By Arnie Gundersen
excerpt:
"As we prepare for the eighth remembrance of the March 11, 2011
earthquake, tsunami and triple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, Fairewinds
is ever mindful of what is currently happening in Japan.
There has never been a roadmap for Japan to extricate itself from the
radioactive multi-headed serpentine Hydra curse that has been created in
an underfunded, unsuccessful attempt to clean-up the ongoing spread of
migrating radioactivity from Fukushima. Rather than focus its attention on
mitigating the radioactive exposure to Japan’s civilians, the government of
Japan has sought instead to redirect world attention to the 2020 Olympics
scheduled to take place in Tokyo.
Truthfully, a situation as overwhelming as Fukushima can exist in every
location in the world that uses nuclear power to produce electricity. The
triple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi are the worst industrial catastrophe
that humankind has ever created.
Prior to Fukushima, the atomic power industry never envisioned a disaster of
this magnitude anywhere in the world. Worldwide, the proponents and
operators of nuclear power plants still are not taking adequate steps to
protect against disasters of the magnitude of Fukushima!
Parts of Japan are being permanently destroyed by the migrating
radioactivity that has been ignored, not removed, and subsequent ocean
and land contamination is expanding and destroying once pristine farmlands
and villages. For reference in the US and other countries, Fukushima
Prefecture is approximately the size of the State of Connecticut. Think about
it, how would an entire State – its woods, rivers, and valleys, eradicate
radioactive contamination?
first-images-inside-fukushmia-reactor.jpg
Let’s begin with the reactors and site itself. There was a triple meltdown in
2011, yet Tokyo Electric banned the use of the word “meltdown” in any of its
communications with Japanese civilians. Now we know that in the first week
after the tsunami, each molten radioactive core melted through its six-inch-
thick steel reactor, burned and chemically reacted with the concrete
underneath, and all are now lying in direct contact with groundwater. Aside
from a few grainy pictures of those cores showing burn holes in the
reactors, nothing has been done to remove the cores and to prevent further
contamination of the groundwater. I have witnessed schemes including a
mining operation to bore under the reactors and an underground train to
collect the molten masses, but those schemes are decades from fruition.
The government of Japan claims that the Fukushima site will be entirely
cleaned and decommissioned in less than forty years, a date that will
definitely slip AFTER the 2020 Tokyo Olympics are held, and one that is
scientifically impossible since some radioactive isotopes will be spread
across the Fukushima site and surrounding landscape for 300 years and
others for 250,000 years.
Fukushima’s radioactive reactor cores have been in direct contact with
groundwater for the last eight years, and then that highly toxic radioactive
water enters the Pacific Ocean. When the disaster struck TEPCO wanted to
build an ice-wall to prevent the spread of the contamination, which I knew
would fail. I advocated immediately surrounding the reactors with a trench
filled with zeolite, a chemical used to absorb radiation at other atomic
facilities.
"The problem with freezing the soil is that as soon as you get an
earthquake, you lose power and then your ice turns to mush and you're
stuck." Gundersen, who has visited the Fukushima power plant in the past,
said a better solution would be to dig a two-meter wide trench down to
bedrock level and fill it with a material called zeolite: a volcanic material that
comes from Mother Nature.
"It's incredibly good at filtering radioactive isotopes. So whatever is inside
the fence will stay inside and whatever is outside the fence would be clean,"
said Gundersen, who estimates the price tag for such a project would be
around $10 billion.
TEPCO’s ice wall has not eliminated radiation from spreading via
groundwater. How will Fukushima’s owner TEPCO and the government of
Japan successfully clean and mitigate the damage caused by the three
atomic reactors that each lost their fuel to a meltdown? These problems
were never anticipated in Japan where these reactors were built and
operated or in the United States where the Fukushima nuclear plants were
engineered and designed and the parts were manufactured. "
part 2 at website
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