Fukushima Six Years Later

Here's where things stand; 

• 400 Tons of Contaminated Water Per Day
• 3,519 Containers of Radioactive Sludge
• 64,700 Cubic Meters of Discarded Protective Clothing 
• Branches and Logs From 220 Acres of Deforested Land
• 200,400 Cubic Meters of Radioactive Rubble
• 3.5 Billion Gallons of Soil
• 1,573 Nuclear Fuel Rods
• Estimated Cost of removing all the waste and cleaning the site, $188.6 billion.
• Time frame - begin removing fuel debris from the reactor cores in 2021&nbsp

Another result of Fukushima

In the last minute the speaker claims that the activity of the boars was predicted in the bible. This seems like a stretch to me.

Fukushima is still a problem

A new reading of the reactor #2 reveals the highest level of radiation recorded to date. True, this is the first time a reading was taken there, but 530 sieverts per hour is a number experts have called "unimaginable". Robert Cringely, who knows a lot about radiation, writes, "What this means is there’s a puddle of molten uranium that has melted its way through the steel pressure vessel, through the reinforced concrete containment, through the reinforced concrete foundation of the nuclear facility, and is now working its way through whatever rock or soil lies underneath the foundation, dropping lower each day."

Will an underground ice wall work at Fukushima?

The wall will consist of frozen dirt 100 feet deep and be nearly a mile in length. It is intended to halt an unrelenting flood of groundwater into the damaged reactor buildings since the disaster five years ago. The plan is to seal off the reactor buildings within a vast, rectangular-shaped barrier of man-made permafrost; the frozen soil will act as a dam to block new groundwater from entering the buildings. It will also help stop leaks of radioactive water into the nearby Pacific Ocean, which have decreased significantly since the calamity but may be continuing.

"When you're at war you do what you have to do"

Those are the words of Kaori Suzuki, who became a scientist and, with a few other women, started a non-profit organisation - Tarachine. Here is the laboratory they set up to monitor radiation in the city of Iwaki.

None of these women had trained as scientists. One used to be a beautician, another was a hairdresser, yet another used to work in an office. They knew nothing about radiation. Then came Fukushima, and Suzuki and her associates did what they had to do.

With the help of experts and university professors, they organized training workshops and soon knew enough about radiation and with money they had raised, bought the proper instrument to test food contamination. The lab now measures the radioactive isotopes caesium 134 and 137, strontium 90 and tritiumand and collects data on gamma radiation. It publishes its findings online every month, and advises people to avoid foods with high readings as well as the places they were grown.

People bring in food, earth, grass and leaves from their backyards for testing. The lab also provides training and equipment to anyone who wants to do their own measurements. And the group keeps an eye on children's health. It runs a small clinic where doctors from all over Japan periodically come to provide free thyroid cancer check-ups for local children. Since screening began, six months after the meltdown, 166 children in Fukushima prefecture have been diagnosed with - or are suspected of having - thyroid cancer. This is a far higher rate than in the rest of the country, although some experts say that's due to over-diagnosis. And for parents who want to give their children a break from the local environment, Tarachine even organises summer trips to the south of the country.

Cleaning up after Fukushima

You really can't say there is a cleanup, as the radioactive waste is either lying around or being moved around. Throughout Fukushima, there are large cylindrical plastic sacks — each roughly the size of a hot tub and weighing about a ton when full — stacked in desultory heaps by the side of roads, near driveways or in abandoned lots. Eventually, these bags will be transferred from one part of Fukushima to another, and then another.

But, the bags deteriorate after three years. Therefore,the waste has to be repackaged regularly. Sacks are sometimes moved from one facility to another, based on their levels of radioactivity, which vary and can shift over time. By last fall, there were more than 9 million one-ton bags of radioactive waste. Standard trucks carry fewer than 10 bags at a time — meaning that radioactive material is regularly rotating around Fukushima in a slow-motion version of pass the nuclear parcel.

Home

These are the homes of some survivors of Fukushima. These may be their final homes as the disaster took place almost four years ago.

