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Uproar over Japan’s Decision to Disperse Fukushima Waste Water

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021
By John LaForge

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s Cabinet on April 13 “gave permission” to Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) to release over 1.25 million metric tons (1.38 million US tons) of Fukushima’s radioactive waste water into the Pacific Ocean.

Japan’s cabinet said the waste water will be diluted with additional seawater before being pumped into the ocean, and that the dumping will start in two years. The government said the dispersal will continue for at least 30 years, painting a picture of indefinitely perpetuating Fukushima’s globalized pollution.

Harsh rejection of the decision was immediate and widespread, coming from Russia, China, North and South Korea, the Philippines, New Zealand, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and several Pacific Island nations, as well as the fishing industry, marine scientists, and environmentalists.

Greenpeace Japan said in a press release the decision itself and any such dumping would violate international maritime law and that the planned release “completely disregards the human rights and interests of the people in Fukushima, wider Japan, and the Asia-Pacific region.”

The Biden Administration and the International Atomic Energy Agency both announced support for the decision, but criticism came from around the world, with South Korea and China considering law suits.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in told officials look into petitioning the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea or filing an injunction there over Japan’s decision, Al Jazeera reported.

According to a statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Beijing also considers Japan’s plan to be a “possible violation of international law,” the French news service AFP reported.

China and Japan both demanded apologies after Chinese foreign ministry representative Zhao Lijian posted this famous Japanese woodblock print altered to show radioactive waste being poured into the ocean. The image of “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” made in the 19th century by artist Hokusai, was changed to illustrate Japan’s April 13 decision to pump its huge volume Fukushima waste water into the Pacific beginning in 2023. Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said April 26 that he was lodging a protest, seeking both an apology and the cartoon’s removal. “It is the Japanese government which needs to revoke its wrong decision and apologize,” Zhao said the next day.

Part of the reason for the backlash is that 70 percent of the waste water now stored in over 1,000 giant tanks is still contaminated with dozens of highly radioactive materials.* Tepco’s Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) — a novel filter system that the company claimed would remove 62 isotopes from the water — has not worked. The company says it will re-filter the waste before it starts pouring it into the Pacific.

“This water is contaminated with such radionuclides as cesium-137, carbon-14, tritium (some of which will form the more dangerous ‘organically bound tritium’), strontium-90, cobalt-60, iodine-129, plutonium-239, and more than 50 other hazardous radionuclides,” reported Rick Steiner, a marine biologist in Anchorage and former University of Alaska professor of marine conservation, in the Anchorage Daily News April 25.

Likewise, physicist Iain Darby and researcher Azby Brown with Safecast wrote in Japan Times, “In late 2018, the company admitted that 70 percent of the tanks — more than 750,000 tons of treated water — still contained above-limit levels of strontium-90, ruthenium-106, cobalt-60, and many other radionuclides that the system had failed to adequately remove.” Safecast is an international nonprofit that conducts citizen monitoring of environmental radiation and other hazards.

Apologies to artist P. Chappatte on this page as we added the Fukushima banner to his 2006 cartoon.

Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Agency said that radioactivity in the released yet continuously accumulating waste water will be “within international limits,” and Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso went so far as to say the waste would be “safe to drink.” (See p. 4) However, Prof. Steiner also reported that Tepco had admitted its waste water contains significant amounts of radioactive carbon-14. “As carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, and is known to bio-accumulate in marine ecosystems and cause cellular and genetic impairment, this is a very serious concern. Fukushima carbon-14 will be added to the elevated radioactive carbon-14 load in the oceans from nuclear weapons tests last century — “bomb carbon” — now found in organisms even in the deepest part of the ocean, the Marianas Trench,” he wrote.

Japan’s dumping decision means that alternatives recommended by experts were rejected in favor of the cheapest choice. Other options include expansion and long-term tank storage to allow the waste’s radioactivity to decrease, replacing the ALPS filter with a system that removes tritium and all the rest, or evaporation of the waste water.

Kazue Suzuki, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Japan, said the government had “discounted the radiation risks and turned its back on the clear evidence that sufficient storage capacity is available on the nuclear site as well as in surrounding districts.”

Korean experts warned that “radioactive materials not properly filtered and discharged into the sea could be hazardous to those living in Korea and its neighboring China,” the Korea Herald reported. Choi Yoon, a professor at South Korea’s Kunsan National University, told Al Jazeera April 24, “When radioactive materials such as cesium or tritium flow into the ocean, they are absorbed into living things, mainly plankton. And through the food chain, radioactive materials accumulate in bigger fishes that eat lots of plankton or smaller fishes.”

“Through the sea’s currents, it can affect fishes near the Korean Peninsula, East Asia and even the entire world although the degree of dilution may vary,” Yoon said.

