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Locals Appalled that Contaminated Soil Could be Used in Road Building, Poisoned Water Could be Dumped

Members of the International Atomic Energy Agency covered up to tour the tank farm holding millions of gallons of radioactive cooling water at the devastated Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex. They recommend dumping it in the ocean.
Summer Quarterly 2018
Japanese Protest Government Plans to Build Roads Using Cesium-Contaminated Soil, and to Dump Cooling Water Into the Pacific

Skeptical Japanese survivors of the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster are protesting state and federal plans to disperse and abandon large amounts of radioactive waste that was generated by the triple reactor meltdowns.

Rachel O’Donoghue wrote in the London Daily Star April 29: “The country’s Environment Ministry wants to use the radiation-tainted material to rebuild a number of roads in the region that was devastated by a tsunami in 2011. But the proposal has sparked fury among residents over fears they could be poisoned by the soil.” An April 26  briefing about the plan “saw angry scenes erupt, with locals in the city of Nihonmatsu yelling about how the roads will be ‘contaminated.’ Authorities have been desperately trying to convince people that it will be safe, saying the soil will be buried under clean earth that will ‘block’ any harmful radiation.” Of course locals reply that the same was said about the reactors themselves. Roughly 28.7 million cubic yards of contaminated soil have been collected in 1-ton bags stacked in vast outdoor areas after being scraped from school yards, play grounds, hospital grounds and other public areas. Likewise, angry protests by fisherman have stalled government plans to dump millions of gallons of contaminated water now in storage into the Pacific Ocean. Seafood workers and others say more radioactive waste in the water will ruin the fishery.

A storage site for poisoned soil in the town of Tomioka, near the destroyed Fukushima reactors on Feb. 23, 2015. There are an estimated 29 million cubic yards of such soil. Reuters/Toru Hanai
US plaintiffs Involved in Disaster Relief Seek $1 Billion in Damages for Radiation Sicknesses

About 200 US citizens have re-filed a lawsuit against Tokyo Electric Power Co. which owns the Fukushima wreckage and an unnamed US firm seeking at least $1 billion for medical expenses related to radiation exposure suffered during the triple meltdowns. The suit was filed March 14 with federal courts in the Southern District of California and the District of Columbia by US participants in the relief effort made in the wake of the disaster. Hundreds of sailors on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and others were heavily contaminated when clouds of radioactive fallout inundated the ship during relief efforts. Many of the plaintiffs are suing for a second time after a similar suit was dismissed by the Californian federal court in January.

New Public TV Documentary: 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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Trump Orders Perry to Stop Retirements of Failed Nuclear & Coal Generators

Summer Quarterly 2018

As nuclear power reactors age, the chances for catastrophic accidents increase because the equipment wears out. Most in the US have reached or exceeded their 40-year licenses. Utility Dive reports that President Trump has directed Energy Secretary Rick Perry to stop the closure of coal and nuclear generators, pushed offline by cheaper electricity from natural gas and renewables. The order came the same day Trump directed secretary Perry to consider using the Federal Power Act and the Defense Production Act to bail out dirty, bankrupt nuclear reactors and coal power plants that can’t compete any longer with wind, solar, natural gas or efficiency programs. The possibility of extraordinary federal intervention—made possible by laws enacted for use during national emergencies like wars, hurricanes or floods—was called “legally indefensible” by the diverse group of experts.

A statement issued the same day by a broad coalition of industry, consumer and environmental groups including oil, gas, efficiency, solar and wind representatives condemned Trump’s announced bailout as unnecessary, counterproductive and harmful to ratepayers.

“Government assistance” to failed coal and nuclear reactor operators “under the guise of national security” would be “misguided,” said Todd Snitchler, a Market Development Group Director for the American Petroleum Institute. Malcolm Woolf, a vice president at the trade association Advanced Energy Economy, said, “There is no emergency that would justify propping up uneconomic power plants that are superfluous.”

