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Reactors in Space

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021
By Christine Manwiller

Hidden beneath the glamour of outer space travel lurks the very real threat of potential nuclear disaster. In two recent articles, Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York, calls attention to the use of plutonium batteries in NASA’s deep-space missions. The Mars rover Perseverance is powered by 10.6 pounds of plutonium-238, which is 280 times more radioactive than the plutonium-239 used in nuclear weapons. The rover’s tiny need of electricity (about 100 watts) could have been produced with solar panels, a safe option that was sidelined by the influence of the nuclear industry, according to Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. NASA acknowledged that the Atlas V rocket carrying Perseverance had a chance of exploding on take-off, or burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, spreading the deadly plutonium across Florida or the world.

Meanwhile, a February report from the National Academy of Sciences describes a partnership between NASA and the whole Pentagon, advocating the use of reactors in space citing “military advantages.” The reactor industry drives this partnership, seeing space as a lucrative market. These plans proceed in spite of past disasters caused by faulty rockets and failed satellites, including the US Transit 5BN-3 that burned up in the atmosphere in 1964, dispersing plutonium which was later linked to increases in lung cancer. The unnecessary use of plutonium batteries and perhaps even reactors by NASA creates risks for everyone, but as Grossman says, “it’s going to take enormous grassroots action — and efforts by those in public office — to stop it.”

—K. Grossman, “Plutonium, Perseverance and the Spellbound Press,” The Free Press, Feb. 24; and “Nuclear Rockets to Mars?,” CounterPunch.org, Feb. 16, 2021

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Fukushima at Ten: Aftershocks, Lies, and Failed Decontamination

Image at “Mechanics of a Nuclear Meltdown Explained”, by Jenny Marder, PBS News Hour, March 15, 2011: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/mechanics-of-a-meltdown-explainedP8

 

By John LaForge

It’s now 10 years since the catastrophic triple meltdowns of reactors at Fukushima in Japan. As Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health project put it three years ago, “Enormous amounts of radioactive chemicals, including cesium, strontium, plutonium, and iodine were emitted into the air, and releases of the same toxins into the Pacific have never stopped, as workers struggle to contain over 100 cancer-causing chemicals.”

Nukewatch and hundreds of other groups and scientific journals have issued dozens of reports about the disaster. A score of books have been published on the subject, and major media have at least done annual reviews of the official evacuations, cleanups and decontamination efforts. With so much information available, it is not possible to do more than present another update on recent news and analysis.

There is news of the shortage of Fukushima health studies; big earthquakes (aftershocks) rattling reactors and waste tanks; corporate and government dishonesty about decontamination; novel radioactive particles dispersed; and renewed fish contamination.

Very few health studies

“So far only one single disease entity has been systematically examined in humans in Fukushima: thyroid cancer,” says Dr. Alex Rosen, the German chair of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Other diseases, such as leukemia or malformations, which are associated with increased radiation exposure, have not been investigated, Rosen told the German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt March 2.

(Fie studies have focused on birth abnormalities in the areas most affected: three on infant mortality rates, one on underweight newborns, and one on declining birth rates 9 months after March 2011.*)

The one disease study of the population was a screening for thyroid cancer in 380,000 local children under the age 18. In January 2018, the journal Thyroid reported 187 cases after five years. Reviewing the study, Mangano write in the Washington Spectator that, “A typical population of 380,000 children would produce 12 cases in five years.” The increase among children is “exactly what would be expected if Fukushima were a factor, as radiation is most damaging to the fetus, infant and child,” Mangano said.

New Earthquakes Rattle Wreckage and Nerves

Another large earthquake, magnitude 7.3, struck Feb. 13, again off the coast of the Fukushima reactor complex, and the reported 30 seconds of terror was followed by14 aftershocks up to magnitude 5.

