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BREAKING
: Tepco Press Conference: The situation at Fukushima is bleak —
“This discharge is beyond our control”
6
August, 2013
Two
and a half years may have passed since the Fukushima nuclear
disaster, but problems there are as serious now as they’ve ever
been [...]
*Just
In* Tepco Press Conference: The situation at Fukushima is bleak —
“This discharge is beyond our control” (VIDEO)
Two
and a half years may have passed since the Fukushima nuclear
disaster, but problems there are as serious now as they’ve ever
been [...]
The
head of the country’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority task force
Shinji Kinjo told Reuters on Monday that the leak was an emergency,
but he was worried the plant’s operator, TEPCO, had no sense of how
to deal with it. [...]
In
a recent news conference, TEPCO General manager Masayuki Ono said the
situation was bleak.
“We
understand that this discharge is beyond our control and we do not
think the current situation is good.” [...]
Watch:
Japan Officials Issue Fukushima Radioactivity Alert — “The
radioactive discharge is out of control” — Contamination seeping
into ocean is an emergency (VIDEO)
Watchdog
Issues Fresh Fukushima Radioactivity Alert
[...]
Japan’s nuclear watchdog said on Monday that radioactive water is
seeping into the ocean creating an emergency Tepco is struggling to
contain. The contaminated groundwater has breached an underground
barrier and is rising towards the surface, says the nuclear
regulator. [...]
Masashi
Goto, a retired nuclear engineer who worked on several Tepco plants
[...] says the current situation is more than Tepco can handle. [...]
Tepco
now admits that tainted water is reaching the sea, saying on Friday
the radioactive discharge is out of control.
BBC:
Flow of radioactive water into Pacific could ‘accelerate rapidly’
now that barrier is breached at Fukushima plant — Tepco clearly in
‘deep trouble’
BBC
News, August 5, 2013: [...] A barrier built to contain the water has
already been breached, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority warned. This
means the amount of contaminated water seeping into the Pacific Ocean
could accelerate rapidly, it said. [...] It has been clear for months
now that the operators of the Fukushima plant are in deep trouble,
says the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes. [...]
Radio
New Zealand, August 5, 2013: [...] The Nuclear Regulatory Authority
said on Monday that a barrier built to contain the water has already
been breached. It said this means the amount of contaminated water
seeping into the Pacific Ocean could accelerate rapidly. [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_0MCKv914#action=share
There
is no way to stop Fukushima radioactive water leaking into the
Pacific - expert
7
August, 2013
The rate at which contaminated water has been pouring into the Pacific Ocean from the disabled Fukushima nuclear plant is worse than thought before, an Industry Ministry official said Wednesday as PM Shinzo Abe pledged to step up efforts to halt the crisis. The Voice of Russia contacted Arnold Gundersen, founder and president of Fairewinds Associates, to discuss the crisis and the possible solutions. The expert suggests radioactive materials will continue to leak into the global seas unless the plant is surrounded with a trench filled with zeolite. Even then, however, toxic materials will enter the Pacific through underwater sources.
The horse is already out
of the barn here. This plant’s been leaking for two years. And
finally, now, the radioactive water has made it to the ocean. But my
experience with underground water is that – if it is serious at the
ocean, it is more serious as you move away from the ocean. So, spike
of radiation continues to move to the ocean.
The Japanese are
proposing putting in a barrier to prevent the water from entering the
ocean. That is two years too late and will be too late by the time
they construct that barrier. But the barrier also causes another
problem. If the water can’t go anywhere into the Pacific Ocean, it
is going to build up onsite, which means that the nuclear reactors
themselves will become unstable. The water can pull underneath the
nuclear buildings and if there is an earthquake, in fact the nuclear
buildings could topple. So, by solving one problem, they are creating
another problem.
The solution that I
proposed two years ago was to surround the plant with a trench filled
with material called zeolite. That’s just the volcanic ash. The
volcanic ash is very good at absorbing radiation. But the solution
isn’t to keep the water from getting out. The solution is to keep
the water from getting in. So, outside the trench that they surround
the plant, if they pull the water level down (the clean water outside
the trench) that would prevent further water from leaking into the
Daiichi site.
The japans haven’t been
willing to spend the money. I approached them two years ago with this
and I was told that Tokyo Electric doesn’t have the money to spend.
But of course, the problem now is that we are contaminating the
Pacific Ocean which is extraordinarily serious.
