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Date: March 11, 2021 at 10:30:08
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Tenth anniversary of Fukushima — here's what we learned |
URL: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/542703-tenth-anniversary-of-fukushima-heres-what-we-learned |
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Tenth anniversary of Fukushima — here's what we learned
By Johanna Neumann, opinion contributor — 03/11/21 12:30 PM EST The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill
Ten years ago this week, I stood at my makeshift desk in the living room of my tiny Baltimore row house, shaking while I watched the news.
On March 11, 2011, the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Japan — registering 9.0 on the Richter scale — took place off the coast triggering a tsunami that flooded nearby coastal areas, causing widespread destruction.
As the waters receded, another tragedy began to unfold. The earthquake had knocked out power to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and the tsunami’s water had flooded the plant’s diesel backup generators, leaving it without power to circulate coolant in the reactor core. Three reactors overheated, melted down, caused hydrogen explosions and released radioactive contamination on the scale of only one previous accident, which I know all too well: Chernobyl.
I spent the early years of my life in Germany — 800 miles away from Chernobyl. But, when I was in first grade, that all changed. Radioactive fallout from Chernobyl blanketed my hometown. Public health officials warned us not to eat the vegetables growing in our backyard. Our family tradition of searching for wild mushrooms was mothballed indefinitely. Decades later, one-third of the boars that roam Bavarian forests are unfit for human consumption because they are radioactive.
The Fukushima accident and the Chernobyl disaster were different in many ways but they shared a common root — the marriage of an inherently dangerous and complex technology with the difficulty of anticipating all the possible ways that things can go wrong.
At Fukushima, Tokyo Electric Power Company planned for a maximum earthquake of magnitude 7.9. No contingency planner expected that a magnitude-9 earthquake — 12 times more powerful than the maximum forecast — would occur.
Fukushima was not the only instance in recent memory when failure to imagine the unimaginable had tragic consequences for people and our environment.
BP embarked on deep-sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and didn't take the risk of a blowout seriously enough. In April 2010, the company's well exploded, the drilling platform burned and sank, 11 workers were killed and the Gulf of Mexico filled with oil. Tar balls wash up on Gulf beaches to this day.
Just last month, Texans shivered in their homes as a result of the failure to plan for an extreme cold snap capable of freezing nearly half of the state’s projected generating capacity from gas, coal and nuclear plants. Millions were left without power, more than 70 people died, and the economic costs of the freeze are projected to be $200 billion.
It is easy to look back at the operators of the Fukushima plant, the Chernobyl reactor, or BP’s rig and identify where they went wrong. It’s harder — maybe even impossible — to envision all the possible ways in which the next disaster, the next mistake, might happen. This is especially true when climate change makes extraordinary weather events more commonplace.
The central lesson of Fukushima is that relying on dangerous fuels to produce power is an invitation to disaster. Yes, most of the time things will be okay. But the consequences of even a single failure — including mass displacement, radiation exposures, the continued buildup of radioactive water at the plant and cleanup costs as seen following the Fukushima disaster — should cause us to lean on safe technologies wherever we can. After all, solar panels don’t need coolant. Wind turbines don’t blow up.
We should also take a hard look at America’s remaining nuclear fleet. Today, there are 20 reactors operating in the United States using the same design as the reactors damaged in Japan 10 years ago — a design experts have long criticized for its questionable ability to contain radioactive material in the event of a crisis.
Risk factors at reactors become more serious as the infrastructure ages. The fact that 86 of the 96 nuclear reactors operating in the U.S. have had their operating licenses extended for at least 20 years beyond their originally envisioned lifetimes is also cause for concern.
Thankfully, there is a bright side for America’s energy future. Safe renewable energy is on the rise. Last year, for the first time in 130 years, America got more power from the sun and the wind than we did from burning coal. Renewables make up the lion’s share of new power generation expected to come online this year.
As we observe this 10-year anniversary of the world’s second nuclear catastrophe, we have to ask ourselves whether we are still willing to accept risks of dangerous fuels. Having experienced a nuclear disaster, I know what my answer would be.
Johanna Neumann is the senior director of the Environment America's campaign for 100% Renewable Energy.
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Date: March 11, 2021 at 19:21:07
From: blindhog 6th sense, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Good Article About Dangerous Nuclear Power Plants, However, as... |
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... demonstratd in Texas, "green" energy didn't cut it,
which Ms Neumann acknowledged in her article.
