Nukewatch

Working for a nuclear-free future since 1979

by Leave a Comment

Chronicling the Plume: Fukushima’s Boundless Fallout

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014
Aug. 6: Total melt-through of Reactor 3 admitted

Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the wrecked Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex in Japan, has admitted that all the uranium fuel in Reactor 3 melted and burned into the bottom of the reactor’s cement containment vessel. In November 2011, Tepco said it thought 63 percent of the reactor’s 100 tons of uranium had melted through. According to the company’s new estimate, all the fuel burned through the steel pressure vessel, fell to the bottom of the containment and burned over two feet into the concrete, the Japan Times reports. So harrowing is the problem of removing this mass of hot, molten fuel wreckage, that Tepco has said it won’t begin the attempt for seven years, the daily Asahi Shimbun reported Aug. 7.

Aug. 12: Bribes offered to areas to store waste

Japan’s government is offering billions in subsidies to communities that agree to store contaminated soil and debris cleared from areas hard hit with radioactive fallout. Greenpeace said the payments were nothing but bribes.

The government has offered to pay an annual subsidy of $2.8 billion to Fukushima Prefecture, and the towns of Okuma and Futaba, in return for permission to construct temporary radioactive waste dump sites. About 900 million cubic feet of contaminated soil and debris need storage.

Asahi Shimbun reports that, “Funds will also be provided to develop measures to alleviate concerns elsewhere in Japan that farm, forestry and fishery products in Fukushima Prefecture are contaminated with radioactive materials.”

“Alleviating concern” over radiation exposure is cheaper than decontaminating heavily poisoned areas to the exposure standard required prior to the disaster. The subsidy proposal was launched after the failure of a plan to purchase private land for dump sites.

NBC News said Sept. 1 that soil being collected from cleanup sites is now stored in plastic bags in over 600 temporary sites outside the evacuation zones, “raising health and safety concerns.”

Aug. 12: Ice wall may not solve problem

In July workers began inserting 1,550 pipes 100 feet vertically into the ground inland from the reactor complex to form a long cordon around the wreckage—costing $300 million. Coolant fed into the pipes is supposed to freeze the surrounding earth and create a barrier to the groundwater now pouring into the reactor buildings at a rate of 400 tons per day.

Ice walls have never been built on such a large scale. “I’m not convinced the freeze wall is the best option,” said Dale Klein, a former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a senior adviser to Tepco, Kyodo News reports. “What I’m concerned about is unintended consequences. Where does that water go and what are the consequences of that?”

Sept. 10: First reactor restart said to be safe 

Japanese regulators announced that one nuclear power station is safe to restart, the New York Times reports. All of Japan’s 48 operable reactors were shuttered in March 2011 following Fukushima’s triple meltdowns. Two reactors at the Sendai station, in the far southwest, are the first to be re-certified in spite of operating in a volcanically active area. Actual restart would take months as operators seek local government consent. A final decision will be made by the prime minister. Public opinion is heavily against any Sendai reactor restart as millions of Japanese are deeply skeptical about its safety. On Sept. 24, 16,000 people marched through Tokyo protesting any such restart.

Oct. 2: Public wary of “allowable” radiation doses

Of those surveyed in Japan, 22.5 percent said the government should impose stricter limits for radiation exposures and radioactive contamination of food; 47 percent said they would like to avoid foods with radioactive substances even if the radiation level is below government-set limits. The latest survey by the Consumer Affairs Agency was conducted in August, and surveyed 5,176 adults in 11 prefectures.

Oct. 12: Groundwater contamination jumps after typhoon

The amount of tritium—radioactive hydrogen—and strontium-90 in groundwater samples at Fukushima jumped more than tenfold in October, reportedly because of heavy rain caused by typhoon Phanfone. Some 150,000 Becquerels of tritium per-liter were measured in groundwater taken Oct. 9 from a well near Reactor 2. The figure is a record and over 10 times the level measured the previous week. The amount of strontium-90 also shattered records with a well water reading of 1.2 million Becquerels per-liter, Tepco reported.

Tepco also revealed that, at a separate well also east of Reactor 2, groundwater was emitting a record 2.1 million Becquerels of strontium-90-like beta radiation, nearly double the level from a week earlier.

Oct. 15: Contaminated exports raise protest

The Wall Street Journal reports that South Koreans are still leery over contaminated imports from Japan. Residents of Changwon, a city on South Korea’s southeastern coast, staged a rally Oct. 14 at a steel company to protest its import of scrap steel from Japan at the port of Masan. The protesters demanded local steel companies stop importing Japanese steel through seaports that aren’t equipped with radioactive detection devices, such as Masan.

