TEPCO

— 23 March 2011: Letter to California senator on Diablo Canyon NPP recertification in the light of Fukushima experience

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Letter to Sen. Sam Blakeslee Regarding Diablo’s Recertification

by Cindy Sage
23 March 2011

I have some thoughts for you, as you go after Diablo’s recertification.

Let me tell you what it is like to fly from Singapore to Hong Kong to SF and back to SB in one day. Because of catastrophic radiation threats from ‘the safest nuclear reactors in the world’ in Japan.

Our daughter, her husband and 22-month old evacuated from Tokyo last Tuesday to Singapore via Osaka and Shanghai. They’ve lived in Tokyo for two years, and the baby was born there.

I flew to Singapore for a week to help them.

These are thoughts now, about California, coming back home. Flying back over the green hills of SLO and SB counties from San Francisco, you think “we don’t even have 160 miles between us and Diablo”. That is the distance between Tokyo and Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear plant that now has four reactors in partial meltdown and thousands of spent fuel rods in empty cooling ponds seeping and belching radiation directly into the air and the seawater. The government acknowledges this will likely continue for weeks and months to come. And, the threat of full meltdown of one, or more, of these four reactors and/or the cooling ponds for spent fuel is not ruled out yet.

Tokyo has thirty million people in one city alone that cannot be moved, or properly informed because they will panic and bring further chaos to an overloaded government.

One hundred and sixty miles away is less than one day’s airflow up the SLO and Santa Ynez valleys to major population areas.

Remember the SB fires? Burning upslope and inland by day, and back downslope at night, carrying fire, smoke and ash in an endless zig-zag pattern? Remember only the rain could really stop the fires? In Tokyo, the rain will bring down the radioactivity. During the Gap fire, we sat at Playa Azul at an outdoor table, and the ash fall was so thick it coated the food and floated black in the margaritas. We had to leave the food on the table and go because we couldn’t breathe and couldn’t eat it.

For a week, people in Tokyo prayed that 160 miles was far enough away. Heck, its the distance from Bakersfield to LA, right? I heard that from seriously smart, educated Americans, waiting it out. But events have to unfold, and the chaos involved and unnecessary anguish are heartbreaking for the families. The slow leakage of information that prevents stampeding and improves the government’s ability to control events also sacrifices many in the process.

“Our expectations had a scientific basis, but conditions were exceeded.” VP of TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company, March 23rd, CNN interview.

Based on the now-demonstrated failure of at least four of Japan’s nuclear reactors to withstand ‘design’ events that were calculated on the basis of only one catastrophic failure at a time, we know this kind of thinking is outdated and monumentally risky for California as well. Japan planned for earthquakes, but not multiple, cascading events that ran out of control, prevented planned emergency responses, and caused them to throw away the rule-book in favor of ‘hail mary’ passes like flooding with seawater, one helicopter squirt at a time. Japan’s TEPCO didn’t even realize for a week that they had cooling ponds running dry that held thousands of leaking radioactive spent fuel rods. Because they couldn’t even get into or close to their own plants to survey the damage.

Not until the effort was militarized, and people could be ordered to go into the hot zone did we begin to see the damage, and understand the colossal breaches of containment and destroyed plants and cooling equipment. That is not in the rule-book. They had no response. Now, Daiichi’s reactor 3 in chronic, uncontrollable release-mode, and it contains plutonium as well as radioactive cesium and iodine. The other three reactors are in partial meltdown, and even government press releases say they cannot rule out complete meltdowns as yet.

Japan continues to deal with the aftermath – major aftershocks, continuing loss of power, loss of back-up power, loss of triple-backup power, fires, radioactive meltdown and seepage, intentional steam releases of radioactive materials directly into the air to prevent catastrophic hydrogen buildup, inadvertent radiation releases from explosions that happen on a regular basis anyway, the spreading plume, the hopeful weather patterns carrying the radiation ‘somewhere else’, the inevitable recirculation of radiation back over Tokyo and central Japan, the lack of equipment to properly test air, water, food and the people evacuating the hot zones.

What pieces of information are reliable? What is the subtext of unfolding US Embassy and State Dept and military advisories? What ‘indicators’ do you hold out as the trigger for “what to do next”? Do you wait until the US government moves the USS George Washington aircraft carrier out of Yokohama as happened Monday, because it is SOUTH of Tokyo? Is that a bad sign? Do you wait for the US State Department to issue potassium iodide pills to all employees and their dependents as happened Monday? Or, the radiation is twice the infant limit in Tokyo groundwater as happened Tuesday? If you wait, will the trains and planes be full, and ticket prices quadruple normal fares – effectively prohibiting travel for families with kids? What can you believe? What is hype or spin? What does it mean when the evacuation zones seem to be based more on what the government can handle sheltering people, rather than what the radiation levels should be dictating? You can’t effectively evacuate 30 million people all at once, even if the exposures are extreme and otherwise dictate that it should be done immediately.

