Nuclear Meltdown Watch

[seemslikeadream]

APRIL 24, 2012

Warning Signs for the US
Why Fukushima is a Greater Disaster Than Chernobyl
by ROBERT ALVAREZ
In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over. After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese officials, nuclear experts, and now a U.S. Senator, it is sinking in that the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amidst the reactor ruins may have far greater potential offsite consequences than the molten cores.

After visiting the site recently, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. stating that, “loss of containment in any of these pools could result in an even greater release than the initial accident.”

This is why:

Each pool contains irradiated fuel from several years of operation, making for an extremely large radioactive inventory without a strong containment structure that encloses the reactor cores;
Several pools are now completely open to the atmosphere because the reactor buildings were demolished by explosions; they are about 100 feet above ground and could possibly topple or collapse from structural damage coupled with another powerful earthquake;
The loss of water exposing the spent fuel will result in overheating can cause melting and ignite its zirconium metal cladding – resulting in a fire that could deposit large amounts of radioactive materials over hundreds of miles.
Irradiated nuclear fuel, also called “spent fuel,” is extraordinarily radioactive. In a matter of seconds, an unprotected human one foot away from a single freshly removed spent fuel assembly would receive a lethal dose of radiation within seconds. As one of the most dangerous materials in the world, spent reactor fuel poses significant long-term risks, requiring isolation in a geological disposal site that can protect the human environment for tens of thousands of years.

It’s almost 26 years since the Chernobyl reactor exploded and caught fire releasing enormous amounts of radioactive debris. The Chernobyl accident revealed the folly of not having an extra barrier of thick concrete and steel surrounding the reactor core that is required for modern plants in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere. The Fukushima Dai-Ichi accident revealed the folly of storing huge amounts of highly radioactive spent fuel in vulnerable pools, high above the ground.

What both accidents have in common is widespread environmental contamination from cesium-137. With a half-life of 30, years, Cs-137 gives off penetrating radiation, as it decays. Once in the environment, it mimics potassium as it accumulates in biota and the human food chain for many decades. When it enters the human body, about 75 percent lodges in muscle tissue, with perhaps the most important muscle being the heart. Studies of chronic exposure to Cs-137 among the people living near Chernobyl show an alarming rate of heart problems, particularly among children.

As more information is made available, we now know that the Fukushima Dai-Ichi site is storing 10,833 spent fuel assemblies (SNF) containing roughly 327 million curies of long-lived radioactivity About 132 million curies is cesium-137 or nearly 85 times the amount estimated to have been released at Chernobyl.

The overall problem we face is that nearly all of the spent fuel at the Dai-Ichi site is in vulnerable pools in a high risk/consequence earthquake zone. The urgency of the situation is underscored by the ongoing seismic activity around NE Japan in which 13 earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 – 5.7 have occurred off the NE coast of Honshu in the last 4 days between 4/14 and 4/17. This has been the norm since the first quake and tsunami hit the site on March 11th of last year. Larger quakes are expected closer to the power plant.

Last week, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) revealed plans to remove 2,274 spent fuel assemblies from the damaged reactors that will probably take at least a decade to accomplish. The first priority will be removal of the contents in Pool No. 4. This pool is structurally damaged and contains about 10 times more cesium-137 than released at Chernobyl. Removal of SNF from the No. 4 reactor is optimistically expected to begin at the end of 2013. A significant amount of construction to remove, debris and reinforce the structurally-damaged reactor buildings, especially the fuel- handling areas, will be required.

Also, it is not safe to keep 1,882 spent fuel assemblies containing ~57 million curies of long-lived radioactivity, including nearly 15 times more cs-137 than released at Chernobyl in the elevated pools at reactors 5, 6, and 7, which did not experience melt-downs and explosions.

The main reason why there is so much spent fuel at the Da-Ichi site, is that it was supposed to be sent to the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, which has experienced 18 lengthy delays throughout its construction history. Plutonium and uranium was to be extracted from the spent fuel there, with the plutonium to be used as fuel at the Monju fast reactor.

After several decades and billions of dollars, the United States effectively abandoned the “closed” nuclear fuel cycle 30 years ago for cost and nuclear non-proliferation reasons. Over the past 60 years, the history of fast reactors using plutonium is littered with failures the most recent being the Monju project in Japan. Monju was cancelled in November of last year, dealing a fatal blow to the dream of a “closed” nuclear fuel cycle in Japan.

The stark reality, if TEPCO’s plan is realized, is that nearly all of the spent fuel at the Da-Ichi containing some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain indefinitely in vulnerable pools. TEPCO wants to store the spent fuel from the damaged reactors in the common pool, and only to resort to dry, cask storage when the common pool’s capacity is exceeded. At this time, the common pool is at 80 percent storage capacity and will require removal of SNF to make room. TEPCO’s plan is to minimize dry cask storage as much as possible and to rely indefinitely on vulnerable pool storage. Senator Wyden finds that TEPCO’s plan for remediation carries extraordinary and continuing risk. He sensibly recommends that retrieval of spent fuel in existing on-site spent fuel pools to safer storage in dry casks should be a priority.

Given these circumstances, a key goal for the stabilization of the Fukushima-Daichi site is to place all of its spent reactor fuel into dry, hardened storage casks. This will require about 244 additional casks at a cost of about $1 mllion per cask. To accomplish this goal, an international effort is required – something that Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has called for. As we have learned, despite the enormous destruction from the earthquake and tsunami at the Dai-Ich Site, the nine dry casks and their contents were unscathed. This is an important lesson we should not ignore.

[eyeno]

Heads up people in the Philadelphia area.

