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Fukushima: Contamination in Spades

By John LaForge
Over 1.3-million tons of wastewater contaminated with dozens of radioactive chemicals left from cooling three reactor core meltdowns stored in tanks at Fukushima Daiichi, in Japan.
Japan’s oceanic pollution launched to wide protest

In August, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) began pumping some of its partially treated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, raising loud international protests and prompting bans on importation of Japanese fish that may last the 30 or 40 years it will take to dump all the waste. China and four other Pacific Rim countries fully banned imports of fishery products from Japan from Aug. 24, when the wastewater discharge started.

Over 1 million tons of radioactive wastewater have accumulated in huge tanks at Fukushima. It is collected after groundwater and cooling water has poured over or run through the 900 tons of melted reactor fuel wreckage now lost somewhere under the three destroyed reactors.

Tepco said October 24 that its dumping of the second, 7,800-ton batch of radioactive wastewater was finished. According to Japan Today, Tepco plans to release 31,200 tons of the wastewater by the end of March 2024. This would drain merely ten of the 1,000 huge tanks of the waste that were built onsite since the earthquake/tsunami/meltdown catastrophe began in March 2011. Due to the need to continually cool the melted reactor cores, mass collection of radioactive wastewater will continue indefinitely.

Meltdown fallout and wastewater dumping prompt major seafood import bans

The operators of the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi reactors intend to disperse over 1.34 million tons of the wastewater over the next 30 to 40 years, after convincing the government and international observers that the practice would have a “negligible” impact on sea life and human health. Fifteen countries have maintained import restrictions on Japanese fish and other seafood from heavily contaminated areas. According to Food Navigator online, five with the strictest bans are geographically close to Japan and fiercely opposed to the waste dumping. They are South Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Macau. Ten others — Indonesia, French Polynesia, the U.S., the European Union (27 states), Iceland, Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein, Russia, and Singapore — require certification, inspections, etc. before allowing imports. China’s ban has had a serious impact on Japan’s fishery.

According to the BBC, China imported over 100,000 tons of scallops from Japan last year. The South China Morning Post reports that China, had been the world’s biggest buyer of Japanese seafood, but “says its ban is due to food safety fears.”

Third round of wastewater dumping protested

In November, Tepco began its third deliberate discharge of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The group Korean Peoples’ Action Against Japan’s Ocean Dumping of Radioactive Wastewater said problems with the wastewater include clogged wastewater filters and an increase in the concentration of radioactive material in the third discharge compared to the second. Likewise, the Pacific Collective on Nuclear Issues, composed of civil society groups, NGOs, and others in the Pacific region, said in a statement, “If the Japanese government and Tepco believe the radioactive wastewater is safe, they should be prepared to safely dispose of it within terrestrial Japan.”

The Collective also reminded the November 8 meeting of Pacific Island Forum states that the panel of scientific experts commissioned by the Forum found that “data provided so far, to support Japan’s claim that the treated wastewater is safe, is inconsistent, unsound, and therefore far from reliable.”

One-ton bags of cesium-contaminated waste full of cesium-contaminated waste scraped from areas around the Fukushima complex are now stacked in thousands of places, some near the ocean where the waste is vulnerable to being dispersed by storm surges and tsunamis. Today there are over 19 million such bags stacked in tens of thousands of locations. AP photo.
Wastewater accident contaminates five workers

Tepco has reported that five workers “accidentally” came in contact with radioactive “fluid” while cleaning discharge systems pipelines, and two of them were contaminated enough to be kept under medical observation, China Daily reported November 6. According to Tepco, a doctor said there was a possibility the two men sustained burns due to radiation exposure, and that the radiation levels in the bodies of the two men were above the company’s allowable threshold. The paper, which has been highly critical of Japan’s wastewater discharging, demanded to know: “[S]ince four of the five workers ‘were wearing protective gear and full-face masks, which prevented ingestion of the fluid,’ how could the ‘fluid’ splash and burn the ‘lower body and both arms’ of one of them, and why the other worker, whose ‘entire body was found to be exposed,’ was allowed to do the dangerous work without wearing any protective gear?” The Daily’s editors said the “Accident proved Japan’s toxic water plan dubious.”

