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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.

October 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

August 31, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Fukushima, Nuclear Power, Radiation Exposure, Renewable Energy

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

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.”

Filed Under: Environment, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

December 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Ignoring Outcry, Mockery, Japan Intends 2023 Start of Fukushima Wastewater Dumping

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

On October 18, Japan’s Prime Minster Fumio Kishida said there would be no postponement of its plan to pollute the Pacific Ocean with 1.27 million metric tons of radioactive cooling water from Fukushima’s destroyed reactors. Kishida said releasing the “heavily diluted” waste water would begin in the spring of 2023. The dispersal is expected to continue for decades as the accumulation of radioactive cooling water increases by 150 tons every day. The water becomes severely contaminated after being poured over large volumes of roiling, not, melted uranium and mixed uranium/plutonium fuel under Fukushima-Daiichi’s three destroyed nuclear reactors.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi was openly mocked with laughter by the dignitaries at COP26 on November 4. The adamantly pro-nuclear Grossi had said before the large audience, “No one died from radiation at Fukushima,” provoking the laughs. “I don’t know why you’re laughing, it’s a fact,” he griped. Earlier Grossi warmed up the crowd with this thigh-slapper: “We control this activity so it does not cause any harm.” Grossi’s job is difficult since under its United Nations Statute, the IAEA has only one objective: “The Agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy … throughout the world.”

Japan’s April decision to further pollute the Pacific caused an uproar in dozens of Pacific rim of countries. South Korean officials denounced Kishida’s declaration the same day, saying that it represents a “grave threat” to the marine environment. South Korea continues to ban seafood imports from the Fukushima region and has repeatedly condemned the dumping plan, which a senior South Korean foreign ministry official said, “could affect our people’s health and security as well as the ocean environment.”

Alternatives to the ocean dumping include long-term tank storage, more thorough filtering, or evaporation, and in 2019 Japan’s own ministry of economy and industry recommended including evaporation in its list of waste water options.

China’s Global Times reported in October that Liu Jiangyong, vice dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University, asked if the wastewater will be processed and will have no impact on the marine environment and food web as the Japanese government claimed, why can’t the water be recycled on land? Japan can’t answer any of these questions, said Liu. The ideal plan would be for Japan to process the wastewater to a safe level and recycle it, rather than dump it into the sea, said Liu.

A June letter to Japan’s permanent mission to the United Nations signed by a group of 70 groups, including Nukewatch, warned: “The dumping of radioactive water into the Pacific is also a violation of international law. The 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter and the London Protocol prohibit dumping of any concentration of radioactive material into the sea.”

In May, three human rights experts appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council issued a statement that expressed “deep regret” at Japan’s dumping plan and “reminded Japan of its international obligations to prevent exposure to hazardous substances, to conduct environmental impact assessments of the risks that the discharge of water may have, to prevent transboundary environmental harms, and to protect the marine environment.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), operators of the Fukushima complex, announced August 24 it would construct a tunnel underwater to release the 1.27 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Tepco said it would start building at least one 8-foot diameter half-mile-long tunnel in March 2022 by hollowing out bedrock on the seabed near the No. 5 reactor at Fukushima, Japan Times reported.

Critics around the world immediately denounced the plan as an attempt to avoid any oversight, monitoring, or independent inspection of the radioactive materials in the waste water.

“…to dump it into an ocean, where we share the same tides, current, and fish, it is a level up from urgent for us,” said Henry Puna, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, noting that even basic concerns had not yet been addressed. “Currently we are not satisfied there will be no harm to our Blue Pacific,” he told Civil Beat in September.

A regional collective of young activists called Youngsolwara Pacific has condemned the dumping plan and Japan’s lack of consultation. Likewise, a senior South Korean foreign ministry official told China’s Global Times in October that, “Japan’s decision was made without enough consultations with neighboring nations.” Talei Luscia Mangioni, a researcher at Australian National University and Youngsolwara Pacific member, said “… this is an act of transboundary harm. ” And it is typical, she said, considering the history of nuclear powers that “have treated the Pacific as a sacrifice zone.”

In Iitate village 24 miles from Fukushima’s meltdowns, Nobuyoshi Ito, a former computer engineer, has been measuring the radioactive properties in the food and soil for nearly a decade. Mr. Ito always carries a monitor and is constantly recording radiation levels, “trying to determine what is and isn’t safe to eat, and where it is and isn’t safe to go,” CBS News reported last August. While the town’s evacuation orders are gone, Ito says people — especially children — shouldn’t return. “It will take 300 years to restore the village to its original state, and it will continue to emit radiation for 300 years,” he said.

On September 22, the United States lifted its weak restrictions on imported food stuffs from Japan, and food products free of inspection now include even rice harvested in Fukushima. According to Japan’s farm ministry, the US is the 3d-largest importer of its food products and were worth $1.09 billion in 2020. Fourteen countries continue to maintain their food import bans. FDA officials say they’d determining a “very low risk” to US consumers from radioactive contaminants in the foods. — JL

Filed Under: Environment, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste

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