Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Video of Final Disposal Site in Shimada City, Shizuoka on a Rainy Day in February This Year

Or so the video description says. I have no way to verify. The mayor of Shimada City has become a darling of the Ministry of the Environment for having decided to bring in, burn and bury the disaster debris from Iwate Prefecture in his city despite opposition from the residents.

The video was taken on February 23, 2012 and uploaded on March 29.

The author of the video keeps referring the brownish lump at at the site as "fly ash", but I think the lump may be "bottom ash".

Toward the end, the author says he (or someone else) took the sediment from what looks like a settling tank to measure radioactivity, and the result was 300 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium. In the comment section, the author tells a skeptic that soil samples of the surrounding area and the settling tank have been tested, and the result has been shared with the city government.

The water from the tank goes to the River Ooi, which flows through the agricultural and industrial lands to the Pacific Ocean. Yaizu Port at the river mouth is one of the largest fishing ports in Japan. The area near the port is also famous for "unagi" (eel) farming.

It looks like a mess of a final disposal site where the ashes from the disaster debris incineration will go. I don't think this is an exception only in Shimada City.

1 comments:

Yosaku said...

Having experience as the quality assurance officer on a landfill, I can say that this landfill doesn't look too bad; they are, after all, a messy business.

Without being onsite, it's difficult to analyze the integrity of the landfill, but the most important part of the video is at the 1:53 minute mark when he shows surface water coming off what appears to be the landfill and by-passing the leachate treatment system, though it is not possible to tell if the surface water here is coming out of the landfill itself or off the edges of the landfill (and I wish he could provide more video on this point). In any event, the flow of water here is much lower than that shown within the landfill, so we can assume that the landfill is basically doing its job and containing the surface water (as also evidenced by the large pool of water at 1:19).

His biggest mistake is at the 2:54 mark when he then shows a high flow rate and says "まざってそのまま大井川へ流れていました。" This flow rate simply doesn't match up with the surface runoff he has shown. What I believe he's viewing here is the effluent from the leachate treatment system, which is housed in the industrial-looking building that you can see in the video at 2:32.

If you want an aerial view of the landfill, just copy and paste "島田市最終処分場" into Google maps. You can see that the Google map image is fairly recent as the working face of the landfill is in roughly the same spot as that in the video. You can also see the leachate treatment building downgradient from the landfill.

In the end, I would say that they could be a little more careful with their surface water containment and erosion control, but otherwise, the landfill appears to be in good shape.

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