HE HAS A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT THAT'S FAR MORE DEADLY.
JAPAN WAS CREATING PURE, WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM YEARS AGO AND THE WORLD ALLOWED IT.
THEN CAME THE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI.
TODAY, ABE "DROPS BOMBS" ON ALL THE WORLD, OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
ABOVE: Radiation's Pathway into the Human Body. Please note that bio-accumulation occurs at all levels as each species consumes other radiated species causing levels to rise each step up the food chain.
Japan's military is growing by leaps and bounds with Shinzo Abe allocating ever more funds for expanding Japan's "new" military for the past 6 years. This trend is very troubling to South Korea and China, in particular.
North Korea Rouses Neighbors to Reconsider Nuclear Weapons
"Shigeru Ishiba, who also once served as head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and oversaw efforts to overcome population decline and to vitalize local economies, said he believed Japan should have the ability to develop nuclear weapons, but he did not believe it actually should do so.
"Japan should have the technology to build a nuclear weapon if it wants to do so," Ishiba said during a speech in Tokyo, according to Japan Today."
Shinzo Abe has signaled his desire for nuclear capability in the face of growing concerns about near-neighbors North Korea and their ally, China.
ALL nations should be troubled by Abe, a known 'hawk', being at the helm.
The above illustration was used in the first month after the 3 (or 4?) reactors blew at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, 2011.
What we see above is the path of a CONTINUAL CYCLE of radioactive contamination by a still-leaking MAN-MADE 'accident'.
The fallout has NOT ceased, it leaks radiation into the air, sea and onto land masses every single day.
The radiation is still being released by the missing corium, the spent fuel rods, some in pools that were not under roof until recently, the flow of water from the hills above the plant after every rain, by the leaks from the metal water storage tanks that were not designed to contain radioactive material and are also leaking, the daily venting and release of radioactive "steam", release of contaminated water into the Pacific, from open-air burning of radioactive debris, contaminated clothing, etc, used by workers who are charged with decontamination, and the many miles of land mass which can never be decontaminated, trees, rocks, soil that are still showing unsafe levels of radiation.
As the Washington Post wrote last year, "Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences said medical professionals had never even thought about encountering this level of radiation in their work.
According to the Kyodo news agency, the institute estimates that exposure to one sievert of radiation could lead to infertility, loss of hair and cataracts, while four sieverts would kill half the people exposed to it.
"We should not be surprised if even higher radiation levels are found there, but only actual measurements will tell."
Could the radiation level be even higher?
"Possibly. The 530 sievert reading was recorded some distance from the melted fuel, so in reality it could be 10 times higher than recorded," said Hideyuki Ban, co-director of Citizens' Nuclear Information Center."
[ALSO NOTE, NEITHER OF THE OTHER TWO REACTORS CAN BE APPROACHED TO MEASURE RADIATION THERE YET. THE CORIUM (MELTED FUEL) HAS NOT BEEN FOUND YET, AND TEPCO ADMITTED THAT THIS PAST FEBRUARY.]
On 2/14/2019, Tepco announced they managed to contact the molten nuclear fuel on the bottom of the Primary Containment Vessel of Reactor 2.
The research was implemented on 2/13/2019. No data about the radiation level has been published.
According to Tepco, the specialized machine contacted the scattered fuel debris at 10 locations of the bottom of pedestal part.
The fuel debris was movable at 5 locations but media coverage is confusing at this moment.
However the exact locations of these 10 points are not defined even by Tepco. The researchable area is reportedly only 2% of the entire pedestal part."
[SEE THE PDF BY TEPCO <HERE>.]
“It’s unbelievable that anyone would want to restart nuclear plants when Japan hasn't learned how and why the Fukushima Dai'ichi accident happened, or learned lessons from it,” Fumiya Tanabe, a nuclear safety expert and former chief research scientist at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, said.
It is indisputable that there is a daily flow of 300 to 600 tons of radioactive contaminated groundwater into the ocean.
Every major news agency on earth has reported those figures many times.
"The figures are something like 80,000 gallons per day of relatively low-level radioactive waste water. Then you’ve got those storage tanks – we’re talking 800,000 tons of HIGHLY radioactive water stored in tanks.
Every day they pour a hundred tons of water on each of these three melted-down cores.
