on Japan’s eastern coast.

Now, if you trace Japan’s troubles back far enough, then once again, you’re going to find yourself right back here in the good old U S of A — in the state of California — during the 1970s — with General Electric at the helm.

The project that we’re referring to was the development of the Mark 1 boiling water nuclear reactor — the very same model which melted entirely in units 1, 2 and 3 at Fukushima.

Now, when it comes to people who are qualified to talk about the many issues and problems surrounding the Mark 1, few could be more capable than former nuclear reactor operator and engineer Arnie Gundersen. As a matter of fact, the distinguished expert is all too familiar with the ins and outs of the design.

So, without further ado, here’s another excerpt from this simply fantastic interview with Arnie Gundersen by EnviroNews USA Editor-in-Chief Emerson Urry. Take a listen.

Urry: And so speaking about these reactors and the technical components — you were actually involved with the Mark 1. And I remember reading that some of the engineers that worked on that project had resigned way back then in 1972, yet General Electric was still apparently willing to pimp this reactor out essentially, all over the planet. What can you tell us about the Mark 1 reactor, and your understanding of what happened back then with these engineers, and how General Electric has been able to spread this reactor to all corners of the globe, with really no consequence. We saw Greenpeace had started a petition to make General Electric and Hitachi, and maybe a couple others of the service providers, actually pay for the damage there, but has there been any culpability? [Editor’s Note: Urry intended to say “1976” not “1972” in this passage]

Gundersen: Fukushima Daiichi has four units — one, two, three, four — and they’re all Mark 1 designs. In addition, there’s another 35 in the world, including 23 here in America, that are the same design. A group of three engineers quit General Electric in 1976 because they realized the design was not safe. Two of the three are still alive and living here in California, and they are my personal heroes. They understood before any of us did how seriously we really didn’t understand what it was that the engineers were doing.

Excerpt From Greenpeace Video With Dale Bridenbaugh

Bridenbaugh: My boss said to me, that if we have to shut down all of these Mark 1 plants, it will probably mean the end of GE’s nuclear business forever.

I started with GE immediately after I got out of college as a mechanical engineer, and I started out as a field engineer responsible for supervising the construction and startup of power plant equipment across the United States.

In the first ten or fifteen plants that GE sold of the large-scale commercial boiling water reactors, they did so on what’s called a “turnkey” basis. They built the whole thing, get it operating, and then they turn the key over to the utility, and the utility then is theoretically capable of operating it to produce electricity.

Fukushima 1 was basically a turnkey plant provided to TEPCO by GE. In 1975 the problem developed that became known at the Mark 1 plants — the some 24 Mark 1 units in the United States, and also those overseas, including the Fukushima units — had not taken into account all of the pressures and forces that are called hydrodynamic loads that could be experienced by the pressure suppression units as a result of a major accident. We didn’t really know if the containments would be able to contain the event that they were supposedly designed to contain.

Not only were there the containment problems that existed with the Mark 1s, which I was very familiar with, but there were a number of other problems with the GE boiling water reactors and with the nuclear program in general. And I got disillusioned with the speed with which these problems were being addressed, and then in the middle of the night I called my boss at GE and I said, “My recommendation is that we tell the U.S. utilities that GE cannot support the continued operation of these plants.” And my boss said to me, “Well, it can’t be that bad Dale, and keep in mind that if we have to shut down all of these Mark 1 plants it will probably mean the end of GE’s nuclear business forever.” That conversation occurred at about midnight on January 26, and that clinched my decision on resignation on February 2.

The accident that occurred in Fukushima, it’s some two years later now, and we don’t really know the condition of the reactor core; we don’t really know the condition of the containment. The radiation levels are so high inside the containment that it’s very difficult to get in there. It will be years before that plant site is cleaned up.

The damage that has been experienced at Fukushima is so great and so extensive that I don’t think any one utility, certainly TEPCO, has the capability to be able to pay for all of that. So, it becomes a national issue. I think it would be a good idea to not have reliance on nuclear units. They’re very risky enterprises. And I would like to see a world that is provided with electricity by alternative energy supplies.

