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Japan to Delay Ocean Dumping of Contaminated Waste Water from Fukushima

By John LaForge

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno announced in January that his government would delay its plan to pump over 1.37 million tons of watery radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean from the devastated six-reactor complex at Fukushima-Daiichi. With the country facing harsh international pressure to cancel the dumping, Matsuno acknowledged “the need to gain public support,” for the plan, the Associated Press reported January 12. The wicked water is now being collected in large tanks that were hastily built near the wrecked reactors.

Fierce criticism of the deliberate pollution scheme has come from China, South Korea, other Pacific Rim countries, scientists, environmental groups, UN human rights experts, and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), an alliance of 17 Pacific island nations. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also indicated that the government wants a postponement of the dumping operation — designed by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) — until it is “verifiably safe to do so,” Thomas Heaton reported February 16 for Civil Beat.

The PIF, independent states where according to Reuters up to half of the world’s tuna is sourced, was crucial in forcing Japan’s apparent retreat. The PIF warned that contaminating the Pacific could harm the fishing that its economies depend on. Mary Yamaguchi reported January 12 for the AP: “Some scientists say the impact of long-term, low-dose exposure to tritium and other radionuclides on the environment and humans is still unknown and the release plan should be delayed. They say tritium affects humans more when it is consumed in fish.” A scientific expert panel assembled by the PIF urged reconsideration of the dumping “because it was not supported by data and more information was needed,” Ken Buesseler, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said in January.

Japan announced in April 2021 that it would allow Tepco to pump the nearly 1.4 million tons of liquid radioactive waste into the public commons of the Pacific Ocean beginning in spring 2023. Tepco says it intends dilute the material and pump it into the sea for the next 30 to 40 years using an underground tunnel now under construction. Media attention has focused on the tritium (radioactive hydrogen) in the waste water which cannot be removed by Tepco’s (failed) filtering system, and has generally ignored mention of the long-lived carbon-14 in the water, which likewise cannot be removed.

Often unreported about the plan is the failure of Tepco’s waste water filer system, dubbed the “Advanced Liquid Processing System,” which has not removed the dozens of long-lived radioactive substances — including ruthenium, cobalt-60, strontium-90, cesium-137, and even plutonium – that the company said it would filter.

The water becomes radioactively contaminated (150 tons more every day) after being poured over hundreds of tons of melted, ferociously radioactive uranium — and in reactor #3 plutonium — fuel, the hot wreckage amassed deep inside the foundations of the three destroyed nuclear reactors, units 1, 2 and 3. All three suffered catastrophic meltdowns following the Great Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Some of the contaminated waste is groundwater reaches the melted fuel after pouring through cracks in the reactors’ foundations caused by the earthquake. Dr. Buesseler Science magazine in 2020, “Many other isotopes are in those tanks still, and over 70 percent [of 1.37 million tons] would have to be cleaned up further before they might consider even releasing….”

Moreover, reactor 3 which was packed with “mixed oxide” fuel made of combined uranium and plutonium, suffered a huge hydrogen explosion at 11 a.m. on March 14, and Tepco announced that on March 21 and 22, in soil collected on the Fukushima site, plutonium was detected. Hydrogen explosions also caused severe damage to reactors 1 and 2, and to the waste fuel pool of reactor 4. (Three additional hydrogen explosions caused severe damage: to reactor 1 on March 11, and to reactor 2 and to the waste fuel pool of reactor 4 on March 15.)

In April 2021, Cindy Folkers, a radiation and health hazards specialist at Beyond Nuclear in Maryland, told Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams, “TEPCO data show that even twice-through filtration leaves the water 13.7 times more concentrated with hazardous tritium — radioactive hydrogen — than Japan’s allowable standard for ocean dumping, and about one million times higher than the concentration of natural tritium in Earth’s surface waters.”

Secretary Matsuno said in his January statement that the delayed dumping plan “includes enhanced efforts to ensure safety.” This vague reassurance comes from the same authorities that caused the triple meltdown and consequently the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean in history; it follows two years of iron-clad declarations from Tepco and government regulators that contaminating the ocean will be safe. The plan to add more radioactive poisons to the Pacific in order to save money has also been approved by the U.S. government and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency. ###

— Used by Counterpunch, March 3, 2023, https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/03/japan-to-delay-ocean-dumping-of-contaminated-waste-water-from-fukushima/

 

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Fukushima: Novel Fixes Repeatedly Fail, Dumping Threatens Pacific Commons

By John LaForge

 

During the 11-year-long, $57.4 billion partial decontamination efforts at the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi reactor site in Japan, almost every novel program invented to deal with the complex, unprecedented triple catastrophe has initially failed and then needed to be re-invented. Unworkable schemes instigated to repair, decontaminate, plug-up, or prevent ongoing radioactive contamination, along with cover-ups and corruption by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. which runs the operation, have left the Japanese public wary of the company’s plans and of safety assurances from the government.

