Author Archive

MAY 19, 2011

Biologist estimates 900,000 deaths

By Geoff Olson
Vancouver Courier

What a beginning to 2011. For the past few month’s it’s been a stomach-churning roller coaster of victory and defeat, with a detour through Malcolm Gladwell’s Funhouse of Tipping Points. It began with the pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which emboldened other Arab states to try out dictator whack-a-mole. In contrast, 40 per cent of Canadians optimistically chose to reelect a secretive leader charged with contempt of Parliament.

For comic relief, we had Charlie Sheen’s camera-friendly meltdown, bundled with his "Torpedo of Truth" tour. Osama bin Laden, cornered, killed, and given a counterintuitive burial at sea, supplied some couch-potato catharsis south of the border. The Royal Wedding enchanted some of Her Majesty’s subjects in the North. Locally, we had Christy Clark’s byelection bonding with the people of Point Grey, consummated by her close-lipped campaign.

Yet the biggest story of all, which has all but spiralled down the media memory hole, is the ongoing disaster in Japan following the March 11 tsunami. The Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) are attempting desperate, finger-in-the-dike measures in the irradiated zone of Fukushima prefecture, after upgrading the crisis to a Chernobyl-level 7. This week, TEPCO admitted that reactor 1 experienced a meltdown within hours of the quake, and reactors 2 and 3 have likely melted down as well. Building number 4 threatens to collapse. Radioactive material is leaking into the Pacific, into the atmosphere and into Japan’s groundwater.

On top of this, there is the issue of the damaged cooling ponds with their spent nuclear fuel rods. In videos of the March 14 explosion at reactor 3, an immense amount of solid material is seen rising with the plume and falling to Earth. Fuel may have been ejected from the pool up to one mile from the plant, according to a leaked NRC report. The fuel rods were likely launched into the air out of their containment vessels "like the muzzle from a gun," believes Arnold Gundersen, a chief nuclear engineer with the energy consulting firm Fairwinds Associates. This would account for TEPCO’s discovery of plutonium in soil samples taken from outside the plant.

Plutonium is very nasty stuff. You may remember the protests leading up to the 1997 NASA launch of a probe containing 72.3 pounds of the lethal element. An accident would have been catastrophic, scientists argued. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku estimated up to 200,000 deaths from an accident. Other scientists predicted up to 40 million deaths in the event of a dispersal of plutonium from the Cassini probe in an Earth "flyby" accident. We’re talking about only 72 pounds of the material.

With the explosion of reactor 3, radioactive elements were "aerosolized" into a fine mist that can make its way across the Pacific, says Gundersen. Scientists have detected trace amounts of radioactive iodine, believed to be from Fukushima, as far away as Glasgow and Pennsylvania. So how much plutonium, the most toxic element of all, was in the Fukushima spent fuel? With an estimated 600,000 fuel rods in the entire complex, and six per cent of the fuel rods from reactor 3 containing a mix of uranium and plutonium, it’s certainly much more than that of the infamous Cassini probe. Who to believe? The estimates of nuclear health risks and fatalities are all over the map. In a recent debate on Democracy Now, Guardian columnist George Monbiot repeated the UN figures of 43 deaths in total from the Chernobyl disaster. Antinuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott responded with Russian biologists’ calculations of 900,000 deaths, with more to come due to the decades-plus half-life of nuclear isotopes, and the incubation period for cancers and other diseases. (A 2007 BBC documentary on Chernobyl quotes Russian military sources that of 500,000 emergency workers in the Chernobyl area, 20,000 have already died, and 200,000 are officially disabled. This doesn’t include other civilian numbers.)

I have to wonder, as the media flits from marrying royals to manic sitcom stars, why there isn’t more focus on what appears to be the worst ecological disaster in human history. The atmosphere doesn’t heed lines on a map, so how dangerous is the invisible threat issuing from Fukushima to the planet’s population? And how can Obama continue to endorse the much-hyped "nuclear renaissance" for atomic energy production in the U.S., with this nightmare-in-progress?

