Nuclear Meltdown Watch

[seemslikeadream]

Namie, Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture

Fukushima town revealed in Google Street View two years after tsunami
Mayor of Namie invites Google's cameras in to stop world forgetting twin disasters of tsunami then nuclear meltdown

Justin McCurry in Tokyo
The Guardian, Wednesday 27 March 2013 15.36 EDT

The Fukushima town of Namie, captured by Google Street View. Photograph: Google
Two years after Fukushima's triple nuclear meltdown forced tens of thousands of residents to flee, it is possible to take a virtual journey deep into the exclusion zone to one of the towns they left behind.

Google Street View has published striking images of the devastation visited on Namie by the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown: abandoned homes, shops and restaurants, fields blanketed in grass and weeds.

Google's camera-equipped vehicles began filming in Namie this month at the invitation of its mayor, Tamotsu Baba, whose sadness at his town's fate is matched by fears that the rest of the world is forgetting about Fukushima.

For residents from towns and villages near the crippled power plant, the crisis is far from over. About 160,000 who fled the 12-mile evacuation zone, including 21,000 from Namie, are still living in temporary housing.

Those from areas closest to the site may have to wait decades before their irradiated communities are safe to live in again. Many older residents accept they will die before their homes are inhabitable; their younger relatives are trying to build new lives elsewhere.

Google's Street View imagery takes users on a 360-degree virtual tour of Namie's eerily quiet streets, its earthquake-damaged buildings and the overturned cars and fishing boats resting where they were deposited by the tsunami.

Koto Naganuma, 32, whose home was destroyed by the waves, believes some Namie residents will be upset by images of familiar places that have been out of bounds for two years, but he is excited about plans to open up parts of the town for temporary visits from next month.

"I'm looking forward to it," said Naganuma, who has visited Namie just once – and only for a few minutes – since the disaster. "I'm excited about being able to take a look at those places that are so dear to me. It will be hard, too. No one is going to be there."

Baba said viewing Google's images brought back fond memories of festivals and other communal events in a tightly knit town, whose residents are scattered across Fukushima prefecture and other parts of Japan. "Those of us who belong to the older generation feel that we received this town from our ancestors, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children," he said in a blogpost.

"Ever since the disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward and many places in Japan have started recovering. But, in Namie, time stands still.

"We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie in the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster."

Panoramic imagery of the town will be available on Google Maps, Google Earth and the Memories for the Future site, which has already carried before-and-after images of coastal communities swept away by the tsunami.

"By capturing and publishing this imagery, we hope to allow people in Namie, in Japan and all around the world to see what the town currently looks like," the company said. "We also hope that this will keep alive memories of the disaster for future generations."

The second anniversary of the disaster this month highlighted the plight of more than 300,000 people in north-east Japan who have yet to be permanently rehoused.

The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has promised to speed up the construction of homes for displaced tsunami survivors and nuclear evacuees.

Abe, who visited Namie last weekend, is to announce plans this summer for the return of residents to some areas of the evacuation zone. Abe is expected to offer a timeframe for the completion of infrastructure repairs and the resumption of health and other services in selected neighbourhoods. But the operation to decontaminate residential areas is well behind schedule and the government has not found a storage site for huge quantities of irradiated soil and rubble.

[seemslikeadream]

Fukushima meltdown appears to have sickened American infants

By John Upton

Fallout from that Fukushima meltdown thing a couple years back? It’s not just the Japanese who are suffering, though their plight is obviously the worst.

Radioactive isotopes blasted from the failed reactors may have given kids born in Hawaii and along the American West Coast health disorders which, if left untreated, can lead to permanent mental and physical handicaps.

Children born in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington between one week and 16 weeks after the meltdowns began in March 2011 were 28 percent more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism than were kids born in those states during the same period one year earlier, a new study shows. In the rest of the U.S. during that period in 2011, where radioactive fallout was less severe, the risks actually decreased slightly compared with the year before.

Substantial quantities of the radioisotope iodine-131 were produced by the meltdowns, then wafted over the Pacific Ocean and fell over Hawaii, the American West Coast, and other Pacific countries in rain and snow, reaching levels hundreds of times greater than those considered safe.

After entering our bodies, radioactive iodine gathers in our thyroids. Thyroids are glands that release hormones that control how we grow. In babies, including those not yet born, such radiation can stunt the development of body and brain. The condition is known as congenital hypothyroidism. It is treatable when detected early.