Frankly, I don’t
believe so. I think we will continue to release radioactive material
into the ocean for 20 or 30 years at least. They have to pump the
water out of the areas surrounding the nuclear reactor. But frankly,
this water is the most radioactive water I’ve ever experienced. I
work directly over a nuclear reactor cores during refueling outages.
And the water directly over a nuclear reactor core when the plant is
operating is a thousand times less radioactive than this water. So,
there is an extraordinary amount of water and even if they build the
wall, ground waters enter the Pacific through underwater sources. It
doesn’t have to run of the top of the surface into the Pacific. It
can enter the underwater sources as well.
Domestically, do you
expect the latest disclosures about Fukushima to delay decisions on
reactivating Japanese nuclear power plants?
I think it should. I
think the big problem is that the Japanese Government has not been
honest with its people about the cost to clean up Daiichi. I think
the cost to clean up just the site is going to be $100 billion. And
the cost to clean up the prefecture of Fukushima is going to be
another $400 billion
.
The
Japanese Government hasn’t told the people that they are on the
hook for a half a trillion dollars. And I think if the japans people
understood the magnitude of the damage a nuclear plant can create,
they’d have had second thought about staring up the remaining
nuclear plants because it could happen elsewhere. This is the most
seismic place on the planet and to build a nuclear plant there is
rather foolish.
A
Fukushima fisherman’s tale: Radioactive water from the Daiichi
plant is flowing into the ocean at a rate of 300 tons a day
7
August, 2013
Old habits die hard among fishermen. Yoshio Ichida still rises for work every day at 3am and checks the engine of his five-ton boat. Then, as the sun rises over the Pacific and the trawler bobs gently in Soma wharf, he switches off the engine and gazes out at a sea too poisoned to fish.
Just
27 miles up the coast from this small harbour town, radioactivity
from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant leaks into the ocean,
and into the sardines, mackerel and squid that three generations of
Mr Ichida’s family once caught.
Engineers
are fighting what appears to be a losing battle to stop the leaks
from worsening.
Japan’s
Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) warned this week that the build-up
of contaminated groundwater at the plant is on the verge of tipping
out of control and that its operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco),
“lacked a sense of crisis” about the looming damage to the
Pacific.
“Right
now, we have an emergency,” said Shinji Kinjo, the head of an NRA
task force. Mr Kinjo warned that leaking water had already flowed
over a barrier built by engineers to block it. “The water could
accelerate very quickly,” he said.
A
survey released today by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and
Industry said water laced with caesium and other radioactive
materials is flowing into the ocean at a rate of 300 tons a day. The
ministry, which oversees the nuclear industry, said it could not rule
out the possibility that the water has been leaking into the Pacific
since the crisis began more than two years ago.
Critics
have accused the NRA of allowing Tepco off the hook. After months of
denials, the embattled utility was finally forced to admit the
groundwater leaks last week. Many suspect the admission was
conveniently delayed until Japan’s pro-nuclear Prime Minister,
Shinzo Abe, had solidified his power in the recent general election.
Anti-nuclear voices in the media were muted during the election
campaign and on occasion silenced completely: a YouTube video showing
Mr Abe’s security confiscating an anti-nuclear sign during a speech
in Fukushima has gone viral – but never been seen on TV.
Tepco
said it is “unable to say” if the latest government figures for
the size of the leak are accurate. But last week it admitted a
cumulative leak of 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of
radioactive tritium since the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011
that triggered the triple meltdown. Tritium, one of the cocktail of
contaminants swimming in the onsite water, has a half-life of about
12 years.
This
month, Tepco acknowledged that levels of radioactive caesium-134 were
at their highest point since the disaster began. “We’re sorry for
delaying this information,” said Yoshikazu Nagai, a Tepco
spokesman. “We’re trying very hard to stop the leaks and fix the
problem.”
Mr
Ichida is not surprised. “Tepco is still trying to hide things from
us,” he says. “They haven’t changed a bit. The 54-year-old, who
survived the tsunami by driving his boat into the open sea, despairs
that the crisis will ever end. “We must work to revive Fukushima
fishing, but it is probably not likely,” he says, choking back
tears. “Why would young people go into this profession?”
Yoshio
Ichida was out fishing when the waves wrecked his home Yoshio Ichida
was out fishing when the waves wrecked his home
The
build-up of contaminated water in the Daiichi’s ruined hulk was
long predicted. Engineers pump about 400 tons of water a day onto the
plant’s reactors to keep its melted nuclear fuel cool, and
inevitably some leaks underground. The radioactive water is stored in
more than 1,000 giant onsite tanks, which are almost full. The
plant’s makeshift decontamination system cannot keep up with the
amount of toxic water being produced.