Getting, judging, and reacting to incomplete, conflicting and incomprehensible information is an impossible task for people in a crisis, who are also dealing with emergency flights, emergency housing, trains that don’t run, sick babies, traveling spouses, planes that are full, empty store shelves, bank accounts that cannot be accessed due to power outages, overloaded telecom systems that don’t work, aftershocks, grief, fear, passports that can’t be located, cell phones that are cancelled or don’t work in other countries, missed connections in foreign airports where there are no diapers, no food, no sleep, no information, wondering if/when people will not be allowed to fly if they test positive for radiation contamination. When is it too late to evacuate? IF you go back, can you get out again?

People with means and money have nearly insurmountable difficulties. People without means and money simply pray and go into deep denial. They are publicly praised by the government for their fortitude, while they can do nothing but await their fate with stoicism.

A week ago, military dependents and ex-pats in Tokyo working for US, German, French, Spanish and other international corporations were formally advised by their employers it would be prudent to evacuate Tokyo. But, there was no health threat. WHO said so.

Ticket prices skyrocketed in Asian countries. Booking evacuation flights and trains became very difficult to impossible. Families split up. Serviced hotel and apartment units in Hong Kong, Singapore and other flee-zones were snapped up by corporations for evacuated ex-pat families…. the one we stayed in went to 97% occupancy in a week.

These families are now trying to figure out if/when they can return. Hour by hour, day by day, parsing the messages in the media coverage. I did this yesterday. And, all last week. I’m still doing it this morning, by skype. Only uncertainty is certain.

Lessons learned? What I can tell you is that I think Diablo should be shut down now. Period. Taken off-line. The Hosgri fault, and perhaps other unrecognized faults, and the likelihood (not just the remote potential) for major earthquakes, tsunami, loss of cooling systems, and proximity to major population zones are clear indicators now that this plant should be mothballed.

The clear underestimation of design earthquake in the original Diablo design, and the failure to anticipate and provide credible protection against predictable, multiple, cascading natural disasters is basis enough not to recertify, and to take it off-line now. Germany is taking some of its older reactors off-line. Why not California?

We don’t get 30% of our power from nuclear in California. We have other options. Japan does not, so they have to accept rolling blackouts for the foreseeable future. They have to accept the long-term consequences including loss of transportation and public services infrastructure, food and water shortages due to radiation contamination, loss of industrial output, loss of communications, banking, and other vital services, contamination of beef and dairy herds and row crops, and embargos and bans by other countries on the import of leafy green vegetables and dairy products from Japan.

Try that on central coast farmers, ranchers, viticulturists and other growers in the agricultural industry.

Talk to Bakersfield, Fresno and the central Valley growers, too, because they’ll be in the hot zone as well.

Japan doesn’t even have enough meters to measure the safety of food and water. Most people shop everyday for foodstuffs and walk to get there. They have to go outside to live. To re-supply their tiny refrigerators.

When summer comes, can you imagine being inside with your kids, unable to turn on the air conditioning or get fresh air because of radiation contamination? Imagine this in 86 degree weather with 90% humidity?

That is best case, and assumes there is enough power for any air conditioning at all.

PG&E has a similar history of malfeasance and misleading regulators and the public as does TEPCO. The parallels are clear – both utilities have demonstrated failures in maintaining critical infrastructure, conducting required safety tests, and providing honest and timely information to regulators and the public about risks to health and safety. The time for wishful thinking is over.

Sam, you have no idea how comforting it is to know you’ve got the scientific and geotechnical background AND the political position to make this issue a front-burner.