“A case in August, in which imports of scrap steel from Japan were found to contain radioactive material and sent back to Japan clearly shows we’re exposed to a real risk,” said Park Jong-kwon, Chairman of the Masan Changwon Jinhae Korea Federation of Environmental Movements.

Oct. 17: Tepco pretends to de-contaminate water

Asahi Shimbun reports that Tepco has decided to simply pretend it’s had some progress in decontaminating tons of water from its flooded reactors. The paper reports, “Although the water treated with … strontium removal systems alone still needs to be processed … to eliminate additional radioactive substances, Tepco officials said the company will temporarily deem such water as being ‘purified’ to achieve its initial goal of completing the processing work by the end of the fiscal year.”

Oct. 29: Radioactive soil stored at schools has nowhere to go

Japan Times reports that tons of contaminated and bagged up topsoil that was removed from school yards will have to stay where it is rather than be shipped to temporary dumps—because of a technicality. The soil was removed before a law on radioactive contamination took effect in January 2012, so its shipment off school grounds isn’t covered by the law. The Fukushima Prefecture Government says the delay is discriminatory and has repeatedly called on Tokyo to allow the soil to be shipped to temporary dump sites.

[In this context, thousands of tons of contaminated soil removed from school grounds and other areas have been incinerated in Japan’s ordinary municipal incinerators. Problems with contaminated incinerator ash arose almost immediately. In August 2011, ash with too much radioactive cesium to allow it to be buried has been found at 42 facilities in Tokyo Prefecture, and five other prefectures as well as Fukushima, the Environment Ministry said Aug. 27, 2011. In the summer of 2011, a 16-prefecture survey of 469 incinerator operators in Tohoku and Kanto was reported to a panel of experts at the Environment Ministry which was discussing how to bury incinerator ash and dust with cesium levels above 8,000 Becquerels-per-kilogram.]
Nov. 11: Cesium found in west coast waters

The Oregon Statesman Journal reports that scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found cesium-134 in seawater from Fukushima had reached the California coast. Tepco downplayed the finding saying in a statement, “It has been … expected … that … radioactivity from … the March 2011 accident … would be carried by ocean currents.” The radioactivity found “raises no concern for human or animal health,” Tepco also said.

Less than 2 Becquerels per-cubic-meter of cesium-134 were found in 10 sea water samples taken between Alaska and California by the researchers.

No US agency is testing Pacific waters for radiation from Fukushima, so the Institute took on the task as a public service.

While the Woods Hole report said the contamination was insignificant, cesium persists in the environment for at least 300 years, during which it bio-accumulates and bio-concentrates in aquatic life as it moves up the food chain.

Nov. 15: Greenpeace: Radiation risks understated 

Radioactive “hot spots” are still prevalent across parts of Fukushima Prefecture, according to Greenpeace monitors who surveyed areas contaminated with fallout from the March 2011 triple meltdowns.

In addition to finding hots spots, Greenpeace experts charged that Japanese authorities consistently underestimate both the amount of radioactive contamination and the health risks it carries. The group began monitoring radiation around Fukushima’s reactor wreckage within a few days of the start of the catastrophe and has conducted independent on-site monitoring visits every year since—the most recent between Oct. 24 and 27.

Greenpeace radiation monitor Heinz Smitai, a nuclear physicist, told foreign journalists Oct. 30 in Tokyo that hot spots exist as far as 37 miles from the site of the disaster, Al Jazeera reported. Mandatory evacuation covered only a 12 mile radius.

Japan’s Ministry of Environment disputes Greenpeace’s charge that it underestimates radiation contamination and risks. The ministry claims that radiation in Fukushima has steadily diminished over time.

However, critics charge that government numbers are made up of estimated averages of radiation findings, meaning that individual “hot spots,” like those Greenpeace recorded, would go unreported and unmapped. Individuals near hot spots could be exposed to greater radiation doses than the government “average” estimates over a large area.

The government’s most recent airborne radiation survey was conducted in December 2013. —JL 

by Leave a Comment

Vienna Conferences Address Nuclear Weapons Effects Defiant United States Impedes Progress on Ban Treaty

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014
By John LaForge

VIENNA, Austria—A pair of major conferences here Dec. 6-9 tried to raise public and government awareness of nuclear weapons.

The Civil Society Forum put on by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN, brought together NGOs, parliamentarians, and activists of all stripes to try and boost morale and renew enthusiasm in efforts to ban the bomb.

About 700 participants spent two days delving into the ghastly health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons production, nuclear war and bomb testing, the alarming frequency of H-bomb accidents—and human radiation experiments conducted without informed consent on unwitting civilians and soldiers.