Sometimes they lose those tanks. They leak, they overflow – it is an ongoing catastrophe.
Highly radioactive waste storage pools [remain] that aren’t even inside radiological containment. They don’t have all of that spent nuclear fuel transferred to a safer location in a couple of the units still. If something were to go wrong with that – those would be open air releases of very high-level radioactivity."
JAPAN HAS ONLY 2 OPTIONS, SPEND BILLIONS AND ENLIST INTERNATIONAL HELP TO STOP THE LEAKS OR SIT STILL AND DO NOTHING.
THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT SHOULD CLUE US IN AS TO WHY SO LITTLE PROGRESS IS BEING MADE.
"The figures of $150 billion to decommission [the Dai'ichi facility] – I have seen figures from a think tank in Japan sided [SIC] by Green Peace Japan up to $600 billion. If you do full cost accounting: where is this high-level radioactive waste going to go? It is going to need a deep geological depository. You have to build that and operate it. That costs a hundred billion or more. So when you do full cost accounting, this catastrophe could cost hundreds of billions of dollars to recover from. We’re just in the beginning."
Japan says it cannot stop the leaks and doesn't know why recent readings in and near the plant are higher than they were right after the triple-meltdown.
They can NEVER decontaminate what is RE-contaminated every time the rains come or the wind blows across miles and miles of contaminated mountains and forests there.
It will be at least 40 years, says TEPCO, before they can hope to begin to stop those leaks...other officials say it will take 100 years or longer.
Above, Just a FEW of the MANY MILLIONS of plastic bags, yes,plastic bags, piled all over northern Japan's Fukushima Prefecture, all containing radioactive soil. They are stacked in school yards, parking lots, around apartments and homes, anywhere they can find more room. Many have already split open and polluted streams and rivers there.
Since 2017, the government has begun to merely spread plastic sheets over enormous piles of this radioactive soil.
IN 2011, 7 YEARS AGO, THE TOKYO TIMES WROTE:
"The amount of radioactive cesium that has leaked from a tsunami-hit nuclear plant is about equal to 168 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, Japan’s nuclear agency said Friday.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency supplied the estimate at a parliamentary panel’s request, but it noted a simple comparison between an instantaneous bomb blast and long-term accidental leak is impossible and the results could be irrelevant.
The report estimated for each of the 16 isotopes released from "Little Boy" and 31 of those detected at the Fukushima plant but didn’t provide the total.
The report estimated that Iodine-131, another isotope that accumulates in thyroid gland, and Strontium-90, which has a 28-year half-life and could accumulate in bones, leaked from the plant in amounts about equal to 2.5 of the Hiroshima bombs.
THAT WAS JUST DURING THE FIRST YEAR, IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE EXPLOSIONS.
IN 2013, THE COMPARISON BETWEEN HIROSHIMA AND DAI'ICHI HAD CHANGED DRAMATICALLY AS TEPCO FAILED AND LIED, TIME AND TIME AGAIN.
Tepco admitted then that the radiation from Fukushima could exceed that from Chernobyl.
A 'Veterans Today' article 3 years ago stated, without sources, that "Fukushima so far is 14.75 Times worse than Chernobyl and growing."
"Fukushima now equals the detonation of 5,910.11 Hiroshima Atomic Bombs or it’s about 6,000 times worse than the A-Bombing of Japan; and, it is still going strong, with no end in sight.
That is equal to 6.45 Hiroshima Atomic Bombs a Day for 916 Days.
At 916 days of growth, Fukushima is 14.75 times bigger than the Chernobyl atomic disaster in 1986. "
The International Atomic Agency (IAEA) stated:
“The accident at Chernobyl was approximately 400 times more potent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima…”
(See #12 of that report.)
400 TIMES, COMPARED TO 5,910 TIMES!
At #5, we read, "While iodine is linked to thyroid cancer, Strontium can lead to leukaemia. Caesium is the element that travelled the farthest and lasts the longest. This element affects the entire body and especially can harm the liver and spleen."
REMEMBER, CHERNOBYL, WHICH INVOLVED ONLY ONE REACTOR, WAS CONTAINED, THE CORIUM WAS FOUND, AND THE SARCOPHAGUS WAS IN PLACE, ALL WITHIN 6 MONTHS AFTER IT BLEW... 6 MONTHS, NOT YEARS, MONTHS.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH JAPAN?
