Nuclear Meltdown Watch

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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 02, 2018 7:03 pm

Controversial Fukushima nuclear statue to be removed
A giant statue of a child wearing a radiation suit in the Japanese city of Fukushima will be removed after it sparked a huge controversy in the nuclear-hit area.
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https://www.financialexpress.com/world- ... d/1295787/


Fukushima water release into sea faces chorus of opposition

Sep 1, 2018
Citizens and environmental groups have expressed opposition to the idea of releasing into the ocean water tainted with tritium, a radioactive substance, from Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s disaster-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

“Long-term storage (of the tritium-containing water) is possible from technical and economic standpoints,” Komei Hosokawa, 63, an official of the Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, said at a public hearing held in Tokyo on Friday by a subcommittee of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy. “The radiation levels in the water will decrease during the long-term storage,” he added.

At a similar hearing held the same day in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, Aki Hashimoto, a housewife from the city, said, “I never want to see further worsening of ocean pollution from radiation.”

Opinions objecting to the release of the tritium-contaminated water into the ocean were also heard at a hearing held in the Fukushima town of Tomioka on Thursday.

After Friday’s hearings, Ichiro Yamamoto, who heads the subcommittee, told reporters that many participants in the hearings said the tainted water should continue to be held in storage tanks.

The subcommittee will study the option of keeping the water in the tanks, he added.

Tepco is lowering the radiation levels in contaminated water at the Fukushima No. 1 plant using special equipment, but the device cannot remove tritium.

The tritium-tainted water is stored in tanks within the premises of the power plant, which was heavily damaged in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

In 2016, an expert panel of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy discussed five methods to dispose of the tritium-tainted water —injection deep into the ground, release into the sea after dilution, release into the air through evaporation, conversion into hydrogen through electrolysis, and burying it after it is solidified.

The panel estimated that the ocean release is the cheapest option, costing up to about ¥3.4 billion.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/ ... 4xska3MzdQ
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 08, 2018 3:50 pm

Japan earthquake death toll 35 as thousands continue to sleep in shelters and in the airport

Sixteen-thousand fill up shelters in Japan on the THIRD DAY after killer earthquake as homes lay destroyed, 20,000 have no power and 30,000 no water supply while death toll rises to 35 and airport is hit with massive backlog of flights
The government will release emergency funds to deliver food, water and fuel for hospital power generators
Thousands of people are still sleeping in shelters following Thursday's 6.6-magnitude earthquake
Rescue workers with bulldozers and sniffer dogs are scouring through solidified mud to find more survivors
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/japan/a ... quake.html
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 04, 2018 6:38 pm

Japan rejects UN call to stop returns to Fukushima
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Japan's government lifted its standard for the acceptable level of radiation to 20 millisieverts per year from 1 millisievert after the Fukushima disaster AFP/Kimimasa MAYAMA
26 Oct 2018 06:37PM

TOKYO: Japan's government on Friday (Oct 26) rejected calls from a UN rights expert to halt the return of women and children to areas affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster over radiation fears.

UN special rapporteur Baskut Tuncak on Thursday warned that people felt they were "being forced to return to areas that are unsafe, including those with radiation levels above what the government previously considered safe."

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Japan's government lifted its standard for the acceptable level of radiation to 20 millisieverts per year from 1 millisievert.

It has been urged to revise that level back down again, but has rejected calls to do so, a decision Tuncak called "deeply troubling."

"Japan has a duty to prevent and minimise childhood exposure to radiation," he said.

But Japan's government rejected the criticism, saying Tuncak's comments were based on "one-sided information and could fan unnecessary fears about Fukushima," a foreign ministry official told AFP.

Japan's government has gradually lifted evacuation orders on large parts of the areas affected by the disaster, which occurred when a massive tsunami sent reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant into meltdown in March 2011.

But other areas remain under evacuation orders because of continued high levels of radiation.

Japan's government has pushed hard to return affected areas to normal, but has faced criticism that what it refers to as "safe" radiation levels are not in line with international standards.

Around 12,000 people who fled their homes for fear of radiation have filed dozens of lawsuits against the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of the stricken nuclear plant.

The Fukushima disaster was the worst since Chernobyl in 1986, though there has only been one death linked to it. More than 18,000 people were killed or left missing in the tsunami that prompted the meltdown.
Source: AFP/nc
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/as ... s-10867932



Radioactive water threatens Fukushima fishery's fragile gains

Plant operator plans to dump contaminated water into the ocean

November 04, 2018 19:54 JST

TOKYO -- Since a catastrophic nuclear accident seven years ago, Fukushima fishermen have made painstaking efforts to rebuild their livelihood, assiduously testing the radioactivity levels of their catches to ensure safety. Now, rapidly accumulating wastewater from the crippled power plant is again threatening this hard-won business recovery.

Faced with the prospect that there will be no more space to store tanks containing radioactive water leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings and the Japanese government are considering diluting the water and dumping it into the ocean.

Even though Fukushima's fishery has been recovering, the haul throughout the entire prefecture amounted to about 3,300 tons last year, just 10% of the average prior to the 2011 disaster. And even reaching there has not been easy.

Fish markets in the prefecture now house testing rooms filled with equipment. Staff members mince seafood caught every morning to screen for radioactivity. Such painstaking efforts gradually enabled fishermen to return to the sea, with all fishing and farming operations resuming in February this year.

But the trend could reverse if the government goes through with plans to release nuclear wastewater into the sea.

Tepco has been cooling down the molten fuel cores by pumping water into the ruined reactors. The tainted water is later taken out and treated, but the system in place does not filter out tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope.

The tritium-laced water is currently stored in tanks within the premises of Fukushima Daiichi, but space is due to run out within five years.

Tritium occurs naturally and is present in rainwater in the atmosphere. The chemical is not known to accumulate within living things, and it is assumed that it can be safely released in the ocean if properly diluted. Nuclear plants in France and elsewhere normally empty treated tritium wastewater into the sea.

Resolving the wastewater issue is a key step in achieving a sustainable fishing revival in Fukushima, according to Shuji Okuda, an official in charge of decommissioning and wastewater management at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.

"I understand that we should cooperate for revival," one Fukushima fisher said.

"But I'm afraid of the damage to our reputation," this fisher said. "I don't want them to dump anything into the ocean."

The waters off the coast of Fukushima teem with about 200 species of fish and shellfish, such as flounder, saury and surf clam.

Despite such abundant marine resources, demand for Fukushima seafood has yet to fully recover. At Tokyo's Toyosu market, wholesale prices for fish caught in the prefecture sell for about 30% cheaper than product from neighboring areas, according to a major wholesaler. Some distributors do not stock up on the prefecture's seafood for fear of driving away customers.

Before the nuclear accident, fishing boats from other prefectures would visit Fukushima harbors. Now, "they have all but vanished," said a representative at the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations.

Japan's trading partners are slowly normalizing restrictions on Fukushima exports -- Russia lifted its remaining ban in March. But despite the scientific verification of safety, many localities still block Fukushima marine products.

In turn, domestic lobbying groups are resisting plans to discharge nuclear wastewater into the ocean -- at least not until there is consensus at home and abroad that the practice is safe. "As a national representative of fishers, we oppose it," said JF Zengyoren, the nationwide federation of fishing cooperatives.

"The reputational risk is still at hand," said Tetsuji Suzuki, managing director at the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations.

"Revival should come after disaster recovery," Suzuki said.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Radioac ... gile-gains


UN envoy: Halt children's return to Fukushima

Friday, October 26, 03:37
A UN envoy has urged Japan to halt the return of children and young women to nuclear accident-hit Fukushima, calling the government's radiation exposure limit too lax. But the Japanese side is refuting the advice.

Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Baskut Tuncak on Thursday was speaking to a committee of the UN General Assembly.

The government set the exposure limit at 20 milisieverts per year as a condition for lifting evacuation orders issued for parts of the prefecture after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident.

Tuncak criticized the government for not taking into account the council's recommendation that the limit be one milisievert.

A Japanese delegate countered by saying the limit is based on a 2007 recommendation by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

He also said the government has been consulting Japanese experts on the matter, and that Tuncak's reports give Fukushima a negative reputation.

But Tuncak said the experts recommend that the annual limit be one milisievert in normal times. He added that risk remains as long as radiation levels exceed this threshold.

Tuncak urged Japan to apply the principle to children and women of reproductive age.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20181026_30/
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby Rory » Fri Nov 09, 2018 2:37 pm

Shit's on fire, yo
https://ktla.com/2018/11/08/crews-respo ... hatsworth/

https://amp.vcstar.com/amp/978261002


Long-planned cleanup of Santa Susana Field Lab delayed again, activists disappointed

Mike Harris | Ventura County Star | 2:32 pm PDT August 21, 2018

The long-planned cleanup of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, site of a 1959 partial nuclear meltdown, has again been delayed, disappointing but not surprising cleanup activists.

In January, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control said it would finally reveal what its cleanup plan for the site will be in a “decision document” to be released in the second half of this year or the first half of 2019. The department is overseeing the remediation of the 2,850-acre site in unincorporated hills just southeast of Simi Valley.

Last week, however, department spokesman Russ Edmondson said that was no longer the timetable.

“DTSC does not anticipate being able to release a cleanup decision document later this year or the first half of next year,” he said.

Asked what the new timetable was, Edmondson said, “I’ll check and if I get a better idea on timing I’ll let you know.” Edmondson didn’t get back to The Star with a new scheduled release date, and is now out of the office until Sept. 24.

But on Monday, another department spokesman, Sanford Nax, said agency officials “don’t have a firm date for the document’s release.”

Cleanup activists expressed disappointment at the latest delay.
DTSC has broken every promise it has ever made to clean up Santa Susana. In late 2010, it signed binding agreements to clean up all contamination by 2017.
Santa Susana Field Laboratory cleanup activist Denise Duffield.

“DTSC has broken every promise it has ever made to clean up Santa Susana,” said Denise Duffield, associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility — Los Angeles. “In late 2010, it signed binding agreements to clean up all contamination by 2017.

“It is criminal because people continue to be at risk from migrating contamination from that meltdown site,” she said.

William Preston Bowling, founder/director of the Aerospace Contamination Museum of Education, said, “pushing back these cleanups and their decision documents are just a way for the polluter to get away with not doing anything, waiting for all the activists to die off.”

In a related development, the U.S. Department of Energy has released proposed plans to demolish five of its inactive buildings at the site, three of which are still contaminated, said John Jones, director of the department’s Energy Technology Engineering Center. The other two buildings were previously cleaned up, he said.

The three contaminated buildings are within the department’s Radioactive Materials Handling Facility, which was built in 1958 and processed, packed and temporarily stored radioactive waste materials for offsite disposal at approved facilities, according to the proposed closure plan for that facility. It has been in “safe shutdown mode” since 2007, the plan states.

The two cleaned-up buildings are within the department’s Hazardous Waste Management Facility, which ceased operations in 1997, according to that facility’s proposed closure plan.

The tear-downs would be part of the overall cleanup of the site, Jones said. The Energy Department plans to eventually tear down all 18 of the structures it owns at the site, he said.

The public is invited to comment on the draft plans until Sept. 27.

The public can mail written comments to Laura Rainey, DTSC Senior Engineering Geologist and Project Manager, Site Mitigation and Restoration Program, 5796 Corporate Ave., Cypress, CA, 90630, or email them to her at laura.rainey@dtsc.ca.gov.

The public can also submit comments at two public meetings the toxic substances control department has scheduled.

The first will be held Aug. 30 in Woodland Hills at El Camino Real Charter High School, 5440 Valley Circle Blvd. An open house is scheduled from 6:30-7 p.m., followed by a public hearing until 8:30 p.m.