Gundersen: When Maggie [Gundersen] and I were walking one day in February [a month] before the [Fukushima] accident, she said to me, “Where is the next accident going to be?” And I said, “I don’t know where, but I know it’s going to be in a Mark 1 reactor.” And, I’m not alone. It’s not like I was clairvoyant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had a report that they published in 1982, and they said there was an 85 percent chance, if there was a meltdown in a Mark 1 reactor, that the containment would explode. The writing was on the wall.

Urry: How many of these things are still out there in operation today?

Gundersen: In the U.S., all 23 continue to run, and as a matter of fact, the staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended some pretty substantial improvements, and the politically appointed commissioners, who have no nuclear background, overrode the staff and said, “no, we’re not going to do those changes.” So, the Commission has been actively involved in thwarting the safety improvements that everybody knows are needed.

Script for General Electric Television Commercial

Voice of Child Narrator: My mom, she makes underwater fans that are powered by the moon. My mom makes airplane engines that can talk. My mom makes hospitals you can hold in your hand. My mom can print amazing things, right from her computer. My mom makes trains that are friends with trees. My mom works at GE.

Cunnings: If GE, a company that successfully weaseled its way out of paying any taxes whatsoever in the U.S. wants to boast night and day on the mainstream media airwaves — the same mainstream media which it once nearly monopolized — that it “brings good things to life” and makes “underwater fans that are powered by the moon” and locomotives that “talk to trees” perhaps the company should also bother to mention its own manufacture and sales of faulty nuclear power reactors that quite frankly, bring good things to an early death.

Oh, and by the way, the company not only builds the reactors that breed uranium into plutonium for bombs, oh no, its role goes much deeper. In fact, GE is in the business of manufacturing the actual bombs too. “We bring good things to life.” Seriously? Let’s get real.

Documentary Film Trailer for Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment

Narrator: The Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a massive 570-square-mile facility, where General Electric made plutonium for the U.S. military.

Subject #1: I began loosing my hair, which I had long naturally curly hair.

Narrator: [Of] 28 families who lived in a small area near Hanford, 27 of them had suffered severe health problems.

Subject #1: … and the physician said that I had the most severe case of hypothyroidism he’d ever seen in his career…

Narrator: … all of which are associated with exposure to high doses of radiation.

Subject #2: We took twice the amount that the Children of Chernobyl took. There was absolutely no warning. They came and said, “You’re safe.”

Narrator: According to the business press, General Electric is the most powerful company in the United States, and GE is rapidly expanding its control of markets worldwide.

Subject #3: I’d like to wake Jack Welch up in the middle of his atomic power lab; let him explain why their husbands died of cancer related to the asbestos.

Subject #4: I find their ads disgusting. I find that ad disgusting.

Narrator: Four million individuals and 450 organizations in the U.S., Canada and around the world, have decided to join the GE boycott.

Subject #4: Are you asking us to clean up your toxic waste again!?

Subject #5: What GE does is not bring good things to life. They mislead the American public.

Subject #6: General Electric is in this business of building weapons for profit — not for patriotism, not for the country, not for the flag, but for profit.

Ronald Reagan: Until next week then, good night for General Electric.

Excerpt from Fairewinds Associates Video, Featuring Arnie Gundersen on the GE Mark 1 Reactor

Gundersen: This picture of a boiling water reactor containment is taken in the early 70s. It was taken at Browns Ferry [Nuclear Plant], but it’s identical to the Fukushima reactors. Now, let me walk you through that as I talk about it.

There are two pieces to the containment, the top looks like an upside down light bulb, and that’s called a “drywell.” Inside there is where the nuclear reactor is. Down below is this thing that looks like a doughnut, and that’s called the “torus,” and that’s filled almost all the way with water. The theory is that if the reactor breaks, steam will shoot out through the light bulb into the doughnut, creating lots of bubbles, which will reduce the pressure. Well, this thing’s called a “pressure suppression containment.” Now, at the bottom of that picture is the lid for the containment. When it’s fully assembled, that lid sits on top. The containment’s about an inch thick. Inside it is the nuclear reactor that’s about eight inches thick, and we’ll get to that in a minute.

Well, this reactor containment was designed in the early 70s, late 60s, and by 1972 a lot of people had concerns with the containment. So, in the early 70s, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recognized this containment design was flawed. In the mid-70s, they realized the forces were in the wrong direction; instead of down, they were up, and large straps were put into place.

