Fukushima Meltdowns: A Global Conspiracy of Denial
Does anyone in authority anywhere tell the truth about Fukushima?
If
there is any government or non-government authority in the world that
is addressing the disaster at Fukushima openly, directly, honestly, and
effectively, it’s not apparent to the outside observer what entity that
might be.
There
is instead an apparent global conspiracy of authorities of all sorts to
deny to the public reliably accurate, comprehensible, independently
verifiable (where possible), and comprehensive information about not
only the condition of the Fukushima power plant itself and its
surrounding communities, but about the unceasing, uncontrolled release
of radioactive debris into the air and water, creating a constantly
increasing risk of growing harm to the global community.
While
the risk may still be miniscule in most places, the range of risk rises
to lethal in Fukushima itself. With the radioactive waste of four
nuclear reactors (three of them in meltdown) under uncertain control for
almost three years now, the risk of lethal exposure is very real for
plant workers, and may decrease with distance from the plant, but may be
calculable for anyone on the planet. No one seems to know. No one seems
to have done the calculation. No one with access to the necessary
information (assuming it exists) seems to want to do the calculation.
There
is no moral excuse for this international collusion. The excuses are
political or economic or social, but none of them excuses any authority
for withholding or lying about information that has potentially
universal and destructive impact on everyone alive today and everyone to
be born for some unknown generations.
Japanese authorities may be the worst current offenders against the truth, as well as the health and safety of their people. Now the Japanese government has passed a harsh state secrets law that threatens to reduce or eliminate reliable information about Fukushima. The U.S. government officially applauded this heightened secrecy, while continuing its own tight control on nuclear information. Japanese authorities are already attacking their own people
in defense of nuclear power: not only under-measuring and ignoring
varieties of radioactive threat, but even withholding the iodine pills
in 2011 that might have mitigated the growing epidemic
of thyroid issues today. Failing to confront Fukushima honestly, the
Japanese are laying the basis for what could amount to a radiological
sneak attack on the rest of the world.Just because no one seems to know what to do about Fukushima is no excuse to go on lying about and/or denying the dimensions of reality, whatever they might be.
There
are hundreds, probably thousands of people with little or no authority
who have long struggled to create a realistic, rational perspective on
nuclear threats. The fundamental barrier to knowing the scale of the
Fukushima disaster is just that: the scale of the Fukushima disaster.
Chernobyl 1986 and Fukushima 2011 are not really comparable
Chernobyl
is the closest precedent to Fukushima, and it’s not very close.
Chernobyl at the time of the 1986 electric failure and explosion had
four operating reactors and two more under construction. The Chernobyl
accident involved one reactor meltdown. Other reactors kept operating
for some time after the accident. The rector meltdown was eventually
entombed, containing the meltdown and reducing the risk. Until
Fukushima, Chernobyl was considered the worst nuclear power accident in
history, and it is still far from over (albeit largely contained for the
time being). The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
of roughly 1,000 square miles remains one of the most radioactive areas
in the world and the clean-up is not even expected to be complete
before 2065.
At the time of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, the Fukushima plant
had six operating reactors. Three of them went into meltdown and a
fourth was left with a heavily laden fuel pool teetering a hundred feet
above the ground. Two other reactors were undamaged and have been
shut down. Radiation levels remain lethal in each of the
melted-down reactors, where the meltdowns appear to be held in check by
water that is pumped into the reactors to keep them cool. In the
process, the water gets irradiated and that which is not collected on
site in leaking tanks flows steadily into the Pacific Ocean. Within the
first two weeks, Fukushima radiation was comparable to Chernobyl’s and while the levels have gone down, they remain elevated.
The plant’s corporate owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), in turn effectively owned by the Japanese government after a2012 nationalization, began removing more than 1,500 fuel rod assemblies
from the teetering fuel pool in November, a delicate process expected
to take a year or more. There are additional fuel pools attached to each
of the melted down reactors and a much larger general fuel pool, all of
which contain nuclear fuel rod assemblies that are secure only as long
as TEPCO continues to cool them. The Fukushima Exclusion Zone, a 12-mile
radius around the nuclear plant, is about 500 square miles (much of it
ocean); little specific information about the exclusion zone is easily available, but media coverage in the form of disaster tourism is plentiful, including a Google Street View interactive display.
Despite
their significant differences as disasters, Chernobyl and Fukushima are
both rated at 7 – a “major accident” on the International Nuclear Event Scale
designed in 1990 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). That
is the highest rating on the scale, a reflection of the inherent denial
that colors most official nuclear thinking. Designed by nuclear
“experts” after Chernobyl, the scale can’t imagine a worse accident than
Chernobyl which, for all its intensity, was effectively over as an
accident in a relatively short period of time. At Fukushima, by
contrast, the initial set of events was less acute than Chernobyl, but
almost three years later they continue without any resolution likely
soon. Additionally Fukushima has three reactor meltdowns and thousands
of precarious fuel rod assemblies in uncertain pools, any of which could
produce a new crisis that would put Fukushima clearly off the scale.
And then there’s
groundwater. Groundwater was not a problem at Chernobyl. Groundwater is a
huge problem at the Fukushima plant that was built at the seashore, on a
former riverbed, over an active aquifer. In a short video,
nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson makes clear why groundwater makes
Fukushima so hard to clean up, and why radiation levels there will
likely remain dangerous for another hundred years.Fukushima Unit #3 activity led to some panic-driven reporting in 2013
The
Japanese government and nuclear power industry have a history of not
telling the truth about nuclear accidents dating back at least to 1995,
as reported by New Scientist and Rachel Maddow, among others.
