Is Fukushima’s nuclear nightmare over? Don’t count on it
Christopher Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia. See also: http://www.chrisbusbyexposed.org, http://www.greenaudit.org and http://www.llrc.org.
Thomas was described as “one of Britain’s leading experts on the health effects of radiation”. She is of the opinion that there is no danger and the Japanese refugees can come back and live there in the “zone”. Her main concern seemed to be how untidy it all was: “Left to rack and ruin,” she complained, sadly.
At one point, Rupert pulled out his Geiger counter and read the dose: 3 microSieverts per hour. “How much radiation would it give in a year to people who came back here,” he asked. Thomas replied: “About an extra milliSievert a year, which is not much considering you get 2mSv a year from natural background”.
“The long term impact on your health would be absolutely nothing.”
Now anyone with a calculator can easily multiply 3 microSieverts (3 x 10-6 Sv) by 24 hours and 365 days. The answer comes out to be 26 mSv (0.026Sv), not “about 1mSv” as the “leading expert on the health effects of radiation” reported.
I must personally ask if Gerry Thomas is a reliable expert; her CV shows she has published almost nothing in the way of original research, so we must ask how it is the BBC has taken her seriously.
This recalled the day the first reactor exploded in 2011. I was in London, and the BBC asked me to come into the studio and comment. Also present was a nuclear industry apologist, Dr Ian Fells. Like Geraldine Thomas he seemed unconcerned about the radiation: the main problem for him was that the lifts would not work. People would have to climb stairs, he complained.
I said then on that first day that this was a serious accident like Chernobyl, but he and everybody who followed him told the viewers that it was no problem, nothing like Chernobyl.
Some months later, looking back, it became clear I was correct on every point, but I never was invited back to the BBC. I visited Japan, took sophisticated measuring equipment, obtained vehicle air filters, spoke to the Japanese people and advised them to take Calcium tablets to block the Strontium-90.
My vehicle air filter measurements showed clearly that large areas of north east Japan were seriously contaminated – including Tokyo. This was too much for the nuclear industry: I was attacked in the Guardian newspaper by pro-nuclear George Monbiot in an attempt to destroy my credibility. One other attacker was Geraldine Thomas. What she said then was as madly incorrect then as what she is saying now. But the Guardian would not let me respond.
The important evidence for me in the recent BBC clip is the measurement of dose given by Rupert’s Geiger counter: 3microSieverts per hour (3Sv/h). Normal background in Japan (I know, I measured it there) is about 0.1Sv/h. So in terms of external radiation, Ruperts’s measurement gave 30 times normal background.
Is this a problem for human health? You bet it is. The question no-one asked is what is causing the excess dose? The answer is easy: radioactive contamination, principally of Caesium-137. On the basis of well-known physics relationships we can say that 3Sv/h at 1m above ground represents a surface contamination of about 900,000Bq per square metre of Cs-137. That is, 900,000 disintegrations per second in one square metre of surface: and note that they were standing on a tarmac road which appeared to be clean. And this is 5 years after the explosions. The material is everywhere, and it is in the form of dust particles which can be inhaled; invisible sparkling fairy-dust that kills hang in the air above such measurements.
The particles are not just of Caesium-137. They contain other long lived radioactivity, Strontium-90, Plutonium 239, Uranium-235, Uranium 238, Radium-226, Polonium-210, Lead-210, Tritium, isotopes of Rhodium, Ruthenium, Iodine, Cerium, Cobalt 60. The list is long.
The UN definition of ‘radioactively contaminated land’ is 37,000Bq/square meter, and so, on the basis of the measurement made by the BBC reporter, the town of Ohkuma in the Fukushima zone (and we assume everywhere else in the zone) is still, five years after the incident, more than 20 times the level where the UN would, and the Soviets did, step in and control the population.
But the Japanese government wants to send the people back there. It is bribing them with money and housing assistance. It is saying, like Gerry Thomas, there is no danger. And the BBC is giving this misdirection a credible platform. The argument is based on the current radiation risk model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection the ICRP.
Last month, my German colleagues and I published a scientific paper [2] in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Health and Toxicology. It uses real-world data from those exposed to the same substances that were released by Fukushima to show that the ICRP model is wrong by 1,000 times or more. This is a game-changing piece of research. But were we asked to appear on the BBC, or anywhere else? No. What do our findings and calculations suggest will have happened in the five years since the explosions and into the future? Let’s take a look at what has happened since 2011.
The reactors are still uncontrolled five years after the explosions and continue to release their radioactive contents to the environment despite all attempts to prevent this. Concerning the melted fuel, there is no way to assess the condition or specific whereabouts of the fuel though it is clearly out of the box and in the ground.
Meanwhile, robots fail at the extremely high radiation levels found; ground water flowing through the plant is becoming contaminated and is being pumped into storage tanks for treatment; high radiation levels and debris have delayed the removal of spent fuel from numbers 1, 2 and 3 reactor buildings. TEPCO plans to remove debris from reactor 3 and this work has begun. Then they are hoping to remove the fuel rods out of reactors 1 and 2 by 2020 and the work on removing debris from these 2 reactors has not begun yet.
Much of the radioactivity goes into the sea, where it travels several hundreds of km. up and down the coast, destroying sea life and contaminating intertidal sediment. The radionuclides bind to fine sediment and concentrate in river estuaries and tidal areas like Tokyo Bay. Here the particles are re-suspended and brought ashore to be inhaled by those living within 1km of the coast.
From work done by my group for the Irish government on the contaminated Irish Sea we know that this exposure will increase the rate of cancer in the coastal inhabitants by about 30 percent.
The releases have not been stopped despite huge amounts of work, thought and action. The treated water is still highly radioactive and cannot yet be released.
That is a real problem on site with three heavy spent fuel pools still full and largely inaccessible. Collapse of the buildings would lead to coolant loss and a fire or even an explosion releasing huge amounts of radioactivity. So this is one nightmare scenario: Son of Fukushima. A solid wall at the port side may have slowed the water down but diverting the water may cause problems with the ground water pressure on site and thus also threaten subsidence. Space for storing the radioactive water is running out and it seems likely that this will have to be eventually spilled into the Pacific.
Only 10 percent of the plant has been cleaned up although there are 8,000 workers on site at any one time, mostly dealing with the contaminated water. Run-off from storms brings more contamination down the rivers from the mountains.
There are millions of 1-ton container bags full of radioactive debris and other waste which has been collected in decontamination efforts outside the plant and many of these bags are only likely to last a handful of years before degrading and spilling their contents. Typhoons will spread this highly contaminated contents far and wide.
Let’s look at the only real health data which has emerged to see if it gives any support to my original estimate of 400,000 extra cancers in the 200km radius. Prof Tsuda has recently published a paper in the peer review literature identifying 116 thyroid cancers detected over 3 years by ultrasound scanning of 380,000 0-18 year olds.
The background rate is about 0.3 per 100,000 per year, so in three years we can expect 3.42 thyroid cancers. But 116 were found, an excess of about 112 cases. Geraldine says that these were all found because they looked: but Tsuda’s paper reports that an ultrasound study in Nagasaki (no exposures) found zero cases, and also an early ultrasound study also found zero cases. So she is wrong. The thyroid doses were reported to be about 10mSv. On the basis of the ICRP model, that gives an error of about 2000 times.
From the results of our new genetic paper we can safely predict a 100 percent increase in congenital malformations in the population up to 200km radius.
In an advanced technological country like Japan these will be picked up early by ultrasound and aborted, so we will not actually see them, even if there were data we could trust. What we will see is a fall in the birth rate and an increase in the death rate because we know what has been happening and what will happen; we have seen it before in Chernobyl. And just like Chernobyl, the (Western) authorities are influenced by or take their lead from the nuclear industry: the ICRP and the International Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA) which since 1959 has taken over from the World Health Organization as the responsible authority for radiation and health (Yes!).
They keep the lid on the truth using ill-informed individuals like Geraldine Thomas and, by analogy with New Labour: New BBC. Increasingly I could say “New Britain” as opposed the Great Britain of my childhood, a country I was proud of where you could trust the BBC. I wonder how the reporters like Rupert can live with themselves presenting such misguided information.
Fukushima is far from being over, and the deaths have only just begun.
Reference:
1. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761141
2. Genetic Radiation Risks-A Neglected Topic in the Low Dose …
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26791091
Source: https://www.rt.com/op-edge/335362-fukushima-nuclear-japan-bbc/
Nuclear refugees tell of distrust, pressure to return to Fukushima
Tokiko Onoda speaks about her house in Fukushima from her apartment
in Tokyo on Feb. 9.
They feel like refugees, although they live in one of the world’s richest and most peaceful nations.
Five years ago, these people fled their homes, grabbing what they could, as a nearby nuclear plant melted down after being hit by tsunami, spewing radiation. All told, the disaster in Fukushima displaced 150,000 by the government’s count.
About 100,000 are still scattered around the nation, some in barrack-like temporary housing units and others in government-allocated apartment buildings hundreds of kilometers away.
Although authorities have started to open up areas near the damaged reactors that were previously off limits, only a fraction of residents have returned. For example, in the town of Naraha, where evacuation orders were lifted in September, 459 people, or 6 percent of the pre-disaster population, have gone back.
Most say they don’t want to return for fear of lingering radiation. Some don’t want the upheaval of moving again after trying to start their lives over elsewhere.
With government housing aid set to end next year, many feel pressured to move back.
Tokiko Onoda, 80, lives with her husband in a cramped, cluttered apartment on the 21st floor of a high-rise in the edge of Tokyo where about 1,000 people displaced by the disaster live in rent-free housing.
Several Fukushima towns that were deserted are now urging residents to return, saying it is safe to live in certain areas. An ambitious effort to decontaminate vast swaths of land by removing topsoil and razing shrubbery has turned farmland and coastlines into stretches of dirt with rows upon rows of black garbage bags filled with grass, soil and debris.
When housing aid ends in April 2017, people in apartments under the government program will have to start paying rent or move out. Those whose homes in Fukushima that are in areas still off-limits for living will continue to receive the aid.
Onoda fears hers will be cut off because her home is in Namie, where evacuation orders are gradually being lifted in parts of the town.
She doesn’t believe it’s safe to go back. She feels duped because she had believed that nuclear power was safe.
Onoda angrily talks about how authorities are treating people like her. Why didn’t the government give her land elsewhere to build a new home?
When she lived in Fukushima, she had a big house with a garden where she grew vegetables and peonies. She picked mushrooms and ferns in the hills.
“We worked so hard to build that house,” she said, often stopping to wipe away tears. “We had no worries in the world except to plan vacation trips to the hot springs.”
That home is now in shambles. Although it survived the magnitude-9.0 quake on March 11, 2011, burglars have ransacked it and rats have chewed the walls. The last time she visited, the dosimeter ticked at 4 microsieverts an hour, more than 100 times the average monitored in-air radiation in Tokyo. That’s not immediately life-threatening but it makes Onoda feel uncomfortable because of worries that cancer or other sicknesses may surface years later.
Before the disaster, the government had set the safe annual radiation dosage level at 1 millisievert. Afterward, it has adopted the 20 millisievert recommendation of the International Commission on Radiation Protection set for emergencies, and 1 millisievert became a long-term goal.
Onoda says she has done her best to cope. She has made friends. She keeps busy with tea parties, art classes and a sewing circle.
And now they want her to go back, after all she has gone through?
“Only someone who has gone through this evacuation can understand,” she said.
Ryuichi Kino, a journalist who wrote, edited and compiled the 2015 book, “The White Paper on Nuclear Evacuees,” believes people like Onoda have been treated like kimin, which means “people who have been discarded” because they have been forgotten or abandoned by society.
“We don’t even know their real numbers,” he said, noting the government lacks a clear definition for “evacuees,” and bases its figures on tallies of those receiving aid. A recent count in Fukushima and a neighboring prefecture found the total number may be as high as 200,000, Kino said.
“Evacuation is a term that assumes the situation is temporary, and there is a place to go back,” said Kino.
The government is spending about ¥40 billion ($400 million) a year on housing aid for those displaced by the disaster. It’s also financially backing Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the damaged Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, to make monthly compensation payments, now at a cumulative ¥5.9 trillion ($59 billion) and rising.
Tests with volunteers who wore dosimeters for two weeks in the town of Naraha found average radiation exposure to be at a rate of 1.12 millsieverts a year.
Government official Yuji Ishizaki, who is overseeing the lifting of evacuation orders, says he is merely following policy.
“There is no clear boundary for what is safe or not safe for radiation,” he said. “Even 1 millisievert might not be absolutely safe.”
Fukushima Medical University, the main academic body studying the health effects of the nuclear disaster, says no sickness linked to radiation has been detected so far, although sickness from lack of exercise, poor diet and mental stress has been observed.
The more than 100 cases of thyroid cancer found among the 370,000 people 18 years old and younger at the time of the disaster the university calls “a screening effect,” or a result of more rigorous testing.
Some scientists say that is unusually high, given that thyroid cancer among children is rare at 2 or 3 in 1 million. Thyroid cancers among the young surged in the Ukraine and Belarus after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
Seiichi Nakate is relatively content in his new life with his wife and two children, 13 and 11, in Sapporo, 600 km from Fukushima. There, some 1,500 people from Fukushima have formed a support network, often getting together for drinks and helping each other find jobs.
Nakate recently bought a house and started a company that refers professional helpers to disabled people, and has hired former Fukushima residents. He vows to never return to Fukushima because of the radiation danger.
He believes that from the beginning, authorities underplayed those risks. He doesn’t trust them.
After the disaster, he immediately sent his wife and children to a relatives’ home in southern Japan. The family started living together in Sapporo a year later.
The end of government housing support makes people feel pressure to return, he says.
“The government abandoned the people of Fukushima, even the children. Now the policy is to push us to go back,” he said. “It’s a policy that forces radiation upon people.”
Megumi Okada, a mother of four, is fighting hard to keep her housing aid in Tokyo, getting people to sign petitions and meeting with government officials.
She scoffs at how officials keep saying that people are living “as normal” in much of Fukushima. She doesn’t want her children eating the food or breathing the air. They get periodic blood tests to make sure they are healthy.
Her husband has found a job as a construction worker in Tokyo. Their apartment is just two rooms and a kitchen, but the rent is covered. Okada wants to work, but publicly funded child care is scarce in Japan, and private ones are costly.
“Nothing has progressed in five years,” she said. “We have the right to stay evacuated.”
Okada says she wants to apply for U.N. refugee status and move to Europe with her family, if she could.
“I know Japanese can’t become refugees now. But I wish we could,” she said. “It is about our staying alive.”
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/11/national/nuclear-refugees-tell-distrust-pressure-return-fukushima/#.VuP97vl95D8
FIVE YEARS AFTER: Tougher work awaits TEPCO at Fukushima after water issue ends
Rows of massive tanks storing radiation contaminated water line at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in February.
OKUMA, Fukushima Prefecture–The ever-increasing rows of tanks storing radioactive water continue to eat up the precious available land at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Five years after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, triggered the triple meltdown at the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. is still struggling to bring the contaminated water problem under control.
And the utility has yet to fully tackle the more difficult and time-consuming task of actually decommissioning the ruined nuclear plant.
Each day, TEPCO circulates 300 tons of water inside the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors to cool down the melted nuclear fuel within.
In addition, groundwater keeps flowing into the damaged reactor buildings and inevitably becomes highly contaminated by the radiation.
TEPCO reuses some of this contaminated water to cool down the damaged reactors.
The rest of the water is processed through the ALPS (advanced liquid processing system) multi-nuclide removal system and other equipment to remove highly radioactive substances. The water is then stored in tanks.
The advanced decontamination equipment has helped TEPCO to reduce the amount of highly contaminated water at the plant’s compound.
But 400 to 500 tons of less contaminated water still accumulates at the plant site on a daily basis.
To reduce the amount of groundwater flowing into the reactor buildings, TEPCO initiated its “subdrain plan” in September to pump groundwater from wells dug around the reactors’ premises and release the water into the ocean after the decontamination process.
On the seaside of the reactor buildings, the utility constructed underground walls to prevent contaminated groundwater from flowing into the sea.
Also around the reactor buildings, TEPCO installed coolant pipes to create an underground frozen soil wall, which is expected to divert the clean groundwater directly to the ocean.
But this is only a stop-gap measure at best.
The number of storage tanks, which are built at the site, has reached 1,000. Rows of tanks cover most of the parking lots, green spaces and vacant areas at the Fukushima plant site. Eventually, space will run out for storing the contaminated water.
The government will start full-fledged discussions on measures to reduce the amount of less contaminated water at the plant in fiscal 2016, which starts in April.
LONG ROAD TO DECOMMISSIONING
Five years after the onset of the nuclear disaster, TEPCO has taken the first step in its decommissioning road map.
The first major challenge in decommissioning the plant is removing spent fuel from storage pools in the upper parts of the reactor buildings.
