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June 22, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima’s Radiation Will Poison Food “for Decades,” Study Finds

Three of the six reactors at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi complex were wrecked in March 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami. The destruction of emergency electric generators caused a “station blackout” which halted cooling water intake and circulation. Super-heated, out-of-control uranium fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 then boiled off cooling water, and some 300 tons of fuel “melted” and burned through the reactors’ core vessels, gouging so deep into underground sections of the structure that to this day operators aren’t sure where it is. Several explosions in reactor buildings and uncovered fuel rods caused the spewing of huge quantities of radioactive materials to the atmosphere, and the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean ever recorded. Fukushima amounts to Whole-Earth poisoning.

Now, researchers say, radioactive isotopes that were spread across Japan (and beyond) by the meltdowns will continue to contaminate the food supply for a very long time.

According to a new study that focused on “radiocaesium” — as the British call cesium-134 and cesium-137 — “food in japan will be contaminated by low-level radioactivity for decades.” The official university announcement of this study neglected to specify that Fukushima’s cesium will persist in the food chain for thirty decades. It takes 10 radioactive half-lives for cesium-137 to decay to barium, and its half-life is about 30 years, so C-137 stays in the environment for roughly 300 years.

The study’s authors, Professor Jim Smith, of the University of Portsmouth, southwest of London, and Dr. Keiko Tagami, from the Japanese National Institute of Radiological Sciences, report that cesium-caused “radiation doses in the average diet in the Fukushima region are very low and do not present a significant health risk now or in the future.”

This phraseology deliberately conveys a sense of security — but a false one. Asserting that low doses of radiation pose no “significant” health risk sounds reassuring, but an equally factual framing of precisely the same finding is that small amounts of cesium in food pose a slightly increased risk of causing cancer.

This fact was acknowledged by Prof. Smith in the June 14 University of Portsmouth media advisory that announced his food contamination study, which was published in Science of the Total Environment. Because of above-ground atom bomb testing, Prof. Smith said, “Radioactive elements such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and carbon-14 contaminated the global environment, potentially causing hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths.”

No less an authority than the late John Gofman, MD, Ph.D., one of the first scientists to produce plutonium, and Professor Emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, spent 50 years warning about the threat posed by low doses of radiation. In May 1999, Gofman wrote, “By any reasonable standard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose, which means that just one decaying radioactive atom can produce permanent mutation in a cell’s genetic molecules. My own work showed this in 1990 for X rays, gamma rays, and beta particles.”

The Fukushima-borne cesium in Japan’s food supply, and in the food-web of the entire Pacific Ocean, emits both beta and gamma radiation. Unfortunately, it will bio-accumulate and bio-concentrate for 300 years, potentially causing, as Dr. Gofman if not Dr. Smith might say, hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths. — John LaForge 

Filed Under: Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste, Weekly Column Tagged With: cancer, fukushima, japan, nuclear, nuclear power, radiation, radioactive waste

June 13, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Government “Low-balls” Likelihood and Radiation Effects of Reactor Waste Fuel Fires — Study

A radiation disaster, worse than the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi catastrophe in Japan, could hit the United States because of ignored risks, according to a startling new study from Princeton University. The US Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC) has greatly underestimated the risk of major radiation releases from a reactor waste fuel fire. Such reactor fuel fire could erupt in the event of a “station blackout”—the loss of off-site and emergency electric power—and the consequent boiling off of cooling water in waste fuel pools.

The wrecked waste fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi reactor No. 3, pictured in March 2013, two years after hydrogen explosions destroyed its outer shell. 

Frank von Hipple, a nuclear security expert at Princeton, and the historian Michael Schoeppner, are the study’s coauthors. The dispersed radioactive contamination from such a fire “would be an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe,” the authors conclude in their paper.

Von Hipple and Schoeppner argue that the NRC’s gross minimization of risk is the result of corporate and political interference. “The NRC has been pressured by the nuclear industry, directly, and through Congress, to low-ball the potential consequences of a fire because of concerns that increased costs could result in shutting down more nuclear power plants,” von Hipple told Science Daily. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” he said.

