In March of 2011, the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan rushed to Japan to help after the disastrous tsunami. Since then, many sailors from that ship have fallen ill, possibly as a result of exposure to radiation from the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. They will soon have their day in court.
The organisation set up to verify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) has a global network of air samplers that monitor and trace the origin of around a dozen radionuclides, the radioactive elements released by atomic bomb blasts – and nuclea
Tomas Kåberger 25.10.:" Den dåvarande japanska premiärministern Kan berättar i en intervju att kärnkraftbolagets anställda var på väg att lämna hela kraftverket dygnet efter olyckan. Premiärministern själv flög till kraftverket i helikopter för att förklara för personalen att det var uteslutet att de lämnade verket. Kan trodde att deras flykt skulle leda till spontan utrymning av Tokyo, en utrymning som i sig kunde få katastrofala följder. Denna rädsla var också skälet till att Japanska myndigheter inte ansåg det lämpligt att berätta allt och att ljuga om olyckans dignitet enligt den så kallade Ines-skalan. Verklighetsanknytningen kan också ifrågasättas när man nu talar om att få reaktorerna sluta läcka och vara i ”kallt, avstängt läge” före årsskiftet. Vad betyder det när man inte ens vet hur mycket av bränslet som ligger kvar i den trasiga inneslutningen eller kanske tiotals meter ner i berget?"
By HIROKO TABUCHI Published: December 16, 2011 TOKYO — Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan has declared an end to the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, saying technicians have regained control of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. "But even before Mr. Noda’s announcement, some experts called the news premature, an attempt to quell continuing public anger over the accident and paper over remaining threats to the plant. The experts argue that the devastated plant remains vulnerable to large aftershocks, which could knock out the jury-rigged cooling system that helped workers bring the reactors into a relatively stable state known as a “cold shutdown.” "
Conditions at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant are far worse than its operator or the government has admitted, according to freelance journalist Tomohiko Suzuki, who spent more than a month working undercover at the power station. A book by Tomohiko Suzuki detailing many of his experiences at the plant and connections between yakuza crime syndicates and the nuclear industry, titled "Yakuza to genpatsu" (the yakuza and nuclear power), was published by Bungei Shunju on Dec. 15.
New York Times By MARTIN FACKLER Published: January 21, 2012 Quotation: “If the government treated us like adults, there would be no need for Mamorukai,” said Sachiko Sato, a network founder. “Japan must build an entirely new food-monitoring system that we average people can really trust.”
Press Release 11.03.2012: "...the Fukushima catastrophe was more serious in terms of its releases of these two nuclides than Chernobyl. This is not surprising since there were three reactors breached at Fukushima to one at Chernobyl of equivalent capacity, said Busby. Total Fukushima releases exceeded 2 x 1019 Bq (20EBq) and were overall more than twice the releases from Chernobyl. The high population density of the area contaminated makes this a more serious issue for health than the Chernobyl releases. These findings support the early assessment made by Prof Busby in March and later in August 2011 and the many statements he made to the BBC, ITV, and Russia Today and show that those many pro nuclear experts who talked down the seriousness of the catastrophe were wrong."
Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal, says Oliver Morton Mar 10th 2012 | from the print edition "But if nuclear power teaches one lesson, it is to doubt all stories of technological determinism. It is not the essential nature of a technology that matters but its capacity to fit into the social, political and economic conditions of the day."
By Monique Sené, physicist, Honorary Research Director at the CNRS, member of the Higher Committee for Transparency and Information on Nuclear Safety, and President of the GSIEN Raymond Sené, physicist, GSIEN member Dominique Leglu, physicist, editor-in-chief of Sciences et Avenir
Heart disease and depression are likely to claim more lives than radiation after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, experts say By Katherine Harmon | March 2, 2012 |
Chris Busby: "...the late Professor John Gofman, a senior figure in the US Atomic Energy Commission until he saw what was happening and resigned, famously said: "the nuclear industry is waging a war against humanity." This war has now entered an endgame which will decide the survival of the human race. Not from sudden nuclear war. But from the on-going and incremental nuclear war which began with the releases to the biosphere in the 60s of all the atmospheric test fallout, and which has continued inexorably since then through Windscale, Kyshtym, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Hanford, Sellafield, La Hague, Iraq and now Fukushima, accompanied by parallel increases in cancer rates and fertility loss to the human race.
"The spent-nuclear-fuel pool at Fukushima No. 1's unit 4 remains a sleeping dragon. The situation and possibility of a fuel pool fire in reactor 4 in the days (immediately) after the (March 2011) quake was the reason the U.S. government recommended that the evacuation zone be (set at) 80 km," said Gundersen, who served as an expert witness during the federal investigation into the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania.
Vulnerabilities found by the commission and identified in the draft report include a situation at four reactors in Finland and Sweden, where if the cooling systems failed or all electric power was lost, the operators would have less than an hour to restore safety functions before catastrophic damage took place. The draft report says that 10 reactors in countries including Spain, France and the Czech Republic lack adequate equipment to detect earthquakes. Mark Breddy, a spokesman for Greenpeace European Unit, the environmental advocacy organization, said: “Cozy relationships between nuclear operators, regulators and politicians were pivotal to aggravating the Fukushima disaster. The situation isn’t much better in Europe.” Given those relationships, he said, he questioned whether the European Commission’s stress tests were as thorough and as impartial as they should have been.