This is ground that’s been plowed before, but it’s staggering to the uninitiated and is in any case never repeated too often—especially in view of the destabilization and skyrocketing death toll of what the Pope has called today’s “World War Three.”

This 23 kiloton nuclear bomb test explosion, called Badger, was detonated on April 18, 1953, at the Nevada Test Site. National Nuclear Security Administration photo.

With offices worldwide, ICAN is infused with youthful encouragement and high-energy campaigning—a welcome relief for the graying anti-nuclear movement that’s seen a generation of activists diverted by campaigns against corporate globalization and climate collapse. Mary Olson, of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, who presented expert testimony at both meetings on the misogynistic gender bias in radiation effects, said she had gotten a “surprisingly big jolt of hope from the youngness of the gathering.”

A second conference—the “Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons” (HINW)—brought together government representatives and hundreds of others and was the third in a series. The state of Austria, which has neither nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors, sponsored the gathering.

After decades of negotiations over the strategic and numerical size of nuclear arsenals, the HINW meetings instead face the harsh ugliness and catastrophic health and environmental effects of nuclear testing and warfare.

Expert witnesses spoke directly to 158 government representatives about the ethical, legal, medical and ecological consequences of H-bomb detonations which are—in the language of diplomatic nicety—“foreseeable.” Then, scores of state delegates called on nuclear-armed states to pursue abolition. Dozens of speakers noted that landmines, cluster munitions, gas, chemical and biological weapons have all been banned, but not the worst of all—thermonuclear weapons.

But the emperor can’t see his own nakedness.

It turns out that a gathering of elites like the HINW is like a prison population: there is a strict, arcane etiquette; a rigorous separation of classes; and a blatant violation of all the rules by privileged, rich and pampered chieftains.

The most blatant violation came at the start of the first question-&-answer session, and it was my own government—which skipped previous HINW meetings in Norway and Mexico—that put a radioactive foot in its bomb-cratered mouth. Immediately following harrowing personal testimonies from downwind bomb test victims and a review by Ms. Olson of the science showing women and children to be far more vulnerable to radiation than men, the US rudely interrupted. Everyone noticed.

Although facilitators twice directed participants to ask questions only the US delegate, Adam Scheinman, was first at the mic, and he declared flatly, “I will not ask a question but make a statement.” The bully then ignored the panel’s hour-long discussion of the brutal, gruesome, and long-term effects of nuclear weapons testing. Instead, in ringing non sequitur, Scheinman’s prepared statement declared U.S. opposition to a nuclear weapons ban and noted support for negotiations for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Mr. Scheinman also lauded the US embrace of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, code language for decades of winking at open US violations of the treaty’s requirements.

(Principle among US NPT violations are President Obama’s planned $1 trillion, 30-year budget for new nuclear weapons; “nuclear sharing” agreements that keep 180 US H-bombs at bases in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Turkey; and sales of Trident nuclear missiles for the British submarine fleet.)

The US’s rude defiance of decorum was a microcosm of the country’s global militarism: oblivious, contemptuous, imperious, and defiant of law. Conducted at 1:20 in the afternoon, the scene-stealing disruption was well-timed to be the lead headline on nightly TV news. US refusal to support and dismissal of the movement for a nuclear weapons ban/treaty should be the story of the conference, but corporate media can be counted on to note only Obama’s public agenda and his finger-pointing at non-nuclear Iran.

The US interruption was perhaps intended to momentarily divert attention from the indiscriminate, uncontrollable, widespread, radiological, long-lived, genetically destabilizing, and illegal impact of its nuclear weapons.

Indeed, after its usurpation of center-stage here—and after having temporarily recast the subject of the conference—the US can return to it $1 trillion upgrade of infrastructure for producing 80 new H-bombs a year by 2020.

At the close of the gathering, the government of Austria called on all states to “fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.”

The 44 states that endorsed the “Austrian Pledge” to pursue a ban treaty were: Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea Bissau, Holy See, Indonesia, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Qatar, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Senegal, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand, Timor Leste, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Uruguay, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

—Quarterly editor John Laforge represented Nukewatch at the Vienna conferences.

by Leave a Comment

The Physics of Domination and Compassion  

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014
By John Heid
Through the Prism of Nonviolence

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. — Newton’s Third Law

The US-Mexico border is una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. A 1,950 mile-long open wound dividing a pueblo, a culture running down the length of my body, staking fence rods in my flesh, splits me… splits me…. — Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands 

“The border wall tells us Mexicans you are scared of us. But what does your wall tell you about yourselves?” This from my conversation with an unidentified Mexican man in Nogales, Sonora.