From the South Pacific the Guardian reported that Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, a Vanuatu [Pacific island nation] stateswoman and member of the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific movement said, “If it is safe, dump it in Tokyo, test it in Paris, and store it in Washington, but keep our Pacific nuclear-free.”

Only 30 percent of 1.25 million metric tons of Tepco’s filtered radioactive waste water, which passed through the Advanced Liquid Processing System, has been cleared of high-risk radioactive materials. Dangerous isotopes have been found in up to 875,000 metric tons of the stored waste. Ingestion of “strontium-90 increases the risk of developing leukemia and bone cancer, according to a report by the Korea Energy Information Culture Agency,” the Korea Herald warned.

Suzuki, with Greenpeace Japan, said, “The Japanese Government has taken the wholly unjustified decision to deliberately contaminate the Pacific Ocean with radioactive wastes.” The group’s international executive director Jennifer Morgan added that the plan for wastewater disposal “is a violation of Japan’s legal obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and will be strongly resisted over the coming months.”

For years leading up to Japan’s announcement, government officials, Tepco and nuclear power lobbyists have claimed that tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen, is not harmful in small amounts. This statement is untrue; see “Reassessing” below and “UN Experts” on p. 3.

In dozens of reports on Japan’s decision, officials repeatedly acknowledged that radioactive tritium is routinely released into public waters by operating reactors, and that this has been a permitted industrial practice for six decades.

The “we do this all the time” admissions appeared to be presented as a kind of reassurance, as if polluting the Great Lakes and major rivers like the Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi is blasé. It continues because the nuclear industry and most government and regulatory agencies deny a connection between environmental radioactive pollution and the alarming rate of cancer incidence in humans.

*See:

• Ken Buesseler, “Opening the floodgates at Fukushima,” Science, Aug. 7, 2020; DOI: 10.1126/science.abc1507

• “Mix of contaminants in Fukushima wastewater, risks of ocean dumping,” Science Daily, Aug. 6, 2020
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200806153610.htm

• “Fukushima nuclear plant owner apologizes for still-radioactive water,” Reuters, Oct. 11, 2018; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-disaster-nuclear-water/fukushima-nuclear-plant-owner-apologizes-for-still-radioactive-water-idUSKCN1ML15N

• “Treated water at Fukushima nuclear plant still radioactive: Tepco,” Mari Yamaguchi, AP, Japan Times, Sept. 29, 2018; https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/09/29/national/treated-water-fukushima-nuclear-plant-still-radioactive/#.XAQcOGhKiUk

• “Treated water at Fukushima nuclear plant still radioactive,” Seattle Times, September 28, 2018; https://www.seattletimes.com/business/water-stored-at-fukushima-nuclear-plant-still-radioactive

• “All options need to be weighed for Fukushima plant tainted water,” editorial, Ashi Shimbun, Sept. 6, 2018;
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201809060020.html

• “Residents blast water-discharge method at Fukushima plant,” The Asahi Shimbun, August 31, 2018
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201808310042.html

 

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Navajo Nation Calls Out Feds Over Shoddy Uranium Mine Cleanup Plans

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021
By Leona Morgan

“From 1944 to 1986, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo lands,” according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website “Navajo Nation: Cleaning Up Abandoned Uranium Mines.” Some remediation has been done through two five-year cleanup plans, but is severely underfunded, and the sites are never restored to pre-mining conditions.

The EPA frames the cleanup of 524 abandoned uranium mines on Navajo Indian Country as a collaborative effort between the US federal agencies charged with the cleanup — US EPA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Navajo Area Indian Health Service, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry — and the Navajo Nation (Navajo). Over the course of the public comment period for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the proposed cleanup of the United Nuclear Corporation/General Electric (UNC/GE) Northeast Churchrock uranium mine, it has become glaringly clear that the federal government is not in collaboration or negotiations with Navajo at all, but rather dictating how to proceed.

Navajo EPA Superfund Director Dariel Yazzie and staff have been working to uphold the requests of the Diné Red Water Pond Road Community Association (RWPR) which will be most impacted if the controversial Churchrock cleanup plan is approved. UNC/GE proposes to “cleanup” the uranium mine by placing one million cubic yards of mine waste atop an existing mill waste disposal site, which is the same site as the 1979 Churchrock spill. For over a decade, RWPR has called for moving all radioactive wastes out of the area entirely. RWPR is opposed to the cleanup plan, despite the US EPA threatening that it may take several years before another is proposed.

Recently, Yazzie exposed how the US EPA doesn’t allow the Navajo Nation a seat at the table while making major decisions regarding cleanup, funds, contractors, etc. Yazzie has also slammed the NRC for moving forward a plan that is “incomplete,” as it does not include any of the recommendations from either the RWPR or the Navajo Nation, and is lacking information on design, engineering, and environmental studies and impacts. Yazzie joined the RWPR and countless others who have criticized the NRC for conducting virtual public meetings during the pandemic, while many locals did not have access to internet or phone service and were under lockdown — due to the severity of Covid-19 in Diné communities.

