Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant is now so stable and safe that TEPCO wants to bring back female workers to the plant.
Yup, you heard it right. What better way is there to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the nuclear accident and to demonstrate how safe it has become, than to have female workers working at Fuku I again?
TEPCO announced on March 9 that the company would review the operation policy in order to allow female workers at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, as the air radiation levels in the Anti-Earthquake Building and the reactor buildings of Reactors 5 and 6 have dropped. In April last year, female workers at the plant were found to have exceeded the radiation exposure limit [for female nuclear workers] of 5 millisieverts in 3 months. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency then instructed TEPCO to come up with the countermeasure to prevent it from happening again, and there has been no female worker at the plant since.
According to TEPCO, the air radiation level on the first floor of the Anti-Earthquake building dropped from 47 microsieverts/hour in March last year to 7.2 microsieverts/hour in November. By reviewing the policy, TEPCO could allow female workers from subcontractors to work at the plant. The company is expecting them to providing medical care and other tasks.
Let's see. 8 hours inside the building, 57.6 microsieverts per day, 288 microsieverts per week (assuming 5 days a week work), 1,152 microsieverts per month. 3,456 microsieverts (3.456 millisieverts) in 3 months, oh that's so within the 5 millisieverts/3 months limit.
Notice that the Jiji article talks about female workers from subcontractors, not TEPCO's own female employees. It also refers to Reactors 5 and 6. What kind of work is TEPCO envisioning female subcontract workers to do in the reactor buildings, I wonder?
The US's NPR (National Public Radio, though they go by NPR these days) has an article written by Richard Harris on the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident.
The most interesting information comes from Dr. John Boice, a cancer epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University who says in the NPR piece:
To be sure, "there was radiation released. It was about a tenth of what was released from Chernobyl," he says. "But most of the releases were blown off to the Pacific Ocean. The winds were blowing to the sea and not to populated areas."
One big cloud did blow inland, up toward the northwest. But most of the 170,000 residents in the area were quickly evacuated. Boice says that helped limit dangerous doses. So did other quick actions by the Japanese government.
"They prohibited the release of any food that had had increased levels of radiation in them," he says. "So there wasn't milk out there in the public supply. There wasn't any fish that had levels that were increased."
One year ago this Sunday, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off Japan triggered a tsunami that killed 20,000 people. It also triggered multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station, one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.
But health effects from radiation turn out to be minor compared with the other issues the people of Fukushima prefecture now face.
That may come as a surprise. We all watched frightening TV images, and clouds of radioactive steam and gas did erupt from the plant. That material did sometimes move over the countryside and into populated areas, so it looked like a horrible disaster.
But in the case of radiation, the dose matters. It's true, there is no bright line that separates a safe dose of radiation from a dangerous dose, but at some point, a dose is so small that any potential health risk is simply too small to measure.
"Surprisingly, there have been no health effects that have been demonstrated among the Japanese people or among the workers," says John Boice, a cancer epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University.
To be sure, "there was radiation released. It was about a tenth of what was released from Chernobyl," he says. "But most of the releases were blown off to the Pacific Ocean. The winds were blowing to the sea and not to populated areas."
One big cloud did blow inland, up toward the northwest. But most of the 170,000 residents in the area were quickly evacuated. Boice says that helped limit dangerous doses. So did other quick actions by the Japanese government.
"They prohibited the release of any food that had had increased levels of radiation in them," he says. "So there wasn't milk out there in the public supply. There wasn't any fish that had levels that were increased."
And that's a huge difference from the aftermath of Chernobyl. In 1986, the Soviets let people eat contaminated food and drink contaminated milk, activity that led to many cancers. In Japan, Boice says the only people with significantly elevated doses are the nuclear workers. And as a result, a few workers are at slightly higher risk for cancer.
Psychological Health Effects
Robert Gale, a bone-marrow-transplant expert who treated workers after Chernobyl, spent half of the past year in Japan talking to some of the thousands of workers called in for the nuclear cleanup.
"Most of these workers are not nuclear workers," Gale says. "They are common workers that [for example] were upholstering couches in Osaka and now they're cleaning up a nuclear reactor."
They work until they reach the occupational radiation limit of 50 millisieverts in a year, then they go home. But they don't know what their risk really entails. So Gale has been meeting with them to explain.
"Usually, when they're discussing these issues we're in an izakaya, a sort of Japanese bar," he says. "While they're discussing their concerns about radiation with me, they can go through a pack of cigarettes. If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day for a year, you're getting an internal radiation dose of about 30 millisieverts."
That's more than half the dose they got through occupational exposure. But cigarette smoke is also filled with cancer-causing chemicals, so smoking is a far bigger risk to their health.
But the issue isn't just physical health — it's the worries that come with radiation. Evelyn Bromet, a psychiatry researcher at SUNY Stony Brook, says this anxiety sets in after big nuclear accidents.
"The central public health issue often becomes health-related anxiety, concerns about the future, about the future health of the children," Bromet says. "So that's what happened in Japan, just as it happened after Chernobyl and after Three Mile Island."