The quake was severe enough that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) and federal regulators suspect it caused additional damage to reactors 1 and 3 where cooling water levels fell sharply, the Associated Press reported. The Feb. 13 quake was felt in Tokyo 150 miles away. Japan’s meteorological agency said it was believed to be an aftershock of the record 2011 quake.

At a Feb. 15 meeting, government regulators said the quake had probably worsened existing earthquake damage in reactors 1 and 3 or broken open new cracks causing the cooling water level drop, the AP said.

“Because (the 2011 quake) was an enormous one with a magnitude of 9.0, it’s not surprising to have an aftershock of this scale 10 years later,” said Kenji Satake, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute.

There have been six major aftershocks in the Fukushima area since March 2011: April 7, 2011 (magnitude 7.1); April 11, 2011 (6.6); July 10, 2011 (7.0); Oct. 26, 2013 (7.1); Nov. 26, 2016 (6.9); and Feb. 13, 2021 (7.3).

Earthquake shocks are not the only recurring nightmare to haunt the survivors of the record quake that killed 19, 630. Typhoon Hagibis slammed into Tamura City in October 2019, and swept away an unknown number of bags of radioactive debris that had been stacked near a river.

Since March 2011, over 22 million cubic meters of contaminated soil, brush and other matter from areas hard hit by fallout have been collected in large black plastic bags and piled in temporary storage mounds in thousands of places. (“Fukushima residents fight state plan to build roads with radiation-tainted soil,” Japan Times, Apr. 29, 2018) Yet the volume is the tip of the iceberg: According to R. Ramachandran, in The Hindu, January 31, 2020, no decontamination activities are planned for the majority of forested areas which cover about 75 per cent of the main contaminated area of 9,000 square km.”

Cover-ups and disinformation

Reporting Feb. 14 about the latest quake, the AP noted that Tepco “has repeatedly been criticized for cover-ups and delayed disclosures of problems.” On June 22, 2016, Tepco’s President Naomi Hirose publicly admitted that the company’s lengthy refusal to speak of the “meltdowns” it knew of at its three reactors was tantamount to a cover-up and apologized for it.

The Washington Post reported March 6, 2021 that, “For years, Tepco claimed that the treated water stored at the plant contained only tritium, but data deep on its website showed that the treatment process had failed.” The tanks now hold almost 1.25 million tons of highly contaminated waste water. “In 2018, [Tepco] was forced to acknowledge that 70 percent of the water is still contaminated with dangerous radioactive elements — including strontium-90, a bone-seeking radionuclide that can cause cancer — and will have to be treated again before release,” the Post reported.

Harvey Wasserman reported for Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism’s The Free Press on a July 2007 earthquake that shook Japan and forced dangerous emergency shutdowns at four reactors at Kashiwazaki. “For three consecutive days [Tepco] was forced to issue public apologies for erroneous statements about the severity of the damage done to the reactors, the size and lethality of radioactive spills into the air and water, the on-going danger to the public, and much more. Once again, the only thing reactor owners can be trusted to do is to lie.”

Radioactive Particles Newly identified

Work just published in the journal Science of the Total Environment documents new, highly radioactive particles that were released from the destroyed Fukushima reactors. The study was led by Dr. Satoshi Utsunomiya and Kazuya Morooka of Kyushu University. “Two of these particles have the highest cesium radioactivity ever measured for particles from Fukushima,” the research found. The study analyzed particles that were taken from surface soils collected 3.9 kilometers from the reactor site.

Speaking with Science Daily Feb. 17, Dr. Utsunomiya said, “Owing to their large size, the health effects of the new particles are likely limited to external radiation hazards during static contact with skin.” The particles were reportedly spewed by the hydrogen explosions that rocked the reactor buildings and fell within a narrow zone that stretches ~8 kilometers north-northwest of meltdowns.

But Dr. Utsunomiya also said the long-lived radioactivity of cesium in “the newly found highly radioactive particles has not yet decayed significantly. As such, they will remain in the environment for many decades to come, and this type of particle could occasionally still be found in radiation hot spots.”