Tepco actually did one job well

Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) safely removed the radioactive fuel from the most vulnerable of the four heavily damaged reactor buildings at Fukushima. They were able to successfully remove 1,500 fuel rods from the reactor No. 4 building, which was gutted in the March 2011 disaster. There was a great degree of risk in doing so. The company's clean-up record prior to the removal has been poor. Now they will soon start on the rods in the other three reactor buildings; it is expected this will take decades and is as risk prone as No. 4. 

A changed life for the children of Fukushima

In the city of Koriyama, 35 miles west of the Fukushima plant, authorities recommended shortly that children up to two years old not spend more than 15 minutes outside each day. Those aged 3 to 5 should limit their outdoor time to 30 minutes or less. These recommendations were eliminated in October of last year, but five months later many parents are still reluctant to have their kids play outdoors.

This lack of outdoor play has negatively effected the children. The director of a local kindergarten observes, "There are children who are very fearful. They ask before they eat anything, 'does this have radiation in it?' and we have to tell them it's okay to eat." Children are weaker yet more obese, their coordination is poor, they tend to anger easily, there are more arguments and fights.

Monitoring Fukushima

We know that the monitoring by Tepco has been questionable and the Japanese government has not been very forthcoming in reporting the situation, which some scientists fear could become catastrophic not only for Japan but for other countries, including the U.S. 

Only volunteers are monitoring the situation on our Pacific coast. They are being managed by a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic. The monitors are checking ocean waters at 16 sites along the California and Washington coasts and two in Hawaii.

We now know that some of our Navy personnel may have suffered major radiation exposure when they were helping in the early days of the disaster. They have instituted suit against Tepco.

It would now seem to be time to press Japan to allow international experts to oversee its recovery efforts.

Getting Closer

The fallout from Fukushima has been detected near Vancouver and is expected near San Francisco in April. So far, scientists think that the radiation level will be quite a bit below the safety limit for drinking water.

250,000 tons

That's how much radioactive topsoil Japan has put into bags and stored in thirty locations (some in town centers) round Fukushima. Someone is praying that the bags do not break, leak, or fall over. But since the bags are temporary, prayers need to be offered for only five years as that's how long the bags can withstand the environment. 

2014 has not started well re Fukushima. In January Tepco had such a problem finding workers to clean up the mess that it had to recruit the homeless in Tokyo. In February, Tepco said that the levels of strontium-90 in te water was five times higher than previously estimated. At least one scientist has forecast that the Fukushima Daiichi plant cannot safely be reoccupied for at least 165 years.

Would we be able to do better? Where in the United States of America would a power company or government authority safely bury 250,000 tons of radioactive soil, millions of gallons of high-radiation water, and the detritus of abandoned homes and farms across thousands of acres of land? 

Removing the fuel rods at Fukushima

Tepco will soon be starting to remove 1535 fuel rods.  John Light comments on this effort:

The rods are capable of producing radiation at levels 14,000 times greater than what was released when America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It’s a highly dangerous operation that has never been attempted on such a scale before, and a key part of decommissioning the facility, which could cost $50 billion and take 40 years.

The fuel rod removal effort is expected to take 13 months to complete, but experts warn that putting the radioactive rods into safe storage won’t be easy. If any of the 15-foot, 660-pound rods break or are exposed to air, huge amounts of radioactive gasses could be released. Should there be another natural disaster like the earthquake Suzuki warned of, those rods could set off a catastrophic reaction that would be more dangerous than the meltdowns the plant has already experienced.

In September when the removal date was set at November 15, I commented:

If any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The risk of touching is high.  The rods are in a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air.  The building containing the rods is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

The Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo said earlier this year that there’s a 70 percent chance a 7.0-magnitude or higher quake will strike Tokyo, near Fukushima, by 2016. 

Incidents at Fukushima since April

 Mari Yamaguchi lists the incidents that have occurred at Fukushima in the last 7 months. Note the increasing number (1 in April to 5 in October).  Are the workers just too tired? Here is the list:

• Oct 20-21: Heavy rains wash contaminated storm-water over protective barriers around storage tanks at six locations, before workers finish setting up additional pumps and hoses to remove the water.