TEPCO has already removed 1,535 fuel assemblies from the No. 4 reactor, which was offline for a periodic safety check when the tsunami slammed into the plant.
However, a large amount of debris and the high radiation levels have delayed the removal of spent fuel from the No. 1 to No. 3 reactor buildings.
Work is under way to remove debris from the upper part of the No. 3 reactor building. TEPCO plans to start removing the spent fuel in fiscal 2017.
According to TEPCO’s road map, the removal of spent fuel from the No. 1 and No. 2 reactor buildings will start in fiscal 2020. But the utility has not started taking debris out of the upper part of the buildings where the fuel storage pools are located.
The toughest task will be removing the melted fuel inside the No. 1 to 3 reactor containment vessels.
The locations and amount of melted fuel inside the reactors remain largely unknown. Extremely high radiation levels in the reactor containment vessels have prevented workers from analyzing the conditions. Even remote-controlled survey robots have failed to readily approach the core areas.
The preferred way to remove the melted fuel is the “water-covered method.” It involves pumping in water to fill the reactor containment vessels to the upper part and removing the fuel while the water keeps radiation exposure of the workers at low levels.
The government and TEPCO are also considering the “airborne method” if contaminated water keeps leaking from the containment vessels. Under this method, water would fill only the bottom part of the containment vessels, and the melted fuel would be removed through the air.
The two parties also need to develop special equipment to remove the melted fuel and keep it safely stored in containers.
They estimate the decommissioning process will take 30 to 40 years. But they have not specified the conditions that can finally bring an end to the nuclear disaster.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201603110047
Fukushima Five Years On: Not a Comedy of Errors, a Calamity of Terrors
Since it began March 11, 2011, thousands of freelancers have reported on the Fukushima-Daiichi triple reactor meltdowns and radiation gusher, the deluge of accidents, leaks, faulty cleanup efforts, the widespread contamination of workers, citizens, soil, food and water, and the long series of cancer studies, lawsuits, and ever-changing clean-up and decommissioning plans. As Japan Times reports last October, “Extremely high radiation levels and the inability to grasp the details about melted nuclear fuel make it impossible for [Tokyo Electric Power Co.] to chart the course of its planned decommissioning of the reactors.”
The journalism is partly a response to the lack of mainstream US news coverage, and partly a warning against similar radiation disasters risked in the United States every day by the operation of 23 identical GE reactors (Fukushima clones) in this country.
Japanese media coverage of the catastrophe in English, along with analysis by independent scientists, researchers, and institutes is mostly available online and much of it is reliable.
Five years into the crisis, officials from Tepco have said leaks from the wreckage with “at least” two trillion Becquerels of radioactivity entered the Pacific between August 2013 and May 2014. “At least” is vague enough to beg the question: Is the actual total 5 trillion; 25; 50? Relentless drainage of contaminated water from the site is estimated to be about 300 tons a day and has continued for 60 months. “We should be carefully monitoring the oceans after what is the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history,” researcher Ken Buesseler, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute said last September.
However, Japan isn’t even monitoring seawater near Fukushima, according to The Ecologist.
Greenpeace launches study of 300-year effect on oceans
On Feb. 26, Greenpeace International launched a major investigation into the gusher’s effects on the Pacific Ocean near the wrecked Fukushima complex in Northeast Japan. The group said in a press release that its investigation will employ an underwater vehicle with a sensitive gamma radiation “Spectrometer,” and a sediment sampler.
Greenpeace noted that, “In addition to the initial release of liquid nuclear waste during the first weeks of the accident, and the daily releases ever since, contamination has also flowed from the land itself, particularly nearby forests and mountains of Fukushima, and are expected to continue to contaminate the Pacific Ocean for at least the next 300 years.”
Former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who headed the government in 2011, joined the Greenpeace crew aboard the Rainbow Warrior on the opening day of its study, and Kan used the occasion to call for a Germany-like total phase-out of nuclear power.
“I once believed Japan’s advanced technology would prevent a nuclear accident like Chernobyl from happening in Japan,” Kan said. “But it did not, and I was faced with the very real crisis of having to evacuate 50 million people… Instead, we should shift to safer and cheaper renewable energy.”
Shaun Burnie, Senior Nuclear Specialist with Greenpeace Germany said, “There is an urgent need to understand the impact this contamination is having on the ocean — how radioactivity is both dispersing and concentrating — and its implications.”
“Tepco failed to prevent a multiple reactor meltdown and five years later it’s still an ongoing disaster. It has no credible solution to the water crisis they created and is failing to prevent further contamination of the Pacific Ocean,” Burnie said.
Criminal charges leveled against reactor execs
The first criminal charges against executives of Tepco were filed Feb. 29 alleging that three officials refused to take precautionary measures that could have prevented the loss of off-site power (known as “station blackout”), and the resulting complete meltdown, or melt-through, of reactor fuel in three units. Specifically, the three are accused of negligence resulting in death and injury, having ignored explicit professional warnings about the inadequate height of the seawall, and about the improper placement (in basements) of emergency diesel generators which were destroyed by tsunami. Many of the 14,000 Japanese citizens who signed on to the lawsuit said their action was taken partly to force disclosure at trial of important information still kept secret by Tepco.
Starting from scratch with no textbook
Last October, four-½ years into the unprecedented self-destruction of three-reactors in one place, Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency opened an institute “to develop” techniques to inspect and eventually decommission the three leaky ruins. Because of the vast, daunting and novel complexity of three melted reactors, the new “Remote Technology Development Center” is starting from scratch. That’s right: No one now knows how to disassemble and safely containerize the ferociously radioactive wreckage — times three.
Naohiro Masuda, Tepco’s chief of decontamination and decommissioning, told the AP Dec. 18, “This is something that’s never been experienced. A textbook doesn’t exist for something like this.” Radiation levels inside the cores are too high for even for robots to make useful inspections.
The ultimate goal of dismantling work is to remove the melted uranium fuel. Researchers don’t yet know how to patch massive quake-caused cracks in chambers under the failed reactors, which release tons of highly contaminated water every day. The new institute is tasked with inventing a first-ever technique to find and plug the leaks. The chambers must be made watertight, because removal of the melted fuel has to be done remotely and under water.
Planners must also invent a system of possible routes by which to remove the hundreds of tons of still-unseen melted fuel, and they’ve been told to find new ways of reducing radiation doses to workers conducting the mission.
Two mayors agree to host waste dumpsites
After first opposing the government’s plans, two towns in Fukushima Prefecture have agreed to Tokyo’s proposal for using them for “permanent” radioactive waste disposal. The sites, one at an existing private facility in Tomioka, and another at Naraha, have been chosen for disposal of “designated waste” in exchange for bribes, including the construction of an industrial park and subsidies worth about $81 million.
“Designated waste” is rubbish with between 8,000 and 100,000 Becquerels of radioactivity per kilogram. Confusingly, the Japan Times called this deadly refuse “low-level nuclear waste,” while the Asahi Shimbun called it “highly radioactive.”
The Tomioka facility, now run by Ecotech Clean Center, will be nationalized and will then bury some 650,000 cubic meters of designated waste which is mostly incinerator ash, sewage sludge and rice straw. It is a small fraction of the estimated 22 million cubic meters of waste that’s been collected in large black bags and stored outdoors at thousands of sites in 11 prefectures.
Waste with higher radiation levels is to be kept at temporary facilities being built near the doomed reactor complex.
Another proposal from the Ministry of Industry is to bury high-level radioactive waste under the seabed. Experts who made the idea public said such waste could be transported by ship, but this raised alarms about transfer mishaps, transport accidents, groundings, breakups, and sinkings of cargo ships.
Pollution solution: Declare safe today what was unsafe yesterday
Following the start of the ongoing disaster, the government’s official allowable public external radiation exposure was arbitrarily raised. One milliSievert (mSv) per year was raised to 20 mSv for residents in areas affected with radioactive fallout. For radiation workers in the nuclear industry the annual limit was raised from 100 mSv to 250 mSv. This had the double effect of both saving the industry billions in cleanup costs, and increasing radiation-induced health effects — especially in women, fetuses, infants, and children.
Robert Hunzinker reported in CounterPunch Dec. 14 that Physicians for Social Responsibility has warned that the new “allowable dose” means there’s a 1 in 200 risk of children getting cancer in the first year; and over two years the risk increases to 1 in 100.
Sea wall making matters worse
In October, Tepco completed a deep seawall dug into the shore between the ocean and the wrecked reactors. Intended to halt the flow of contaminated groundwater to the Pacific, the dam has cause groundwater levels to rise behind the wall. Now, in an attempt to fix the problem caused by the wall, Tepco dug new wells to pump backed-up groundwater, planning to dump less-contaminated groundwater from new wells into the sea. But the water is so heavily poisoned with tritium that sea dumping was not allowed. Now the company is pumping and dumping the fast rising groundwater into severely radioactive reactor buildings — where the water will become even more contaminated by passing over the mass of hot melted fuel inside. It’s not really a comedy of errors, but a calamity of terrors.
Fukushima Five Years On: Not a Comedy of Errors, a Calamity of Terrors
Fukushima+5, Part 6. “Dose” does not exist, only exposure
The onset of the Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011 set off a new round of anti-nuclear protest across the world so large even the U.S. NRC was forced to take notice.
About 300 people gathered in the Diet Offices to commemorate the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Tepco’s meltdowns. Hosted by Friends of the Earth Japan and a large network of NGOs in Japan working on every nuclear concern, including continued aid and support to Chernobyl victims, this was a national-scale event. At 2:46 we paused to silently mark the time of the quake.
A number of people I have met previously on this tour are here. It feels good to have new friends here.
What follows is a piece I wrote in anticipation for this day. I know it is long. I hope some will read it through. It is Mary’s Manifesto on radiation, but I feel with some certainty that Rosalie Bertell would support it!
The Nuclear Dose Emperors Have No Clothes
It is now five years since three reactors melted down (and out of containment). Arnie Gundersen does not know where the melted fuel is, but he is pretty confident that it has now been cooled, and continues to be cooled to the point where it is not melting any more. He thinks maybe it is through all the metal containment, but still in the concrete of the reactor building floor. Huge amounts of radioactivity are still there, on-site, but huge amounts are distributed to the land, ground and surface waters, plants, animals children and to the men and women of Japan. And then there is the Pacific Ocean…
Interesting that the paper reports the UN Agency as saying the doses from 2012 on will not cause health problems… Does that mean they are admitting that the doses from 2011 definitely will?
The various official bodies really do not know how to think about radioactivity in an environment where people of all ages are living. Their thinking has been formed by the atomic workers of the world (all adult males) and the Hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a few other cases. The A-Bomb study was of a single acute dose of external radiation, much more like X-rays than like living in a “hot zone.”
We now have confirmation from Richardson, et all that many small radiation exposures over an extended time that add up deliver the same level of harm to a body as did the A-Bomb.
Citation: Risk of cancer from occupational exposure to ionizing radiation: retrospective cohort study of workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (INWORKS). David B Richardson, et al. BMJ 2015;351:h5359 doi: 10.1136/bmj.h5359
Today, Lakota children in the Black Hills of the Dakotas and other uranium contaminated areas; children in Kazakhstan, Marshall Islands, Utah and other nuclear weapons test areas, children still living in contaminated areas of Ukraine and Belarus, and those living here in Japan are all effectively “swimming in radioactive “soup.” More exposure one day, less another but breathing, drinking, eating radioactivity across their lives. Here is the fundamental point that is missing from the regulator’s thinking: every adult was a child. From 2011 on, here in Japan, all children in contaminated areas (some far beyond Fukushima) are impacted to one degree or another.
Any calculation that assumes that exposure began after adulthood was attained applies only to the adults of 2011 and before. The adults that emerge from the children of Daiichi are different. They will likely continue to be exposed as adults, but the deal is done: any radiological damage in childhood will dominate. The cancers will likely come in adulthood, but not primarily from exposure as adults. This will continue. All the projections on health consequences imagine that for the rest of time there will be adults who were not exposed as children. This is magical thinking for these hot zones.
We can hope that people will leave. We know some people are paid to come in. But we cannot really imagine a real estate boon in Fukushima Prefecture. The deal is done.
Mary Olson speaks at a Fukushima anniversary event in Japan’s Diet Building,
March 11, 2016.
Another way to speak of childhood exposure to radiation is that it is an “opportunity cost” in terms of an individual who has been exposed as a child ever fitting the assumptions the regulators use about adults. Regulators tag age groups in a large hypothetical population. They do not assume that their “adults” were exposed from birth on. People growing up in contaminated areas do become adults. They do continue to be exposed, but their exposures as children make them a different category of adult when it comes to “risk.” Most regulators do not consider this. No regulation factors the gender difference.
Radiation regulators exercise powers of life and death and like that story of an Emperor who thinks he is wearing magical cloth, it is time, once again to to point and say “Look! You are naked!” These emperors of radiation regulation are clothed in mumbo jumbo of “dose” and “risk” and “keep the people confused.” None of this is real.
Japan Diary 4 tells the story of age and gender as factors in radiation harm. We can no longer say that “a millirem is a millirem.” It matters WHO is getting that exposure. What age? What gender? Likely we will someday learn about other important factors.
We could hypothetically make new units (infant-female millirem vs elderly-woman millirem vs Reference-Man millirem) but the concept of DOSE itself is beginning to fall apart in other ways. Following is a short peak at some of the fabric of evidence that our regulators (emperors) do not consider. Together these are why I join others who question the very basis of current radiation regulation. If enough people get these points, we will all point and say “you are naked!”
Point 1: It matters WHO gets exposed;
Point 2: “Dose” is an idea from chemistry and does not fit radiation harm;
My good friend Dennis Nelson points out that damage to cells from radiation is primarily physical, from energetic particles and waves. Dennis posits that “dose” is deeply rooted in chemistry where a substance can be either “safe” or “poisonous” and the difference depends on the mass of the substance that is introduced into the body. In this case, of poison, there is some level that is safe. In radiation exposure there is no level that is safe, just a higher statistical probability of disease or death when impacted by a larger number of particle or ray emissions. (See: www.serv.org) As I first read in Dr Helen Caldicott’s Nuclear Madness (updated in 1992), it takes only one living cell and a single radioactive emission in order to have the potential for a fatal cancer. It is this fact which should remove radiation from any concept of “dose.”
It is true that elements like uranium and plutonium area also toxic (poisonous). Here I am focusing on radiological impacts only, but those who live with uranium and plutonium contamination need to know there is a “double-header” of both!
Point 3: Radioactive decay makes a different kind of chaos in our biochemistry
In 1984 I had a job as Assistant in Research in a lab at Yale. I got contaminated with a radioactive element common in biological research: Phosphorus-32 (P32). Some of the exposure was internal. Like all radioactive elements, the body responds to the chemical characteristics: cesium is similar to potassium so it tracks to muscle; strontium is similar to calcium so it finds its way to bones, teeth and Mother’s milk; phosphorus has many routes in the body—in the lab we used it to track neural activity, but also tracks to the DNA itself. Sort of like giving the bank-robber a bank-guard uniform.
P32 has a 2 week half-life, making it pretty highly radioactive. When the radioactive decay step happens, the atom is no longer phosphorus, but becomes the stable atom, Sulphur32. Here is the rub: if the body has incorporated the phosphorus into a molecule, suddenly the molecule (with no warning) now has a Sulphur atom where it thought it had a phosphorus; particularly troubling inside a DNA strand.
Other radionuclides create similar chaos as they decay.
Point 4: Invisible bullets is the best way to describe impact of ionizing radiation and there is a much wider range of harm than only “ionization;”
I don’t want to get too far into the weeds here. My readers are not generally chemists or biophysicists, but suffice it to say, industrial fission is less than 100 years old. Regulation of radiation exposure is only a little older than fission, and came soon after the concentration of radium by Marie Curie and her cadre of researchers. Doctors quickly adopted radiation because it was observed to kill growths (tumors) of various kinds. (For a great read on this history, find Catherine Caulfield’s Multiple Exposures, 1989, now available on books.google.com)
Nonetheless, anyone can follow this: It is true that a radioactive wave or particle does knock an electron off of another atom (likely in a molecule). When the electron is knocked off, the remaining configuration now has a “charge” because the electron (minus) is gone. All of radiation regulation is based on measuring the production of ions in living tissue in response to X-rays. The details of other radioactive events (decay via emission of alpha, beta and neutrons) are mixed in, but the fundamental concept of “dose” comes from the simple measurement of ions generated by exposure.
While it is true that these ions can be very damaging to the cell, and even neighboring cells, there is no similar evaluation for direct physical damage to cell structures (much greater impacts than knocking off an electron). This includes:
Damage to cell membranes
Chromosomal breaks and other deformations
Mitochondrial damage
Primary germ cell damage
This list of types of cellular damage are more likely from internalized alpha particles and beta particles. For years the radiation regulators have ignored internal exposure, and attributed zero-dose to alpha particles since they bounce off the skin. Inside the body (inhaled, ingested or injected) they are many times (some estimates as high as 1000 times) more harmful than an X-ray/gamma ray.