An article in the UK's 'Independent' seems to agree that Fukushima is or will be much worse than Chernobyl.
WE ARE NOW PAST YEAR 7.
"There are 1,946 known lethal radioactive isotopes."
"There were over 100 radioactive elements released into the atmosphere when Chernobyl’s reactor exploded."
WHY THE HELL ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT JUST CESIUM?
WHY IS JAPAN STILL AFTER 'THE BOMB'?
THEY DON'T NEED IT ANYMORE.
THEY HAVE FUKUSHIMA.
ABOVE: A bank of centrifuges at a Urenco plant, each being 3 to 5 meters tall and 20 cm diameter. (For Americans, 1 meter still equals about 3.3 feet and a centimeter is about 0.4 inches.)
USEC's ( United States Enrichment Corporation, a subsidiary of Centrus Energy Corp.) American Centrifuges are more than 12 meters tall and 40-50 cm diameter. The Russian centrifuges are less than one meter tall. Chinese ones are larger, but shorter than Urenco's.
To obtain efficient separation of the two isotopes, centrifuges rotate at very high speeds, with the outer wall of the spinning cylinder moving at between 400 and 500 metres per second to give a million times the acceleration of gravity.
Most of the 500 commercial nuclear power reactors operating or under construction in the world today require uranium 'enriched' in the U-235 isotope for their fuel.
The commercial process employed for this enrichment involves gaseous uranium in centrifuges.
Most reactors are light water reactors of two types – PWR or Pressurized Water Reactor, and BWR or Boiling Water Reactor and require uranium to be enriched from 0.7% to 3-5% U-235 in their fuel. This is normal low-enriched uranium (LEU). There is some interest in taking enrichment levels to about 7%, and even close to 20% for certain special power reactor fuels, as high-assay LEU (HALEU).
Although 13 countries have enrichment production capability or near-capability, about 90% of world enrichment capacity is in the five nuclear weapons states, China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States. These plus Germany, the Netherlands and Japan provide toll enrichment services to the commercial market.
Uranium is only weakly radioactive, and its chemical toxicity – especially as UF6 – is more significant than its radiological toxicity."
THE OVERWHELMING AMOUNT OF NUCLEAR WASTE FROM JUST THE DAI'ICHI NUCLEAR POWER PLANT SINCE 2011 BOGGLES THE MIND.
BUT, AT PEAK, JAPAN HAD 54 REACTORS RUNNING AND, BEING A SMALL ISLAND NATION, MUST STRUGGLE TO FIND STORAGE FOR IT ALL.
IN THE MEANTIME, JAPAN WAS CREATING PURE, WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM, EXACTLY WHAT IS USED TO MAKE ATOMIC BOMBS...AN ESTIMATED 40 TONS OF PLUTONIUM.
THERE WAS CONCERN THAT THIS PLUTONIUM WAS ONLY "LIGHTLY GUARDED"
FROM NBC, March 11, 2014:
"Already, Japan has 9.3 metric tons of plutonium stored at Rokkasho and nine other sites in the island nation, along with around 35 tons of plutonium stored in France and the United Kingdom. Altogether, Japan has the fifth-largest plutonium stockpile of any nation, representing 9 percent of the world’s stocks under civilian control. The figure includes 730 pounds of high-grade plutonium, the kind preferred by weapons designers, that Japan has agreed to send to the United States.Once the Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Center at Rokkasho opens, the size of this stockpile could double in five and a half years.
When the plant is operating at full capacity, it’s supposed to produce 8 metric tons of plutonium annually. That’s enough to make an estimated 2,600 nuclear weapons, each with the explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT.
A six-and-a-half pound lump of plutonium— enough to make a weapon — is the size of a grapefruit. The point, critics say, is that a thermos full of the metal in the wrong hands could produce a devastating terror attack.
[See also: http://www.publicintegrity.org/national-security/nuclear-waste]
Washington has been lobbying furiously behind the scenes, trying to persuade Japan that terrorists might regard Rokkasho’s new stockpile of plutonium as an irresistible target — and to convince Japanese officials they should better protect this dangerous raw material.
Specifically, U.S. officials have struggled, without success so far, to persuade Japan to create a more capable security force at the plant than the white-gloved, unarmed guards and small police unit stationed here now.
