By John LaForge

Fourteen-million cubic meters of radioactive “fill” could be spread to the commons

Japan has doubled down on the nuclear industry’s historical practice of spreading radioactive pollutants to public air space and to common waterways.

In addition to the often-reported pumping of thousands of tons of radioactively contaminated cooling water to the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex, the government has announced its intention to spread around the country as much as 14 million cubic meters of radioactively contaminated soil, reportedly for road-building, construction projects, and even agricultural underlayment. Last September the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna — which promotes the nuclear reactor industry around the world — declared that the plan to disperse the waste “is consistent with international safety standards.”

The federal government in Tokyo announced a cabinet-level meeting set for December to discuss its plans to disperse the contaminated soil in public works projects. In 2016, a government study group outlined the plan to allow 14 million cubic meters of contaminated soil generated from decontamination in Fukushima prefecture, to be used for public works projects and agricultural land development nationwide, if it emits less than 8,000 becquerels-per-kilo of cesium-137.The becquerel is a measure of radioactivity, and vast areas were contaminated with wildly varying amounts of cesium-137 and other radio-isotopes which spewed from Fukushima’s three out-of-control reactors.

The contaminated soil was scraped up and removed from farms, school yards, public parks, and other green spaces during the government’s attempt to “decontaminate” thousands of square kilometers around the Fukushima-Daiichi site. These millions of bags have been kept in the open air for years at over 1,000 “temporary storage sites” in Fukushima prefecture.

The Japan Times reported in 2015 that there were then 22 million cubic meters of the poisoned soil in bags. Four years ago, the Indian daily The Hindu said that there were 20 million cubic meters, and that by early 2019 its collection and bagging had cost the government $27 billion.

Fukushima’s cesium fallout contaminated over 9,000 square kilometers (3,474 sq. miles) of forests, farmland, and residential areas, according to a 2019 European Geosciences Union (EGU)assessment of the decontamination work, that was published in the journal Soil. The Hindu reported in January 2020 that the EGU authors warned, “No decontamination activities are planned for the majority of forested areas, which cover about 75 per cent of the main contaminated area,” and that “outdoor workers in the special decontamination zone [a 1,117 sq. km area] may, as a group, be exposed to more than the government’s long-term suggested limit of radiation.”

The cesium-contaminated waste should be containerized and kept out of the environment for up to 300 years (after the cesium has decayed to other elements). But the government has arbitrarily decided that a certain amount of cesium-137 contamination will be permitted in “fill” for highway construction and other projects.

To make way for the public’s contamination with the radioactivity in public works and agriculture, the government has increased by 80 times the “allowable” cesium contamination in the collected soil. Hajime Matsukubo, with the Nuclear Information Centre in Tokyo, has warned that the standard for soil contamination was previously just 100 becquerels per kilogram. The new 8,000 Bq/kg limit goes “against their own recommendations,” according to Matsukubo, who said, “My fear is that once they relax this rule, they can then go on and ease all sorts of other rules.” (In a related case of weakening radiation standards, in 2023 the government shortened the list of radioactive materials it will measure in seawater near the Fukushima contaminated wastewater release site from 64 to 30. The new list removed 39 nuclides and added five.)

The daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported December 5, that the ministers will consider using soil “as a base for asphalt in road construction, after taking measures to prevent the radiation from spreading.” The paper noted that Tokyo actually tested the use of the contaminated soil in farm fields, “harvesting cucumbers and daikon radishes in fields where the [contaminated] soil has been covered with normal soil and using it to raise the ground level.”

Rain moving through the cesium-contaminated soil will of course move the long-lived radioactive material into groundwater.

Melted fuel: Under 1 gram removed, only 880 million grams to go

The first tiny morsel of melted reactor fuel has been removed by a remote-controlled robotic arm from inside unit #2 of the Fukushima-Daiichi triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, meltdowns) in Japan. It could take up to a year to analyze the 0.7 grams (1/40th of an ounce) of lethally radioactive debris that was grasped by the 72-foot long robot, according to a Nov. 21, 2024 announcement by Fukushima’s owner/operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco). Reactor #2 holds an estimated 237 tons of melted reactor fuel wreckage.

