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New Public TV Documentary on Fukushima: Meltdown: Cooling Water Crisis

A shocking new 49-minute documentary from Japan’s public television broadcaster NHK titled “MELTDOWN: Cooling Water Crisis,” reveals new information on how corporate policy undermined efforts to keep the three destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi reactors stable one week after the triple reactor meltdown disaster began. See video here. Hear an interview related to the film here.

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Fukushima’s Endless Crisis

By John LaForge
PhotoCredit:https://www.base.bund.de/EN/ns/accidents/fukushima/fukushima_node.html

International Objections to Japan’s Plan to
Dump Contaminated Wastewater in the Ocean

China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian has again urged Japan “to respond to the legitimate concerns of all relevant parties,” Telesur English (Venezuela) news reported November 11. Speaking April 23, 2021, Zhao Lijian had outlined China’s objections:

“As a close neighbor and stakeholder, the Chinese side expresses grave concern over this. The Fukushima accident is one of the most serious in world history. The leak of large amounts of radioactive materials has had far-reaching implications on the marine environment, food safety, and human health. Despite doubts and opposition from home and abroad, Japan has unilaterally decided to release the Fukushima wastewater into the sea before exhausting all safe ways of disposal. … This is highly irresponsible and will severely affect human health and the immediate interests of people in neighboring countries.”

Meanwhile on December 9, the Pacific Alliance of Municipal Councils’ meeting on Saipan adopted a resolution condemning “the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant and the Japanese government’s 30-year

plan to release approximately 1.1 [to 1.27] million tons (527,578 gallons per year for 30 years) of treated nuclear waste water into the Pacific Ocean.”

Environment Ministry to Experiment
with Dispersing Contaminated Soil

In Japan’s experimental trial-and-error mission to recover from the March 2011 reactor meltdowns, millions of tons of radioactively contaminated soil and debris — scraped up from surrounding lands and collected in 1-ton bags — have reportedly been “decontaminated.”

Japan’s daily Asahi Shimbun on December 7, reports that “the volume of decontaminated soil in Fukushima Prefecture … is about 14 million cubic meters.” Japan’s public TV network NHK reported December 9, “Soil exposed to radioactive fallout from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been decontaminated,” but neither report explained how or where the soil was decontaminated. Japan’s Environment Ministry has decided to experimentally use some of this waste soil — “which still contains low-level radioactive substances” — as a way “to reduce that volume before disposal.”

The plan is to use some of the waste in lawns, parking lots, and flower beds. The ministry reportedly promised that “tests will be conducted to verify changes in radiation doses in the air.” Radioactivity spread by rainfall to surface water or ground water was not mentioned in the news report. The story notes that the contaminated soil measuring less than “8,000 becquerels per kilogram … will be used in the trial runs.” The “becquerel” is a measure of radioactivity usually regarding the presence of cesium-137 which was dispersed in large amounts by the disaster.

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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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Point Beach Reactors Pose Needless Risks

By Al Gedicks*

On July 31, 2021 the operators of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant on the shore of Lake Michigan had to shut down the 52-year-old reactor after a cooling pump failed and waste heat was vented into the atmosphere.

According to Physicians for Social Responsibility and Nukewatch, two anti-nuclear groups, the shutdown “was caused by a failure to adequately monitor and maintain the aging and outmoded components in the Point Beach reactor” (“Questions about nuclear safety,” La Crosse Tribune, August 14, 2022).

ups have told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that the plant is operating beyond the 40- year lifespan of its 1960s design and questioned the agency’s oversight of the plant’s safety.

One of the most serious safety questions for aging nuclear reactors is the problem of neutron embrittlement of the nuclear reactor. Scientists have long been aware that neutron radiation from inside the nuclear core would gradually destroy the thick metal reactor that surrounds the core.

According to nuclear expert Arnold Gundersen: “If embrittlement becomes extensive, the dense metallic reactor can shatter like glass…creating what the NRC calls a Class 9 Accident, which is the worst nuclear catastrophe acknowledged by the NRC…The NRC has identified that NextEra’s Point Beach Reactors are the most embrittled operating reactors in the United States.” NextEra Energy is the owner of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant in Two Rivers.

Neutron embrittlement happens to all reactors, but the issue is especially crucial in reactors built before 1972, such as Point Beach. Those vessels were built using copper – which is no longer used in reactor construction because it is more prone to embrittlement – in the walls and welds.

