Terrorist drill held for Fukushima nuclear plant

May 13, 2013

 

By Sheila Samples

 

Police and the Japan Coast Guard conducted a joint drill Saturday to prepare for a possible terrorist attack on the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. About 150 officers and other people, including members of a special assault team of the police, participated in the drill at the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant, about 10 km from Fukushima No. 1. Both plants are operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.

Submitters Website: http://sheilastuff.blogspot.com

Submitters Bio:

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a Managing Editor for OpEd News, and a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites.

‘Flood of Highly Radioactive Wastewater’ Overwhelms Fukushima Crews

Published on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 by Common Dreams

Latest crisis reveals intractable nature of nuclear cleanup

- Common Dreams staff

Japan’s battle against the ongoing disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant has intensified as “a flood of highly radioactive wastewater” overwhelms emergency crews and highlights just how intractable the cleanup effort is proving.

As the New York Times reports:

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.

But even they are not enough to handle the tons of strontium-laced water at the plant — a reflection of the scale of the 2011 disaster and, in critics’ view, ad hoc decision making by the company that runs the plant and the regulators who oversee it. In a sign of the sheer size of the problem, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to make room for hundreds more tanks, a task that became more urgent when underground pits built to handle the overflow sprang leaks in recent weeks.

“The water keeps increasing every minute, no matter whether we eat, sleep or work,” said Masayuki Ono, a general manager with Tepco who acts as a company spokesman. “It feels like we are constantly being chased, but we are doing our best to stay a step in front.”

Throughout the month of April, more than two years after the earthquake and tsunami that spurred the initial disaster at Fukushima,  those leaks of radioactive water, as well as power outages at the plant, became a regular occurance (see here and here).

Just last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned that the plant’s owner TEPCO was failing in its duty to protect essential safety systems at the plant and warned that it could be more than 40 years until the crippled plant could properly be deemed “decommissioned.”

At this point, given the TEPCO’s track record and what’s occurring at Fukushima now, that seems like an unlikely timeframe.

To that issue, the Times spoke with Tadashi Inoue, an expert on Japan’s nuclear power industry, who said: “Tepco is clearly just hanging on day by day, with no time to think about tomorrow, much less next year.”

IAEA says Fukushima cleanup may take more than 40 years

By Mari Yamaguchi

NATIONAL APR. 23, 2013 – 06:55AM JST ( 18 )

International Atomic Energy Agency mission team leader Juan Carlos Lentijo arrives at a press conference in Tokyo Monday.AP

TOKYO —

A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Monday that Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant and urged its operator to improve plant stability.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is so complex that it is “impossible” to predict how long the cleanup may last.

“As for the duration of the decommissioning project, this is something that you can define in your plans. But in my view, it will be nearly impossible to ensure the time for decommissioning such a complex facility in less than 30-40 years as it is currently established in the roadmap,” Lentijo said.

The government and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) have predicted the cleanup would take up to 40 years. They still have to develop technology and equipment that can operate under fatally high radiation levels to locate and remove melted fuel. The reactors must be kept cool and the plant must stay safe and stable, and those efforts to ensure safety could slow the process down.

“You have to adopt a very cautious position to ensure that you always are working on the safe side,” Lentijo said.

The plant still runs on makeshift equipment and frequently suffers glitches.

Just over the past few weeks, the plant suffered nearly a dozen problems ranging from extensive power outages and leaks of highly radioactive water from underground water pools. On Monday, TEPCO had to stop the cooling system for one of the fuel storage pools for safety checks after finding two dead rats inside a transformer box. Earlier this month, a rat short-circuited a switchboard, causing an extensive outage and cooling loss for up to 30 hours.

The problems have raised concerns about whether the plant, crippled by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, can stay intact throughout a decommissioning process. The problems have prompted officials to compile risk-reduction measures and review decommissioning plans.

Lentijo, an expert on nuclear fuel cycles and waste technology, warned of more problems to come.

“It is expected in such a complex site, additional incidents will occur,” Lentijo said. “It is important to have a very good capability to identify as promptly as possible failures and to establish compensatory measures.”

The IAEA team urged the plant operator to “improve the reliability of essential systems to assess the structural integrity of site facilities, and to enhance protection against external hazards” and promptly replace temporary equipment with a more reliable, permanent system.