Under Control: Relax, Our Nuclear Spill isn't an 'EPPI'
Wed, 04/25/2012 - 17:53 — Anonymous
by:
Dave Lindorff



A little over a month ago, back on March 19, at 3:00 in the morning, the Limerick Nuclear Power Station, which runs two aging GE nuclear reactors along the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia, had an accident. As much as 15,000 gallons of reactor water contaminated with five times the official safe limit of radioactive Tritium as well as an unknown amount of other dangerous isotopes from the reactor’s fission process blew off a manhole cover and ran out of a large pipe, flowing into a streambed and on into the river from which Philadelphia and a number of smaller towns draw their municipal water supplies.

No public announcement of this spill was made at the time, so the public in those communities had no idea that it had occurred, and water system operators had no opportunity to shut down their intakes from the river. There was no report about the spill in Philadelphia’s two daily newspapers or on local news programs.

Only weeks later, after the regional office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was finally sent an official report by Exelon, the owner of the plant, did a public notice get posted on the NRC’s website, after which some excellent reporting on the incident was done by Evan Brandt, a reporter for a local paper called The Pottstown Mercury.

ThisCantBeHappening! contacted the NRC regional office with oversight over Limerick and was told that Exelon had only reported the incident to state authorities -- the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA). A call to the DEP elicited a response that the state agency, now in the hands of a Republican governor who has shown open distain for environmental concerns ranging from nuclear waste to regulation of natural gas fracking chemicals, that it did not feel it was necessary to issue any public report on the spill. “Exelon assured us that it was not an EPPI incident,” explained DEP regional office spokeswoman Deborah Fries.

“What’s an EPPI?” she was asked. “It’s an Event of Potential Public Interest,” Fries replied.

The Limerick nuclear reactors just outside Philadelphia are the same design as those at Fukushima, all built by GE

In other words, Exelon and the state’s DEP and PEMA officials, meeting behind closed doors, agreed that the spilling of up to 15,000 gallons of radioactive isotope-laced reactor water into a river that supplies drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people was not an event of “potential public interest,” and so they didn’t make it public, thus insuring that it would not become a matter of public interest, or even of public knowledge! The logic is impeccable, though the NRC subsequently protested that Exelon should have reported the incident to the commission, which would automatically have posted it on its website as public notice of a spill.

But it gets worse. Mercury reporter Brandt discovered that one reason Exelon was able to claim initially that the spill of reactor water into the river was no big deal, and to avoid publicly announcing it, was that it was a “permitted discharge.” Even the NRC report on the incident, when it was finally posted three weeks late, said that the spill had merely been waste water that had “overflowed during a scheduled and permitted radiological release.”

The idea that the Limerick nuclear generating plant is “routinely discharging” nuclear waste into the Schuylkill River and that this is permitted by the NRC, and that by extension this is being done by all the nuclear generating plants across the nation, will no doubt come as a big surprise to most Americans, including those who live downstream and downwind of these plants (because it turns out that there are also permitted regular releases of radioactive gas by these other facilities). But that’s the truth.

As Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the NRC’s Southeast Pennsylvania Regional Office, explains, “Periodically, to clean their cooling tower water pipes, the operator will have a ‘blow-down’ where they pump a lot of clean water through the system to push out collected sediment. When they do that, whey are allowed to add some reactor water to it. This is an acceptable method, well within federal safety levels” for radio isotopes. Sheehan explained that while the concentration of Tritium and other radioactive elements in the 15,000-gallon reactor waste-water tank would have exceeded federal safety levels for release into the environment, by first diluting it with all the water being used for the cooling tower “blowdown” process, and then dumping the resulting water into the large river, it would all be diluted to below federal safety levels.

“It’s nothing we would try to disguise,” said Sheehan.

Maybe, but then why was this dumping process being done by Exelon at the peculiar time of 3 a.m., and why was Exelon so anxious to avoid having to report it?

Lewis Cuthbert, a retired schools superintendent who lives with his wife Donna in the shadow of the Limerick cooling towers, has been a critic of the plant and its owners for 15 years. He says, “I don’t believe the NRC or Exelon have ever before said that the plant ‘routinely’ releases nuclear waste into the environment.”

Cuthbert suggests such releases might help explain why the incidence of childhood cancers around the vicinity of the Limerick plant are "92% higher than normal" according to research he and Donna Cuthbert have done.

Coincidentally or not, the Philadelphia Water Department announced that on April 4, traces of the radioisotope Iodine 131, a short-lived alpha-emitter produced as a fission byproduct in nuclear reactors, had been found in the city’s water supply. Though the Queen Lane Reservoir where the I-131 contamination was found draws its water from the nearby Schuylkill River, no mention was made of the Limerick Generating Station as a possible source of the contamination. Instead, the two possible sources suggested were the Fukushima accident in Japan, and medical facilities in the region that use I-131 for medical tests (though in the later instance, such materials would end up in the sewer system, not the water system!). At the time of the finding, the PWD would not even have known that Limerick had had a spill in the Schuylkill only days earlier, much less that the nuke plant has been routinely releasing reactor wastewater into the river for years.

Meanwhile, Exelon is working hard to play down the issue of its dumping of contaminated reactor water into the heavily populated Philadelphia area’s waterways and air. “Limerick Generating Station’s procedures and guidelines allow for water releases to be performed routinely within strict state and federal environmental guidelines and oversight,” said Limerick Plant spokeswoman Dana Melia. “During a release, mildly radioactive water is pre-mixed with hundreds of thousands of gallons of non-radioactive water from Limerick’s cooling towers before it is pumped through a network of pipes to the Schuylkill River. Radiation and flow monitoring at the river’s edge ensure that all releases are performed in accordance with the station’s water use permit and that no releases exceed stringent radiological or environmental limits.” She added, “It is important to point out that most of the limited amount of spilled water ended up where it was originally intended to go – in the river. The rest evaporated.” (Well, not really. Some water, and the Tritium atoms in the water molecules, may evaporate, but elements like radioactive Iodine, Cesium, Potassium, Strontium or Cobalt do not.)