Japan’s extensive bull-dozing and mass collection of contaminated topsoil and debris, poisoned by the meltdowns’ radioactive fallout, has filled approximately 20 million one-ton bags. These millions of tons of cesium-contaminated waste are standing outdoors in mountainous stacks scattered across seven states. Some of the heavy bags have been jostled and broken open by torrential rains during typhoons.

Attempts to locate and examine the total of 900 tons of melted reactor fuel (which possibly burned through the wrecked “containments” and foundations of the three units) have failed, because robotic cameras have repeatedly been destroyed by the ferociously hot and radioactive melted wastes. Eleven years after the catastrophe, the condition and location of the melted fuel masses, known as “corium,” is still uncertain because Tepco has yet to develop a robust enough camera.

South Korean fishing boats joined nationwide protests to demand Japan reverse its decision to release contaminated water from its crippled Fukushima nuclear complex into the sea. The banners read “Condemning Japan’s decision to release Fukushima water into the sea.” Photo by Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji

The reactors’ concrete foundations were so severely broken up by the record 9.0 magnitude earthquake, that groundwater rushes through cracks and broken pipes, pours over the three huge masses of corium and becomes highly contaminated with a mix of at least 62 radioactive materials. Tepco’s installation of an expensive “ice wall” that was dug into the ground behind the wrecked reactors, was intended to divert the groundwater keeping it away from the foundations. This fix has also failed.

Tepco has slowed the direct flow of the contaminated water into the Pacific by filtering it and then collecting it in giant tanks. But the tank farm is plagued by leaks and by the discovery that the filter system has failed. In 2018, Tepco admitted that its “Advanced Liquid Processing System” or ALPS had not removed iodine-129, ruthenium-106 and technetium-99, as well as carbon-14, and 60 other long-lived poisons, putting the lie to its repeated assurances that ALPS would remove everything but tritium. The company then promised that it would re-treat the collected water, before dumping all 1.3 million tons of the waste water into the Pacific.

In July, Japan’s nuclear regulator formally approved Tepco’s plan to dump the water into the ocean beginning in spring 2023 and continuing for 30 years. (The reactors produce 140 cubic meters of contaminated water every day, a combination of ground- and rainwater that seeps into the wreckage, and cooling water mechanically poured over the three corium piles.) While independent scientists and environmental historians have charged that dumping would constitute the worst premeditated maritime pollution in recorded history, Tepco’s ocean pollution solution has already been okayed by the government in Tokyo and by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Ocean dumping would violate international law

In August, Tepco announced that it would begin constructing a tunnel to the sea for releasing the waste water. Complaints from scientists, environmental groups and Pacific rim countries, particularly South Korea and China, have not forced Japan to reconsider the plan.

Certain international treaties forbid such deliberate pollution of the global commons. The “Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter,” or London Convention, prohibits any intentional release of radioactive wastes into the sea. Writing in The Korea Times, environmental attorney Duncan Currie and nuclear specialist Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace Germany noted that ocean dumping would also violate the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea by posing a direct threat to the marine environment and the jurisdictional waters of the Korean peninsula.

Tepco says the tritium concentration in the wastewater will be lowered before dumping by diluting it with seawater. However, dilution is basically a public relations scheme since the total amount of radioactive tritium will remain the same. Greenpeace’s Burnie and Currie and others have warned about tritium’s ability to form organically-bound tritium, and that if ingested with seafood the biological power of its beta radiation can damage human DNA.

 

-The Guardian, July 13  & June 29; Hankyoreh, June 9, 2022

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Alliances Unite in Fight Against Foreign Fossil Fuel Giant

By Kelly Lundeen
Treaty walker Sherry Couture, Fond du Lac Ojibwe, walks to protect water, honor treaties, and oppose Enbridge tar sands pipelines.
Photo: Indigenous Environmental Network

 

Canadian oil transport company Enbridge has a tough task ahead of it in Wisconsin and Michigan. Keeping their 69-year-old Line 5 pipeline flowing with tar sands requires the approval of two major projects: the reroute of the pipeline around the Bad River Reservation of the Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe), in Wisconsin, and a tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow strip of water connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

Opposition to pipelines has been fueled by growing awareness that climate chaos can be diminished by rejecting coal, oil, and gas projects. Furthermore, the Indigenous-led movement against fossil fuel infrastructure reminds US citizens that it is everyone’s responsibility to uphold Article 6 of the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, which states that international law, such as treaties with native nations, takes priority over conflicting state laws.