Faulty editors paste “safety” over risky wastewater discharge

“IAEA confirms safe tritium levels in latest ALPS treated water release at Fukushima,” was the November 7 headline Nuclear Engineering International magazine used in its report on Tepco’s wastewater dumping. Yet the article itself had no such confirmation. IAEA experts monitoring the discharge only said that the concentration of radioactive tritium in the waste was “far below Japan’s operational limit.” Nowhere did the word “safe” appear. The article itself is factually accurate since there is no safe level of radioactive contamination, regardless of how small the amount. It was the editors that have put words into the IAEA’s mouth and turned the reporter’s story into a lullaby.

Area forests are a re-contamination source

Jim Smith, a Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Portsmouth, wrote in The Conversation, October 23, that “Radiocaesium [cesium-137], which is the most important long-lived radioactive element emitted by the accident in terms of radiation dose, adheres to soil particles very strongly. Consequently, the decontamination of agricultural land primarily involved removing the top 5cm [about 2 inches] of topsoil. In urban areas, decontamination efforts entailed the removal of soil from sports fields”, school yards and other public areas.

As much as 71% of Fukushima Prefecture is covered by forest, and most of it remains contaminated. “Restrictions on the consumption of forest products have lasted for decades following the 1986 Chernobyl incident. And they are expected to persist in many forested areas of Fukushima too,” Prof. Smith wrote. Rainwater runoff from these forests creates routine downstream re-contamination of previously decontaminated areas. Additionally, forest fires can redistribute radioactivity still on trees and the forest floor creating inhalation risks.

Japanese minister under fire for calling wastewater ‘contaminated’

In an August 31 “slip of the tongue,” Japan’s Fisheries Minister Tetsuro Nomura publicly said Tepco was dumping “contaminated water” into the Pacific. As the waste is poisoned with four dozen radioactive chemicals due to the failure of Tepco’s filtration system known as ALPS, the minister was merely stating a fact. He was attacked in the press and by politicians for the “error” in not referring to “treated” water, and had to publicly apologize for the “gaffe” after being scolded by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

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Renowned Economist on Nuclear Power: “From a business perspective, it’s over. We don’t have the water.”

Photo: Wall Street Journal, “Europe’s Key Rivers Fall to Critical Levels, Aggravating Energy Crunch.”

Jeremy Rifkin is the economic and social theorist, writer, activist, public speaker, political advisor to the European Union, and author of 23 books about the influence of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment.

At an annual investors’ meeting of Germany’s Wermuth Asset Management Group in October 2013, Rifkin was asked his opinion of nuclear power in view of climate change.

Rifkin said, “Frankly, I think from a business perspective it’s over. Let me explain why …

“No. 1: … There are only 400 nuclear power plants [436 in 2023]. These are old nuclear power plants, but our scientists tell us [that] to have a minimum impact on climate change — which is the whole rationale for bringing this technology back — nuclear would have to be 20 percent of the energy mix to have the minimum, minimum impact on climate change, not six percent of the mix [10% in 2023]. That means we’d have to replace the existing 400 nuclear plants and build 1,600 additional plants — three nuclear plants have to be built every 30 days for 40 years to get to 20 percent — and by that time climate change will have run its course for us. So I think, from a business point of view, I just don’t see that investment. I’d be surprised if we replace 100 of the 400 existing nuclear plants which would take us down to 1 or 2 percent of the energy [mix].

“No. 2: We still don’t know how to recycle the nuclear waste and we’re 70 years in. We have good engineers in the United States. We spent 18 years and $8 billion building an underground vault in Yucca Mountain to store the waste for 10,000 years, but we can’t use it. It’s already no good because there are cracks in the mountain. But any geologist could have told them we live on tectonic plates and you can’t keep underground vaults secure.