The
recent admissions have forced the government to step into what many
experts now consider the world’s most complex ever nuclear
clean-up. Mr Abe has ordered his government to help the struggling
utility, a move that is likely to involve a huge injection of money
into building an artificial underground wall to block the toxic water
from reaching the Pacific. The Nikkei business newspaper estimates
the cost of the operation at about £260bn.
Experts
say the government’s admission shows that the crisis at the Daiichi
complex is being managed, not solved. “It is an emergency – has
been since 11 March 2011 and will continue to be long into the
future,” said Shaun Burnie, an independent nuclear consultant. He
says onsite contaminated water contains three times the caesium
released from the 1986 Chernobyl accident – the world’s worst
nuclear disaster. “That underscores the scale of this never-ending
threat.”
That
news is a disaster to fishermen like Mr Ichida. Every Thursday he and
his colleagues learn the latest radioactive readings from the sea.
“Until recently, we only detected caesium, but now we detect
strontium, which has a much longer life-span,” he says.
He
and hundreds of other fishermen who used to work the Fukushima coast
now while away their days mending nets and boats they may never use.
A
government-funded project that pays them a little to collect debris
from the sea ends in November. Some are contemplating virtually the
only work left in the area: decontaminating Fukushima towns and
villages poisoned by radiation.
“We
have all made a living from the sea. We love the sea. We are proud of
it and the work we got from it,” he says, choking back tears again.
“We
must pass it on to the next generation. We will never get back what
we had but we have to keep demanding that Tepco and the government
take responsibility.”
Fukushima's
Radioactive Water Leak: What You Should Know
7
August, 2013
Tensions
are rising in Japan over radioactive water leaking into the Pacific
Ocean from Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, a breach
that has defied the plant operator's effort to gain control.
issue”
and ordered the government to step in and help in the clean-up,
following an admission by Tokyo Electric Power Company that water is
seeping past an underground barrier it attempted to create in the
soil. The head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority task force told
Reuters the situation was an "emergency." (See Pictures:
The Nuclear Cleanup Struggle at Fukushima.”)
It
marked a significant escalation in pressure for TEPCO, which has come
undersevere
criticism since
what many view as its belated acknowledgement July 22 that
contaminated water has been leaking for some time. The government now
says it is clear that 300 tons (71,895 gallons/272,152 liters) are
pouring into the sea each day, enough to fill an Olympic-size
swimming pool every eight days. (See related, “One
Year After Fukushima, Japan Faces Shortages of Energy, Trust.”)
While Japan grapples with the problem, here are some answers to basic
questions about the leaks:
Q:
How long has contaminated water been leaking from the plant into the
Pacific?
Shunichi
Tanaka, head of Japan’s Nuclear
Regulation Authority,
has told reporters that it’s probably been happening since
an earthquake and tsunami touched off the disaster in
March 2011. (See related: "Photos:
A Rare Look Inside Fukushima Daiichi.")
According to a report by
the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety,
that initial breakdown caused "the largest single contribution
of radionuclides to the marine environment ever observed." Some
of that early release actually was intentional, because TEPCO
reportedly had to dump 3 million gallons of water contaminated with
low levels of radiation into the Pacific to make room in its storage
ponds for more heavily contaminated water that it needed to pump out
of the damaged reactors so
that it could try to get them under control.
But
even after the immediate crisis eased, scientists have continued to
find radioactive contamination in the waters off the plant. Ken
Buesseler,
a senior scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who
has analyzed thousands of samples of fish from the area, said he’s
continued to find the high levels of cesium-134, a radioactive
isotope that decays rapidly. That indicates it’s still being
released. "It’s getting into the ocean, no doubt about it,"
he said. "The only news was that they finally admitted to this."
(See related: "Photos:
Japan's Reactors Before And After.")
Q:
How much and what sort of radiation is leaking from the plant into
the Pacific?
TEPCO
said Monday that radiation
levels in its groundwater observation hole on
the east side of the turbine buildings had reached 310 becquerels per
liter for cesium-134 and 650 becquerels per liter for cesium-137.
That marked nearly a 15-fold increase from readings five days
earlier, and exceeded Japan’s provisional emergency standard of 60
becquerels per liter for cesium radiation levels in drinking water.