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Date: March 12, 2021 at 21:20:07
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Good Article About Dangerous Nuclear Power Plants, However, as... |
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"green energy" wasn't the issue. (tallied)
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Date: March 11, 2021 at 10:37:11
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Tenth anniversary of Fukushima — here's what we learned |
URL: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/EXPLAINER-How-dangerous-is-the-Fukushima-nuke-16016571.php |
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EXPLAINER: How dangerous is the Fukushima nuke plant today?
MARI YAMAGUCHI , Associated Press
March 11, 2021
Updated: March 11, 2021 1:30 a.m.
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A worker for Tokyo Electric Power Co. stands by a gate at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, northeastern Japan, Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021.
1of29A worker for Tokyo Electric Power Co. stands by a gate at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, northeastern Japan, Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021.Hiro Komae/AP
This photo shows tanks (in gray, beige and blue) of storing water that was treated but still radioactive after it was used to cool down spent fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, northeastern Japan, Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021. The reactors of the Unit 3, lower left, and 4 are seen by the ocean.
OKUMA, Japan (AP) — A decade ago, a massive tsunami crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Three of its reactors melted down, leaving it looking like a bombed-out factory. Emergency workers risked their lives trying to keep one of history's worst nuclear crises from spiraling out of control.
Proper equipment has now replaced ragged plastic hoses held together with tape and an outdoor power switchboard infested by rats, which caused blackouts. Radiation levels have declined, allowing workers and visitors to wear regular clothes and surgical masks in most areas.
But deep inside the plant, danger still lurks. Officials don't know exactly how long the cleanup will take, whether it will be successful and what might become of the land where the plant sits.
Journalists from The Associated Press recently visited the plant to document progress in its cleanup on the 10th anniversary of the meltdowns and the challenges that lie ahead.
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WHAT HAPPENED 10 YEARS AGO?
After a magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11, 2011, a tsunami 17 meters (56 feet) high slammed into the coastal plant, destroying its power supply and cooling systems and causing meltdowns at reactors No. 1, 2 and 3.
The plant's three other reactors were offline and survived, though a fourth building, along with two of the three melted reactors, had hydrogen explosions, spewing massive radiation and causing long-term contamination in the area.
The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., says the tsunami couldn't have been anticipated, but reports from government and independent investigations and recent court decisions described the disaster at the plant as human-made and a result of safety negligence, lax oversight by regulators and collusion.
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WHAT'S INSIDE THE MELTED REACTORS?
About 900 tons of melted nuclear fuel remain inside the three damaged reactors, and its removal is a daunting task that officials say will take 30-40 years. Critics say that's overly optimistic.
Separate efforts to remove spent fuel from cooling pools inside the reactor buildings were hampered by high radiation and debris and have been delayed for up to five years. If the plant’s pools lose their cooling water in another major quake, exposed fuel rods could quickly overheat and cause an even worse meltdown.
The melted cores in Units 1, 2 and 3 mostly fell to the bottom of their primary containment vessels, some penetrating and mixing with the concrete foundation, making removal extremely difficult.
Remote-controlled robots with cameras have provided only a limited view of the melted fuel in areas still too dangerous for humans to go.
Plant chief Akira Ono says the inability to see what's happening inside the reactors means that details about the melted fuel are still largely unknown.
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ARE THERE UNDERGROUND LEAKS?
Since the disaster, contaminated cooling water has constantly escaped from the damaged primary containment vessels into the reactor building basements, where it mixes with groundwater that seeps in. The water is pumped up and treated. Part is recycled as cooling water, with the remainder stored in 1,000 huge tanks crowding the plant.
Early in the crisis, highly contaminated water that leaked from damaged basements and maintenance ditches escaped into the ocean, but the main leakage points have been closed, TEPCO says. Tons of contaminated sandbags filled with a material used to reduce cesium in the highly radioactive water early in the disaster remain in two basements.
Tiny amounts of radiation have continued leaking into the sea and elsewhere through underground passages, though the amount today is small and fish caught off the coast are safe to eat, scientists say.
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WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE STORED RADIOACTIVE WATER?
The 1,000 tanks filled with treated but still radioactive water tower over workers and visitors at the plant.
TEPCO says the tanks' 1.37 million ton storage capacity will be full in 2022. A government panel's recommendation that the water be released into the sea is facing fierce opposition from local residents, especially fishermen concerned about further damage to the area's reputation. A decision on that recommendation is pending.
TEPCO and government officials say tritium, which is not harmful in small amounts, cannot be removed from the water, but all other isotopes selected for treatment can be reduced to safe levels for release.