“No. 3: We run into uranium deficits according to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] between 2025 and 2035 with just the existing 400 plants. So that means the price goes up.

“No. 4: We could do what the French generation of new plants is doing and recycle the uranium to plutonium. But then we have plutonium all over the world in an age of uncertainty and terrorism.

“No. 5: And this is the big one that people don’t realize: We don’t have the water. Over 40 percent of all the fresh water consumed in France each year goes to cooling the nuclear reactors. It’s almost 50 percent now. When it comes back [when reactor cooling water is returned to the lakes and rivers] it’s heated and it’s dehydrating our ecosystems, and threatening our agriculture. We don’t have the water, and this is true all over the world. We have saltwater nuclear plants but then you have to put them on coastal regions and you risk a Fukushima because of tsunamis.

“The last thing: nuclear power is centralized power, like fossil fuels. It doesn’t fit a new generation that’s moving with the kind of technologies that are distributed, collaborative, and laterally scaled. It’s an old technology. So it’s no accident Siemens [Corporation] is out [of the reactor business], Germany is out, Italy is out, Japan is now out, and I think with [French] President Holland’s election — I met with him in the spring — they’re moving to a Third Industrial Revolution Model in France. I’d be surprised if nuclear has much of a life left. I don’t think it’s a good business deal.”

— Video of Jeremy Rifkin at the Annual Investors Event of Germany’s Wermuth Asset Management Group, Oct. 8, 2013.

 

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Nuclear Power’s Magical Thinking Debunked

By John LaForge, Source article by Amory Lovins

Stewart Brand, the writer best known as the co-founder and editor of Whole Earth Catalog, and the writer and physicist Amory Lovins, a former chair of the Rocky Mountain Institute who’s been awarded 12 honorary doctorates, have been friends for years. When Brand came out in support of nuclear power (Whole Earth Discipline, Viking 2009), Lovins demolished his arguments in a carefully reasoned article rebutting four main claims that nuclear advocates continue to use. The nuclear industry’s case is still pushed by Brand, Jim Hansen, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and others, in spite of the fact that they have been thoroughly refuted.

Four claims reactor construction advocates continue to use include:

● Baseload: Wind and photovoltaics can’t keep the lights on because they can’t run 24/7.
● Footprint: Photovoltaics need about 150-175 times, and wind farms from 600 to nearly 900 times more acreage than nuclear reactors to produce the same amount of electricity.
● Portfolio: We need every tool for combating climate change, including nuclear power.
● Government role: The climate imperative trumps economics, so governments everywhere must and will do what France did — ensure that nuclear power gets built, regardless of economics or dissent.

These claims are unsupportable, Lovins explains, but are worth reviewing because the same lies continue to be touted by young climate activists, industry greenwash groups like Generation Atomic, and others.

Artwork from Hoodwinked in the Hothouse and nativemovement.org.

Lovins explains:

Baseload: The electricity system doesn’t rely on any plant’s ability to run continuously; rather, all plants together supply the grid, and the grid serves all loads. That’s necessary because no kind of power plant can run all the time, as Stewart says they must do to meet steady loads. I repeat: there is not and has never been a need for any particular plant or kind of plant to run all the time, and none can do so. All power plants fail, varying only in their failures’ size, duration, frequency, predictability, and cause. Solar cells’ and wind power’s variation with night and weather is no different from the intermittence of coal and nuclear, except that they affect less capacity at once, and more briefly, far more predictably, and are no harder and probably easier and cheaper to manage. In short, the ability to serve steady loads is a statistical attribute of all plants on the grid, not an operational requirement for one plant. Variability (predictable failure) and intermittence (unpredictable failure) must be managed by diversifying type and location, forecasting, and integrating with other resources. Utilities do this every day, balancing diverse resources to meet fluctuating demand and to offset outages. Even with a largely (or probably a wholly) renewable grid, this is not a significant problem or cost, either in theory or in practice — as illustrated by areas that are already 30-40% wind-powered.