Well, then in the 80s, there was another problem that developed. After Three Mile Island engineers began to realize that this containment could explode from a hydrogen buildup. That hadn’t been factored into the design in the 70s either. Well, what they came up with for this particular containment was a vent in the side of it.

Now, a vent is designed to let the pressure out, and a containment is designed to keep the pressure in. So, rather than contain this radioactivity, engineers realized that if the containment were to survive an explosion they’d have to open a hole in the side of it called a “containment vent.”

Well, these vents were added in the late 1980s. And they weren’t added because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission demanded it. What the industry did to avoid that was create an initiative and they put them in voluntarily. Now, that sounds really proactive, but in fact, it wasn’t. If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission required it, it would have opened up the license on these plants to citizens and scientists who had concerns. Well, by having the industry voluntarily put these vents in it did two things: One, it did not allow any public participation in the process to see if they were safe. And the second thing is that it didn’t allow the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to look at these vents and say they were safety related. In fact, it sidetracked the process entirely.

Well, these vents were never tested until Fukushima. This containment was never tested until Fukushima. And it failed three times out of three tries. In retrospect, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Looking at the procedures for opening these vents, in the event electricity fails, requires someone fully clad in radiation gear to go down to an enormous valve in the bowels of the plant and turn the crank 200 times to open it. Now, can you imagine, in the middle of a nuclear accident, with steam and explosions and radiation, expecting an employee to go into the plant and turn a valve 200 times to open it?

So, that was the second Band-Aid fix that failed, on a containment that 40 years earlier, was designed too small.

Well, with all this in mind, I think we really need to ask the question: should the Mark 1 containment even be allowed to continue to operate? The NRC’s position is: well, we can make the vents stronger. I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Now, all those issues that I just talked about are related to the Mark 1 containment. The next thing I’d like to talk about is the reactor that sits inside that containment. So, that light bulb and that doughnut are the containment structure; inside that is where the nuclear reactor is.

Now, on a boiling water reactor, the nuclear control rods come in at the bottom; on a pressurized water reactor they come in from the top. All of the reactors at Fukushima, and 35 in the world in this design, have control rods that come in from the bottom. Now, that poses a unique problem and an important difference that the NRC is not looking at right now.

If the core melts in a pressurized water reactor, there’s no holes in the bottom of the nuclear reactor, and it’s a very thick eight to 10-inch piece of metal that the nuclear reactor core would have to melt through. But that didn’t happen at Fukushima.

Fukushima was a boiling water reactor; it’s got holes in the bottom. Now, when the nuclear core lies on the bottom of a boiling water reactor like Fukushima, or the ones in the U.S., or others in Japan, it’s easier for the core to melt through because of those 60 holes in the bottom of the reactor. It doesn’t have to melt through eight inches of steel. It just has to melt through a very thin-walled pipe and scoot out the hole in the bottom of the nuclear reactor. I’m not the only one to recognize that holes at the bottom of a boiling water reactor are a problem.

Last week an email came out that was written by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission right after the Fukushima accident, where they recognize that if there’s a core meltdown, and it’s now lying as a blob on the bottom of the nuclear reactor, these holes in the bottom of the reactor form channels, through which the hot molten fuel can get out a lot easier and a lot quicker than the thick pressurized water reactor design. Now, this is a flaw in any boiling water reactor, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not recognizing that the likelihood of melting through a boiling water reactor like Fukushima, is a lot more significant than the likelihood of melting through a pressurized water reactor.

The third area is an area we’ve discussed in-depth in a previous video, and that’s that the explosion at Unit 3 was a detonation, not a deflagration. It has to do with the speed of the shockwave. The shockwave at Unit 3 traveled faster than the speed of sound, and that’s an important distinction that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the entire nuclear industry, is not looking at.

A containment can’t withstand a shockwave that travels faster than the speed of sound. Yet, all containments are designed assuming that doesn’t happen. At Fukushima 3 it did happen, and we need to understand how it happened and mitigate against it in the future on all reactors.

Now, I measured that. I scaled the size of the building versus the speed at which the explosion occurred, and I can determine that that shockwave traveled at around 1,000 feet per second. The speed of sound is around 600 feet per second. So, it traveled at supersonic speeds that can cause dramatic damage to a containment. They’re not designed to handle it. Yet, the NRC is not looking at that. [Editor’s Note: Gundersen intended to say “miles per hour,” not “feet per second” in this video.]