TEPCO has managed to cut the amount of contaminated water to one-third of what it used to be through a series of measures.
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WHAT'S IT LIKE TO VISIT THE PLANT?
The first thing visitors see is a stylish office building that holds the TEPCO decommissioning unit.
In another building, plant workers — about 4,000 per day now — go through automated security checkpoints and radiation measurements.
Because radiation levels have fallen significantly following decontamination, full protection gear is only needed in a few places in the plant, including in and around the melted reactor buildings.
On a recent visit, AP journalists donned partial protective gear to tour a low-radiation area: a helmet, double socks, cotton gloves, surgical masks, goggles and a vest with a personal dosimeter.
Full protection gear, which means hazmat coveralls, a full-face mask, a head cover, triple socks and double rubber gloves, was required at a shared storage pool where fuel relocation from the No. 3 reactor pool was recently completed.
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WHAT'S THE ENDGAME?
A decade after the accident, Japan doesn't yet have a plan to dispose of the highly radioactive melted fuel, debris and waste at the plant. Technology also isn't advanced enough yet to manage the waste by reducing its toxicity.
TEPCO says it needs to get rid of the water storage tanks to free up space at the plant so workers can build facilities that will be used to study and store melted fuel and other debris.
There are about 500,000 tons of solid radioactive waste, including contaminated debris and soil, sludge from water treatment, scrapped tanks and other waste.
It's unclear what the plant will look like when the work there is done. Local officials and residents say they expect the complex to one day be open space where they can walk freely. But there's no clear idea if or when that might happen.
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Tokyo correspondent Mari Yamaguchi has visited the Fukushima nuclear plant nine times, starting in 2012.
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Date: March 11, 2021 at 10:45:43
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Tenth anniversary of Fukushima — here's what we learned |
URL: https://www.gregpalast.com/fukushima-they-knew-5/ |
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Fukushima: They Knew
by Greg Palast March 11, 2021
Today is the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima tsunami and meltdown.
A nuclear plant is built with steel and cement and lies and fraud — and that’s the take-a-way for today.
Stacey Abrams has shown REAL courage in Georgia in her opposition to the Vogtle nuclear power plant — the last and only nuclear plant under construction in the USA. As the building trades are behind this multi-billion dollar project, alongside thousands of small Georgia suppliers, this has cost her. But she won’t back charging Georgians ruinous electric bills to finish it.
(The only other plant under construction was South Texas — a plant stopped when its builder, Tokyo Electric Power, pulled the plug in 2011 after its Fukushima plant went down. They were chosen because they had, supposedly, the world’s best safety record.)
As the federal and state lead investigator in the nuclear industry racketeering case Suffolk v. LILCO, I dug into the Fukushima meltdown. They were required to harden the plant against an earthquake the size that hit on March 11 — but never did. And the back-up generators were NEVER flooded — their shafts snapped, as happened again and again in emergencies in the US.
This is part of my chapter from Vultures’ Picnic on Fukushima, if you’re curious about such stuff.
“Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake”
The Fukushima story you didn’t hear on CNN
I’ve seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level. Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earthquake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could “completely and utterly fail” during an earthquake.
“Utterly fail during an earthquake.” And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.
The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I’m not supposed to have. Good thing I’ve kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ….
WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR, NEW YORK, 1986
Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.
The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.
On March 12, 2011, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew: the “SQ” had been faked. Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK. He’d flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit. The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.
Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts. The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away. It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.
I called the US Geological Survey. (Yes, Anderson, journalists are allowed to check out facts.) The plant took a hit of 550 galileos. (The “Richter scale” is TV talk — “galileos” measure ground movement at the danger point). I contacted my network of engineers. Turns out, Tokyo power promised government regulators they would raise seismic (earthquake) protection to 600 galileos. They promised. That was 2006, five years before the meltdown. So there you have it. If TEPCO had not played the regulators, Japan would not be suffering a slow-motion Hiroshima.
I was ready to vomit. Because I knew even more. I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it: Shaw Construction. Shaw Construction-the latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.
But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company. I’d squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down. I shouldn’t have done that. Too bad.
This is an excerpt from the “Fukushima, Texas” chapter of Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters.
Click here to get the book.
My own favorite of all my books, I’ll sign my last copies — I removed it from print — if you make a tax-deductible donation to support our continuing investigations.
All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t supposed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.
SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.
This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by US and international rules.
Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.
Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .
The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.
What did Wiesel do? What would you do?
Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, “Bob is a good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob.”
That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.
But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.
From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t look back.