Amy Farrell, a vice president at the American Wind Energy Association said, “[O]rderly power plant retirements do not constitute an emergency for our electric grid. …there’s certainly no credible justification to force taxpayers to bailout uneconomic power plants.”

Referring to earlier federal assistance to failing coal and nuclear systems, John Shelk, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, said, “There was no emergency when coal and nuclear interests sought federal relief, and there is none today that justifies such unprecedented Executive Branch intervention in the economic life of the country.”

—New York Times; American Petroleum Institute media advisory; and UtilityDive.com, all on June 1, 2018.

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On the Bright Side

Summer Quarterly 2018
England’s and Germany’s Renewables Producing More than Nuclear

In the first quarter of 2018, England’s wind industry produced a record 15,560 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity, surpassing nuclear production for the first time (by 30 GWh). Germany also hit a milestone by providing 100 percent of its electric power consumption with renewable energy for one hour on New Year’s Day, and two years ahead of schedule, Germany reached its (2020) target of increasing renewable’s share of power production to 36%.

German Reactor Phase-out: Ten Down, Seven to Go

Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power is moving ahead. The Dec. 31, 2017 shutdown of the Grundremmingen Unit B reactor was the 10th out of a total of 17 that will be retired with the last seven to power down by 2022. Grundremmingen and its still-operating twin Unit C are General Electric Mark I models identical to the three destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi reactors in Japan. Unit A shutdown in 1975.

Six More US Reactors Shutting Down

In its article “The 60-Year Downfall of Nuclear Power in the US Has Left a Huge Mess,” The Atlantic reported May 28: “Oyster Creek in New Jersey disconnects from the grid [this coming] October with 11 years left on its license. Indian Point in New York State is to shut by 2021 due to falling revenues and rising costs. In California, Diablo Canyon is being closed by state regulators in 2025. The reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania that survived the 1979 accident will finally shut in 2019.” FirstEnergy Solutions has filed deactivation notices for three of its nuclear stations putting them on track for retirement: Davis-Besse and Perry in Ohio, in 2020 and 2021 respectively, and Beaver Valley in Shippingport, Penn. in 2021. However, such notices are often just a tactic used to garner sympathy from lawmakers who have secured taxpayer bailouts for the money-losing reactors.

Investments in Solar Power Outstrip Coal, Nuclear and Gas Combined

According to a new report from the United Nations Environment Program, more money was invested in photovoltaic or solar power in 2017 than in coal, gas and nuclear power combined. In addition, the world’s solar power capacity exceeded nuclear capacity for the first time—reaching 402 gigawatts, compared to 353 GW of nuclear. Electricity from wind power, which far exceeds solar/photovoltaic generation,  outstripped nuclear powered electricity back in 2014, and by the end of 2017 amounted to 539 GW.

California’s New Houses Must Have Solar Electric, Hawaii’s Solar Hot Water

California is set to become the first state to require solar panels on all newly built single-family houses. The mandate is expected to save buyers money in the long run but also raise their upfront costs. The rules were adopted May 8 by state’s Energy Commission and are scheduled to take effect in 2020. The Commission said it expects the solar power initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.4 million metric tons in the first three years. Back in 2008, Hawaii became the first US state to impose energy-saving rules in new house construction requiring them to have solar water heaters starting in 2010. Solar water heaters typically cost home buyers about $5,000 extra on their mortgage, but supporters said that island residents would save thousands of dollars on their electric bills in the long run.

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Russian Sea Monsters: Rudderless Reactors on the High Seas

The Akademik Lomonosov, a barge containing two nuclear reactors, leaves St Petersburg. Anton Vaganov/TASS (Photo by Anton VaganovTASS via Getty Images)

Did you hear the one about the Exxon Valdez, Fuku-Chernobyl, Gulf Oil Titanic?  Yeah: Russia floated two nuclear reactors on a barge to power oil rigs in the Arctic Ocean and nothing went wrong!