But it's worse in Japan because the public is also suffering from the trauma of the tsunami, of evacuation and of losing livelihoods, because people are reluctant to buy produce from Fukushima. And Bromet says physicians in Japan don't generally treat mental health issues.
"So I think it's not going to be very easy to set up intervention programs in the same way it would in countries like Holland, for example, where there's much more integrated mental and physical health care."
Bromet says it will be essential to deal with both physical health and mental health in the years to come.
Professor Shinji Tokonami, Department of Radiation Physics, Institute of Radiation Emergency Medicine, Hirosaki University and his researchers say people who escaped from the coastal areas of Fukushima Prefecture after the accident and people who continued to live in Namie-machi after the March 11, 2011 nuclear accident were found with high levels of radiation exposure on the thyroid.
They tested 65 residents in April 2011, and it is in the news on March 9, 2012. Another case of nearly one-year delay in disclosing the information that would have made the difference if known earlier. Like 11 months ago.
It has been disclosed that someone was exposed to nearly 90 millisievert radiation [equivalent dose] on the thyroid from radioactive iodine during the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident. Professor Shinji Tokonami, Department of Radiation Physics, Institute of Radiation Emergency Medicine, Hirosaki University and his researchers analyzed the test result of 65 Fukushima residents. The test was conducted 1 month after the accident. Of people who were exposed to radiation, about half had equivalent dose of 10 millisieverts or less, but 5 people had equivalent dose exceeding 50 millisieverts.
The radiation exposure on the thyroid increases the risk of cancer. However, radioactive iodine has a short half life, and the exposure was not measured properly in the confusion right after the accident and the details were not known.
From April 11 to 16 last year, Professor Tokonami's group measured the density of radioactive iodine in the thyroid of 48 people who evacuated from Hamadori (coastal 1/3 of Fukushima) to Fukushima City and 17 people who remained in Tsushima District of Namie-machi, right outside the 30 kilometer radius from the nuclear power plant. Radioactive iodine was found in 50 people, nearly 80% of people tested.
From the actual measurement, the researchers calculated the equivalent dose at the thyroid. Assuming they had inhaled radioactive iodine immediately after the accident on March 12 and were exposed to radiation, the calculation showed that 34 people had equivalent dose of 20 millisieverts and less, and 5 people exceeded 50 millisieverts, which is an international standard for intervention to prevent negative effect on health.
The maximum equivalent dose was 87 millisieverts, from an adult who remained in Namie-machi after the accident. The second highest was 77 millisieverts from an adult who had spent more than 2 weeks in Tsushima District of Namie-machi on his/her way to evacuate to Fukushima City. The highest dose in children was 47 millisieverts. There is no information of whereabouts of the child during the weeks in March and April.
In the test done by the national government late last March on 1,080 children in Iwaki City, Kawamata-machi, and Iitate-mura, 35 millisievert equivalent dose was announced as the maximum.
From Asahi's extremely convoluted tabulation, here's what I've figured out (I think, maybe):
48 people from Hamadori (coastal 1/3), 17 people who remained in Tsushima District of Namie-machi, total 65 people
Radioactive iodine detected in 50 people
25 people below 10 millisieverts equivalent dose
9 people between 10 and 20
11 people between 20 and 50
5 people above 50
Why can't Asahi say it straight? (Rhetorical question in case you're wondering.)
NHK, reporting on the same news, says the researchers are yet to tell the residents about the test result:
調査チームでは、今後、検査を行った住民に対し結果を報告することにしています。
The researchers plans to tell the residents about the test result in the near future.
How nice of them.
Hirosaki University is one of the 86 national universities in Japan.
It has been revealed that an increasing number of marine products from Japan imported to South Korea have been found with radioactive materials. Since the levels are below the safety limits, they are being sold in the marketplace.
South Korea's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries and Food announced on March 8 that an increasing number of marine products imported to South Korea from Japan have been found with radioactive cesium.
The South Korean government conducts its own test of marine products imported from Japan, aside from the radiation test in Japan [by the Japanese authorities] at the time of shipment.
Radioactive cesium was found in mackerels and Alaska pollock. There were 13 cases of cesium detection in 8 months from April to November last year, but the number significantly increased from December onward. There are 40 cases of cesium detection in 3 months from December to February this year.
In most cases, the radioactive density was 7 becquerels/kg or less. The maximum was 97.9 becquerels/kg. Since they are all below the safety limit of South Korea, they have been sold in the market.
JAEA published the photographs of the corium from the Reactor No.2 from the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.
Asahi Shinbun (3/7/2012) reports that the 60 samples of the TMI corium have been kept at JAEA since 1991. The samples, weighing 3 kilograms, were given to JAEA by Idaho National Laboratory as part of the international research collaboration.
According to Asahi, JAEA is planning to re-evaluate the samples as part of the basic research for decommissioning the reactors at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.
Cross section of a corium sample, with the surface oxidized to show colors. Green is uranium dioxide. Brownish part is metals like zirconium, iron, nickel melted together (according to Asahi):
Cross section of a small 1-mm corium grain. Whitish color is where uranium and cladding melted and mixed (according to Asahi):
It seems to be part of the report by Professor Tomoya Yamauchi of Kobe University who did the measurement. Mr. Ooyama lists the result of 11 samples tested by Professor Yamauchi.
