With every atomic reactor disaster comes the inevitable whitewash.
Its “Panic at Fukushima” speaks volumes to a nuclear power industry now crumbling at the core. It fits an historic pattern:
When yet another radioactive leak emits from the local nuke—no matter how serious—the official response is hard-wired to include the phrase “no danger to the public.”
When serious structural cracks surface at reactors like Ohio’s Davis-Besse or Crystal River, Florida, safety concerns are invariably dismissed with well-funded contempt.
As with fatally flawed steam generators at California’s San Onofre, if it can make an extra buck, the industry will run these reactors into the ground, safety-be-damned. Protected by federal taxpayer insurance and the bankruptcy laws, they know even a catastrophic disaster need not trouble their bottom line.
When earthquakes rattle reactors in Virginia and Ohio, or threaten others near New York City and Los Angeles, the public is “never in danger.” Likewise a generation of Japanese heard for decades that reactors at Fukushima and Kashiwazaki were “perfectly safe.”
But, now that earthquakes have hammered them both, we know who pays.
At Three Mile Island, there was “no melting of fuel” until, nine years later, robotic cameras showed there certainly was.
“Nobody died” at Three Mile Island until epidemiological evidence showed otherwise. (Disclosure: In 1980 I interviewed the dying and bereaved in central Pennsylvania, leading to the 1982 publication of
KILLING OUR OWN).
TMI was a “success story” for industry apologist Patrick Moore, whose accounting skills apparently include cheerily alchemizing a $2 billion liability from a $900 million asset.
Likewise, the Soviet Union said not to worry as Chernobyl spewed lethal radioactive clouds across Europe and into the jet stream that contaminated the entire northern hemisphere. One “scientist” said the fallout would “improve” human health in downwind Ukraine and Belarus, where stillbirths, malformations and birth defects still run rampant.
For Fukushima, the inevitable Murdoch whitewash comes from a one-time Koch-funded climate skeptic named Richard Muller. He says Fukushima has harmed virtually no one except the nuclear industry, which the Japanese people have all but shut.
Muller’s article occupies a parallel pro-nuclear universe. Virtually devoid of actual fact,
it is meticulously dissected by SimplyInfo in a brilliant primer on the health impacts of a truly apocalyptic nightmare that is far from over.
Entitled “The Truth vs. the Wall Street Journal,” SimplyInfo’s dissection is deja vu all over again. The once-prestigious Journal disgraces itself in vintage Murdoch style with some truly embarrassing errors and anachronisms. Simply and briefly:
1. The Journal astonishingly minimizes the death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki using speculative data that has been discredited for decades. It ignores the findings by Japanese scientists that Fukushima has (thus far) spewed nearly 30 times as much radioactive cesium as did the Bombings;
2. The Journal’s totally discredited averaging assumptions say Fukushima’s fallout will nicely administer uniform minimal doses for everyone.
But the fallout has gone global. Plutonium, cesium, strontium and other killer isotopes tend to come down in clumps and clusters, heavily dosing some while missing others. As at TMI, Chernobyl and now Fukushima, woe be to the unlucky masses who get rained on;
3. The averaging argument jumps off the rails with pregnant women, as well as small children, the elderly, the biologically sensitive. At TMI, the owners’ advertising compared the fallout to a single x-ray for everyone in the area. But a doubled childhood leukemia rate has long been linked to a single x-ray administered to a fetus in utero. Pregnant women exposed to these small doses must brace for the worst.
4. The Journal admits that Fukushima was not designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and 50-foot tidal wave. The quake’s epi-center was more than 100 miles offshore, but all three Fukushima reactors operating at the time melted and exploded. Diablo Canyon, San Onofre, Indian Point are no safer. Nearby fault lines could reduce them and others to rubble, followed by emissions whose death toll would be virtually impossible to calculate.
5. The Journal has published a heavily edited rebuttal (the full original is at
http://www.nirs.org/fukushima/crisis.htm) from Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service pointing out that sea-ward winds saved Japan—including Tokyo—from suffering far heavier doses.
Fukushima erupted 66 years after Hiroshima/Nagasaki, 32 since Three Mile Island, 25 after Chernobyl. The atomic industry seems defined by a reverse learning curve.