Waste uranium fuel rods, often called “spent fuel,” are kept in cooling pools near reactors for several years. Although still very hot, they can then be moved into so-called “dry cask” storage. While nuclear reactors themselves have emergency, back-up generators to circulate cooling water inside the “reactor core” (these generators were wrecked at Fukushima), US waste fuel pools do not have back-up, emergency  power. The pools are especially vulnerable to station blackouts.

Cooling pool water is normally pumped from a nearby lake, river or sea, and must constantly circulate and cover the waste fuel, which is the hottest and most radioactive material in the commercial nuclear industry. (Waste fuel from Navy propulsion reactors is reportedly more deadly.) Any loss of on-site electric power—like happened at Fukushima—can stop cooling water circulation, causing the water to boil away, and expose the fuel rods. Such loss of coolant can ignite a fuel fire and cause catastrophic amounts of radiation to be released.

Waste Fuel Fire Barely Avoided in Fukushima

 The world watched dreadfully in March 2011 as the station blackout at Fukushima-Daiichi threatened to cause this sort of fuel fire. The earthquake and tsunami cut off all cooling water-pumping and circulation. At a congressional hearing March 16, 2011, six days into the triple meltdowns, the head of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, said in a Congressional hearing in Washington that all the water was gone from one of Fukushima’s waste fuel pools. Although Jaczko was mistaken, the nightmare was possible, likely even, and observers counted the hours until cooling water boiled off and a fuel fire would ignite.

An in-tact cooling pool in Japan, with one “assembly” of waste fuel rods being moved in the 20-foot covering of water which keeps the hot irradiated uranium from catching fire.

The NRC has estimated, for example, that a major waste fuel pool fire at the Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania would force the evacuation of 3.46 million people from 12,000 square miles, reports Richard Stone writing in Science magazine May 24. But the Princeton researchers, who say they used a better computer modeling system, estimate that such a disaster would force 18 million people to evacuate from the surrounding 39,000 square miles.

Von Hipple’s and Schoeppner’s report followed, by only one week, a study from the US National Academies of Sciences that urges the United States to make improvements at its waste fuel pools. The NAS’ study recommends that the NRC and reactor operators upgrade monitoring of the waste pools—most do not even have a waste pool water-level monitor in the operator control rooms!—and improve the means of topping up water levels during an accident.

Another way to reduce the risk of waste fuel fires is to hurry the transfer of fuel from the cooling pools to dry casks. “As recently as 2013, the NRC concluded that the projected benefits do not justify the roughly $4 billion cost of a wholesale transfer. But the national academies’ study concludes that the benefits of expedited transfer to dry casks are five-fold greater than NRC has calculated,” Stone reported in Science.

The paper, “Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era,” was published May 26 in Science. —John LaForge

Filed Under: Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste, Weekly Column Tagged With: fukushima, NRC, nuclear, nuclear power, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, radiation, radioactive waste

October 7, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima, Japan

Fukushima Japan

Earthquake & Tsunami Stagger six Japanese Reactors Radiation Released, Fuel Melting, Broad Evacuations Ordered

Spring 2011 Nukewatch Quarterly

By John LaForge and Bonnie Urfer

News from northwest Japan is changing minute by minute after the record-breaking March 11 earthquake and tsunami-caused radiation disaster involving at least six nuclear reactors. For the first time since the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine, scrolls at the bottom of TV screens are warning, “Fuel melting at nuclear reactors,” and chances of multiple core meltdowns and massive radiation releases were being warned of by the government and by independent observers alike.

The enormous radiation risks posed by the out-of-control reactor operations forced the government in Tokyo, 140 miles away, to declare its first ever “nuclear emergency” at three complexes, Fukushima Daiichi I, Fukushima Daini II, and Onagawa, with a combined total of 13 reactors. By Tues. Mar. 15, the International Atomic Energy Agency had declared the radiation crisis a level 6 disaster on its 1-to-7 scale.