* * * * *
Greg Palast was the lead investigator in the successful government racketeering case against nuclear plant builders which resulted in the closure of the Shoreham plant, NY.
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Date: March 12, 2021 at 10:09:54
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Tenth anniversary of Fukushima — here's what we learned |
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/12/fukushima-at-ten-aftershocks-lies-and-failed-decontamination/ |
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March 12, 2021
Fukushima at Ten: Aftershocks, Lies, and Failed Decontamination
by John Laforge
It’s now 10 years since the catastrophic triple meltdowns of reactors at Fukushima in Japan. As Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health project put it three years ago, “Enormous amounts of radioactive chemicals, including cesium, strontium, plutonium, and iodine were emitted into the air, and releases of the same toxins into the Pacific have never stopped, as workers struggle to contain over 100 cancer-causing chemicals.”
There is news of the shortage of Fukushima health studies, big earthquakes (aftershocks) and typhoons rattling nerves, reactors and waste systems, novel radioactive particles dispersed, and corporate and government dishonesty about decontamination.
Very few health studies
“So far only one single disease entity has been systematically examined in humans in Fukushima: thyroid cancer,” says Dr. Alex Rosen, the German chair of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Other diseases, such as leukemia or malformations, which are associated with increased radiation exposure, have not been investigated, Rosen told the German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt March 2. (Five studies have focused not on disease, but on birth abnormalities in the areas most affected: three on infant mortality rates, one on underweight newborns, and one on declining birth rates 9 months after March 2011.*)
The one disease study of the population was a screening for thyroid cancer in 380,000 local children under the age 18. In January 2018, the journal Thyroid reported 187 cases after five years. A typical population of 380,000 children would produce 12 cases in five years, reported Joseph Mangano, director of the Radiation and Pubic Health Project. The increase among children is “exactly what would be expected if Fukushima were a factor, as radiation is most damaging to the fetus, infant and child,” Mangano said.
New Earthquakes Rattle Wreckage and Nerves
Another large earthquake, magnitude 7.3, struck Feb. 13, again off the coast of the Fukushima reactor complex, and the reported 30 seconds of terror was followed by14 aftershocks up to magnitude 5.
The quake was severe enough that its Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) operators and federal regulators suspect it caused additional damage to reactors 1 and 3 where cooling water levels fell sharply, the Associated Press reported. The Feb. 13 quake was felt in Tokyo 150 miles away. Japan’s meteorological agency said it was believed to be an aftershock of the record 2011 quake.
At a Feb. 15 meeting, government regulators said the quake had probably worsened existing earthquake damage in reactors 1 and 3 or broken open new cracks causing the cooling water level drop, the AP said.
“Because (the 2011 quake) was an enormous one with a magnitude of 9.0, it’s not surprising to have an aftershock of this scale 10 years later,” said Kenji Satake, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute.
There have been six major aftershocks in the Fukushima area since March 2011: April 7, 2011 (magnitude 7.1); April 11, 2011 (6.6); July 10, 2011 (7.0); Oct. 26, 2013 (7.1); Nov. 26, 2016 (6.9); and Feb. 13, 2021 (7.3). All six of these earthquakes were named Fukushima in one language or another.
Earthquake shocks are not the only recurring nightmare to haunt the survivors of the record quake that killed 19, 630. Typhoon Hagibis slammed into Tamura City in October 2019, and swept away an unknown number of bags of radioactive debris that had been stacked near a river.
Since March 2011, over 22 million cubic meters of contaminated soil, brush and other matter from areas hard hit by fallout has been collected in large black plastic bags and piled in temporary storage mounds in thousands of places. (“Fukushima residents fight state plan to build roads with radiation-tainted soil,” Koydo, Japan Times, Apr. 29, 2018) Yet the volume is the tip of the iceberg: According to R. Ramachandran, in The Hindu, January 31, 2020, no decontamination activities are planned for the majority of forested areas which cover about 75 per cent of the main contaminated area of 9,000 square km.”
Cover-ups and disinformation
Reporting Feb. 14 about the latest quake, the AP noted that Tepco “has repeatedly been criticized for cover-ups and delayed disclosures of problems.” On June 22, 2016, Tepco’s President Naomi Hirose publicly admitted that the company’s lengthy refusal to speak of the “meltdowns” it knew of at its three reactors was tantamount to a cover-up and apologized for it.