At first the phone calls from the ticket clerk at the Tucson Greyhound bus station came about once a week. The conversation was simple: “Do you have room for a mother and her children tonight? Their ticket hasn’t come in yet.”

“Yes, we do.” The bus station closes nightly. That was over two and a half years ago. Gradually the number of requests increased. Most of the families were Guatemalan. All were indigenous. Every family had relatives in the US. All had come across the desert. Their stories were nearly identical. Rampant violence, death threats and extreme poverty had forced a choice: flee or perish.

One Saturday night last September a dam, of sorts, broke. The bus station clerk, Juan, called frantically saying he had 19 people who needed a place for the night. From then on the number of Central American refugees coming through our doors was consistently high. Night after night we heard the familiar story with different names.

Guatemalan society is being ripped apart at the seams. Late in the night I could hear the women talking across the hall in their native K’iche and Mam. Melodic languages filled the bedrooms of our small community, Casa Mariposa. In the past year, over 2,500 guests came through our doors; another 3,500 or so were offered food, clothing and comfort at the Greyhound station as they awaited their bus. A veritable flood of humanity. A contemporary exodus.

As this unprecedented displacement began to attract media attention, so did the random gestures of support. Our phone rang all hours of the day and night. Local women and children would show up at our door with bags of clothing, food, coloring books, diapers, whatever. We’d often wake to find boxes of toiletries and sundry items left anonymously on our front porch overnight. Others called to say they had space in their home to host a family. A construction worker called from Chicago offering to come down to Tucson and build houses for these families. Tucson witnessed its own kind of surge — a surge of compassion.

Before long the analysts and spin doctors pronounced the causes of the surge with nauseating monotony and finality: Poverty and violence. End of sentence; end of discussion. Yet the gristmill of poverty and violence is merely a symptom of a deeper phenomenon: the physics of domination. When digging deep to find its source, we will discover its gnarly roots in the dynamics of unequal economic, political and power relationships. Income disparity indeed.

Rarely mentioned in mainstream media is the history of strong US support for violent regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the US poured over $1 million of military aid every day into El Salvador alone, a place where 85% of the war crimes were attributed to the government. Over 100,000 civilians were killed. Guatemala’s story was similar during those years. In 2009, the US supported a coup in Honduras which deposed the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya and led to an epidemic of violence against civilians. Honduras now has the highest per capita homicide rate in the world. Is it coincidental then that of the tens of thousands of children and families coming into the US this year 28% are Honduran, 24% Guatemalan, and 21% El Salvadoran? Nicaragua is the poorest country in the region, yet only 194 of the 63,000 unaccompanied children who entered the US this year are Nicaraguan. Poverty is volatile. Violence trumps.

Also, rarely mentioned by commercial news media is the devastating impact of international trade agreements on the village economies of Central American nations. After two decades, the tourniquet of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its structural adjustments has finally gotten a choke hold on the hemisphere’s most vulnerable populations. This impoverished environment has been fertile ground for recruitment by cartels, thus exacerbating the cycle of violence and justifying the infusion of even more US arms into the region. I never heard any of the hundreds of families coming through our doors talk about coming north in pursuit of the fabled American dream. I only heard stories of people in flight for their lives. Survival.

Yet, this “urgent humanitarian crisis,” as the President called it, is not acknowledged as a refugee crisis, but rather just another twist on northern migration for upward economic mobility. Children and families are treated as criminals, not refugees. Detention centers for youth were opened on three military bases. A detention facility for families was reopened in New Mexico, with more planned. Thus, incarceration of refugees and persons without status is normalized. The National Guard was mobilized in Texas. Governors from Maine to Arizona decried children coming to their state. Calls for even more border enforcement were raised. Vigorous efforts were made to rollback legal protection for vulnerable children under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act — which passed both Houses of Congress unanimously and became law in 2008.

Scant, scattered attention, let alone analysis, is given in the circles of power to the causes and conditions of the current movement of people into the US. In classic blame-the-victim reaction, young people become the scapegoat, with children, not the border, seen as the problem.

There is an open wound. It’s source is the clash of power and identity. Whose identity crisis is this? Not the Central Americans’. Refugees know exactly where they stand and why. It is our crisis and it has two faces: one, the humanitarian; the other, the wall. The earlier question echoes in the back of my mind: who does that wall tell us we are? Who does it say I am?