Tepco also said that studying this bit of waste — about one raisin worth — will “shed light” on the chemical structure of the estimated total 880 tonnes of ruined, radioactive, and hot reactor fuel now lost somewhere below the site’s three rubbished reactors. For perspective, there are 1 million grams in 1 metric tonne, so the 880 tonnes of melted reactor fuel amounts to 880 million grams.

In March of 2011, the three units lost all cooling capacity which caused their uranium fuel rods to overheat beyond control and melt. Some experts speak of the possibility of a “melt through,” in which the extreme temperature of the molten core causes it to burn through the bottom of the steel reactor vessel. This possibility has not been ruled out at Fukushima.

Fukushima-Daiichi’s first-ever triple-reactor meltdown followed the 2011 earthquake, the largest in Japan’s recorded history — which smashed the reactors’ foundations and wrecked off-site transmission lines, and produced the biggest tsunami in Japan’s recorded history, which then destroyed the site’s emergency diesel generators causing a “station
blackout.” The catastrophic March 11 earthquake killed or disappeared an estimated 20,000 people, and the resulting tsunami and meltdowns amounted to an astonishing and unheard-of triple terror of widespread earthquake destruction, devastating floodwaters, and vast plumes of radioactive gases and liquids spread around the Northern Hemisphere by the wind and throughout the Pacific Ocean by currents.

Now, 13 years since the events began, the Japanese government, Tepco, and Japan’s reactor industry need to convince the public that some 880 tonnes of reactor fuel inside or under the devastated reactors can be cooled, captured, and contained for hundreds of thousands of years — the period that the fuel remains lethally radioactive. Finding, removing, and packaging the melted uranium and plutonium fuel (6 per cent of the fuel in reactor #3 was plutonium) is likely an impossible mission, but officially remains a part of the government’s disaster response and decontamination process.

The time and expense of managing this volume of lethally radioactive waste will be so enormous that Japan will eventually decide instead to cover the deadly wreckage with a giant Quonset hut, like the Soviet Union and later Russia did at Chernobyl. At the site of the 1986 single-reactor disaster in Chernobyl, the then USSR simply abandoned the fuel
wreckage and rubble and built a covering to keep rain off of the highly radioactive materials. This first concrete cover degraded rapidly and was famously replaced in 2019 with a giant sliding cover at a cost of 1.5 billion Euros.

— For more information: A detailed evaluation of Japan’s deceptive plan to use contaminated soil in public works projects is now available from the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center (Tokyo), at https://cnic.jp/english/?p=7917.

By John LaForge

Melted fuel still vexing test extraction methods

Thirteen years on from the catastrophic triple explosions and reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in northeast Japan, emergency responders are still trying to observe and examine the melted fuel under the reactors (sometimes called “corium”). Contractors from Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) have repeatedly failed in attempts to robotically collect a mere three grams (0.1 ounce) of the corium from reactor 2, a project that started three years ago.

The company Amentum, working for Mitzubishi Heavy Industries, has built robotic machinery to try to retrieve a smidgen of corium. Its goal is to find out the state of the meltdown because, as National Public Radio reported, “the exact nature of the debris is currently unknown.”

Amentum is trying to build an extraction tool that can function in a radiation zone so fierce that it wrecks most machinery. A 2015 attempt to look inside reactor 1 with a device built by Hitachi-GE Nuclear failed after three hours. Amentum’s first attempt in reactor 2 was stalled August 22 after the long pipe insertion system was found to have been mis-assembled. Then Sept. 18, video feed problems halted the second try. The Associated Press reported that the probe is “maneuvered remotely by operators at another building because of the fatally high radiation emitted by the melted debris.”

Teams of workers have to do 15-minute rotating shifts — to limit their exposure to the wreckage’s radioactivity level — preparing the probe for another attempt. Industry slang for team members is “sponge.” Recovering a mere three grams is scheduled to take two weeks, because the slow-moving robotic plucker tends to get stuck in the tangled debris and takes a tortured path past meltdown-produced obstacles.

The mission of the tiny retrieval is to determine whether it’s possible to eventually retrieve and containerize all 880 metric tonnes — 300 tonnes per reactor — of the fatally radioactive wreckage, to keep it out of the environment for eons. Some critics have said decommissioning the whole site could take 100 years.