The 13-member mission plans to release a report next month.

Among the most pressing issues recently was the leak of tons of highly radioactive water from three of seven underground storage pools into the soil. TEPCO and regulatory officials said none of it was believed to have reached the ocean. TEPCO has moved underground water from the pools to more reliable tanks.

The contaminated water storage has been a problem since early in the accident, but officials acknowledged this month that a lack of storage space has become a “crisis.” TEPCO has promised to speed up building more reliable steel tanks and eventually empty the underground tanks, but the leaks will continue until then. Runoff from the three reactors melted in the aftermath of the March 2011 quake-tsunami and a steady inflow of groundwater seeping into the basement of their damaged buildings produce about 400 tons of contaminated water daily at the plant.

TEPCO says 280,000 tons of contaminated water has been stored in tanks on the plant, and the amount would double within a few years.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Fukushima radiation brings hypothyroidism to babies on USA West coast

Study: Fukushima radiation fallout has devastated health of US babies on West Coast and in other areas   http://www.naturalnews.com/039923_Fukushima_radiation_hypothyroidism.html#ixzz2Qr6W6hxg April 15, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer New peer-reviewed research published in the Open Journal of Pediatrics raises fresh concerns about the health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on American children and babies. As has long been suspected by those with an understanding of the widespread reach of radioactive fallout from Fukushima, newborns living in California, Hawaii, Washington, and other West Coast states appear to have been directly affected by Fukushima fallout in a serious way, which is reflected by the disproportionate rate of hypothyroidism observed amongst this demographic.

Conducted by a duo of scientists from the Radiation and Public Health Project, a non-profit education and scientific organization that seeks to understand the relationship between nuclear radiation exposure and public health, the research evaluated average rates of hypothyroidism both before and after the Fukushima disaster. In their findings, Joseph J. Mangano and Janette D. Sherman reported that, compared to one year earlier, babies born between one week and 16 weeks after the nuclear meltdowns in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington were 28 percent more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism.
2,110 percent increase in iodine-131 on US West Coast following Fukushima linked to hypothyroidism Each of these states and the Pacific Ocean, according to the study, experiences significantly elevated levels of radioactive iodine-131 (I-131), as well as various other radioactive isotopes, in the days and weeks following the March 11, 2011, disaster. Based on the data, the 2,110 percent increase in detectable I-131 all along the U.S. West Coast following the disaster appears to be directly correlated with the higher-than-average rates of congenital hypothyroidism.

“After entering our bodies, radioactive iodine gathers in our thyroids,” explains John Upton, writing for Grist.com, about how radioactive isotopes interfere with proper thyroid function. “Thyroids are glands that release hormones that control how we grow. In babies, including those not yet born, such radiation can stunt the development of body and brain. The condition is known as congenital hypothyroidism.”
You can view an abstract of the new study here:
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=28599

You can also download or view a PDF file of the complete study here:
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperDownload.aspx?paperID=28599

A similar uptick in congenital hypothyroidism, which is fully treatable if detected early, was also observed in young children following the historic meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor back in 1986. Because of this, researchers are even more convinced that Fukushima is responsible for the now-occurring uptick, which is only just now beginning to be realized.

“Congenital hypothyroidism can be used as one measure to assess any potential changes in U.S. fetal and infant health status after Fukushima because official data was available relatively promptly,” wrote the authors in their report. “However, health departments will soon have available for other 2010 and 2011 indicators of fetal/infant health, including fetal deaths, premature births, low birth weights, neonatal deaths, infant deaths, and birth defects.”

For the latest developments related to the Fukushima disaster, be sure to check out the Fukushima Diary blog:
http://fukushima-diary.com/

The Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident: Two Years On, the Fallout Continues

Apr. 15, 2013 — More than two years after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan, scientists are still trying to quantify the extent of the damage.

Of particular importance is determining just how much hazardous material escaped into the atmosphere from the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in the period following the disaster on 11 March 2011.