The second will be held Sept. 8 in Simi Valley at the Senior Center, 3900 Avenida Simi. An open house is scheduled from 10-10:30 a.m., followed by a public hearing until noon.

The toxic substances control department will take the public comments into consideration in deciding whether to approve the energy department’s closure plans.

The site experienced the 1959 partial nuclear meltdown when it was the Rocketdyne/Atomics International rocket engine test and nuclear facility, and was also plagued by other chemical and radioactive contamination over the years.

Most of the site is now owned by aerospace giant Boeing and is divided into four areas with northern and southern buffer zones.

Boeing is responsible for cleaning up Area 3, its part of Area 1 and the Southern Buffer Zone.

The Department of Energy’s 18 buildings are in Area 4 and it is responsible for those structures’ demolition. The department does not own any land at the site, but is also responsible for the cleanup of Area 4 and the Northern Buffer Zone.

NASA administers a smaller portion of the site and is responsible for remediating Area 2 and its part of Area 1.
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby Grizzly » Fri Nov 09, 2018 4:55 pm

Environmental factors have not been found to be involved.[2]*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroblas ... I2016Pro-2
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Image

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory

:wallhead: :wallhead: :wallhead:

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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 20, 2018 4:07 pm

Thyroid cancer impact on children and teens following Fukushima nuclear accident

More than 3,600 people died from causes such as illness and suicide linked to the aftermath of the tragedy.

Workers wearing protective suits spray adhesive synthetic resin over the ground at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)'s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

OVER 180 TEENAGERS and children have been found to have thyroid cancer or suspected cancer following the Fukushima nuclear accident, new research has found.

A magnitude 9.0 quake – which struck under the Pacific Ocean on 11 March 2011 – and the resulting tsunami caused widespread damage in Japan and took the lives of thousands of people.

The killer tsunami also swamped the emergency power supply at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, sending its reactors into meltdown as cooling systems failed in what was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

As of November, the total of dead or missing from the earthquake and the tsunami stood at 18,434 people, according to the National Police Agency.

In addition, more than 3,600 people – most of them from Fukushima - died from causes such as illness and suicide linked to the aftermath of the tragedy, government data shows.

More than 73,000 people still remain displaced, while no one is officially recorded as having died as a direct result of the nuclear catastrophe.

Cancer concerns

The accident at the nuclear power station in 2011 has also raised grave concerns about radioactive material released into the environment, including concerns over radiation-induced thyroid cancer.

Ultrasound screenings for thyroid cancer were subsequently conducted at the Fukushima Health Management Survey.

The observational study group included about 324,000 people aged 18 or younger at the time of the accident. It reports on two rounds of ultrasound screening during the first five years after the accident.

Thyroid cancer or suspected cancer was identified in 187 individuals within five years – 116 people in the first round among nearly 300,000 people screened and 71 in the second round among 271,000 screened.

The overwhelming common diagnosis in surgical cases was papillary thyroid cancer – 149 of 152 cases.

Worker death

In May, Japan announced for the first time that a worker at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant has died after being exposed to radiation, Japanese media reported.

The man aged in his 50s developed lung cancer after he was involved in emergency work at the plant between March and December 2011, following the devastating tsunami.

The Japanese government has paid out compensation in four previous cases where workers developed cancer following the disaster, according to Jiji news agency.

However, this was the first time the government has acknowledged a death related to radiation exposure at the plant, the Mainichi daily reported.

The paper added the man had worked mainly at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant and other atomic power stations nationwide between 1980 and 2015.

Following the disaster, he was in charge of measuring radiation at the plant, and he is said to have worn a full-face mask and protective suit.

He developed lung cancer in February 2016.
https://www.thejournal.ie/thyroid-cance ... 2-Dec2018/
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 27, 2018 8:41 am


Executives In Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Deserve 5-Year Prison Terms, Prosecutors Say

Bill ChappellDecember 26, 201811:50 AM ET

Prosecutors say TEPCO leaders should have known the risks a tsunami could pose to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which sits along Japan's eastern coast. Here, the Unit 3 reactor is seen this past summer, amid storage tanks of radiation-contaminated water.
Kimimasa Mayama /AFP/Getty Images
The former chairman and two vice presidents of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. should spend five years in prison over the 2011 flooding and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japanese prosecutors say, accusing the executives of failing to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe.

Prosecutors say the TEPCO executives didn't do enough to protect the nuclear plant, despite being told in 2002 that the Fukushima facility was vulnerable to a tsunami. In March of 2011, it suffered meltdowns at three of its reactors, along with powerful hydrogen explosions.

"It was easy to safeguard the plant against tsunami, but they kept operating the plant heedlessly," prosecutors said on Wednesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. "That led to the deaths of many people."

Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78; former Vice President Ichiro Takekuro, 72; and former Vice President Sakae Muto, 68, face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury. Muto and Takekuro once led the utility's nuclear division. All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.

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The stricken plant triggered mandatory evacuations for thousands of people. Prosecutors attribute 44 deaths to the incident, including a number of hospital patients who were forced to leave their facilities.

The sentencing recommendation came as prosecutors made their closing arguments on Wednesday, more than two years after the executives were initially indicted.

The next step in the case will see a lawyer for victims and their families speak in court on Thursday. But it won't be until March of 2019 that defense lawyers will deliver their closing arguments, according to Japan's NHK News.

Hinting at what the defense's argument might be, NHK cites the prosecutors saying, "the former executives later claimed that they had not been informed, and that the executives put all the blame on their subordinates."

The case has taken a twisting journey to arrive at this point. In two instances, public prosecutors opted not to seek indictments against the three TEPCO executives. But an independent citizen's panel disagreed, and in early 2016, prosecutors in the case — all court-appointed lawyers — secured indictments against the three former TEPCO leaders.

Both TEPCO and the Japanese government lost a class-action lawsuit in late 2017, when a court found that officials had not prepared enough for potential disaster at the Fukushima power plant. In that case, the Fukushima district court ordered payments totaling nearly $4.5 million to about 3,800 plaintiffs.

All told, around 19,000 people are estimated to have died in eastern Japan's triple disaster that included a powerful earthquake off the coast of Tohoku, a devastating tsunami, and the worst nuclear meltdown since the Chernobyl catastrophe of 1986.

In September, Japan's government announced the first death due to radiation that was released at the Fukushima plant.

The region is still sharply feeling the results of the calamity. As of late November, more than 30,000 people who fled the area had still not returned, Kyodo News reports.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/26/68017536 ... rosecutors
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 11, 2019 9:22 am


Radiation doses underestimated in study of city in Fukushima

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
January 9, 2019 at 18:15 JST

Workers decontaminate land in Date, Fukushima Prefecture, in 2013. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
A nuclear physicist who has drawn attention for tweeting about fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster has admitted that he and a colleague underestimated radiation doses in an article for an international scientific journal.

Ryugo Hayano, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, said the error, which he recognized on Jan. 8, was “unintentional.”

The article, carried in the Journal of Radiological Protection’s online edition in July 2017, listed average radiation doses that were one-third of the actual levels for people in Date, a city around 60 kilometers northwest of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, he said.

Hayano’s admission came after an atomic nucleus expert submitted a letter to the editor of the journal last year to point out unnatural data carried in the report.

The radiation doses in the article were based on dosimeters worn by Date residents after the nuclear accident unfolded in March 2011.

“Even if residents lived in the most contaminated area of Date for 70 years, the median of the doses would not exceed 18 millisieverts,” the article concluded.

However, Shinichi Kurokawa, professor emeritus with the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, an institute jointly used by national universities, raised doubts about the data presented in some sections of the report.

When Hayano and his colleague re-examined the figures, they found that they mistook a monthly dose recorded on a dosimeter as the figure for three months of exposure.

“Even after the error was fixed, I believe the average of annual doses will be within the 1-millisievert mark,” Hayano said.

The benchmark upper limit for radiation exposure among ordinary people is 1 millisievert a year.

Hayano has frequently tweeted about radiation levels and doses from the nuclear disaster.

He was also involved in another research paper that analyzed radiation doses among people in Date. Kurokawa also questioned the veracity of a chart in the second report.

The second report has often been cited in discussions by the government’s Radiation Council on setting standards for protecting people from radiation.

The two research papers were produced after the Date city government provided Hayano’s research team with data on radiation doses of about 59,000 residents.

But it has emerged that data for 27,000 citizens were provided without their consent.

The city plans to set up an investigation panel to find out why it occurred.

Date has a population of 61,000.
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201901090057.html
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 26, 2019 10:52 am

Former U.S. Nuclear Safety Regulator Withheld Vital Aid During Fukushima Crisis, Says Top Official

4,743 viewsJan 22, 2019, 09:06am


Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman, Gregory Jaczko and top U.S. government official for Fukushima, Charles CastoWikipedia

The nuclear safety expert in charge of the U.S. government’s response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident says he was denied critical resources by the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Gregory Jaczko.

The expert, Charles Casto, makes his allegation in a new book, Station Blackout: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Recovery.

The publication of Casto’s book comes at the same time that Jaczko is on a nationwide speaking tour promoting his own book, Confessions of A Rogue Nuclear Regulator which I recently reviewed for The Washington Post.


Jaczko’s book is focused on rehabilitating his reputation. In the fall of 2011, all four of his fellow commissioners criticized him before Congress alleging that after Fukushima, he “became increasingly irrational” and “sort of snapped.” In my Washington Post review I noted,

The NRC’s inspector general investigated and found 15 episodes of behavior that was “not supportive of an open and collaborative work environment,” including one instance when three female NRC staffers broke down crying after Jaczko berated them publicly. “It was like [the 1973 horror movie] ‘The Exorcist,’” the commissioner, a fellow Democrat, testified.

In his book, Jaczko grants that he “sometimes behaved in a way that could be described as hotheaded” and that he had a “propensity to occasionally lose my cool” — but only because he cared so much about safety.

Casto’s book reveals how the former NRC chairman contributed to the deadly panic and unnecessary evacuation.

Five days after a tsunami triggered meltdowns at Fukushima, Jaczko told Congress that he and his NRC colleagues thought water had drained out of a pool where used fuel was being cooled, which would have made a bad situation much worse.

Casto says he was unaware that Jazcko was going to testify that the pool was empty. "I was stunned when I heard his statement," writes Casto. “I hadn’t even had a conversation about the condition of the spent-fuel pool with him.”

In Confessions Jaczko describes his testimony as “unfortunate,” but does not apologize. "I was just stating the facts as we understood them."

But, writes Casto, “It was not his job to make predictions or assess conditions that he didn’t really understand.”

Early in the crisis, Casto says he made an urgent request to Jaczko, by phone, for additional staff and other resources.

His reaction was not positive. The number of staff requested struck Jaczko as beyond our mandate to provide consultation and advice.... At one point in the conversation, the chairman said to me, “Stop and take thirty seconds to take a breath.” That struck me as demeaning. It wasn’t as if I were panicking; I was using my decades of training, experience, and the experience for which I’d been hired to lead… The result of the call was clear. I would have to compromise.

Casto's testimony is troubling because he is the rare NRC official who Jaczko singles out for praise in his book. Writes Jaczko,

Chuck Casto, the lead NRC expert in Japan, was my most trusted advisor there. His efforts to gain the trust of everyone with whom he worked helped make this crisis much less difficult to resolve… He told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear.

Jaczko isn’t the only anti-nuclear advocate to praise Casto. The former director of nuclear safety for the anti-nuclear Union of Concerned Scientists told The Chicago Tribune that Casto was somebody who could be trusted. "He's not a used-car salesman," David Lochbaum told the Tribune for 2012 profile of Casto. "He doesn't want to just ignore the bad.”