Melia declined to state how often such “routine” authorized releases occur.

She claimed that Exelon regularly monitors radiation levels around the plant to assure that there are no hazardous levels of radioactivity, but there is reason to doubt that those measurements are reliable. On April 23, an article in Global Security Newswire reported that an April 19 internal audit of the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s national radiation monitoring network had found many of the EPA’s 124 monitoring stations to be either broken or in such poor maintenance that they were not working over the past year. The audit found that one in five of the monitors were broken, and that 50% of those sampled that were functioning had not had their filters changed in at least 130 days, making them ineffective. EPA policy, the auditor noted, calls for filter replacement twice a week.

Exelon, the EPA and other agencies, including Philly’s water company also routinely downgrade the risks of isotope releases and contamination of air and ground water by conflating beta radiation of the type detected by geiger counters with the presence of alpha-particle-emitting isotopes. The truth is that there is really no “safe level” of something like radioactive Iodine, Cobalt, Cesium or Strontium. Such chemicals tend to gravitate to certain organs in the body, where they sit and irradiate surrounding tissue with large, relatively slow-moving alpha particles which can eventually cause cancer in those cells.

Word that plants like Limerick (which features the exact same flawed GE plant design as the exploded, melted-down reactors in Fukushima), are “routinely” releasing wastes into the environment could complicate plans by Exelon and other operators to avoid having to decommission their aging facilities, and to receive 20-year license renewals to continue operating them.

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1139

[crikkett]

http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/jellyfish-like-organisms-shut-down-california-power-plant/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
----
Jellyfish-like organisms shut down California power plant
Posted on April 27, 2012

April 27, 2012 – CALIFORNIA – The workers of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant received a very slimy surprise this week when they discovered hoards of jellyfish-like creatures clinging to the structure, leading to the shutdown of the plant. The organisms, called salp, are small sea creatures with a consistency similar to jellyfish. The influx of salp was discovered as part of the plant’s routine monitoring system, according to Tom Cuddy, the senior manager of external and nuclear communications for the plant’s operator, Pacific Gas & Electric. “We then made the conservative decision to ramp down the affected unit to 20 percent and continued to monitor the situation,” Cuddy said. “When the problem continued, we made another conservative decision that it would be safest to curtail the power of the unit.” The salp were clogging the traveling screens in the intake structure, which are meant to keep marine life out and to keep the unit cool. “Safety is the highest priority,” Cuddy said. “We will not restart the unit until the salp moves on and conditions improve. No priority is more important than the safe operation of our facility.” The plant consists of two units. Unit 1 was shut down previously because of refueling and maintenance work and will not be functional for several weeks. Now that Unit 2 has been shut down because of the influx of salp, the plant has ceased all production. Even with the Diablo Canyon plant out of commission, PG&E has pledged to continue production using other sources of power so that customers are unaffected by the closure. “We’ve had salp cling to the intake structure before, but nothing to this extent,” Cuddy said. -ABC

[StarmanSkye]

Re: The routine, 'safe; discharge of nuclear waste that is rationalized-away by claiming it is 'diluted' is the epitome of pathologically flawed thinking which can seemingly justify ANYTHING. The fact is, a given quantity of poisonous, dangerous stuff like irradiated 'waste' isn't rendered safe by dumping it into a river. This is the SAME idiotic thinking that Japanese officials are using to incinerate radiation-contaminated junk, agricultural products and anything else that ordinarily can't be discharged into the environment because of safety rules and regs -- simply by 'mixing' it with a large amount of non-radiated stuff. Too, the fact remains -- large amounts of radiated stuff are routinely being released to poison the air, water and land.

DESPITE the officialeese nonsense about 'stringent standards' which is the height of Sophistry. I'm greatly disheartened to be reminded how utterly stupid much of the public apparently are who have abdicated critical thinking, allow public officials to feed them a line of shiite & swallow such vapid idiocy without a second thought.

[wintler2]

With a half-life of 30, years, Cs-137 gives off penetrating radiation, as it decays. Once in the environment, it mimics potassium as it accumulates in biota and the human food chain for many decades.

Jesus wept. Whats a good root veg source of potassium?

Salps close nuke power station

Something tells me the corals aren't sneering at these homeless drifters.

[seemslikeadream]

The Worst Yet to Come? Why Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb
Experts say acknowledging the threat would call into question the safety of dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants in the U.S.
May 4, 2012 |

More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site's current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.

But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel -- 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.

Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat

The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core's reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean -- just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored -- but it's also open to the elements because a hydrogen explosion blew off the roof during the early days of the accident and sent the building into a list.

Alarmed by the precarious nature of spent fuel storage during his recent tour of the Fukushima Daiichi site, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, subsequently fired off letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko and Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Ichiro Fujisaki. He implored all parties to work together and with the international community to address this situation as swiftly as possible.

A press release issued after his visit said that Wyden, a senior member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources who is highly experienced with nuclear waste storage issues, believes the situation is "worse than reported," with "spent fuel rods currently being stored in unsound structures immediately adjacent to the ocean." The press release also noted the structures' high susceptibility to earthquakes and that "the only protection from a future tsunami, Wyden observed, is a small, makeshift sea wall erected out of bags of rock."

As opposed to units 1-3 at Fukushima Daiichi, where the meltdowns occurred, unit 4's reactor core, like units 5 and 6, was not in operation when the earthquake struck last year. But unlike units 5 and 6, it had recently uploaded highly radioactive spent fuel into its storage pool before the disaster struck.