Sherry Couture spoke at the Treaty People Convergence August 6, which her organization R.I.S.E. Coalition, Nukewatch, and several other groups helped organize through the Wisconsin Building Unity network. “I come from Fond du Lac, the 1854 Treaty territory [of the Lake Superior Chippewa] … I’m known as a Treaty walker … I’ll do anything for the nibi [“water” in Ojibwe]. I’ll live in a ditch. I’ll walk to the Capitol. I’ll sleep on the pipeline. [We] will chase Enbridge down and make sure that they leave our reservation,” she said. The US government violates the Treaty signed with the Fond du Lac by allowing Enbridge’s pipeline to run through the Treaty territory. At the Convergence, on the anniversary of Hiroshima day, Nukewatch linked the issues of the targeting of Indigenous populations and people of color both by nuclear weapons and environmental racism.

Nonviolent action against the Line 5 projects has been ongoing, and Enbridge also faces legal challenges by the Bad River Band and the State of Michigan. In 2013, the Bad River Band refused to renew pipeline easements across their reservation in northern Wisconsin, and in 2019 the Band sued to have the pipeline removed, forcing Enbridge to propose a reroute. On September 7, US District Judge William Conley found Enbridge to be trespassing on the Reservation for nearly a decade, yet didn’t go as far as shutting down the pipeline. Enbridge is working to obtain permits for a reroute while a Final Environmental Impact Statement is being completed. In order to demonstrate union support, Enbridge has already secured project labor agreements with four labor unions and a construction company that was partially owned by Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels (when the contract was signed). Enbridge, a foreign company, is on track to spend as much as $1.7 million on US lobbying for a second consecutive year.

A 2010 Enbridge oil spill into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, the largest inland oil spill in US history, called into question the Line 5 pipeline’s safety, particularly where it runs under the Straits of Mackinac in the Great Lakes, which contain 20% of the world’s freshwater. In 2018, a boat anchor was dragged across the pipeline, causing damage but not a rupture. Even those concerned about energy independence would wonder if putting the Great Lakes at peril is worth the 10% of oil from Line 5 reaching the US market, while 90% returns to Canada. Former Michigan governor Rick Snyder approved Enbridge’s plan to pass the pipeline through a tunnel under the Straits. Enbridge is still hoping to acquire state and local permits.

Nukewatch has supported Indigenous-led objections to both regional Enbridge pipeline projects, Line 3 and Line 5, including Camp Makwa starting in 2017, and a walk supporting Treaty rights last year. This spring Nukewatch organized local events as part of the March Forth to Earth Day actions opposing Line 5, which took place throughout Wisconsin. Pushback against the pipelines will continue in order to protect the water, the Earth, and the people.

What you can do:

• The Army Corps of Engineers is taking comments through October 14 on the proposed tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac for the Environmental Impact Statement scoping process. Participate in a public meeting on October 6, noon Central time, here: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82961743672; or by phone (309) 205-3325 (zoom ID 829 6174 3672).

• Submit comments online with a sample letter here: oilandwaterdontmix.org/submit_army_corps_tunnel_comment.

• See updates at rise-coalition.com, and at communitiesunitedbywater.org.

— Wisconsin Public Radio, Sep. 8, June 8, 2022 & July 20, 2016: GazetteXtra, Apr. 13, 2022; Open Secrets, 2022

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Business Case for Nuclear Power Collapsed Forty Years Ago — Economist

By Amory Lovins

Nuclear reactor purchase orders collapsed to zero in [1978] the year before Three Mile Island because they cost too much. How do we know? The cover story of the last 1978 issue of Business Week, months before TMI, reported nuclear power’s commercial collapse. TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima only emphasized the industry’s slow-motion collapse caused not by public fears but by the lack of a business case.

