Why the entire Pacific fishery could be tainted

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2013-2014

By John LaForge 

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow 

Distracting the public from the 300 tons (80,000 gallons) of highly radioactive water spreading into the Pacific Ocean every day from the triple reactor melt-through at Fukushima-Daiichi, is news of the plan to build an underground “ice wall” to dam up the poisoned water before it leaks to the sea. The project is reportedly a better plan than the failed concrete wall that Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) first built.

This frozen finger-in-the-dike won’t be completed until 2015, and it may then fail. Even if it were to work as planned, there is a risk of reversing the water flow, forcing highly radioactive water to seep out from the reactor buildings to the aquifer. Meanwhile, nothing is slowing the relentless radioactive contamination of the Pacific — the world’s largest ocean which covers about a third of Earth.

What we’re being distracted from is the threat to the fishery caused by Fukushima’s ongoing radioactive gusher. At least 300 tons of cesium- and strontium-contaminated water is still spewing into the Pacific every day. Tepco admitted in August that this massive carcinogenic hemorrhage has been going on since March 11, 2011. It amounts to about 85 million gallons — 80,000 gallons per day, for 942 days, dumped into the Pacific — and counting.

The radiation dumped by Fukushima into the environment has exceeded that of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the second worst nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima so far are 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 Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News, “The situation is not under control. Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”

Tepco estimates about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the 2006 TORCH Report by Ian Fairlie, et al, estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels. The mind-numbing “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels. A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second.

Where have all the Becquerels gone? 

Japan has decided that fish contaminated with fewer than 100 Becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg) of cesium-137 is good enough to eat. Some local officials have set a stricter bar of 50 Bq/kg.

In the US the permissible level of cesium in food is 1,200 Bq/kg. Canada allows 1,000 Bq/kg. The difference is startling. The huge discrepancy allows importation by the US and Canada of what Japan considers highly contaminated fish, vegetables and meat. Rice, fish, beef and other Japanese exports poisoned by nuclear power’s single worst nightmare is doubtless being consumed in the United States.

Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, told CTVnews that the 1,000 Bq/kg allowance is dangerous. “It has to be recognized that even Health Canada acknowledges that even those levels correspond to an increased cancer risk of eight cancers per 1,000 people exposed over a 70-year period. So these are not safe levels, even by Health Canada’s own standards,” he said.

Cesium-137 and -134 — muscle-seeking isotopes that can cause cancers and other illnesses when ingested or inhaled — were and are being dumped into the atmosphere in huge quantities by Fukushima. An April 12, 2011 warning about food contamination from the Low Level Radiation Campaign in England said, “Vegetables and other foodstuffs showing more than 50 Bq/kg of cesium indicate airborne contamination with other radionuclides. LLRC advises food with more than 50 Bq/kg should not be eaten unless there’s absolutely no choice. We recommend that the Japanese government ask for international food aid supplies to prevent its people eating contaminated food.”

The Seattle Times reported last October that researchers found small amounts of Fukushima’s cesium in albacore tuna caught off the coasts of Washington and Oregon. The albacore warning followed the May 2012 and February 2013 findings of cesium-contamination in Blue fin tuna caught off California.

The Huffington Post said Aug. 28 that out of 170 types of fish tested in the Fukushima area, 42 species were put off limits. CBS News put it a little differently Aug. 20, noting that in the same region only 16 types of fish are considered safe to catch, compared with 150 types before the catastrophe. Japanese public television reported July 11 that sea bass were found with 1,037 Bq/kg, or ten times the allowed contamination. The Tokyo daily Asahi Shimbun noted Aug. 29, 2013 that a greeling had 25,800 Bq/kg cesium, an all-time record in the 2 ½ years since the radiation gusher began. Pacific cod and black sea bream had 3,300 Bq/kg.

Environmental radioactivity bio-accumulates as it climbs the food chain. Smaller species now under Japanese fishing bans — which are eaten by the big tuna — eat species that are smaller yet. So prize fish like tuna, which can live 30 years and are at the top of the food chain, will eventually be poisoned with far more than “trace” amounts of cesium.

Professor Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says the seafloor is a major reservoir for Fukushima’s cesium. “It looks to me like the bottom fish, the fish that are eating, you know, crabs and shellfish, the kinds of things that are particle feeders — they seem to be increasing their accumulation of the cesium isotopes because of their habitat on the seafloor,” he told Science in Oct. 2012. The BBC reported Oct. 25, 2012 that flounder, conger, Pollock, rockfish, skate and the popular US imports cod, sole and halibut — all bottom feeders or demersal — “consistently showed the highest cesium counts.”