Footprint: Brand understates nuclear power’s land-use by about 43-fold by omitting all land used by exclusion zones and the nuclear fuel chain. Conversely, he includes the space between wind and solar equipment — unused land commonly used for farming, grazing, wildlife, and recreation. That’s like claiming that two lampposts require a parking lot’s worth of space, even though 99% of the lot is used for parking, driving, and walking. Properly measured, per-kilowatt-hour produced, the land made unavailable for other uses is about the same for ground-mounted photovoltaics as for nuclear power, sometimes less — or zero, for building-mounted PVs sufficient to power the world many times over. Land actually used-per-kWh is up to thousands of times smaller for wind power than for nuclear power. If land-use were an important criterion for picking energy systems, which it’s generally not, it would thus reverse Stewart’s footprint conclusion.

Portfolio: The one paper he cites as proof that we need all energy options (Pacala & Socolow’s “Stabilization Wedges”) actually says the opposite. There is no analytic basis for his conclusion, and there’s strong science to the contrary. We can’t afford to stuff our energy portfolio indiscriminately with some of everything, and we shouldn’t: some options are less worthy and effective than others. The more you fear climate change, the more judiciously you should invest to get the most solution per-dollar and per-year. Nuclear flunks both these tests.

Government’s role: If nuclear power isn’t needed, worsens climate change (vs. more effective solutions) and energy security, and can’t compete in the marketplace despite uniquely big subsidies — all evidence-based findings unexamined in Stewart Brand’s chapter — then his nuclear imperative evaporates. Of course, a few countries with centrally planned energy systems, mostly with socialized costs, are building reactors: over two-thirds of all nuclear plants under construction are in China, Russia, India, or South Korea. But that’s more because their nuclear bureaucracies dominate national energy policy and face little or no competition in technologies, business models, and ideas. Nuclear power requires such a system. The competitors beating nuclear power thrive in democracies and free markets.

— This article first appeared in Grist.

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If You Love Nuclear Energy, You’re in Bed with Nuclear Weapons

Photo: wikipedia
By Harvey Wasserman

There is no separation between nuclear power and nuclear war. The “Peaceful Atom” is a radioactive myth.

The world’s fleet of atomic reactors is the happy-faced infrastructure for the global radioactive weapons industry.

In the United States, 94 commercial nukes comprise the core foundation of the world’s biggest Bomb machine. They are, above all, military devices.

Amidst the massive multi-billion-dollar government-sponsored expansion of the Piketon-Portsmouth Enrichment facility in southern Ohio, the prime function of every U.S. reactor is to be an essential provider of waste management, fuel, and expertise for radioactive weapons of mass destruction.

The Biden Administration is now further blurring the lines with a controversial plan to use weapons-grade materials in civilian reactors, a move that can — according to Scientific American — greatly facilitate the building of more Bombs.

The public smokescreen for all this back-door weapons proliferation remains an updated version of the original “too cheap to meter” lie that “our friend the atom” now produces “carbon-free” energy.

In fact, virtually all operating reactors spew radioactive carbon-14 into the biosphere while emitting countless tons more greenhouse gasses through the mining, milling, enrichment, and ultimate attempted disposal of fuel.

Commercial reactors operate at ~570 degrees Fahrenheit, pouring massive quantities of waste heat into the atmosphere and nearby rivers, lakes, and oceans.

And they churn out electricity at far higher cost than solar, wind, hydro, battery storage, efficiency, and other green energy sources. At massive geezer sites like Diablo Canyon, Cali., the nukes’ hyper-expensive, inflexible baseload supply clogs the grid and blocks off far cheaper, far more flexible renewable sources.

