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Fukushima at Ten: Aftershocks, Lies, and Failed Decontamination

Image at “Mechanics of a Nuclear Meltdown Explained”, by Jenny Marder, PBS News Hour, March 15, 2011: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/mechanics-of-a-meltdown-explainedP8

 

By John LaForge

It’s now 10 years since the catastrophic triple meltdowns of reactors at Fukushima in Japan. As Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health project put it three years ago, “Enormous amounts of radioactive chemicals, including cesium, strontium, plutonium, and iodine were emitted into the air, and releases of the same toxins into the Pacific have never stopped, as workers struggle to contain over 100 cancer-causing chemicals.”

Nukewatch and hundreds of other groups and scientific journals have issued dozens of reports about the disaster. A score of books have been published on the subject, and major media have at least done annual reviews of the official evacuations, cleanups and decontamination efforts. With so much information available, it is not possible to do more than present another update on recent news and analysis.

There is news of the shortage of Fukushima health studies; big earthquakes (aftershocks) rattling reactors and waste tanks; corporate and government dishonesty about decontamination; novel radioactive particles dispersed; and renewed fish contamination.

Very few health studies

“So far only one single disease entity has been systematically examined in humans in Fukushima: thyroid cancer,” says Dr. Alex Rosen, the German chair of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Other diseases, such as leukemia or malformations, which are associated with increased radiation exposure, have not been investigated, Rosen told the German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt March 2.

(Fie studies have focused on birth abnormalities in the areas most affected: three on infant mortality rates, one on underweight newborns, and one on declining birth rates 9 months after March 2011.*)

The one disease study of the population was a screening for thyroid cancer in 380,000 local children under the age 18. In January 2018, the journal Thyroid reported 187 cases after five years. Reviewing the study, Mangano write in the Washington Spectator that, “A typical population of 380,000 children would produce 12 cases in five years.” The increase among children is “exactly what would be expected if Fukushima were a factor, as radiation is most damaging to the fetus, infant and child,” Mangano said.

New Earthquakes Rattle Wreckage and Nerves

Another large earthquake, magnitude 7.3, struck Feb. 13, again off the coast of the Fukushima reactor complex, and the reported 30 seconds of terror was followed by14 aftershocks up to magnitude 5.

The quake was severe enough that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) and federal regulators suspect it caused additional damage to reactors 1 and 3 where cooling water levels fell sharply, the Associated Press reported. The Feb. 13 quake was felt in Tokyo 150 miles away. Japan’s meteorological agency said it was believed to be an aftershock of the record 2011 quake.

At a Feb. 15 meeting, government regulators said the quake had probably worsened existing earthquake damage in reactors 1 and 3 or broken open new cracks causing the cooling water level drop, the AP said.

“Because (the 2011 quake) was an enormous one with a magnitude of 9.0, it’s not surprising to have an aftershock of this scale 10 years later,” said Kenji Satake, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute.

There have been six major aftershocks in the Fukushima area since March 2011: April 7, 2011 (magnitude 7.1); April 11, 2011 (6.6); July 10, 2011 (7.0); Oct. 26, 2013 (7.1); Nov. 26, 2016 (6.9); and Feb. 13, 2021 (7.3).

Earthquake shocks are not the only recurring nightmare to haunt the survivors of the record quake that killed 19, 630. Typhoon Hagibis slammed into Tamura City in October 2019, and swept away an unknown number of bags of radioactive debris that had been stacked near a river.

Since March 2011, over 22 million cubic meters of contaminated soil, brush and other matter from areas hard hit by fallout have been collected in large black plastic bags and piled in temporary storage mounds in thousands of places. (“Fukushima residents fight state plan to build roads with radiation-tainted soil,” Japan Times, Apr. 29, 2018) Yet the volume is the tip of the iceberg: According to R. Ramachandran, in The Hindu, January 31, 2020, no decontamination activities are planned for the majority of forested areas which cover about 75 per cent of the main contaminated area of 9,000 square km.”

Cover-ups and disinformation

Reporting Feb. 14 about the latest quake, the AP noted that Tepco “has repeatedly been criticized for cover-ups and delayed disclosures of problems.” On June 22, 2016, Tepco’s President Naomi Hirose publicly admitted that the company’s lengthy refusal to speak of the “meltdowns” it knew of at its three reactors was tantamount to a cover-up and apologized for it.

The Washington Post reported March 6, 2021 that, “For years, Tepco claimed that the treated water stored at the plant contained only tritium, but data deep on its website showed that the treatment process had failed.” The tanks now hold almost 1.25 million tons of highly contaminated waste water. “In 2018, [Tepco] was forced to acknowledge that 70 percent of the water is still contaminated with dangerous radioactive elements — including strontium-90, a bone-seeking radionuclide that can cause cancer — and will have to be treated again before release,” the Post reported.