So, we’ve got three key areas where the NRC, and the nuclear industry, don’t want people to look, and that’s: 1) should this Mark 1 containment even be allowed to continue to operate?

Cunnings: In America, when a vehicle, or even a part in a vehicle, is deemed unsafe for the population at large, the government forces automakers into costly and multi-billion dollar recalls — and the mainstream media does its part by shaming those culprit companies, relentlessly beating them to a bloody pulp for their negligence and their reckless endangerment of innocent American citizens.

The Mark 1 nuclear reactor is an extremely outdated model with obvious design flaws. Apparently, it has so many problems, that as Mr. Gundersen pointed out, three of the engineers who originally designed it ended up resigning because they knew it wasn’t safe — and that was well before Three Mile Island or Chernobyl ever happened — long before the public had experienced the fright, and health consequences of a full-scale nuclear meltdown.

Surely, after the triple meltdowns at Fukushima, Japan, it appears the Mark 1 is far from safe, yet here in the U.S., the government continues to let operators drive this faulty nuclear vehicle down the road — knowing full well that it could fall apart and crash, harming, or even killing innocent Americans at any time.

Perhaps the government should consider holding nuke-plant manufacturers, like GE, to the same standards it demands from automakers, and punish them with shameful recalls when they market a piece of faulty equipment that poses any danger to the public.

So, just what would a recall of the Mark 1 nuclear reactor look like, and who would issue or enforce it? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission? And how could enough political will ever be mustered for such a massive undertaking? It would surely cost more than any auto recall ever has, but frankly, who should give a damn (except for General Electric’s shareholders of course)? I mean, if it ain’t safe, then it just ain’t safe mate. Besides, after paying zero taxes, GE’s pockets should be plenty deep enough to handle such an event — right? The concept of an all-out recall on the antiquated General Electric Mark 1 reactor is one that we will continue to explore. As a matter of fact, in tomorrow’s show, we’ll discuss the problems with the Mark 1 a little further.

Tune in then for episode six in our series of short films, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, with esteemed expert and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen.

Signing off for now — Josh Cunnings — EnviroNews USA.

Source:
Should GE’s Mark 1 Nuclear Reactor Be Recalled Worldwide Like a Faulty Unsafe Automobile?
Related articles:
Fukushima: Mark 1 Nuclear Reactor Design Caused GE Scientist To Quit In Protest
Experts Had Long Criticized Potential Weakness in Design of Stricken Reactor
23 GE-Designed Reactors in in 13 states Similar to Japan’s

January 18, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018, Reference, safety | , | Leave a comment

An assessment on the environmental contamination caused by the Fukushima accident

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Highlights

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Different mechanisms of the release of the radionuclides into the atmosphere and cooling water.

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Atmospheric releases mainly governed by the volatility of the radionuclides.

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Significant releases of long-lived radionuclides including 137Cs and 90Sr into the cooling water.

Abstract

The radiological releases from the damaged fuel to the atmosphere and into the cooling water in the Fukushima Daiich Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) accident are investigated. Atmospheric releases to the land and ocean mostly occurred during the first week after the accident whereas continuous release from the damaged fuel into the cooling water resulted in an accumulation of contaminated water in the plant during last six years. An evaluation of measurement data and analytical model for the release of radionuclides indicated that atmospheric releases were mainly governed by the volatility of the radionuclides. Using the measurement data on the contaminated water, the mechanism for the release of long-lived radionuclides into the cooling water was analyzed. It was found that the radioactivity concentrations of 90Sr in the contaminated water in the Primary Containment Vessel (PCV) of unit 2 and unit 3 were consistently higher than that of 137Cs and the radioactivity concentration of 90Sr in the turbine building of unit 1 in year 2015 was higher than that in year 2011. It was also observed that the radioactivity concentration of long-lived radionuclides in the contaminated water in the FDNPP is still high even in year 2015. The activity ratio of 238Pu/239+240Pu for the contaminated water was in the range of 1.7–5.4, which was significantly different from the ratios from the soil samples representing the atmospheric releases of FDNPP. It is concluded that the release mechanisms into the atmosphere and cooling water are clearly different and there has been significant amount of long-lived radionuclides released into the contaminated water.

January 16, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

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