###

Published in the SLO Coast Journal, April 2011

Cindy Sage is an owner of Sage Associates, an environmental consulting firm located in Santa Barbara, California. She is a Research Fellow at Orebro University’s School of Health and Medical Sciences, Department of Oncology, Orebro, Sweden (2008-2010) and Guest Lecturer (2011). Her journal publications appear in Bioelectromagnetics, Biomedicine and Pharmacology, and Reviews on Environmental Health.   Her articles have appeared in San Francisco Medicine, the Real Estate Law Journal, Electricity Journal. the German journal Environment•Medicine•Society,  the  Land Use and Environment Forum of the California Continuing Education of the Bar and has she authored numerous articles on EMF policy and public health issues in contemporary print media.  She is an author of the Seletun Scientific Statement (2010), Seletun, Norway. Sage Associates has conducted more than 1000 professional studies since 1982 on projects involving electromagnetic fields (both ELF and RF). Invited presentations have been made in London, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Canada and the United States and include: the Emergency Conference on the Adequacy of the ICNIRP Public Safety Limits (hosted by Coghill Labs at the Royal Society of London, 2007); the London International Leukemia Conference (2004), conference presentations at the Bioelectromagnetics Society annual meetings (1991 – 2006), the First World Congress on Breast Cancer in Kingston, Ontario, Canada (1997), Witness at the International Hearing and contributor to the Global Action Plan for Breast Cancer (1997), presenter at the Etiology Working Group, National Action Plan for Breast Cancer at the Workshop on Electromagnetic Fields, Light-at-night and Breast Cancer Washington DC (1997), and the National Breast Cancer Coalition Fund Environmental Policy Summit  in Washington, DC (1998).   She is a full Member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society.   Ms. Sage is a founder of the BioInitiative Working Group (2006) and co-editor of the BioInitiative Report; A Rationale for a Biologically-based Public Exposure Standard for Electromagnetic Fields (2007).  She is co-chair of the Collaborative for Health and the Environment EMF Working Group.

— Despite scientific evidence and public opposition, Japan to start ocean wastewater discharge from Fukushima on June 12

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TEPCO admitted that tritium (radioactive hydrogen) cannot be removed from the wastewater.

“When tritium gets inside the body, it’s at least as dangerous as any of the other radionuclides. And in some cases, it’s more than double as dangerous in terms of the effects of the radiation on the genetic material, on the proteins.”

— Timothy Mousseau, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina,

From China Global Television Network

June 11, 2023

Japan plans to start sending seawater in an underwater tunnel built to release nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on June 12, local media reported on Friday citing news from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

According to TEPCO, the tunnel has been filled with about 6,000 tonnes of seawater this week for a two-week test before releasing the nuclear-contaminated water from the plant to a point about one kilometer offshore.

Japan is likely to officially begin its plan to dump the nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the ocean as early as the beginning of July. So far, the implementation of Japan’s plan still needs to await the outcome of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) meeting in late June.

In spite of the damage to the marine ecology and environment, Japan unilaterally pushed forward the discharge plan and constantly made excuses for its claim that “nuclear wastewater is safe.”

However, the content of Cs-137 (a radioactive element that is a common byproduct in nuclear reactors) in the marine fish caught in the harbor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is 180 times that of the standard maximum stipulated in Japan’s food safety law, according to a statement released by the Chinese embassy in Japan on Monday, referring to data from a report released by TEPCO.

It also pointed out that there are more than 60 radionuclides, including tritium, carbon-14, cobalt-60, strontium-90 and iodine-129, in the nuclear-contaminated water. Some long-lived nuclides may spread with ocean currents and result in a bioconcentration effect, which will increase the total amount of radionuclides in the environment and cause unpredictable hazards to the marine ecosystem and human health. 

Continue reading →

— Global Times uncovers more lies on Japan’s move to dump wastewater; ‘unacceptable’ experiment with Earth’s future, says senior expert

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From Global Times

Xu Keyue and Xing Xiaojing
May 19, 2023

Although Japan suffered a lot from the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII as well as the Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011, the Japanese government has seemingly failed to learn from history and insists on dumping nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the sea. The plan has continued to arouse opposition and skepticism at home and abroad.

Japanese lawmakers and international nuclear experts said in recent exclusive interviews with the Global Times that they are opposed to the dumping plan, stressing that this disposal is not the only way to deal with the nuclear-contaminated wastewater, and it is unacceptable to experiment with the future of the Earth.

Public opposition and recourse to the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Law of the Sea can be regarded as effective ways to prevent the Japanese government from insisting on pushing forward with the plan.

“I oppose the discharge of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea,” Junichi Tamatsukuri, Japanese lawmaker in Ibaraki Prefecture, told the Global Times.

Two nuclear accidents have occurred in and around his prefecture. The first was the Tokaimura critical nuclear accident in a small fuel preparation plant operated by JCO (formerly Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Co) in September 1999. The second was the Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011. The two accidents severely affected the local economy, with consumers worried that food produced in Ibaraki contained radioactive substances that could harm their health. Many people have stopped visiting Ibaraki out of safety concerns.

“Local people from all walks of life have been working hard for years to recover from the economic losses caused by the two accidents,” Tamatsukuri said. “If the nuclear-contaminated wastewater from Fukushima is released into the sea this time, many industries such as fishing, agriculture, industry and tourism in Ibaraki Prefecture will be affected,” the lawmaker said.

Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear expert at the Japan office of the international environmental organization Greenpeace, told the Global Times that the Japanese government and TEPCO have failed to explain their scientific justification for the discharge plan and have so far ignored the opposition of communities in Fukushima – especially the fishing communities.