Scientists estimate a ‘source term’ (the types and amounts of hazardous materials released following an accident) by running computerised atmospheric and oceanic dispersal simulations and collecting samples from seawater. Data from the Fukushima incident is unfortunately plentiful. Immediately after the accident some radionucleids were carried east by a strong jet stream and reached the west coast of North America in just four days; other airborne radionucleids were eventually deposited into the Pacific Ocean. Further releases of hazardous material occurred through accidental and intentional discharges of contaminated water from the plant into the ocean.

Writing in the Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, a team of researchers from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency now reveal that the previously estimated release rates of 137C and 131I were too low. They present their new source-term estimates for 12-20 March 2011, as refined through four numerical models and seawater data. Their comparison of the statistics obtained using the new source term with those obtained with the initial source term showed that all statistic values were improved by the new calculation. Their studyalso shows the effectiveness of using radionucleids observed in seawater to estimate the source term of atmospheric release in coastal areas.

Further research and modelling is needed to improve their new estimate, but this study is an important step in understanding the likely effects of the Fukushima incident on the marine environment by providing a clearer picture of how much hazardous material was actually released.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, andGoogle:

Fukushima Disaster Ruled ‘Man-Made’ as Nuclear Plant Concerns Increase

 EMAIL     PRINT     SHAR
E

Posted on Jul 6, 2012

Democracy Now!

A Japanese parliamentary inquiry concluded that last year’s disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was “a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.” Former nuclear industry executive Arnie Gundersen talks about the significance of the report for U.S. nuclear facilities.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

‘Democracy Now!’:

 

TAGS: arnie gundersen fukushima daichii japan nuclearnuclear power regulation tepco

Fukushima plant abandoning leaky underground pools

NATIONAL APR. 11, 2013 – 06:45AM JST ( 7 )

The Fukushima DaiIchi nuclear power plantAFP

TOKYO —

The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant said Wednesday it will abandon seven underground reservoirs storing radioactive water after three of them sprang leaks.

The contaminated water will be transferred to more reliable containers on the ground, possibly by early June, to avoid risks of further leaks, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) President Naomi Hirose told a news conference.

“We have yet to grasp the cause of the leaks. But we will strengthen monitoring activities so as to prevent the water from flowing into the sea,” he said. “We want to transfer the contaminated water from the underground reservoirs as soon as possible.”

Three of the underground reservoirs were found to have leaked contaminated water since April 5 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant which was crippled by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The enclosed reservoirs store water that has been used to cool down the reactors after cesium is removed but while other radioactive substances remain.

TEPCO said it will transfer about 7,000 tons of contaminated water from two of the three leaking reservoirs to tanks on the ground.

It will also build 38 new tanks on the ground with total capacity of 19,000 tons by mid-May.

Failures at the plant, more than two years after it was hit by the disaster that caused meltdowns and sent tens of thousands fleeing from their homes, have underlined the precarious state of the facility.

© 2013 AFP

TEPCO may run out of space for radioactive water

NATIONAL APR. 09, 2013 – 11:28AM JST ( 14 )

TOKYO —

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said on Monday it does not have enough tank space should it need to move contaminated water from storage pits that started leaking over the weekend at its wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Two years after the worst nuclear disaster in a quarter of a century, TEPCO is struggling with breakdowns and glitches in its jerry-rigged cooling system to keep reactors and spent fuel pools in a safe state known as cold shutdown.

About 120,000 liters of water contaminated with radiation leaked from two giant pits over the weekend. The cooling system has broken down twice over the past three weeks.

The utility does not have enough sturdy, above-ground tanks it is building to take the water from the pits, a TEPCO general manager, Masayuki Ono, said at a news conference at the company’s headquarters.

TEPCO engineers have not decided whether to transfer the water to above-ground tanks, Ono said. The plant’s seven storage pits are lined with water-proof sheets meant to keep the contaminated water from leaking into the soil.

An earthquake triggered tsunami waves that crashed into the power plant, setting off a chain of events that caused three reactors to melt down and forcing 160,000 people to flee from their homes.

In the immediate aftermath of explosions at the plant, TEPCO released some radioactive water into the sea nearby, prompting protests from neighboring countries. Many nations put restrictions on imports of Japanese food after the disaster.

“It is extremely regrettable that incidents keep occurring at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters. “The government has instructed TEPCO to carry out a fundamental review of how it’s dealing with the problems.”