The NRC estimated that both the Point Beach 2 reactor, located on Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan shoreline, and the Palisades nuclear power plant, also located on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Covert, Michigan, were expected to reach the traditional embrittlement screening limits in 2017. Some scientists have called embrittlement the single most important factor in determining the life span of a reactor.

Unlike the Palisades reactor that has announced permanent closure by May 31, 2022, Point Beach has sought permission to operate 20 more years, despite increasing age-related degradation risks. The current licenses for the two reactors are set to expire in 2030 and 2033.

With thermal shock from rapid cooling or from overheating, the steel vessel could crack, releasing coolant from around the fuel rods, leading to a core meltdown, as it did at the Fukushima Daiichi site in Japan on March 11, 2011. Pressurized thermal shock is a problem most severe in the older generation of reactors such as Point Beach.

In 1982, Demetrios Basdekas an NRC Reactor Safety Engineer, expressed his concern about the age-degradation risks of reactor embrittlement in a letter published in the New York Times: “There is a high, increasing likelihood that someday soon during a seemingly minor malfunction at any of a dozen or more nuclear plants around the United States, the steel vessel that houses the radioactive core is going to crack like a piece of glass. The result will be a core meltdown, the most serious kind of accident, which will injure many people, and probably destroy the nuclear industry with it.”

The casualty and property damage figures from the NRC’s “CRAC-2 Report on Accident Consequences for Point Beach, Units 1 & 2, Two Rivers, Wisconsin,” show that a reactor meltdown would have catastrophic negative impacts on health and the economy of nearby neighborhoods and the people who live and work in those communities.

This level of risk justifies serious consideration for shutting down the plant. Renewable energy sources would provide safer alternatives to this threat.

* Al Gedicks is executive secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council in La Crosse. This report was first published in La Crosse Tribune as ‘Nuclear Safety Must be Focus’, Aug. 31, 2022

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Fukushima’s Endless Cleanup: Mistakes Prompt More Decontamination

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By John LaForge

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) plans to pump all 1.27 million tons of its contaminated water — which is peppered with over 60 radioactive materials and now stored in over 1,000 giant tanks onshore — into the Pacific Ocean commons. The water gets contaminated because it is pumped inside the three destroyed Fukushima reactors to cover hundreds of tons of thermally and radioactively hot, melted, destroyed reactor fuel (called “corium”). Tepco workers pump the water in to keep the fuel wreckage from going “critical,” melting further, and spewing more radiation. Additionally, tons of groundwater pours into the reactor building basements through earthquake cracks in the foundations, and it also passes over the corium, becoming intensely radioactive. The amount of waste water increases every day by 140 tons, Tepco says.

The company claims to be running out of storage space on land for the giant tanks (although the fishing community, environmental watchdogs, South Korea, China, and other Pacific Rim countries have contested the claim).

One-ton bags of cesium-contaminated soil, leaves, wood and litter scraped from the ground after the triple meltdown at Fukushima.

Now, copying the likes of France and Britain before them, Tepco and the government announced last year that the company will build a huge drain pipe and pump its pollution into the Ocean. This caused an international uproar, but the plan is moving ahead with federal government approval.

Then last summer Tepco announced that it will drill an undersea tunnel 40-feet deep and about 0.62 miles long for a wastewater drain, and said it would start drilling by the end of March 2022. The 8.2-foot diameter tunnel “requires penetrating the bedrock about [36 feet] below the surface of the [seafloor], according to the utility,” the daily Asahi Shimbun reported last August 26. “We have no idea how fast we can dig into the seafloor until we conduct a drilling survey into the bedrock,” a Tepco official told the paper.

Tepco’s tunnel idea replaces its earlier plan to lay a pipeline on the seabed. On December 20, 2022, ARD-TV Germany reported the puzzling explanation that, “The tunnel will run below the seabed so that it is not damaged by an earthquake or tsunami and by the current.” It was unclear how earthquakes — like the monstrous 9.0 magnitude that struck March 11, 2021, and actually moved the landmass of Honshu Island, Japan’s largest, one full meter — would not damage bedrock. Severe earthquakes have repeatedly rocked the Fukushima region of northeast Japan since 2011. The most recent was a frightening 7.4 magnitude quake on March 16, 2022.