As we go to press, at least seven workers were missing after explosions rocked three reactors at the Diiachi site. The hydrogen blasts, plus two fires that broke out in the site’s irradiated waste fuel pool, caused radiation levels to spike outside the facility. Consequently, authorities ordered the evacuation of at least 500,000 people from a 13-mile radius around the complex, warned people not to drink from public water sources for fear of contamination, told others to stay indoors in spite of severe earthquake aftershocks, and began the voluntary testing of people for contamination — all while struggling to cool down three failed reactors.

The 8.9 magnitude Miyagiken-Oki earthquake of March 11 — the worst in Japanese history — struck on a busy Friday afternoon. The epicenter was 80 miles off the Northeast coast of Japan’s biggest island, Honshu, but the quake’s enormous power, and the impact of the resulting tsunami, crashed the electrical grid, cut power to over 4 million buildings, and forced the shutdown of 11 of Japan’s 55 power reactors.

The tsunami — which reached the terrifying height of 30 feet in some places — smashed with full force directly into the coastal face of the sprawling Daiichi complex, with six reactors, and to a lesser degree into the Daini site, seven miles to the south, with four.

The earthquake, the staggering tsunami and electrical blackout that resulted meant that emergency reactor cooling systems needed to kick in. But six reactors (three at Fukushima I and three at Fukushima II) completely lost cooling ability after the tsunami knocked out all 13 emergency backup generators. These back-up generators are essential during emergencies to circulate cooling water through the extremely hot reactor cores (3,400 degrees) and around the ferociously radioactive waste fuel which is kept in pools of cooling water.

Without cooling water and with back-up battery power having failed as well, the overheated fuel rods inside three Diiachi reactors boiled off their coolant and their exposed fuel rods rapidly began melting. The extreme danger is this situation is the breaching of a reactor vessel and a massive release of radiation. Having no power to operate cooling systems, the government (using military helicopters and soldiers trained for chemical, biological and nuclear warfare) rushed to deliver heavy replacement batteries to the site in order to pump or inject coolant into the cores.

All six of the failed reactors, owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), were in some danger of melting down. The government, in an eerie parallel to the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania, issued ever-widening evacuation orders over the course of the emergency. On Friday, it set a 3 kilometer radius, then 10, and then — after a massive explosion in Daiichi reactor 1 at 4:30 p.m. local time, March 12 — increased the evacuation to 20 kilometers, or 12.5 miles. That explosion tore apart the containment building that houses the reactor, leaving only skeletal wreckage around the core.

Reuters reported March 11 that pressure inside the failed Unit 1 reactor core had increased to 2.5 times its designed capacity, according to the Japanese Nuclear Safety Agency. At the same time, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told the press that Unit 2 “remains at a high temperature,” because it “cannot cool down.” The venting of gas to relieve this pressure filled Unit 1’s containment structure with volatile hydrogen, according to the Safety Agency, and led to the explosion.

A second hydrogen explosion occurred Monday and destroyed the containment structure housing Daiichi Unit 3. In a sign of the operator’s utter loss of control, the Associated Press reported that fuel rods at Daiichi Unit 2 were completely uncovered. The blast injured 11 workers and released as much radiation in an hour as would normally be expected in six months. It exposed at least 160 people to high doses and 22 received treatment for radiation poisoning.

The government, obviously fearing a large radiation release, on Saturday began preparing the distributing potassium iodide pills which can inhibit the uptake of radioactive iodine-131 by the thyroid. Reactor accidents can disperse huge volumes of radio-iodine which, in the body, seeks the thyroid and causes thyroid cancer.

Prof. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York, told ABC News on Monday, “Thank god the vessel itself, which contains the super-hot uranium, was intact. If it had ruptured you’re talking about an accident that is beyond comprehension,” to which the ABC replied: “That could still happen.”

This indeed may be what happened next. At 6 p.m. local time the 14th, a third explosion shook Daiichi Unit 2 where all the coolant had been lost and where fuel was reported to have been completely exposed. This third explosion was significantly different from the first two, since it caused a burst of radiation to be reported by the government. Observers speculated that the blast could have broken open the reactor core which may now be venting high levels of radiation to the environment.