Here are simple reasons why this makes sense. The alpha particle (an energetic bundle of 2 protons and 2 neutrons) is enormous compared to the wave of energy (no mass) and even compared to the beta (electron-sized). Does a cannon ball do more damage than a BB?
Where internal exposure has been considered a really bizarre concept of “effective dose equivalent” is used by the emperors of radiation. While there are mitigating parameters, such as inclusion of weighting factors derived from organ-doses studies (from equally inhuman experimentation in the U.S.), the whole approach exceeds credibility: the regulators decide how much ionization the internalized radionuclide is likely causing and then they distribute those ionizations as if they were to the whole body. Averaging the high local dose across the entire body mass–with no recognition that the energy to break a chromosome is local–that the concept of “dose” from external exposures includes distance from the source as a factor. When the source is internal, distance for the immediate tissues drops to zero. This is a quantum change, not a simple matter of degree.
Let’s get to it: dose is irrelevant in this picture.
Final Point 5: No two radiation exposures result in the same harm; every is unique.
Dr. Donnell Boardman was a physician in Massachusetts who treated some of the first nuclear power workers. Donnell told me (he was retired when I met him) that no two radiation exposures, including to the same person, are ever identical. Donnell liken radioactivity’s impact on living tissue to car collisions. We do not expect to find any two accidents that are identical. Donnell saw hundreds of nuclear workers and he said that nearly every story and the problems the individuals faced were unique.
Radiation is a physical event, but it depends as much on the body and the unique chain of events at the cellular level to determine the outcome. The broad-brush dose-response work done on adults is important, but the projections based on it just do not hold water.
Radiation Regulators: you have no clothes.
Mary Olson
March 11, 2016
Permalink: http://safeenergy.org/2016/03/11/japan-diary-2016-fukushima5-part-6/
Fukushima+5, Part 5. We Are All Hibakusha: Fission Never Results in Peaceful Atoms!
A Japanese court this week ordered the shutdown of two reactors at Takahama, leaving Japan with only two reactors (at Sendai) currently operating five years after the onset of the Fukushima disaster.
All my life I have tried to find the truth, and make it beautiful.” – Sting
It never ceases to amaze me how many wonderful people I meet in this work. Every stop on this tour is populated by exceptional hearts and minds. It reminds me of a woman I met during the years working to stop the US Department of Energy from selectively targeting Native Lands for nuclear waste. (Okay; the 1990’s round of that!) We were at an event at the Mole Lake Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. She was from the Western Shoshone Nation, home of the proposed Yucca Mountain Dump. She said she was “new” to nuclear issues. Welcoming her, I said, “this is a grim topic, but you will meet wonderful people who care about nuclear waste.”
She told me that the Shoshone People know this; she said, “It is a Law of the Universe.” What?!? She explained that uranium in the ground is neutral, but when people dig it up it becomes more and more negative. Inside a reactor uranium becomes the most negative thing on the planet. Shoshones know that the Universe IS in balance (in contrast to Judeo/Christian folks who think it “should” be). Thus, it is a Law that the most positive people drop what they are doing and pay attention to the most negative thing (nuclear energy/weapons).
This response from positive people of great integrity is the first, initial step; she explained there would be many more steps before nuclear fuel/waste is finally balanced.
Three of the dedicated activists working in Japan and helping with this tour. From left to right, Steve Leeper, Peace Culture Village and tour organizer; Naoko Koizumi brilliant translator (my “bridge”); and Tamiko Nishijima of Peace Platform, our glue.
Here in this land of Fission Products (the contamination is at varying levels well beyond Fukushima Prefecture, see www.fairewinds.org, Arnie will be sharing more news in coming months from samples he has shipped home), I am meeting these many, many positive people.
Five years in, some are tired. Others are just beginning to realize that the Tepco disaster is not over. I think there is real potential for organizers now and Japan is blessed with some outstanding activists and service organizations. The focus for Green Action and other NGO allies is to stop the re-start of the reactors that have been on “atomic holiday” since March 2011.
NEWS! Since I began this Diary edition, my e-mail inbox tells me that a court has just issued the decision that Kansai Electric must reverse and take two Takahama nuclear reactors off-line. One unit had been lurching towards full operation after five years of no fission. It is a huge win for Green Action and all its allies that have been working to keep Japan fission-free! The ruling states that emergency planning for Takahama is not sufficient. The local activists I met were focused on what the reality of evacuation in Kyoto Prefecture could be. The largest cities near Takahama are over the Prefecture (“state”) line in Kyoto.
The report also specifies that the plan for MOX fuel use in Takahama is also insufficient! Green Action and Allies are working hard, in addition to stopping reactor re-start, to reverse the Japanese industry and federal commitment to MOX fuel.
Plutonium from reactor waste has been separated by the European nuclear giants (at one time BNFL and still AREVA) and AREVA is fabricating MOX fuel for use in the Japanese reactors as they restart. This pro-nuclear notion is profoundly disturbed thinking. MOX was in Fukushima Daiichi Unit-3 (only a small fraction, probably less than 5%). There is still expert debate about the difference between the explosions at Units 1, 2 and 3, but Arnie Gundersen has said many times there was a detonation shockwave at Unit 3, that hydrogen cannot cause that, and the MOX fuel may have had a role in what happened there.
Takahama had a small amount of MOX in the core as it limped towards restart. The plan remains to load 30% plutonium fuel there (if the plans are deemed sufficient in the future—we hope not!) Dr. Edwin Lyman (www.ucsusa.org) has done the calculations to show that when a MOX core is released in a major reactor accident, the long-term cancers that would result are twice the number from a regular uranium (LEU) core accident. Ed made that calculation initially during the NIX MOX campaign that NIRS and IEER led and UCS supported, before 2000. Long before the gender factor (see Blog 4).
It has taken traveling around the world to have this MOX thought come home:
A nuclear accident involving a fully-loaded MOX core could double the numbers in this chart based on an accident from a normal uranium core: 6 women for every 4 men could expect to suffer from a fatal cancer.
Double cancers in the MOX case for Reference Man = double cancers for little girls too. Juvenile girls when exposed will get ten times more cancer over their lives than the Reference Man (same dose, different gender, different age). Double that for a MOX fuel accident. The ratio is the same comparing the little girl to the adult man, MOX to MOX, but for policy decision making, one must now look at the consequences of a MOX accident compared to an LEU accident. Now female children will suffer twenty times more cancer compared to the Reference Man in a LEU accident.
Again: females exposed as girls, to fission products from MOX fuel in a major reactor accident would get twenty times more cancer than Reference Man exposed to LEU.
If this is not a reason for all good people to oppose MOX fuel use…what will it take?
It was deeply gratifying to me when I spoke in Northern Kyoto Prefecture and a grandmother at the back of the room began chanting “Nix MOX Takahama, Nix MOX Takahama!” NIRS launched the US grassroots NIX MOX campaign in 1996. It continues!
We are, all of us, a Law of the Universe. I am now getting ready for three of my largest events:
Citizen Nuclear Information Center talk, College Women’s Association of Japan Luncheon, and on Friday, March 11, the 5th Anniversary of the Tohoku quake and tsunami triggering the Tepco Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns, I will join NGO’s from the region at the Japanese Diet.
Mary Olson
March 10, 2016
Permalink: http://safeenergy.org/2016/03/10/japan-diary-2016-fukushima5-part-5/
Fukushima disaster sheds light on lack of preparedness for compensation
The crisis at the tsunami-hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant has shed light on a lack of preparedness on the part of the government and utilities to pay massive amounts of compensation for a nuclear accident, which has placed a burden on the public.
At a panel of experts at the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), there have been calls since this past January for reviewing the current system under which nuclear plant operators are responsible for paying compensation for accidents without limits and setting an upper limit on damages.
“The number of nuclear power plant operators could decrease as long as they are required to bear risks exceeding their limits,” one member said.
“It’s important for operators to bear responsibility for such accidents on condition that they could have predicted such disasters,” another stated.
These problems emerged because operators cannot ascertain risks involving the operation of atomic power stations unless they can estimate the amount of compensation for accidents.
However, others in the panel argued that operators would cut back on their investment in safety measures unless they are to bear unlimited responsibility. As such, the overall direction of debate on the issue has not been set.
Under the current nuclear plant accident compensation system, atomic power station operators bear unlimited responsibility for compensation for accidents except in cases of massive natural disasters. However, there is no clear definition of “massive natural disasters,” and the national government is only required to extend the necessary assistance for efforts to deal with such accidents.
Following the outbreak of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the national government placed Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the stricken plant, effectively under state control by providing the firm with an infusion of 1 trillion yen in public funds.
The government then created a system under which it loans necessary money for compensation payments to TEPCO via the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corp. (NDF) without interest. Thus the situation in which TEPCO would go under and become unable to pay compensation to victims of the nuclear crisis has been avoided.
When it placed TEPCO under de-facto state control, the central government explained that the operator of the plant would shoulder the responsibility in principle. However, the reality is different from the government explanation.
Kenichi Oshima, professor at Ritsumeikan University, estimates the total cost of dealing with the nuclear crisis at 13.3 trillion yen. The estimated cost includes 6.2 trillion yen to pay compensation, 2.5 trillion to decontaminate areas tainted by radioactive substances, 2.2 trillion yen to decommission reactors and bring the disaster under control, and 1.1 trillion yen to build interim storage facilities for waste contaminated with radioactive materials.
Of the total amount, TEPCO is likely to pay just over 3 trillion yen on its own, including part of the cost for bringing the crisis under control and paying compensation.
Most of the money needed to pay compensation will be secured from “general contributions” that operators of nuclear plants extend to the NDF. Much of the contributions are passed onto electricity bills consumers pay to utilities. Taxpayers’ money will be spent on the construction of interim storage facilities. Decontamination costs, which the government temporarily foots, will be covered with proceeds from the sales of shares the government holds in TEPCO to lessen the burden on the utility.
“The public is required to effectively shoulder over 70 percent of the costs. The public is being required to pay the costs in a way that lacks transparency,” Oshima said.
If the response to the accident progresses to a certain extent and TEPCO has rehabilitated itself, the government can recover the money it invested in the utility and prevent any increase in the burden on the public. However, this is no easy task.
A high-ranking official of TEPCO’s Kawasaki Thermal Power Plant says it has been successful in streamlining its regular checkup on its generators, shortening the checkup period, increasing the ratio of operation of the latest and most efficient generators and raising the profits by up to hundreds of millions of yen a day.
Learning how to rationalize operations from a worker who had previously worked for Toyota Motor Corp., the plant monitored plant workers’ moves by seconds to reduce time wasting.
“We succeeded in reducing the checkup period, which used to be 80 days in the pre-quake period, to 60 days,” the official said.
However, the increase in profits is attributable mainly to a sharp decline in oil prices. TEPCO posted a pretax profit of 436.2 billion yen in the April-December 2015 period on a consolidated basis. This is largely because fuel costs decreased by about 730 billion yen from the corresponding period of the previous year. If crude oil prices increase, it will offset reductions in expenses.
If the idled Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Niigata Prefecture is to be reactivated, it will increase TEPCO’s monthly profits by 8 to 13 billion yen per reactor. However, there are no prospects that the plant can be reactivated in the foreseeable future.
If the government is to use the proceeds from its sales of TEPCO shares to fully cover decontamination expenses, the value of one share must exceed 1,000 yen. However, the current price is about the half that amount.
The government and electric power companies had promoted the use of atomic power by emphasizing that its costs are low. However, they failed to include risks of accidents and safety measures in power generation costs, and where the responsibility for nuclear accidents lies has remained unclear. As a result, members of the public are being forced to foot the costs and TEPCO is allowed to survive.
A system under which the government and private sector share the burden of nuclear accidents in an appropriate manner has not yet been established.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160311/p2a/00m/0na/019000c
Takashi Hirose: veteran Japanese anti-nuclear activist on the Fukushima disaster
Today marks the 5th anniversary of the March 11th earthquake-tsunami-meltdown catastrophe in Japan. There are countless ways we could commemorate the event, and media outlets throughout the world are doing it in hundreds of ways this week. It is impossible to write one message that covers it all, and difficult to write about it without being redundant. We chose to mark the occasion with a look back at one of the Japanese citizens who first warned, long before 3-11, about the eventuality of this new kind of “triple disaster” that Japanese energy policy had created.
On March 3, 2012, at the first anniversary of the March 11 disaster, Takashi Hirose gave a short testimony for the film project Beyond the Cloud, produced by Keiko Courdy. This film was released in 2013 in French and Japanese, but many segments of it, some subtitled in English, can now be viewed at the Japan Webdoc Project YouTube channel.
More about the film Beyond the Cloud (Au-delà du nuage 霧の向こう) :
Beyond the Cloud Yonaoshi 3.11 is a web documentary and full-length film about Japan post-Fukushima and the triple disaster of March 11, 2011 (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear accident). It is based on interviews conducted by Keiko Courdy during 2011 and 2012, both with residents of the devastated areas, but also with a range of leading Japanese public figures: artists, activists, a monk, writers, investigative journalists, the erstwhile prime minister at the time of the accident.
A segment from Beyond the Cloud—Yonaoshi 3.11:
Takashi Hirose is a longtime, vocal opponent of nuclear energy. He spent many years in the marginalized wilderness that was the customary place for anti-nuclear activists in Japanese society, ignored as they were by a mass media that had been silenced by nuclear industry sponsorship. After March 11, 2011, people started listening to what he had to say.
Takashi HIROSE 広瀬隆 March 3, 2012 (transcript, the video posted below includes subtitles in English and French):
People were in shock after the accident, then gradually, everyone began to be scared. But in the end it was a good thing, a valuable scare. They understood it was no longer possible to have trust.
Unfortunately, man is every day surrounded by thousands of pieces of information. And that makes him forget even the most terrible events. This is the situation we are facing today. As we speak, radioactive material is seeping through Fukushima’s ground. It makes its way underground, reaches the ocean, to finally end up in the sky. This kind of fact does not make the news. So everyone forgets about it. If that was talked about every day in the news, the Japanese population couldn’t ignore it. Instead, all sorts of other things are being shown.
In my opinion mass media bear most of the responsibility for it. They created this situation. Nothing has changed since the incident. Incidents happen because mass media never take the problem seriously. Even though there were a few reports right after the incident, they now mention it sparingly.
The problem with contamination is that we can only measure it within items surrounding us, in the soil, the ground. A lot of people today own a Geiger counter, but it can only report airborne particles, it only measures gamma rays. In fact, when researching the radioactive content released from the reactors, and its dispersion, we do not find everything. It was about 5,000 degrees Celsius inside the reactors. This was a temperature of colossal magnitude. The uranium and plutonium were released as gases. I can find all that based on my calculations, but none of this can be detected using a Geiger counter, and the same goes for alpha and beta rays. No one even measures the strontium level. The strontium is the scariest of all. It penetrates and stays resident in bones, causing leukemia. This is particularly dangerous for the growth phase of children exposed today.
For children living near contaminated areas like Fukushima, we have to immediately set up a plan for their evacuation. But when one does not have money, one cannot escape. Even if the Fukushima population wanted to leave, they could not afford it. Now we must act to demand that TEPCO, the company that caused this accident, be required to give compensation money so that those who want to leave can do so. The country must first organize the evacuation of children from Fukushima in groups. Instead of leaving them alone to decide where to go. Children want to remain close to their schoolmates, so we must keep them in groups. This is achievable. Before Japan lost the war, we organized group evacuations We managed the escape of children from dangerous areas by bringing them to the mountains. This is something that must be done now. But the country does not do anything about it. For that I am calling this country a criminal nation. If we do not act, terrible things are looming for those children. I am worried.
See more in this series at the Japan Webdoc Project YouTube channel.
Takashi Hirose: veteran Japanese anti-nuclear activist on the Fukushima disaster
TEPCO: Accident info was not shared among workers
A survey by the operator of the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant shows that information on a cooling system at one of the reactors was not shared by plant workers at the time of the 2011 accident.
Meltdowns took place at 3 of the plant’s reactors, starting with the No.1 unit. The complete loss of power at that reactor stopped all of its cooling systems.
Surveys in the year after the accident by the government, Diet, and Tokyo Electric Power Company showed that staff at the reactor did not know whether an emergency cooling system was functioning after an indicator lamp went off following the loss of power.
Different findings were obtained in a survey carried out last year by TEPCO.
One worker said he himself stopped the cooling system just before the loss of power. Another said he thought the system had not been functioning, because pressure inside the reactor was rising after the power went out.
The manager on duty at the time said he had no memory of being informed that the emergency cooling system had been stopped.