Robert Alvarez, a nuclear waste expert and former senior adviser to the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, has crunched the numbers pertaining to the spent fuel pool threat based on information he obtained from sources such as Tepco, the U.S. Department of Energy, Japanese academic presentations and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), the U.S. organization created by the nuclear power industry in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

What he found, which has been corroborated by other experts interviewed by AlterNet, is an astounding amount of vulnerably stored spent fuel, also known as irradiated fuel, at the Fukushima Daiichi site. His immediate focus is on the fuel stored in the damaged unit 4's pool, which contains the single largest inventory of highly radioactive spent fuel of any of the pools in the damaged reactors.

Alvarez warns that if there is another large earthquake or event that causes this pool to drain of water, which keeps the fuel rods from overheating and igniting, it could cause a catastrophic fire releasing 10 times more cesium-137 than was released at Chernobyl.

That scenario alone would cause an unprecedented spread of radioactivity, far greater than what occurred last year, depositing enormous amounts of radioactive materials over thousands of miles and causing the evacuation of Tokyo.

Nuclear experts noted that other lethal radioactive isotopes would also be released in such a fire, but that the focus is on cesium-137 because it easily volatilizes and spreads pervasively, as it did during the Chernobyl accident and again after the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi last year.

With a half-life of 30 years, it gives off penetrating radiation as it decays and can remain dangerous for hundreds of years. Once in the environment, it mimics potassium as it accumulates in the food chain; when it enters the human body, about 75 percent lodges in muscle tissue, including the heart.

The Threat Not Just to Japan But to the U.S. and the World

An even more catastrophic worst-case scenario follows that a fire in the pool at unit 4 could then spread, igniting the irradiated fuel throughout the nuclear site and releasing an amount of cesium-137 equaling a doomsday-like load, roughly 85 times more than the release at Chernobyl.

It's a scenario that would literally threaten Japan's annihilation and civilization at large, with widespread worldwide environmental radioactive contamination.

"Japan would suffer the worst, but it would be a global catastrophe," said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste expert at the watchdog group Beyond Nuclear. "It already is, it already has been, but it would dwarf what's already happened."

Kamps noted that these pool fires were the beginning of the worst-case analysis envisioned by the Japanese government in the early days of the disaster, as reported by the New York Times in February.

"Not only three reactor meltdowns but seven pool fires at Fukushima Daiichi," Kamps said. "If the site had to be abandoned by all workers, then everything would come loose. The end result of that was the evacuation of Tokyo."

In an interview with AlterNet, Alvarez, who is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that the Japanese government, Tepco and the U.S. NRC are reluctant to say anything publicly about the spent fuel threat because "there is a tendency to want to provide reassurance that everything is fine."

He was quick to note, "The cores are still a problem, make no mistake, and there will be some very bad things happening if they don't maintain their temperatures at some sort of stable level and make sure this stuff doesn't eat down through the concrete mats."

But he said that privately "they're probably more scared shitless about the pools than they are about the cores. They know they're really risky and dangerous."

AlterNet asked the NRC if it is concerned about the vulnerability of the spent fuel at Fukushima Daiichi and what, if anything, it had expressed to the Japanese government and Tepco on the matter.

"All the available information continues to show the situation at Fukushima Dai-ichi is stable, both for the reactors and the spent fuel pools," NRC spokesman Scott Burnell replied via email. "The available information indicates that Spent Fuel Pool #4 has been reinforced."

But nuclear experts, including Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president who coordinated projects at 70 U.S. nuclear power plants, and warned days after the disaster at Fukushima last year of a "Chernobyl on steroids" if the spent fuel pools were to ignite, strongly disagreed with this assessment.

"It is true that in May and June the floor of the U4 SFP [spent fuel pool] was 'reinforced,' but not as strong as it was originally," Gundersen noted in an email to AlterNet. "The entire building however has not been reinforced and is damaged by the explosion in both 4 and 3. So structurally U4 is not as strong as its original design required."

Gundersen, who is chief engineer at the consulting firm Fairewinds Associates, added that the spent fuel pool at unit 4 "remains the single biggest concern since about the second week of the accident. It can still create 'Chernobyl on steroids.'"

Alvarez said that even if the unit 4 structure has been tentatively stabilized, it doesn't change the fact "it sits in a structurally damaged building, is about 100 feet above the ground and is exposed to the atmosphere, in a high-consequence earthquake zone."

He also said that the urgency of the situation is underscored by the ongoing seismic activity around northeast Japan, in which 13 earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 to 5.7 have occurred off the northeast coast of Honshu between April 14 and April 17.

"This has been the norm since 3/11/11 and larger quakes are expected closer to the power plant," Alvarez added.

A recent study published in the journal Solid Earth, which used data from over 6,000 earthquakes, confirms the expectation of larger quakes in closer proximity to the Fukushima Daiichi site. In part, this conclusion is predicated on the discovery that the earthquake that initiated last year's disaster caused a seismic fault close to the nuclear plant to reactivate.

"There are a few active faults in the nuclear power plant area, and our results show the existence of similar structural anomalies under both the Iwaki and the Fukushima Daiichi areas," lead researcher Dapeng Zhao, a geophysics professor at Japan's Tohoku University, said in a press release. "Given that a large earthquake occurred in Iwaki not long ago, we think it is possible for a similarly strong earthquake to happen in Fukushima."

AlterNet asked Sen. Wyden if he considers the spent fuel at Fukushima Daiichi a national security threat.

In a statement released by his office, Wyden replied, "The radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States."

Alvarez agrees, saying, "My major concern is that this effort to get that spent fuel out of there is not something you should be doing casually and taking your time on."