Organically bound tritium (OBT) in the contaminated water is a “particular concern, because the amount to be discharged is on a vast scale,” said the expert who has been working on nuclear issues for nearly 40 years and radioactive waste discharge for more than 30 years.

“The Japanese government and TEPCO have deliberately miscommunicated on the risks of radionuclide tritium,” Burnie said. “They only focus on the external hazards, but the problem with tritium is when it is inside plants or seaweed, animals, fish or shellfish and humans,” Burnie said.

The scientific literature shows OBT has the potential to bio-accumulate and even potentially bio-magnify – as a slow energy radionuclide, when tritium is inside cells it can repeatedly damage the DNA structure. In this way, tritium is a much more dangerous radionuclide than the Japanese government and TEPCO have claimed, Burnie warned.

Continue reading →

— Global Times: Detailed evidence exposes Japan’s lies, loopholes in nuclear-contaminated wastewater dumping plan

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From Global Times

June 5, 2023
By Huang Lanlan

As the date for Japan’s planned dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the ocean approaches, a Pandora’s Box threatening the global marine ecosystem is likely to be opened. 

The Japanese government announced its decision on April 13 to release the nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the storage tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the sea. Starting from 2023, the discharge is scheduled to last about 30 years. This decision has garnered widespread attention and sparked great concern across the globe.

While Japanese authorities are busy colluding with some Western politicians in boasting about the discharge plan, Fukushima residents, international experts in ecology, and various stakeholders around the world have kept calling for Japan to reconsider and modify its flawed plan.

Japan’s attempt to “whitewash” the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater release plan failed again at the Group of Seven (G7) summit in May. The joint statement of the summit did not explicitly state nor allude to the G7 members’ “welcome” of the current dumping plan due to strong opposition. Instead, it only reiterated support for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) review of Fukushima’s treated water release.

An insider familiar with Japan’s dumping plan recently told the Global Times that he has many concerns and doubts about the plan. The insider provided detailed evidence exposing Japan’s lie that whitewashes its dumping plan. He also revealed many loopholes in the plan that the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) have refused to talk about or even deliberately concealed from the public.

All provided evidence considered, it is apparent that, currently, Japan is incapable of properly handling the nuclear-contaminated wastewater dumping. The toxic wastewater processed by the Japanese side cannot currently meet international discharge standards, and the country’s reckless behavior, if not stopped and corrected in time, may cause irreparable damage to the global ecosystem.

“There are still many unresolved issues with the source terms of the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater,” the insider said. 

“If the Japanese government and TEPCO continue to have their own way, it may cause improper discharge of nuclear-contaminated water, and that must be taken seriously,” he noted, calling on the two sides to be open, transparent, and honest in solving the problem.

Disappointing data monitoring

Japan’s current plan of releasing nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea, though superficially reasonable at first glance, cannot hold up to close scrutiny. Its monitoring on the source terms of the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater is incomplete, and the data it collects is likely unreliable, observers told the Global Times.

In February 2022, the IAEA Task Force released its first report, the IAEA Review of Safety Related Aspects of Handling ALPS-Treated Water at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The report clearly stated that the Task Force “commented on the importance of defining the source term for the discharge of ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System) treated water in a sufficiently conservative yet realistic manner.” 

Source terms of contaminated water include the composition of radionuclide and the activity of simulation of nuclides dispersion. As the premise of marine environmental monitoring, the accuracy and reliability of the source term-related data is crucial. However, Japan’s data statistics and monitoring on the source terms are disappointingly full of loopholes. 

Firstly, the types of radionuclides that TEPCO monitors are relatively few, making it far from being able to reflect the correct radionuclide dispersion in the contaminated wastewater.

The Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater, coming from the wastewater which was directly in contact with the core of the melted reactor, theoretically contains all the hundreds of types of radionuclides in the melted reactor, such as fission nuclides, a uranium isotope, and transuranic nuclide.

But TEPCO at first only listed 64 types of radionuclides including H-3 and C-14 as a (data) foundation for the works including monitoring and analysis, emission control, and environmental impact assessment. These 64 radionuclides did not include the uranium isotope and certain other α-nuclides, which have long half-lives while some are highly toxic.

TEPCO’s exclusion of the radionuclides mentioned above has greatly compromised the effectiveness of its monitoring work, as well as the credibility of its environmental impact assessment result, the insider stressed.

As for sampling and monitoring, TEPCO initially only sampled and monitored nine nuclides in the nuclear-contaminated water except tritium, including Cs-134, Cs-137, Sr-90, C-60, Sb-125, Ru-106, I-129, Tc-99, and C-14 (as well as gross α and gross β).

“TEPCO’s plan of only monitoring a few types of radionuclides is unscientific,” the insider told the Global Times.