Agence France Press reported that Tepco’s “chief decommissioning officer Akira Ono said releasing the water through a tunnel would help prevent it flowing back to the shore.” Ono went on to say, “We will thoroughly explain our safety policies and the measures we are taking against reputation damage,” appearing more concerned about the company’s image than about its contamination of the Pacific Ocean food web.

After Tepco acknowledged that its water filter system failed to remove radioactive materials as promised, the company has said it will re-filter the water already in its tanks. In addition, the company says the water will be diluted 40-to-1 with regular seawater before being pumped into the Pacific. One-million tons is so large a volume that Tepco estimates its re-filtering, diluting and dumping scheme will take 40 years to complete.

Decades-long practice of ocean dumping

Tepco’s ocean dumping plan recalls France’s practice at La Hague, where a waste “reprocessing” system has for decades pumped liquid radioactive effluent into the English Channel. Greenpeace has reported that La Hague dumps “one million liters [264,000 gallons] of liquid radioactive waste per day,” and the British Medical Journal published a study in 1997 that warned of an increased risk of leukemia for children who played regularly on beaches near La Hague’s effluent pipe.

Britain’s reprocessing complex at Sellafield pours radioactive waste through a mile-long pipeline into the Irish Sea, waste that’s known to be contaminated with plutonium, cesium, and other radionuclides. Radioactivity from the site was picked up in shellfish in Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, and in local seafood. “The nuclear industry’s irresponsible ‘out of sight-out of mind’ approach must now stop for good,” said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner, Diederik Samsom, on June 26, 2000. Instead, the corporate contamination of the world’s greatest ocean with privately owned radioactive waste is being franchised to Japan, in order to cut costs.

Twenty-two Million Tons of Bagged Rad Waste

The Washington Post has reported that at Fukushima vast “quantities of contaminated soil and water are being stored onsite while political leaders decide what to do with it…” But millions of bags of waste are not just “onsite.”

About two inches of the ground was scraped up from fields, flower beds, parks, and playgrounds across some 324 square miles in 52 cities, Germany’s Deutsche Welle reported. Millions of one-ton plastic bags filled with contaminated soil, leaves, wood chippings, and other debris are piling up outdoors in thousands of places awaiting transfer to a landfill just outside Fukushima.

The massive landfill may eventually hold up to 22 million bags of the waste, the Los Angeles Times reported. Ten-ton trucks can carry only seven of the heavy bags at a time, the Times said, noting that “At that rate, transport could take decades. Material might have to be put into fresh bags if they start to break down before they can be moved.”

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A Turn for the Worse–Failure of Water Filtration at Fukushima

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By Robert Hunziker

The cooling water continuously poured over the reactors’ creakily dilapidated ruins turns radioactive, almost instantaneously, and must be processed via the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), intended to remove most radioactive materials….

Here’s the big new danger: As ALPS processes radioactively contaminated water, it flushes out a “slurry” of highly concentrated radioactive material….

How to handle and dispose of the radioactive slurry may be an impossible quagmire, and a big one, since the storage containers for the tainted slurry quickly degrade because of the high concentration of radioactive, caustic, corrosive chemicals in the material. The storage containers, in turn, have to be regularly replaced as the  slurry’s caustics eats away at the containers’ liners.

Radioactive slurry is muddy and resembles a shampoo in appearance, and it contains highly radioactive strontium readings that reach tens of millions of Becquerels per-cubic-centimeter. However, according to the EPA 148 Becquerels per-cubic-meter, not centimeter, is the allowable level for human exposure. Thus, Becquerels in the tens of millions per-cubic-centimeter is “off the charts” dangerous….

Since March 2013, Tepco has accumulated 3,373 special vessels that hold these highly toxic radioactive slurry concentrations. But, because the integrity of the vessels deteriorates so quickly, the durability of the containers reaches a limit, meaning the vessels will need replacement by mid-2025.

Transferring this slurry is a time-consuming, highly dangerous, even horrific job, which creates yet a second series of unacceptable risks of radioactive substances released into the air during transfer of slurry. Tepco expects to open and close the transfers “remotely” (using robots). But as of January 2, 2022, Tepco had not yet revealed acceptable plans for dealing with the necessary transfer of slurry from weakening, almost deteriorated containers, into fresh, new containers. (“Tepco Slow to Respond to Growing Crisis at Fukushima Plant,” The Asahi Shimbun, January 2, 2022)

— Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles. This is an excerpt from a longer piece at Counterpunch, Jan. 10, 2022.

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