The NGO in Minami Soma, HCR, seems to have some kind of a fallout with the assemblyman's volunteer group over the "black dust", and they've been making rather wild announcements (telling residents that the black dust was plutonium, when there was no alpha emission was detected, for example). I am still trying to get the overall picture on this matter.
The National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS) knew about it since May last year, but decided to keep quiet. Why? It's yet another case of the researchers waiting until their data collection is published in a peer-review scientific magazine (the paper is linked at the bottom of the post).
For the NIRS researchers, their data has just been published in the UK's Scientific Reports (electronic version), reports Kyodo News (3/8/2012):
The National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS, in Chiba City, Chiba) published the result of their measurement of plutonium-241 at three locations in Fukushima Prefecture 20 to 32 kilometers northwest and south of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in the electronic version of the UK's science magazine "Scientific Reports" issued on March 8, 2012.
The level [of plutonium-241] will not affect human health. Plutonium-241 has relatively short half life of 14 years compared to other isotopes of plutonium. It decays into americium-241, which is easily absorbed through soil into legumes. The NIRS says "To avoid internal radiation exposure, it is necessary to survey the spread of plutonium-241 inside the 20 kilometer zone around the plant."
[Plutonium-241] was detected from the samples they collected in April and May last year - the dead leaves from the forests in Iitate-mura and Namie-machi, and the soil at J-village, which has been used as the staging area for the work after the Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident. Other isotopes of plutonium, plutonium-239 (half life 24,000 years) and plutonium-240 (half life 6,600 years), were also detected. From the ratio of isotopes, the NIRS researchers concluded that they were from the Fukushima nuclear accident.
The density of plutonium-241 [detected this time] is higher than that being detected in Japan after the atmospheric nuclear tests in the past. However, plutonium-241 has a short half life, and the density is lower than that during the 1960s when the radioactive fallout from the nuclear tests fell on Japan.
Plutonium is a radionuclide that hardly exists in nature. It is created when uranium in the reactor fuel absorbs neutrons.
Hmmm. If you want to avoid internal radiation exposure by ingesting food that may contain americium-241, a decay product of plutonium-241, don't you want to survey the area outside the 20 kilometer zone? After all, outside the 20 kilometer zone, Fukushima farmers will be tilling the land, ready to grow crops of all kinds again this year.
Half life of americium-241 is 432.7 years. As it decays, americium-241 emits alpha and gamma rays.
Dead leaves in Namie-machi (26 kilometers NW of the plant): 34.8 becquerels/kg
Dead leaves in Iitate-mura (32 kilometers NW of the plant): 20.2 becquerels/kg
Soil at J-Village (20 kilometer south of the plant: 4.52 becquerels/kg
Farmers in Fukushima, are you still going to grow stuff on your land?
Researchers at the NIRS, did you think of at least informally telling the local authorities or the farmers about your findings? Or did you just sit and wait until your paper was published by a peer-review magazine?
From decidedly "non-warmer" James Delingpole on wind farms (he calls " Bat Chomping Eco-Crucifixes") that:
ruin views, kill birds, cause bats to implode, destroy the British film industry, frighten horses, enrich rent-seeking toffs like David Cameron's father-in-law Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt, drive up electricity bills, kill jobs, create fuel poverty, cause old people to die of hypothermia, wipe out property values, drive people mad with strobing and noise pollution and enable smug liberal idiots to spout rubbish like "Oh, I don't mind them. Actually I think they're rather beautiful", but also by 2020 they're set to drive up consumer bills in the UK alone by £120 billion.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has produced yet another devastating report: this time on the economics of wind farms. Turns out they're even worse than we thought.
Not only do the Bat Chomping Eco-Crucifixes (TM) ruin views, kill birds, cause bats to implode, destroy the British film industry, frighten horses, enrich rent-seeking toffs like David Cameron's father-in-law Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt, drive up electricity bills, kill jobs, create fuel poverty, cause old people to die of hypothermia, wipe out property values, drive people mad with strobing and noise pollution and enable smug liberal idiots to spout rubbish like "Oh, I don't mind them. Actually I think they're rather beautiful", but also by 2020 they're set to drive up consumer bills in the UK alone by £120 billion.
This is about ten times more than it would cost if we stuck to gas. (Which we have in abundance, just waiting to be exploited, in places like the Bowland Shale).
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world's energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.
If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron's government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government's heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.
Some readers may occasionally detect in my coverage of wind farms a mild hint of contempt for those involved in the wind farm industry whether as lawyers (that means you Mrs Nick Clegg), paid propagandists/disrupters (see commenters, below), rent-seekers (yep, Sir Reginald) or corporatist blood-suckers feeding off the backs of innocent taxpayers.
One thing is certain: the arguments against wind farms are so abundant and well-known that ignorance is no longer a plausible excuse. If you're involved in the wind farm industry, you're a weapons-grade tosser, simple as that.
"Wind farms are beautiful" meme is in Japan also, despite the complaints from the residents who live near one of them and suffer health problems from the ultra-low frequency from the wind mills. I guess anything can be said to be beautiful after witnessing the wreckage at Fukushima I Nucleaer Power Plant.