In her May 24, 2021 cover letter responding to the DEIS, Navajo EPA Executive Director Valinda Shirley condemned the US government’s failure in “assuring the stability and integrity” of the initial impoundment dam which breached in 1979, “despite the approved engineering.” Shirley explains, “This failure has drastically contributed to … mistrusting of the NRC, DOE, UNC/GE, EPA and their assurances on any environmental remediation activity.”

The Navajo Nation EPA is not only holding the federal government accountable to clean up the Churchrock area, but is also supporting community demands that the United States be named as the responsible party to fund cleanup of all abandoned uranium mines, and to work with affected communities to clean up to the highest standards.

At the request of Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, the NRC has extended the DEIS comment period to October 31, 2021. For background info and talking points to send comments:

https://haulno.com/.

The RWPR’s annual event in remembrance of the July 16, 1979 uranium spill was not held last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year, RWPR will do a private event. For updates: https://swuraniumimpacts.org/.

— Leona Morgan works with the Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico. For background see: “A Second Churchrock Spill in the Making?” in the Winter 2020-2021 Nukewatch Quarterly. 

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Iran’s Uranium Processing Site Bombed by Israel?

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021
By Bob Mayberry

On April 11, 2021, an explosion at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site destroyed the power supply to its underground uranium processing centrifuges. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, called the attack an act of “nuclear terrorism,” and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif condemned the bombing as a “war crime.” Iran said there were no fatalities.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was with former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem April 11, the day Iran’s uranium processing site was bombed most likely by Israeli agents with US approval. Photo: Menahem Kahana/UPI/Pool

The New York Times reported that “American and Israeli intelligence officials said there had been an Israeli role.” The morning of the bombing, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

Israel, which has between 80 and 400 nuclear weapons and has never joined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the attack. Iran has no nuclear weapons and ratified the NPT in 1970.

Prior to the April attack, Iran began using new advanced centrifuges for enriching uranium-235 up to 20 percent. Enriched uranium is produced by feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into centrifuges that separate the uranium-235, the most suitable isotope for nuclear fission. Uranium enriched to 90% or more can be used to make nuclear weapons, the BBC noted. Shortly after the attack, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced that Iran would begin enriching uranium to 60%. Although Rouhani repeated that Iran’s nuclear activities were “exclusively peaceful,” France, Germany and the UK all expressed “grave concern” since there is no civilian atomic reactor using uranium enriched to 60%. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki described Iran’s decision — not the bombing of a uranium processing complex — as “provocative.”

On April 29, Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen said, “Israel will not allow Iran to attain nuclear arms.… Our planes reach everywhere in the Middle East, and certainly Iran.” Meanwhile, White House officials met with Israeli delegates and agreed only on the “significant threat” posed by Iran. The Israeli ambassador to the US announced that the Biden administration would consult with Israel about any renewal of the anti-nuclear deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreed to in 2015 between Iran, China, France, Russia, the UK, the US and Germany — together with the European Union. What Israel’s act of war provokes from Iran remains to be seen.

— Reuters, “Our warplanes can reach Iran, Israeli minister warns amid nuclear talks,” April 29; Reuters, “Iran to begin 60% uranium enrichment after nuclear site incident,” April 13; Associated Press, “Iran blames Israel for sabotage at Natanz nuclear site,” April 12; and New York Times, “Blackout Hits Iran Nuclear Site in What Appears to Be Israeli Sabotage,” April 11, 2021

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Nukewatch Staffer, Convicted of Trespass & Property Damage in Germany, will Appeal

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021

Nukewatch co-director John LaForge was convicted of trespassing and damage to property May 31 in Cochem, Germany. The charges stemmed from two 2018 nuclear weapons protest actions directed against the US nuclear bombs deployed at the Büchel Air Force Base in the southwest state of Rhineland-Pfalz. The trial was only the second for a US citizen in a 25-year-long campaign against “nuclear sharing” between the United States and Germany at Büchel. Over 90 similar trials have resulted from recent protests at the base, but only residents of Germany or The Netherlands have been prosecuted.

Dennis DuVall, formerly of Prescott, Arizona became the first US citizen convicted of the same charges in May 2020, although the long-time member of Veterans for Peace now lives in Germany.

LaForge, 65, was given a penalty of 600 euros ($727) or 50 days of either community service or jail. The bench trial conducted by Cochem District Court Judge Alexander Fleckenstein took place in LaForge’s absence. LaForge will appeal the conviction.

Susan Crane and John LaForge walked out of Büchel Air Force Base in Germany Aug. 6, 2018 after occupying the top of one of its bunkers reportedly holding US nuclear weapons.