Later, during the review process of the IAEA Task Force in 2022, TEPCO changed the number of radionuclide types it was monitoring and analyzing to 30, and then decreased it to 29 this year. This is far from enough to provide a complete assessment of the extremely complex nuclides in the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater.

Secondly, there are missing activity concentration values for multiple radionuclides in TEPCO’s monitoring scheme.

TEPCO’s public report on the 64 radionuclides only provides activity concentration values for 12 radioactive nuclides other than tritium, while over 50 other nuclides do not have specific activity concentration values. The report, while only offering gross α and gross β values, doesn’t disclose the respective concentration levels of many highly toxic radionuclides in the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater, such as Pu-239, Pu-240 and Am-241. 

“[TEPCO’s] current plan only monitors some of the nuclides and the gross α and gross β values, which cannot accurately indicate the fluctuations or changes in the activity of each nuclide after treating the contaminated wastewater due to the fluctuation of the nuclide source term composition,” said the insider. 

This operation of TEPCO has largely increased the uncertainty of the [nuclide] source item information of the nuclear-contaminated wastewater, and thus greatly increases the difficulties of making subsequent monitoring plans and marine ecological environmental impact assessment, he added.

Thirdly, TEPCO didn’t make conservative assumptions in many aspects of its monitoring data, and some of the assumptions it made were somewhat “negligent.”

In the process of treating the nuclear-contaminated wastewater, the slight particle shedding of chemical precipitants and inorganic adsorbents in the ALPS may cause some radionuclides to exist in a colloidal state, the insider explained.

Therefore, TEPCO’s assumption that all nuclides in nuclear-contaminated wastewater in the ALPS are water-soluble is obviously invalid, said the insider. “TEPCO should scientifically and comprehensively analyze whether colloidal nuclides are present in the nuclear-contaminated wastewater based on the long-term operation experience of its ALPS system,” he noted.

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— Japan plans undersea tunnel to dump nuclear waste

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” seeing the wastewater flushed away by Ocean currents” —
and it magically disappears….

From ZeroHedge

August 27, 2021
Tyler Durden

In a world where the UN is pressuring the west (but oddly not China) to drastically lower emissions to save the world from global warming, where ESG investing is the hottest new trend in the investment universe, it’s remarkable that the government of Japan would do something so retrograde as to dump treated wastewater from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant off shore.

TEPCO has finally settled on a plan to get rid of the nuclear wastewater that has been building up in the ruined reactors of the nuclear power plant at Fukushima Daiichi. The utility will construct an underwater pipeline 1 kilometer long to dump the water directly from the ruins of reactor No. 1 into the Pacific Ocean, where experts believe currents will quickly dilute it and carry it away.

The undersea tunnel will be constructed by hollowing out bedrock on the seabed near the No. 5 reactor at the Fukushima plant, and will stretch 1km east to the sea, according to the Japan Times.

According to Nikkei, TEPCO is planning to officially announce the decision Wednesday. The final plan will then be presented to Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority next month for review. The fishing industry in the area is understandably opposed to the measure, but few analysts expect their resistance to scuttle the plan, given the lack of alternatives for disposing of the radioactive wastewater.

Since the Japanese government first approved the plan in April, TEPCO has explored whether it should release the water along the shore, or further out at sea.

The plan to dump it further from shore eventually won out, as experts decided that this strategy had a better chance of seeing the wastewater flushed away by Ocean currents (apparently, the flow of the currents can greatly complicate the dumping).

Innkeepers and other business operators in Fukushima were also in favor of discharging the wastewater far enough away to prevent reputational damage (or any potential blowback). Before releasing the wastewater, TEPCO plans to remove as much radioactive material as it can, then dilute what remains with at least 100 parts of seawater.

Before dumping the water, TEPCO says it will remove as much radioactive material as it can, then dilute whatever is left with 100 parts of seawater.

To be sure, Japan’s fishermen aren’t the only party opposed to the plan. Back in April, China slammed Japan’s plans to dump the wastewater in the Pacific, even going so far as to threaten retaliation.

Pumping the water out of (at least one) the [reactors] is an important step toward cleaning up Fukushima Daiichi, but the effort remains a long way from finished. Last year, TEPCO outlined a 44-year plan to decommission reactor No. 2.