“Fukushima fallout appeared to affect all areas of the U.S., and was especially large in some, mostly in the western part of the nation,” wrote researchers with the Radiation and Public Health Project in their peer-reviewed paper published in Open Journal of Pediatrics.

The links between iodine radioisotope exposure and juvenile hypothyroidism were established after the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown. The authors of this new paper suspect that the spike in Pacific Coast cases in 2011 was linked to the Fukushima accident, but they warn that further analysis is needed “to better understand any association between iodine exposure from Fukushima-Dai-ichi and congenital hypothyroidism risk.”

Their findings may be only a tip of an epidemiological iceberg.

“Congenital hypothyroidism can be used as one measure to assess any potential changes in U.S. fetal and infant health status after Fukushima because official data was available relatively promptly,” the researchers wrote. “However, health departments will soon have available for other 2010 and 2011 indicators of fetal/infant health, including fetal deaths, premature births, low weight births, neonatal deaths, infant deaths, and birth defects.”

So stay tuned. Two years and one month after the meltdown, we’re only just beginning to understand how the nuclear catastrophe affected the health of people living around the vast Pacific Ocean.

[Iamwhomiam]

Fukushima fallout may be causing illness in American babies: Study
A young man walks through the devastation in Otsuchi, Japan. (Getty Images)

A new study from the Radiation and Public Health Project found that babies born in the western United States as well as other Pacific countries shortly after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011 may be at greater risk for congenital hypothyroidism.

Babies born in places including Hawaii, Alaska, California, Oregon and Washington shortly after Fukushima were 28 percent more likely to suffer from the illness, according to the study, than children born in those same regions one year earlier. The illness, if untreated, can cause permanent handicaps in both the body and brain.

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, "If untreated, congenital hypothyroidism can lead to intellectual disability and abnormal growth. In the United States and many other countries, all newborns are tested for congenital hypothyroidism. If treatment begins in the first month after birth, infants usually develop normally."

MSN's Healthy Living blog explains the Fukushima explosions led to clouds of radioisotope iodine-131 that "floated east over the Pacific Ocean and landed through precipitation on West Coast states as well as other Pacific countries."

In Japan, the health effects associated with Fukushima are obviously much worse. The mortality rate of elderly people who were in retirement facilities near the nuclear plant has reportedly tripled. There has also been reported increases in the number of children with flat feet, thought to be the result of kids playing on radiated soil.

Experts suggest that parents of children born in the western United States or Pacific regions in March or April 2011 get their children checked by a pediatrician for congenital hypothyroidism.

[seemslikeadream]

Radioactive water leak feared at Japan nuke plant
Associated Press | Updated: April 06, 2013 17:37 IST

Storage tanks for radiation-contaminated water in the compound of Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant
Tokyo: The operator of Japan's crippled nuclear plant said Saturday that it was moving tons of highly radioactive water from a temporary storage tank to another after detecting signs of leakage, in a blow to the plant's struggles with tight storage space.

Tokyo Electric power Co. (TEPCO) said about 120 tons of the water are believed to have breached the tank's inner linings, some of it possibly leaking into the soil. TEPCO is moving the water to a nearby tank at the Fukushima Dai-chi plant - a process that could take several days.

TEPCO detected the leak earlier in the week, when radiation levels spiked in water samples collected in between the inner linings of the tank. Radiation levels in water samples taken outside the tank also have increased, an indication of the water leak, TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono said.

Contaminated water at the plant, which went into multiple meltdowns after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan, has escaped into the sea several times during the crisis. Experts suspect there has been a continuous leak into the ocean through an underground water system, citing high levels of contamination among fish caught in waters just off the plant.

The leak is not only an immediate environmental concern, but threatens TEPCO's tight water management situation, Ono said.

The tank contains 13,000 tons of water, which is part of the water that was used to cool melted fuel at the plant's reactors damaged in the twin disasters. So much water has been used that TEPCO is struggling to find storage space.

"The impact (from the leak) is not small, as the space is already tight," Ono said. "We need to revise our water management plans."

More than 270,000 tons of highly radioactive water is already stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks and another underground tank. They are visible even at the plant's entrance and built around the compound, taking up more than 80 percent of its storage capacity.

TEPCO expects the amount to double over three years and plans to build hundreds of more tanks by mid-2015 to meet the demand.