In his book, Casto describes how anti-nuclear propaganda made the Fukushima accident worse.

“Anti-nuclear activists and contrarian nuclear experts (who lacked detailed information about the unfolding crisis) took to social media to speculate about the condition of the plant,” writes Casto. “This ‘fake news’ fueled the panic and undermined our best efforts to calm the fears of embassy dependents and the public.”


As a result, far more people were harmed by the fear-mongering than by the trace quantities of radiation that escaped from the stricken plant. Writes The Financial Times:
There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima, according to the government’s Reconstruction Agency, from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide; so far, there has not been a single case of cancer linked to radiation from the plant.

That is prompting a shocking reassessment among some scholars: that the evacuation was an error. The human cost would have been far smaller had people stayed where they were, they argue.

“The government basically panicked,” Dr. Mohan Doss, a medical physicist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, told The New York Times. “When you evacuate a hospital intensive care unit, you cannot take patients to a high school and expect them to survive.”

Radiation scientist Philip Thomas of the University of Bristol told the Financial Times, “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”

Since leaving government, Jaczko has started Wind Future LLC, a for-profit company that promotes itself as offering “the right mix of knowledge and experience to make wind energy a feasible and profitable renewable energy source.”

In Confessions, Jaczko sings his praises to the “ever-decreasing cost of renewable energy and natural gas” but never discusses their safety record. Natural gas and wind energy, it turns out, have death tolls that are 22 times and nine times higher, respectively, than nuclear energy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe ... e2879e1d52




Fukushima Tank Leaked 300 Tons Of Radioactive Water Since 2016

25 Jan 2019 - 06:52 by Local Press Report
TOKYO

Tokyo Electric Power Company says it has determined that water containing radioactive substances leaked from a tank at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant for more than two years. The company says there is no impact on the environment. Officials later found that the water level of a nearby tank had dropped since around November 2016. They say about 300 tons of water leaked from the tank.
https://www.ooskanews.com/story/2019/01 ... 016_177580



Greenpeace slams Japan’s plan to dump radioactive Fukushima water into the ocean
The decision by the government and the tsunami-devastated plant’s operator to release contaminated water into the Pacific was ‘driven by short-term cost-cutting’, a new study has found
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 22 January, 2019, 5:32pm

Julian Ryall

Released on Tuesday, the Greenpeace study condemns the decision taken after the disaster to not develop technology that could remove radioactivity from the groundwater, which continues to seep into the basement levels of three of the six nuclear reactors at Fukushima.
An estimated 1.09 million tonnes of water are presently stored in more than 900 tanks at the plant, which was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, with up to 4,000 tonnes added every week.

The decision by the government and the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), to avoid developing the relevant technology “was motivated by short-term cost-cutting, not protection of the Pacific Ocean environment and of the health and livelihoods of communities along the Fukushima coast”, said Kazue Suzuki, campaigner on energy issues for Greenpeace Japan.
“We have raised the water crisis with the UN International Maritime Organisation and firmly stand with local communities, especially fisheries, who are strongly opposed to any plans to discharge contaminated water into their fishing grounds.”
Controversial Fukushima statue of child in radiation suit to be removed

The backlash against the plan jointly put forward by the government and Tepco began late last year after the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) held public hearings in Tokyo and Fukushima designed to convince local people that releasing the water into the ocean would have no impact on marine or human life.



An estimated 1.09 million tonnes of water are presently stored in more than 900 tanks at the Fukukshima plant, which was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, with up to 4,000 tonnes added every week. Photo: AFP
Anti-nuclear and environmental groups had obtained data leaked from government sources, however, that showed that the water was still contaminated, triggering public anger. Tepco was forced to admit late last year that its efforts to reduce radioactive material – known as radionuclides – in the water had failed.
The company had previously claimed that advanced processes had reduced cancer-causing contaminants such as strontium-90, iodine-129 and ruthenium-106 in the water to non-detectible levels.
Despite the much-vaunted Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) plant at Fukushima, Tepco has confirmed that levels of strontium-90, for example, are more than 100 times above legally permitted levels in 65,000 tonnes of water that have already been through the ALPS system.
Fukushima episode of Netflix’s Dark Tourist sparks offence in Japan

In one of the hearings, Tatsuhiko Sato, a resident of Naraha who only returned to his home last spring because of contamination from the nuclear accident, accused Tepco of “not gathering all the data” and failing to adequately investigate reports that dangerous levels of radionuclides were still in the water after it was treated.
Local fishermen used the public hearing to express their “strong opposition” to plans to release the water, with one, Tetsu Nozaki, pointing out that while levels of radiation in locally caught fish and shellfish have been at or below normal levels for the past three years, releasing contaminated water would “deal a fatal blow” to the local fishing industry.
A Fukushima local sells seafood products to tourists. Photo: Handout
There has also been anger in some nearby countries, with environmental groups demonstrating in Seoul in November and Korea Radioactive Watch declaring that releasing the water “will threaten the waters of South Korea and other neighbouring nations”.
The issue was also part of a referendum held in Taiwan in November, with voters asked whether the government should maintain the ban on imports of food and products from areas of Japan that were most seriously affected by radiation from the disaster.
Japan’s trade ministry, however, still refuses to rule out the possibility that the water will be poured into the Pacific.
Japan rejects UN call to stop women, children from returning to Fukushima

“We have established a committee to discuss the treatment of the water that is presently being stored and those discussions are still going on,” Shinji Hirai, director of the ministry’s Nuclear Accident Response Office, told the Post.
“There are five proposals being discussed, including releasing the water into the ocean or storing it underground, and we have not set a deadline for the committee to reach a decision.”
He declined to comment on the findings of the Greenpeace report.
But others have welcomed the new study, with Caitlin Stronell, spokeswoman for the Tokyo-based Citizens’ Nuclear Information Centre, also expressing opposition to plans to dump the water into the ocean.
The Greenpeace report says the only viable option to safeguard local communities and the environment is to continue to store the water. Photo: Kyodo
“There needs to be a lot of consultations before any decision is reached on what to do and it cannot simply be the government making an arbitrary decision,” she said. “The whole story of the Fukushima disaster has been one of lies and half-truths from the authorities and it is very hard to trust anyone in Tepco or the government on this issue.
“People’s opinions have been completely disregarded in the rush by the government to tell us how everything is just fine and we believe the people from the region, those who have lost the most, cannot be overlooked or neglected.”
‘There is hope here’: Fukushima wants tourists to look beyond the legacy of 2011 nuclear meltdown

The Greenpeace report concludes that the water crisis at the plant will remain unresolved for the foreseeable future – and that the only viable option to safeguard local communities and the environment is to continue to store the water.
“The Japanese government and Tepco set an objective of ‘solving’ the radioactive water crisis by 2020 – that was never credible,” said Shaun Burnie, a nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany.
“The reality is that there is no end to the water crisis at Fukushima, a crisis compounded by poor decision-making by both Tepco and the government. Discharging into the Pacific is the worst option and must be ruled out.”
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asi ... hima-water




Abe makes sales pitch for Fukushima sake at Davos

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND -

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other Japanese officials toast with sake produced in Fukushima Prefecture during the Japan Night event in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday. | KYODO
On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting on Wednesday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a sales pitch for sake produced in Fukushima Prefecture.

At the Japan Night event in Davos, Abe advertised Yamato no Kokoro, produced in Fukushima’s Aizuwakamatsu from rice that his wife, Akie, grew in Yamaguchi Prefecture, where his electoral home district is located.

In the past, it would have been unthinkable for a sake brewer in the Aizu region to use rice from Choshu — now Yamaguchi — Abe said in a speech, noting that the Aizu and Choshu domains fought against each other in a civil war amid the 1868 Meiji Restoration.

Yamato no Kokoro is a symbol of peace, he said.

“I hope you’ll enjoy Japanese food and sake, the strongest of the country’s soft powers, and visit Japan to enjoy the real stuff,” Abe said.

The prime minister was making an appearance at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting for the first time in five years. Abe made a speech at the Davos conference and stressed the need to promote free trade.

He returned to Japan on Thursday evening.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/ ... Exzkq3MzdQ




Governor promotes Fukushima food in Hong Kong amid post-disaster import restrictions

HONG KONG -
Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori, on a visit to Hong Kong which kicked off Thursday, has worked to promote the safety of food from his prefecture, home to the heavily damaged Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

Hong Kong introduced restrictions on food imports from the prefecture after a triple meltdown occurred at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power station, which was inundated by tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.

Uchibori is the first Fukushima governor to visit Hong Kong after the disasters for the promotion of local food products.

During his stay, Uchibori met with officials of an industry association related to Japanese food. He also paid a courtesy call on a senior Hong Kong government official in charge of import regulations.

The official said that Hong Kong will consider whether to relax the restrictions on Fukushima food while closely watching the pace of recovery in food imports from four nearby prefectures —Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Chiba — according to Uchibori. Hong Kong eased its restrictions on food from the four prefectures last year.

At a seminar for Hong Kong journalists on Friday, Uchibori stressed that he will redouble efforts to ease concerns over Fukushima food as much as possible, noting that more than 80 percent of all exports of Fukushima-made agricultural, forestry and fishery products had been shipped to Hong Kong before the disasters.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/ ... ExzGK3MzdQ
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 02, 2019 5:49 pm

Japan, Fukushima operator told to pay over 2011 nuclear disaster

today

Around 12,000 people who fled after the disaster due to radiation fears have filed various lawsuits against the government and TEPCO [File: Toru Hanai/Reuters]
A court in Japan has awarded nearly $4m in new damages to 152 residents forced to flee their houses after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown eight years ago, the world's most serious nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

The Yokohama district court on Wednesday ordered the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) to pay 419.6m yen ($3.8m) to the residents, a court spokeswoman told AFP news agency.

Triggered by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake, a tsunami crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in March 2011, overwhelming reactor cooling systems, causing multiple meltdowns and sending radiation over a large area that forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate.

Nearly 19,000 people were killed or went missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods in the massive earthquake and tsunami.

Presiding judge Ken Nakadaira said the government and TEPCO "could have avoided the accident if they had taken measures" against the tsunami, according to public broadcaster NHK.

The verdict was the fifth time the government has been ruled liable for the disaster in eastern Japan.

In March last year, a court in Kyoto, western Japan, ruled that both the government and TEPCO were responsible and ordered them to pay 110m yen ($992,300) to 110 residents.

However, in a separate case in September 2017 in Chiba near Tokyo, the court ruled that only the operator was liable.

Around 12,000 people who fled after the disaster due to radiation fears have filed various lawsuits against the government and TEPCO.

Cases have revolved around whether the government and TEPCO, both of whom are responsible for disaster prevention measures, could have foreseen the scale of the tsunami and subsequent meltdown.

Dozens of class-action lawsuits have been filed seeking compensation from the government.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/ ... 22469.html


Image
Urban explorer Bob Thissen, from The Netherlands, took to an eerie abandoned games hall in Fukushima that had been left in near pristine condition after the Fukushima nuclear disaster which saw over 160,000 people flee the area and leave their lives behind
Image
The once vibrant and enchanting SEGA games hall now lies abandoned and with a distinct chill of abandon. Mr Thissen had to hike through bushes to avoid police patrols before he could enter the games hall. The Japanese government has put exclusion zones around the area to protect people from potential radiation

Image
Some of the games included in the abandoned site are Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong and House of the Dead (pictured). Mr Thissen had tried to get into the abandoned arcade hall in 2017 but because there was a lot of renovations and radioactive clean-up he was unable to get in
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 12, 2019 4:27 pm

Japan marks 8th anniversary of 3/11 disaster in Tohoku region. More than 50,000 people remained displaced from their homes on March 11 as the nation marked the eighth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear accident.