It all but guarantees that Japan will be dealing with the cleanup of the disaster at Fukushima for some time. It might not even be finished by the time Japan hosts its next Olympics.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/japan-plans-build-undersea-tunnel-help-dump-radioactive-water-fukushima-pacific

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— ‘We all live downstream”; marine conservation biologist warns of the danger of Japan dumping Fukushima wastewater into the ocean

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Posted by The Hill

by Rick Steiner Opinion Contributor
(THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL)

April 17, 2021

The Biden administration must urge Japan to abandon this unnecessary and dangerous plan.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster was caused by the 9.1 magnitude Tohoku earthquake and a 14-meter-high tsunami. The tsunami flooded and disabled emergency generators needed to pump cooling water into the nuclear reactor cores, causing three reactor core meltdowns and hydrogen explosions. Radionuclides flowed eastward across the Pacific and were eventually found in waters off California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia  and Alaska. We all live downstream. 

The storage tanks now hold seawater that has been used to continue cooling the reactor cores, and this water is contaminated with such radionuclides as Cesium-137, Carbon-14, tritium (including the more dangerous “Organically Bound Tritium”), Strontium-90, Cobalt-60, Iodine-129, Plutonium-239 — and over 50 other radionuclides. Some of this has reportedly been removed, but some has not (e.g. radioactive tritium and C-14).  

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that owns Fukushima, and is now responsible for the cleanup (that is likely to last the remainder of this century), didn’t admit until recently that the wastewater contains significant amounts of radioactive Carbon-14. As C-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, and is known to bio-accumulate in marine ecosystems and cause cellular and genetic impairment. This is a very serious concern.

Fukushima C-14 will be added to the already elevated radioactive C-14 load in the oceans from nuclear weapons tests — or  “bomb carbon” — last century. It’s now found in organisms even in the deepest part of the ocean, the Marianas Trench. It is easy to imagine the impact this new, intentional Fukushima release could have, rightly or not, on the public image of clean marine seafood and tourism along the Pacific coast.

TEPCO claims the water has been sufficiently treated and is OK to release, but the treatment system they are using is reported to be substandard and not up to the job. Communities across the Pacific deserve an independent scientific assessment of TEPCO’s claims, by an Independent Scientific and Technical Commission. Remember, TEPCO and the Japanese government approved locating the nuclear power plant’s emergency generators in a tsunami flood zone. Their assurances now that there is no risk in releasing this radioactive water are neither credible nor scientifically defensible.

China and South Korea have registered objections to the release plan with Japan, but other downstream nations — the U.S., Russia and Canada — have stayed quiet. It isn’t often that China expresses more concern for the environment than the U.S., but this is one such time.

And even if the ecological and public health risk from the planned release is indeed low, as claimed (this is highly doubtful), the risk is entirely unnecessary and avoidable. 

Beyond marine discharge, several other disposal options have been considered, including evaporating the water, or injecting it into deep geologic formations.

But by far the best solution is for TEPCO to build more storage tanks and continue holding all contaminated water for another 15 years or so, during which time the radioactive tritium level will decay by half, and simultaneously treat it with best available technology (such as ion exchange systems and modular “detritiation” systems in the U.S.) to remove all radionuclides possible. Japan and TEPCO considered this long-term storage option, but opted instead for the cheapest choice — simply dumping the wastewater into the Pacific. 

The era of intentionally dumping toxic waste in our one global ocean is, or should be, over.

Fukushima was, and continues to be, a nuclear nightmare, and all nations should join together in a collaborative effort to resolve this mess. This effort will take hundreds of billions of dollars, over many decades, and the U.S. and other G20 nations must step up and help both financially and technically.

Unless and until this wastewater is independently certified as effectively free of radionuclides and safe, not one drop should be released into the beautiful deep blue Pacific.

Finally, Fukushima should be the last nail in the coffin for the notion that nuclear fission power could be a realistic solution to our climate crisis.

Rick Steiner is a marine conservation biologist in Anchorage and former professor of marine conservation with the University of Alaska from 1980-2010. He now consults for the U.N., governments and NGOs on marine environmental issues. He is author of “Oasis Earth: Planet in Peril.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/548726-the-danger-of-japan-dumping-fukushima-wastewater-into-the-ocean#:~:text=The%20Japanese%20government%20just%20announced,and%20the%20U.S.%20West%20Coast.

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— Greenpeace reports on government’s “failing program in Fukushima”– On the Frontline of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

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From Greenpeace

PDF

On the Frontline of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident:
Workers and Children
Radiation risks and human rights violations

March 2019 

“…so long as the Japanese government remains committed to its failing program in Fukushima, it will continue to come under domestic and international criticism. Eight years after the start of the nuclear disaster, thousands of evacuees are continuing their legal challenges against both TEPCO and the government.  These include the judgement of the Tokyo District Court on the criminal prosecution of three TEPCO executives due in 2019 and the newly initiated lawsuit by residents of Namie.