Because of that, TEPCO is anxious to launch a new water treatment system that can purify the contaminated water. The machine, called ALPS, recently started a final test run after six months of delays due to safety requirements by government regulators.

The delay caused TEPCO to use some of seven underground tanks, originally meant for ALPS-treated water, to accommodate the contaminated water backlog as a stopgap measure.

TEPCO officials have indicated they hope to release the water into the ocean, but Ono said the company has no immediate plans to do so without public acceptance.

The plant is being decommissioned but continues to experience glitches. A fuel storage pool temporarily lost its cooling system Friday, less than a month after the plant suffered a more extensive outage.

The underground tank, several times the size of an Olympic-size swimming pool and similar to an industrial waste dump, is dug directly into the ground and protected by two layers of polyethylene linings inside the outermost clay-based lining, with a felt padding in between each layer.

The meltdowns have caused the plant to release radiation into the surroundings and displaced about 160,000 people from around the plant. They do not know when or if they will be able to return home.

[seemslikeadream]

Mothers of Fukushima Trailer

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/eur ... 93991.html

German journalists have discovered barrels of radioactive waste on the floor of the English Channel, just a handful of thousands dumped there decades ago. It was previously thought the material had dissipated. Now politicians are calling for the removal of the potentially harmful containers.

Some 28,500 containers of radioactive waste were dropped into the English Channel between 1950 and 1963. Experts have assumed that the containers had long since rusted open, spreading the radioactivity throughout the ocean and thus rendering it innocuous. But a new investigative report from the joint French-German public broadcaster ARTE has concluded that the waste is still intact at the bottom of the sea.

As part of an investigative report set to air on April 23, affiliated German public broadcaster SWR sent an unmanned, remote-controlled submarine into the canal's depths, where they discovered two nuclear waste barrels at a depth of 124 meters (406 feet) just kilometers from the French coast.

Jettisoned by both the British and the Belgians, the containers hold some of the estimated 17,224 metric tons of low-level radioactive waste dumped in the English Channel's underwater valley known as Hurd's Deep, just north of the isle of Alderney, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The British barrels are estimated to have contained 58 trillion becquerels (units of radioactivity), while the Belgian barrels held some 2.4 trillion bequerels. By way of comparison, the European Union's limit for drinking water is 10 becquerels per liter.

"We think that there are still many more undamaged barrels below," SWR journalist Thomas Reutter told SPIEGEL ONLINE, adding that it was very unlikely that the broadcaster's expedition uncovered the only intact containers in existence.

'High Potential for Danger'


In response to the discovery, members of Germany's environmentalist Green Party have called for the barrels to be removed from the channel, SWR reports. "I believe that at such shallow depths these barrels pose a high potential for danger," Green Party parliamentarian and nuclear policy spokesperson Sylvia Kotting-Uhl told the broadcaster. "And it's not for nothing that dumping in the ocean has been forbidden for 20 years."

Hartmut Nies, a German oceanic expert for the IAEA, is also in favor of removing the waste. "If it's not too complex, then of course they should be removed," he told SWR.

In response to a parliamentary inquiry from the Green Party in August 2012, entitled "Final Disposal Site Ocean Floor," the German federal government stated: "The Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH), as part of its radioactivity monitoring in the North Sea, regularly carries out monitoring runs, which went into the British Channel Most recently in August 2009. The monitoring data contained no indication of emissions from dumping areas."

[coffin_dodger]

Ex-Regulator Says Reactors Are Flawed

WASHINGTON — All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/us/ex-regulator-says-nuclear-reactors-in-united-states-are-flawed.html?_r=1&

[seemslikeadream]

Published on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 by Common Dreams
'Flood of Highly Radioactive Wastewater' Overwhelms Fukushima Crews
Latest crisis reveals intractable nature of nuclear cleanup

- Common Dreams staff
Japan's battle against the ongoing disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant has intensified as "a flood of highly radioactive wastewater" overwhelms emergency crews and highlights just how intractable the cleanup effort is proving.

As the New York Times reports:

Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.

But even they are not enough to handle the tons of strontium-laced water at the plant — a reflection of the scale of the 2011 disaster and, in critics’ view, ad hoc decision making by the company that runs the plant and the regulators who oversee it. In a sign of the sheer size of the problem, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to make room for hundreds more tanks, a task that became more urgent when underground pits built to handle the overflow sprang leaks in recent weeks.