In my darkest moments I have found comfort in recalling the soft song-like cadence of the Guatemalan women talking that night in our home. They have a passion and a hope that nurtures mine. I am heartened too by the likes of that fella from Chicago, whoever he is, who roused me out of bed early one morning to say, “I’m coming down to help build homes for these families.” He and the women have the kind of fiber and spirit that can and will change the world. That’s some place to stand. May we all be there one day — together.

— John Heid lives and works at the Casa Mariposa in Tucson, Arizona.

 

by Leave a Comment

Risky Plutonium  Project Put on Hold

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

The Energy Department has proposed that construction of a nuclear reactor fuel production system underway in South Carolina be postponed. The factory would use an expensive and pollution-intensive process of mixing extracted plutonium with uranium to make a reactor fuel called mixed-oxide, or MOX, for use in commercial power reactors — a scheme that involved “significant security risks,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. A UCS analysis has found that the MOX system makes it easier for terrorists to steal plutonium during processing, transport and storage at reactors than containerizing the plutonium as high-level waste. 

The US and Russia have promised to dispose of some 34 tons of military plutonium, left from bomb production and dismantled nuclear weapons. The UCS and other experts recommend that the plutonium should be processed with inert material for long-term isolation. UCS is pushing Congress to officially terminate the ill-advised MOX program and pursue safer, less expensive alternatives. — JL

— Union of Concerned Scientists, Catalyst, Summer 2014 

by Leave a Comment

International Nuclear Power Fading Fast, Study Finds 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

The latest World Nuclear Industry Status Report, published in July 2014,* provides a comprehensive review of nuclear power data, which “is critically important to understanding the past and current situations without bias for a healthy public policy debate.” According to the study’s forward by Tatsujiro Suzuki — who until March 2014 was Vice-Chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission and is one of the report’s eight authors. 

The collage “Unsinkable,” by Chris Jordan, is made up of 67,000 photos of mushroom clouds, equal to the number of metric tons of ultra-radioactive waste being stored in temporary on-site pools at the US’s 100 operating reactors. A closer view o f the art is available at www.chrisjordan.com.

The report includes information on reactor operations, production and construction and looks extensively at the status of new-build programs in existing as well as in potential newcomer countries, considering in detail how changing market conditions are affecting the economics of nuclear power. The 2014 edition updates a Fukushima Status Report featured for the first time in 2013 which then triggered widespread media attention. The Nuclear Power vs. Renewable Energy chapter provides comparative data on investment, capacity and generation and assesses how nuclear power performs in systems with high renewable energy share. 

The report’s detailed country-by-country analysis provides an overview of all 31 countries operating nuclear power reactors, with extended sections on China, Japan and the United States. 

Some of the key findings by the report’s eight authors reporting from London, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg and Tokyo, include: 

• A declining role. Nuclear power’s share of global commercial primary energy production declined from the 2012 low of 4.5 percent, a level last seen in 1984, to a new low of 4.4 percent. 

• Aging machinery. The average age of the world’s operating nuclear reactors is increasing and by mid-2014 stood at 28.5 years. 

• Construction delays. At least 49 of the total of 69 construction sites — including three quarters of the Chinese projects — have encountered delays, many of them multi-annual. Construction of two units in Taiwan was halted. 

• Project cancellations. Several projects have been cancelled and new programs indefinitely delayed, including in the Czech Republic and in Vietnam. 

• Operating costs soar. Nuclear reactor generating costs jumped 16 percent in real terms in three years in France, and several units were shut down in the US because income does not cover operating costs. The economic survival of nuclear reactors is also threatened in Belgium, Germany and Sweden. 

• Renewables trump nuclear. In 2013 alone, 32 gigawatts (GW) of wind and 37 GW of solar were added to the world power grids. By the end of 2013, China had 91 GW of wind power and 18 GW of solar capacity installed, solar exceeding operating nuclear capacity for the first time. China added four times more solar than nuclear reactor capacity in the past year, and Spain generated more power from wind than from any other source, outpacing nuclear for the first time. Also the first time in any country, Spain made wind the largest electricity generating source over an entire year. Spain has thus joined the list of reactor operating countries that produce more electricity from new renewables — excluding large hydro-power — than from its nuclear reactors. The others are Brazil, China, Germany, India and Japan. 

*www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/201408msc-worldnuclearreport2014-hr-v4.pdf 

For further information and full copies of all previous reports see www.WorldNuclearReport.org. — JL

Contact Us

(715) 472-4185
nukewatch1@lakeland.ws

Address:
740A Round Lake Road
Luck, Wisconsin 54853
USA

Donate To Nukewatch

News & Information on Nuclear Weapons,
Power, Waste & Nonviolent Resistance

Stay Connected