In the protest on July 15, 2018, LaForge and 17 others entered the base through five openings cut in the base’s chain link perimeter fence in broad daylight on a Sunday morning. In a subsequent action August 6, the anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, LaForge and Susan Crane of the Redwood City, California Catholic Worker also entered the base unhindered, in daytime, and even climbed to the top of one of the bunkers reportedly holding some of the 20 US hydrogen bombs on base. Charges were not brought against Crane.

About his May 31st guilty verdict LaForge said, “The court refused to consider federal and international laws that forbid preparations for mass destruction. It is grimly ironic that my defense relies on the Nuremberg Charter and Principles which were created in Germany by the WW II allies, with US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson as chief prosecutor leading the charge. Nuremberg law declares that planning and preparing indiscriminate attacks is criminal before the fact. Our actions were taken to prevent the illegal preparations for massacres using US nuclear weapons that take place at the base.”

In the May 31 trial, Attorney Busl read John’s written testimony and introduced several supporting documents including formal declarations by international law expert Anabel Dwyer of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and by retired German judges Bernd Hahnfeld and Ulf Panzer. Judge Fleckenstein said international law was irrelevant to the charges and was better suited for consideration by higher courts.

After similar convictions in the campaign against the “sharing” of US nuclear weapons in Germany, gravity bombs known as B61s, appeals to higher courts have not been successful. Germany’s highest judicial body, the Constitutional Court has ruled that addressing the question of whether deployment is lawful “is not in the public interest.”

In view of the court system’s refusal to consider international treaty law as a defense to the protest charges, several resisters intend to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. The ECHR can hear cases of unfair trials under certain circumstances, and the resisters argue that refusing to consider their international law defense constitutes trial court unfairness or judicial bias.

Nukewatch, and the German group Nonviolent Action Abolish Nuclear Weapons (GAAA) coordinated three delegations of US peace activists — in 2017, 2018, and 2019 — to the annual peace encampments near the Büchel Air Base. The delegations participated in vigils, blockades, and “go-in” actions together with resisters from Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, France, and the UK.

Scores of similar actions have taken place at the base over the last 25 years, and over 90 court trials in Cochem have resulted from the long-running campaign which demands: 1) removal of the US H-bombs, 2) cancellation of their replacement with the new bomb, and 3) German ratification of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

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More Leaking from Hanford Rad Waste Tanks

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021
By Kelly Lundeen

In the 1980s, when highly radioactive liquid wastes were found to be leaking from old, corroded underground tanks at the Hanford Reservation in Eastern Washington State, the Department of Energy announced that double-walled tanks were the answer.

Now a second double-shell radioactive waste tank has been found to be leaking at the superfund site, which holds the distinction of being the most radioactively contaminated site in the US. There are additional confirmed leaks in 67 single-shell tanks out of 177. 

One thousand, seven hundred gallons of radioactive waste have leaked into the soil from Tank B-109 since it was first suspected of leaking in March 2019, but the Department of Energy (DOE) waited over a year before launching an investigation. The leaking 123,000-gallon tank is loaded with liquid and solid waste from plutonium production done there from 1946-1976, and there are no plans to stop the leak. 

The Hanford site is responsible for producing two-thirds of the plutonium used for the United States’s cold war nuclear weapons. DOE spokesperson Geoff Tyree assured the public that, “Contamination in this area is not new and mitigation actions have been in place for decades.” 

“The tanks hold half a century’s worth of highly radioactive and poisonous by-products of nuclear weapons production,” and “about a million gallons of liquids has leaked,” the New York Times reported in 1997. If contaminated ground water reaches the Columbia River which borders the Hanford site, radioactive material could enter the food chain, “and could expose people to radiation for centuries,”the Times predicted back then.

At the last five-year review of the decades-long cleanup and waste treatment operations in 2017, the US Environmental Protection Agency Project Manager Dennis Faulk reported, “Contaminated in-area groundwater is still flowing freely into the Columbia” [River]. Ken Niles, retired head of the Oregon Department of Energy’s Hanford program admitted of the cleanup effort, “Its cost overruns and schedule delays are legendary.” Niles went on to say, “Some scenarios show treatment continuing well past the year 2100, and all scenarios show cost estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The citizen’s watchdog group Hanford Challenge paints a sobering picture for those who work around the tanks. “Since March 2014, over 100 workers suffered vapor exposures serious enough to seek medical evaluation,” the group reported in April. 

— State of Washington Department of Ecology, Apr. 29, 2021; Tri-City Herald, Aug. 10, 2020; Hanford Challenge, 2019; “Radioactive Waste Still Flooding Columbia River, EPA Says” Courthouse News, June 8, 2017; “Radiation Leaks at Hanford Threaten River, Experts say,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 1997

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