TEPCO President Naomi Hirose was summoned to the Industry Ministry to explain the leaks in the temporary storage pits and got a public dressing down from the minister, Toshimitsu Motegi.

TEPCO said on Friday it lost the ability to cool radioactive fuel rods in one of the plant’s reactors for about three hours, the second cooling system failure at the plant in three weeks.

Last month, a senior TEPCO executive told Reuters in an interview that the company was struggling to stop groundwater flooding into the damaged reactor buildings and may take as long as four years to fix the problem.

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2013.

Radioactive Water ‘Escapes’ from Fukushima Tank

Published on Saturday, April 6, 2013 by Common Dreams

- Common Dreams staff

Up to 120 tonnes of radioactive water may have “escaped” from anunderground storage tank at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, an official announced Saturday.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (Photo: IAEA Imagebank via Flickr)”We are transferring the remaining water from the tank to others,” said a Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) spokesman. The company claims that it is “unlikely” any of the contaminated water found its way into the ocean.

The contaminated water may have leaked from one of the seven underground reservoir tanks which stores water previously used to cool down the nuclear reactors, AFP reports.

The news follows reports Friday that one of the plant’s cooling systemshad failed temporarily, the second outage in a matter of weeks.

Deadly levels of radiation found in food 225 miles from Fukushima: Media blackout on nuclear fallout continues

Monday, April 08, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) New data released by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) shows once again that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is far from over. Despite a complete media blackout on the current situation, levels of Cesium-137 (Cs-137) and Cesium-134 (Cs-134) found in produce and rice crackers located roughly 225 miles away from Fukushima are high enough to cause residents to exceed the annual radiation exposure limit in just a few months, or even weeks. According to Fukushima-Diary.com, which posts up-to-date information about the Fukushima disaster, rice crackers and tangerines produced in the Shizuoka prefecture are testing high for both Cs-137 and Cs-134. Rice crackers, according to the data sheet, tested at 3.7 Becquerels per kilogram (Bq/Kg) of Cs-137, while tangerines tested at 1.46 Bq/Kg of Cs-134 and 3.14 Bq/Kg of Cs-137. The Shizuoka prefecture is located about 80 miles southwest of Tokyo, which is highly concerning as it is actually farther away from Fukushima than Tokyo. This suggest that potentially deadly levels of radiation are still affecting large population centers across Japan, including those that are not even in close proximity to the Fukushima plant. It is generally regarded that adult radiation workers should be exposed to no more than 50 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation per year in order to avoid serious health consequences. For children, this number is far lower, probably somewhere around 10 mSv, with this being on the high end. But the average adult and child eating these tainted foods at their current radiation levels will not only reach but exceed the safe maximum in just a few weeks. Radiation levels continue to increase in lakes, rivers north of Tokyo But food, of course, is not the only major source of radiation exposure in Japan. Other data also released by Fukushima-Diary.com shows that radiation levels in rivers, lakes and shorelines around Kashiwa City in Chiba, located about 20 miles northeast of Tokyo, are dangerously high and getting even higher. Since radiation levels were last tested in the Otsu River back in September, detected levels have nearly tripled, jumping from 5,700 Bq/Kg to 14,200 Bq/Kg of radiation. Similar jumps were observed in lakes and shore soils, the former increasing from 7,600 Bq/Kg to 8,200 Bq/Kg of radiation, and the latter increasing from 440 Bq/Kg to 780 Bq/Kg of radiation. Any increase in disease or death resulting from these continued radiation spikes, however, will more than likely be blamed on other causes besides radiation, so as to cover up the severity of the situation. The radiation component of radiation-induced heart disease, organ failure, and cancer, for instance, will simply be ignored, and any uptick in deaths, particularly among the elderly, declared normal. Meanwhile, a recent Rasmussen Report found that more than one-third of all Americans believe radiation from Fukushima caused “significant harm” in the U.S. This is likely due to the fact that high levels of radiation were observed in soil, water, and even food all across America in the wake of the disaster. Sources for this article include: http://fukushima-diary.com http://fukushima-diary.com http://www.rasmussenreports.com

Comment: The legal allowable limit is 1mSv./yr for adults, 20mSv./yr for the nuclear workers.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039828_Fukushima_radiation_media_blackout.html#ixzz2PsbHjbze