Nukewatch

Working for a nuclear-free future since 1979

by Leave a Comment

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

 

by Leave a Comment

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. 

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

Tracking Health Casualties from Fukushima

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021
By Joseph Mangano

The recent 10-year mark since the three catastrophic reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi poses questions, such as “How many people were harmed by the huge amount of radioactivity released?”

The answer, according to many nuclear proponents: zero. The response to that answer? “Prove it.”

From the outset, the crescendo of cheerleaders asserting Fukushima harmed nobody has been loud and steady. No cancer cases, no cancer deaths. As the reactors exploded, as thousands streamed out of the area, and as enormous volumes of contaminated water poured into the Pacific Ocean, the party line has remained unchanged.

Is there any proof, any data, any evidence, supporting this belief? Only one study is under way in Japan, which identified several hundred local children who developed thyroid cancer since 2011. But researchers at the Medical University of Fukushima are quick to explain that the big number, in a disease rarely seen in children, is due only to more extensive testing, not radiation exposure. 

Any objective researcher would not accept this as “proof” and would call for studies that go beyond child thyroid cancer. The meltdown is arguably the worst environmental disaster in history. Fallout affected all of Japan, and traveled thousands of miles. But studying effects on human health is left to independent researchers.

Fukushima and the United States

The Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) has published 38 peer-reviewed journal articles on health effects of nuclear power emissions. RPHP members believe relatively small doses of exposure affect human health — a fact supported by hundreds of studies in the National Academy of Science’s Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) reports.

While Japan was the site of the disaster, and thus hardest-hit, exposure and health data from that nation has been largely unavailable. I and my colleague Dr. Janette Sherman (who died in 2019), have responded by building a database in the United States for the past 10 years.

Exposure data was first. Airborne fallout arrived on the US west coast four days after the meltdowns, and moved across the continent. Environmental Protection Agency measurements of gross beta radiation in the air from March 17 to April 30 were highest in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington (7.35 times higher than the year before, vs. just 2.38 times higher for the rest of the US.

Precipitation was next. Airborne radiation enters the food chain and human bodies from rain and snow. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data showed that in Washington state, precipitation rose from 7.76 to 12.48 inches from March/April 2010 to March/April 2011. In Oregon, the jump between the two periods was from 7.46 to 10.31 inches. These large increases made these two states the rainiest area of the country — in an area hardest-hit by Fukushima fallout.

Large rises in radiation and precipitation made the five Pacific states the focus of our studies.

Quick Publication, Quick Backlash

Finding health data was next. Most official statistics require several years to be made public; but with the constant “no cancers at Fukushima” in our ears, Dr. Sherman and I moved quickly.

One immediately available source was the Centers for Disease Control’s weekly estimate of deaths in 38 US cities, 30% of the nation. In the 14 weeks after Fukushima fallout arrived, deaths rose 4.46% compared to the same period in 2010. The change for the prior 14 weeks was 2.34%.

Projecting these changes to the entire US, suggested 14,000 additional deaths had occurred. Our article on the findings was published in the International Journal of Health Services in December 2011. We noted that RPHP founders Jay Gould and Ernest Sternglass had shown a similar spike after the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986, and estimated 15,000 excess deaths in the United States (American Medical Association News, August 1988).

The response was immediate and strong. Angry responses were published in the journal — none of which explained the unusual increase. Some took to blasting the research on social media. Final figures showed 9,000 excess deaths — with the greatest gaps in the hard-hit Pacific states.

Focus Shifts to Infants

We shifted our work to infants, who are more susceptible to radiation than adults. We followed our first article with three more in rapid order (March 2013, December 2013, and March 2015), each published in the Open Journal of Pediatrics, and each addressing infant health changes on the west coast.

In the five states, newborns born with hypothyroidism, which can be caused by radioactive iodine, jumped 16%, from 281 to 327 cases, in the period March 17 to December 31 (2010 vs. 2011). In the rest of the US, cases fell 4%. The biggest jump was in the first 10 weeks after Fukushima (28%). Rises were statistically significant.