Smaller radioactive particles of uranium, thorium, radium, cesium, strontium, polonium, tellurium and americium were found afloat throughout Northern Japan, according to a report by Arnie Gundersen and Marco Kaltofen published July 27, 2017 in Science of the Total Environment. The radioactively hot particles were found in dusts and soils. About 180 particulate matter samples were taken from automobile or home air filters, outdoor surface dust, and vacuum cleaner bags. Some142 of the samples (about 80 percent) contained cesium-134 and cesium-137 which emit intense beta radiation and is very dangerous if ingested or inhaled. “A majority of these samples were collected from locations in decontaminated zones cleared for habitation by the National Government of Japan,” the authors revealed.

Greenpeace Reports Cleanup Failures and Deception

Greenpeace Japan released two major reports March 4 that also contradict the country’s positive decontamination and human rights claims after 2011.

“Successive governments during the last 10 years … have attempted to perpetrate a myth about the nuclear disaster. They have sought to deceive the Japanese people by misrepresenting the effectiveness of the decontamination program and ignoring radiological risks,” said Shaun Burnie, Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia and co-author of the first report.

Key findings of the radiation report Fukushima 2011-2020 are:

  • Most of the 840 square kilometer Special Decontamination Area (SDA), where the government is responsible for decontamination, remains contaminated with radioactive cesium. … an overall average of only 15% has been decontaminated. • No long-term decontamination target level will be achieved in many areas. Citizens will be subjected for decades to radiation exposures in excess of the … recommended maximum. • In the areas where evacuation orders were lifted in 2017, specifically Namie and Iitate, radiation levels remain above safe limits, potentially exposing the population to increased cancer risk.

Key findings of The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station decommissioning report are:

  • The current decommissioning plan in the timeframe of 30-40 years is impossible to achieve and is illusory. • Radioactive waste created at the site should not be moved. Fukushima Daiichi is already and should remain a nuclear waste storage site for the long term.

— This is a report is the Spring 2021 Nukewatch Quarterly soon in your mailbox. A version of the article was published at CounterPunch, March 12-14, 2021 

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50-Year-Old Wisc. Reactors Want 30 Years More

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

The owner of the last two operating nuclear reactors in Wisconsin, NextEra Energy, has applied to the NRC asking to run the Point Beach units for 80 years—twice the limit in their original licenses and double their engineered lifespan—until 2050.

The Point Beach reactors on Lake Michigan near Green Bay are 50 years old, making them two of the oldest still operating in the United States. Licenses for the two reactors are now set to expire in 2030 and 2033.

Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, a watchdog group in Takoma Park, Maryland, told Nukewatch, “This is scary for several reasons. One reason is that one reactor at Point Beach is tied for worst ‘neutron-embrittled reactor vessel’ in the United States.” (Years of neutron bombardment from nuclear fissioning inside the reactor make the giant machine increasingly brittle and unstable.)

“When reactor embrittlement risks are reviewed by the NRC,” Kamps writes, “the commission simply lowers the safety standards nationwide by weakening the regulations (for embrittled/pressurized thermal shock safety). The NRC has done this time and time again.”

The NRC has approved only two other such 80- year-long license exceptions: Pennsylvania’s Peach Bottom and Florida’s Turkey Point. Three of the oldest operating US reactors—50-yr-old Monticello in Minnesota; 49-yr-old Dresden 3 in Illinois; and 47-yr-old Peach Bottom 2 & 3 in Pennsylvania—are General Electric “Mark I” units, exactly like the Fukushima reactors that exploded and melted in 2011.