The Japanese government is defying United Nations human rights specialists who have challenged the policy of lifting evacuation orders and exposing citizens, particularly women and children, to unsafe radiation levels. At the same time, nuclear workers in Fukushima are continuing to suffer from varied forms of exploitation, including low pay, lack of comprehensive access to medical services, and the abuse of their right to not be exposed to hazardous radiation.

The Greenpeace survey results highlight the scale of the ongoing nuclear crisis in the most contaminated areas of Fukushima, and why the United Nations human rights experts are fully justified in expressing their urgent concerns.”

This reports contains 9 recommendations to the Japanese government and concludes:

The results of our investigations add further to the
urgency for the Abe government to halt its current
program of lifting evacuation orders, to comply
with its domestic and international human rights
obligations and to initiate a comprehensive and
publicly accountable review of current policy.

— ‘Global consequences’ of lethal radiation leak at Fukushima; TEPCO botches recent measurement inside reactor; “insane” levels detected last year, exceed Chernobyl

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From Sputnik News

February 4, 2018

Lethal levels of radiation have been observed inside Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. And they are arguably way higher than you suspect.

According to Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), radiation levels of eight Sieverts per hour (Sv/h) have been discovered within the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which was destroyed after a massive earthquake and a tsunami in March 2011.

Japanese Regulator Advocates Releasing Toxic Water Into Sea at Fukushima

Tepco, the company that operated the plant and is now tasked with decommissioning it, reported the discovery after making observations in a reactor containment vessel last month.

Eight Sv/h of radiation, if absorbed at once, mean certain death, even with quick treatment. One Sv/h is likely to cause sickness and 5.5 Sv/h will result in a high chance of developing cancer.

While 8 Sv/h is deadly, outside of Fukushima’s Reactor Number 2 foundations of a much higher level of 42 Sv/h was detected.

A strange occurrence, and experts are still arguing what caused the discrepancy. One possible explanation is that cooling water washed radioactive material off debris, taking it somewhere else.

But here’s a truly terrifying catch: according to the report, Tepco highly doubts the new readings, because, as was discovered later, a cover was not removed from the robot-mounted measurement device at the time of the inspection, NHK World reports.

Exactly one year ago, Sputnik reported that Tepco engineers discovered absolutely insane levels of radiation of about 530 Sv/h within the reactor. Such levels of radiation would kill a human within seconds. By comparison, the Chernobyl reactor reads 34 Sv/h radiation level, enough to kill a human after 20 minutes of exposure.

Japan Begins Disposal of Radioactive Waste From Fukushima Disaster

The levels of radiation within Fukushima reactor number 2 were so high that Tepco’s toughest robot, designed to withstand 1000 Sv/h of radiation, had to be pulled out, as it started glitching due to high radiation levels. Nuclear experts called the radiation levels “unimaginable” at the time.

On November 2017, the New York Times and other news outlets reported a much smaller figure of 70 Sv/h of radiation, more or less on par with a 74 Sv/h reading gathered before an anomalous 530 Sv/h spike.

While that radiation dosimeter cover negligence prevents precise calculations, the actual picture inside Unit 2 is thought to be much worse.

Japanese state broadcaster NHK World quoted experts saying that if the cleaning of the stricken power plant is not properly addressed, it will result in major leak of radioactivity with “global” consequences.

Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, says that while the readings are not reliable, they still “demonstrate that, seven years after the disaster, cleaning up the Fukushima site remains a massive challenge — and one that we’re going to be reading about for decades, never mind years.”

Mycle Schneider, independent energy consultant and lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, criticized Tepco, saying the power company has “no clue” what it is doing.

“I find it symptomatic of the past seven years, in that they don’t know what they’re doing, Tepco, these energy companies, haven’t a clue what they’re doing, so to me it’s been going wrong from the beginning. It’s a disaster of unseen proportions.”

In observing the poor maintenance of plant radiation leaks, Schneider also pointed out that the company stores nuclear waste at the site in an inappropriate way.

“This is an area of the planet that gets hit by tornadoes and all kinds of heavy weather patterns, which is a problem. When you have waste stored above ground in inappropriate ways, it can get washed out and you can get contamination all over the place.”

https://sputniknews.com/environment/201802041061337934-global-consequences-fukushima-leak/

Posted under Fair Use Rules.

The great Fukushima nuclear cover-up

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From the Ecologist

No bliss in this ignorance: the great Fukushima nuclear cover-up
Linda Pentz Gunther
February 20, 2016

The Japanese were kept in the dark from the start of the Fukushima disaster about high radiation levels and their dangers to health, writes Linda Pentz Gunter. In order to proclaim the Fukushima area ‘safe’, the Government increased exposure limits to twenty times the international norm. Soon, many Fukushima refugees will be forced to return home to endure damaging levels of radiation.

Once you enter a radiation controlled area, you aren’t supposed to drink water, let alone eat anything. The idea that somebody is living in a place like that is unimaginable.