Perhaps it could heed Jeffrey Immelt, president of General Electric, who warns that nuclear power has no economic future. GE’s brand is all over Fukushima. Small wonder Immelt wants to join Siemens et. al. in a green-powered Solartopian future, built on renewable technologies like wind, solar and bio-fuels.
No verbal contortions can ever cleanse what Forbes Magazine long ago branded “the largest managerial disaster in American history.” No error-filled whitewash will ever convince our bodies that radiation is good for us.
While Rupert Murdoch helps paint a happy face on a dying industry, we continue to pay with our money and our lives.
As of September 2012, most Japanese people support the zero option on nuclear power, and Prime Minister Noda and the Japanese government announced a dramatic change of direction in energy policy, promising to make the country nuclear-free by the 2030s. There will be no new construction of nuclear power plants, a 40-year lifetime limit on existing nuclear plants, and any further nuclear plant restarts will need to meet tough safety standards of the new independent regulatory authority. The new approach to meeting energy needs will also involve investing $500 billion over 20 years to commercialize the use of renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar power.[
Fukushima's Forgotten 50 Oct 14 2012
IT HAS taken the Japanese government more than 18 months to pay tribute to a group of brave men, once known as the “Fukushima 50”, who risked their lives to prevent meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant from spiralling out of control. But when the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, belatedly offered official thanks to them on October 7th something strange was afoot: six of the eight men he addressed had their backs to the television cameras, refused to be photographed and did not introduce themselves by name, not even to Mr Noda (see the image below).
The reason: officials from the government and from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) quietly admitted that the men wanted to keep their identities secret because they were scared of stigmatisation for being involved in the disaster, such as might lead to the bullying of their children and grandchildren. But Tepco is also muzzling them, presumably for fear that what they say will further discredit the now nationalised company. When I asked if I could at least hand my business card to them to see if they wanted to tell their side of the story, an irate Tepco spokesman answered bluntly: “Impossible.”
There are numerous ways that this incident reflects badly on both Tepco’s and the government’s handling of the situation. Firstly, there is the contrast between the frontline worker’s behaviour and the brazen hypocrisy of Tepco’s management after the accident. I remember Tepco’s then-chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata (now thankfully retired), nonchalantly blaming everyone but himself when giving testimony to a Diet commission earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the men who worked loyally for him, risking their lives on behalf of his company, still hide their heads in shame.
The government, for its part, has done these men a huge disservice by not acting more quickly to differentiate their heroism from the craven self-interest of the company’s bosses. In the eyes of the public there ought to be no confusion between the two. In Chile, it was easy to see how the country made heroes of the 33 trapped mine workers in 2010, while making villains of their bosses. Nothing like that has happened in Japan. As one government official noted, if this were America, the “Fukushima 50” would have been invited to the Rose Garden for presidential recognition.
An English-language paper, the Japan Times, today at least tells part of their harrowing story, though it doesn’t mention the refusal of all but two of them to be identified. They did not depict themselves as heroes, as they recounted their experiences to Mr Noda. They mostly sounded plain scared. One said he thought “it was all over” after the tsunami of March 11th, 2011 knocked out all the power. Another told of how he sent his staff out into the dark, where they faced the danger of electrocution, to restore the power to a nuclear reactor on the verge of melting down. He was asked by his men whether he thought they would come back alive. They went on regardless.
But the headlines, ultimately, refer back to Mr Noda, not to the Fukushima 50. He gets more of the credit than they do, despite his wooden acknowledgement to the men, that “Thanks to your dedication, we have managed to preserve Japan.” This is one of the tragic flaws of modern Japan. The media attention is always focused on those in power, who typically do nothing to merit the recognition. The multitudes on the frontline, who put their heads down and do all the hard work are treated as faceless, nameless and ultimately forgotten.
FUKUSHIMA--Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda visited Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant Sunday to see the site of the country's worst nuclear crisis first-hand and offer gratitude to workers.
Having secured his second term as head of the Democratic Party of Japan last month, and reshuffling his Cabinet last Monday, Noda is poised to reveal his stance of tackling the Fukushima nuclear crisis as his administration's No. 1 task, sources said.
Before arriving at the nuclear plant, Noda visited J-Village, a J.League national training center in the town of Naraha in the prefecture that now serves as the base for nuclear crisis-related work.