Call for Doctor Helicopter due to occurrence of injured person
At around 1:55 pm on March 7, at the first basement of Heat Exchanger Building* of Unit 1 (non-controlled area) a partner companies' worker found another worker who was engaged in repair work of insulation material of piping was lying. After that, at 2:36 pm on the same day, we requested the helicopter emergency medical service (called "Doctor Heli"). The worker retained consciousness and suffered no external injury. In addition, we confirmed no radioactive materials were adhered to the worker's body.
By "lying", TEPCO means "collapsed" (in case you're wondering).
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace just released a paper by James C. Acton and Mark Hibbs titled "Why Fukushima Was Preventable".
Their main argument is that TEPCO and the Japanese government could have better prepared for the tsunami if they had followed the international standards (for flooding).
The authors say TEPCO and the NISA's assessment for tsunami risks were inadequate because:
Insufficient attention was paid to evidence of large tsunamis inundating the region surrounding the plant about once every thousand years.
Computer modeling of the tsunami threat was inadequate. Most importantly, preliminary simulations conducted in 2008 that suggested the tsunami risk to the plant had been seriously underestimated were not followed up and were only reported to NISA on March 7, 2011.
NISA failed to review simulations conducted by TEPCO and to foster the development of appropriate computer modeling tools.
Never mind that TEPCO and NISA didn't intend to pay enough attention. But that is beyond the scope of the analysis by these authors. Not to mention that the earthquake alone may have doomed the plant, even without tsunami.
The following is the opening section that summarizes the paper "Why Fukushima Was Preventable" (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2012):
Public sentiment in many states has turned against nuclear energy following the March 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The large quantity of radioactive material released has caused significant human suffering and rendered large stretches of land uninhabitable. The cleanup operation will take decades and may cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Fukushima accident was, however, preventable. Had the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and Japan’s regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), followed international best practices and standards, it is conceivable that they would have predicted the possibility of the plant being struck by a massive tsunami. The plant would have withstood the tsunami had its design previously been upgraded in accordance with state-of-the-art safety approaches.
The methods used by TEPCO and NISA to assess the risk from tsunamis lagged behind international standards in at least three important respects:
* Insufficient attention was paid to evidence of large tsunamis inundating the region surrounding the plant about once every thousand years.
* Computer modeling of the tsunami threat was inadequate. Most importantly, preliminary simulations conducted in 2008 that suggested the tsunami risk to the plant had been seriously underestimated were not followed up and were only reported to NISA on March 7, 2011.
* NISA failed to review simulations conducted by TEPCO and to foster the development of appropriate computer modeling tools.
At the time of the accident, critical safety systems in nuclear power plants in some countries, especially in European states, were—as a matter of course—much better protected than in Japan. Following a flooding incident at Blayais Nuclear Power Plant in France in 1999, European countries significantly enhanced their plants’ defenses against extreme external events. Japanese operators were aware of this experience, and TEPCO could and should have upgraded Fukushima Daiichi.
Steps that could have prevented a major accident in the event that the plant was inundated by a massive tsunami, such as the one that struck the plant in March 2011, include:
* Protecting emergency power supplies, including diesel generators and batteries, by moving them to higher ground or by placing them in watertight bunkers;
* Establishing watertight connections between emergency power supplies and key safety systems; and
* Enhancing the protection of seawater pumps (which were used to transfer heat from the plant to the ocean and to cool diesel generators) and/or constructing a backup means to dissipate heat.
Though there is no single reason for TEPCO and NISA’s failure to follow international best practices and standards, a number of potential underlying causes can be identified. NISA lacked independence from both the government agencies responsible for promoting nuclear power and also from industry. In the Japanese nuclear industry, there has been a focus on seismic safety to the exclusion of other possible risks. Bureaucratic and professional stovepiping made nuclear officials unwilling to take advice from experts outside of the field. Those nuclear professionals also may have failed to effectively utilize local knowledge. And, perhaps most importantly, many believed that a severe accident was simply impossible.
In the final analysis, the Fukushima accident does not reveal a previously unknown fatal flaw associated with nuclear power. Rather, it underscores the importance of periodically reevaluating plant safety in light of dynamic external threats and of evolving best practices, as well as the need for an effective regulator to oversee this process.
In "Predicting the Disaster" section of the paper, the authors say:
First, there appears to have been insufficient attention given by TEPCO and NISA to historical evidence of large earthquakes and tsunamis. Best practice, as promulgated by the IAEA, requires the collection of data on prehistorical and historical earthquakes and tsunamis in the region of a nuclear power plant in order to protect the plant against rare extreme seismic events that may occur only once every ten thousand years.36 Historical data was used in assessing plant safety.
If that's the case, going back 10,000 years, there should have been no nuclear power plants approved anywhere in Japan.
