Nuclear news - 12/20/2015

Huge Fukushima Cover-Up Exposed, Government Scientists In Meltdown

Zero Hedge,

20 December, 2015

Submitted by Sean Adl-Tabatabai via InvestmentWatchBlog.com,

Fukushima radiation just off the North American coast is higher now than it has ever been, and government scientists and mainstream press are scrambling to cover-up and downplay the ever-increasing deadly threat that looms for millions of Americans. 

Following the March 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, reactors have sprayed immeasurable amounts of radioactive material into the air, most of which settled into the Pacific Ocean. A study by the American Geophysical Union has found that radiation levels from Alaska to California have increased and continue to increase since they were last taken.

Naturalnews.com reports:

The highest levels yet of radiation from the disaster were found in a sample taken 2,500 kilometers (approx. 1,550 miles) west of San Francisco.

 

“Safe” according to whom?

 

Lead researcher Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was one of the first people to begin monitoring Fukushima radiation in the Pacific Ocean, with his first samples taken three months after the disaster started. In 2014, he launched a citizen monitoring effort – Our Radioactive Ocean – to help collect more data on ocean-borne radioactivity.

 

The researchers track Fukushima radiation by focusing on the isotope Cesium-134, which has a half-life of only two years. All Cesium-134 in the ocean likely comes from the Fukushima disaster. In contrast, Cesium-137 – also released in huge quantities from Fukushima – has a half-life of 30 years, and persists in the ocean, not just from Fukushima, but also from nuclear tests conducted as far back as the 1950s.

 

The most recent study added 110 new Cesium-134 samples to the ongoing studies. These samples were an average of 11 Becquerels per cubic meter of sea water, a level 50 percent higher than other samples taken so far.

 

Instead of presenting the findings as an alarming sign of growing radiation, however, Buesseler emphasizes that the Cesium-134 levels detected are still 500 times lower than the drinking water limits set by the U.S. government. The news site The Big Wobble questions whether Buesseler and Woods Hole’s heavy financial reliance on the U.S. government – Woods Hole has received nearly $8 million in research funding from several government agencies – plays any role in this emphasis.

 

Situation still worsening

 

The reality, however, is that radiation along the West Coast is expected to keep getting worse.According to a 2013 study by the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway, the oceanic radiation plume released by Fukushima is likely to hit the North American West Coast in force in 2017, with levels peaking in 2018. Most of the radioactive material from the disaster is likely to stay concentrated on the western coast through at least 2026.

 

According to professor Michio Aoyama of Japan’s Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity, the amount of radiation from Fukushima that has now reached North America is probably nearly as much as was spread over Japan during the initial disaster.

 

The recent Woods Hole study also confirmed that radioactive material is still leaking into the Pacific Ocean from the crippled Fukushima plant. Cesium-134 levels off the Japanese coast are between 10 and 100 times higher than those detected off the coast of California.

 

Without directly challenging the U.S. government’s “safe” radiation limits, Buesseler obliquely references the fact that any radioactive contamination of the ocean is cause for concern.

 

“Despite the fact that the levels of contamination off our shores remain well below government-established safety limits for human health or to marine life,” he said, “the changing values underscore the need to more closely monitor contamination levels across the Pacific.”

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Don't worry though Olympians, everything will be fine in a few billion or so years.

Yesterday we reported an accident at the Leningrad NPP. It seems that there has been a history of shut-downs and problems with the 1 Chernobyl-type RBMK reactor

Seaweed shuts down reactor at Leningrad nuclear plant

Bellona,

9 October, 2015

ST. PETERSBURG – Seaweed caused almost three days’ downtime at Unit 3 of Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant (LNPP), on the Gulf of Finland, near St. Petersburg, after a storm blew bay bottom sediments into the plant’s water intake structures, clogging the intakes that supply water to the unit’s cooling system. The blockage had to be manually removed before the reactor could resume operation.

A scram caused… by seaweed

The unit remained in unplanned shutdown from 2:03 a.m. of October 3 to 3:02 p.m. of October 5, LNPP’s Information and Public Relations Center reported.

“As of 9:00 a.m. (Moscow time) on October 6, Unit 3 is operating as usual at a capacity of 855 megawatts; bringing the unit to the rated [power] level is in progress,” said a statement published on October 6 on the LNPP page (in Russian) on the website of the Russian nuclear power plant operator, Rosenergoatom.

The unit could achieve rated capacity on the same day, but as of October 8, no information updates to that effect had been published on Rosenergoatom’s LNPP page.

Unit 3 was stopped at 2:02 a.m. on October 3 following a shutdown request, an earlier statement by the plant’s press service, of the same day, said: “A storm resulted in a rise in the water level in the Gulf of Finland and an increase in the amount of seaweed, which affected proper operation of LNPP’s water intake equipment.”

Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, located in Sosnovy Bor on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, some 35 kilometers from St. Petersburg city limits, operates four reactors of the RBMK-1000 type, of Chernobyl infamy. The reactors were taken online in 1973, 1975, 1979, and 1981, respectively, and all four have been operating beyond their design-basis 30-year lifespans. Their efficiency factor is less than 30 percent, and over 70 percent of the heat produced by the reactors is waste heat, released with warmed water into the gulf.

Cold seawater at a rate of several hundred tons a second must be supplied to the plant’s units from a cooling reservoir, which for LNPP is the gulf’s Koporye Bay.

And earlier

Emergency shut-off at Leningrad nuclear plant picks scabs of environmental concern

ST. PETERSBURG – The Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant’s beleaguered No 1 Chernobyl-type RBMK reactor experienced another hiccup – it second in less than a year – earlier this month when the reactor automatically shut down due to a malfunction in shut off system of the unit.