Yet Tepco's current plans are to hold the majority of this spent fuel onsite for years in the same elevated, uncontained storage pools, only transferring some of the fuel into more secure, hardened dry casks when the common pool reaches capacity.

For the moment, though, and for the foreseeable future -- unless the international community substantively comes to Japan's aid -- Tepco couldn't transfer the irradiated fuel from the damaged reactor units into dry cask storage even if it wanted to because the equipment to do so, such as the crane support infrastructure, was destroyed during the initial disaster.

"That's kind of shocking," said Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear. "But that's why we're still sitting on this gamble that there won't be another earthquake that could topple a very precarious unit 4."

Gunter is concerned that even a minor earthquake or a subsidence in the earth under unit 4 could cause its collapse.

"I think we're all on pins and needles every day with regard to unit 4," he said. "I mean there's any number of things that could happen. Nobody really knows."

Gunter added, "Right now its seismic rating should be zero."

Alvarez echoed Wyden's letters to the Japanese ambassador and U.S. officials.

"It really requires a major effort," he said. "The United States and other countries should begin to get involved and try to help the Japanese government to expedite the removal of that spent fuel and to put it into dry, hardened storage as soon as possible."

Same Spent Fuel Pool Designs at Dozens of U.S. Nuclear Sites

So why isn't the NRC and the Obama administration doing more to shed light on the extreme vulnerability of these irradiated fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, which threaten not only Japan but the U.S. and the world?

Nuclear waste experts say it would expose the fact that the same design flaw lies in wait -- and has been for decades -- at dozens of U.S. nuclear facilities. And that's not something the NRC, which is routinely accused of promoting the nuclear industry rather than adequately regulating it, nor the pro-nuclear Obama administration, want to broadcast to the American public.

"The U.S. government right now is engaged in its own kabuki theatre to protect the U.S. industry from the real costs of the lessons at Fukushima," Gunter said. "The NRC and its champions in the White House and on Capitol Hill are looking to obfuscate the real threats and the necessary policy changes to address the risk."

There are 31 G.E. Mark I and Mark II boiling water reactors (BRWs) in the U.S., the type used at Fukushima. All of these reactors, which comprise just under a third of all nuclear reactors in the U.S., store their spent fuel in elevated pools located outside the primary, or reinforced, containment that protects the reactor core. Thus, the outside structure, the building ostensibly protecting the storage pools, is much weaker, in most cases about as sturdy, experts describe in interviews with AlterNet, as a structure one would find housing a car dealership or a Wal-Mart.

Not what Americans might expect to find safeguarding nuclear material that is more highly radioactive than what resides in the reactor core.

The outer containments surrounding these spent fuel pools in these U.S. reactors patently fail to meet the NRC's own "defense in-depth" nuclear safety requirements.

But these reactors don't merely suffer from the same storage design flaw as those at Fukushima Daiichi.

In the U.S., the nuclear industry has been allowed to store incredible volumes of spent fuel for decades in high-density pools that were not only originally designed to retain about one-fourth or one-fifth of what they now hold but were intended to be temporary storage facilities. No more than five years. That was before the idea of reprocessing irradiated fuel in this country failed to gain a foothold over 30 years ago. Once that happened, starting in the early 1980s, the NRC allowed high-density storage in fuel pools on the false assumption that a high-level waste repository would be opened by 1998. But subsequent efforts to gain support for storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have also been scrapped.

More recently, the NRC arbitrarily concluded these pools could store this spent fuel safely for 120 years.

"Our pools are more crammed to the gills than the unit 4 pool at Fukushima Daiichi, much more so," noted Kamps of Beyond Nuclear. "It's kind of like a very thick forest that's waiting for a wildfire. It would take extraordinary measures to prevent nuclear chain reactions in our pools because the waste is so closely packed in there."

Experts say the only near-term answer to better protect our nation's existing spent nuclear fuel is dry cask storage. But there's one catch: the nuclear industry doesn't want to incur the expense, which is about $1 million per cask.

"So now they're stuck," said Alvarez, "The NRC has made this policy decision, which the industry is very violently opposed to changing because it saves them a ton of money. And if they have to go to dry hardened storage onsite, they're going to have to fork over several hundred million dollars per reactor to do this."

He also pointed out that the contents of the nine dry casks at the Fukushima Daiichi site were undamaged by the disaster.

"Nobody paid much attention to that fact," Alvarez said. "I've never seen anybody at Tepco or anyone [at the NRC or in the nuclear industry] saying, 'Well, thank god for the dry casks. They were untouched.' They don't say a word about it."

The NRC declined to comment directly to accusations it's reluctant to draw attention to the spent fuel vulnerability at Fukushima Daiichi because it would bring more awareness to the dangers of irradiated storage here in the U.S. But the agency did respond to a question about what it has done to address the vulnerability of spent nuclear fuel storage at U.S. nuclear sites with the Mark I and II designs.

"All U.S. spent nuclear fuel is stored safely and securely, regardless of reactor type," NRC spokesman Burnell replied in an email. "Every spent fuel pool is an inherently robust combination of reinforced concrete and steel, capable of safely withstanding the same type and variety of severe events that reactors are designed for."

He continued, "After 9/11, the NRC required U.S. nuclear power plants to obtain additional equipment for maintaining reactor and spent fuel pool safety in the event of any situation that could disable large areas of the plant. This 'B5b' equipment and related procedures include ensuring spent fuel pools have adequate water levels. The B5b measures are in place at every U.S. plant and have been inspected multiple times, including shortly after the accident at Fukushima.

"The NRC continues to conclude the combination of installed safety equipment and B5b measures can protect the public if extreme events impact a U.S. nuclear power plant."

But nuclear experts told AlterNet that the majority of Burnell's response could've been made prior to the disaster at Fukushima. In fact, Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, investigated these so-called "B5b" safety measures the NRC ordered post-9/11 and published his findings in a May 2011 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article.