Bon appétit! 

— A version of this article was published Oct. 23 by Counterpunch.

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2013-2014

By Harvey Wasserman 

Japan’s pro-nuclear Prime Minister has finally asked for global help at Fukushima. It probably hasn’t hurt that more than 100,000 people have signed petitions calling for a global takeover; more than 8,000 have viewed a new YouTube video on it.

Massive quantities of heavily contaminated water are pouring into the Pacific Ocean, dousing workers along the way. Hundreds of huge, flimsy tanks are leaking untold tons of highly radioactive fluids.

At Unit #4, more than 1,300 fuel rods, with more than 400 tons of extremely radioactive material, containing potential cesium fallout comparable to 14,000 Hiroshima bombs, are stranded 100 feet in the air.

All this more than 30 months after the 3/11/2011 earthquake/tsunami led to three melt-downs and at least four explosions.

“Our country needs your knowledge and expertise” he has said to the world community. “We are wide open to receive the most advanced knowledge from overseas to contain the problem.”

But is he serious?

“I am aware of three US companies with state of the art technology that have been to Japan repeatedly and have been rebuffed by the Japanese government,” says Arnie Gundersen, a Vermont-based nuclear engineer focused on Fukushima.

“I have spoken with six Japanese medical doctors who have said that they were told not to discuss radiation induced medical issues with their patients. None will speak out to the press.

“Three American University professors … were afraid to sign the UN petition to Ban Ki-Moon because it would endanger their Japanese colleagues who they are doing research with.” Abe, he says (to paraphrase it politely), might not be entirely forthcoming.

Fukushima-Daiichi is less than 200 miles from Tokyo. Prevailing winds generally blow out to sea — directly towards the United States, where Fukushima’s fallout was measured less than a week after the initial disaster.

But radioactive hot spots have already been found in Tokyo. A worst-case cloud would eventually make Japan an uninhabitable waste-land. What it could do to the Pacific Ocean and the rest of us downwind approaches the unthinkable.

“If you calculate the amount of cesium 137 in the pool” at Unit #4, “the amount is equivalent to 14,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs,” says Hiroaki Koide, Assistant Professor at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.

The Unit #4 fuel assemblies were pulled for routine maintenance just prior to the earthquake/tsunami. An International Atomic Energy Agency document says they were exposed to the open air, did catch fire and did release radiation.

Since none of the six GE-designed Daiichi reactors has a containment over the fuel pools, that radiation poured directly into the atmosphere. Dozens more designed like these reactors operate in the US and around the world.

Then corrosive sea water was dumped into the pool.

Unit #4 was damaged in the quake, and by an explosion possibly caused by hydrogen leaking in from Unit #3. It shows signs of buckling and of sinking into soil turning to mud by water flowing down from the mountains, and from attempts to cool the cores missing from Units #1, #2 and #3.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the Japanese government may try to bring down the Unit #4 rods in November. With cranes operated by computers, that might normally take about 100 days. But this requires manual control. Tepco says they’ll try to do it in a year (half their original estimate) presumably to beat the next earthquake.

But the pool may be damaged and corroded. Loose debris is visible. The rods and assemblies may be warped. Gundersen says they’re embrittled, may be crumbling and removing them will be like trying to pull a cigarette from a crumpled pack.

Some 6,000 additional rods now sit in a common storage pool just 50 meters away. Overall some 11,000 rods are scattered around the site. Vital as it is, bringing Unit #4’s rods safely down is a just a small step toward coping with the overall mess.

Should just one rod fall or ignite, or buildings collapse, or cooling systems fail, radiation levels at the site could well force all humans to leave. Critical electronic equipment could be rendered unworkable. The world might then just stand helpless as the radioactive fires rage.

Gundersen long ago recommended Tepco dig a trench filled with zeolite to protect the site from the water flowing down from the mountains. He was told there was not enough money available to do the job.

Now Prime Minister Abe wants an “ice wall” to run a mile around the site. No such wall that size has ever been built, and this one could not be in place for at least two years.

Gundersen and 16 other experts have filed a list of suggestions with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Thus far there’s been no official response.

Abe’s request for global help with Fukushima’s water problems may be a welcome start.

But the fuel rods at Unit #4 embody our Earth’s most serious immediate crisis.

The team in charge of bringing them down must embody all the best minds our species can muster, along with every ounce of resource we can bring to bear.

The whole world must be watching as this operation begins.

— Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org, where the nukefree/moveon petition is linked. He is Senior Editor of www.freepress.org. His interviews on Fukushima are at the www.prn.fm, Solartopia Green Power & Wellness Show, and at EON Films.