Has the unthinkable truly happened, and is there a global, institutional inability to address it properly?

www.geoffolson.com
© Copyright (c) Vancouver Courier

May 18, 2011

By MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Five years before the crucial emergency vents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were disabled by an accident they were supposed to help handle, engineers at a reactor in Minnesota warned American regulators about that very problem.

One of the two engineers, Anthony Sarrack, notified staff members at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the design of venting systems at his reactor and others in the United States, similar to the ones in Japan, was seriously flawed. He later left the industry in frustration because managers and regulators did not agree.

Mr. Sarrack said that the vents, which are supposed to relieve pressure at crippled plants and keep containment structures intact, should not be dependent on electric power and workers’ ability to operate critical valves because power might be cut in an emergency and workers might be incapacitated. Part of the reason the venting system in Japan failed — allowing disastrous hydrogen explosions — is that power to the plant was knocked out by a tsunami that followed a major earthquake.

Mr. Sarrack’s memo was found in the archives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by David Lochbaum, a boiling-water-reactor expert who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., that is generally hostile to nuclear power.

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot claim ignorance about this one," he said.

Plant managers and nuclear regulators are warned about far more problems each year than actually occur, but in this case, the cautionary note was eerily prescient and could rekindle debate over whether automatic venting systems are safer alternatives.

While staff members at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considered Mr. Sarrack’s suggestion, they decided against it.

On Wednesday, a commission spokesman, Scott Burnell, said the commission still believed that existing venting systems were a "reasonable and appropriate means" of dealing with a rise in pressure after an accident. But he has also said that the commission’s staff members are studying the events at Fukushima for "lessons learned," and that they had identified means of "reducing risk even further" by making the vents "more passive." He said the staff had not yet chosen a way to do that.

Read more at the New York Times website…

May 17, 2011

By HIROKO TABUCHI, KEITH BRADSHER and MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times

TOKYO — Emergency vents that American officials have said would prevent devastating hydrogen explosions at nuclear plants in the United States were put to the test in Japan — and failed to work, according to experts and officials with the company that operates the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The failure of the vents calls into question the safety of similar nuclear power plants in the United States and Japan. After the venting failed at the Fukushima plant, the hydrogen gas fueled explosions that spewed radioactive materials into the atmosphere, reaching levels about 10 percent of estimated emissions at Chernobyl, according to Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency.

Venting was critical to relieving pressure that was building up inside several reactors after the March 11 tsunami knocked out the plant’s crucial cooling systems. Without flowing water to cool the reactors’ cores, they had begun to dangerously overheat.

American officials had said early on that reactors in the United States would be safe from such disasters because they were equipped with new, stronger venting systems. But Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, now says that Fukushima Daiichi had installed the same vents years ago.

Read more at the New York Times website…

22 April 2011

Mike Head
Aliran Monthly

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is the conglomerate at the centre of Japan’s nuclear radiation emergency at Fukushima. Its operations over the past several decades epitomise the government-backed pursuit of corporate profit, at the direct expense of lives, health and safety.

Tepco is the fourth largest power company in the world, and the biggest in Asia, operating 17 nuclear reactors and supplying one-third of Japan’s electricity. It has a long, documented history of serious safety breaches, systemic cover-ups of potentially fatal disasters, persecution of whistle-blowers, suppression of popular opposition and use of its economic and advertising clout to silence criticism.

Among the company’s record of more than 200 proven falsifications of safety inspection reports are several relating to the stricken Fukushima Daiichi facility itself. In 2002, Tepco admitted to falsifying reports about cracks that had been detected in core shrouds at reactors number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, as far back as 1993.

The current crisis at Fukushima, caused by last Friday’s magnitude 9 earthquake, is not the company’s first quake-related breakdown. In 2007, a much smaller 6.8-magnitude tremor caused a fire and radiation leaks that shut down Tepco’s seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest. The company later admitted that the plant had not been built to withstand such shocks.