—Beyond Nuclear, Nov. 23; AP, Nov. 21, 2020; Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Operating Nuclear Power Reactors,” Oct. 21, 2019

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NRC Should Fix Potentially Fatal US Reactor Flaw 

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

On October 16, Beyond Nuclear submitted a “federal enforcement petition” to the NRC urging the immediate shutdown of the country’s 19 GE “Mark I” boiling water reactors until their faulty containment vents are replaced. The destroyed Fukushima reactors are the same design as these 19 US units. “The NRC has known for decades that the [GE] Mark I containment is … too small to contain the dynamic force of a severe accident,” said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project at Beyond Nuclear.

In the early 1970s, when many Mark I units were still under construction, the Atomic Energy Commission—the NRC’s predecessor—concealed design flaws and vulnerabilities in the reactors, fearing that disclosing the defects would lead to the shutdown of the reactors. GE engineers reportedly said in 1976 that nuclear power is “so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on this planet.”

In the aftermath of Fukushima, the NRC ordered owners of Mark I reactors to install new “reliable” vents intended to prevent an uncontrolled release of radioactive material during a severe accident. However, according to the petition, the installed vents cannot handle all the thermal energy that could be generated during a severe accident. The NRC stipulated that the new vents handle just 1% of a reactor’s thermal power level under accident conditions. In order to “cope with the vast amounts of thermal energy, steam, and explosive hydrogen gas produced during a partial or complete meltdown accident,” a vent needs to be capable of removing at least 25 times as much thermal energy as the NRC stipulated in its order.

—Beyond Nuclear press release, Oct. 20, 2020

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Japan Waffles Over Plan to Dump Radioactive Water Tainted with Tritium, Strontium, Cesium, etc. 

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

News was leaked in early October that Japan had decided to release over one million metric tons of Fukushima’s radioactive waste water into the Pacific.

But on October 23, the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry Hiroshi Kajiyama told a press conference “the government has no plan to make a decision on what to do with over [one million metric tons] of treated water,” and Kyodo News reported that the government had “put off a decision.”

Flipping again on October 28, the AP reported that “Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga says his government is working on the final details of a plan to release” the tainted cooling water, a process that would reportedly involve dilution and gradual dumping over many years’ time.

Tanks hold over 1.2 million metric tons of radioactive waste water left from cooling melted fuel under the three destroyed reactors at Fukushima, Japan. The amount of contaminated waste water increases by about 150 tonnes a day because the hot melted wreckage requires cooling water to be continuously poured over it.

Critics of the dumping proposal called the plan a bailout of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), which owns the wreckage. Local and national representatives of the fishing community traveled to Tokyo in October to protest to federal ministers. Nongovernmental experts have recommended costlier alternatives to ocean dumping including evaporation, long-term storage, mixing with concrete for burial, or buying additional tank farm acreage.

Although the stored water has been through Tepco’s novel filter system known as ALPS, the process has largely failed. About 70 percent of the stored waste water contains deadly isotopes that Tepco earlier claimed would be removed.

Dr. Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, reported about the waste water Oct. 26: “Radioactive varieties of iodine, ruthenium, rhodium, antimony, tellurium, cobalt, and strontium have been reduced by ALPS but not eliminated. In 2017, more than half of the samples studied showed levels of radioactive contamination for these materials that are above legal limits. In the case of strontium-90, a bone-seeking radioisotope, some 65,000 tonnes of water had levels 100 times above the legal limit even after being treated by ALPS.”

Tepco, trying to quell the uproar over the ALPS failure, announced that it can re-filter the waste before piping it into the Pacific. The fishing industry and neighboring countries including South Korea oppose any ocean release of tritium and other radioactive contaminants which would eventually contaminate seafood as the materials move up the food chain. An Oct. 9 editorial in the Korea Times that condemned the dumping threat warned of an “environmental disaster” that could “destroy the marine ecosystem.”

Independent scientists argue that long-term food and environmental impacts from radioactive seawater are unknown and could pose higher risks than Japan’s environmental, agricultural, and industrial ministries have claimed. Ken Buesseler, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, wrote recently that not only tritium but other isotopes that affect marine life should be carefully examined.

—JL

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