They also have been trying to persuade the privacy-minded Japanese to undertake stringent background checks for the 2,400 workers employed here.It’s been a hard sell for Washington, according to experts and officials in both countries familiar with the diplomatic dialogue.
After a U.S. embassy science officer witnessed a security drill in 2006 at the Mihama nuclear power plant along Japan’s northern shoreline, the officer sent a classified cable back to the State Department noting the typical police presence: “a lightly armored police vehicle with up to six police officers — some of them fast asleep."
“We are in the process of making those changes, but we don’t want to do them all at once because we don’t want people to think that we have been operating them unsafely in the past,” an unnamed Tokyo Electric Power Co. official said.
TRUTH IS, THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OPERATING UNSAFELY, AND THEIR RECORD SCREAMS THAT THEY HAVE.
JAPAN COULD FEASIBLY BUILD A NUCLEAR BOMB THIS YEAR, IF IT WANTED TO.
“Japan already has the technical capability [to build a nuclear bomb], and has had it since the 1980s,” said an official. He said that once Japan had more than five to 10 kilograms of plutonium, the amount needed for a single weapon, it had “already gone over the threshold,” and had a nuclear deterrent.
Japan now has 9 tons of plutonium stockpiled at several locations in Japan and another 35 tons stored in France and the U.K. The material is enough to create 5,000 nuclear bombs. The country also has 1.2 tons of enriched uranium."
In fact, many of Japan’s conservative politicians have long supported Japan’s nuclear power program because of its military potential. “The hawks love nuclear weapons, so they like the nuclear power program as the best they can do,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. “They don’t want to give up the idea they have, to use it as a deterrent.”
WHY STOCKPILE SO MUCH PLUTONIUM, AND WHY BE SO CARELESS WITH IT?
THEY DON'T NEED NEARLY THAT MUCH TO RUN THEIR REACTORS, ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN NUCLEAR AGENCY, WHICH ALSO HAS STATED THAT JAPAN NEEDS TO FIND AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE MORE DANGEROUS PLUTONIUM REACTORS.
.North Korea Says Japan Wants War in 2018 as Both Gather New, More Powerful Weapons
“The rhetoric about ‘threat from surrounding areas’ oft-repeated by Japan is little short of a prelude to a re-invasion aimed to paint their criminal nature of rushing headlong into turning the country into a military giant as ‘legitimate’ and openly come out for overseas expansion,” the commentary read.
In 1947, U.S.-occupied Japan drafted a constitution, vowing to “forever renounce war” and promising that any military with “war potential will never be maintained.”
SHINZO ABE HAS OTHER IDEAS, HE WANTS THE BOMB AND HAS INCREASED MILITARY SPENDING AND GREATLY EXPANDED JAPAN'S MILITARY CAPABILITY FOR SIX CONSECUTIVE YEARS NOW.
AN IMPRESSIVE AMOUNT OF RECENTLY DECLASSIFIED GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS PUBLISHED BY THE WILSON CENTER REVEAL HOW HARD JAPAN PUSHED TO PROCESS WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS DURING THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION AND THE LESS THAN HONEST MEANS USED TO GET AN OKAY FROM THE U.S. AND THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY.
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY DRIVE ANY NATION TO DECIDE TO CONTEND WITH SO MUCH NUCLEAR WASTE?
POWER...BUT NOT THE KIND WE GET BY FLIPPING A LIGHT SWITCH.
TERRORIST PLOTS FROM INSIDE JAPAN OFTEN GO UNREPORTED.
"For years Japan resisted taking steps that would have made it possible to share classified information with the United States about nuclear threats, partly out of concern that doing so might weaken public support for nuclear power, according to another U.S. diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks.
Yasuyoshi Komizo, a nonproliferation official in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a delegation from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2008 the government worried that “if, for example, the information sharing concerned potential insider threats, that could be interpreted as suggesting that some segment of the Japanese population was a problem,” the cable quoted him as saying.
Most alarming, however, was the long-term obsession of the Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult, with acquiring an atomic weapon. Followers of the cult’s guru, Shoko Asahara, traveled to Russia to buy them and recruit former Soviet weapons scientists. Investigators reported that the group was prepared to pay as much as $15 million for a warhead. In 1993, the group bought a sheep ranch in Australia, where 25 of Asahara’s followers tried to mine uranium to fuel a bomb.