Image

Radioactive Glass Beads May Tell the Terrible Tale of How the Fukushima Meltdown Unfolded

The microscopic particles unleashed by the plant’s explosions are also a potential environmental and health concern

Andrea ThompsonMarch 11, 2019
Radioactive Glass Beads May Tell the Terrible Tale of How the Fukushima Meltdown Unfolded
The Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power plant after a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 14, 2011 in Futaba, Japan. Credit: Getty Images
On March 14 and 15, 2011, explosions unleashed invisible radioactive plumes from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, crippled three days earlier when the strongest recorded earthquake in Japan’s history triggered a massive tsunami. As the plumes drifted over the neighboring countryside, their contents—including radioactive cesium, a by-product of the plant’s fission reactions—fell to the ground and over the ocean.

What no one knew or expected was the fallout also contained bacteria-size glassy beads, with concentrations of radioactive cesium that were far higher than those in similar-size motes of tainted dust or dirt.

Since these particles were discovered in 2013, scientists have plucked them from soil samples and air filters throughout the contamination zone, including filters as far away as Tokyo. The beads could pose an under-recognized heath risk, researchers say, because they are tiny enough to be inhaled deep into the lungs—and their glassy makeup means they may not easily dissolve or erode. They also present an opportunity to conduct what one researcher called “nuclear forensics”: By analyzing the particles’ composition, scientists can piece together a clearer image of what happened during the white-hot violence inside the plant itself, and of the current condition of the debris in the three reactors that experienced meltdowns. This could help inform the strategy for cleaning up the ruins of the plant.

Researchers say a picture of the unusual beads is coming into focus against a backdrop of the Japanese public’s general nuclear wariness, and the government’s desire to put the Fukushima incident behind it—particularly with Tokyo poised to host the 2020 Olympics. “I think, unfortunately, the reaction to this discovery [of the beads] has been not very welcomed in Japan,” says Rod Ewing, a mineralogist and nuclear materials expert who co-directs the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.


An autoradiograph image of a radioactive cesium microparticle, which shows the relatively high levels of radioactivity contained in the particle. Credit: Dr. Satoshi Utsunomiya
“The Only Clue”

It was initially thought all the radioactive cesium released in the Fukushima plumes was in a water-soluble form, and would disperse more or less evenly throughout the environment. But when aerosol specialist Yasuhito Igarashi, then of the University of Tsukuba, and his colleagues examined an air filter from the Meteorological Research Institute in Tsukuba, 170 kilometers southwest of Fukushima, they noticed the filter contained radioactive hotspots. Using specialized imaging techniques they detected high concentrations of radioactive cesium as well as bits of iron and zinc, packed into particles just a couple of microns in diameter (about the size of the average Escherichia coli bacterium). Subsequent studies noted these bits were encapsulated in silica, giving them a glassy texture. Particles found within a few kilometers of the power plant also contained nanosize pieces of uranium dioxide, the nuclear fuel used in the plant.

Because the cesium-rich particles were born early in the meltdown, they offer scientists an important window into the exact sequence of events in the disaster. Indirect evidence suggested the tsunami knocked out the reactors’ cooling water systems, causing the nuclear fuel to heat up. As temperatures rose, steam corroded the metal cladding on the plant’s containment vessels (which enclose the nuclear fuel), giving off hydrogen gas in the process. A spark finally caused the hydrogen to explode, breaching the reactors and releasing the radioactive plumes. The specific structure of the glassy microparticles and the ratios of elements they contain form a record of the sequence of chemical reactions that took place. For scientists, this can help flesh out the time line—and illuminate the current state of the debris in the plant’s melted reactors, which remain off-limits due to high radiation levels. The beads are “the only direct evidence of the debris remaining inside the reactor. That’s the only clue,” says Satoshi Utsunomiya of Kyushu University, who studies environmental threats from various nanoparticles.

The beads’ composition tells researchers, for example, that the cesium (along with some other fission products that vaporized in the high temperatures during the meltdown) ultimately condensed like raindrops, glomming onto bits of iron dioxide and zinc dioxide that had been generated as the containment vessel and cladding corroded. The particles’ glassy texture shows temperatures in some spots reached the extremely high levels needed to melt and vaporize silica.

Utsunomiya thinks that happened when the containment vessels finally failed and dropped down onto the reactor’s concrete pedestal: Some of the silica in the concrete vaporized into silicon dioxide, which condensed around the particles. Larger, millimeter-scale particles found closer to the plant seemed to get their silica from the insulation in the cladding, according to an analysis done by Tom Scott, a professor of nuclear materials at the University of Bristol, and his colleagues.

It is possible each reactor unit underwent slightly different meltdown processes, yielding particles with characteristic makeups. Pinpointing what went wrong in each reactor helps tell those working to clean up the plant what they might be dealing with in the radioactive plant wreckage, as well as “better understand the mechanisms and the contributing factors” involved in the disaster, Scott says—“because if you understand that, you can prevent it happening ever again.”

A Sharper Picture Emerges

Scott’s group works with scientists from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (which is tasked with spearheading the research to support the Fukushima cleanup), and is also using details it gleans from the beads to refine maps of contamination and radiation risk in the area around the plant. Although the microparticles were apparently not distributed as widely as other forms of radioactive cesium—some of which were blown around the globe—they have turned up throughout the most contaminated areas. Utsunomiya and his colleagues have found as many as 318 particles in a single gram of soil near the plant. They also discovered the particles blew farther than anyone initially anticipated. Some were found in an air filter in Tokyo, about 240 kilometers from Fukushima.

Although less radioactive cesium fell on Tokyo than closer to the plant, a bigger proportion of the total was packed into the microparticles, the team’s findings suggest. However, publication of the full study describing those findings, initially slated for 2017 in Scientific Reports, was postponed after researchers with the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Technology Research Institute (TIRI)—which had provided an air filter sample to one of the study’s authors—objected to the study over the sample’s use by the other co-authors. A 2017 investigation by several institutions in Japan found no evidence of wrongdoing by the co-authors—and “there’s never, in any of the discussion, been concern about our scientific results,” says Ewing, the Stanford nuclear materials expert who is also a study co-author.

But for two years the study was “caught in limbo,” he says. The co-authors said they were unable to talk about the study’s findings for this article because of the journal’s restrictions on discussing studies prior to publication—but a description of the key finding appeared in a subsequent study, also published there. Then, last Friday the journal (which is owned by the same parent company as Scientific American) withdrew its offer of publication for the study, citing its inability to adjudicate the sample issue. The journal said it would reconsider publishing the work if that issue is resolved, according to correspondence shown to Scientific American. The researcher at TIRI who initially objected to the publication referred all questions to Scientific Reports, which declined to comment on the study specifically, but said through a spokesperson that journal editors do not settle disputes on issues such as ownership of data and materials.

Understanding how the microparticles move and how far they spread, including to places like Tokyo, is crucial to assessing any potential environmental and health risks they may pose. Utsunomiya, who has spoken with residents concerned about the particles, is trying to figure out how long it will take for these beads to dissolve in water; their glassy casing means they are likely to break down slowly, their radioactive components leaching out like a timed-release medicine capsule, as Ewing describes it. If dissolution happens slowly enough, though, it could mean the radioactive elements decay before the particles fully dissolve. Calculations of radiation doses from similar particles also suggest there is little concern about radiation exposure from the cesium in the particles—even if inhaled deep into the lungs. But Scott is concerned about the uranium that has been found in some of the particles, as well as the potential for some to harbor plutonium—both of which are chemically toxic. Uranium-containing particles seem to be limited to a relatively small area very near the plant, however, and it is unclear if the amounts of either element would be large enough to pose a significant concern.

Researchers are also finding these particles can congregate in certain areas such as river bends or in drain downspouts, where they collect after being washed from rooftops by rain. This could potentially create hotspots. Scientists additionally want to understand how easily these particles might get re-suspended in the air; some research suggests they become naturally buried into the soil quite quickly, which would reduce the risk of their being re-suspended, Scott says. Understanding the particles’ behavior could help guide decontamination efforts, which so far have included removing the top layer of soil and pressure-washing buildings and roads in the contamination zone.

As studies of these particles continue to accumulate, researchers are gradually gaining an improved understanding of them—“much better than we had a year or two ago,” Scott says. “But there are still unanswered questions.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -unfolded/



Ex-Tepco execs' lawyers make final plea for acquittal over negligence in Fukushima nuclear crisis

Mar 12, 2019

Two people wearing protective suits and masks talk in front of the No. 3 reactor building at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, on Feb. 18. | REUTERS
Lawyers for three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. called for their acquittal in their final defense plea on Tuesday in a negligence case stemming from the Fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011.

The defense team said that it was impossible for them to foresee the massive tsunami that engulfed the Fukushima No. 1 power plant and caused fuel meltdowns following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake that rocked the coastal Tohoku region.

The day after the nation marked the eighth anniversary of the March 11, 2011, disasters, the lawyers for Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78, Tepco chairman at the time of the crisis, and Ichiro Takekuro, 72, and Sakae Muto, 68, both vice presidents, told the Tokyo District Court they “do not recognize any predictability in the disaster.”

The three men have been indicted for allegedly failing to take measures against the massive tsunami and causing the deaths of 44 hospital inpatients and injuries to 13 others during the evacuations prompted by fuel meltdowns and hydrogen explosions at the plant.

Court-appointed lawyers acting as prosecutors have called for five-year prison terms for the three, claiming they could have prevented the nuclear disaster had they fulfilled their responsibilities in collecting information and taking safety measures.

Tepco had estimated that a tsunami up to 15.7 meters could strike the southern side of the Fukushima plant based on the government’s long-term evaluation of quake risks in 2002, but did not take specific safety measures before the Tohoku earthquake occurred.

The defense team argued they could not predict a tsunami hitting the eastern side of the plant based on the government evaluation and said installing coastal levees would not have prevented the disaster.

The three were charged with professional negligence resulting in deaths and injuries in 2016 by the court-appointed lawyers after an independent panel of citizens mandated indictment.

The panel’s decision came after Tokyo prosecutors decided against charging the three over the world’s worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl crisis.

A total of 37 hearings have been held since last June, during which many current and former Tepco officials, as well as earthquake and tsunami experts, were questioned.

The six-reactor plant located on the Pacific coast was flooded by tsunami triggered by the quake, causing the reactor cooling systems to lose their power supply.

The Nos. 1 to 3 reactors subsequently suffered fuel meltdowns, while hydrogen explosions damaged the building housing the Nos. 1, 3 and 4 units.

As a result, around 160,000 people were evacuated at one point, and more than 40,000 people remain displaced today.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/ ... IgWZa3MzdQ


Fukushima grapples with toxic soil that no one wants

Justin McCurryMon 11 Mar 2019 04.25 EDT
Eight years after the disaster, not a single location will take the millions of cubic metres of radioactive soil that remain


Workers at a soil separation facility for decontamination work in Okuma. Photograph: Issei Kato/Reuters
Not even the icy wind blowing in from the coast seems to bother the men in protective masks, helmets and gloves, playing their part in the world’s biggest nuclear cleanup.

Away from the public gaze, they remove the latest of the more than 1,000 black sacks filled with radioactive soil and unload their contents into giant sieves. A covered conveyor belt carries the soil to the lip of a huge pit where it is flattened in preparation for the next load. And there it will remain, untouched, for almost three decades.

It is repetitive, painstaking work but there is no quick way of addressing arguably the most controversial physical legacy of the triple meltdown that occurred eight years ago at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

In the years after the disaster, about 70,000 workers removed topsoil, tree branches, grass and other contaminated material from areas near homes, schools and public buildings in a unprecedented ¥2.9tn (£21bn) drive to reduce radiation to levels that would enable tens of thousands of evacuees to return home.