Just before the loss of power, the system was turned on and off to cool the reactor in stages.
TEPCO officials say reactor staff may have failed to share important information on the status of the cooling system amid confusion over the loss of power.
A later analysis shows that the meltdown started at the No.1 reactor in the evening of March 11th, the day of the accident.
But members of a task force set up that day believed that the cooling system was working until midnight. They included then plant chief Masao Yoshida.
The 2015 findings suggest that the delay in sharing the correct information may have affected the response to the accident.
Fukushima nuclear disaster left 10.7 million 1-ton container bags with radioactive debris
Five years after a powerful earthquake and tsunami sent the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan into multiple meltdowns, cleaning up
the mess both onsite and in surrounding towns remains a work in progress. Here’s a look, by the numbers, at the widespread effects of radiation from the March 11, 2011, disaster:
164,865: Fukushima residents who fled their homes after the disaster.
97,320: Number who still haven’t returned.
49: Municipalities in Fukushima that have completed decontamination work.
45: Number that have not.
30: Percent of electricity generated by nuclear power before the disaster.
1.7: Percent of electricity generated by nuclear power after the disaster.
3: Reactors currently online, out of 43 now workable.
54: Reactors with safety permits before the disaster.
53: Percent of the 1,017 Japanese in a March 5-6 Mainichi Shimbun newspaper survey who opposed restarting nuclear power plants.
30: Percent who supported restarts. The remaining 17 percent were undecided.
760,000: Metric tons of contaminated water currently stored at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
1,000: Tanks at the plant storing radioactive water after treatment.
10.7 million: Number of 1-ton container bags containing radioactive debris and other waste collected in decontamination outside the plant.
7,000: Workers decommissioning the Fukushima plant.
26,000: Laborers on decontamination work offsite.
200: Becquerels of radioactive cesium per cubic meter (264 gallons) in seawater immediately off the plant in 2015.
50 million: Becquerels of cesium per cubic meter in the same water in 2011.
7,400: Maximum number of becquerels of cesium per cubic meter allowed in drinking water by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Sources: Fukushima prefectural government, Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., the Nuclear Regulation Authority, the Federation of Electric Power Companies and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.—AP
Fukushima decontamination troops often exploited, shunned
A worker clears potentially radioactive brush at the garden of a private house in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan. Nearly 26,000 men work in the cleanup campaign.
MINAMISOMA, Japan — The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed, and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains.
They were simply labeled “decontamination troops” — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside.
The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — assigned to remove the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine.
Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations. Vulnerable to exploitation and shunned by local residents, they typically work on three- to six-month contracts with little or no benefits, living in makeshift company barracks. And the government is not even making sure that their radiation levels are individually tested.
“They’re cleaning up radiation in Fukushima, doing sometimes unsafe work, and yet they can’t be proud of what they do or even considered legitimate workers,” said Mitsuo Nakamura, a former day laborer who now heads a citizens’ group supporting decontamination laborers. “They are exploited by the vested interests that have grown in the massive project.”
Residents of still-partly deserted towns such as Minamisoma, where 8,000 laborers are based, worry that neighborhoods have turned into workers’ ghettos with deteriorating safety. Police data show arrests among laborers since 2011 have climbed steadily from just one to 210 last year, including a dozen yakuza, or gangsters, police official Katsuhiko Ishida told a prefectural assembly. Residents are spooked by rumors that some laborers sport tattoos linked with yakuza, and by reports that a suspect in serial killings arrested in Osaka last year had worked in the area.
“Their massive presence has simply intimidated residents,” said Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai. “Frankly, the residents need their help but don’t want any trouble.”
Most of the men work for small subcontractors that are many layers beneath the few giants at the top of the construction food chain. Major projects such as this one are divided up among contractors, which then subcontract jobs to smaller outfits, some of which have dubious records.
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare examined more than 300 companies doing Fukushima decontamination work and found that nearly 70 committed violations in the first half of last year, including underpayment of wages and overtime, and failure to do compulsory radiation checks. Those companies were randomly chosen among thousands believed to be working in the area.
“Violations are so widespread in this multilayer subcontract system. It’s like a whack-a-mole situation,” said Mitsuaki Karino, a city assemblyman in Iwaki, a Fukushima city where his civil group has helped workers with complaints about employers.
Karino said workers are sometimes charged for meals or housing they were told would be free, and if they lose jobs or contracts aren’t renewed, some go homeless.
“It’s a serious concern, particularly for workers who don’t have families or lost ties with them,” he said.
Government officials say they see no other way than to depend on the contracting system to clean up the radiated zone, a project whose ballooning cost is now estimated at $44 billion.
“That’s how the construction industry has long operated. In order to accomplish decontamination, we need to rely on the practice,” said Tadashi Mouri, a health and labor ministry official in charge of nuclear workers’ health.
http://www.sfgate.com/world/article/Fukushima-decontamination-troops-often-exploited-6882977.php
“The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster is a Serious Crime”: Interview with Professor Koide
Introduction
Koide Hiroaki (66) has emerged as an influential voice and a central figure in the anti-nuclear movement since the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi of March 11, 2011. He spent his entire career as a nuclear engineer working towards the abolition of nuclear power plants. His powerful critique of the “nuclear village” and active involvement in anti-nuclear movements “earned him an honorable form of purgatory as a permanent assistant professor at Kyoto University.”1 Koide retired from Kyoto University in the spring of 2015, but continues to write and act as an important voice of conscience for many who share his vision of the future free from nuclear energy and weapons. He has authored 20 books on the subject. Professor Kasai Hirotaka and I visited his office at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute in Kumatori, Osaka, on December 26th, 2014 for this interview. We believe that the contents of the interview, which offer new information about the degree of radioactive contamination and invaluable insight into Koide’s ethical and political stance as a scientist, remain crucial for our critical reflection on ecological destruction, the violation of human rights, and individual responsibility. Professor Robert Stolz, the translator of this interview and the author of Bad Water (Duke University Press, 2015), provides a historical perspective on the interview in a separate article. KH
Interview
I The Fukushima Disaster and Government and Corporate Response
Hirano: How does the Fukushima accident compare with the bombing of Hiroshima or Chernobyl in its scale? What are the possible effects of this yet unknown exposure?
Koide: Let’s start with the scale of the accident: It was a core meltdown involving the release of various kinds of radioactive material. Radioactive noble gas isotopes were also released, as were iodine, cesium, strontium, and other radioactive material. The noble gas isotopes have a short half-life and so at this stage they are all gone. Iodine, too, is gone. So now four years since the accident the materials that are still a problem are cesium-137, strontium-90, and tritium; really, it’s these three.2
Now, as for the scale of the accident, I think it would be best to compare these three radionuclides. Today the main contamination of Japanese soil is the radionuclide cesium-137 [Cs-137 or 137Cs]. The ocean is largely contaminated with strontium-90 [Sr-90 or 90Sr] and tritium [T or 3H]. Right now the main culprit adding to the exposure of the people in Japan is Cs-137, so I think it’s best to use Cs-137 as a standard for measuring the scale of the accident.
But we simply don’t know with any precision how much Cs-137 was released. That’s because all the measuring equipment was destroyed at the time of the accident. How much Cs-137 was released into the air? How much was spilled in the sea? We just don’t know.
Still, the Japanese government has reported estimates to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]. According to those estimated levels, reactors 1, 2, and 3 had been in operation on March 11, 2011, and all three suffered meltdowns. Those three reactors released 1.5×1016 Becquerels of Cs-137, which would make it a release of 168 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bombing. And this is only material released into the atmosphere-at least according to Japanese government estimates.
But I myself think the government’s numbers are an underestimate. Various experts and institutes from around the world have offered several of their own estimates. There are those that are lower than the Japanese government’s numbers and those that are higher, some two or three times higher than the government’s numbers. According to these other estimates I think that the release of Cs-137 into the atmosphere could be around 500 times the Hiroshima bombing.
Now for what has been washed into the sea. That number is likely not much different from the levels released into the atmosphere. Even today we are unable to prevent this release. And so if we combine the amount of Cs-137 released in the air and the ocean together, we get an estimate several hundred times the Hiroshima levels. And some estimates suggest the Fukushima accident could be as much as one-thousand Hiroshimas.
Now to compare this with other accidents: The amount released into the atmosphere from the explosion during the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant was 800 to 1000 times the Hiroshima levels. Put simply, these estimates place Fukushima on par with Chernobyl.
Worse than any of these, however, is atmospheric testing. From the 1950s to the 1960s atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons had already released Cs-137 into the air more than sixty times the numbers released even by the Japanese government for Fukushima. Of course Fukushima is an incredible tragedy, but considered from the earth as a whole it is a rather small accident.
Hirano: I want to ask in more detail about the effect of Cs-137 on the human body and the environment.
Koide: Cesium is an alkaline metal. From the human body’s perspective, cesium closely resembles potassium. The body contains enormous amounts of potassium. It is essential for humans. It’s everywhere in our bodies. Especially our flesh and muscles are full of potassium. And because of this, when cesium is released into the environment, the body deals with cesium as it does with the alkaline metal potassium, which is to say that it is taken into the body and accumulates there.
Strontium is an earth metal. The body treats it like calcium. As you know calcium is a human body building block that accumulates in our bones. Strontium, too, is taken into and collects in the bones. Just as cesium is taken in and is transported to the flesh and muscle.
Hirano: Comparing the releases from nuclear tests by the US and the USSR during the Cold War period, you said that the Fukushima accident was small. So in what way should we think about Fukushima: is it best to consider it a Japanese problem, or to consider it from a global perspective?
Koide: The amount of products of nuclear fission released during atmospheric testing was enormous, and these particles continue to expose humans to radiation. I’m a bit older than you and I recall in my childhood being told not to let the rain fall on me at the time of the testing. In this way everyone on earth has been exposed (hibaku/ 被曝). And because of this testing, historically speaking, cancer rates have slowly risen; I believe this increase in cancer is due to the exposure suffered during the atmospheric testing. Now the radioactive material released from Fukushima has been dispersed across the globe and so once again everyone on earth has been exposed to additional radiation. I think we can expect cancer rates to rise once again.
Atmospheric nuclear testing released all of the radioactive material in the explosions, which entered the stratosphere. Between the stratosphere and the troposphere there is the tropopause, and every year come spring all that material dispersed in the stratosphere breaks through the tropopause and falls to earth. So that material, though initially dispersed in the stratosphere, eventually falls to earth evenly, everywhere. Actually, it might not be accurate to say that it falls evenly on the earth. The majority of the testing was done in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, such as Nevada and the Semipalatinsk test site [in Kazakhstan], so that the northern hemisphere-as the site of most of the testing-is heavily contaminated, and within that the temperate region is heavily contaminated. Still, I can say the atmospheric testing overall has caused global contamination.
My focus now is to figure out how to deal with the acute and heavy contamination from Fukushima. I know something needs to be done right there in that specific place. That contamination will disperse and be diffused across the globe. Once dispersed, the amount of radioactive material from Fukushima will be small when compared with the atmospheric testing. Which is not to say it is not harmful. An increase in cancer will be the result. I mention that for humanity as a whole; the atmospheric tests were worse.
Now, strontium-90 [Sr-90] has been leaking from Fukushima into the ocean, so it will eventually reach the United States, especially the west coast. This much we are sure of. But to answer your question, the amount of dispersed cesium and strontium released by the atmospheric tests is tens of times greater than the Fukushima levels. Because the west coast of the US is already contaminated from the atmospheric testing, though the dispersed contamination from Fukushima will reach US shores, for people living on the US west coast, the Fukushima accident―and this is perhaps awful to say―contamination from Fukushima is hardly worth considering. Historically a much greater event has already taken place.
Hirano: To put that another way, the current Fukushima accident gives us a chance to reconsider the enormity of the past contamination from US and Soviet atmospheric tests, which has not been openly discussed.
Koide: Yes, that’s exactly right. In fact, it is the masses of people who need to realize the impact of the contamination on them. In the case of the Fukushima disaster, for example, they need to be aware that some radioactive material is reaching the North American coast, and the prevailing westerly winds will carry anything released into the atmosphere to the US. Those earlier numbers from the Japanese government indicate that the levels for Cs-137 in the atmosphere are 168 times those of the Hiroshima bombing. I’ve been told that level is 1.5 x 1016 Becquerels [Bq]. These exponents can be a pain to process, so if we think of it in peta-units-which is 1015-we get essentially 15 petabecquerels [PBq].
That said, while we are not really sure this is the number, we do know that a portion of this material will ride the prevailing winds across the Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, closer to the ground, the winds will be east, south, and north, and therefore this other portion will fall on Japan―and we can investigate the actual levels here: how much fell on this town, on this prefecture? Adding these up, it seems to be only 2.4 PBq. Which is to say of the total fifteen PBq, 2.4, or roughly only 16%, fell on Japanese soil. If the totals are higher, still a smaller share of the total contamination will have fallen on Japan compared with the Pacific, with the largest portion falling on the west coast of the United States.
So why don’t we hear complaints from the US? Why are there no calls for compensation? Whenever someone asks me this, I simply say that there just aren’t any such complaints. Why is this so? Well the levels released by the US during the atmospheric testing were tens of times greater than Fukushima. They are the criminals, so they cannot ask for compensation from Japan. The U.S. government does not want to have to reflect on its own past, and I think they are eager to completely avoid bringing up anything like that conversation. That is why I believe it is so important that those who have been exposed to radioactive contamination realize what atmospheric testing has done to them.
Kasai: I’d like to get back to the moment of the accident in some detail. On March 11, 2011 we had the East Japan Disaster (meaning the earthquake and tsunami off Tohoku). You’ve already talked about the string of accidents at the nuclear plant. At the moment the accident was taking place, you were following the response by the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in real time. What did you see in those initial moments?
Koide: It was truly a disastrous response. On the 11th I was in the laboratory in Kyoto as March was my month to work in the radiation-controlled area.3 It was normal workday hours and various tasks kept me busy working within the controlled area. Of course there is no TV or anything like that in the work space. That night there was a meeting so I came out to attend and that’s when I saw the images of the Sendai airport being swept away by the tsunami. The report said that there had been a devastating earthquake and tsunami. Then I wondered about the safety of the nuclear plants.
Right then, there really was no more information. We had scheduled a nuclear safety issues seminar for the 18th. I’ve participated in hundreds of these seminars. Participants from the Ukraine had just arrived on the 11th. We promised to go out drinking after they arrived and so that night I went out. There was no more TV, and while there was a vague unease among us, that’s how we spent the time.
The next day I learned that all power at Fukushima had been lost and I knew things were not going to be simple. Then at noon on the 12th the roof of reactor one was blown off; at that point any expert must have known there had been a reactor meltdown. So I was certain of a core meltdown and because once it has gone this far, there is no going back, it was time to call for anyone who could evacuate to do so. I thought we were at that stage on the 12th.
Yet neither the government nor TEPCO said a single word about a core meltdown; they announced that the incident merited a 3 or 4 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. I remember thinking “You’ve got to be kidding! There’s already been a meltdown. This is at least a level 6 or 7.” But neither the government nor TEPCO gave any indication of this and there was no word of it in the media either.
One by one there were explosions at reactors 3, 4, and 2. As an expert in nuclear power, I understood there was absolutely nothing that could be done. I thought people needed to be evacuating, but still the Japanese government didn’t make the call. Government officials had set up at an off-site center near a power plant in Fukushima―at first they announced evacuation inside two kilometers, then that expanded to three, five, ten, and finally twenty km. After that nothing was done. The offsite center was supposed to coordinate the emergency response in the event of an accident, but it turned out that every one of the officials fled. They left the employees behind and fled. The Japanese government’s response was indescribably cruel.
Kasai: It seems the very words “meltdown” (メルトダウン) and “core meltdown” (roshin yōyū/炉心熔融) were strictly forbidden.
Koide: Exactly.
Kasai: I was in Japan watching on TV. What shocked me was all the nuclear power experts explaining the incident in the studio. I suppose it was a satellite relay, but when reactor number three exploded on our screens they were giving their analyses of the explosion in real time. There were experts on TV saying that the reactor had a blast valve that was used successfully. Even hearing that, an average viewer might think something was amiss. But having physicists, experts on radiation, on TV saying these things, well, even the average viewer wouldn’t buy that explanation. In a broad sense, nuclear experts like yourself played several roles in the media and government.
Koide: Yes, that’s clearly true for pronuclear experts. They all tended to tell a story that underestimated the accident. Immediately after the accident public announcements and information were restricted. As a result individual opinions or statements were strictly forbidden and nearly all experts remained silent, so even basic information was not broadcast. Though I’d made statements from the nuclear lab beginning on the 12th, it is likely there were instructions from the Ministry of Science and Education to silence me. The head of the lab convened several meetings where he told each of us not to make any statement, that the lab would toe the official line when dealing with the mass media. I thought this was wrong and said that anyone who was asked a question by the media should answer it, further saying that if I were asked a question, I had a responsibility to answer. Since then I’ve continued to make statements in the media. Still the large majority of nuclear researchers were not able to do this.