The international best practice the authors cite is that of flooding, not tsunami that comes after a large earthquake. I haven't finished reading the paper yet, but their proposed actions to protect the plant from the tsunami seem viable as long as there is no damage from the preceding earthquake, which in Fukushima's case was M.9. The actions that could have saved the plant, as proposed by the authors, are:
Moving emergency diesel generators and other emergency power sources to higher ground on the plant site
Establishing watertight connections between emergency power supplies and the plant
Building dikes and seawalls to protect against a severe tsunami
Installing emergency power equipment and cooling pumps in dedicated, bunkered, watertight buildings or compartments
Assuring that seawater-supply infrastructure is robust and providing additional robust sources to serve as the plants’ ultimate heat sink.
None of the actions seems to assume any damage to the buildings, structures, pipes, equipment from an earthquake.
France's ACRO (Association pour le Contrôle de la Radioactivité de l'Ouest) released the result of the urine tests of children in Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate, Chiba, Tokyo, Kanagawa, and Saitama Prefectures.
While the radioactive cesium levels in children in Tokyo, Kanagawa and Saitama were below detection levels, children in Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate and Chiba (Kashiwa City) were found with radioactive cesium in their urine.
Most troubling were the results for children outside Fukushima with rather high levels of radioactive cesium. ACRO suspects (I think correctly) that they may come from ingesting contaminated food.
8-year-old boy in Kakuda City, Miyagi: 3.12 becquerels/kg
11-year-old boy in Marumori-cho, Miyagi: 3.03 becquerels/kg
10-year-old boy in Oshu City, Iwate: 2.89 becquerels/kg
4-year-old girl in Kashiwa City, Chiba: 1.47 becquerels/kg
Even in the Aizu region of Fukushima (western third) where the radiation contamination is far less than the rest of Fukushima, a 36-year-old woman was found with 1.84 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium in her urine.
ACRO continues to face a large demand for urine testing from Japan at the request of local NGOs or individuals and to provide free analysis. This time, the urines come from prefectures that further from the Fukushima NPP.
Results show that urines are still contaminated almost one year after 3/11 and are contaminated in places located as far as Oshu (Iwate Pref.) at about 220 km from the NPP. In Miyagi Pref. that is closer, urines are also contaminated. It is particularly the case in Marumori.
Sample n°11 comes from the same girl from Ichinoseki as the last time. We notice a significant decrease of the contamination. Parents were eating vegetables from the Grandparents’ garden without expecting that they could be contaminated. The urine test provided by ACRO allowed them to change their food habits and protect themselves.
Marumori-cho is located in southern Miyagi. 1600 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium was just found in shiitake mushrooms in Marumori-cho.
The 4-year-old girl in Ichinoseki City in Iwate Prefecture had been found with 4.64 becquerels/kg of cesium in the urine test done by ACRO in September 2011.
Contaminated food could come from home-grown vegetables, or from school lunches in which local produce is used. As far as schools are concerned, it's "safe" as long as the food items are sold in the market, or the food items test below the government safety limit (500 becquerels/kg for radioactive cesium, until April 1, 2012; then 100 becquerels/kg).
The Mühleberg atomic plant near Bern will lose its operating licence at the end of June 2013 on security grounds, the Federal Administrative Court has ruled.
The court upheld a complaint by local opponents of the plant against the indefinite extension of the plant's licence by the environment ministry, granted at the end of 2009.
The 1972 plant, one of the oldest in Switzerland, is run by BKW Energy. Last September it was restarted after three months of annual checks and safety improvements.
Before the court’s ruling, Mühleberg's licence was open-ended as long as it met national nuclear safety requirements.
All Swiss atomic plants are due to be decommissioned by 2034, in line with the government’s decision to opt out of atomic energy, announced last May.
In the wake of last year’s crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, the Swiss government suspended all applications for the building of new power plants and ordered a review of options for the country’s energy mix in the future.
In case you are not aware, Japan is one of the last bastions of people who believe in anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. The majority of the population in Japan are quite willing to sacrifice their well-being if that reduces CO2 emission and save the mother earth.
Secretaries-general and Diet policy committee chairmen of the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito Party met on March 7, and confirmed their parties' policy to agree to 4 tax bills [submitted by the Noda administration] in the bills related to the fiscal 2012 budget including the one that will create the tax for countermeasures against global warming (environmental tax).
これにより、４法案は月内にも成立する見通しとなった。
With their agreement, the 4 bills are likely to be passed within this month.
Meanwhile, the Diet Steering Committee of the Lower House held a meeting on March 7, and decided that the fiscal 2012 budget would be voted on in the plenary session of the Lower House in the evening on March 8. The 2012 budget is expected to pass by the majority vote from the ruling coalition. The LDP and the New Komei Party confirmed in the meeting on March 7 to oppose the budget.
The budget is going to pass anyway, so the LDP and Komeito want to make a token stand that they opposed, a gesture enough to fool people into voting for them in the future.
Well they lied. They used the absorption towers for one month and stopped using them, but never bothered to tell they stopped using them.
In one month, they used 5500 kilograms of zeolite, which absorbed 5000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium. In other words, 27.5 million becquerels of radioactive cesium was effectively caught. So the city thought "Oh that's good", and stopped using zeolite.