“Japan simply didn’t consider terrorism a possibility here,” said former Prime Minister Naoto Kan.
He said this attitude was widely shared in industry and government, and as a result “Japan almost entirely ignored the advice” of the United States after 9/11.
“And you may ask whether Japan is prepared for such threats. Well, the answer is that it isn’t prepared for such attacks,” Kan said."
Japan Has Nuclear 'Bomb in the Basement,' and China Isn't Happy.
"Steve Fetter, formerly the Obama White House’s assistant director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, thinks China's concerns are not purely political.
"I've had private discussions with China in which they ask, 'Why does Japan have all this plutonium that they have no possible use for?'
For at least four or five years, said Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, the Japanese plutonium stockpile has been mentioned as a threat in Chinese defense white papers."
THE HAZARDS TO JAPAN'S PEOPLE (TO ANY "ATOMIC" NATION'S PEOPLE) FROM THE AMOUNT OF RADIATION FROM JUST ONE "NUCLEAR ACCIDENT", AS IS SHOWN BELOW, SHOULD DEMONSTRATE THE INSANITY OF USING 'NUCLEAR POWER', BUT, WITHOUT THE NEED FOR FUEL RODS, FOR ENRICHED URANIUM, THERE WOULD BE NO STRONGER ATOMIC POWER...NO BOMBS.
UNSECURED NUCLEAR BIOHAZARDS ALL OVER JAPAN.
The amount of radioactive water at Fukushima is still growing, by at least 150 tons a day.
The reactors are damaged beyond repair, but cooling water must be constantly pumped in to keep them from overheating. That water picks up radioactivity before leaking out of the damaged containment chambers and collecting in the basements.
There, the volume of contaminated water grows, because it mixes with groundwater that has seeped in through cracks in the reactor buildings.
[IN AN ARTICLE IN JAPAN TIMES, MARCH, 2018, WE READ THAT "850 NEW tanks had been built in the southwest part of the facility. They contain 1 million of the 1.1 million-ton total capacity, including 850,000 tons of so-called tritiated water."
Also in that article, we're told that "about 47 percent of 1,000 Tokyoites surveyed online by MRI in August indicated they haven’t received information about Fukushima’s reconstruction since the end of 2013."
The media blackout was supposed to have ended about conditions at Dai'ichi, but obviously has not ended in Japan.]
There is only room to keep storing radioactive water through 2020.
SO THEY WILL RELEASE IT ALL INTO THE PACIFIC, EITHER PUBLICLY,OR IN THE DARK OF NIGHT, LIKE THEY USED TO BURN DEBRIS AT NIGHT ONLY.
PROBABLY BY YEAR'S END THEY WILL HAVE DUMPED THE CONTENTS OF ALL THOSE RUSTY, LEAKING TANKS INTO THE PACIFIC
I'M ALWAYS A BIT FLABBERGASTED BY THE RESPONSE FROM MOST PEOPLE ON THE SUBJECT OF JAPAN'S ONGOING "SILENT BOMBING" OF THE ENTIRE PLANET.
JUST YESTERDAY, IN RESPONSE TO A QUESTION I HAD ABOUT JAPAN'S 'SECRET' TEST LABS, AN ACQUAINTANCE, WHOM I IMAGINED KNEW BETTER SCOFFED AND SAID, "If Japan wanted to develop nuclear weapons, they could do it very quickly and without fuss...hiding serious radiation problems would be like hiding the sun."
REALLY?
THEY SURE AS HELL HID A LOT OF SUN FOR A VERY LONG TIME.
A reading of 530 sieverts per hour of radiation near the entrance of just one hole under reactor #2 was incorrect, TOO LOW, with a margin of error of 30%, Tepco admitted, due to failure to remove the cover on their robotic device's gauge.
THIS WAS THE HIGHEST READING IN RECORDED HISTORY ANYWHERE ON EARTH.
CHERNOBYL'S PEAK READING OF 300-400 Sieverts per hour PALES IN COMPARISON.
As Reuters reported, "One sievert is enough to cause radiation sickness, infertility and cataracts.
Exposure to 10 sieverts will lead to a human’s death within weeks"
SO, HOW DO YOU HIDE THE SUN?