As a result it was the pronuclear researchers who monopolized the interpretations – exactly. So as they went to the TV studios I think each was told: “Today, it’s your turn to go to the studio.” I think that’s how they played their part and handled the media.
Kasai: With respect to controlling information, would you say your experience with the head of the nuclear lab shows how the professional organizations exert pressure on the universities?
Koide: Yes, I would. The head of the lab opened a conference with all the other laboratories―even I went. There he said that any statements to the media should be on message and come only from the information office.
Kasai: So pressure came from academic conferences.
Koide: Yes, there was pressure coming from the academic conference side as well. Take for example something like a conference on nuclear power. From the very start it was never a real discussion; it was a meeting of powerful and vocal spokesmen for the nuclear community or village (genshiryoku kyōdōtai/原子力共同体 or genshiryoku mura/ 原子力村), which is to say the group of pronuclear government officials and private companies mainly centered around the LDP and Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and other pronuclear manufacturers of power plants―and of course their supporters in the media. Thus as an organization the conference was predisposed to underestimate the accident and to then promote that underestimation.
Hirano: Immediately after the accident you testified in the Diet presenting data indicating the seriousness of the disaster and demanding that the government terminate the operation of all the power plants.4
Koide: I did.
Hirano: After that it seems you weren’t again asked to speak publicly, or given the opportunity to offer more detailed thoughts on the situation.
Koide: By “speak publicly” you mean in the Diet or in some other official government setting?
Hirano: Yes, and also in the media.
Koide: With respect to the media, I’ve never really had any confidence in them. Since the accident, I’ve been overwhelmingly busy and haven’t accepted a single invitation from TV stations.
Hirano: I see. So there were invitations.
Koide: There have been many calls saying, “come down to the studio.” But I always tell them that I am too busy for this sort of thing. I’d say, if you come to my office, we could meet. Many did come by, even back then. But as everyone knows, in television you might talk for an hour and none of it makes it on air, or if it does, it’s maybe thirty seconds.
Hirano: Right, and only the convenient parts.
Koide: That’s it and there’s really nothing that can be done about it. There was, however, one outlet for which I was extremely grateful: the daily radio program called Tanemaki Journal (種まきジャーナル).5 There I could go on every day and offer my thoughts live. I wish it could have continued, but it was completely and totally smashed. What a world we live.
Kasai: So, on the subject of standards used for assessing the danger posed by radiation for the human body and the environment: What are your thoughts on how the government deals with this issue?
Koide: They are absolutely not dealing with it at all. I think you already know this but in Japan the average person is not supposed to be exposed to more than one milliSievert per year―that’s set by law. Why is that the level decided on? Because exposure to radiation is dangerous. If exposure weren’t dangerous, if low levels of exposure were safe, there’d be no problem even without that legal limit. But exposure to radiation is dangerous―this is the conclusion of all research. So every nation in the world has set legal limits for exposure.
For people like me who get paid to work with radiation, it’s not really possible to observe the 1mSv/yr limit [1mSv/yr]. We’re told that in exchange for our salaries, we accept exposure to twenty milliSieverts a year. That’s the standard I work under in my job. But the current Japanese government has now stated that if contamination is under 20mSv/yr somewhere, that place is safe to return to―safe to return to even for children. This is way beyond common sense.
Hirano: What is the basis of this claim? Why would the government announce these numbers and forcefully declare these areas safe to return to? What’s the basis for the government’s numbers?
Koide: The basis for those numbers…for example the government says that organizations like the IAEA or the ICRP [International Commission on Radiological Protection] suggest that in emergencies during which the 1mSv/yr standard cannot be maintained standards should be set between twenty and 100mSv/yr. The government seizes on this and declares that since the IAEA and the ICRP have said this, that 20mSv/yr is therefore a safe level-usually adding that membership in both the IAEA and the ICRP is voluntary anyway. But because these organizations have said this is no reason to break Japanese law. If Japan is a nation governed by the rule of law at all, surely this means that the very people who make the laws should also follow them―that should be obvious. But these guys have declared 20mSv/yr safe even for children. There is absolutely no way I can consent to this.
Hirano: So there is no scientific basis for these levels.
Koide: Well… the danger corresponds to the amount of exposure―you probably know this―so for a country that has declared its intention to maintain the 1mSv/yr standard to then turn around and ask people to endure twenty times that level, there is no scientific basis for that declaration. That’s a social decision.
But if you want to inquire as to why, as I’ve mentioned to you, some 2.4 petaBecquerels of radioactive material have fallen on Japan, that material has been dispersed, contaminating Tohoku, Kanto, and western Japan. So in addition to the law setting the legal limit for exposure at 1mSv/yr, there is another law that states that absolutely nothing may be removed from a radioactive management area in which the levels exceed 40,000 Becquerels per square meter.
So the question becomes how many places or how much area has been contaminated beyond 40,000 Bq/m2? And according to the investigations, that answer is 140,000 km2. The entirety of Fukushima prefecture has been contaminated to where all of it must be declared a radioactivity management area. Indeed, while centered on Fukushima, parts of Chiba and Tokyo have also been contaminated. The number of people living in what must be called a radiation-controlled area is in the millions, and could exceed ten million.
For me, if Japan is in fact a nation governed by the rule of law, I believe the government has the responsibility to evacuate these entire communities. Instead of taking a proper action to secure people’s livelihood, the government decided to leave them exposed to the real danger of radiation. In my view, Fukushima should be declared inhabitable and the government and TEPCO should bear a legal responsibility for the people displaced and dispossessed by the nuclear disaster. That’s what I think, but if that were to be done, it would likely bankrupt the country. I think that even though it could bankrupt Japan, the government should have carried out the evacuation to set an example of what the government is supposed to do. But obviously those in and around the LDP certainly didn’t agree. They’ve decided to sacrifice people and get by taking on as little burden as possible. So they’ve made the social decision to force people to endure their exposure. In my view, this is a serious crime committed by Japan’s ruling elite.
I would like people to know just how many thousands of people live in this abnormal situation where even nuclear scientists like me are not allowed to enter, not to mention, drink the water. It is strange that this issue has been left out of all debate over the effects of the radioactive exposure. We must be aware that contemporary Japan continues to operate outside the law in abandoning these people to their fate by saying it’s an extraordinary situation. Under such circumstances, I think, there are a multitude of symptoms of illnesses in contaminated areas. But if we’re talking about any given symptom, it’s hard to say since we just don’t have any good epidemiological studies, or even any good data. But there will surely be symptoms, namely cancer and leukemia.
However little exposure to radiation is, it causes cancer and leukemia―this is the conclusion of all current science. These symptoms are said to become visible 5 years after the initial exposure. But because radiation is not the sole cause of cancer or leukemia establishing a direct causal relationship is extremely difficult. For this very reason we need to continue to investigate the state of exposure by conducting rigorous epidemiological studies. But this government wishes instead to hide the damage so I’m afraid no such study is on the horizon. In addition, I have heard about many cases of nose bleeding, severe headaches, and extreme exhaustion. And I am truly concerned about small children and young people living in Fukushima as they are most vulnerable to exposure.
Hirano: So what is your view of the actual damages of radiation exposure on human health?
Koide: On the evening of the Fukushima dai-ichi reactor accident of March 11, 2011, a Radiation Emergency Declaration was announced. The Declaration suspended existing Japanese law concerning exposure to radiation. Though Japanese law sets the limit for exposure for the general population at one milliSievert a year [1mSv/yr], the new permissible level would be 20 mSv/yr. That Emergency Declaration is still in effect. It is common knowledge that even low levels of exposure are dangerous. Including even infants in this newly imposed 20mSv/yr standard will obviously lead to various diseases. Further, because the monitoring equipment was destroyed at the time of the accident we do not have accurate data on the exposure levels of the residents. Numerous cases of thyroid cancer have been found. The prevalence of thyroid cancer is dozens of times that of normal incidence. Pro-nuclear groups say those numbers are the result of the screening process itself, not the effect of radiation exposure. Which is to say that this was the first major screening of that population and so it was natural that many cases of thyroid cancer would be found. Put differently, what they are saying is that they have never conducted a thorough study of radiation exposure and its impact on human health. Science should acknowledge what it already knows and what it does not. If it is true that there is no established scientific data, a properly scientific approach would be to carry out a through investigation. To deny the damage to health by exposure to radiation without such an investigation is absolutely at odds with the scientific spirit. Prof. Tsuda at Okayama University has already conducted a detailed study on the outbreak of thyroid cancer, showing an epidemiological-like outbreak. Just as happened at Chernobyl, as time passes it is clear there will be more and more instances of all kinds of illnesses.
Hirano: In your books you’ve often stated that there is no uncontaminated food. But for most Japanese, such basic knowledge seems limited to food from Fukushima, and nearby parts of Ibaraki, Gumma, Chiba, Miyagi. For food produced outside these areas, do you think it’s necessary to have strict testing of food that is sold and consumed? What is to be done? Do you think food from outside these areas should also be subject to strict testing before being sent to market and consumed?
Koide: Right, as we discussed earlier, before the Fukushima accident the entire globe was already contaminated with radiation. This means that Tohoku or Kanto or Kansai food, all of it, has been contaminated with radiation―radiation from atmospheric tests. Beyond this, contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl accident reached Japan on the prevailing westerly winds, meaning that all Japanese food was contaminated. And on top of all this, with the Fukushima disaster, as I mentioned, it is not that a thick layer of contamination has dispersed to every corner of the globe from Fukushima, but that this thick layer of contamination is right now centered on Fukushima.
So if we were to carefully measure the levels of food contamination, we’d more or less find moving out from the highest levels in Fukushima to say western Japan or Kyushu, that the numbers would gradually decline to the lower levels received from the atmospheric tests. Right now the people of Fukushima have been abandoned in the areas of the highest levels of radiation. And abandoned people have to find a way to live. Farmers produce agricultural goods, dairy farmers produce dairy products, and ranchers produce meat; these people must do so in order to live. They are not the ones to be blamed at all.
As the Japanese state is absolutely unreliable in this matter, these people have no choice but to go on producing food in that place, all the while suffering further exposure. So I don’t think we can throw out the food they produce there under those conditions. Inevitably someone has to consume that food―I suggest it be fed to the pronuclear lobby (laughs). We should serve all of the most heavily contaminated food at say the employee cafeteria at TEPCO or in the cafeteria for Diet members in the Diet building. But that isn’t nearly enough. We must carefully inspect the food, and once we’ve determined what foods have what levels of contamination, once that is fully measured and delineated, then those who have the corresponding levels of responsibility should eat it, should be given it.
Now of course strict levels of responsibility cannot really be allotted one by one to individuals that way, so when it comes to this food, I would propose devising a “60 and over” system. The most contaminated foods could only be eaten by those 60 years old and older, and from there also have food for “50 and over,” “40 and over,” “30 and over” – giving the best food to children. For example, school lunches would get the most uncontaminated food available―there’d still be contamination from the atmospheric tests―but food with only those levels would be given to children and only adults would receive the contaminated food. That would be my proposal.
My proposal would first be a precise measurement, starting from Fukushima and then of course including western Japan and Kyushu, to sort out the levels and then determine the relative burdens. I am aware that this is a controversial proposal, but each one of us, especially those who built postwar Japan, bears responsibility for allowing our society to heavily dependent on nuclear energy without carefully reflecting on the risks and consequences of it. And more importantly, we have the responsibility for protecting children.
Kasai: Recently, that idea has been suggested in Nishio Masamichi’s Radioactive Archipelago (Hibaku retto/『被爆列島』). You’ve just stressed that though the first step must be a rigorous measurement, right now that is simply impossible.
Koide: Right, completely impossible.
Kasai: So, that’s true of water as well. First I don’t think most people know how to measure the levels in water. You’ve already said how the current minimum standards are worthless, that below a certain threshold it would be displayed as “ND” (Not Detectable). For example, for tap water, up to 20 Becquerels would be posted as “ND,” exactly as if there was no radiation detected at all. Yet even with all these doubts on measurement, we must start with it, though it’s a dizzyingly long road ahead. But what do you think can be done to change this situation for the better?
Koide: Right now Japan has a standard of 100Bq/kg for general foodstuffs. Before the Fukushima disaster, Japanese foodstuffs were contaminated―by the atmospheric tests―at a level of 0.1Bq/kg. Of course there were some foods with less contamination and some with more. Still, roughly speaking it was 0.1Bq/kg. So when you’re talking 100 Bq/kg that’s allowing 1,000 times the [pre-Fukushima] levels.
As I said before, any exposure is absolutely dangerous. And the dangers increase corresponding to an increase in levels of exposure; this is the conclusion of all research. 100 Bq/kg is dangerous, 99 is dangerous, as is 90, and 50, and 10―they are all dangerous. 10 Bq/kg is 100 times the pre-Fukushima levels.
So I think it’s necessary to precisely measure the levels of contamination. As many people are living in a state of anxiety, groups like consumers’ cooperatives and other sorts of organizations are trying to measure the contamination on their own. But the measuring devices that these groups are able to get, such as the ones called NAI, these devices can only measure levels above 20Bq/kg. While this means that they can measure levels as little as one-fifth of the national thresholds, from my perspective even this lower level is far too high.
And the worst thing that could happen is thinking that any contamination below the detectable limits of these machines, meaning below 20Bq/kg, would be misunderstood as being free of contamination, and then having the Fukushima prefectural government actively using this data as good news: “measurements below the detectable limits of the device must be clean; we can even serve this food in school cafeterias,” or PR campaigns announcing “Fukushima produce is safe.” Of course it would be totally outrageous and unthinkable and yes I think every effort should be made to serve the least contaminated food in school cafeterias―but the reality is that any food tested below detectable levels is distributed to schools as safe produce.
I think we need to stop this situation, and technically speaking, I think several germanium semiconductor detectors must be deployed instead. But a germanium detector would cost from $100,000 to $200,000. And in order to use it, the detector needs to be kept at 150 degree below zero Celsius. So these are not devices that the average citizen is going to be able to use.
So no matter how dedicated any individual citizen may be, there are real limitations when it comes to measuring radiation levels. If you ask me what should be done, for example when faced with Cs-137 or Sr-90, what should be done about these contaminants? Well these contaminants were produced in a nuclear reactor at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and it means that they are unmistakably TEPCO’s property. And if their private property is found to have contaminated other areas they have undeniable responsibility for it. So I think this is something that is required of TEPCO. I think it is TEPCO’s responsibility to precisely measure which foods have been contaminated, and to what extent, and then to report the results to the public. I think this is something the public should demand. After TEPCO the government also has responsibility―they gave their seal of approval to TEPCO after all. So the public should also demand that the government precisely measure the levels and publish the results.
Because there are limits to what one can do on one’s own, I think we need a movement that forces the government and TEPCO to take responsibility for the precise measurement of the contamination.
Hirano: Some have raised doubts over precisely this kind of rigorous measurement citing possible damage caused by rumors or misinformation (fūhyōhigai/風評被害), but to me this sort of criticism is tainted with a sort of “national morality” discourse (kokumin dōtokuron/国民道徳論).
Koide: Yes, I think so.
Hirano: There seems to be a very strong sense of dividing people into those who are seen as patriotic and those who are seen as un-Japanese (hikokumin/非国民).
Koide: For me, I’ve been making statements on the Fukushima contamination. These statements have been denounced and even made some angry with me. But the contamination is real. For a long time now I’ve been the kind of person who would rather hear the truth, no matter how awful, than to remain ignorant. I am absolutely not going to hide the truth; no matter how much criticism I have to take I am going to diligently report the truth. Yeah, a lot of people get angry with me. (Laughs).
Kasai: On this point, this year saw the publishing of Kariya Tetsu’s manga series Oi shinbo: Fukushima no shinjitsu (『美味しんぼ – 福島の真実』). 6 It would seem a kind of political campaign was developed to attack it. What is your take on this?
Koide: The editors sent me a copy and I’ve read it. It’s an awesome manga. In this day and age we just don’t have this kind of detailed manga on this problem and I am grateful for it. And more, Oi shinbo talks about the nosebleeds [caused by radiation]. The nosebleeds are real. Lots of Fukushima residents are said to be suffering from nosebleeds. Itokawa, the mayor of Futaba machi, has shown us proof. One of my acquaintances often talks about the nosebleeds.
It was true at Chernobyl, too. But nosebleeds have not been definitively and scientifically linked to exposure to radiation.7 Still there is no denying that it is real and happening. So even if current science is unable to explain it, it’s for science to ask just what is going on? Science has a duty to explain this, to tell the truth without obfuscation. No matter the reasons, we should be allowed to tell the truth. So for me I don’t think there is anything wrong with this part of Oi shinbo.