Directly reflecting Burnell's response to AlterNet, Lyman wrote that after the Fukushima disaster, "the NRC and the industry invoked the mysterious requirements known as 'B5b' as a cure-all for the kinds of problems that led to the Fukushima crisis.

"Even though the B5b strategies were specifically developed to cope with fires and explosions, the NRC now argues that they could be used for any event that causes severe damage to equipment and infrastructure, including Fukushima-scale earthquakes and floods."

But contrary to these NRC assurances, then and now, Lyman's report found B5b requirements inadequate, containing flaws in safety assumptions that suggest the NRC has not applied the major lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster. Additionally, he revealed emails showing that the NRC's own staff members questioned the plausibility of these procedures to effectively respond to extreme weather events like floods, earthquakes and concomitant blackouts.

Burnell sent a follow-up email, noting, "I also should have mentioned the NRC issued an order in March to all U.S. plants to install enhanced spent fuel pool instrumentation, so that plant operators will have a clearer understanding of SFP status during a severe event."

This is a curiously roundabout way of saying that spent fuel pools at U.S. reactors currently have no built-in instrumentation to gauge radiation, temperature or pressure levels.

Kamps also pointed out that the NRC commissioners voted 4 to 1, with Chairman Gregory Jaczko in dissent, to not require such requested safety upgrades to U.S. reactors until the end of 2016.

He added, "Burnell's flippant, false assurances prove that pool risks, despite being potentially catastrophic, are largely ignored by not only industry, but even NRC itself, even in the aftermath of Fukushima."

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/1300 ... 6qNLOjwscA

More than 1,300 tubes that carry radioactive water inside the San Onofre nuclear plant in Southern California are so damaged that they will be taken out of service, the utility that runs the plant said Tuesday.

The figures released by Southern California Edison are the latest disclosure in a probe of equipment problems that have kept the coastal plant sidelined for more than three months.

At issue has been the integrity of tubing that snakes through the plant's four steam generators, which were installed in a multimillion-dollar makeover in 2009 and 2010.

A company statement said that as of Monday, 510 tubes had been plugged, or retired from use, in the Unit 2 reactor, and 807 tubes in its sister, Unit 3. Each of the generators has nearly 10,000 tubes, and the number retired is well within the limit allowed to continue operation.

The statement comes just days after an Edison executive said the company hopes to restart at least one of the twin reactors next month. The company is drafting a plan under which the reactors would run at reduced power, at least for several months, because engineers believe that will solve a problem with vibration that the company believes has been causing unusual wear in the alloy tubing.

Government regulators say there is no timetable for a restart, which would require federal approval.

A joint statement issued Tuesday by Edison and the agency that operates the state's wholesale power system, the California Independent System Operator, said the possible June dates are for planning and subject to change.

"There is no timeline on nuclear safety," Edison President Ron Litzinger said.

Activists viewed the new figures as another alarming sign following a tube break in January, which prompted Edison to shut down the Unit 3 reactor as a precaution. Traces of radiation escaped at the time, but officials said there was no danger to workers or neighbors.

Unit 2 was taken offline in January for routine maintenance, but investigators later confirmed accelerated wear on tubing in both units.

"It seems that these new steam generators are falling apart and Edison doesn't know why. It would be foolhardy to restart, even at reduced power, under the current circumstances," said Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear watchdog who lectures on nuclear policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ted Craver, chairman of SCE parent Edison International, told investors in a phone call last week that unusual wear was found in about 1 percent of nearly 39,000 tubes in the steam generators.

Costs related to the long-running shutdown could climb over $100 million, company officials say, and state officials have warned about possible rotating blackouts in Southern California while the reactors are offline.

About 7.4 million Californians live within 50 miles of San Onofre, which can power 1.4 million homes.

The plant is owned by SCE, San Diego Gas & Electric and the city of Riverside. The Unit 1 reactor operated from 1968 to 1992, when it was shut down and dismantled.

[82_28]

I'm gonna crosspost this in the forced relocation thread as well. . .

Forty million Japanese in 'extreme danger' of life-threatening radiation poisoning, mass evacuations likely

(NaturalNews) Japanese officials are currently engaging in talks with Russian diplomats about where tens of millions of Japanese refugees might relocate in the very-likely event that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility's Reactor 4 completely collapses. According to a recent report by EUTimes.net, Japanese authorities have indicated that as many as 40 million Japanese people are in "extreme danger" of radiation poisoning, and many eastern cities, including Tokyo, may have to be evacuated in the next few weeks or months to avoid extreme radiation poisoning.

As we continue to report, the situation at Fukushima is dire, to say the least. Reactor 4 is on the verge of complete collapse (http://www.naturalnews.com/035789_Fukus ... -Gate.html), which would send radioactive nuclear fuel from thousands of fuel rods directly into the atmosphere. These fuel rods, after all, are already exposed to the open air, but the full release of their fuel would cause not only a regional catastrophe, but also a global nuclear holocaust.

"A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant's No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be 'the weakest link' in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster," reported the Mainichi Daily News recently.

"The worst-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant's other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate."

So in an effort to establish contingency for the Japanese people in closest proximity to the fray, authorities are considering potentially relocating tens of millions of Japanese people to the Kuril Islands, which are located in Russia's Sakhalin Oblast region, or potentially even to China, where hundreds of uninhabited "ghost town" cities with no apparent use could house at least 64 million refugees. If this relocation were to occur, Japan would largely become a barren wasteland.