The Washington Post reported March 6, 2021 that, “For years, Tepco claimed that the treated water stored at the plant contained only tritium, but data deep on its website showed that the treatment process had failed.” The tanks now hold almost 1.25 million tons of highly contaminated waste water. “In 2018, [Tepco] was forced to acknowledge that 70 percent of the water is still contaminated with dangerous radioactive elements — including strontium-90, a bone-seeking radionuclide that can cause cancer — and will have to be treated again before release,” the Post reported.
Harvey Wasserman reported for The Free Press on a July 2007 earthquake that shook Japan and forced dangerous emergency shutdowns at four reactors at Kashiwazaki. “For three consecutive days [Tepco] was forced to issue public apologies for erroneous statements about the severity of the damage done to the reactors, the size and lethality of radioactive spills into the air and water, the on-going danger to the public, and much more. Once again, the only thing reactor owners can be trusted to do is to lie.”
Radioactive Particles Newly identified
Work just published in the journal Science of the Total Environment documents new, highly radioactive particles that were released from the destroyed Fukushima reactors. The study was led by Dr. Satoshi Utsunomiya and Kazuya Morooka of Kyushu University. “Two of these particles have the highest cesium radioactivity ever measured for particles from Fukushima,” the research found. The study analyzed particles that were taken from surface soils collected 3.9 kilometers from the reactor site.
Speaking with Science Daily Feb. 17, Dr. Utsunomiya said, “Owing to their large size, the health effects of the new particles are likely limited to external radiation hazards during static contact with skin.” The particles were reportedly spewed by the hydrogen explosions that rocked the reactor buildings and fell within a narrow zone that stretches ~8 kilometers north-northwest of meltdowns.
But Dr. Utsunomiya also said the long-lived radioactivity of cesium in “the newly found highly radioactive particles has not yet decayed significantly. As such, they will remain in the environment for many decades to come, and this type of particle could occasionally still be found in radiation hot spots.”
Smaller radioactive particles of uranium, thorium, radium, cesium, strontium, polonium, tellurium and americium were found afloat throughout Northern Japan, according to a report by Arnie Gundersen and Marco Kaltofen published July 27, 2017 in Science of the Total Environment. The radioactively hot particles were found in dusts and soils from Northern Japan. About 180 particulate matter samples were taken from automobile or home air filters, outdoor surface dust, and vacuum cleaner bags. Some142 of the samples (about 80 percent) contained cesium-134 and cesium-137 which emit intense beta radiation and is very dangerous if ingested or inhaled. “A majority of these samples were collected from locations in decontaminated zones cleared for habitation by the National Government of Japan,” the authors revealed.
Greenpeace Reports Cleanup Failures and Deception
Greenpeace Japan released two major reports March 4 that also contradict the country’s positive decontamination and human rights claims after 2011.
“Successive governments during the last 10 years … have attempted to perpetrate a myth about the nuclear disaster. They have sought to deceive the Japanese people by misrepresenting the effectiveness of the decontamination program and ignoring radiological risks,” said Shaun Burnie, Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia and co-author of the first report.
Key findings of the radiation report Fukushima 2011-2020 are:
• Most of the 840 square kilometer Special Decontamination Area (SDA), where the government is responsible for decontamination, remains contaminated with radioactive cesium. … an overall average of only 15% has been decontaminated. • No long-term decontamination target level will be achieved in many areas. Citizens will be subjected for decades to radiation exposures in excess of the … recommended maximum. • In the areas where evacuation orders were lifted in 2017, specifically Namie and Iitate, radiation levels remain above safe limits, potentially exposing the population to increased cancer risk.
Key findings of The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station decommissioning report are:
• The current decommissioning plan in the timeframe of 30-40 years is impossible to achieve and is illusory. • Radioactive waste created at the site should not be moved. Fukushima Daiichi is already and should remain a nuclear waste storage site for the long term. ###
*On perinatal mortality:
Scherb, H. et al. 2016: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27661055/
Körblein, A. et al. 2017: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28632136/
Körblein, A. et al. 2019: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31357178/
On underweight newborns:
Basket, A. 2020: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33239016/
On the decline in birth rates in Japan 9 months after Fukushima:
Körblein, A. 2021: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33630835/
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.
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Date: March 11, 2021 at 19:37:50
From: blindhog 6th sense, [DNS_Address]
Subject: The Fact that Companies, like Countries, Will Force Employees to.. |
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...lie on pain of losing their job (their only source
of income) even if that lie means there's a strong
chance some, many, 1000s, or even 10s of 1000s may die,
is despicable and is why, in the end, companies, like
Countries, fail...the corruption comes back to destroy
the company as well as a country.
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