In a hole in the ground beneath a blown nuclear reactor?
In several holes in the ground near reactor sites?
OR...PUT YOUR HAND OVER YOUR OWN CLOSED EYES AND TELL YOURSELF THE SUN IS GONE?
JAPAN'S OLD RULING CLASS HAS TRIED DESPERATELY SINCE BEFORE THE END OF WW2 TO MAKE 'THE BOMB' AND HAS USED SOME FAIRLY FANCY FOOTWORK TO GET WHAT THEY WANT.
HOW MANY TIMES HAS TEPCO AND THE ABE REGIME BEEN CAUGHT IN LIES SINCE THE TSUNAMI AND THE FUKUSHIMA DISASTER?
DARE WE TRY TO COUNT THAT HIGH?
ABE WANTS THE BOMB, THE MAJORITY OF JAPANESE CITIZENS DO NOT.
ABE AND HIS CIRCLE OF COHORTS WANT ANOTHER CHANCE TO 'RULE THE WORLD'.
THEY WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO RETURN TO JAPAN'S "GLORY DAYS".
MEANWHILE, AS MORE RADIATION THAN 250 HIROSHIMA BOMBS IS RELEASED INTO WATER, SOIL AND AIR EACH DAY WHILE TEPCO AND ABE WHINE ABOUT THE IMPOSSIBILITY AT PRESENT TO STOP IT, AND THEIR NEED TO RELEASE EVEN MORE INTO THE PACIFIC, PEOPLE LIKE MY ACQUAINTANCE FRET OVER 'KRAZY KIMMIE'S' LAUNCH OF A SINGLE NUCLEAR DEVICE.
I CALL THAT ILLOGICAL.
FIVE LONG YEARS AGO, REUTERS REPORTED...
"Containing radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area.
Each fuel rod assembly weighs about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) and is 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. Spent fuel rods also contain plutonium, one of the most toxic substances in the universe, that gets formed during the later stages of a reactor core's operation. There are 1,331 of the spent fuel assemblies and a further 202 unused assemblies also stored in the pool, Nagai said.
"There is a risk of an inadvertent criticality if the bundles are distorted and get too close to each other. The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can't stop it. There are no control rods to control it,"
THERE ARE FOUR (KNOWN) REACTORS INVOLVED THERE, NOT JUST ONE.
DO THE MATH?
FROM PBS NEWS HOUR...
"More than 80 percent of the [INITIAL]radioactivity from the damaged reactors ended up in the Pacific — far more than reached the ocean from Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.
Of this, a small fraction is currently on the seafloor — the rest was swept up by the Kuroshio current, a western Pacific version of the Gulf Stream
This event is unprecedented in its total release of radioactive contamination into the ocean.
It is incorrect to say that Fukushima is under control when levels of radioactivity in the ocean indicate ongoing leaks, caused by groundwater flowing through the site and, we think, enhanced after storms."
HOW MUCH DAILY RADIATION IS 'LEAKED' BY DAI'ICHI?
IT WAS BAD 4 YEARS AGO, BUT WORSE TODAY.
DECEMBER 2014:
CANADIAN SCIENTISTS MONITORING BOTH AIR AND OCEAN RADIATION LEVELS FIND IT DOUBLED.
IN SOME AREAS IT IS "OFF THE CHARTS".
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 11, 2017
RADIOACTIVE WATER.
About 400 tons of water passes through the reactors every day, including groundwater that seeps in. The water picks up radiation in the reactors and then is diverted into a decontamination facility.But the decontamination filters cannot remove all the radioactive material. So for now, all this water is being stored in 1,000 gray, blue and white tanks on the grounds. The tanks already hold 962,000 tons of contaminated water, and Tokyo Electric is installing more tanks.
RADIOACTIVE GEAR.
6,000 cleanup workers at the site put on new protective gear every day. These hazmat suits, face masks, rubber gloves and shoe coverings are thrown out at the end of each shift. The clothing is compressed and stored in 1,000 steel boxes stacked around the site.
To date, more than 64,700 cubic meters of gear has been discarded, the equivalent of 17 million one-gallon containers. Tokyo Electric says it will eventually incinerate all this contaminated clothing to reduce the space needed to store it.
INCINERATION WILL SEND IT INTO THE ATMOSPHERE.