In a last-ditch effort to cool the fuel inside the cores at Daiichi’s units 1, 2 and 3, the government and Tepco began injecting them with sea water, but the effort appeared too slow to keep the coolant from boiling away from the hot fuel. This “Hail Mary” use of seawater was only grudgingly allowed by Tepco, since salt water’s corrosive and clogging character means the reactors will be ruined and permanently closed.

According to news reports, fuel in Unit 1 has been uncovered to as much as 6 feet. Confirmation of melted fuel came Sunday March 13 when radioactive cesium-137 was detected outside the reactor, according to Yuji Kakizaki, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

As Dr. Kaku told ABC News: “Japan’s reactors are the safest in the world, but they were never designed to handle this big a quake. The seawater dump is a last-ditch effort. The alternative is to expose the core, let it melt and create a steam explosion that will blow the reactor apart.”

Radiation inside buildings including the control room at the failed Daiichi Unit 1 reached 1,000 times normal operational levels at one point Saturday, according to Tepco. This radioactivity doubtlessly was dispersed to the environment by the Unit 1’s explosion. Indeed, the Onogawa complex to the north (with three reactors) declared its own “nuclear emergency” that day — because radiation there had risen to “higher-than-permitted” levels. The government later claimed that radiation blown from the explosion at Daiichi 1 had caused the increased contamination.

Japanese industry watchdogs who translated a government report on the unfolding events Saturday found a dire prediction from the safety agency. It warned that if new cooling water couldn’t be pumped into Daiichi Units 1 and 2 by 10 p.m. local time Saturday the 12th, the fuel would be uncovered. This is what happened in Units 1, 2 and 3 where the superheated fuel began melting. Because of failed cooling systems at four other reactors, melting of fuel was highly likely at all of them.

The watchdog group, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, reported that Tepco’s official website assures the public that radiation monitoring outside its reactors “goes on around the clock year round.” However, CNIC reported March 11 that the company said at the bottom of the same webpage, “This system is currently shutdown.”

The group’s independent monitoring of radiation levels was not possible because of government evacuation orders. This has left the Japanese public and the world with only the government and company officials to rely on regarding radiation levels. The CNIC activists were skeptical about the shutdown of the monitors and suggested that it was an attempt to downplay the severity of radioactive releases.

Throughout the emergency, Japanese Prime Minister Kan repeatedly declared on television that none of the reactors were in any danger, even after Tepco announced it had begun venting contaminated steam and gas from the failed reactors’ containment structures. With the venting underway at up to five reactors, safety agency spokesman Ryohei Shiomi had the nerve to declare, “Radiation spread by the venting won’t be at a level dangerous to health.” Regulatory agencies all acknowledge that even the slightest radiation exposure increases the risk of cancer.

Although the quake’s epicenter was eight miles below sea level and 231 miles northeast of Tokyo, its power shook and destroyed buildings there.

After a September 30, 1999 radiation accident killed two workers and contaminated over 400 residents in Tokaimura, the Japanese were jolted. The New York Times reported, “many here are wondering if a wariness over nuclear hazards borne of this accident will not, indeed should not, lead to an eventual phasing out of the industry altogether.” Yet even after a 2007 quake flooded and shuddered four reactors on the other side of the island, and after five workers in the Mihama reactor were burned to death by high-pressure steam exploding from a burst duct in 2004, the country still ignores the radiation industry’s incalculable risks.

— John LaForge & Bonnie Urfer are on the staff of Nukewatch, the nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and report on nuclear power and weapons in the Nukewatch Quarterly.

plume

Tens of thousands of news articles can be read online to keep you updated on the nuclear crisis in Japan. Below are resources we have found helpful.

Japan’s Earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster

The Low Level Radiation Campaign is updating their information daily. Follow the link below.
http://www.llrc.org/

Watch coverage from Japan at:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv

Karl Grossman
http://envirovideo.blip.tv

Contact us for related articles and information from Nukewatch.


Greenpeace
Lessons from Fukushima

February 2012

Full Report
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/nuclear/2012/Fukushima/Lessons-from-Fukushima.pdf

Executive summary
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/nuclear/2012/Fukushima/Lessons-from-Fukushima.pdf

Filed Under: Fukushima Tagged With: fukushima, japan, nuclear power

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