At the tail end of the fuel cycle, uranium, plutonium, hyper-radioactive cladding, and other components now find their way into the warheads and depleted uranium shells of global mass destruction. The reactors themselves are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive suicide.

The devastating explosions at Chernobyl and Fukushima underscore the potential of atomic reactors to spew their own apocalyptic quantities of deadly radiation throughout the planet.

But the Ukrainian war zone exposure of six Zaporizhzhia nukes also makes it terrifyingly clear that even a single errant shell fired by a warring nation or a tiny terror group could send one or more lethal Chernobyl-sized clouds over all of Europe and, via the jet stream, throughout the planet.

Even less dramatic catastrophes at Three Mile Island, Fermi One, Santa Susana, Windscale-Sellafield, Kyshtym, Mutsu, Kashiwazaki, and more have produced massive health, ecological, and financial fallout. Each sitting nuke and its fuel pool thus plays the role of a pre-deployed weapon of apocalyptic mass suicide.

None are insured. Nor are they reliably inspected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, or other so-called regulatory bodies throughout the world.

So one must ask: if atomic reactors can’t economically compete, can’t be insured, operate un-inspected, worsen climate chaos, are sitting ducks for terror attack, and so much more….why are they still running?

The answer is clear: they are the unspoken infrastructure for our nation’s Bomb-making machine, playing the same role for dozens of other countries around the world.

So next time someone tells you to support nuclear power, ask them:

“Exactly which reactors can you prove to be safe?”

“Which ones’ future are you ready to personally guarantee?” … and …

“Why do you support these atomic reactors’ irreplaceable role in the continued production of nuclear weapons?”

— Harvey Wasserman wrote this for CounterPunch (Oct. 27, 2023), and is author with Norman Solomon of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation (Delta 1982).

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First Attempt to Build Small Reactors in U.S. Nixed over Cost

By Lindsay Potter

NuScale Power Corp., the first company to win approval for a small “modular” nuclear reactor (SMNR) design in the U.S., pulled the plug on its flagship project in Utah after costs ballooned 53 percent. NuScale and non-profit state utility partner UAMPS agreed to build a dozen 77-megawatt reactors at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to begin delivering electricity in 2029. But the cost per-megawatt-hour rose from $53 to $89, and subscribers began to pull out. The deal was canceled in November despite receiving $232 million in federal taxpayer handouts from a $1.4 billion non-competitive DOE grant.

 

INL uses nuclear reactors and related radioactive material to research and manufacture systems for energy production as well as military technology. The lab is the lead manufacturer of armor, featuring depleted uranium, for U.S. Abrams tanks. Export-version (non-D.U.-armored) Abrams have been used to fire D.U. munitions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently in Ukraine.

 

Description of location of DU heavy armor plates on Abrams tanks. Different Abrams tanks have DU in different parts of armor and some versions of the tank, ostensibly the ones sent to Ukraine, do not have DU armor, though they are designed to fire DU munitions.

NuScale chief executive officer John Hopkins said, “Once you’re on a dead horse, you dismount quickly. That’s where we are here.” Another deal with Standard Power to build 24 SMNRs is faltering, and NuScale has ambitions to sell reactors to Romania, Kazakhstan, Poland, and Ukraine — despite the clear warning bells of the nuclear time bomb at Zaporizhzhia.

 

NuScale pitches their project as “carbon free,” failing to acknowledge the carbon-intensive nuclear fuel chain, production of the reactors, and radioactive waste handling and transportation. David Schlissel, director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said, “We are happy for the communities who dodged a huge financial debacle … As we have repeatedly shown, SMNRs that are being hyped by the nuclear industry and its allies are simply too late, too expensive, too uncertain … There are less risky and more proven alternatives for addressing growing energy needs and the global warming crisis.”

— Reuters, Nov. 9; Data Center Dynamics, Nov. 9; Bloomberg News, Nov. 8; Al Jazeera, Sept. 7, 2023; inl.gov

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