Despite Japan’s history of nuclear dishonesty, Japanese authorities
remain in total control of the Fukushima site and most of the
information about it, without significant objection from most of the
world’s governments, media, and other power brokers, whose reputation
for honesty in nuclear matters is almost as bad as Japan’s. In such a
context of no context, the public is vulnerable to reports like this from the Turner Radio Network (TRN) on December 28:
Five days after this story was posted, the “radiation cloud” had not developed despite the story’s assertion that: “Experts say this could be the beginning of a ‘spent fuel pool criticality (meltdown)’ involving up to 89 TONS of nuclear fuel burning up into the atmosphere and heading to North America.” The story named no “experts” and provided links only to TEPCO announcements in Japanese. The bulk of the story reads like an infomercial for “protective” gear of various sorts that TRN makes a point of saying it does NOT sell. Despite such obvious warning signs, others – such as The Ecologist and Gizmodo – reported the threat of “another meltdown” at Fukushima Unit #3 as imminent.
Clarification and reassurance quickly started chasing the “new meltdown” rumor around the Internet. ENENEWS (Energy News) promptly posted the TEPCO reports in English, demonstrating that there was nothing “sudden” about the steam releases, they’ve been happening more or less daily since 2011, but condensation caused by cold weather makes them visible. At FAIREWINDS (Energy Education), Arnie Gunderson posted on January 1:
“… the Internet has been flooded with conjecture claiming that Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 is ready to explode…. Our research, and discussions with other scientists, confirms that what we are seeing is a phenomenon that has been occurring at the Daiichi site since the March 2011 accident…. While the plants are shutdown in nuke speak, there is no method of achieving cold shut down in any nuclear reactor. While the reactor can stop generating the actual nuclear chain reaction, the atoms left over from the original nuclear chain reaction continue to give off heat that is called the decay of the radioactive rubble (fission products)…. constantly releasing moisture (steam) and radioactive products into the environment.” [emphasis added]In other words, Fukushima Unit #3 continues to leak radioactivity into both air and water, as Units #1 and #2 presumably do as well. But as Gunderson explains, the level of radioactivity has declined sharply without becoming benign:
Reassurances about Fukushima are as misleading as scare stories“When Unit 3 was operating, it was producing more than 2,000 megawatts of heat from the nuclear fission process (chain reaction in the reactor). Immediately after the earthquake and tsunami, it shut down and the chain reaction stopped, but Unit 3 was still producing about 160 megawatts of decay heat. Now, 30 months later, it is still producing slightly less than 1 megawatt (one million watts) of decay heat…. 1 megawatt of decay heat is a lot of heat even today, and it is creating radioactive steam, but it is not a new phenomenon.”
The
reassuring aspects of the condition of Unit #3 – radioactive releases
are not new, they’re less intense than they once were, the nuclear waste
is cooling – while true enough, provide only a false sense of comfort.
Also true: radiation is released almost continuously, the releases are
uncontrolled, no one seems to be measuring the releases, no one seems to
be tracking the releases, no one is assessing accumulation of the
releases. And while it’s true that the waste is cooling and decaying,
it’s also true that a loss of coolant could lead to another uncontrolled
chain reaction. (“Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 is not going to explode,”
says Gunderson in a headline, but he can’t know that with certainty.)
For the near future, what all that means, in effect, is that the
world has to accept chronic radiation releases from Fukushima as the
price for avoiding another catastrophic release. And even then, it’s not
a sure thing.
But
there’s another aspect of Fukushima Unit #3 that’s even less
reassuring. Unit #3 is the one Fukushima reactor that was running on
Mixed oxide fuel, or MOX fuel, in its fuel rods. MOX fuel typically uses Plutonium mixed with one or more forms of Uranium. Using Plutonium
in fuel rods adds to their toxicity in the event of a meltdown. In part
because Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 240,000 years and can be used
to make nuclear weapons of “dirty bombs,” its use in commercial reactors
remains both limited and controversial. Because it contains Plutonium, MOX fuel is more toxic than other nuclear fuel and will burn at lower temperatures. As Natural Resources News reported in 2011:
“The mixed oxide fuel rods used in the compromised number three reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi complex contain enough plutonium to threaten public health with the possibility of inhalation of airborne plutonium particles…. Plutonium is at its most dangerous when it is inhaled and gets into the lungs. The effect on the human body is to vastly increase the chance of developing fatal cancers.”
Reportedly, TEPCO plans don’t call for the removal of the MOX fuel in Unit #3 for another decade or more. Fuel removal from Units #1, #2, and #3 is complicated by lethal radiation levels at all three reactors, as well as TEPCO’s inability so far to locate the three melted cores with any precision.
There
is ample reason to hope that Fukushima, despite the complex of
uncontrollable and deteriorating factors, will not get worse, because
even the Japanese don’t want that. But there is little reason to expect
anything but worsening conditions, slowly or suddenly, for years and
years to come. And there is even less reason to expect anyone in
authority anywhere to be more than minimally and belatedly truthful
about an industry they continue to protect, no matter how many people it
damages or kills.
The perfect paradigm of that ruthlessly cynical nuclear mentality is the current Japanese practice of recruiting homeless people
to work at Fukushima in high level radiation areas where someone with
something to lose might not be willing to go for minimum wage.
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