RADIOACTIVE TREE AND BRUSH CUTTINGS.
Workers have cleared about 220 acres of trees AT THE DAI'ICHI SITE since the meltdown spewed radiation over them.
Now, piles of branches and tree trunks are stacked all over the site. Officials say there are about 80,000 cubic meters of this waste, and all of it will have to be incinerated and stored someday.
INCINERATION WILL ALSO SEND THAT INTO THE ATMOSPHERE.
RADIOACTIVE RUBBLE.
Explosions during the meltdown filled the reactors with rubble. Workers and robots are slowly and carefully trying to remove this tangled mass of crushed concrete, pipes, hoses and metal.
Tokyo Electric estimates that more than 200,400 cubic meters of rubble — all of it radioactive — have been removed so far and stored in custom-made steel boxes. That is the equivalent of about 3,000 standard 40-foot shipping containers.
RADIOACTIVE SOIL.
Thousands of plastic garbage bags sit in neat rows in the fields and abandoned towns surrounding the Fukushima plant. They contain soil that was scraped from land that was exposed to radiation in the days after the accident.
Japan’s Ministry of the Environment estimates that it has bagged 3.5 BILLION gallons of soil, and plans to collect much more. It will eventually INCINERATE some of the soil, but that will only reduce the volume of the radioactive waste, not eliminate it.
The ministry has already begun building a massive, interim storage facility in Fukushima prefecture and negotiating with 2,360 landowners for the thousands of acres needed to complete it. And that is not even a long-term solution: The government says that after 30 years it will need another site — or sites — to store radioactive waste.
RADIOACTIVE SLUDGE.
The process of decontaminating the water leaves radioactive sludge trapped in filters, which are being held in thousands of containers of different sizes.
LETHAL FUEL RODS.
Six of the spent fuel rod pools were located at the top of six reactor buildings.
One “common pool” is at ground level in a separate building.
Each “reactor top” pool holds up to 3450 fuel rod assemblies.
The common pool holds up to 6291 fuel rod assemblies but 6,375 assemblies have been counted there. .
566 fuel assemblies were in place inside reactor #3.
1,573 fuel rod units, each consisting of dozens of fuel rods, in unit #4 .
Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods.
One of these fuel rods has the potential to kill 2.89 billion people.
This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods. The fuel rods once stored atop reactor 3 are no longer there: one of the several explosions at the Fukushima reactors damaged that pool.
A significant problem in tracking radioactive release was that 23 out of the 24 radiation monitoring stations on the plant site were disabled by the tsunami.
There is some uncertainty about the amount and exact sources of radioactive releases to air.
FROM THE UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS, FUKUSHIMA FACTS:
"It is important to note that spent fuel pools are not as isolated from the environment as the reactor core, because the pools are located outside the primary containment structure. So even if the total amount of radiation released by damaged fuel rods in a spent fuel pool is less than that released by similarly damaged fuel rods in the reactor core, the fraction of that radiation that escapes into the atmosphere from the spent fuel pools is likely to be much higher.
In early April, levels of radioactive iodine-131 and cesium-137 in seawater off the coast of Japan were reportedly measured at 5 million and 1 million times the legal limit, respectively.
U.S. plants have the same key vulnerability that led to the crisis in Japan. The basic problem is that the Japanese reactors lost both their normal and back-up power supplies, which are used to cool fuel rods and the reactor core."
-CHERNOBYL DID NOT HAVE A TRIPLE MELTDOWN.
-THE SINGLE CORIUM AT CHERNOBYL WAS FOUND.
-CHERNOBYL WASTE WATER WAS NOT DUMPED INTO THE SEA.
-CHERNOBYL DID NOT ENGAGE IN OPEN-AIR BURNING OF WASTE.
-CHERNOBYL HAD A 'PROTECTIVE' SARCOPHAGUS WITHIN LESS THAN A YEAR.
THIS WON'T WORK AT FUKUSHIMA AS IT SITS AT THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN AND DIRECTLY ABOVE A MAJOR AQUIFER.
-CHERNOBYL'S SITE WAS NOT THREATENED BY EARTHQUAKE, TSUNAMI, OR TYPHOON.
-CHERNOBYL DID NOT SEND RADIOACTIVE LEAKS INTO A MAJOR AQUIFER THAT SUPPLIED DRINKING WATER TO A LARGE CITY LIKE TOKYO.