“The water keeps increasing every minute, no matter whether we eat, sleep or work,” said Masayuki Ono, a general manager with Tepco who acts as a company spokesman. “It feels like we are constantly being chased, but we are doing our best to stay a step in front.”
Throughout the month of April, more than two years after the earthquake and tsunami that spurred the initial disaster at Fukushima, those leaks of radioactive water, as well as power outages at the plant, became a regular occurance (see here and here).

Just last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned that the plant's owner TEPCO was failing in its duty to protect essential safety systems at the plant and warned that it could be more than 40 years until the crippled plant could properly be deemed "decommissioned."

At this point, given the TEPCO's track record and what's occurring at Fukushima now, that seems like an unlikely timeframe.

To that issue, the Times spoke with Tadashi Inoue, an expert on Japan's nuclear power industry, who said: “Tepco is clearly just hanging on day by day, with no time to think about tomorrow, much less next year.”

[seemslikeadream]

[cptmarginal]

http://www.japansubculture.com/japan-la ... lting-sun/

There are some great resources linked to in that article (such as Power Politics: Japan’s Resilient Nuclear Village) so here's an excerpt:

On April 15, two alleged terrorists in Boston killed three people, injured more than 170 others and terrified a nation — for about $100 it cost them to modify pressure cookers into bombs. We should be glad they didn’t come to Japan, where they may have been able to explode a ready-made nuclear dirty bomb, kill untold thousands, render huge swaths of the country uninhabitable — and get paid by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) in the process. I wish I were kidding. Japan has more than 50 gigantic nuclear “pressure cookers” ripe for exploitation by terrorists. And they wouldn’t even have to lay siege to the facilities. Instead, they could just walk into a nuclear plant and leave with enough weapons-grade plutonium for a small atomic device — which later could be detonated wherever they chose. How?

In Japan, getting access to a nuclear power plant is very simple: fill out a job application.

It is now more than two years since the start of the nuclear crisis following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, and there are still no mandatory background checks for workers at its nuclear facilities. After the three reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear complex in March 2011, it became clear that Tepco, the plant’s operator, was allowing members of Japan’s organized crime groups, the yakuza, to staff the well-paid cleanup — just as they had been allowed into plants long before then. Indeed, members and associates of the Sumiyoshi-kai (Kanto) and Kudo-kai (Kyushu) mobs have been arrested for their roles supplying labor to Tepco and its Kansai cousin, Kepco. So the dirty secret that yakuza-linked workers and companies have long sustained Japan’s nuclear industry — along with yakuza members themselves, ex-convicts, wanted criminals, and drug addicts working there — is now public knowledge. Although many yakuza groups claim to have a protective role in society, most of their members are sociopathic felons who would commit theft, assault or murder to make a little money. And if you consider the black-market value of a little plutonium, you may feel a tad uneasy knowing such people have long had access to it — and can still get their hands on nuclear materials.

This may strike some as sort of contributing to terror-threat propaganda, but it's a bit more complex than that. The bizarre Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult had the weapons capacity to kill tremendous amounts of people with poison and radiation back in the 90s, way more than what they actually managed to pull off in the initial subway attack test. That particular group was tied to formal yakuza organizations, senior right-wing politicians, the JSDF, post-Soviet Russian mafia types and who knows what else. After reading all of the published books on Aum in the English language, I only got to the most important point in the last one: probably as much as 50% of the police accounts of the investigation are falsified. Which, of course, is standard practice in the land of the 99% conviction rate for accused criminals.

[Iamwhomiam]

It was claimed they used ricin, iirc.

[cptmarginal]

It was sarin that was used, actually. If you look into the story of Aum Shinrikyo you'll see that they were stockpiling every form of weapon they could create or acquire; guns, poisons, chemical and biological agents, radioactive material...

I've just noticed this RAND report while looking around for new information:

Aum Shinrikyo, Al Qaeda, and the Kinshasa Reactor

Though RAND is of course untrustworthy. It's interesting to see them weighing in on this topic, partly because I'm of the opinion that Aum Shinrikyo as a social phenomenon in Japan has a lot in common with the various mind-control or psy-ops programs involving publicly visible cults in the United States.