It was revealed on March 6 that Yokohama City had stopped using the system to absorb radioactive cesium using zeolite in November last year at the city's Minami Honmoku Final Disposal Site (in Naka-ku, Yokohama). The city continued to tell residents about the zeolite absorption system in the meetings to explain the ashes from the sewer sludge being buried in the final disposal site, even after they stopped using the system. The official says, "We are sorry if the residents were misled into thinking the system was still used."
The Minami Honmoku Final Disposal Site is on Tokyo Bay, encircled by the seawalls. When the ashes are dumped on the ocean [inside the seawalls], the displaced water go through the absorption system and is discharged into the ocean [outside the seawalls]. The city started to use 5500 kilograms of zeolite in October last year to process the water, and stopped the usage about one month later. 5,000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium was found in the zeolite. The city explains that it was only an experiment to see how effective zeolite was in absorbing [radioactive cesium], and that the radioactivity of the exhaust water is very low.
The city will start cesium absorption treatment at the garbage incineration plants in the city. At the Minami Honmoku site, they will conduct the test of a new system using zeolite to absorb radioactive cesium in September.
According to Yokohama City Assemblywoman Sakura Inoue, the city official in charge said he was impressed with zeolite's ability to absorb radioactive cesium, but he stopped the use anyway because the radioactivity of the treated water was below the national safety level.
Here's a hilarious exchange between the official and Assemblywoman Sakura Inoue during the recent Assembly meeting, as Ms. Inoue relates in her blog:
Inoue: Why did you stop treating water with zeolite?
Official: It was to see the effect of zeolite.
Inoue: I am asking you why you stopped treating the water.
Official: No detection of radioactive cesium in water coming in to the absorption system or in water coming out of the system into the ocean.
Inoue: It's not "no detection", but "below detection limit". Since the ashes were dumped into a large amount of seawater, when you look at the density it may be below the detection limit. But it doesn't mean there was no radioactive cesium. In fact, what was the radioactive density of zeolite after 26 days of use?
Official: 5,000 becquerels/kg.
Inoue: What did you think of the number?
Official: I thought zeolite was quite effective.
Oh boy. But wait, it gets worse:
Inoue: Why did you give misleading explanation? Did you tell the residents, fishermen and harbor workers that you stopped using the zeolite absorption system?
Official: We explained to them that radioactive cesium was not detected.
Inoue: It's not the matter of density but the absolute amount. A large amount of radioactive cesium is being dumped into the bay. Treatment with zeolite should be resumed.
Official: There's no problem, as it is below the national safety standard. We are not going to use zeolite.
Inoue: Why then are you building a new embankment as a new countermeasure against radiation?
Official: To be safer...
Inoue: How much does it cost to build the embankment, and how much does zeolite cost?
Officla: It costs 130 million yen to build the embankment, and 1.2 million yen for one zeolite tower. [Kanagawa Shinbun says it is 1.2 million yen for 2 zeolite towers.]
Here's my take, in an effort to make sense:
The city doesn't want to have highly radioactive (over 8,000 becquerels/kg) zeolite after absorbing radioactive cesium, because they cannot dump zeolite in the landfill if the radioactivity exceeds 8,000 becquerels/kg.
Building the embankment costs a lot more money, and the city wants to spend more money as it is able to distribute money and jobs to the well-connected contractors.
What "national safety limit" of exhaust water is this official talking about? It turns out (according to Kanagawa Shinbun 3/7/2012) to be 60 to 90 becquerels/liter.
Well guess what kind of "safety limit" it is.
Those numbers happen to be the allowed density of radioactive cesium in exhaust water of a nuclear power plant. Cesium-134: 60 becquerels/liter, and cesium-137: 90 becquerels/liter.
Not just the Noda administration, not just the Democratic Party of Japan but the so-called "opposition" parties join the government's all-out effort to spread the disaster debris all over Japan.
That alone shows there are tons of money to be made from tons of debris.
Yomiuri Shinbun (3/6/2012; link will disappear soon as this is a Yahoo link) reports that 5 former Ministers of the Environment from the DPJ, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Komei Party will collaborate in persuading the residents in municipalities in Japan to accept the disaster debris from Miyagi and Iwate.
野田首相は６日、首相官邸で神奈川県の黒岩祐治知事と会談した。
Prime Minister Noda met with Governor Yuji Kuroiwa of Kanagawa Prefecture on March 6 at the Prime Minister's Official Residence.
Mr. Kuroiwa handed the prime minister the request that the national government pay for the entire cost of wide-area disposal of disaster debris from the March 11, 2011 disaster. The prime minister expressed appreciation for Kanagawa Prefecture's willingness to consider accepting the debris.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party of Japan held the first meeting of the DPJ members of the Diet for promoting the wide-area disposal of the disaster debris (chairman Yoshiaki Takagi, ex-Minister of Education and Science), and decided on the policy to explain the safety of debris disposal to the municipalities and directly intervene in the process of acceptance [instead of going through the governors or through the Ministry of the Environment].
5 former Ministers of the Environment in the DPJ, the Liberal Democratic Party, and New Komeito [fairness] Party will launch their campaign to push the municipalities to accept the debris, with each former Minister in charge of one specific geographic region.
All-out war on those pesky residents who dare say no, by convincing the majority who don't care one way or another of the need to "help" Tohoku "recover".