FUKUSHIMA TOPS CHERNOBYL BY MILES.
JAPAN DOESN'T REALLY NEED NUCLEAR ENERGY TO SUSTAIN ITS ENERGY NEEDS, WHICH WAS PROVEN IN 2015.
"Japan in 2015 produced 1041 TWh of electricity, 409 TWh from natural gas, 343 TWh from coal, 103 TWh from oil, 91 TWh from hydro, 41 TWh from solar and wind, 41 TWh from biofuels and waste, and 9 TWh from nuclear. There were no imports or exports, and final consumption in 2015 was 957 TWh or about 7500 kWh per capita on average. Total installed capacity was about 324 GWe at the end of December 2015."
[SOURCE: Electricity data from International Energy Agency's Electricity Information 2017]
IN APRIL OF 2011, THE NEW YORK TIMES DID AN ARTICLE ON THE "CULTURE OF COMPLICITY TIED TO THE STRICKEN NUCLEAR PLANT".
"In 2000, Kei Sugaoka, a Japanese-American nuclear inspector who had done work for General Electric at Daiichi, told Japan’s main nuclear regulator about a cracked steam dryer that he believed was being concealed. If exposed, the revelations could have forced the operator, Tokyo Electric Power, to do what utilities least want to do: undertake costly repairs.
What happened next was an example, critics have since said, of the collusive ties that bind the nation’s nuclear power companies, regulators and politicians.
Despite a new law shielding whistle-blowers, the regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, divulged Mr. Sugaoka’s identity to Tokyo Electric, effectively blackballing him from the industry. Instead of immediately deploying its own investigators to Daiichi, the agency instructed the company to inspect its own reactors. Regulators allowed the company to keep operating its reactors for the next two years even though, an investigation ultimately revealed, its executives had actually hidden other, far more serious problems, including cracks in the shrouds that cover reactor cores.
Investigators may take months or years to decide to what extent safety problems or weak regulation contributed to the disaster at Daiichi, the worst of its kind since Chernobyl. But as troubles at the plant and fears over radiation continue to rattle the nation, the Japanese are increasingly raising the possibility that a culture of complicity made the plant especially vulnerable to the natural disaster that struck the country on March 11."
BOTTOM LINE? IN JAPAN, HERE IN AMERICA, EVERYWHERE, THERE IS INDEED A "CULTURE OF COMPLICITY" AS WHAT ARE SUPPOSED TO BE REGULATORY AGENCIES, 'PROTECTION' AGENCIES, ALL SIDE WITH 'BIG NUKE', WITH THE VERY ONES WHO PUT THE WORLD AT RISK WITH FAILING, LEAKING NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS, SIMPLY BECAUSE OF THE POLITICAL CLOUT, THE CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS, ETC, THAT THOSE GIANTS OF THE NUCLEAR ENERGY WORLD ARE ABLE TO PAY SO THEY CAN PAY WITH OUR VERY LIVES.
WE CAN CONTINUE TO ALLOW THIS OR WE CAN DEMAND BETTER SAFETY MEASURES, EVEN AN END TO THIS NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE, AT LAST.
ONLY THE VOICES OF MILLIONS, RAISED AS ONE VOICE, WILL SHAKE THE FOUNDATIONS OF COLLUSION AND COMPLICITY.
...
_____________________
Further reading and a few sources not cited above:
~ WORLD NUCLEAR ASSOCIATION, FUKUSHIMA.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx
~ 2018 UPDATE TO THE ABOVE WNA PAGE.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx
~ JUST FOLLOW ALL THE LINKS IN THIS POST.
http://havacuppahemlock1.blogspot.com/2014/07/fukushima-is-extinction-level-event.html
~ Dying robots and failing hope: Fukushima clean-up falters six years
~ MICHIO KAKU, FUKUSHIMA IS NOT OVER!
"The attempted cover up of the severity of the Fukushima disaster is nothing new. Governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for 50 years, and the basic design for nuclear reactors was not chosen for safety, but because it worked on Navy submarines ... and produced plutonium for the military."
~ The Fukushima Disaster Is Far From Over - Tokyo Review
~ Fairewinds Energy Education Special Reports
//WW
No comments:
Post a Comment