(Drinking water at 300 becquerels per liter would be approximately
equivalent to one year’s exposure to natural background radiation,
or 10 to 15 chest X-rays, according
to the World Health Organization.
And it is far in excess of WHO’s guideline advised maximum level of
radioactivity in drinking water, 10
becquerels per liter.)
Readings fell somewhat on Tuesday. A similar spike and fall
preceded TEPCO’s July admission that it was grappling with leakage
of the radioactive water. (See related: "Would
a New Nuclear Plant Fare Better than Fukushima?")
Scientists
who have been studying the situation were not surprised by the
revelation, since radiation levels in the sea around Japan have been
holding steady and not falling as they would if the situation were
under control. In a 2012
study,
Jota Kanda, an oceanographer at Toyko University of Marine Science
and Technology, calculated that the plant is leaking 0.3
terabecquerels (trillion becquerels) of cesium-137 per month and a
similar amount of cesium-134. While that number sounds mind-boggling,
it’s actually thousands of times less than the level of radioactive
contamination that the plant was spewing in the immediate aftermath
of the disaster, estimated to be from 5,000 to 15,000 terabecquerels,
according to Buesseler. For a comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima released 89 terabecquerels of cesium-137 when it exploded.
(See related: "Animals
Inherit a Mixed Legacy at Chernobyl.")
Another
potential worry: The makeup of the radioactive material being leaked
by the plant has changed. Buesseler said the initial leak had a high
concentration of cesium isotopes, but the water flowing from the
plant into the ocean now is likely to be proportionally much higher
in strontium-90, another radioactive substance that is absorbed
differently by the human body and has different risks. The tanks (on
the plant site) have 100 times more strontium than cesium, Buesseler
said. He believes that the cesium is retained in the soil under the
plant, while strontium and tritium, another radioactive substance,
are continuing to escape. (Related: "Japan's
Nuclear Refugees")
Q:
Why is the plant continuing to leak?
There
are at least a couple of possibilities. In an effort to cool and
control the damaged reactors, TEPCO has pumped enormous amounts of
water in and out. But that water is contaminated with radioactive
material, and it has to go someplace. According to a
recent report issued
by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the plant operator has
been storing highly contaminated water in seven underground storage
ponds, which have a total of 60,000 tons (14.4 million gallons/54.5
million liters) of capacity. In April, TEPCO workers discovered that
at least three of the ponds were leaking. The IAEA concluded that the
company’s monitoring system, which hadn’t spotted the breach, was
insufficient to spot such outflow. So it could be that the faulty
containments, which are now being replaced, are the source of at
least some of the contaminated water that’s gotten into the ocean.
But
most experts seem to think that ordinary movement of groundwater
probably is the real culprit. An estimated 400 tons (95,860 gallons/
362,870 liters) of water streams into the basements of the damaged
reactors each day. Keeping that water from continuing to flow into
the ocean is crucial. As the IAEA noted in its report, "the
accumulation of enormous amounts of liquids due to the continuous
intrusion of underground water into the reactor and turbine buildings
is influencing the stability of the situation."
"Big
surprise—water does flow downhill," said Dr.
Janette Sherman,
a medical expert on radiation and toxic exposure who once worked as a
chemist for the Atomic Energy Commission, the forerunner of today’s
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "If you’ve ever had a leak
in your house during a storm, you know how hard it is to contain
water. There’s a lot of water going into the plant, and it’s got
to go someplace. It’s very hard to stop this."
Q:
What can be done to stop the leaking?
According
to TEPCO’s latest
full status report on
the cleanup of Fukushima Daiichi, issued in October 2012, the utility
company already had put in place an array of measures to try to
control the radioactive water. It built a groundwater bypass system,
which tries to siphon off and reroute groundwater flowing down from
the mountain side of the complex, before it can get into the
basements of the reactor buildings and be contaminated. But that
doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the problem. (See
related: "Pictures:
'Liquidators' Endured Chernobyl 25 Years Ago.")
Plant
workers also tried to create an underground barrier by injecting
chemicals into the soil to solidify the ground along the shoreline of
the Unit 1 reactor building. But TEPCO officials Tuesday said the
water was seeping under or past this barrier. Officials also believe
the water is rising to the surface, which is a troubling development
because it could hasten leakage into the sea.
The
company also continues to add to a massive tank farm on the site,
with capacity to store about 400,000 tons (95 million gallons/360
million liters) of contaminated water, and is planning to add an
additional 300,000 tons of capacity over the next three years.
