Tokyo Starts Burning Radioactive Waste from Other Areas …
Tokyo Governor Tells Residents to “Shut Up” and Stop Complaining.
The FALLOUT from this radioactivity ends up not only in neighboring prefectures, but in all of Japan's neighbor nations as well as Hawaii, British Columbia, Oregon, Washington and California.
RISING INTO OUR ATMOSPHERE, THAT RADIATION WILL BE WITH US FOR A LONG, LONG TIME, FALLING BACK TO EARTH IN PRECIPITATION.
JAPAN GENERATES MUCH MORE NUCLEAR WASTE AND RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL THAN IT CAN EVER SAFELY DISPOSE OF.
THE ONLY RATIONAL ANSWER TO THIS PROBLEM IS TO STOP USING NUCLEAR ENERGY.
ACCORDING TO THE MAP ABOVE, THE ABE REGIME WOULD MAKE ALL OF JAPAN A SMOLDERING DUMPING GROUND.
THEY KNOW IT'S EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS TO HEALTH SO THEY JUST RAISED THE "ACCEPTABLE LIMIT".
ABOVE: PROTESTS GROW ACROSS JAPAN.
WHY ISN'T THE ENTIRE GLOBAL COMMUNITY PROTESTING?
Residents in Osaki, Miyagi Prefecture, filed a lawsuit Thursday (OCTOBER 11, 2018) seeking to prevent a local public association from burning radiation-tainted waste generated by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis.
Osaki, located about 120 kilometers north of the city of Fukushima, has been keeping some 6,000 tons of tainted grass and rice straw containing radioactive substances in excess of state standards, and the association in charge of waste disposal is scheduled to start burning it from Monday.
The residents filed the suit with the Sendai District Court in the hope of suspending the ¥21.6 million budget for the incineration, claiming the association failed to keep an agreement that it would alleviate residents’ concerns.
“The agreement was a strong message that we would protect the environment for future generations,” said 79-year-old Tadaetsu Abe, who is leading the plaintiffs. “The public administration has ignored the residents’ wishes.”
The waste stored in Osaki contains radioactive substances of up to 8,000 becquerels per kilogram. Each municipality is responsible for radioactive waste disposal.
Some 170 residents opposed to the incineration requested an audit of the city’s budget on the waste disposal, but it was rejected as of Sept. 13.
BACK IN JULY OF 2017, THE ABE REGIME RELEASED A COLOR-CODED MAP [PICTURED ABOVE] OF POTENTIAL STORAGE AREAS FOR THEIR EVER-INCREASING NUCLEAR WASTE.
RESIDENTS ALL ACROSS JAPAN ROSE UP IN PROTEST.
WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE THE ABE REGIME LISTEN TO ITS OWN PEOPLE AND START PUTTING THEIR HEALTH BEFORE PROFITS AND THE 2020 OLYMPIC GAMES?
On July 28, the central government released what it called a scientific, specialized map of the country highlighting areas where highly radioactive nuclear waste from the nation’s power plants might, or might not, be safely buried underground for as long as 100,000 years.
The general response from Hokkaido to Okinawa was: “Not in my backyard.”
MAKING AN ENTIRE NATION A NUCLEAR WASTE DUMPING SITE
Close to 900 municipalities, nearly 70 percent of the country, were judged to be favorable.
The map has four colors. Dark green indicates favorable conditions, mostly concentrated within 20 km along the coast, and easily accessible in terms of transportation. Light green areas are generally favorable, but more than 20 km from the coast. Orange marks locations that would pose geological problems and silver highlights the potential existence of mineral resources.
In 2015, the Science Council of Japan, a national body that represents scientists and operates independently of the government, released a series of recommendations that called for storing the waste in provisional, above-ground facilities for a half century.
According to the plan, during the first 30 years of temporary storage, locations for a final disposal site would be identified and selected, and during the last 20 years, those facilities would be built.
That still requires a local government to accept a midterm facility, and none has yet. Also, such a course of action would only postpone the final site issue, putting it on the next generation to solve the predicament.
Now that the map has been published, what happens next?
The central government will begin to narrow the list of possible host sites. Much will depend on the strength of local opposition, and how much time, money and effort those who favor a particular locale becoming a final waste disposal site wish to spend on overcoming the local opposition.
"HOW MUCH TO SPEND OVERCOMING THE OPPOSITION"?
WHY NOT SPEND NOTHING AND FIND A BETTER WAY, LIKE MAYBE ENDING ALL NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS IN JAPAN?
AFTER ALL THE MAJORITY OF JAPANESE DON'T WANT 'NUCLEAR ENERGY' AND PREFER OTHER SANER MEANS FOR POWER.
Fuji TV news also says that 3,000 complaints have been sent to the Tokyo Metropolitan government, over 90% of them protesting against the debris from disaster-affected areas to be transported, processed, crushed and burned and buried in Tokyo Bay.
Steven Starr – Senior Scientist, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who has advised numerous countries on issues of nuclear non-proliferation – wrote a comment to the post agreeing [that burning releases toxic poisons]:
Burning radioactive debris will only serve to further randomly spread radiation across Japan, as well as the rest of the world. Not only will this lead to more morbidity and mortality within Japan, but it will further complicate epidemiological studies of the Fukushima disaster. Raising “acceptable” levels of radioactive fallout is a false solution to a serious problem. It is possible for the government authorities to do this because radiation is invisible to us, and at lower doses, the consequences of exposure do not manifest themselves for some time . . . thus it is a poison that is easy to hide and ignore. Sadly, the children of Japan will be those most seriously affected by this man-made environmental catastrophe.