27 April 2013 : "Groundwater is pouring into the plant's ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools."
MAKHIJANI: Well, I think there's no call--you know, it's not a panic type of situation. So if there are people who are panicking and talking about evacuations and so on on the west coast, I think that that is out of proportion. But at the same time, there is a real cause for concern because, as we know, there are hundred of tons of radioactive water that are flowing into the ocean every day.
Some 1,400 people have filed a joint lawsuit against three companies that manufactured the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, saying they should be financially liable for damage caused by its 2011 meltdowns.
July 13, 2014 The court ordered Kansai Electric Power Co. not to restart the two reactors at its Oi nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture, saying that local residents can seek a halt to reactor operations because it is impossible for modern science to predict the scale of possible earthquakes. Part of the translated ruling says: “… this court considers national wealth to be the rich land and the people’s livelihoods that have taken root there, and that being unable to recover these is the true loss of national wealth.” The ruling also says, “… the operation of nuclear power plants as one means of producing electricity is legally associated with freedom of economic activity and has a lower ranking in the Constitution than the central tenet of personal rights.”
Tšernobylin ja Fukushiman onnettomuuksien seurauksena luontoon levisi laajoille alueille radioaktiivista ainesta. Radioaktiivinen laskeuma aiheuttaa suhteellisen alhaisen, mutta pahimmillaan useita vuosisatoja kestävän altistuksen ionisoivalle säteilylle. Tapio Mappesin tutkimusprojektin tarkoitus on selvittää kuinka alhainen ionisoiva säteily vaikuttaa alueen eläimiin, niiden kantoihin, lisääntymiseen, kuolleisuuteen ja fysiologiaan. Tutkimus on vielä alussa, mutta tuloksia joihinkin kysymyksiin on jo saatu.
The plant's operator recently admitted for the first time that radioactive water was still going into the sea. On Tuesday [23 July], Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said steam was seen around the fifth floor of the building housing Reactor No 3 shortly after 09:00 local time The sight of steam rising is worrying because it means somewhere inside the reactor building water is boiling, says the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo. The badly damaged reactors are supposed to be in what is called "cold shutdown"; the temperature of the cooling water inside the reactor should be well below boiling point. It is another sign that Tepco still does not fully know what is going on inside the damaged reactors, our correspondent adds. Steam was last seen rising from a reactor building at the plant on 18 July
A Quick Solution Is Unlikely BY Von Marco Evers, SPIEGEL Sept. 14, 2013: Every day, TEPCO pumps 400 tons of contaminated cooling water and groundwater out of the radioactive wreckage of Fukushima. This water is too heavily contaminated with cesium, strontium and tritium to be emptied into the ocean. Instead, TEPCO stores the liquid in numerous tanks, the largest of which are 12 meters (40 feet) across and 11 meters high, hastily riveted together rather than welded. Satellite images show how these behemoths have proliferated at the Fukushima site, with a few dozen of them in mid-2011, then several hundred by mid-2012. Currently, there are over 1,000 such tanks, with plans for over 2,000 of them by 2015. TEPCO is veritably drowning in contaminated water.
By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes BBC News 1 October 2013 1. Firstly, Fukushima was not an unavoidable natural disaster. - there was no plan for how to deal with such a large and complex disaster. ( "a one-in-1,000-year probability") - the nuclear power industry "captured" the bureaucracy that was supposed to regulate it - the whole town was far too trusting 2. Cleaning up a nuclear disaster is extremely difficult. - just how complex only becomes apparent when you see how it is done - large areas (e.g. forests) may have to be declared out of bounds for decades (cannot be cleaned) - the waste (and this article does not even mention the leaks)
Reactor 4 contains 10 times more Cesium-137 than Chernobyl did. Scientists have warned that another nuclear disaster could be the beginning of an ultimate catastrophe for the planet. The mid-November fuel removal operation will be just the first step in a decommissioning process that is expected to take decades.
Scientists Warn of Extreme Risk November 8, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog Wahington"... the greatest short-term threat to humanity is from the fuel pools at Fukushima." Experts around the world have warned … that the fuel pool is in a precarious state – vulnerable to collapsing in another big earthquake. Yale University professor Charles Perrow wrote about the number 4 fuel pool this year in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. “This has me very scared,” he told the ABC. “Tokyo would have to be evacuated because [the] caesium and other poisons that are there will spread very rapidly.
BBC 8 Nov 2013: Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from inside Reactor Building 4 at Fukushima..... It comes down to what is, in the next few weeks, going to start happening inside one building at the destroyed nuclear plant. ... So what can I report? Mainly that I feel somewhat reassured by what I have seen. The preparations for the fuel removal appear meticulous.
Posibilities: 1) 89 tonnes of MOX in the spent fuel storage pond would melt down becoz of water loss; 2) the reactor 'corium' has reached groundwater; 3) rainwater on hot fragments
Beginning on Monday December 30, 2013, the Internet has been flooded with conjecture claiming that Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 is ready to explode. Fairewinds Energy Education has been inundated with questions about the very visible steam emanating from Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3. Our research, and discussions with other scientists, confirms that what we are seeing is a phenomenon that has been occurring at the Daiichi site since the March 2011 accident.
RT.com 4.1.14: "As TEPCO began preparations for the cleaning of the drainage system with tons of leaked radioactive water at the Fukushima power plant,a former employee reveals the reason for so many leaks was cost cutting measures such as using duct tape,Asahi reported."