Tepco’s record is a case study in the complicity of successive Japanese governments and regulatory agencies over the past 40 years in the safety failures of nuclear power companies. With the backing of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which ruled Japan virtually continuously from 1955, when it was formed, to 2009, the business elite aggressively pursued the construction of more than 50 nuclear plants over the objections of residents and environmentalists, in order to secure the energy needs of Japanese capitalism, despite the patent dangers of doing so in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone zones.

The known nuclear cover-ups—undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg—began to emerge in 1995. In that year, an official falsification of the extent of a sodium leak and fire at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s Monju fast-breeder reactor caused public outrage. It was revealed that Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), the agency then in charge of Monju, had altered reports, edited a videotape taken immediately after the accident, and issued a gag order to employees. After a long series of court battles, the government allowed the reactor to restart last year.

In 1999, one of Japan’s worst nuclear accidents occurred at the Tokaimura uranium processing plant, 120 kilometres north of Tokyo. An uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction at the plant, operated by JCO, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining, killed two employees and leaked radioactivity over the countryside. Fifty-five workers were exposed to radiation and 300,000 people ordered to stay indoors, after the circumvention of safety standards caused a leak. Government officials later said safety equipment at the plant had been missing.

Three years later, Tepco was exposed as falsifying safety data, including at the ageing Fukushima Daiichi facility. Initially, the company admitted 29 cases of falsification. Eventually, however, it admitted to 200 occasions, over more than two decades between 1977 and 2002, involving the submission of false technical data to authorities. According to the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), Tepco had attempted to hide cracks in reactor vessel shrouds in 13 units, including Fukushima Daiichi (6 reactors), Fukushima Daini (4 reactors), and Kashiwazaki-Kariwa (7 reactors).

Tepco’s wrongdoings were only revealed as a result of whistle-blowing by a former engineer at General Electric (GE), a company with close connections to Tepco. GE built the plants and has been contracted by TEPCO to carry out inspection and operational matters for decades. Two years earlier, the engineer had reported the safety frauds to the relevant ministry, MITI, the forerunner of the current Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), only to have the government supply his name to Tepco and conspire with the company to bury the information.

Hitachi, which conducted the air tightness checks for Tepco, was also implicated in the manipulation of test results. On two occasions, the pressure readings in Fukushima’s No 1 reactor were unstable, so workers were instructed to inject air into the container to make it appear that pressure was being maintained.

Nevertheless, relying on Tepco’s own calculations, NISA maintained that there should be no problem regarding the safety of the plants. The agency inspects nuclear plants only every 13 months, and leaves the inspection of the shrouds and pumps around the reactor cores to each company.

The LDP government feigned concern at these blatant safety breaches, with Seiji Murat, Vice Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry, declaring the company had "betrayed the public’s trust over nuclear energy". Tepco’s senior executives duly resigned, and their successors formally pledged to take all necessary measures to prevent any further fraud. By the end of 2005, generation had been restarted at all suspended plants, with government approval.

A little over a year later, in March 2007, the company announced that an internal investigation had revealed a large number of unreported incidents. These included an unexpected unit criticality in 1978 and additional systematic false reporting, which had not been uncovered in 2002. Once more, the firm was publicly remorseful. "We apologise from the bottom of our heart for causing anxiety to the public and local residents," Tepco vice-president Katsutoshi Chikudate said. The company was permitted to keep operating.

Several months later, in July 2007, the 6.8 quake that shut down Tepco’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant demonstrated the real nature of the company’s assurances. The earthquake, 10 kilometres offshore from the Honshu west coast plant, caused subsidence of the main structure, ruptured water pipes, started a fire that took five hours to extinguish, and triggered radioactive discharges into the atmosphere and sea. The company initially said there was no release of radiation, but admitted later that the quake had released radiation and had spilled radioactive water into the Sea of Japan. Seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi warned that had the epicentre been 10 kilometres to the southwest and at magnitude 7, Kashiwazaki City would have experienced a major emergency.