The decontamination operation cleaned generated millions of cubic metres of radioactive soil, packed into bags that carpet large swaths of Fukushima prefecture.

Flowers for earthquake victims have been placed near the tsunami-stricken town of Namie in Fukushima prefecture. Photograph: Jiji Press/EPA
Japan’s government has pledged that the soil will moved to the interim storage facility and then, by 2045, to a permanent site outside of Fukushima prefecture as part of a deal with local residents who do not want their communities turned into a nuclear dumping ground.

But the government’s blueprint for the soil is unravelling: so far, not a single location has agreed to accommodate the toxic waste.

While workers inside the ruined nuclear plant struggle to contain the build-up of more than 1m tonnes of radioactive water, outside, work continues to remove, process and store soil that will amount to 14m cubic metres by 2021.

The task is expected to take another two years, according to Jiro Hiratsuka, an environment ministry official who is guiding a small group of foreign journalists, including the Guardian, around the interim storage facility.

“We are required by law to find a final storage place outside Fukushima, so it can’t be kept here indefinitely,” Hiratsuka said. “It’s true that we have yet to find an appropriate location, but a lot will depend on how much space we need and the level of radioactivity in the soil.”

There is opposition, too, to the idea of using soil with lower radiation levels – or less 8,000 becquerels per kilogram – as the foundation for roads, embankments and other infrastructure in Fukushima.

Smoke billows from fires raging at the port in Tagajō, Miyagi prefecture, in March 2011 after a massive earthquake and tsunami. Photograph: Kim Jae-Hwan/AFP/Getty Images

The storage facility straddles the towns of Okuma and Futaba, located west of the power plant, where radiation levels are still too high for residents to return. So far, 2.3m cubic metres of soil – about 15% of the total – have been brought to the site.

The operation involves thousands of workers, including drivers who make 1,600 return trips every day. So far, 355,000 trucks have been used – and officials say they need more.

“I am aware that some people are saying it would be better to keep it here, but the people of Okuma and Futaba have had a really tough time, and they agreed the soil could be kept here on the condition that it would eventually be moved out of Fukushima,” Hiratsuka said.

Despite the decontamination efforts, only a small number of residents who were ordered to leave after the triple meltdown have returned to neighbourhoods where evacuation orders have been lifted, according to local government data.

A poll by the Asahi newspaper and a local broadcaster found that almost two-thirds of evacuated residents felt anxious about radiation despite official claims that decontamination work had been a success.

As Japan marked the eighth anniversary on Monday of the magnitude-9 earthquake and deadly tsunami that triggered the Fukushima meltdown, environmental groups warned that some “safe” neighbourhoods still contained radiation hotspots.

A Greenpeace investigation revealed high levels of radiation in areas that had been declared safe, and accused the government of misleading the international community about the risks faced by returning evacuees and decontamination workers.

Rows of black bags at a soil storage facility in Fukushima. Not a single location in the entire country has agreed to accommodate the toxic waste. Photograph: Issei Kato/Reuters

“Some areas still have significantly high levels of radiation,” said Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Germany who is based in Japan. “They are much higher than background radiation before the accident.”

Minoru Ikeda, who took part in the decontamination effort, said workers cut corners to meet strict deadlines. “There were times when we were told to leave the contaminated topsoil and just remove the leaves so we could get everything done on schedule,” he said. “Sometimes we would look at each other as if to say: ‘What on earth are we doing here?’”

He was sceptical of official claims that a permanent home would be found the for soil. “I don’t believe for a minute that they will be able to move all that soil out of Fukushima,” he said. “The government has to come up with a plan B.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... adioactive


The Fukushima nuclear disaster's legacy: An inescapable stigma

Commentary: Pockets of innovation, like a drone testing field, have some hoping the region sheds its notoriety. But it's not that simple.

Roger ChengMarch 7, 2019 5:00 AM PST
The J-Village hotel and sports complex in Fukushima was immaculate, its grand lobby welcoming us with bright lights and pristine marble floors. Several furnished conference rooms stood ready to host one event after another.

There' was just one jarring thing: the utter silence throughout the facility.

Fixing Fukushima is a CNET multi-part series that explores the role technology plays in cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster in history.
It was our first night in the Fukushima region, and my photographer, James Martin, and my interpreter had arrived a little after 10 p.m. Initially, we weren't sure if this was the right location – we seemingly had the only vehicle in the parking lot, and a quick search of those conference rooms found no staff.

It wasn't until we located the reception desk, tucked out of sight from the main lobby, that we found another human. The employee noted that only 15 guests were staying in the 200-room hotel.

Welcome to Fukushima.

That first night proved to be one of the more memorable moments in a trip that included a visit inside one of the most radioactive hotspots in the world, a look at a massive underground ice wall and a virtual reality experience that took me to places no human could survive. It stood out because it illustrated the long way this area has to go before any semblance of normalcy can return.

When reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melted down in 2011, the disaster didn't just displace more than 160,000 people -- many of whom have yet to return -- it marked the region with a stigma that may never go away. I'll never forget the scenes of the tsunami wiping away whole cities broadcast on television, or reading about the meltdown. The urge to see just how a country comes back from such devastation drove me to pursue this assignment.

Now playing: Inside Fukushima: Standing 60 feet from a nuclear disaster

Eight years on, there's been little progress with the actual cleanup. While three of the six reactors have been safely decommissioned, the remaining three have proven to be such a challenge that Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, just last month finally succeeded in sending a robot down to the Unit 2 reactor to pick up some of debris in the highly radioactive core.

japan-reference-4891
The lobby of the J-Village hotel and sports complex.

In some ways, it's unfair to place the entire burden of the radiation scare upon Fukushima. One of the most surprising things I learned was just how massive Fukushima actually is. It's the third-largest prefecture in Japan and is split into three regions: the coastal Hamadori, which is where Daiichi lies; the central Nakadori, an agricultural hub and home to the capital, Fukushima City; and a mountainous region in the west known as Aizu. Only Hamadori was affected by the disaster, yet everyone feels the pain.

Still, I witnessed pockets of life return even in the areas close to Daiichi. J-Village, for instance, was once a national training center for the Japan football (soccer) team. But immediately after the earthquake and meltdown, it transformed into a staging area for thousands of workers dealing with the nuclear disaster and the reconstruction of the surrounding area.

The robots going inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
Fukushima turns to robots to fix the future
18 Photos

That it's up and running again as a sports complex and hotel is a point of pride for locals.

"For those of us from Fukushima who live here, we try to live as we did before," says Shunsuke Ono, managing director of the facility. "For people outside of Fukushima, there's a feeling that Fukushima is not normal."

Tepco and local government officials are pushing the concept of an "Innovation Coast" in the region through facilities like the Naraha Center for Remote Control Technology and the Robot Test Field in nearby Minamisoma. The idea is to tap into the investment already being made in the cleanup effort and create a Silicon Valley of robotics and drone technology.

"What we want to do is turn that on its head and create a positive image of Fukushima around the world," Akifumi Kitashima, director of the robot industry promotion unit for the Fukushima prefectural government, says through an interpreter.

Tepco, meanwhile, has attempted to assuage the concerns of the locals who've returned, including offering free dosimeters and investing in drones to scare away the wild boar that come down from the mountains to inhabit the abandoned houses and buildings.

Tepco has also set up nursing care training facilities, offers home visit inspections and removes the weeds at local cemeteries. Masaaki Hanaoka, executive general manager of international affairs for Tepco's Fukushima Revitalization Headquarters, talks about the festivals it's sponsored and its attempt to promote tourism in the area.

What we want to do is create a positive image of Fukushima around the world.
Akifumi Kitashima, director with the Fukushima prefectural government

But there are reminders of the disaster everywhere. Drive on the nearby Joban Expressway and you'll periodically run into signs with a readout of the radiation level. The daily weather report on the local evening news contains an update on the radiation in the area.

I periodically drove past fields containing hundreds of bags of radiated dirt.

At the same time as my tour of Daiichi in November, former Tepco executives were in court to deal with charges of professional negligence. Despite Tepco's efforts to clean the mess up, there continues to be mistrust of the company and of nuclear power.

The Fukushima Daiichi meltdown caused a chilling effect on the use of nuclear power around the world. If it wasn't for stepped-up production in China, the generation of nuclear energy would be down over the last few years.

In Japan, only nine of the 35 nuclear reactors have switched back on, and there remains public concern over the use of nuclear power, according to the World Nuclear Industry's 2018 status report. It's unlikely any nuclear reactors in Fukushima will see life again.

But ridding itself of nuclear power isn't going to reverse the damage done to Fukushima -- both to the land and to its reputation. The cleanup effort could take upward of $70 billion and at least 40 years.

Locals hope it doesn't take that long for the reputation to recover.

"Our message is just come and see us," Kitashima says. "What we like them to see is that this area, which was an evacuation area, has recovered and life goes on."
https://www.cnet.com/news/the-fukushima ... le-stigma/


Fukushima Nuclear Accident’s 8th Anniversary: Book Review: An Alarming Inside View from the Top of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Today, March 11, marks the 8th anniversary of the devastating nuclear accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan in 2011. The ramifications of the triple nuclear meltdown continue today as thousands of Japanese are still displaced and an extremely complicated cleanup effort continues. On this somber anniversary, we wanted to call attention to the regulatory side of the nuclear power industry here in the U.S. and highlight a unique perspective from a former regulator, Gregory Jackzo, who was Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the accident and recently released a book about his experiences, which include the U.S. response to the #Fukushima disaster.

Sara Barczak | March 11, 2019 | Nuclear

Photo courtesy of greensefa CC by 2.0
Today, March 11, marks the 8th anniversary of the deadly earthquake and subsequent tsunami that led to the devastating nuclear accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan in 2011. The ramifications of the triple nuclear meltdown continue today as thousands of Japanese are still displaced and an extremely complicated, expensive and dangerous cleanup effort that will span decades continues. The disaster did push Japan towards a safer, clean energy future with massive growth in renewables while the vast majority of nuclear plants still remain closed. On this somber anniversary, we wanted to call attention to the regulatory side of the nuclear power industry here in the U.S. and highlight a unique perspective from a former regulator, Gregory Jackzo, who was Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the accident. Mr. Jaczko recently released a book about his experiences, which include the U.S. response to the #Fukushima disaster. Below is a book review from a long-time friend of SACE, Don Safer, board member of the Tennessee Environmental Council and Know Nuclear Committee Chair of the Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club. I supplemented Mr. Safer’s review with links to additional information. –Sara Barczak, SACE Regional Advocacy Director

An Alarming Inside View from the Top of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Former Board Chairman Jaczko Excoriates NRC by Don Safer

In January 2019, Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator, a book by former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory (NRC) Commissioner (2005 to 09) and Chairman (2009 to 12) Gregory Jaczko was released. It provides an important, troubling look at the work of the NRC during those years, which include the 2011 Fukushima triple meltdown of the U.S. designed Japanese reactors. The book is accurately described on the jacket cover as “a shocking expose’ from the most powerful insider in nuclear regulation about how the nuclear energy industry endangers our lives – and why Congress does nothing to stop it”.

In the Prologue Jaczko describes the NRC as: “an agency overwhelmed by the industry it is supposed to regulate and a political system determined to keep it that way.” The book is his personal story of how he evolved from a “nuclear power moderate” concerned with nuclear safety at the start of his time on the commission to a full-blown nuclear industry critic with the message: “nuclear power will never be safe.” It is also the national story of the capture of the NRC’s work by wealthy, powerful utility and nuclear industry proponents. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says it very well on the book’s jacket back cover: “The infuriating inside story of how a corrupt, outmoded, and inefficient nuclear industry maintains its market position against safer, more efficient forms of renewable energy by hoodwinking and corrupting Congress and co-opting the regulators.”