'Wave' of highly-radioactive waste reportedly headed for West Coast of U.S.
For the Japanese people, the Fukushima disaster represents the complete demise of their nation, as literally nothing is being done to contain the thousands of exposed fuel rods that will eventually explode when Reactor 4 fails. But the consequences of all this are not limited to just Japan, as the rest of the world, including the U.S., will bear the brunt of this ticking nuclear time-bomb as well. We are, in fact, already suffering the consequences of this "nuclear war without a war" (http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28870).

Late last year, for example, it was reported that U.S. officials ordered the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to release three million gallons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean. Now, according to The Intel Hub, this waste will soon arrive on the shores of the U.S. West Coast, unbeknownst to the millions of Americans living in that region that will be exposed to it.

This new 'wave' of radiation is, of course, in addition to previous waves that have already killed thousands of people, many of whom were children, and sparked a considerable uptick in cancer cases. And as time goes on, more and more people living in America will begin to develop chronic conditions as a result of perpetual radiation poisoning from Fukushima, and many will die, all while the mainstream media remains willfully silent on the issue.

And the federal government has known all along that the Fukushima disaster is shaping up to be the most severe global catastrophe in recorded history, as was evidenced in a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Not only were federal authorities aware of the extreme dangers posed by Fukushima from the early days of the disaster, but they also orchestrated misinformation campaigns to keep the American people, and the rest of the world, in the dark about the truth (http://www.naturalnews.com/035847_plume ... ation.html).

Since neither the U.S. nor the Japanese governments appear willing to actually deal with Fukushima, and particularly the Reactor 4 situation, NaturalNews is calling on the United Nations (U.N.) to take swift action. A new petition urges the U.N. to organize a Nuclear Security Summit to address the problem of Reactor 4, and also establish an independent assessment team to somehow stabilize it and prevent its fuel from potentially destroying all life on earth.

You can access that petition here:
http://fukushima.greenaction

Sources for this article include:

http://www.eutimes.net

http://www.naturalnews.com/035894_Fukus ... ation.html

Could be some hokey source, so I suppose take with the normal skepticism one applies to shit you read on the Internet.

[Simulist]

Japanese officials are currently engaging in talks with Russian diplomats about where tens of millions of Japanese refugees might relocate in the very-likely event that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility's Reactor 4 completely collapses.

Wow. Where's the rest of the world going to go?

[seemslikeadream]

Marines will move to Hawaii from Japan
by Jonah Kaimana on Apr 25, 2012

Up to 2,700 Marines will move to Hawaii from Okinawa, Japan, according to the office of Governor Neil Abercrombie.

Since 2006, Japan and United States officials have planned to reduce the number of US forces in Okinawa by half. The initial plan included transferring 9,000 Marines from Japan to Guam and Hawaii.

The new plan, which the Pentagon recently finalized, will move 4,700 Marines from Okinawa to Guam. Then, 2,700 of those Marines will continue their transfer and arrive in Hawaii, according to Senator Daniel Inouye.

Paul Gunter, Beyond Nuclear joins Thom Hartmann. There is troubling news out of Japan - where there's now more signs now that the Fukushima nuclear crisis is still ongoing. Sludge samples taken from Tokyo Bay reveal that radioactive cesium contamination has increased in some areas by 13-times since measures were taken last August. Health officials claim the radiation levels pose no immediate risk to the population - but could get worse as contaminated fish filled with radioactive isotopes travel up the food chain into the world's restaurants and dinner tables. Meanwhile, in the United States - the Associated Press is reporting that nuclear regulators have quietly watered-down US planning for nuclear emergencies. Despite nuclear plants all around the nation ageing beyond their recommended operational lives - nuclear regulators have reduced evacuation zones around them, required fewer exercises for accidents, and relaxed training for emergency officials. In other words, we’re less prepared today to deal with a nuclear disaster than we were before Fukushima happened.

[82_28]

Japanese officials are currently engaging in talks with Russian diplomats about where tens of millions of Japanese refugees might relocate in the very-likely event that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility's Reactor 4 completely collapses.

Wow. Where's the rest of the world going to go?

Precisely. Where? Perhaps that's the whole point. Perhaps we're beyond "disaster capitalism" and awareness therein. We've been so subsumed by this system of oblivion that anything else is unimaginable.

I can speak for myself and say that I can't imagine what I would do. It's one thing to live within the system and criticize it to heart's content -- it's a totally different beast when sheer tragedy arises on such an epic scale that no one can make heads or tails of what ordinary life is at this moment in "time". For as connected as we are, we are at such a disconnect overall that humans and their ways cannot keep up. I ain't no Luddite, but I do believe I am quickly beginning to hate technology -- at least the form it is taking in ever quickening ways.

What's funny is, is that I envision the invasive technology I am critical of here, today, coming to kill me in a few years just for writing this, just because I was still free to do so 5/19/2012 but will be deemed not to have been free to do so in the past because the technocratic future must be sustained at all costs.

How will the historians and history judge us and how we lived upon Earth?

They won't.

There won't be any. Only corporations and burbclaves and simulations and pharmaceuticals and panopticon surveillance. It will all be normal. Which it already is.

[crikkett]

http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2012/05 ... our-photo/

http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2012/05 ... rom-tokyo/

Extreme Radioactive Black Substance Discovered 5 Kilometers From Tokyo
Large Crack on South Wall of Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Number Four? (Photo)

Someone else please pull text and paste here. I'm disturbed after reading it and off to find someone to hug.

[seemslikeadream]

Extreme Radioactive Black Substance Discovered 5 Kilometers From Tokyo
May 15, 2012
By LBG1

Black substance five times more radioactive than Chernobyl-Belarus mandatory exculsion zone


[Photo-Image: Radioactive mystery black substance discovered in different locations in Tokyo, photo source, Fukushima Diary]

A mysterious black substance five times more radioactive than the Chernobyl-Belarus mandatory evacuation zone was discovered 4 kilometers from the center of Tokyo, the Hirai Station. The mystery radioactive black substance discovered close to Tokyo on the heels of the discovery of Cesium in Fukushima Prefecture 122 times higher than in Belarus evacuation zone.