The Ministry of the Environment continues to push for wide-area dispersion of debris to be burned and buried, and has allocated 200 million yen (about US$2.5 million) for the PR blitz featuring a popular actor from Onagawa-machi, Miyagi (whose debris is being shipped to the central Tokyo to be burned in the municipal incinerators for household garbage) showing the piles of debris in his hometown (Nikkan Sports news, 3/6/2012, in Japanese).
The paper by a Tokyo University researcher that was finally published nearly one year after he took the samples at the front gate of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant and in Iitate-mura in Fukushima Prefecture (see my post from yesterday) has this very interesting chart.
It shows the spacial dose of radiation at the front gate of Fukushima I Nuke Plant and the timeline of events at the plant in March. The largest spike seems to be around or after 12AM on March 15, and the label on the spike says "Dry vent at reactor no.2".
On checking the information from March 2011, I find that TEPCO did the dry vent at Reactor 2 at 12AM on March 15, 2011 for a few minutes. At first (on March 20), TEPCO announced they'd done the dry vent sometime on March 16 and 17, but on March 21 retracted that statement and said the dry vent was done at 12AM on March 15. (See Sankei Shinbun article on 3/21/2011.)
It is not clear whether the company informed the residents or the government before the the Reactor 2 dry vent on March 15 which caused a huge spike in radiation, and which may be the biggest contributor to radiation contamination in wide areas in Tohoku and Kanto. From the Sankei article it doesn't look like they gave any prior notice. This is the same company that didn't even tell the plant workers that the vent on Reactor 1 was about to be carried out on March 12.
Dry vent releases different types of radioactive materials compared to wet vent.
The peak that appears to the right side of the largest peak is after the hydrogen explosion of Reactor 4, but not at the time of explosion. I suspect the peak may have been the result of some event on Reactor 2's Suppression Chamber which seems to have taken place about the same time as the Reactor 4 hydrogen explosion. TEPCO says it was not "explosion" that happened at the Reactor 2 Suppression Chamber but still doesn't say what it was.
The second largest peak was when the fire broke out on Reactor 3 on March 16. The white smoke was seen at 8:30AM on March 16, and the radiation level at the front gate of the plant shot up to 10,000 microsieverts/hour (10 millisievert/hour) at 10:40AM (Asahi Shinbun 3/16/2011).
Again, it is just too bad that the researcher had to sit on the data for 11 months for his article to be published in a peer-review magazine.
A paper by a researcher at Tokyo University about discovery of neptunium-239 and other short-lived nuclides in Iitate-mura seems to have finally been accepted and published by Environmental Pollution, a peer-reviewed scientific magazine. It was made available online on January 20, 2012, and is published in the April 2012 issue of the magazine.
It took nearly 1 year for off-line readers to know about the discovery. The researcher took the samples of soil, plants and water in early April last year.
In August last year there was an article of neptunium-239 having been discovered in Iitate-mura, 35 kilometers from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, by a researcher at Tokyo University. The article was written by a husband and wife comedian couple. (For more, see my post on August 15, 2011.) They were criticized for not revealing the source (name of this researcher) or the details. Their response was that the researcher was submitting the paper to a peer-reviewed magazine.
Well here it is, published by a peer-reviewed magazine nearly one year after the accident, and now utterly irrelevant except for some academic curiosity. The information, as it sat in limbo of peer-reviewing process, was not used to educate, warn people in Fukushima, particularly in Iitate-mura, so that they could decide what to do. If they had known their soil and vegetation were extremely contaminated with short-lived radionuclides with strong radioactivity, they might have done things differently.
I hope the researcher at least warned the villagers privately.
* a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan * b Radioisotope Center, The University of Tokyo, 2-11-16 Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0032, Japan
* Received 22 August 2011. Revised 24 December 2011. Accepted 1 January 2012. Available online 20 January 2012.
Abstract
The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, damaged reactor cooling systems at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The subsequent venting operation and hydrogen explosion resulted in a large radioactive nuclide emission from reactor containers into the environment. Here, we collected environmental samples such as soil, plant species, and water on April 10, 2011, in front of the power plant main gate as well as 35 km away in Iitate village, and observed gamma-rays with a Ge(Li) semiconductor detector. We observed activation products (239Np and 59Fe) and fission products (131I, 134Cs (133Cs), 137Cs, 110mAg (109Ag), 132Te, 132I, 140Ba, 140La, 91Sr, 91Y, 95Zr, and 95Nb). 239Np is the parent nuclide of 239Pu; 59Fe are presumably activation products of 58Fe obtained by corrosion of cooling pipes. The results show that these activation and fission products, diffused within a month of the accident. ----------------------------------------------------- Highlights
► We collected environmental samples near the Fukushima nuclear power plant. ► We observed 239Np and 59Fe along with many fission products. ► 239Np is evidently an activation product of 238U contained in nuclear fuel. ► 239Np is also parent nuclide of 239Pu. ► Our results show that activation products diffused within a month of the accident.
If the data in the paper is not much different from what the researcher had put on his own website last year, Iitate-mura had several thousand becquerels/kg of neptunium-239, exceeding one of the two sampling locations in front of the Fukushima I plant gate. Iitate-mura also had a host of other radionuclides in amounts exceeding the immediate vicinity of the plant or the front gate of the plant or even inside the plant.