[Iamwhomiam]

Yes, of course, it was sarin gas. Not ricin. thanks for the correction cptmarginal

[cptmarginal]

They may have been trying to acquire ricin too; I can't remember. It was likely inaccurate for me to say earlier that they had the ability to "kill tremendous amounts of people with poison and radiation" but that's just a product of my frustration with mainstream superficial accounts of what the Aum cult was up to. Again it must be noted that a lot of the information we have regarding them is highly suspect because of their connections to political and organized crime entities.

Sarin was supposedly the only weapon they had the ability to use for a mass attack, but they were making a concerted and sophisticated effort to do the same on many different fronts. Helped, no doubt, by the numerous members with scientific educations from elite universities. Even wikipedia says: It attracted such a considerable number of young graduates from Japan's elite universities that it was dubbed a "religion for the elite"

Intelligence/yakuza were probably involved from the start, in my opinion. Why the sarin attacks and other incidents happened are a bit of a mystery to me, since it would be ludicrous for the Japanese security apparatus not to have been aware of what the Aum leaders were brazenly doing on an international scale. This was a religion that attracted the attention of major celebrities and the press, so there seems to have been sort of an embarrassed cover-up after things turned so crazy. I think that there is a whole background story that we aren't privy to...

Anyway, this is somewhat irrelevant to the topic at hand. Since the ability of workers to easily steal radioactive material from Japanese nuclear facilities is apparently a reality, to my mind that means Japanese intelligence agencies keep a close eye on that potential. The article I posted above makes it sound like nobody is paying attention, but I doubt it.

[seemslikeadream]

“Absolutely Every One” – 15 Out of 15 – Bluefin Tuna Tested In California Waters Contaminated with Fukushima Radiation
Posted on May 29, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog
California Fish Contaminated with Fukushima Radiation

We noted more than a year ago:

The ocean currents head from Japan to the West Coast of the U.S.

***

Of course, fish don’t necessarily stay still, either. For example, the Telegraph notes that scientists tagged a bluefin tuna and found that it crossed between Japan and the West Coast three times in 600 days:


That might be extreme, but the point is that fish exposed to radiation somewhere out in the ocean might end up in U.S. waters.

And see this.

CNN reports today:

Low levels of radioactive cesium from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident turned up in fish caught off California in 2011, researchers reported Monday.

The bluefin spawn off Japan, and many migrate across the Pacific Ocean. Tissue samples taken from 15 bluefin caught in August, five months after the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, all contained reactor byproducts cesium-134 and cesium-137 at levels that produced radiation about 3% higher than natural background sources

The Wall Street Journal quotes the studies’ authors:

“The tuna packaged it up and brought it across the world’s largest ocean,” said marine ecologist Daniel Madigan at Stanford University, who led the study team. “We were definitely surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we measured.”

***

“We found that absolutely every one of them had comparable concentrations of cesium-134 and cesium-137,” said marine biologist Nicholas Fisher at Stony Brook University in New York state, who was part of the study group.

The bad news is that it is only going to get worse.

As Reuters points out:

Unlike some other compounds, radioactive cesium does not quickly sink to the sea bottom but remains dispersed in the water column, from the surface to the ocean floor.

Fish can swim right through it, ingesting it through their gills, by taking in seawater or by eating organisms that have already taken it in ….

As CNN notes:

Neither [of the scientists who tested the fish] thought they were likely to find cesium at all, they said. And since the fish tested were born about a year before the disaster, “This year’s fish are going to be really interesting,” Madigan said.

“There were fish born around the time of the accident, and those are the ones showing up in California right now,” he said. “Those have been, for the most part, swimming around in those contaminated waters their whole lives.”

In other words, the 15 fish tested were only exposed to radiation for a short time. But bluefin arriving in California now will have been exposed to the Fukushima radiation for much longer.

As KGTV San Diego explains:

The real test of how radioactivity affects tuna populations comes this summer when researchers planned to repeat the study with a larger number of samples. Bluefin tuna that journeyed last year were exposed to radiation for about a month. The upcoming travelers have been swimming in radioactive waters for a longer period. How this will affect concentrations of contamination remains to be seen.

One of the studies’ authors told the BBC:

The fish that will be arriving around now, and in the coming months, to California waters may be carrying considerably more radioactivity and if so they may possibly be a public health hazard.

Japanese and U.S. officials – of course – are pretending that the amount of radiation found in the bluefin is safe. But the overwhelming scientific consensus is that there is no safe level of radiation … and radiation consumed and taken into the body is much more dangerous than background radiation.