Harvey Wasserman reported for Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism’s The Free Press on a July 2007 earthquake that shook Japan and forced dangerous emergency shutdowns at four reactors at Kashiwazaki. “For three consecutive days [Tepco] was forced to issue public apologies for erroneous statements about the severity of the damage done to the reactors, the size and lethality of radioactive spills into the air and water, the on-going danger to the public, and much more. Once again, the only thing reactor owners can be trusted to do is to lie.”

Radioactive Particles Newly identified

Work just published in the journal Science of the Total Environment documents new, highly radioactive particles that were released from the destroyed Fukushima reactors. The study was led by Dr. Satoshi Utsunomiya and Kazuya Morooka of Kyushu University. “Two of these particles have the highest cesium radioactivity ever measured for particles from Fukushima,” the research found. The study analyzed particles that were taken from surface soils collected 3.9 kilometers from the reactor site.

Speaking with Science Daily Feb. 17, Dr. Utsunomiya said, “Owing to their large size, the health effects of the new particles are likely limited to external radiation hazards during static contact with skin.” The particles were reportedly spewed by the hydrogen explosions that rocked the reactor buildings and fell within a narrow zone that stretches ~8 kilometers north-northwest of meltdowns.

But Dr. Utsunomiya also said the long-lived radioactivity of cesium in “the newly found highly radioactive particles has not yet decayed significantly. As such, they will remain in the environment for many decades to come, and this type of particle could occasionally still be found in radiation hot spots.”

Smaller radioactive particles of uranium, thorium, radium, cesium, strontium, polonium, tellurium and americium were found afloat throughout Northern Japan, according to a report by Arnie Gundersen and Marco Kaltofen published July 27, 2017 in Science of the Total Environment. The radioactively hot particles were found in dusts and soils. About 180 particulate matter samples were taken from automobile or home air filters, outdoor surface dust, and vacuum cleaner bags. Some142 of the samples (about 80 percent) contained cesium-134 and cesium-137 which emit intense beta radiation and is very dangerous if ingested or inhaled. “A majority of these samples were collected from locations in decontaminated zones cleared for habitation by the National Government of Japan,” the authors revealed.

Greenpeace Reports Cleanup Failures and Deception

Greenpeace Japan released two major reports March 4 that also contradict the country’s positive decontamination and human rights claims after 2011.

“Successive governments during the last 10 years … have attempted to perpetrate a myth about the nuclear disaster. They have sought to deceive the Japanese people by misrepresenting the effectiveness of the decontamination program and ignoring radiological risks,” said Shaun Burnie, Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia and co-author of the first report.

Key findings of the radiation report Fukushima 2011-2020 are:

  • Most of the 840 square kilometer Special Decontamination Area (SDA), where the government is responsible for decontamination, remains contaminated with radioactive cesium. … an overall average of only 15% has been decontaminated. • No long-term decontamination target level will be achieved in many areas. Citizens will be subjected for decades to radiation exposures in excess of the … recommended maximum. • In the areas where evacuation orders were lifted in 2017, specifically Namie and Iitate, radiation levels remain above safe limits, potentially exposing the population to increased cancer risk.

Key findings of The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station decommissioning report are:

  • The current decommissioning plan in the timeframe of 30-40 years is impossible to achieve and is illusory. • Radioactive waste created at the site should not be moved. Fukushima Daiichi is already and should remain a nuclear waste storage site for the long term.

— This is a report is the Spring 2021 Nukewatch Quarterly soon in your mailbox. A version of the article was published at CounterPunch, March 12-14, 2021 

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Nuclear-weapons treaty the right way forward: The treaty has already strengthened peace and safety in 50 countries.

Note: A model of public engagement, Nukewatch volunteer Joel Bransky had this excellent letter published in his local paper, the Duluth News Tribune:

Fifty nations just outlawed nuclear weapons forever. The international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, came into force on Jan. 22 after the 50th country, Honduras, ratified it. The people of these countries will never have to worry about cancer-causing weapons tests or pay for the secretive governmental nonsense required to manufacture and store nuclear warheads.

The treaty’s entry into force comes at a critical time. Just three years ago, while living in South Korea, I watched our president joke about the size of his launch button and challenge a volatile dictator to a game of nuclear chicken. Congress held hearings on how a nuclear strike would be carried out. The world was one miscalculation away from nuclear war, it seemed — yet many people have already forgotten. The enormity of the problem makes it seem unsolvable.