Kasai: I think Oi shinbo clearly exposed the politically constructed narratives “damage from rumor or misinformation” and “emotional bonds” (kizuna/絆) as fictions, and so for this reason it appears it had to be crushed.
Koide: Exactly. But Kariya, the author of Oi shinbo, is not one of the criminals responsible for the Fukushima disaster. Rather the government officials who caused the Fukushima disaster are the criminals. Yet it is these same government bureaucrats who now come out and complain that this manga is out of order. I say, “No, it’s you who are out of order. We need to send you to prison right now.”
But isn’t it always the case that a criminal who has committed a crime remains unquestioned and so starts bashing those who are telling the truth? When that happens I think the problem is precisely this word you just used “emotional bonds.” Since Fukushima, I have come to hate this word. (Laughs).
Hirano: “Bonds” seems to be the new nationalism, doesn’t it?
Koide: Yes, yes it does.
Hirano: You’ve often said that the Japanese economy and the people’s lifestyle would be fine even without a single nuclear power plant. In fact, since the government shut all the nuclear reactors down, the people have experienced no real trouble at all. In addition, considered in light of world standards we still have material riches and a lifestyle of surplus. Given this, what are your thoughts on the call to restart the reactors? For what purpose, what reason do you think the government has?8
Koide: First of all, the power companies don’t want to go bankrupt. In other words, the heads of the power companies do not want to take personal responsibility. For example, if the reactors are restarted and there’s an accident, are the heads of the power companies going to be punished? We already know that they will not be. Even after the Fukushima disaster neither the chairman, nor the CEO, nor anyone below―not a single person―was punished.9 It certainly looks as if the reactors are restarted and there’s an accident, the heads of the power companies would not be required to take any responsibility. The heads of the power companies, from Kyushu Electric to Kansai Electric, have received this message loud and clear.
What’s more, if the nuclear power plants are idled and not allowed to restart, then all the capital they represent becomes a non-performing asset. And of course this is anathema to anyone in management.
Hirano: If we could return to a technical discussion specifically how to decommission a reactor. As have others in your field you’ve already stated that a full end game cannot be envisioned yet. Still could you talk about what makes this issue so difficult?
Koide: By decommissioning you mean the endpoint of the Fukushima reactors?
Hirano: Yes, what does it mean for Fukushima dai-ichi?
Koide: When we say decommission we basically mean: How do we fully contain the radiation? At least I think that’s the main point. Now this is impossible if we don’t know the status of the melted core. Though it’s been four years since the disaster we simply do not know where the core is or in what state it is.
This is a situation that only happens in nuclear accidents. However large a chemical plant explosion may be there’d probably be an initial fire, but usually after several days, perhaps weeks you’d still be able to go on site and investigate. You’d be able to see just how things broke down. And in some situations might even be able to fix them. But with an accident at a nuclear plant you cannot even go on site four years later―probably not even ten years later.
Hirano: Because the contamination is so severe that no one can come close to it.
Koide: Yes. For humans going there means instant death, so the only way at all is to use robots. But robots are extremely vulnerable to radiation. Consider, robots receive their instructions through series of 1s and 0s, so should the radiation switch a 0 to a 1 you’d end up with completely different instructions. Essentially robots are useless. Even if you are able to send them in they can never return. Because this has been the case up to now, the only way left in the end might be to use robots that try to avoid exposure or that are built as much as possible to withstand exposure, but that is no simple thing.
So it means until we figure out what to do it would still take many years. Once you understand this fact you can start thinking about what can be done. And at the very least the “road map” devised by the government and TEPCO is the most absolutely optimistic road map that there could be. They are convinced that the melted core fell through the bottom of the pressure vessel and now lie at the bottom of the containment vessel―basically piling up like nuggets of the melted core. There’s no way this would be the case. (Laughs).
As the severity of the disaster became clear, water was repeatedly thrown on the reactors. This water would evaporate and dissipate continuously. That was the actual situation. There is no way that the melted core would have stayed as slimy liquid and then piled up like so many little nuggets. It should have been scattered all over the place. This is how the government and TEPCO’s roadmap goes: The buns would stay at the bottom of the containment vessel, above which is the reactor pressure vessel―a steel pressure furnace. With the furnace floor broken open, there is a hollow at the bottom through which the melted core must have leaked.
So at some point both the containment vessel and the pressure vessel would be filled with water and they’ll be able to see the nuggets of melted core by looking from above down into the water. They say the nuggets (the fallen material), yes, that they sit some thirty to forty meters below the water’s surface, that they’ll eventually be able to grab and remove them. This is all it takes, according to the government and TEPCO’s roadmap. Not a chance. This simply cannot be done.
Hirano: Obviously we can’t confirm or really say anything definitive about the situation in the reactors, but what do you think has happened?
Koide: I simply don’t know. But as I have mentioned, this whole “nugget” scenario is just not the case, and so I think the materials are scattered all over the place. Though the containment vessel is made of steel, if the melted core has come in contact with that steel, just as it ate through the floor of the pressure vessel, it could possibly have melted through the containment vessel. Depending on how things developed this, too, is a possibility. Unfortunately, I simply do not know.
Hirano: If that is in fact the situation, what steps are necessary?
Koide: First, as we talked about earlier, radiation must be prevented from being released into the environment. As I consider this task as “decommissioning” or the final containment of the accident, I think in order to prevent the release into the environment you must do whatever you can starting from the worst-case scenario.
There are situations in which the containment vessel can suffer a melt-through. I think this likely has already happened. And if it has happened what should be done? Outside the reactor there flows ground water. If the melted core were to come in contact with the ground water, the whole situation would be unmanageable. While this may have already have happened, in order to get any kind of control over the situation, some sort of barrier must be built to prevent the melted core from reaching the ground water. I’ve been saying this since May 2011―and they have not done a thing.
Kasai: This barrier would be an ice dam, a wall of super-chilled soil.
Koide: That’s the most recent idea. But it simply cannot be done successfully. It would cost billions of dollars. And it would fail. And when it did fail they’d say there’s nothing to be done but build a concrete wall. No matter how foolish an idea may be, they’ll just keep moving from failure to failure.
But really, for the construction companies that’s a good thing. I think Kashima would be the ones to build the super-chilled earth wall, for some billions of dollars. And if it doesn’t work―they wouldn’t have to take responsibility. Next they’d build an impermeable concrete wall. Several huge construction firms (zenekon/ゼネコン) would be contracted and would all make billions.
But considered from the perspective of actually ending the disaster, it would be a series of failures. Personally, I think an underground, impermeable wall needs to be built immediately. They are not going to be able to remove the material. All that can be done is to contain it. Underground the wall needs to be strengthened; above ground the only choice is some sort of sarcophagus like the one they built over Chernobyl. But even this would take dozens of years―I’ll probably be dead by then.
Kasai: There are temporary tanks sitting on land for this water, but they are starting to leak. What should be done about this contaminated water? There’s not enough space for all of it on land; it cannot be controlled; and every year the volume grows larger.
Koide: The radioactive water has penetrated the coastline around the Fukushima Daiichi. Underground water in the large area of Fukushima has been seriously contaminated. And at some point those contaminated water tanks will fail. I thought we must do everything that we possibly could. Already in March of 2011 there was some 100,000 tons of contaminated water. Even then I proposed moving it but didn’t get anywhere with it. Now there’s up-to 400,000 tons. In the near―meaning not too distant―future there will be nothing left but to release it into the sea.10 The water contains plutonium 239 and its release into the Ocean has both local and global impacts. A microgram of plutonium can cause death if inhaled.
Kasai: It appears that they are already moving toward that direction a little at a time aren’t they.
Koide: The Nuclear Regulatory Committee has been hinting at the possibility of releasing it into the ocean.
Kasai: They have been trying to persuade the fishing cooperatives and others to allow the release.
Koide: Yes, they have.
Kasai: Something that has not been much of a topic of discussion today is decontamination. It has become a rather large industry, in other words, “the exposure industry” (hibaku sangyō/被曝産業). Do you think decontamination is really meaningful and effective?
Koide: Yes, I do. And we must do it. But, to say that because we’ve decontaminated some area that the whole issue is resolved, or that people may safely live in a decontaminated place―I think that is a real problem.
First, fundamentally, people must not be forced to live in contaminated areas that must be decontaminated. First must come complete evacuation. The state must take on the responsibility to allow whole communities to evacuate. Of course, they did not do this.
Briefly, I use the word “decontamination” (josen/除染), which is a compound word written with the characters for “remove” and “stain.” But this is something that cannot be completed when it comes to radiation, so the original sense of the word “removal of contaminants” is impossible. But as long as people are abandoned in the contaminated areas, I believe all possible actions should be taken to lessen their exposure. It is essential that the contamination be removed as far away as possible, to be transported far from where people live. For this reason I prefer to call it “[toxic] relocation” (isen/移染).
But even if this is done, that does not mean that the radiation has been erased. This stuff contaminates everything from mountains to what have you, it gets into the space of people’s lives. When that happens it must be removed. But removal merely means moving it around―it does not mean eliminating it. It means another job is waiting to handle the contaminated materials that get moved around.
Right now the authorities say they want various prefectures and other local governments to build a temporary storage and bury the accumulated contamination there.
We talked about this before, but the contaminants themselves were clearly formerly in the reactor at TEPCO’s Fukshima Daiichi plant and are therefore also clearly TEPCO’s property. So while it is residents who are doing the hard work of collecting all these contaminants, I think it would be right and just for these contaminants to be returned to TEPCO. Earlier prof. Kasai told us the contaminants were being called “no-one’s property” (mushubutsu/無主物), but I say in all seriousness, the conclusion of my logic here is to say to TEPCO: “Hey, this is your crap” and return it to them. That way the residents are not forced to accept the stuff, TEPCO is. The best solution is to return all of the material back to the Fukushima Daiichi plant, but that is not possible. Right now that place is a battlefield between poorly paid workers and the radiation, so I don’t see this as a possibility.
What I would most like to do is have TEPCO’s headquarters buried under all the radiation, but whenever I say this people just laugh. (laughs)
I do have a second proposal. Fifteen kilometers south of Fukushima Daiichi [Fukushima 1] is the Fukushima dai-ni [Fukushima 2] nuclear plant. There is a lot of wide open space there. So first off we would return the Fukushima 1 contamination to TEPCO there. I think there would be enough space, but if there were not, the rest could be taken to TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki Kariya nuclear plant. It’s the world’s largest nuclear plant and so there is a lot of space. I think turning that place into a nuclear waste site is a good idea.
Lately I’ve been invited to Kashiwazaki11 and talked about it. I think I’ve become a hated man there. (Laughs). But I think taking full responsibility for various actions is the most important thing. And when it comes to this particular disaster no one has greater responsibility than TEPCO. As I think it important for one to take full responsibility, if Fukushima 2 doesn’t work out, then Kashiwazaki Kariya is the only other option.
Hirano: State expenditures for decontamination have supposedly reached one trillion yen.
Koide: It’s more than that.
Hirano: This summer I spent some time in Iitate village. Of course at the time the place was crawling with decontamination workers. It was a truly bizarre scene. I had the feeling of running around on a moonscape. Of course there were no residents there-just decontamination workers in strange gear, trucks running all over the place. Looking at that scene, being shown the actual work of decontamination, it seemed to be an excruciatingly slow―even endless―endeavor. I mean they were scrubbing everything with small brushes. I was able to ask the workers a few questions―off the record. Many were people from Hokkaido, Okinawa, and Fukushima who had lost their homes. It was a collection of modern day migrant workers and victims of disaster. They said that they work for just 15,000 yen a day.
I asked them if they thought their work was doing any good. They said they needed the money and honestly had no way of knowing if this sort of minute and delicate work would remove the contamination.
Was this a mistake? Is scrubbing everything by hand and then dumping it all in the ground really the only way to decontaminate an area?
Koide: Well I think both that it is and it isn’t effective. For example, when they first started the decontamination work, what they did was blasting everything with high-pressure water hoses. That’s bad. All that does is get all the contamination moving around. It’s really just dispersing it.
Some of my colleagues have said that is a bad method. Be it a roof or a wall, you shouldn’t just douse it with water. To really remove the contamination, you would first cover it with something that could prevent the escape of radioactivity then knock down the radiated structure, tear it all off, and then fold it up and collect it all. I think that’s probably true. But it takes a long time.
I think there are effective ways of doing it and I think there are ineffective ways. Still it is fundamentally impossible to erase the contamination and so it must be moved. The only thing we should be doing is thinking about the easiest way to relocate it all.
Hirano: That’s the meaning of “effective” in this situation isn’t it.
Koide: Right. So the current method may be rather small in scale. But for me even small-scale methods are necessary. As long as people are living there everything is necessary.
Of course, there’s legitimate criticism over the fact that this is a decontamination business and that the large construction companies are getting rich, but again, for me, as long as there are abandoned people still living there it all must be done.
Hirano: It was really a shock going there and seeing it. To see those workers and, honestly, their lack of conviction for the work. It was a really weird scene. No real enthusiasm, but rather one day after the other, contingent labor. The media has reported that the workers come from a few particular prefectures, but actually being there and talking to them, I could really get a true sense of the structure of economic inequality in Japan, that this sort of work found this kind of person, a person coming from economically precarious and socially marginalized backgrounds. In fact, you come to understand that decontamination work depends on these people.
For example, decontamination, or your preferred “relocation,” couldn’t those jobs be made more equitable―say by requiring TEPCO office workers, especially executives, to do it?
Koide: I’ve said that.
Hirano: You have? (Laughs).
Kasai: So…about the airborne radiation dosage and the soil contamination, there is a public entity that measures and publishes the airborne levels. But the soil contamination is not measured. I remember reading about Chernobyl that the soil contamination levels are the standard by which one gets the right to evacuation and refuge. But Japan only measures the air. And there are those who doubt the accuracy of the levels recorded. I thought the soil contamination had not been measured yet, but from what you mentioned earlier, we do know the extent of the contamination, don’t we?
Koide: Yes, we do.
Kasai: The actual levels?
Koide: With respect to soil contamination we more or less know the extent of it. We largely know which prefectures, which towns, and which villages―as well as how badly―have been contaminated. Four years after the disaster it has moved around. Radiation moves through the environment; it has a material existence and also does die out. I’m sure much has changed since immediately following the accident.
We have the data necessary to draw a map of the situation immediately following the accident, but we don’t have the data necessary to draw a map of the contamination today. That said, we basically know the extent of the soil contamination.
Kasai: Who is it that is making these measurements?
Koide: It is basically the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Some local governments took part as well. Some independent groups, as well as some local governments, took part in taking measurements back then. But for us the number one data source is the US military.
Hirano: I see; how is that?
Koide: They worked at truly amazing speed-and accuracy.
Hirano: Sorry if this next thought seems a bit of a tangent, but right after the accident both the US and Japan were looking at the same data. But their interpretations of it were extremely far apart. The US ordered all of its personnel to evacuate an area 80 km from Fukushima. While Japan’s largest evacuation zone was 20 km. Where does this disparity in evacuation zones come from? They are both looking at the same data. How do they arrive at such definitive and divergent judgments?
Koide: Well…and this was true for me, too, any nuclear specialist would have known on March 11th-March 12th at the latest-that there had been a meltdown. And this means, quite simply, that control had been lost. And once control is lost you simply don’t know what is going to happen next-or that’s what you must think at the time. Disaster preparedness must always imagine the worst-case scenario. If you don’t plan for the worst-case scenario it will be too late. What the US did was believe there had been a worst-case scenario-a meltdown-and so moved to take care of its people. That’s why they ordered an 80 km evacuation. I think this was the correct strategy. Japan didn’t do this. Japan was always thinking of the ideal, the best case scenario. They had to be thinking they could still get control and based their policy on that optimistic assumption. So they only declared a 20 km evacuation zone. I would say that from this conclusion two things may unfold: one is their desire to see this as a best-case scenario and the other is their inability to deal with it.
Hirano: What do you mean by their inability?
Koide: In a word, the Japanese state is incapable of functioning adequately when dealing with a disaster. That’s why they evacuated those within 20 km by bus but when it came to the 30 km zone they told those who could easily evacuate to do so and for all others to merely close their doors and windows.
Hirano: So there was no emergency management.
Koide: None. There simply is not a single person in the Japanese government who had thought an accident like this was possible. They all immediately fled the off-site center and so there was absolutely no emergency management―there couldn’t be. And because management was now impossible, there were no announcements. Even if they had declared an 80 km evacuation zone there were no emergency shelters. They had made no preparations, so there was nothing to be done.
Hirano: Last summer I interviewed Murakami Tetsuya 12 Just as the accident was happening he reached out to the government. But he got no response. He went to the prefecture. No response from them either. In the end he just used his own judgment. So really there was essentially zero emergency management in place. His thoughts at the time were to get the whole village to emigrate; that really there was nothing to do but to buy land and move to Hokkaido. He said these were his actual plans at the time. In fact, it would seem that the myth of safety has so totally permeated the bureaucracy that there really is no one who thinks about these things―wouldn’t you say?