Dr. Tetsunari Iida is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP) in Japan.

As such, one might have expected a recent presentation he gave in the UK within the hallowed halls of the House of Commons, to have focused on Japan’s capacity to replace the electricity once generated by its now mainly shuttered nuclear power plants, with renewable energy.

But Dr lida’s passionate polemic was not about the power of the sun, but the power of propaganda. March 11, 2011 might have been the day the Great East Japan Earthquake struck. But it was also the beginning of the Great Japan Cover-Up.

On the ISEP website, Iida extols the coming of the Fourth Revolution, following on from those in agriculture, industry and IT. “This fourth revolution will be an energy revolution, a green industrial revolution, and a decentralized network revolution”, he writes.

But in person, Iida was most interested in conveying the extent to which the Japanese people were lied to before, during and after the devastating nuclear disaster at Fukushima-Daiichi, precipitated on that same fateful day and by the deadly duo of earthquake and tsunami.

“Shinzo Abe says ‘everything is under control'”, said Iida, speaking at an event hosted by Nuclear Free Local Authorities, Green Cross, and Nuclear Consulting Group in late January. It was headlined by the former Japan Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, who was at the helm when the triple disasters struck. “Yes – under the control of the media!”

A trial for Tepco like post-war Tokyo Trials

The media may have played the willing government handmaiden in reassuring the public with falsehoods, but in July 2012, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission concluded that the disaster was really no accident but “man-made“. It came about, the researchers said, as a result of “collusion” between the government, regulators and the nuclear industry, in this case, Tepco.

“There should be a Tepco trial like the post-war Tokyo Trials”, Iida said, referring to the post World War II war crimes trial in which 28 Japanese were tried, seven of whom were subsequently executed by hanging.

Hope for such accountability – without advocating hanging – is fleeting at best. In 2011, while addressing a conference in Berlin hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, I suggested the Tepco officials should be sent to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, (a body the US still conveniently refuses to recognize) to answer for what clearly amounts to crimes against humanity.

The remark caused a bit of a stir and earnest questions about the mechanism by which Tepco could be brought there. Needless to say, nothing of the kind ever happened, or is likely to.

Instead, the Abe’s government’s preferred tactic is to go full out to restart reactors and move everybody back home as soon as possible, as if nothing serious had happened. Just scoop off a little topsoil, cart it away somewhere else and, Abracadabra! Everything is clean and safe again!

Normalizing radiation, a policy and now a practice

Of course radiological decontamination is not that easy. Nor is it reliable. It is more like“pushing contamination from one spot to the next”, as independent nuclear expert, Mycle Schneider describes it. And radiation does not remain obediently in one place, either.

“The mountains and forests that cannot even be vaguely decontaminated, will serve as a permanent source of new contamination, each rainfall washing out radiation and bringing it down from the mountains to the flat lands”, Schneider explained. Birds move around. Animals eat and excrete radioactive plant life. Radiation gets swept out to sea. It is a cycle with no end.

…

Next in the ‘normalization’ process came the decision to raise allowable radiation exposure standards to 20 millisieverts of radiation a year, up from the prior level of 2 mSv a year. The globally-accepted limit for radiation absorption is 1 mSv a year.

This meant that children were potentially being exposed to the same levels of radiation that are permitted for adult nuclear power plant workers in Europe. Some officials even argued that zones where rates were as high as 100 mSv a year should be considered ‘safe’. Writing on his blog, anti-pollution New Orleans-based attorney, Stuart Smith,observed wryly:

“Instead of taking corrective measures to protect its people, Japan has simply increased internationally recognized exposure limits. It seems that the priority – as we’ve seen in so many other industrial disasters in so many other countries – is to protect industry and limit its liability rather than to ensure the long-term health and well being of the masses. Go figure.”

For the entire article:

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987222/no_bliss_in_this_ignorance_the_great_fukushima_nuclear_coverup.html

— TEPCO: 5 Billion Bq of Strontium-90 flows to the sea every single day

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From Fukushima Diary

5 Billion Bq of Strontium-90 flows to the Pacific on the daily basis in 2014. Tepco announced in the press conference of 8/25/2014.

This is due to the contaminated water overflowing from the seaside of Reactor 1 ~ 4 to Fukushima plant port.

They also announced 2 Billion Bq of Cesium-137 and 1 Billion Bq of Tritium flow to the sea every single day as well.

Fukushima plant port is not separated from the Pacific. Discharged nuclide naturally spreads to the sea.

http://www.tepco.co.jp/tepconews/library/archive-j.html

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http://fukushima-diary.com/2014/08/5-billion-bq-strontium-90-flows-sea-every-single-day/