Unsatisfied with trouncing Japan at the Winter Olympics, 14 gold medals to four, Moscow wants to topple Tokyo as Oceanic Polluter No. 1. As it stands, Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi triple reactor catastrophe which began March 11, 2011 “has caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen,” as the journal Nature reported Nov. 14, 2012.

To top this, the geniuses in Russia plan to drag a teetering ocean barge, carrying two nuclear reactors full of hot, fissioning not-yet-melted fuel, around the Arctic Ocean looking for icebergs, shoals or oil tankers to crash into. What better way to smoke Japan’s inglorious world record? And, instead of going to all the trouble of pouring cooling water over three smoldering melted reactor cores and watching the contamination run to sea for seven years (and counting) as in Fukushima, Russia’s sea monster can go down in a whole gale like the Edmund Fitzgerald, putting all the cesium, plutonium, strontium and the rest directly into the Arctic without all the fuss.

The April 28 launch of the barge Akademik Lomonosov presents such an outrageous risk to sea life and seacoasts that even Newsweek said of it on April 30th, “Russia’s ‘Nuclear Titanic’ Raising Fears of ‘Chernobyl On Ice.’” Having hoisted this petard from St. Petersburg April 28 en route to Murmansk, the plan is to have real eco-terrorists there load the two reactors with uranium fuel and set it to test at fissioning. Then the 12-story building is to be towed so far east — 3,000 miles to Pevek — that Sarah Palin might be able to see it.

No wonder the biggest insurance companies on Earth refuse to sell accident coverage to reactor operators. Lovers of nuclear power hate this social problem like the plague since it gives their science a bad name and makes their “clean and safe” sales pitch look like snake oil. The same pro-nuclear “small government” and “free market” enthusiasts pretend it isn’t big corporate welfare for the federal Price-Anderson Act to cover reactor disaster claims above $12.6 billion with tax-payer-funded liability insurance. (Utilities would never “risk the farm” by running their reactors without the handout; they’d sooner shut them all down. Owners and stock holders rest easy saying, “The tax-paying rubes have us covered — and they don’t even know it.”)

It will cost Japan over $300 billion in compensation to evacuees and the injured of Fukushima, and a couple of hundred billion more to sweep the cesium, plutonium, strontium, tritium and the rest under a rug, into the Pacific Ocean — or to build roads with it. Our very own General Electric Corp. brought those good Fuku’ reactors to life and it’s managed to avoid liability (by getting Congress to put the taxpayers on the hook for accidents), even after the Great East Japan Earthquake rattled then blew apart three large reactors in the worst radiation disaster in history. (We’ve got 23 identical models in the US.) The 1986 Chernobyl reactor disaster will have cost the world $9 trillion by 2015, according to Natalia Mironova, a thermodynamic engineer in Russia.

Undersea earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricane winds and rogue waves are natural disasters known to be both extremely dangerous and inevitable. Daring to place hot bobbing vulnerable nuclear reactors directly into a public commons like the Arctic Ocean in the face of such enormous risks is not just tempting fate. It is saying, ‘We don’t care about permanent atomic violence if it happens to plants, animals and the seafood web — even if we need the food and the water.’

It’s another atomic industry embarrassment that only nuclear power reactors — alone among all the dangerous, large-scale industrial enterprises on Earth — are legally required to have evacuation plans approved before going online. But how to evacuate the sea?

Also published in Counterpunch.org on May 4, 2018.

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Chernobyl Anniversary Begs Comparisons to Fukushima

Photo: The cement tomb built in 1986 over the destroyed Chernobyl reactor No. 4 in Ukraine needed replacement by 1996. It finally got re-covered in 2016. Similar abandonment has been recommended for three wrecked General Electric reactors in Fukushima, Japan.

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the “second worst” nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima are estimated to be between 5.6 and 8.1 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Professor Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the report’s Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News then, “Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has estimated that about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the updated 2016 TORCH Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels.[1] (A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. The “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels.)

Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 in Ukraine suffered several explosions, blew apart and burned for 40 days, sending clouds of radioactive materials high into the atmosphere, and spreading fallout across the whole of the Northern Hemisphere — depositing cesium-137 in Minnesota’s milk.[2]

The likelihood of similar or worse reactor disasters was estimated by James Asselstine of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), who testified to Congress in 1986: “We can expect to see a core meltdown accident within the next 20 years, and it … could result in off-site releases of radiation … as large as or larger than the releases … at Chernobyl.[3] Fukushima-Daiichi came 25 years later.

Contamination of soil, vegetation and water is so widespread in Japan that evacuating all the at-risk populations could collapse the economy, much as Chernobyl did to the former Soviet Union. For this reason, the Japanese government standard for decontaminating soil there is far less stringent than the standard used in Ukraine after Chernobyl.

Fukushima’s Cesium-137 Release Tops Chernobyl’s

The Korea Atomic Energy Research (KAER) Institute outside of Seoul reported in July 2014 that Fukushima-Daiichi’s three reactor meltdowns may have emitted two to four times as much cesium-137 as the reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl.[4]

To determine its estimate of the cesium-137 that was released into the environment from Fukushima, the cesium-137 release fraction (4% to the atmosphere, 16% to the ocean) was multiplied by the cesium-137 inventory in the uranium fuel inside the three melted reactors (760 to 820 quadrillion Becquerel, or Bq), with these results:

Ocean release of cesium-137 from Fukushima (the worst ever recorded): 121.6 to 131.2 quadrillion Becquerel (16% x 760 to 820 quadrillion Bq). Atmospheric release of cesium-137 from Fukushima: 30.4 to 32.8 quadrillion Becquerel (4% x 760 to 820 quadrillion Bq).

Total release of cesium-137 to the environment from Fukushima: 152 to 164 quadrillion Becquerel. Total release of cesium-137 into the environment from Chernobyl: between 70 and 110 quadrillion Bq.

The Fukushima-Daiichi reactors’ estimated inventory of 760 to 820 quadrillion Bq (petabecquerels) of cesium-137 used by the KAER Institute is significantly lower than the US Department of Energy’s estimate of 1,300 quadrillion Bq. It is possible the Korean institute’s estimates of radioactive releases are low.

In Chernobyl, 30 years after its explosions and fire, what the Wall St. Journal last year called “the $2.45 billion shelter implementation plan” was finally completed in November 2016. A huge metal cover was moved into place over the wreckage of the reactor and its crumbling, hastily erected cement tomb. The giant new cover is 350 feet high, and engineers say it should last 100 years — far short of the 250,000-year radiation hazard underneath.

The first cover was going to work for a century too, but by 1996 was riddled with cracks and in danger of collapsing. Designers went to work then engineering a cover-for-the-cover, and after 20 years of work, the smoking radioactive waste monstrosity of Chernobyl has a new “tin chapeau.” But with extreme weather, tornadoes, earth tremors, corrosion and radiation-induced embrittlement it could need replacing about 2,500 times. — John LaForge

_______________

[1] Duluth News-Tribune & Herald, “Slight rise in radioactivity found again in state milk,” May 22, 1986; St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch, “Radiation kills Chernobyl firemen,” May 17, 1986; Minneapolis StarTribune, “Low radiation dose found in area milk,” May 17, 1986.

[2] Ian Fairlie, “TORCH-2016: An independent scientific evaluation of the health-related effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster,” March 2016 (https://www.global2000.at/sites/global/files/GLOBAL_TORCH%202016_rz_WEB_KORR.pdf).

[3] James K. Asselstine, Commissioner, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Testimony in Nuclear Reactor Safety: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, May 22 and July 16, 1986, Serial No. 99-177, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987.

[4] Progress in Nuclear Energy, Vol. 74, July 2014, pp. 61-70; ENENews.org, Oct. 20, 2014.

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