You can see the charts for yourself, here. They are from the researcher's presentation last year, not from the paper submitted and accepted at Environmental Pollution.
The push has gotten noticeably stronger in the past week or so, gearing toward the one-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 disaster.
Even the far-away prefecture like Okinawa, some of whose islands are physically much closer to Taiwan than to the Japanese mainland, eagerly wants disaster debris from Tohoku to be shipped there (I hate to think how much it would cost), much to the despair of parents who have thought they escaped to Okinawa with their children to avoid radiation contamination.
Now, Prime Minister Noda has promised a beefed-up support (i.e. more subsidy, i.e. more taxpayers' money) to those exemplary municipalities who take the debris and burn, on a TV show.
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda appeared on a program aired on Nippon Television in the evening of March 4. About the wide-area processing and disposal of the debris from the March 11, 2011 earthquake/tsunami disaster, he said, "We will have to support the municipalities that will accept the debris. The national government will support the testing of radioactivity, which is the only way to dispel fears. In some cases, the national government will conduct the test", indicating the policy to financially support the municipalities that accept the debris.
The prime minister also promised the financial support from the national government when the municipalities expand the existing disposal sites or build new disposal sites. He said emphatically, "The most important thing is to get approval from people near the disposal sites. If necessary, we will go ourselves to explain to them."
The national government makes it the goal to dispose all the debris by the end of March 2014. However, there is a limit to how much debris can be processed at the disaster affected areas, and the prime minister called for cooperation from municipalities in Japan in wide-area debris processing in the press conference on February 10. However, only Tokyo, Aomori Prefecture, and Yamagata Prefecture have accepted the debris, because of the fear of radiation contamination of the disaster debris.
Oh boy. This prime minister may have been a good speaker on the street corner in his younger days, but he doesn't seem to live in the reality-based world.
1. No one outside the government believes the numbers that the government churns out regarding radiation contamination. Even the ranking official at the Ministry of the Environment has admitted that people do not trust any government numbers.
2. His understanding that the only people that should matter are the residents near the final disposal sites is plain wrong. The debris will be burned elsewhere, and the residents near the incineration plants do matter. Besides, the final disposal sites are often located near or at the water source, and even without radioactive materials there have been numerous problems with contaminated runoffs polluting the water and soil, affecting people and businesses downstream.
3. Capacity to process the debris at the disaster-affected area is a matter of debate right now. More and more municipalities and waste management industry people are saying they want the debris to stay where they are, instead of wasting money to transport it as far away as to Okinawa.
But it doesn't seem to matter to the Japanese government a bit. They seem to think if they repeat the same words over and over again people will get weary and give up.
It's rather symbolic and ironic that the commemorative event for the March 11, 2011 disaster is going to be held at the National Theater where "kabuki" performance is regularly held.
(Almost worthy of Onion News coverage...)
To be fair, as a nation that is not very overtly religious, they can't pick a cathedral, temple or shrine for a ceremonial event to be conducted by the national government. There must be a (perceived) security concern also, judging by the way the police has been reacting to peaceful demonstrators.
I found a statement by the Prime Minister's Office announcing the event, laden with customary, formal cliche as to how regrettable and sorrowful was the loss of lives in this unprecedented disaster. (For those of you who read Japanese, you would understand what I mean from the Japanese text below. So cliche that it means almost nothing.)
Wide areas were affected by this unprecedented disaster in which extremely large number of people lost their precious lives and people's way of living was significantly affected. When I think about the deep sorrow of people whose family members were lost in the disaster, it is a matter of greatest regret and sorrowfulness.
To express our sorrow to those who perished in the disaster, we will stand in silent prayer for one minute starting 2:46PM on the day of the memorial service [March 11] at the National Theater. I would like to ask the Japanese citizens to pray in silence at the same time, wherever you happen to be.
平成２４年２月２４日 東日本大震災一周年追悼式実行委員長 内閣総理大臣 野田佳彦
February 24, 2012 Executive chairman of the one year anniversary memorial service for the March 11, 2011 disaster Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda
I know the Japanese are way too serious on certain things and way too casual on others (the worst nuclear accident in the history of Japan, for example), but I felt sorry when I saw tweets circulating rapidly in Japan about the Onion video from last year where "CIA Deputy Director" says the agency created Facebook, and it is saving the government millions of dollars.
They thought Onion News Network is real, like ABC, CBS, NBC, or BBC.
Well it is real, now I think about it. I can't tell the difference any more.
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I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.
"Magno Arms" What Does It Indicate? Nothing Good
-
*UPDATE *
As an affiliate of Elliott Wave International I'll be promoting the
following all week:
EWI has given me the OK to share Bob Prechter's April ...
SO WHAT'S NEXT
-
Just a list. Not too complicated, but time to think about the next few
months. We're in the "Quickening"......"the Fourth Turning"..... basically
we'r...
DOWN we go.......
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corona virus could be a black swan Hehehe
Information here is not meant as trading advice. Please do your own DD
before any decisions.
Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word. ------------------ This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.
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