But we can solve this problem, and TPNW maps the path to nuclear disarmament. The treaty has already strengthened peace and safety in 50 countries. This is remarkable, given the opposition to the treaty from the U.S. government and weapons manufacturers. It shows that a nuclear-free future is coming. In fact, for the citizens of those 50 countries, it is already here.

I am tired of our government wasting taxpayer money on weapons that are never used and that, if used, would kill us through incineration, radiation poisoning, or starvation. We must tell our government that this is absurd and outdated. Now is the time. Please call or email your U.S. senators and representative and tell them you support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

— Joel Bransky, Duluth, Minnesota, Feb. 25, 2021

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Treaty Banning the Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction Enters Into Force

BUS activists join 2019 protest against US nuclear weapons deployed at Germany's Buechel Air Basey John LaForge

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) takes effect Friday, January 22, 2021.

After decades of campaigns of every kind to “ban the bomb”, to prevent the nuclear arms race, and later to freeze the arms race, and, the nuclear weapons prohibition outlaws not just their development, testing and possession, but forbids any threatened use — commonly known as “nuclear deterrence.” Like with other multi-generational struggles against slavery, torture, the death penalty, child labor, TPNW campaigners justly call it “the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.”

The new international law  — which for the first time in weapons treaty law requires reparations and compensation to victims of H-bomb testing and production — is similar to earlier global prohibitions such as the Geneva Protocol (outlawing gas warfare), the Hague Conventions (forbidding poisoned weapons), the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Ban the Convention on Cluster Munitions and the anti-personnel Mine Ban.

The difference here is that the world community has finally added to the list of despicable, loathsome, appalling and shunned weapons of war those devices whose effects contain and exceed beyond comprehension the accumulated evil of the all the rest—nuclear and thermonuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons have been earnestly condemned for 75 years by legal scholars, religious leaders, peace groups, military commanders, prime ministers, presidents and corporate CEOs. They’ve been called “the ultimate evil” by the International Court of Justice in 1996 and any use of them was declared by the UN General Assembly as early as 1961 “a crime against [hu]mankind and civilization.” The TPNW’s language makes clear why: “Cognizant that the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons cannot be adequately addressed, transcend national borders, pose grave implications for human survival, the environment, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and the health of current and future generations, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, including as a result of ionizing radiation…”

Yet nuclear-armed countries all hold that their plans and threats to commit atomic violence are legal. For example, the US Navy Field Manual says, “There is at present no rule of international law expressly prohibiting States from the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. In the absence of express prohibition, the use of such weapons … is permitted.”

No more. The TPNW rebukes and nullifies this artful dodge, which is partly why its establishment is a monumental accomplishment. Forbidding nuclear weapons by name is also a triumph of harrowing urgency, considering the number of doddering heads of state with access to nuclear launch codes and especially in view of the atomic scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” being set at 100 seconds to midnight.

Countries with nuclear arsenals rejected the UN negotiations in 2017 that produced the TPNW, and they dismiss its obligations because the law applies only to states that ratify it. The duplicity of the nuclear-armed governments was displayed by then US UN Ambassador Nicki Haley who led 35 countries in a boycott of the talks. Haley said the treaty would end up disarming the nations “trying to keep peace and safety”. At the time, the United States was militarily occupying and/or at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. Haley’s speech must have reminded the more than two-thirds of the UN Ambassadors that “hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue.”

The power of the new Treaty is worth celebrating for now, but then it must be employed by us all to end the public’s ignorance, denial, forgetfulness, and habituation regarding plans for nuclear war, and to bring the nuclear weapons states into compliance. ###

— John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, and with Kelly Lundeen co-edits its newsletter, Nukewatch Quarterly.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/20/treaty-banning-the-ultimate-weapon-of-mass-destruction-enters-into-force/

http://www.peacevoice.info/2021/01/19/treaty-banning-the-ultimate-weapon-of-mass-destruction-enters-into-force/

 

 

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Treaty Seeks End to Nuclear Madness

The US delegation standing just outside the Büchel Air Base, and in front of inflatable mock B61 nuclear bombs, included from left, Brian Terrell, Andrew Lanier, Susan Crane, Cee’Cee’ Anderson, Ralph Hutchison, Richard Bishop, Cindy Collins, Kevin Collins, and John LaForge. Not pictured, Fred Galluccio and Dennis DuVall.

By ,  15 Jan. 2021

On January 22, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will enter into force. The treaty bans the development, production, possession, deployment, testing, use and just about anything else you can imagine related to nuclear weapons.