Medical staff check radiation levels in Koriyama, Japan, in April 2011. Reports from the period noted: “Radioactive iodine found in breast milk of Japanese mothers,” The Independent, April 20, 2011. Photo: Aflo/Rex Features.

Even so, the number of cases was small. We asked the California screening program to do a special program, in which we could analyze the “borderline” newborn hypothyroid cases — those who had a high thyroid stimulating hormone level but didn’t quite qualify as confirmed cases. We found confirmed plus borderline cases rose 27% from March 17 to December 31 (2010 vs. 2011) — with a much larger number of cases (2,137 in 2011).

The next frontier was birth defects. Radiation exposure is well known to raise risk of defects in newborns, and the CDC published statistics for five of them — anencephaly, cleft palate, down syndrome, Gastroschisis, and Spina Bifida. The number of newborns born April through November with any of these anomalies jumped 13%, from 600 to 672, from 2010 to 2011. In the rest of the US, the number declined 4% — making the difference significant. Rises occurred in each state, for each defect, for babies born prematurely or full-term.

Infant Deaths and Child Cancers

In addition to immediate effects on newborns, higher numbers of infant deaths and child cancers would be expected. We plan to continue our work by focusing on these populations in the five Pacific states.

The study of Fukushima casualties is just beginning. A full review will eventually include adults, which will take decades. Of course, Japan will have the most serious hazards, as its people received the greatest radiation doses. Studies will be needed there, and throughout the world, before the full health story of the 2011 meltdowns is known.

— Joseph Mangano, MPH MBA, is executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project and author of Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment (OR Books 2012).

by Leave a Comment

UN Experts ‘Deeply disappointed’ by Decision to Discharge Fukushima Water

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021
By the United Nations News

Three independent UN human rights experts expressed deep regret on [April 15] over Japan’s decision to discharge potentially still radioactive Fukushima nuclear plant water into the ocean, warning that it could impact millions across the Pacific region. 

“The release of one million tonnes of contaminated water into the marine environment imposes considerable risks to the full enjoyment of human rights of concerned populations in and beyond the borders of Japan,” said Marcos Orellana, Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, Michael Fakhri, Special Rapporteur on the right to food, and David Boyd, Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment in a joint statement.

Given the warnings from environmentalists and some governments that the discharge would affect many people as well as the environment at large, the experts called the Government’s decision “very concerning.”

It comes after years of discussions with communities including the fishing sector (which was already severely hit by the 2011 disaster), environmental NGOs, neighboring countries, and civil society. “The decision is particularly disappointing as experts believe alternative solutions to the problem are available,” the letter said.

Noting that the water may contain quantities of radioactive carbon-14, as well as other radioactive isotopes, independent experts raised their concerns with the Japanese Government that discharging radioactive water to the Pacific Ocean threatens the health of people and planet. 

Meanwhile, in reply to expert concerns, the Japanese Government has suggested that the treated water stored in the tanks was not contaminated.

However, the experts upheld that the ALPS [Advanced Liquid Processing System] water processing technology had failed to completely remove radioactive concentrations in most of the contaminated water stored in tanks at Fukushima-Daiichi.

“A first application ALPS failed to clean the water below regulatory levels and there are no guarantees that a second treatment will succeed,” they said, adding that the technology did not remove radioactive tritium or carbon-14. 

Isotope concerns

While Japan said that the tritium levels are very low and do not pose a threat to human health, scientists warn that in the water, the isotope organically binds to other molecules, moving up the food chain affecting plants and fish and humans.

Moreover, they say the radioactive hazards of tritium have been underestimated and could pose risks to humans and the environment for over 100 years. 

“We remind Japan of its international obligations to prevent exposure to hazardous substances, to conduct environmental impact assessments of the risks that the discharge of water may have, to prevent transboundary environmental harms, and to protect the marine environment,” the experts concluded.

Special Rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country situation. The positions are honorary and the experts, who serve in their personal capacities, are not paid for their work. 

— UN News, April 15, 2021

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