Chancellor Angela Merkel didn’t decide to phase out nuclear power only after Fukushima in 2011; Germany had already written the phaseout into its atomic law in 2002 after a national consensus process in 2001. Fukushima only reversed a delay (added months before) and [Germany] returned to the original 2022 phaseout date. Now the last three reactors may run briefly, probably a few months, into 2023 to help 1-2% with the Russian gas crisis.

https://diablocanyonpanel.org/history-of-dcpp/

 

California’s legislature just voted to extend Diablo Canyon five years beyond its planned 2024/25 retirement at age 40 — if it meets a slew of conditions it’s unlikely to meet, such as showing 1) the extension is needed, 2) won’t cost too much, and 3) its gotten all required federal approvals and subsidies. In other words they voted to do the analyses no one had done when the Governor’s office, a few weeks before adjournment, introduced this proposal that no state agency or utility had requested, reversing a thoroughly analyzed 2016 agreement that nearly all the legislators had approved just four years ago. Nothing significant changed since except the Governor’s mind.

Renewables’ [often claimed] “unreliability and relatively small contribution to overall power generation” is untrue. Renewables outproduce nuclear energy in the US and the world, and are growing rapidly while nuclear output is stagnant or falling. Solar cells and wind turbines do produce varying output, but those variations are more predictable than nuclear reactors’ bigger, longer, and more abrupt failures. Solar and wind power’s unpredictable (“forced”) outages are roughly one-tenth those of nuclear power, so they need less and cheaper backup to keep the grid reliable.

State-level data confirm that abrupt nuclear retirement (not with the 9-year notice provided in California) can briefly raise gas-fired generation, but only for a year or two; then renewables and efficiency can contest the market space and grid capacity that the nuclear reactor sat on, they win, and they get installed. Since they’re cheaper than running the closed [reactor], they displace more fossil-fueled generation for the same cost, and for many times longer, so they protect the climate better than continuing to run the uneconomic nuclear unit.

— Amory Lovins is a physicist, an architect, an engineering scholar, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and currently Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University.

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EPA Announces Shutdown of Online Archives

By Elena Hight

 

Less than a year after Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan declared his wish for the EPA to operate “in a ‘fishbowl’ once again,” the agency has decided to close or “sunset” its online archive. The archive hosts digital records of EPA resources, policy changes, regulatory actions, enforcement, and compliance dating back to the 1990s, and it is a vital resource for communities, activist groups, researchers, historians, and citizens.

Although far from perfect, the archive contains reports on thousands of sites within the United States, and it is a rich source of data that individuals can use to better understand the government’s response to a myriad of environmental issues. The closure of this archive signals the abandonment of transparency and the expressed values of administrator Regan.

Activists and environmental organizations have condemned the decision. In a June 13 open letter to the EPA from the Environmental Governance and Data Initiative, the EGDI wrote, “Overall, the lack of transparency in the decision to sunset the EPA’s archive is at odds with the EPA’s commitment to openness.” And, the group added, the closure leaves both the public and federal government “dependent upon third-party non-governmental organizations” to maintain records, groups that are not bound by “federal data integrity and provenance policies.” The EGDI letter is co-signed by 20 other organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Internet Archive, and the Sierra Club.

While public pressure caused the EPA to delay archive closure for a year, until July 2023, it is still unclear exactly why the EPA wants to shutter its archive instead of making it more accessible and user-friendly. In an email statement to The Verge, the EPA claims that the site’s infrastructure is outdated and that it is no longer “cost-effective.” The agency also said that the public could still access archive material through Freedom of Information Act requests and that most EPA documents will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis for submission to the National Archives and Records Administration. However, these claims are widely criticized, as both means of accessing EPA materials can be time-consuming, confusing, and costly.

The EPA archives have already proven to be essential in places like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina where residents used the online repository to better understand the government’s response to the military’s contamination of surrounding land and water, as well as their own exposure to toxic chemicals. In an era in which the Supreme Court is hampering the government’s ability to regulate pollution and toxic exposure, the archives are also a vital source of information about threatened federal programs. Despite problems with the current archive, it is clear that its closure will result in greater barriers to access, especially, as the American Society for Environmental History notes, among “more marginalized and environmental justice communities.”

 

https://www.selectjustice.com/camp-lejeune-lawsuit

 

While the delay of the archive’s closure was a short-term victory for environmental groups, the EPA has not publicized next steps for the archive. The Internet Archive and other sites like the Policy Commons are continuing to save tens of thousands of documents from the EPA website. Yet both systems have downsides and are not replacements for free and easily-accessible documents through government agencies. As Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of EGDI, wrote on March 19, “EPA’s archive could become a model of web governance that fosters democratic oversight. Shuttering the archive is moving backwards and is a disservice to the public.”

As we move into an age of greater threats to environmental governance, the EPA should keep the archive open, improve its functionality, and maintain its commitment to transparency and democratic engagement.

— Elena Hight is a writer, educator, activist, and PhD candidate in sociology based in Oklahoma City.

– News Security Beat, July 21, 2022

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