Unfortunately, TEPCO must deal with an ever-increasing amount of
contaminated water—nearly 150,000 tons (35.9 million gallons/136
million liters) a year—so it’s inevitable that the company is
going to run out of storage space.
That’s
why TEPCO seems to be betting heavily on another solution—an
elaborate state-of-the art system for filtering the accumulated water
and removing radioactive materials from it. According to New
Scientist, the new system supposedly can filter out 62 different
radioactive substances. However,the
April IAEA report noted that
the filtering system is still a work in progress, and that in tests
so far, "it has not accomplished the expected result" in
terms of removing radioactive material from the water. Additionally,
the system doesn’t remove tritium, which isn’t as radioactive as
other materials in the water, but which still is a health hazard if
it is inhaled or ingested. The Wall Street Journal
recently reported that
TEPCO hopes eventually to be able to discharge the cleansed water
into the ocean, though that plan would likely meet intense opposition
from local fishermen. Sherman, who has a chemistry background, said
she’s skeptical that such a process could work on the enormous
scale required. "You can precipitate these things out in the
laboratory, but you’re talking about millions of gallons here,"
she explained.
In
a July
26 press release,
TEPCO also said it would continue construction of a shielding wall
along the waterline, but that structure will not be finished until
September 2014. Marine scientist Buesseler isn’t sure that will
work, either. "You can build a dam, but eventually the water
goes around it," he explained.
Q:
How far is the radiation spreading, and how fast does it travel?
The
initial gigantic deluge of contaminated water dispersed through the
immediate Fukushima coastal area very quickly, according to a 2012
report by
the American Nuclear Society. But it takes years for the
contamination to spread over a wider area. A mathematical model
developed by Changsheng Chen of the University of Massachusetts at
Dartmouth and Robert Beardsley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institute found that radioactive particles disperse through the ocean
differently at different depths. The scientists estimated that in
some cases, contaminated
seawater could reach the western coast of
the United States in as little as five years. Buesseler thinks the
process occurs a bit more rapidly, and estimates it might take three
years for contamination to reach the U.S. coastline.
Q:
What are the potential risks to humans, and who might be affected by
the contamination?
This
is a murky question, because it’s not that easy to determine
whether health problems that may not show up for decades are caused
by exposure to radioactive contamination. A report released
in February by the World Health Organization, which was based upon
estimates of radiation exposure in the immediate wake of the
accident, concluded that it probably would cause "somewhat
elevated" lifetime cancer rates among the local population. But
figuring out the effect of years of exposure to lower levels of
radioactive contamination leaking into the ocean is an even more
complicated matter.
Minoru
Takata, director of the Radiation Biology Center at Kyoto University,
told the Wall Street Journal that the radioactive water doesn’t
pose an immediate health threat unless a person goes near the damaged
reactors. But over the longer term, he’s concerned that the leakage
could cause higher rates of cancer in Japan.
Marine
scientist Buesseler believes that the leaks pose little threat to
Americans, however. Radioactive contamination, he says, quickly
is reduced "by many orders of magnitude" after it moves
just a few miles from the original source, so that by the time it
would reach the U.S. coast, the levels would be extremely low. (See
related, “Rare
Video: Japan Tsunami.”)
Q:
Will seafood be contaminated by the leaks?
As
Buesseler’s research has
shown, tests of local fish in the Fukushima area still show high
enough levels of radiation that the Japanese government won’t allow
them to be caught and sold for human consumption—a restriction that
is costing Japanese fishermen billions of dollars a year in lost
income. (But while flounder, sea bass, and other fish remained
banned for radiation risk, in 2012 the Japanese government did
begin allowing sales of octopus and whelk,
a type of marine snail, after tests showed no detectable amount of
cesium contamination.)
Buesseler
thinks the risk is mostly confined to local fish that dwell mostly at
the sea bottom, where radioactive material settles. He says bigger
fish that range over long distances in the ocean quickly lose
whatever cesium contamination they’ve picked up. However, the
higher concentration of strontium-90 that is now in the outflow poses
a trickier problem, because it is a bone-seeking isotope. "Cesium
is like salt—it goes in and out of your body quickly," he
explains. "Strontium gets into your bones." While he’s
still not too concerned that fish caught off the U.S. coast will be
affected, "strontium changes the equation for Japanese
fisheries, as to when their fish will be safe to eat." (See
related blog, “Safety
Question on Fukushima Anniversary: Should Plants of the Same Design
Have Filtered Vents?”)
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