• Oct 9: Six workers remove the wrong pipe, dousing themselves with highly radioactive water. TEPCO says exposure for the workers, who were wearing facemasks with filters, hazmat suits and raingear, is negligible. An estimated 7 tons of water almost overflows the barrier around it.
• Oct 7: A worker mistakenly presses a stop button during a power switchboard check, stalling a pump and cooling-water supply to the Unit 1 reactor for a split second. A monitoring device for Units 1 and 2 and a building ventilator also fail briefly until backup power kicks in.
• Oct 2: Workers overfill a storage tank for radioactive water, spilling about 430 liters (110 gallons). The workers were trying to maximize capacity amid the plant’s water storage crunch. Most of the spill is believed to have reached the sea via a nearby ditch.
• Oct 1: About 5 tons of contaminated rainwater overflows when workers pump it into the wrong tank, most of it seeping into the ground.
• Sept 27: A piece of rubber lining mistakenly left inside a water treatment unit clogs it up, causing it to fail hours after it resumed a test-run following repairs. The fragment is removed, and the unit returned to testing.
• Sept 19: A firefighting water pipe is damaged during debris removal, and 300 liters of non-radioactive water spurt out. The same day, TEPCO provides Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with a hazmat suit for a plant visit with the wrong Japanese character for his family name on the nametag. Spotting the mistake halfway through the tour, an apparently displeased Abe peels the sticker off.
• Sept 12: A water treatment machine overflows, leaking about 65 liters of contaminated water, when a worker doing unrelated work nearby inadvertently shuts a valve.
• Aug 19: A patrolling worker finds a massive pool of contaminated water spilling out of a protective barrier around a storage tank. TEPCO later concludes an estimated 300 tons escaped unnoticed over several weeks.
• April 4: A worker pushes the wrong button on a touch panel, temporarily stopping one of three water treatment units during a pre-operation test.

Dealing with contaminated water at Fukushima

November 13: Day of Destruction?

November 13 is the day when Tepco begins removing 1535 fuel rods from the Fukushima site.  If any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The risk of touching is high.  The rods are in a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air.  The building containing the rods is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

Perhaps the most serious risk is that Tepco will be removing the rods. Tepco's performance has been miserable throughout the past 2+ years.  Its protection of the plant was totally inadequate. They have yet to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility.  While the government of Japan has taken some steps to control the situation, by and large they've ceded control to Tepco in building the plant, operating the plant and recovering the plant.

International action has to be taken.  The risks are too high to let a demonstrably ineffective company and government run the show when a mistake could wipe out a good part of the world. 

Japan moves in on Fukushima

"Discarding the current, impromptu response, we will set up our basic policies for a fundamental resolution of the contaminated water problem," so spoke Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan.  He described Tepco's approach as "haphazard".  One of his ministers described Tepco as playing "whack-a-mole". 

Abe's plan is to freeze the soil around the stricken reactors to form an impenetrable wall they hope will direct groundwater away from the plant. The government hopes this ice wall will be operational by March 2015.  The cost will be about $500,000,000.  

The United States will escape with a very mild dosing of cesium-137 from ocean currents coming from Japan.  These currents will not reach us until next year and will peak in 2016.

Getting more severe

Tepco has not yet solved its water problem.  Japan's nuclear agency has upgraded the severity level of a radioactive water leak at the Fukushima plant from one to three on an international scale where seven is the worst.  The water is so radioactive that teams must be constantly rotated and it is clear that most of the toxic water has already disappeared into the ground.  The radiation level is strong enough to give someone a five-year dose of radiation within one hour, so the repair crew has to be constantly rotated.

Fish are not jumping in Hisanohama

Hisanohama is a small fishing village up the coast from the Fukushima nuclear complex.  But the fishermen have not fished since March of 2011, 29 months ago.  The problem is the tons of contaminated groundwater leaking into the ocean from Fukushima every day.  It does not look as though Tepco will be able to solve the problem for at least another two years.  Many are urging the government to take over, but so far they have not.

"Right now, we have an emergency"

That's a quote from the head of a Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Authority task force, Shinji Kinjo, with regard to our old friend, Fukushima.  Contaminated water, which has come from the 400 tons of groundwater pumped into the plant every day to cool the reactors, could rise to the ground's surface within three weeks.  This would join the 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium which are already there.

There appears to be no place to store the contaminated water as the more than 1,000 giant holding tanks surrounding the plant are nearly all full.