Fifty years later, nine nuclear-armed militaries possess more than 13,000 nuclear weapons, arsenals that mock their claimed commitment to disarm “at an early date.”

Approved at the United Nations by 122 countries in 2017, and subsequently signed by 86 and ratified by 51 nations, the nuclear weapons ban will join the venerated status of international prohibitions already established against lesser weapons of mass destruction. These earlier agreements include the Geneva Gas Protocol, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Ottawa Treaty or  Mine Ban Convention and the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is no magic wand. Nine nuclear-armed states claim that the treaty doesn’t apply to them, and it’s true that only governments that are “states parties” to the treaty are subject to its prohibitions and obligations. However, the treaty can be a kind of a lever and a beacon for achieving the elimination of nuclear weapons, a goal every government on earth claims to desire.

“the nuclear weapons ban will join the venerated status of international prohibitions already established against lesser weapons of mass destruction”

Decades of refusal to conclude “good faith” negotiations for nuclear disarmament “at an early date,” which the United States and four other nuclear nations agreed to in the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, have left the rest of the world fed up. Fifty years later, nine nuclear-armed militaries possess more than 13,000 nuclear weapons, arsenals that mock their claimed commitment to disarm “at an early date.”

As with bans on other weapons of mass destruction, scofflaw states that continue to produce and use nuclear weapons will increasingly be condemned and shunned as outliers and rogue actors. And nuclear-armed states have already been stung by the treaty’s imminent entry into force. Last October, the Trump White House urged those governments that had ratified the treaty to withdraw their ratifications. Happily, none did.

For more than a decade, public support for the elimination of nuclear weapons remains consistently strong. Current polls — Belgium, 64%; Germany, 68%; Italy, 70%; Netherlands, 62% — show strong majorities in countries that now host U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe. The treaty heralds a new global, civil, diplomatic and economic environment in which nuclear weapons are banned. In Belgium, one of five NATO countries that currently station U.S. nuclear weapons inside their territories, the parliament in January 2020 nearly expelled the U.S. weapons in a close vote. When the first NATO country still hosting the U.S. nuclear bombs demands their removal, others are expected to follow suit.

Elsewhere, financial divestment campaigns in Europe are succeeding, pressing hundreds of institutions to get out of the business of genocidal atomic violence. The Dutch pension fund APB, the fifth largest of its kind in the world, has announced  it will exclude companies involved in production of nuclear weapons. It joins more than seventy other European banks, pension funds, and insurance companies that have already adopted divestment policies.

January 22 marks the culmination of the effort led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, civil society, and non-nuclear-armed states to create the treaty. It is also the beginning of a new movement that will, in the end, see the elimination of the existential nuclear threat.

Given the need to stop the Biden administration from continuing the $2 trillion commitment to “modernize” U.S. nuclear weapons, build new bomb plants, and invest in new nuclear weapons, the treaty and its message could not be timelier or more compelling.

As supporters the world over have noted, this treaty is the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.

Ralph.jpg Ralph Hutchison is coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

John LaForge.JPG John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch in Wisconsin.

This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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50-Year-Old Wisc. Reactors Want 30 Years More

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

The owner of the last two operating nuclear reactors in Wisconsin, NextEra Energy, has applied to the NRC asking to run the Point Beach units for 80 years—twice the limit in their original licenses and double their engineered lifespan—until 2050.

The Point Beach reactors on Lake Michigan near Green Bay are 50 years old, making them two of the oldest still operating in the United States. Licenses for the two reactors are now set to expire in 2030 and 2033.

Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, a watchdog group in Takoma Park, Maryland, told Nukewatch, “This is scary for several reasons. One reason is that one reactor at Point Beach is tied for worst ‘neutron-embrittled reactor vessel’ in the United States.” (Years of neutron bombardment from nuclear fissioning inside the reactor make the giant machine increasingly brittle and unstable.)

“When reactor embrittlement risks are reviewed by the NRC,” Kamps writes, “the commission simply lowers the safety standards nationwide by weakening the regulations (for embrittled/pressurized thermal shock safety). The NRC has done this time and time again.”

The NRC has approved only two other such 80- year-long license exceptions: Pennsylvania’s Peach Bottom and Florida’s Turkey Point. Three of the oldest operating US reactors—50-yr-old Monticello in Minnesota; 49-yr-old Dresden 3 in Illinois; and 47-yr-old Peach Bottom 2 & 3 in Pennsylvania—are General Electric “Mark I” units, exactly like the Fukushima reactors that exploded and melted in 2011.

—Beyond Nuclear, Nov. 23; AP, Nov. 21, 2020; Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Operating Nuclear Power Reactors,” Oct. 21, 2019

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