The book is a very important read for all interested in nuclear safety. If you are new to the questions and challenges that nuclear power poses it provides a critical look at the agency tasked with protecting the public’s safety from nuclear power’s unique immediate and incredibly long term biological and environmental threats. It should help to dispel unwarranted trust in the NRC, utilities and often uninformed elected officials.

If you are a seasoned, skeptical and even cynical veteran of many years of engagement on the issue you will be nodding your head in agreement and find your frustrating and exasperating experiences in advocating for nuclear safety and sanity explained, put into context and validated.

Jaczko documents the economic and political power of the nuclear industry, its ability to control the U.S. Congress, and its near total capture of the NRC Commissioners. This explains the convoluted, irrational and dangerous regulatory decisions that result in mind benders like “Waste Confidence”, the multiple lives of TVA’s zombie reactors at Bellefonte, burying spent fuel rods next to the ocean at San Onofre, California and the list goes on and on and on. He also documents Congressional bullying of the NRC when the industry feels pressure from the agency to improve safety.


Book review author Don Safer, Board member, TN Environmental Council; Know Nuclear Committee Chair, TN Chapter of the Sierra Club
The information and perspective in the book about the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster is especially valuable. Jaczko experienced the terror of an out of control nuclear accident with multiple explosions and a triple melt-down. He realized the unwarranted hubris of many: “most nuclear safety professionals believed plants were effectively designed to prevent the events we were now seeing.” (p 79) He learned of all the horrifying effects and possibilities and was profoundly changed by it. He summarizes the results of three independent Japanese investigations of cause the meltdowns and explosions:

“the nuclear power regulators were too accommodating to those they were supposed to regulate. They worked together to create what one report called a ‘nuclear village,’ not an idyllic hamlet where business and government worked in harmony for the good of all but a corrupt, toxic environment.” (p 71)

He recognized a similar situation in the U.S. and was shocked by the inadequacy of the U.S. regulatory response to use what was learned to improve nuclear reactor safety in the U.S. He finally concluded that it is impossible to make “reactors impervious to catastrophic releases of radiation”. (p 116)

Jaczko is not the first former NRC Commissioner to become a critic of the agency and the industry, but he is the first former Chairman. Former Commissioners Peter Bradford (1977-82) and Victor Gilinsky (1974-84) are vocal critics. More common is the use of the lucrative revolving door between cooperative Commissioners and the nuclear industry (see the August 2, 2016 article in The Ecologist by Linda Pentz Gunter on the NRC). It is not a surprise that Jaczko had a very difficult time finding any employment after he was forced out of the NRC.

This book is an important addition to the works of the many critics of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear enterprise.
https://cleanenergy.org/blog/fukushima- ... ommission/
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby Grizzly » Tue Mar 19, 2019 12:14 pm

Efforts to normalize life in Fukushima 8 years after the meltdowns appear to be successful if trends in media consumption are any indication. Articles marking the anniversary were eclipsed by other breaking stories.[6]


https://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-at-eight-ongoing-cover-up-of-the-nuclear-hazards-in-japan-and-abroad/5671690

The group Simplyinfo.org has been undertaking extensive ongoing research and analysis of the Fukushima disaster and its aftereffects. In its recently released annual report*, Simplyinfo presented a number of astonishing and grim revelations.

The report estimated the threat of radioactive microparticles created by the meltdowns as possibly “the single largest ongoing risk to public health from the Fukushima disaster.” According to the research, these pieces of material from the nuclear fuel meltdowns are small enough to be inhaled or ingested and lodge in major organs of the human body where they continually irradiate cancer-causing levels of radiation, making them much more hazardous than the external sources of radiation being monitored by health authorities. [3]

The report also highlighted startling instances of negligence and cover-up. One notable example was the case of Dr. Shunichi Yamashita. He had downplayed the health risks in public meetings, but was discovered through an internal memo retrieved from an ‘off-site center’ set up as a central commend for the disaster to have warned of ‘a serious possibility of thyroid damage to children in the region.’ [4]

As the radioactive contamination continues to be a concern the Japanese government of Shinzō Abe is inviting the world to visit Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics. The authorities are maintaining that the situation has been contained. Officials have decided to have the city of Fukushima host baseball and softball games, and are even having the iconic torch run start in Fukushima. [5]

Efforts to normalize life in Fukushima 8 years after the meltdowns appear to be successful if trends in media consumption are any indication. Articles marking the anniversary were eclipsed by other breaking stories.[6]

This week’s instalment of the Global Research News Hour strives to impress on our listenership that the Fukushima event, if it does not constitute an extinction level event, it is certainly an ongoing health and environmental hazard deserving of at least a portion of the public attention currently directed to climate change.

Dr. Helen Caldicott appears in the first half hour of our program. She collaborated with other experts to provide a one of a kind volume detailing the medical and ecological costs of the Fukushima catastrophe. She returns to the program to update listeners on what is known about the ongoing health dangers, the lack of transparency around the casualties, and the extent of the suppression and misrepresentation of the truth by the Japanese government, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization and the media.

We next hear from Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education. The nuclear industry watchdog shares his understanding of the spread of nuclear contamination at Fukushima, the Japanese government’s bid to distract the public with heavy investment in and promotion of the 2020 Olympics, and the general tendency of governments and regulators to put the health of the industry above the safety of the public. He also addresses some of the background of the Three Mile Island incident which took place 40 years ago this month in Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg.

*http://www.fukuleaks.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/SimplyInfoOrg_2019_annual_report_Fukushima_finalc.pdf
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 18, 2019 10:01 am

Fukushima’s Final Costs Will Approach A Trillion Dollars Just For Nuclear Disaster
Michael Barnard
For a year or two, I’ve been asserting that the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster would cost closer to a trillion US dollars when all costs were accounted for. Recently, I was challenged on this point and decided to document and argue my thesis.

Let’s start with principle accountability. Yes, if the tsunami had not occurred, the Fukushima reactor would not have a problem. But that’s facile. If a wind or solar farm had been where the reactor is, it would have been destroyed and the loss would have been trivial in comparison.

It’s also important to point out that the earthquake and tsunami killed thousands directly and slightly fewer indirectly. The reactor meltdown is expected to statistically shorten the lives of a few people. This isn’t a cost comparison of lethality, or a diminishment of the lethality of the earthquake and tsunami.

However, it’s important to understand that the nuclear generator is core to a series of follow-on costs.

First, there’s the basic cost of clean up of the reactor site itself.

Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion. The Japan Center for Economic Research, a private think tank, said the cleanup costs could mount to some $470 billion to $660 billion, however.

TEPCO indicates that it will take 30–40 years. That’s 3–4 decades of expensive management, execution, and governance. The solutions to the problem have been somewhat intractable so far. The site is very small. If it had anything else on it, the costs would have been orders of magnitude smaller. Site cleanup costs over 3–4 decades of this magnitude are very localized, while the earthquake and tsunami were much less localized.

It’s also important to note that the nuclear technology was comparatively ancient and had insufficient passive safety features, and that it was built in an area known to be inundated with tsunamis. If it had been located uphill a bit, none of these costs would exist. If the flood management system had been designed with a tsunami in mind, most of these issues would have been avoided. But the reactor was sited poorly and protected poorly from understood risks. These are nuclear generation issues, not tsunami issues.

My experience includes billion-dollar multiyear programs in various parts of the world. They never get cheaper or shorter unless requirements fundamentally change. They usually get more expensive and longer. My gut tends to support the JCER’s numbers, and more likely higher in the range. Let’s call it $600 billion for now. And remember, this is just the cleanup of the reactor site, nothing else.

The next lever to question is exports. I’ve tended to lump the Japanese automotive industry’s post-Fukushima challenges in with the reactor rather than the earthquake and tsunami. In researching this answer, of course the reality is more nuanced than either-or.

Image

This graphic is of Honda Group’s automotive exports. There’s a very clear signal in the data that something related to Fukushima caused a significant drop in exports after the disaster.

However, this is the entire Japanese auto industry’s perspective.

Image

That’s right, 2012 was up appreciably in terms of exports. But then it dropped again in 2013 and 2014 as Honda continued to increase. What’s going on?

There were two separate things happening. The first was direct disruption of automotive manufacturing and distribution facilities by the earthquake and tsunami. That was a big impact and relatively quickly improved. Toyota was hard hit, for example.

Toyota hasn’t been immune to the after-effects of the natural disaster that hit Japan in March. Toyota and its affiliates have three factories in the Tohoku region, a center for auto making in Japan, that suffered greatly because of the tsunami. According to Japan’s Cabinet Office figures, the Tohoku region accounts for about 8% of the country’s gross domestic product.

But then we get the radioactive cars concern.

Radiation concern bars Japanese car shipment
Mythbuster: Can cars imported from Japan be radioactive?
Radioactive Used Cars Being Sold in Japan
Radioactive cars from Japan keep turning up in Central Asia
This is the mostly irrational part of the equation. The cars in question were too far from Fukushima to have been irradiated and were so lightly ‘radioactive’ that flying in a passenger jet is worse, but still, people are weird about radiation after decades of Hollywood and — ironically — Japanese movies demonizing radiation.

The combination has had a toll on Japanese automotive (and other) exports. Barring Fukushima’s impacts, one would assume a return to pre-2008 fiscal meltdown exports by now. But basically they’re static. That’s in the range of $200 billion in lost exports just for the automotive industry.

It’s likely fair to attribute $20 to $50 billion of that to irrational fear of radiation. And once again, that’s solely due to the nuclear plant’s technology, siting, and safety systems, not the tsunami itself.

No nuclear plant, no fear of radiation.

So we’re up to $650 billion. What else? Well, now we have the nuclear exclusion zone. This is a 2013 map of it.

Image

It’s about 30 kilometers by 5 kilometers for a total of about 150 square kilometers. This was an economically productive region. The region including the zone had a population of close to a million. Its industries included “Information and telecommunications, electronic parts, electrical machinery, chemicals, beverages” as well as agriculture.

Fukushima Prefecture produce became undesirable in and outside Japan, even when much of it was actually safe, as radiation levels vary according to areas and products.

Yeah, back to that irrational fear of radiation.

About a 100,000 people are still not able to return home, and the exclusion zone once again has a decades-long lifespan. If we take Japan’s GDP and divide it by the square kilometers we see that it’s about 13,000 per year per square kilometer. We can adjust that upward quite a bit because this region was obviously not an unpopulated mountainous or island region, but highly productive, industrialized and intensely used industrial land. It’s probably closer to $13 million per square kilometer. 150 square kilometers over 30 years makes that another $60 billion in economic losses.

No nuclear plant, no exclusion zone. That puts us around $710 billion.

Next, let’s look at the electrical generation. Here’s a useful EIA chart.

Image

Prior to the Fukushima disaster, ~30% of Japan’s electricity came from nuclear power plants. There’s an obvious line on the chart that plunges to zero, and that’s nuclear generation. The Japanese government made the call to shut off all nuclear generation until they’d been vetted for safety after Fukushima. Overreaction? Not according to the economic workup so far, regardless of anything else.

But that had direct and indirect costs too. The first is that as nuclear plunged, coal and gas jumped. Japan doesn’t have fossil fuels. Gas jumped from about 280 TWh to almost 400 TWh of generation, a leap of about 43%. Coal jumped from 280 TWh to about 340 TWh, a pop of roughly 21%. Here’s the thing about those jumps. Coal and gas are commodities that have decade-long markets in some cases. Want a lot more on short notice, you pay through the nose. Eventually that stabilizes and prices optimize again, but the 43% extra gas was probably a 100% cost increase and the 21% extra coal was probably a 50% cost increase. Let’s look at a nice, current chart from Lazard (as gas and coal haven’t changed that much).