The idea of covering the site’s six-reactor radioactive blight with a roof — like the shed that was installed over the Chernobyl reactor site — is unpopular because of the risk of another major earthquake and tsunami.

Meltdown-spewed plutonium on the wind

Nuclear reactors at Fukushima (and everywhere), smash apart uranium atoms creating a lot of heat — to boil water. This atom smashing inside reactors produces radioactive poisons like cesium, iodine, strontium, and dozens of other elements — including plutonium. In addition to this reactor-borne plutonium at Fukushima, about 6% of the fuel in reactor No. 3 was made from plutonium itself.

Some of this plutonium from inside the three destroyed reactors was released to the environment by the meltdowns and explosions of March 2011. On Nov. 15, 2020, the journal Science of the Total Environment published the report, “Particulate plutonium released from the Fukushima-Daiichi meltdowns,” noting that plutonium-239 was dispersed widely by the disaster.

Plutonium, the most toxic substance known to science, was spread “up to 230 km away” (142 miles) from the reactor site, the researchers found.

Long-distance dispersion of plutonium was partly the result of micro-particles being blown by the wind. Five isotopes of plutonium were released including Pu-238, -239, -240, -241, and -242. Some plutonium persists environmentally and contaminates the food chain for 240,000 years.

In 2023, the journal Chemosphere reported on a study’s findings of large amounts of highly radioactive cesium-rich micro-particles (CsMPs) in an abandoned school building close to the Fukushima -Daiichi site.

Plumes of the micro-particles penetrated the building during the meltdowns of March 2011. Phys.org online reports that the contamination poses “a threat to human health if inhaled. The study shows that indoor CsMPs should be considered in safety assessments and in building clean-up efforts.”

Long-term effects of dumping unknown, scientist warns

Japan hosted the 10th Pacific Island Leaders Meeting in Tokyo last July, which was attended by most leaders of the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum.

A hot topic was Japan’s dumping of tens of thousands of tons of contaminated Fukushima wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The dumping was protested by Pacific rim countries and many, including China and Russia, have banned imports of seafood products from the region’s waters. Some 60,000 tonnes of the wastewater had been discharged by August 2024.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida assured the island leaders’ gathering that the discharge of the wastewater was being done “in compliance with international safety standards and practices.” Yet the controversial dumping continues to be criticized by scientists.

At the meeting, director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the Univ. of Hawaii, professor Robert Richmond, complained that questions remain regarding the effectiveness of the water filtration system, known as ALPS, and about the radioactive contents of the thousand-plus storage tanks of wastewater.

In October 2018, Tepco admitted that the ALPS had failed to remove dangerous elements and made a public apology. For years, Tepco and most media have insisted that the ALPS treatment removes everything but tritium, including strontium and 61 other radioactive elements, from the contaminated water. Tepco has promised to re-filter the wastewater, noting that 84% of the 890,000 tonnes then held in tanks (today there are 1.3 million tonnes) still had high concentrations of iodine-129, ruthenium-106, technetium-99, and carbon-14. Levels of strontium-90 (a severe human health hazard) were detected in some tanks at 20,000 times the drinking water limit.

“The long-term effects of this discharge on Pacific marine ecosystems and those who depend on them are still unknown. Even small doses of radiation can cause cancer or genetic damage,” Prof. Richmond said in a statement to BenarNews online after the gathering.

Richmond called Japan’s current radiation monitoring system inadequate and poorly designed, and said it’s failing to protect ocean and human health.

“The discharge, planned to continue for decades, is irreversible. Radionuclides bio-accumulate in marine organisms and can be passed up the food web, affecting marine life and humans who consume affected seafood,” Richmond said.

The professor also raised concerns about other severe hazards already harming the Pacific Ocean and marine life, such as pollution, overfishing, and climate change. He urged Japan to reconsider its approach. Enclosing the contaminated water in cement structures like sea walls is one alternative.