Koide: That’s right. Not a single nuclear expert or policy maker ever seriously considered the possibility of an accident like this. I knew accidents were possible, and that when they happened the damage would be enormous; I had been commenting on the possibility, referring to some results of simulations. But still I would have thought the kind of disaster that happened at Fukushima was some kind of impossible nightmare―yet it actually happened. It was like the worse nightmare becoming a reality. And if even I thought this then all those pronuclear people surely never gave it a moment’s thought. And so when it actually happened, no one had thought about, let alone built a system to deal with it.
II The Responsibility of the Scientist and the Citizen
Kasai: In your books and lectures you often express strong respect for Tanaka Shōzō.13 Can you connect what you’ve just said to this as well?
Koide: Sure. I first became aware of Shōzō when I was in the student movement during the 1970s This was a time when there was close attention paid to Japan’s many pollution incidents, such as at Minamata. Personally I was working on nuclear power, but it was a time when, like it or not, we learned of all the harm that came along with building Japan into a modern nation. What I got from Shōzō was this epiphany that just like the Minamata disease right there before our eyes these sorts of pollution incidents went way back in Japanese history. With Japan’s decision to cast off Asia and follow the West after the Meiji Ishin of 1868 came these sorts of incidents, and the question within that was just how should one live? I learned the way Shōzō lived his life. I thought: Wow, it is possible to live that way; I must do it. Unfortunately I am completely unable to do so, but I never stop thinking that Shōzō’s was a wonderful way to live a life.
Hirano: Going back to an earlier discussion. You’ve repeatedly talked about the government’s responsibility, scientists’ responsibility, and individual responsibility. It would seem that this word “responsibility” is an extremely important keyword for you. You often emphasize it in your writing, too. What I want to ask concerns the issue of scientists’ special responsibility, a particular social responsibility. Scientists are often thought of as technicians, but this is not really the case. As a result, I feel you’ve pursued an intense interrogation of yourself as a scientist. As you’ve said you are not going to enter politics, could you connect this discussion of scientific responsibility to your earlier discussion of doing all that has fallen to you personally to do? How should we think about these two things?
Koide: I am in science and as such I have to take on the responsibility of a scientist-Just as a politician must take political responsibility. I think I mentioned this to you the last time, but I am an absolute individualist (tetteiteki na kojinshugisha/徹底的な個人主義 者). I don’t want to be constrained by anyone. I want to be able to decide my own life for myself. But because I’ve made this choice by myself I must also take full responsibility for that choice.
It’s two sides of the same coin. I don’t take orders from anyone. And this means that I alone bear the responsibility. It’s really as simple as saying: I’m a scientist and so I have the responsibility of a scientist.
Hirano: On this way of thinking about responsibility: “Who is the subject responsible?”―this way of thinking about it seems to be quite absent in contemporary Japan.
Koide: Right. People living in Japan today have not made decisions as individuals. They just “go with the flow;” as long as they follow the “authorities” whom they believe will guarantee the happiness of their individual selves. This seems true of education, too. Go to a slightly better school; get into a slightly better company; grow a bit more rich, a bit more grand. I think everyone is swept up in this current, and it’s really senseless.
I think it is extremely important that each and every individual live out their individuality. The absolute worst thing is for everyone to become blindly obedient to the “authorities,” yet this is the Japan we find ourselves in today. And so no one takes any responsibility. Living in such a society it is too easy to say, “It can’t be helped.” Everyone is thus able to blame the society as a whole; “It can’t be helped.” And so no one takes any individual responsibility.
The most extreme and obvious example was the war. Everyone would say: “It’s not my fault; I was deceived. The military were the culprits.” Saying this allows people to remain at a distance, indifferent. It is bad news for a nation when its citizens have only this view of responsibility.
Hirano: You’ve declared, “I am an absolute individualist.” Personally I am very interested in that statement. So could you speak a bit more concretely about the meaning of your individualism for how one lives a life? In other words, could you explain just what you mean by this “individualism?”
That is, in Japan being individualistic is more often a way to say egotistical; a sort of disregard of others. One should pursue one’s own interests―in English the word is “selfish” ― egocentric ― pursue your own egotistic advantage. Now this seems completely different from the way you use the term. Could you speak directly to this difference?
Koide: I think you’ve just done so.
Hirano: Did I? (Laughs). So that’s it then, just as I said? Still it’s clearly not selfishness.
Koide: No, I don’t think it’s about interests.
Hirano: It’s about values isn’t it?
Koide: Yes, it’s about personal values. You and I are different people. I am different again from Mr. Kasai. Why? Well our genetic information is different. I received a bundle of information from my parents. You and Mr. Kasai, too, are influenced by your genetic information. Every one of the over one hundred million Japanese is a unique human being; and every one of the over 7.3 billion people on earth are unique individuals.
History may keep moving on, and there is a big, wide world here on this planet earth. That said, right now, at this moment, and right now, in this place, I exist as an irreplaceable being. It is nothing but an absolute truth. You normally live in Los Angeles, but right now at this moment you are a person who is here. Mr. Kasai has come down from Tokyo. While acknowledging all the implications of being within the flow of history, we are all right here, right now.
In other words, every single individual human being has a different way of living a life; they are each unique. They have each lived a life that absolutely no one else could have lived. It is a real loss if they don’t live up to their full potential. Those are my thoughts.
So for my own unique self, and so for your own unique self, and Mr. Kasai’s own unique self, none of us should be compelled by someone else to do something (meirei o sarete/命令されて). If we don’t live our lives according to the will coming from deep within ourselves, that’s a real loss; we must all live with our values coming from within ourselves.
I am going to retire next March, but though I am the lowest ranked employee here― above me are assistant professors and professors ― because of the peculiar arrangements of working where I do, I am not compelled to take orders from anyone. I am the lowest ranked so of course there is also no one below me to order around. So I am in a position where I never take nor give orders. For me this is the ideal position to be in.
And so I can live out my own life according to my own values; I’m allowed to live a life that suits me. Now I found myself in this position largely by accident, and then chose to continue to live my life this way. Related to this, I am a human being and so will make mistakes, but these mistakes will be things that I have chosen, things that I have personally done so there is nothing to do but to take responsibility for them. This is what I mean when I say that responsibility is an extremely important word.
Hirano: Well, you’ve exhaustively criticized this competitive society. You’ve said that this competitive society has ruined Japan and destroyed life based on what you call responsibility.
Koide: Yes. Everyone is running towards the exact same goal. It’s ludicrous. You want to go that way; I want to go this way. I think this would be the ideal society. Full mutual recognition is a good thing.
Hirano: Does your view come from your personal experience? In your books you state that you were a really conscientious student when you were younger (laughs).
Koide: (laughs) Well, yes.
Hirano: You studied extremely hard. Did everything extremely hard. You continued this in your nuclear research in college believing that a new energy source was cheap and good for everyone. You must have thought this was a great thing.
Koide: That’s right.
Hirano: But you eventually noticed that it was all wrong. So on this, from deep in your own experience, it’s an individual history, an individual experience, in one sense it’s connected to your current individualism, to how you live your life focused on the important things to you.
Koide: I think that’s right. So, well, when I was young, in my late teens, I was consumed by the dream of nuclear power. I devoted my life to it. That was all a mistake―it did not take me too long to realize that.
Hirano: When did it happen? In graduate school?
Koide: My third year in university.
Hirano: Third year―so as an undergraduate.
Koide: Yes, I came to this realization in the latter half of my undergraduate studies. It was foolish and I curse myself for it, but I didn’t quit. To this day I’ve lived my life as someone who made that wrong choice, and there is nothing to do but make amends for that choice.
At a minimum I wanted to get rid of nuclear power before there was a bad accident. I guess I’ve lived with this wish for over forty years―but that wish stayed out of reach. And here we have had the accident so my life has been for nothing. You could say that thing I wanted most to do has been denied. Really, what have I lived for? I think about that from time to time.
As this was my choice I have to accept it. So while the meaning of my life may have been lost, still I was able to live my own life as I pleased, without submitting to the orders of others and without ordering others around―for this I am grateful. My hopes were never realized. History is full of that kind of thing. Likely very few people see their hopes fulfilled. And while in my case they were rejected, I was able to live the life I wanted and that is a life to be grateful for.
Hirano: In a way, it’s just how Tanaka Shōzō lived his life isn’t it?
Koide: Yes it is. That is what I like about Shōzō.
Hirano: On that point. His life, too, was a defeat.
Koide: Complete and total defeat.
Hirano: Still, he used all sorts of means, and followed all the way through on his beliefs.
Hirano: So getting back to Fukushima, it seems when it comes to the life choices of the so-called Japanese elites, they seem caught in a system in which they will succeed and become famous by crushing their individuality and subsuming it under some organization in order to get ahead in a society and achieve fame and status. And the education system seems to be promoting this lifestyle where these sorts of people are created through intense competition. I think the very end result of this social and educational system was revealed, and it exploded in an explicit and ugly manner through various problems the Fukushima disaster has posed.
Koide: Yes, I think so. You said it.
Hirano: I see. In one sense it would have been possible even for these Japanese elites to make their personal responsibility clear and take appropriate actions only if they had lived a life based on individualism as you suggested.
Koide: Yes I think such a possibility exists, but unfortunately in Japan today that possibility has been completely crushed. It was abundantly clear from the Fukushima disaster that no one in this country is going to take responsibility.
Hirano: You’ve already talked about how TEPCO and the government made huge mistakes in dealing with the problem immediately after the accident. What do you see as the definitive mistake that led to this disaster?
Koide: There’s a ton of them. Any specialist would have known right away there had been a meltdown, and that everyone needed to be evacuated immediately. And evacuating to 20 km away is totally inadequate. Iitate village some 40-50 km away received an enormous amount of contamination and was neglected for over a month.
Soma residents evacuated to Iitate, this kind of stupidity cannot stand, the government’s criminal mistakes.
Kasai: I’m deeply taken by your previous discussion on responsibility. It’s really a story of something with no owner. A golf course that has had to close because it is considered contaminated with radiation from TEPCO’s plant has recently sued. TEPCO’s top attorneys argued in defense that the radiation is not their property, which would make it no one’s property and therefore TEPCO is not responsible. It seems the opposite of what you’ve just said about responsibility, to be sure, yet this declaration of complete lack of responsibility, once passed through the logic and system of the courts, these lawyers have arrived at precisely this conclusion. It is not a question of individual responsibility; it is a problem of the social system. Lack of any responsibility is the basis of the entire social system. What are your thoughts on this?
Koide: It’s exactly as you say. This is what it has come to. I couldn’t care less about a country like that. But in order to overcome this situation, it’s something I mentioned earlier, but there is no way but for rather foolish citizens to get smarter. Only each individual standing up for his or her own way is going to do it.
Hirano: You’ve also talked about “responsibility for being fooled.” You’ve said that even the deceived are guilty and stressed that they too must take responsibility. How do you think about this at the individual level? For example, you’ve often stated that there should be a new food labeling system put in place by which especially the generation that agreed to build the reactors would be obliged to eat the contaminated food―would this be an example of taking individual responsibility for you?
Koide: Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. So, because I think that every Japanese adult has responsibility for both allowing the rampant development of nuclear power and the Fukushima disaster, I said that they should be the ones to eat the contaminated food. And so that this disaster may never happen again, nuclear power must be eliminated―of course there should be no question of restarting the reactors. Yet, what I’ve just said is not really a widespread idea. Slowly all the reactors are being restarted.
Hirano: So in that sense Japanese citizens’ responsibility is increasing in that they are allowing the restart of the reactors.
Koide: I think the nuclear power issue is precisely analogous to the war.
Hirano: Indeed, as with the damage of misinformation and national morality discourse we talked about and the pressure that comes from those hints of someone being somehow “un-Japanese,” it seems to really resemble the war.
Koide: I think so, yes.
Hirano: I’d like to ask more about the responsibility for being misled. Up to now the reason most would say that nuclear power has been allowed is the myth of safety―a myth invented by the coordination of the government, TEPCO, and the media. So Japanese citizens have been robbed of being told the truth, of having the chance to know the truth.
Koide: That’s true.
Hirano: So the likely response to your position would be that it’s unjust to blame those who were robbed of the chance to know the truth. How would you answer this challenge?
Koide: I also said that the current situation is just like during the war. Then, too, the media only reported the information coming from imperial headquarters: The Japanese military enjoyed nothing but a string of victories. We were all told that because of the emperor Japan was a divine country and therefore could not lose. You would go to school and there would be the emperor’s portrait hanging on the wall. There was a place where the emperor was enshrined right there on school grounds. Every child was taught that the emperor was present there.
In such a country it wasn’t strange to think that Japan would win the war. But those who knew more about the world, including of course those in the military, knew that Japan could not win. Still they said nothing. And so everyone was swept along with the current.
But history is harsh, and in the end Japan was battered. And people at that time said, “Ah, we’ve been misled. The military are the culprits.” But even within all of this there were those who resisted the war. The number of people tortured and killed by the Special Higher Police was huge. And those people, too, were labeled as “un-Japanese” and ostracized from society by the majority of the population. Whole families, whole groups of people were obliterated.
So those who lived then were duped, they were given false information. But should they say that’s where their responsibility ends? I would respond that even if they were duped, the duped still bear the responsibility of the duped. How did each and every one of them live their lives during the war? How did they deal with the information they were being given? I think we need to include these kinds of questions when we interrogate ourselves over taking responsibility. Now if you say this people get angry but I think without question the emperor has absolute responsibility for the war. We ended up moving on without trying to pursue the emperor’s war responsibility.
Even today you’ll see people happily shouting “Tennō heika banzai,” Long Live the Emperor. At midnight NHK will broadcast the Japanese flag flapping in the wind. I can’t stand that and so don’t watch TV. Most Japanese get happy when they hear ‘honorable’ addresses by His Majesty the Emperor or news about the imperial family. From the bottom of my heart I think we should have pursued his war crimes and punished him with whatever it takes, including execution. I have been saying this and people get very angry.
I am told not to criticize the emperor. They say if I do I’ll harm the anti-nuclear movement.
Hirano: Even people in the anti-nuclear movement warn you about things like that? A critical reference to the emperor’s wartime responsibility could be fatally divisive for the movement?
Koide: Those roots are that strong when you talk about war responsibility. But as I have mentioned to you, I feel at the bottom of my heart that each and every individual must take personal responsibility for how he or she lived his or her life. That’s the reason why I wanted the emperor to take his responsibility as a person.
We must build such a country. Even the duped and the lied to have responsibility as individual human beings. It’s true for those who lived through the war, and it’s true for those who promote nuclear power in Japan today―indeed it’s true for everyone on earth. Each one, should they be deceived, is responsible for being deceived.
Hirano/Kasai: Well we’ve gone on long today and heard some really important things. Thank you very much.
Katsuya Hirano is Associate Professor of History at UCLA. He is the author of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (Chicago). This interview is the second installment of his oral history project on Fukushima in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. The first interview was with Murakami Tatsuya: “Fukushima and the Crisis of Democracy: Interview with Murakami Tatsuya”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 20, No. 1, May 25, 2015.
Hirotaka Kasai is Professor of Political Thought at Tsuda College in Tokyo, Japan. He has published articles and book chapters on Maruyama Masao and radical democracy in Gendai Shiso and others.
Robert Stolz is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia. He is the author of Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke). He has published an article on Tanaka Shozo in The Asia-Pacific Journal: “Remake Politics, Not Nature: Tanaka Shozo’s Philosophies of ‘Poison’ and ‘Flow’ and Japan’s Environment”, Vol. 5, Issue 1, January 2, 2007.
Akiko Anson is a freelance translator who lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Anson obtained a BA degree in English Literature from Gakushūin University in Tokyo, Japan and an MA degree in Asian Studies from the University of Iowa.
Recommended citation: Katsuya Hirano and Hirotaka Kasai interview Koide Hiroaki, “The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster is a Serious Crime”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 6, No. 1, March 15, 2016.
Notes
Social workers visit temporary housing in Motomiya, Fukushima Prefecture, to interview disaster victims in December.
By Mari Yamaguchi
The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains.
They were simply labeled “decontamination troops” — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside.
The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine.
Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations. Vulnerable to exploitation and shunned by local residents, they typically work on three-to-six-month contracts with little or no benefits, living in makeshift company barracks. And the government is not even making sure that their radiation levels are individually tested.
“They’re cleaning up radiation in Fukushima, doing sometimes unsafe work, and yet they can’t be proud of what they do or even considered legitimate workers,” said Mitsuo Nakamura, a former day laborer who now heads a citizens’ group supporting decontamination laborers. “They are exploited by the vested interests that have grown in the massive project.”