Image

Gas is $41-$74 per MWh. Coal is $60-$143. They would have already been in the top 50% of those ranges already due to lack of in-nation reserves, but they probably would have been out of those ranges afterward. And given the expectation of the return of nuclear, they would have been paying premium prices the entire time.

What does the math suggest? Pre-Fukushima, let’s call it $60 for gas and $90 for coal because a lot of those costs are fuel. Nuclear was operational, not new, and built when it was cheap due to ignorance and optimism. It was probably cost $70 for the nuclear per MWh.

Post-Fukushima? Gas at $74 and coal at $143 easily due to premium fuel pricing. At 75% averaging factor over the likely 20 years it will take to replace the nuclear with restarted nuclear, wind, and solar, that’s about $100 billion in extra fuel costs.

All due to the nuclear part of the Fukushima disaster. That puts us around $810 billion.

And then there are the negative externalities of coal and gas. Let’s look at this Union of Concerned Scientists of the USA report.

A 2013 study also assessed the economic impacts of fossil fuel use, including illnesses, premature mortality, workdays lost, and direct costs to the healthcare system associated with emissions of particulates, NOx, and SO2. This study found an average economic cost (or “public health added cost”) of 32 cents per kWh for coal, 13 cents per kWh for oil, and 2 cents per kWh for natural gas [47].

Hmm… that’s another $22 billion for unexpected health costs due to burning extra fossil fuels. That could put us at $833 billion. But it’s tricky. Is this an extra cost now, or an avoided cost earlier? As weird as it sounds, only $22 billion is relatively immaterial in this workup.

So there we are. There’s a reasonable case for an identifiable $800 billion in costs for the nuclear portion of the Fukushima disaster. It’s not hard to see that a 40-year recovery period along with costs excluded from this could add 25% to that without breaking a sweat.

That’s why I say that when all the costs of Fukushima are added in, it’s easy to see that it will be close to a trillion US dollars. Feel free to quibble, but realize that in quibbling, you might get the number down to half a trillion dollars if you are persistent and generous.

I hope this helps answer the question of whether the major costs of the Fukushima disaster — outside of human lives — are heavily skewed by the nuclear reactor’s presence, and that without it the costs would have been much, much lower.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fu ... -disaster/



Japan Removes First Nuclear Fuel Rod From Fukushima Power Plant
Ryan Whitwam

It has been more than eight years since the Tōhoku earthquake struck Japan, resulting in a devastating tsunami and damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Several reactors at the plant went into meltdown, causing widespread contamination of the region. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) has just taken a major step toward cleaning up the site by removing the first spent-fuel assembly from reactor 3. Of course, they did it with a robot after figuring out how to keep them from dying.

The March 11, 2011 earthquake caused a 49-foot (15-meter) tsunami to come crashing down on the Fukushima plant. The water flowed easily over the sea wall protecting the facility, flooding the turbine buildings. Reactors 1, 2, and 3 all overheated and melted down. The build-up of hydrogen gas caused explosions that scattered radioactive debris across the landscape. It was a horrific accident that could have been even worse if not for the fact that the three other reactors were offline for inspections.

Tepco expects it will take decades to completely clean up the site, and the first major step in that process is removing the radioactive fuel rods from the melted-down reactors. Previously, Tepco removed all the fuel rods from reactor 4, which did not experience a meltdown. The company was supposed to begin removing fuel from reactors 1-3 in 2014, but technical issues and continued high levels of radiation delayed plans.


Fukushima Daiichi following the meltdown.
Earlier this year, Tepco started testing the technology employed in the new operation. It used a small remote-controlled probe to scoop up radioactive debris from the bottom of reactor 2. This week, Tepco used a remote operated crane to grab one of the fuel rods and remove it from its rack. The crane carefully lowered the rod into a storage cask that will eventually house many more rods. Once sealed, Tepco plans to move the casks to an on-site storage pool.

Reactor Unit 3 holds 514 spent-fuel assemblies and a further 52 unpent-fuel assemblies. Removing all of them is not an overnight task. Tepco hopes to have seven more low-risk fuel assemblies removed by June. It will take until at least March 2021 to have reactor 3 cleaned out. Work to remove the fuel rods from reactors 1 and 2 will start in 2023. The ruined Fukushima plant has 1,573 spent and unspent-fuel rods across all its reactors. Even when the operation is complete, it could be years before people are allowed back inside the core exclusion zone.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/289 ... ower-plant
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby chump » Thu Jun 13, 2019 5:15 pm


http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2019/06/n ... .html#more

TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 2019
Nuclear Meltdown at HBO

There is no particular reason why you should be aware of this, but HBO, in collaboration with British Sky, has created a miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster. I have not watched it, but I have read multiple analyses and discussions of it by those who have, and who can also claim the Chernobyl disaster as their particular area of expertise. Based on their collective verdict, I will not watch it, because it is basically shit, and I have much better things to do with my time. So do you. The miniseries isn’t interesting; what is interesting is why and how it was made. Armed with this understanding, we will know what to look out for.

First of all, let us point out that HBO and Sky are but minor divisions within two vast mass media conglomerates, WarnerMedia (worth $85.4 billion) and Comcast (worth $187 billion). If this miniseries were a Russian propaganda exercise, ordered by the Kremlin, then it would have been made by state-owned entities VGTRK and First Channel; but the US (and its British subsidiary) are run by an oligarchy which carries out its propaganda exercises through private corporate entities. Nevertheless, it is still a propaganda exercise, and it is very interesting to ask, What is being propagandized, and for what purpose?

The screenplay appears to have been based on the book Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarussian fiction writer who writes in Russian. Although Wikipedia claims her to be an investigative journalist and historian, her real genre is historical fantasy of the tendentiously anti-Russian macabre variety. It works well on those who enjoy having their negative emotions manipulated and not at all on those who enjoy a balanced perspective and objectivity. You know, one self-important lady-writer’s senseless, bloody mayhem could also be construed as altruistic acts of patriotic heroism by men whose sacrifices have built and preserved the great Russian nation. Oh, but Alexievich isn’t even a Russian; she has just been borrowing Russia’s language and culture to make a bit of money.

Another one of her books was on the Afghan conflict and has been widely discredited by those who took actually took part in it. She wrote it after just a 20-day visit to Kabul five months before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and it was a fabrication pretty much from beginning to end. But Russophobia pays (in the West) and Alexievich has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature (which has been highly politicized all along). As a sort of homage, I suppose, Alexievich has been written directly in the screenplay of the HBO miniseries as one Ulyana Khomyuk, a sort of Ukrainian Erin Brokovich.

The miniseries has been praised for its obsessive-compulsive attention to the details of the late Soviet-era lifestyle. Apparently, no effort was spared in collecting period props at flea markets throughout Belarus and the Ukraine, and those who had lived in the USSR during that period were impressed by the verisimilitude of the setting. But that’s the extent of the show’s praiseworthiness; the rest is a litany of lies, as attested by the very lengthy lists of outright fabrications and distortions compiled by several analysts who have thorough firsthand experience of the disaster. I can’t recommend that you watch it; I know I won’t. As I said, the show itself doesn’t matter; what matters is why it was made, and what that means.

Based on all of my research, major nuclear accidents are rarely accidental. The ones that are truly accidental are hushed up; the ones that aren’t are widely publicized. You have probably heard about Three Mile Island, Chrernobyl and Fukushima; but have you heard about the Windscale reactor fire at Sellafield in the UK in 1957? It burned for three days and spread radioactive contamination all over the UK and Europe. That was an actual accident: somebody forgot to turn on cooling fans, and somebody else preferred to sit around drinking tea instead of responding to an alarm.

As far as the other three, there is a strong whiff of mystery to them. In the case of the Three Mile Island, valves controlling the flow to a secondary cooling circuit were inexplicably left closed for several work shifts. When an over-temperature condition occurred, the reactor had to be shut down in a hurry, which it was. Nevertheless, operators then fiddled with circulator pumps until the tops of the fuel assemblies became exposed to air and overheated, releasing hydrogen and gaseous radioactive isotopes into the reactor containment vessel. The operators then vented the radioactive gas to an expansion tank outside the containment vessel but the vent valve got stuck and the venting went on until the expansion tank had to be vented to the atmosphere. The result was a smallish radioactive fart—too small to reliably measure above background radiation and definitely too small to have any measurable adverse effects on public health.

When you cross-multiply the probabilities of the entire cascade of events that led all the way to the little radioactive fart, you get such an infinitesimally small probability of the overall event that it beggars the imagination. At the same time, great pains were taken to drive the population into a state of panic and to provoke an entirely unnecessary evacuation in which 17 people died in car accidents as they fled in horror. As always, it is useful to ask, quo bono? Who benefited from this ridiculous exercise of first staging a mindbogglingly unlikely accident, then publicizing it with the goal of whipping the public into a paroxysm of fear and despair? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that this appears to have been done for the benefit of the federal bureaucracy. You see, nuclear energy is one industry that is most frequently, and most successfully, organized as a government monopoly, but in the US the ideology of free enterprise dictates that it be handled by private companies. In order for the federal government to assert control over the nuclear industry (which it did) it had to thoroughly undermine public trust in privatized nuclear industry (which it did).

Now let’s look at Fukushima. There, three reactors were running at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, and all three were successfully shut down. Nevertheless, over the following days, all three reactors melted down, roughly one a day. The reason given for the meltdowns is that there was no electricity to power the cooling pumps because the electric grid was out while the backup diesel generators were flooded out by the tsunami.

But there is more to this story. Here are some bullet points to consider:

• Nuclear power stations are constructed out of a great deal of concrete, rebar, steel plate and other very sturdy materials that can stand up to any tsunami; but the doors to the building that contained the diesel generators was made of… plywood! That’s right, it was specifically designed to break away when hit with a bit of water. A sliding screen of oiled rice paper with a drawing of Mount Fuji on it would have worked just as well.

• Diesel engines will run even when fully submerged provided their air intakes are fitted with snorkels, and are not too hard to restart even after they’ve been flooded out. If compressed air tanks are available, they can be restarted without any electricity. But in this case the electrical switching panels (which do not respond well to being flooded out) were installed in the basement, which filled with water.

• Naturally occurring earthquakes have a certain specific signature on a seismograph: they start small and get bigger as the rock being moved picks up speed. Nuclear explosions, on the other hand, start with an instantaneous big bang and then die down as the shockwaves propagate away from the epicenter. The Fukushima earthquake is an imposition of the two signatures: it looks like a nuclear depth charge that triggers an earthquake… that produces the tsunami that floods out Fukushima (because it was delicately arranged for just that purpose).


• At the time of the earthquake and tsunami the US aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was cruising offshore, close to the epicenter of the earthquake, and a bunch of sailors on it got radiation poisoning (and later sued the US government for and received monetary compensation for the harm they suffered).

• At the time of the Fukushima disaster a large release of radioactive Cesium 137 was mapped by satellite, and the location of the release was not over Fukushima but several hundred miles offshore, near the epicenter of the earthquake. From there it spread all over the planet. Calculations showed that the reactors at Fukushima could not have produced the required quantity of Cs-137; that would have required the use of a nuclear bomb.


• Also at the time of the Fukushima disaster the US nuclear power industry was looking at a major shortage of enriched uranium. During the previous years it operated on mixed-oxide fuel provided by Russia as part of the megatons-to-megawatts program, in which Russia ground up its excess plutonium, combined it with uranium and provided it to the US for a modest fee, but this program was scheduled to end. Meanwhile, the effort to build uranium enrichment facilities within the US did not succeed (earlier diffusion-based methods were no longer practical while gas centrifuges are very tricky to design).