All independent nuclear health experts would agree with Starr.
Japan is a very homogenous society where peer pressure to conform can be intense. For example, last month it was reported that mothers who expressed concern about their kids playing outside in potentially radioactive conditions are called “monster parents” by their peers.
ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE FUKUSHIMA DISASTER LAST YEAR, THE NEW YORK TIMES WROTE:
Six years after the largest nuclear disaster in a quarter-century, Japanese officials have still not solved a basic problem: what to do with an ever-growing pile of radioactive waste. Each form of waste at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, where three reactors melted down after an earthquake and a tsunami on March 11, 2011, presents its own challenges.
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.
“We cannot continue to build tanks forever,” said Shigenori Hata, an official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
THEN STOP USING NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS?
PROBLEM CLOSER TO BEING SOLVED IF THEY STOP NOW.
ALMOST 4,000 CONTAINERS OF 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.Tokyo Electric says it cannot quantify the amount of radioactive sludge being generated.
CONTAMINATED PROTECTIVE CLOTHING ALONE GENERATES WASTE THAT MUST BE INCINERATED, ACCORDING TO THE ABE REGIME AND TEPCO.
The estimated 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.
RADIOACTIVE BRUSH, TREES, SOIL AND GRASSESPiles 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.
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.
THERE IS MUCH MORE THAN THIS ALL ACROSS THE AREAS HIT BY THE INITIAL FALLOUT. MOST IS BEING STORED IN DECOMPOSING PLASTIC BAGS, SOME OF WHICH ARE STACKED IN SCHOOL YARDS, ALONG ROADWAYS, IN CITY PARKS AND WHAT USED TO BE APARTMENT PARKING LOTS.
Japan's Latest Nuclear Crisis: Getting Rid of the Radioactive Debris
FROM 'THE ATLANTIC', Jun 4, 2012
Disposing of the more than 20 million tons of rubble caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami is proving to be a difficult problem for Japan, not least because much of the rubble has been irradiated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The government's plan -- to destroy 4 million tons of potentially radioactive earthquake debris in garbage incinerators around the country -- is dividing the nation.
Last week, trucks carrying earthquake debris from northeastern Japan arrived in the south-western island of Kyushu, as part of the national government's plan to disperse and destroy debris. Protestors blocked the road for 8 hours over fears that incinerating the debris would spread radiation to areas that have not yet been contaminated by the nuclear disaster.
The debris that was burned in Kita Kyushu on Thursday had been trucked over 620 miles from Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, which lies about 70 miles from the stricken nuclear reactors in Fukushima.
While debris from Fukushima will not be incinerated in the program [TEPCO WAS BUSTED BURNING THE FUKUSHIMA WASTE ON BARGES OFFSHORE, REMEMBER?], due to high radiation levels, municipalities and citizen groups are worried that even debris from neighboring Miyagi and Iwate prefectures could be contaminated enough to be too hazardous to process. Many fear that doing so will not only release radiation into the local atmosphere, but also concentrate it into highly irradiated ash that would be difficult for local municipalities and garbage companies to dispose of safely.
THEY KNOW IT'S EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS TO HEALTH SO THEY JUST RAISED THE "ACCEPTABLE LIMIT"!
Previously, Japanese regulations required nuclear waste with 100 or more bq/kg of Cesium to be monitored and disposed of in specialized containers.
But the new limit for debris in the "wide area incineration" program is 240 to 480 bq/kg. Because radioactive particles accumulate and concentrate in the ash of burned rubble, the material headed for local landfills could be significantly more radioactive.
The new government limit for material headed for landfills is 8000 bq/kg, 80 times the pre-Fukushima limit.
YES, 80 TIMES THE PREVIOUS LEVEL!
BUT SOME BURN SITES HAVE EXCEEDED EVEN THE NEW ALLOWABLE LIMITS.
The limit of 8000 bq/kg has been surpassed even in facilities processing local garbage in Tokyo, according to the Ministry of the Environment.
Such stories have exacerbated fears that incinerating debris from areas even closer to Fukushima could produce potentially hazardous irradiated ash.
It's still not clear why the Japanese government has decided against a policy of containing, rather than dispersing, the radioactive debris.
CONTAINMENT?
HOW DOES ONE "CONTAIN" SOMETHING THAT KEEPS SENDING OUT RADIATION?
Lethal levels of radiation was detected spiking in one of the reactors in January, 2017.
TEPCO AND THE ABE BOYS HAVE CONTAINED NOTHING, NOT EVEN THEIR GREED FOR PROFITS AND STILL HOLDING ONTO THOSE 2020 OLYMPIC GAMES DESPITE KNOWING ALL WHO VISIT JAPAN WILL GO AWAY AS CONTAMINATED AS THOSE STILL LIVING THERE.
Containment would also mean solidifying the already-worrisome invisible border between "contaminated" and "un-contaminated" areas, with the former unfairly stigmatized. This subjective differentiation, called "rumor damage" in Japanese, currently affects everything from land prices to the value of local produce, and has already dealt a crippling blow to the Tohoku economy. Maybe that's part of the "wide area incineration" motivation: rather than dooming an entire region to long-term "contaminated" status, it makes every region in Japan share the burden of the radiation taboo.
If everyone is "contaminated," then, in a relative sense, no one is.
IF EVERYONE IS CONTAMINATED?
WE ALREADY ARE!
//WW
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