[Image: Google Earth map location of Japan's Hirai Station]

The Belarus exclusion zone, a 30-mile now wilderness area around the Chernobyl plant. Tokyo is located more than 241 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant with four nuclear reactors in “dire” condition according to physicist Dr. Michio Kaku.

Fukushima Diary:

The extremely radioactive black substance was found at 4km from the center of Tokyo.

In 10 minutes walk from Hirai station of JR Sobu line, where is about 4 km from Tokyo station, 5 km from Imperial Palace

black substance was found in several places near the play ground of a public estates.

A local citizen’s group found this and had it analyzed by Prof. Yamauchi from Kobe university. He measured 243,000 Bq/Kg of cesium and the surface dose was 2?Sv/h.

Mr. Ishikawa, the chairman of citizen’s group states, the black substance is now everywhere in Tokyo, and it moves by wind or rain.

Roughly estimating, the soil around the black substance is contaminated as 15,600,000 Bq/m2 (cesium134/137).

In Belarus, the place where is more contaminated than 1,480,000Bq/Kg (cesium137) was defined as mandatory evacuation area.

To double the Belarus standard to make it close to the total of cesium 134 and 137, it becomes 2,960,000Bq/m2.

The graph to compare Tokyo to the mandatory evacuation area in Tokyo is below, which shows the contamination situation around Hirai Station is worse than no-man’s zone of Belarus by 527%.


Dr. Michio Kaku, Flashpoints Daily News Magazine interview:

“Humans cannot come close to certain parts of the reactor site and even robots get fried. They’re delicate machinery; their micro-circuitry cannot withstand the intense bombardment of radiation. We’re talking about thousands of rads of radiation per hour being registered there and that is affecting the cleanup operation.

“It will take years to invent an new generation of robots” to be able to withstand the radiation.

The workers are like Samurai warriors, they’re like suicide workers. They know they are getting huge amounts of radiation going to the site. They can only go in, seconds to minutes, at a time doing work and then the next batch has to come in.

Chernobyl had a half a million workers who worked minutes at a time. Here we have a situation much worse than Chernobyl simply because we have basically five reactors that could go up. One reactor setting off the next reactor, that’s a huge amount of radiation, over ten times the radiation inventory found in Chernobyl.

They said they are in a stable situation, stable in a sense that they are hanging by their fingernails. And if their fingernails begin to crack, and of course you go over. That’s how dire this situation is, and again it’s not making media because it is quote “stable”, but it’s stable only in a sense that they’re hanging in there by their fingernails.”

….

“People don’t realize that the Fukushima reactor is on a knife’s edge; it’s near the tipping point. A small earthquake, another pipe break, another explosion could tip it over and we could have a disaster much worse, many times worse than Chernobyl. It’s like a sleeping dragon.

Just in the last few weeks it’s been in the paper to some degree, Units 2, 3, and 4 have been shown to be in a very dire situation. Unit 2, we now know completely liquified. We’ve never seen this before in the history of nuclear power, a 100% liquefaction of a uranium core. Unit 3, on the other hand, Unit 4, on the other hand, has an even worse problem, and that it’s a spent fuel pond that is totally uncovered because of a hydrogen explosion that took place last year. The 1,500 rods that could be exposed to the air and then set off another spent pond with 6,000 rods. Altogether there are 11,000 rods in the Fukushima site that could be tipped over. A slight earthquake, a light explosion could set the whole reactor back into motion. And also, in regards to Unit 3, we found where we thought there was 33 ft. of water above the core. We put a TV camera in Units 2 and 3. We have TV pictures of the core; Unit 2 is completely liquified, Unit 3 does not have 33 ft. of water on top of it, it has two feet of water. TWO FEET of water, not thirty-three, meaning that the core is completely, or partially covered, meaning it could liquify. So between Units 2, which is completely liquified, Units 3, which is totally exposed, and Unit 4, which has 1,500 spent fuel rods that, in principle, are exposed to the outside environment, we have a catastrophe in the making.”

[StarmanSkye]

Its hard to get a handle on just how utterly pernicious & perilous the continuing disaster at Fukushima is as so much of the danger is invisible and happening incrementally, and then results are obscured if they aren't just officially ignored, dismissed or denied by 'experts'.

'Getting better' doesn't really seem to apply at Fukushima, or it won't for at least several human generations -- assurances and pronouncements to the contrary. More than 500 times worse than Chernobyl is kind of ambigiously relative, depending how close and in-your-face it is to you, personally. I can't imagine the dread and pain this has caused, is causing the people of Japan.

On a related side-note, the Fukushima dilemna suggests this 'kind-of' analogy --

The genie's been let out of its now-broken, shattered bottle, lurking, semi-hidden among the shards and fragments, slowly spreading its invisible pall of death and poison across the landscape; Its not that the genie is malevolent, it has no sinister ambition, its just the terrible, mindless nature of genies to cause disaster, decay and corruption when they are let loose, freed from doing the bidding of their former masters. Genies just can't help it, its the result of genies' tremendous concentration of energy following the laws of nature to seek a lowest groundstate level, wreaking destruction and confounding those who in arrogance once thought it could make it their dutiful servant but who ultimately failed to keep it confined.

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^^if it does evolve to become 500 times worse then Chernobyl, we can expect 85 million radiation-related deaths in North America alone.

By 2006 Chernobyl caused more than 170,000 radiation-related North American deaths. (Yablokov, et al, Chernobyl Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, P.322)

170K X 500 = 85M