Residents of still partly deserted towns such as Minamisoma, where 8,000 laborers are based, worry that neighborhoods have turned into workers’ ghettos with deteriorating safety. Police data shows arrests among laborers since 2011 have climbed steadily from just one to 210 last year, including a dozen yakuza, or gangsters, police official Katsuhiko Ishida told a prefectural assembly. Residents are spooked by rumors that some laborers sport tattoos linked with yakuza, and by reports that a suspect in serial killings arrested in Osaka last year had worked in the area.
“Their massive presence has simply intimidated residents,” said Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai. “Frankly, the residents need their help but don’t want any trouble.”
Most of the men work for small subcontractors that are many layers beneath the few giants at the top of the construction food chain. Major projects such as this one are divided up among contractors, which then subcontract jobs to smaller outfits, some of which have dubious records.
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare examined more than 300 companies doing Fukushima decontamination work and found that nearly 70 committed violations in the first half of last year, including underpayment of wages and overtime and failure to do compulsory radiation checks. Those companies were randomly chosen among thousands believed to be working in the area.
“Violations are so widespread in this multilayer subcontract system. It’s like a whack-a-mole situation,” said Mitsuaki Karino, a city assemblyman in Iwaki, a Fukushima city where his civil group has helped workers with complaints about employers.
Karino said workers are sometimes charged for meals or housing they were told would be free, he said, and if they lose jobs or contracts aren’t renewed, some go homeless.
“It’s a serious concern, particularly for workers who don’t have families or lost ties with them,” he said.
Government officials say they see no other way than to depend on the contracting system to clean up the radiated zone, a project whose ballooning cost is now estimated at 5 trillion yen ($44 billion).
“That’s how the construction industry has long operated. In order to accomplish decontamination, we need to rely on the practice,” said Tadashi Mouri, a health and labor ministry official in charge of nuclear workers’ health. He said the ministry has instructed top contractors to improve oversight of subcontractors.
Several arrests have been made in recent months over alleged labor violations.
A complaint filed by a worker with labor officials led to the October arrest of a construction company president who had allegedly dispatched workers to Fukushima under misleading circumstances. The investigation found that the worker had been offered pay of 17,000 yen ($150) per day, but after middlemen took a cut he was getting only 8,000 yen ($70).
In another case, a supervisor and a crane operator were arrested in July for alleged illegal dumping of radiated plant debris in Minamisoma. Five companies heading the project were suspended for six weeks.
Most workers keep their mouths shut for fear of losing their jobs. One laborer in a gray jacket and baggy pants, carrying cans of beer on his way home, said he was instructed never to talk to reporters.
A 62-year-old seasonal worker, Munenori Kagaya, said he had trouble finding jobs after he and his fellow workers fought for and won unpaid daily “danger” allowance of 10,000 yen ($88) for work in Tamura city in 2012.
Officials keep close tabs on journalists. Minutes after chatting with some workers in Minamisoma, Associated Press journalists received a call from a city official warning them not to talk to decontamination crews.
Beyond the work’s arduous nature, the men also face radiation exposure risks. Inhaling radioactive particles could trigger lung cancer, said Junji Kato, a doctor who provides health checks for some workers.
Although most laborers working in residential areas use protective gear properly, others in remote areas are not monitored closely, according to workers and Nakamura, the leader of the radiation workers support group. Many are not given compulsory training or education about dealing with radiation, he said.
Though group leaders’ radiation exposure levels are regularly checked, decontamination workers’ individual levels have not been systematically recorded. The government introduced a system in 2013 but only for a fee, and many lower subcontractor workers are likely not covered. Even non-alarmist experts say that workers doses must be kept individually for their own records as well as for studies of low-dose radiation impact.
Mouri, the government official, said decontamination workers’ average annual dose fell to 0.7 millisievert last year, a fraction of the 20-millisievert annual limit for those working at the nuclear plant, and is not a concern.
Though no radiation-induced illness has been detected, workers have developed diabetes, cerebral and respiratory problems, often long untreated due to lack of money, awareness and social ties, local hospital intern Toyoaki Sawano said in a medical magazine last month.
Having trouble making ends meet, a growing number of laborers are seeking welfare assistance, local authorities say. The officials worry that they may end up staying on, like construction laborers did in Osaka and Tokyo after the 1960s building boom, forming Japan’s poorest ghettos.
Police and volunteers have started neighborhood patrols amid concerns about safety. Some big construction companies have taken steps to address concerns. Hazama Ando Corp. imposed an 11 p.m. curfew on workers.
Residents say they avoid convenience stores in the evenings, when many laborers stop by after work to buy snacks, bento boxes or beer on their way home. Some of them used to discard their contaminated gloves and masks in garbage bins there, triggering complaints from the neighborhood and prompting the government to launch a “manner” campaign in December.
At a convenience store in Minamisoma on a recent evening, workers came in waves, waiting quietly in line to pay for food and other items.
“The workers face heartless rumors as if they are all reckless outlaws. They are the same human beings. Like anywhere, there are good guys and bad guys,” said Nakamura, the support group leader.
One resident grateful for the workers is Hideaki Kinoshita, a Buddhist monk who keeps the unidentified laborers’ ashes at his temple, in wooden boxes and wrapped in white cloth.
“We owe a lot to those who clean this town, doing the work that locals don’t even want to,” he said.
Minamisoma city official Tomoyuki Ohwada said the worker population should decline next year, when intensive decontamination efforts are scheduled to end. But Kinoshita believes many will still be needed, given the amount of work left to do.
“There is no end to this job,” Kinoshita said. “Five years from now, the workers will still be around. And more unclaimed ashes may end up here.”
Daily grind of decommissioning continues for workers at Fukushima plant
FUKUSHIMA – Five years after the March 2011 nuclear calamity started at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s efforts to contain the radioactive water at the site still makes headlines.
But not much is known about the daily lives and operations of some 7,000 workers at the plant engaged in decommissioning and other tasks.
To offer a glimpse of the workplace, Kyodo News followed Yasuki Hibi, 52, who heads major contractor Kajima Corp.’s civil engineering office at the wrecked plant, for a day last month. His office takes on a number of projects, including processing contaminated water and highly radioactive rubble.
“I feel that time has stopped here since that day,” said Hibi. “By taking part in the decommissioning work, I hope to let time flow again. Some of the workers were brought up in the local area, doing their best despite the circumstances.”
Hibi leaves his apartment in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, about 50 km south of the complex, just before 8 a.m., dropping by at Kajima’s Iwaki office to check paperwork before traveling to another office in the town of Tomioka and then the nuclear plant. His wife and son live in Tokyo.
Kajima’s office at the plant is located in a building by the main gate. The building serves as a resting place for workers at the complex and houses offices for other firms engaged in decommissioning work.
Around 100 workers a day, including from affiliated companies, come and go at the Kajima office. The contractor is in charge of building sea walls near the plant aimed at prevent radiation-contaminated water from spilling into the ocean, as well as transporting highly radioactive soil to designated sites.
Hibi was posted to Kajima’s Fukushima plant office in January 2011, two months before the earthquake and tsunami struck. At the time, his job was to reinforce the earthquake resistance of reactors 5 and 6, which survived the disaster.
But after March 11, 2011, Kajima’s mission was focused on removing vehicles scattered by the tsunami and building a temporary sea wall, he said.
“Of Kajima’s civil engineering sections, the office at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is unique,” Hibi said. “The radiation level in the air has dropped significantly, but there still are many hot spots around the reactor buildings.”
When Hibi arrives at the office, he makes sure the day’s work is in progress as scheduled. Some 20 workers on the early shift are already working at the complex by then.
Lunchtime is one of the few occasions where workers can relax.
The building’s eatery offers five different menu items, ranging from set meals to rice bowl dishes and noodles, and they are served at ¥380 with extra-large helpings for free. The food is cooked at a kitchen about 9 km away and carried there warm. Before the eatery opened, workers had to buy boxed lunches at convenience stores.
A large portion of Hibi’s work focuses on ensuring workers’ safety.
“Many other firms are involved and there are many cases in which workers need to work in small areas,” Hibi said. “I pay attention so that we won’t cause accidents.”
When he holds a meeting with staff who oversee the work site, Hibi asks detailed questions to avoid possible problems.
“Has there been anything wrong with the equipment recently?” Hibi asks the workers. “Is there any frost on the pipes?”
At noon, about 20 workers on the noon shift gather in the office, sitting in a circle for a meeting with Hibi. Afterward, they stand and together say: “Be safe!”
The workers change into disposable protective gear, including two thin rubber gloves on top of cotton ones. Adhesive tape is used to seal the gloves to the protective clothing so radiation won’t seep in.
Names and affiliations are written on the back and front of the protective gear in big, bold letters to clarify who’s who.
Workers appear used to the drill they have conducted for the past five years. One notable change is the half-face mask covering their mouth and nose, replacing a full-face mask used early on.
After seeing them off, Hibi also heads to the No. 1 reactor building, where workers are preparing to pour a bulking agent into an underground trench.
The radiation level is relatively high in this area, recording around 170 microsieverts per hour. A commercial flight between Tokyo and New York exposes passengers to about 10 microsieverts per hour. About 10 workers wear black vests made of tungsten over their protective gear. The vests reportedly reduce the radiation exposure to internal organs by 30 percent.
“Make sure that you are properly equipped to prevent a fall,” Hibi says to a worker through his mask. Checking various sites on the plant takes about two hours.
At 3:30 p.m., workers return to the office. Their working hours are limited to prevent excessive radiation exposure.
Shortly after 4 p.m., Hibi leaves the Kajima office. However, his day is not over yet. He heads to the firm’s office in Iwaki to check on upcoming construction schedules. It is close to 9 p.m. when he arrives back at his apartment.
Hibi’s day only illustrates a portion of what is going on at the Fukushima plant and he is well aware that the task of decommissioning has a long way to go.
“When I was involved in a project to dig a tunnel for a subway in Taiwan, I went to ride the train after it was completed,” Hibi said. “But decommissioning at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant won’t be completed anytime soon.
“I hope that when I turn 80-something, I can visit here and see how much progress has been made.”
5 years after disaster, reactor decommissioning faces troubling shortage of workers
Workers are seen undertaking construction work on the premises of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant on May 7, 2015
A total of 21 companies involved with the decommissioning of reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant — half of the firms that responded to a survey conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun — revealed that they are facing concerns due to an insufficient number of employees for the work.
The risk of radiation exposure from the decommissioning work means that the companies are having trouble attracting young people, with the ongoing aging of the population pointing toward a possible hollowing-out with respect to the technical abilities of the workforce in this regard. This could mean that the problem of securing workers will become an ongoing problem that would result in a delay of reactor decommissioning — which could in turn hinder local reconstruction efforts.
At the administrative building located at the nuclear plant’s point of entrance and exit, workers are routinely met with a greeting of “Please be safe” as they come and go in order to encourage them to fulfill their tasks without any incidents occurring.
While the plant was known immediately after the nuclear accident as a disaster zone, now — five years later — a sense of calm has been restored. The radiation exposure risks and the aging of employees, however, have meant that problems continue to plague the workplace environment.
The survey was sent to a total of 246 companies connected to the reactor decommissioning work, including prime contractors, as well as additional firms whose names were included in construction work-related approval and licensing documents that were submitted to Fukushima Prefecture and other local government offices. Responses were received from 42 companies, or around 20 percent of the total number contacted.
Asked whether they had a sufficient number of employees, 21 firms responded either “No, we have an insufficient number of employees,” or “Basically speaking, we have an insufficient number of employees” — a figure eclipsing the 20 firms that responded, “We have a sufficient number of employees,” or “Basically speaking, we have a sufficient number of employees.”
Asked to name the reasons for the insufficiency (with multiple responses allowed), the answer with the highest number of responses was “Numerous employees are leaving the company due to retirement, and young people are not coming (to take their place),” at 10 firms. The second- and third-highest answers, respectively, were “it’s difficult to pass down the (required) technical skills,” at seven firms; and “the number of aspiring employees is decreasing due to the high radiation levels,” at six firms.
“Although people respond when we announce job openings, they do not have the necessary qualifications — such as being able to hoist and lower suspended loads,” commented the 52-year-old president of a construction firm in the Fukushima prefectural city of Iwaki that is contracted by the nuclear plant for reactor decommissioning-related work.
The firm in question is mostly contracted for on-site work where radiation levels are high. When the government-set figures of 50 millisieverts per year and 100 millisieverts per every five years are exceeded, on-site work is not permitted — and the company must therefore compensate by hiring extra employees.
Because qualified individuals are not available, however, the firm contracts with another company — resulting in a situation whereby its labor insufficiency is filled by hiring the other firm’s employees as its own. This practice, which is known as fake subcontracting, runs the risk of infringing the Worker Dispatch Law and other regulations.
“We are aware that this is illegal,” the company president notes, “but everyone still does it.”
According to a worker survey conducted by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which operates the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, some 20 percent of all workers at the plant had been hired via fake subcontracting. And while TEPCO asks its business affiliates to comply with the law, it does not appear that this is a situation that is set to improve.
“With reactor decommissioning set to be entering its most crucial stage, the national government should be taking the initiative to put measures in place that are aimed at securing workers for this purpose,” points out Kazumitsu Nawata, a professor of econometrics at the University of Tokyo who is well-versed in the situation facing the nuclear plant workers.
In assessing the future prospects for the reactor decommissioning work, which is likely to go on for several decades, a matter exists beyond that of securing new laborers that is an additional cause for concern: the problem of workers’ exposure to radiation.
The estimated average monthly radiation exposure of workers was 32 millisieverts immediately following the nuclear accident, and has presently decreased to 0.44 millisieverts. No longer is there a need to wear full-face masks, which made breathing difficult.
Between the disaster and January 2016, however, the number of workers whose yearly radiation exposure level was greater than 5 millisieverts — a figure that the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare utilizes as a criteria when determining the recognition of workers’ compensation in cases of leukemia — was around 20,000 among the total of 42,000 workers.
When irradiated fuel from the spent nuclear fuel pools begins to be transported, moreover, there is a possibility that the dosage in this regard will increase even further.
A 23-year-old male worker from the city of Iwaki who was responsible for removing radioactively-contaminated vehicles that had been left on the premises of the nuclear plant said that he was surprised when the figures on his dosimeter began increasing immediately.
“I do not know what effects (this work) will have upon my body in 30 years,” he commented. “I do not want to do work involving high doses (of radiation).”
Also troubling are the effects of the withdrawal of seasoned workers from the field. According to TEPCO, veteran employees in their 50s or older comprise 45 percent of all total workers. With reactor decommissioning work — including the collection of melted nuclear fuel — expected to enter its main phase in 2021, it is possible that the continuing loss of experienced workers will lead to a situation characterized by a reduction in both human resources and technology.
“I will never again return to 1F (the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant),” asserted Yuji Takagi, 53, a former nuclear plant worker from the city of Iwaki.
Takagi, a veteran employee since the time prior to the nuclear disaster whose work included helping to measure the number of neutrons directly underneath the nuclear reactors, explained that with the sudden increase in the number of tank and other construction projects taking place following the accident, there was also a rising number of employees who were inexperienced with working at nuclear power plants.
As a result, Takagi felt like there was a mismatch wherein he was unable to utilize his job experience.
“If you do not understand the inner structure of nuclear plants, there will be problems with reactor decommissioning,” he commented, adding, “Know-how is indispensable.”
The system is comprised of a pyramid-like structure, whereby TEPCO and major general contractors — which serve as the original contractors at its peak — contract out work to the other companies that are fanned out beneath them. With work consequently compartmentalized, then, it accordingly becomes increasingly difficult to utilize employees’ expertise.
“The structure of subcontracting results in decreasing profits for lower-level companies, who are additionally burdened with taking up the slack (of companies further up on the pyramid),” commented Professor Nawata. “A mechanism is necessary to improve this treatment.”
Also involved with the reactor decommissioning work are numerous local residents of Fukushima Prefecture who are themselves victims of the disaster.
A 51-year-old worker from Futaba County who is responsible for analyzing contaminated water at TEPCO-owned facilities on the premises of the plant commented, “My work plays only a small part, but analysis of the contaminated water is an indispensable part of the reactor decommissioning process.”
The worker added, “I am happy to be of service to Fukushima Prefecture, as well as to the next generation.”
The feared scarcity of workers, then, has also resulted in a situation of dependence upon Fukushima workers to fill this employment need that exists within the reactor decommissioning sector.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160307/p2a/00m/0na/020000c
1 This Month
petition to oppose the rapid increase of space-military industry threatening Jeju Island and the region.
[Petition by April 19th (KST)] Stop the joint military-Hanwha Systems-Jeju Provincial Government Sea Launch!
World Nuclear Power. Reactors 1951-2026, 75 Years of Nuclear Power.
Interactive Map– https://dv.worldnuclearreport.org/
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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