• If the nuclear power stations in the US could not be refueled (and there is somewhere around 100 of them) then the US would be facing major blackouts. But Japan had backup fossil fuel-based generating capacity for every last bit of its nuclear power capacity, and its nukes could be shut down without triggering blackouts. Handling this crisis on a commercial basis would have resulted in exorbitantly high electricity rates, triggering a wave of bankruptcies and causing a financial collapse.

• Japan is not a sovereign nation but has remained under US military occupation ever since World War II. Its nuclear power industry has been controlled by the US through major government contractors such as General Electric. The US had already nuked Japan once before, so there was a precedent. The dramatically overhyped disaster at Fukushima has caused the Japanese public to become extremely adverse to the use of nuclear power, which neatly solved the problem of enriched uranium shortage.

Now, moving on to the Chernobyl disaster. It was by far the worst nuclear disaster in history, because there the entire contents of a nuclear reactor were spat up into the sky, spreading long-lived radioactive contamination over a very wide area. And, once again, the theory that it was an accident appears significantly weaker than the theory that it was not an accident. Here are some points to help us weigh the evidence.

To make things simple, nuclear reactors are like cars: safe if safely operated, manifestly unsafe if not. If while cruising along the highway, you let go of the steering wheel and step on the accelerator, then there is an excellent chance that you will crash and burn. Your control inputs keep the car from “going critical.” Similarly with the nuclear reactor; timely and correct control inputs keep it from blowing up.

Nuclear reactors are a bit tricker to operate than cars. With cars, every time you step on the accelerator or the brake, the effect is largely the same. But nuclear reactors have memory and can be in any number of states based on how they have been operated. While a lot of the power they generate comes from the nuclear decay of uranium and plutonium, a very important fraction comes from the decay of lighter elements that are generated in the process, each with a different set of characteristics and a different half-life. In our car analogy, under some conditions suddenly stomping on the accelerator will cause your car to blow up. You have to speed up very slowly and gently, keeping an eye on the temperature gauge.

Unlike a car, a nuclear reactor doesn’t have an accelerator and brakes; it has just the brakes. These are called control rods and inserting them into the reactor dampens the reaction while pulling them out part-way causes it to speed up while pulling them out all the way and leaving them there will reliably cause a nuclear accident. Now, the type of nuclear reactor used at Chernobyl, RBMK-1000, had a strange quirk. Normally, if the reaction is getting out of control, pushing the control rods all the way in is a good way to get it under control. But with RBMK-1000, pushing them all the way in actually accelerated the reaction, at first. This was discovered at another RBMK-1000 in Leningrad 11 years before Chernobyl, where a full meltdown was avoided by sheer luck. Although the release of radioactive contamination was some 30 to 50 times smaller than at Chernobyl, it was significant. Nevertheless, there was no hype or media attention of any sort and the incident was largely kept secret—a sure sign of a real nuclear accident as opposed to a contrived one.

The experience at Leningrad was subsequently studied and new operating procedures and standards were established that would avoid repeating the mistake that led to it (which was shutting down the reactor, then restarting it too soon or too quickly, then being forced to shut it down again). Nevertheless, this is precisely what happened at Chernobyl 11 years later. Various people blame various factors. One of them was the administrative decision to transfer nuclear power plants from the purview of the Ministry of Middle Industry (code for Nuclear Industry) to the Energy Ministry which had no experience with nuclear power and put similarly inexperienced political appointees in positions of responsibility at nuclear facilities.

The accident at Chernobyl was the outcome of an experiment which was either mindbogglingly stupid (if it was indeed an accident) or moderately clever (if the disaster happened as intended). It pretty much repeated the script of the Leningrad accident. There was also some outright political meddling: phone calls from the Kremlin forced the experiment to be delayed, ensuring that the reactor would sit idle for a longer period of time, making it more likely to explode when it was suddenly restarted.

So, who were the traitors that caused the Chernobyl disaster? They were ensconced in the Kremlin, and their ringleader was Mikhail Gorbachev, who saw his greatest lifetime achievement in relinquishing his post as the first and only president of the USSR as nationalist leaders broke it up into 15 pieces. But he had some other major achievements as well, such as pulling troops out of Afghanistan in such a way as to make the spread of Islamic jihad to Russia’s southern tier almost inevitable. But Chernobyl definitely took the cake: the mitigation of this one disaster cost the USSR almost its entire annual GDP, resulted in massive reputational damage, and the ham-handed political handling of the post-disaster situation succeeded in turning quite a bit of the population against the Soviet government. This last element was not a complete success, as shown by the results of various referenda during the breakup of the USSR, because much of the populace voted to preserve it. But their wishes were overruled by… traitors.

And this brings us to the final question: What would prompt two giant Western media conglomerates to throw massive treasure at a relatively obscure and unpopular miniseries that is essentially a nuclear horror flick that is custom-tailored to smear Russia? Yes, the 30-year anniversary of the disaster is indeed an anniversary, but what else? Here, the relevant facts appear to be as follows:

The collective West has pretty much lost the ability to build nuclear power plants. The only new European nuclear power plant to have been completed is in… China, and the project only succeeded thanks to swarms of Chinese specialists documenting and rectifying every single mistake made by the Europeans at a similar reactor in France, which is not on-line yet. Another similar project in Finland is in some state of un-completion. All three of these projects have seen absolutely staggering schedule slips (of a decade or more) and truly ridiculous cost overruns. A couple more projects in the US are also languishing in some state of un-completion (the Department of Energy recently threw some more federal money at the one in Georgia).


Although the harm caused to human health and the environment by nuclear energy is orders of magnitude smaller than that caused by fossil fuel generation, nuclear power is deeply unpopular in the West and, given the experience at Fukushima, in Japan. Germany has shut down its nuclear power plants. France still relies on theirs for a large percentage of its power generation, but at this rate its aging fleet of reactors will not be replaced in time. Experiments with renewable energy have so far resulted in much higher electricity rates, hurting the competitiveness of European industry. In short, Europe does not have any good options as far as electricity generation.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Rosatom has perfected the latest VVER-1200 and has a full dance card building, fueling and operating nuclear power plants all around the planet. Since nuclear reactors apparently do melt down sporadically, Russia’s latest ones are fitted with a meltdown tank that stops the reaction and makes clean-up easier, so no more “China syndrome.” And since it does apparently happen that nuclear fuel becomes exposed and generates hydrogen gas, the new reactors have catalytic hydrogen scrubbers installed at the top of the containment vessel, so no more hydrogen explosions either. Rosatom now owns something like 2/3 of the global market for new nuclear energy projects. China has a very ambitious program to build out nuclear generation capacity as well. Add to this the fact that Russia has scored two major nuclear technology breakthroughs.

The first breakthrough was in bringing a fast breeder reactor online: the BN-800 has been in commercial use at Beloyarskaya AES since October of 2016. This is a type of reactor that makes its own fuel and then some from the extremely abundant but generally useless uranium 238. Everyone else who has tried to perfect this technology (the US, France and Japan) has failed and given up. It is a breakthrough because it solves two major problems: mitigating the shortage of naturally occurring uranium 235, and solving the problem of long-lifetime radioactive nuclear waste, which BN-type reactors can burn up until it is safe enough to bury.

The second breakthrough is in the introduction of the closed nuclear cycle. Those who obtain their nuclear fuel through contracts with Rosatom do not have to worry about what to do with spent fuel: after a cool-down period, Rosatom takes the fuel assemblies back for reprocessing. The spent fuel is ground up and the useful elements are extracted, enriched, recombined and used to make new fuel assemblies. With a steady stream of Western nukes being shut down and dismantled about to turn into a flood, simply paying Rosatom to take away the spent fuel provides a good solution where previously there was none, lowering the costs of decommissioning to something that national budgets can conceivably bear.

So, what is there to be done by Western propagandists confronting the situation of the West languishing with no good energy alternatives while Russia’s and China’s nuclear programs are speeding away from them? Why, of course, the choice is obvious: put out a pseudo-documentary based on the fantasy-fiction of a Nobel-prized Grade A Russophobe to smear both Russia and its nuclear industry! Honest competition is too old-fashioned. The new Western way to succeed (or to try but fail) is by knocking out your global competitors using whatever it takes: sanctions, fabrications, smear campaigns… nuclear horror flicks.

While some countries are rich enough to film high-budget nuclear horror flicks, some are not so lucky. For instance, the Ukraine is too destitute to do much of anything artistic at such a scale, but this wretched country, trying so hard to be a Mini-Me to America’s Doctor Evil, might actually try to grab some international attention (and help—for its oligarchs to steal) by staging a nuclear “accident.” It still has a dozen or so nuclear reactors, which produce the majority of its electricity, and they are—horror of horrors!—Russian. Well, no, they are in fact Soviet: they are very old and due to be shut down for good in just a couple of years. Let’s hope that that Ukrainian nuclear reactors will be shut down and decommissioned safely (quite a trick in a country that will by then lack an electric grid). But if Chernobyl 2.0 does happen, please, don’t go around claiming that it was an accident!
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Re: Nuclear Meltdown Watch

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Jul 30, 2019 2:49 pm

Gigantic, mysterious radiation leak traced to facility in Russia - 29 July 2019
By Ruby Prosser Scully

The source of a gigantic, mysterious leak of radioactive material that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced to a Russian nuclear facility, which appears to have been preparing materials for experiments in Italy.

The leak released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere that the Fukushima disaster did. Italian scientists were the first to raise the alarm on 2 October, when they noticed a burst of the radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. This was quickly corroborated by other monitoring laboratories across Europe.

Georg Steinhauser at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany says he was “stunned” when he first noticed the event. Routine surveillance detects several radiation leaks each year, mostly of extremely low levels of radionuclides used in medicine. But this event was different.

“The ruthenium-106 was one of a kind. We had never measured anything like this before,” says Steinhauser. Even so, the radiation level wasn’t high enough to impact human health in Europe, although exposure closer to the site of release would have been far greater.

The Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Security in Paris soon concluded that the most probable source of the leak was between the Volga river and Ural mountains in Russia. This is where Russia’s Mayak facility is located. The site, which includes a plant that processes spent nuclear fuel, suffered the world’s third most serious nuclear accident in 1957.

At the time of the 2017 leak, Russian officials denied the possibility of the facility being the source, saying there were no radioactive ruthenium traces in the surrounding soil. Instead, they suggested the source may have been a radionuclide battery from a satellite burning up during re-entry into the atmosphere.

Steinhauser and his colleagues decided to investigate more thoroughly by forensically analysing 1300 measurements from hundreds of monitoring stations across Europe. They found that radiation levels in the atmosphere were between 30 and 100 times higher than those measured after Fukushima. “This was indeed quite alarming,” says Steinhauser.

Eliminate the impossible

The team excluded Romania as the source of the accident, despite the country’s high radiation levels. Each station in the country detected the radioactive plume simultaneously, which indicated the source was far enough away for it to have grown to the width of Romania.

They also excluded a satellite as the cause because space organisations didn’t report any missing at the time. The pattern of radiation through the atmosphere didn’t match the spread of radiation from a satellite’s reentry either.

Combining these findings with information on air movements and concentration levels from monitoring data, the team found clear evidence that the release happened in the Southern Urals, which is where the Mayak nuclear facility is located.

The leak was unusual because the release was limited to radioactive ruthenium. “If there is a reactor accident, one would expect the release of radioactive isotopes of many different elements,” says Steinhauser. Exactly why such a specific element was released remained a mystery until Steinhauser learned that an Italian nuclear research facility had ordered a consignment of cerium-144 from Mayak before the incident. “There are several indications that the release of ruthenium-106 was linked to this order,” he says.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1907571116
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