You can hear Prof. Richmond explain the risks of tritium contamination in an National Public Radio interview, here: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/09/1186674909/what-to-know-about-japans-plan-to-dump-waste-water-into-the-ocean

Water treatment leaves highly radioactive sludge in search of containment

Tons of highly radioactive chemicals collected in the ALPS filters as sludge are transferred to heavy plastic casks called “high integrity containers” or HICs, and moved to temporary storage. The Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, published a report on the wastewater dumping August 24, 2024 that clearly outlines some problems with the sludge. The end of the article reads as follows:

In addition to the release of treated water, there are many other issues to be tackled. The amount of highly radioactive sludge, or “slurry,” produced in the process of treating contaminated water continues to increase, but no effective treatment method has been decided upon.

The increasing amount of slurry is stored in tanks, but since there is still a risk of leakage when it is in liquid form, plans call for it to be dehydrated to reduce its volume and then process the substance into solid form.

In 2021, Tepco filed an application to build a device for this purpose. But the Nuclear Regulation Authority pointed out the risk of radiation exposure to workers, and Tepco was told to review the design.

As a result, the start of the dehydration process has been delayed from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2026.

Furthermore, no concrete method has been decided on for solidifying the dehydrated slurry.

Tepco is aiming to determine the solidification method by the end of fiscal 2025 and start solidification around fiscal 2035.

Advocates demand stricter limits on radioactive poisons

The Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN) in Tokyo is an alliance of parents, concerned citizens, and affiliated organizations. The group writes:

“The U.S. FDA has set a potentially hazardous level of ‘allowable’ radiation in food: 1,200 Becquerel per-kilogram (Bq/kg) of cesium-134 and cesium-137.”

“Becquerels-per-kilogram” is a reference to concentrations of radioactive cesium that has been found to contaminate food, soil, and water since the March 2011 disaster. Cesium-134 and -137 was spread in large quantities from the three burning reactor meltdowns and it Cs-137 persists in the environment for 300 years.

Alarmingly, the limit of 1,200 Bq/kg in food is merely a recommendation. It is both a non-binding and unenforceable. Such a high contamination threshold exposes a significant portion of the U.S. population, particularly children and women, to considerable health risks.

Standards limiting radiation in food in Japan are 12 times more protective for adults and 24 times more protective for children than U.S. standards. Food too radioactive to be sold to Japanese consumers is allowed to be sold to U.S. consumers and served to U.S. service members and their families on military bases overseas.

FFAN is urging the FDA to lower its permitted cesium limit to five Bq/kg for all food, nutritional supplements and pharmaceuticals, and that the U.S. quickly institutes widespread, transparent testing to ensure this limit, particularly in the wake of Japan’s catastrophic and ongoing radiation releases from Fukushima-Daiichi’s triple reactor meltdowns. This aligns with a similar call by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in Germany, which promotes a European Union-wide standard of four to eight Bq/kg. To sign FFAN’s petition see:https://nislappdc.org/fukushima-fallout/

Kimberly Roberson, Project Director for the FFAN, commented on this scandal for Food Safety News, Sept. 4, 2024. Roberson wrote, “At 1,200 Becquerels per kilogram, FDA has among the highest [allowances] in the world.”

“To confront and mitigate the growing public health threat of radioactive contamination in food, Congress should pass the Federal Food Administration Act, establish the FFA to focus like a laser beam on food safety, and empanel independent scientists and experts who understand radiation’s environmental and health effects to advise it,” FFAN said.

The IAEA: International Allowances for Environmental Assaults?

The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, which ignored its own guidelines in approving the dumping of Fukushima wastewater into the Pacific, has granted approval to Japan’s plan to use some of the 14 million tonnes of cesium-contaminated soil and debris collected after the Fukushima meltdowns in construction work.

The Japanese government intends to get rid of roughly 75 percent of the radioactive soil — if it’s contaminated at or below 8,000 Bq/Kg — by using it in road embankments, railways, agricultural land, and land reclamation.

“We are extremely concerned. The IAEA has consistently stated in the past that radioactive waste should be stored centrally and we have supported that position,” said Hajime Matsukubo, the secretary general of the Nuclear Information Centre in Tokyo. He said the limit for soil contamination was previously set at just 100 Bq/kg, and has now been lifted to 8,000 Bq/kg. “But now they are going against their own recommendations,” he told the South China Morning Post. “My fear is that once they relax this rule, they can then go on and ease all sorts of other rules,” Matsukubu said.