"Please accept my words of gratitude as a member of this nation for your having worked so hard in such an appalling, severe environment."
After expressing thanks to the workers, Noda entered the nuclear plant, inspecting the fifth floor of the No. 4 reactor building, where the main problem is retrieving spent nuclear fuel from the fuel pool.
Noda also inspected the central control rooms for the Nos. 1 and 2 reactors.
In the afternoon, Noda made an on-site inspection of radiation cleanup operations and a temporary storage site for contaminated soil in Naraha. He then visited a rice- inspection facility in Motomiya in the prefecture.
(Oct. 8, 2012)
Same Type of Reactor Used in U.S.A
The
NRC database of nuclear power plants shows that 23 of the 104 nuclear plants in the U.S. are GE boiling-water reactors with GE's Mark I systems for containing radioactivity, the same containment system used by the reactors in trouble at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. The U.S. reactors are in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont.
In addition, 12 reactors in the U.S. have the later Mark II or Mark III containment system from GE. These 12 are in Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington state.
The six reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, which had explosions ... are all GE-designed boiling-water reactors, known in the industry as BWRs. Five have containment systems of GE's Mark I design, and the sixth is of the Mark II type. They were placed in operation between 1971 and 1979.
Nuclear Mishap or Meltdown?: It's All a Matter of Degree
In all, there were 10 incidents at U.S. nuclear
plants last year [2011 MM] that merited ratings of 2—"significant spread of contamination / overexposure of a worker" and "incidents with significant failures in safety provisions," as the INES handbook puts it—or above, Jones says. "Two reactor events and eight nonreactor events."
Among the eight nonreactor events was a spill at the Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., fuel production plant in Erwin, Tenn., in March 2006. More than eight gallons (31 liters) of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranyl nitrate, the liquid form of transportable uranium, nearly pooled in a sufficient quantity to achieve the conditions necessary for a spontaneous chain reaction—uncontrolled fission, otherwise known as a criticality.
Radioactive Fuel Fires: Not Just a Japanese Problem
If the water drains out for any reason, it will cause a fire in the fuel rods, as the zirconium metal jacket on the outside of the fuel rods could very well catch fire within hours or days after being exposed to air. See
this,
this,
this and
this. (Even a large solar flare could
knock out the water-circulation systems for the pools.)
The pools are also
filling up fast, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:
Even though they contain some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, U.S. spent nuclear fuel pools are mostly contained in ordinary industrial structures designed to merely protect them against the elements. Some are made from materials commonly used to house big-box stores and car dealerships.
***
All spent fuel pools at nuclear power plants do not have steel-lined, concrete barriers that cover reactor vessels to prevent the escape of radioactivity. They are not required to have back-up generators to keep used fuel rods cool, if offsite power is lost.
***
For nearly 30 years, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) waste-storage requirements have remained contingent on the opening of a permanent waste repository that has yet to materialize. Now that the Obama administration has cancelled plans to build a permanent, deep disposal site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, spent fuel at the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors will continue to accumulate and are likely remain onsite for decades to come.
The U.S. government should promptly take steps to reduce these risks by placing all spent nuclear fuel older than five years in dry, hardened storage casks — something Germany did 25 years ago. It would take about 10 years at a cost between $3.5 and $7 billion to accomplish. If the cost were transferred to energy consumers, the expenditure would result in a marginal increase of less than 0.4 cents per kilowatt hour for consumers of nuclear-generated electricity.
Another payment option is available for securing spent nuclear fuel. Money could be allocated from $18.1 billion in unexpended funds already collected from consumers of nuclear-generated electricity under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to establish a disposal site for high-level radioactive wastes.
Short of closing plants, there is a fairly reliable solution to the problem of spent fuel rods. It is called “dry cask storage.”
***
But there is a problem with dry cask storage: it costs money….
Video: 51 min.
Video Transcript available.
With more radioactive Cesium in the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant's spent fuel pool than was released by Fukushima, Chernobyl, and all nuclear bomb testing combined. Gundersen and Lockbaum ask why there is not a single procedure in place to deal with a crisis in the fuel pool?
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/more-than-a-dozen-nuclear-plants-near-hurricane-sandys-path-brace-for-impact.html