Amid a public outcry, the government again put on a display of anger. According to media reports, a senior Japanese government official hauled Tepco’s president into his office "for a rare and humiliating verbal caning". The official was "furious" because Tepco management had "initially misled his officials—and not for the first time, either—about the extent of breakdowns at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa".

The 2007 closure of Tepco’s largest nuclear plant contributed to the company posting its first ever losses over the past two years. It is now the world’s most indebted utility, with current net borrowings of $88 billion. This financial crisis has driven management to slash costs and boost output from its other plants, no doubt also at the expense of safety. Tepco’s "2020 Vision" document pledges to "accelerate cost reduction efforts" and raise the non-fossil fuel (mainly nuclear) proportion of its generation from 33 to 50 percent.

The current meltdown and radiation emergency at Fukushima is the inevitable product of the protracted record of Tepco-government collaboration, which is being continued by the present Democratic Party of Japan administration. Prime Minister Naoto Kan, like his LDP predecessors, has publicly professed outrage at Tepco’s repeated cover-ups in this latest—and by far the most serious—disaster. Reuters reported: "Japan’s prime minister was furious with executives at a power company at the centre of the nuclear crisis for taking so long to inform his office about a blast at its stricken reactor complex, demanding ‘what the hell is going on?’.

Kan’s "fury" is purely for public consumption. In recent months, the Kan government has stepped up a campaign to help Japanese power companies, led by Tepco, to win contracts to build nuclear reactors overseas. As part of that push, METI, the parent ministry of the nuclear safety agency NISA, has boasted that Japan maintains a "healthy regulatory environment". Last August, Tepco chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, together with other Japanese power company executives, was part of a delegation, headed by then METI minister, Masayuki Naoshima, which signed deals to build two nuclear reactors in Vietnam.

With the government’s backing, Tepco also remains closely interlocked with other giant Japanese companies. Just weeks ago, on February 23, Tepco and Mitsubishi Corporation formed a partnership to take over the management of Electricity Generating Public Company Limited (EGCO), one of the largest power companies in Thailand.

The company’s recent expansion extends to the US. In May 2010, Tepco announced an agreement for the planned enlargement of the South Texas Project nuclear plant, in partnership with Nuclear Innovation North America LLC (NINA), a nuclear development company jointly owned by NRG Energy, Inc. and Toshiba.

Within Japan, Tepco is planning to open six new nuclear reactors, including units 7 and 8 of the Fukushima Daiichi plant (in 2014 and 2015), and units 1 and 2 of the Higashidori plant, facing the Pacific Ocean in northern Japan (in 2015 and 2018). Last month, residents protested as the company commenced construction, in the dark of night, on two nuclear plants at Iwai Island, in the Inland Sea south of Honshu, Japan’s main island, and close to Kyushu island, where a volcano burst this week.

Scenes of the Iwai Island protest were broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7.30 television program on 15 March. The footage was recorded by documentary film-maker Hitomi Kamanaka, who resigned from the state broadcaster NHK after it refused to run her material criticising the country’s nuclear power companies.

Tepco has been shielded by governments and the media for decades because, as the World Socialist Web Site has pointed out ("The implications of the Japanese catastrophe"), the Japanese ruling elite turned to the breakneck development of nuclear power in the late 1960s and early 1970s to shield itself from dependence on imported oil. Now more than 40 years-old, Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi plant was the very first to begin operational generation, on March 26, 1970.

Tepco’s litany of deliberate violations of the most elementary safety standards, enabled by the collusion of one government after another, is a graphic demonstration of the intolerable danger posed to the world’s population by the capitalist economic order itself, based as it is on the extraction of private profit at all costs.

May. 4 2011

Jeff McMahon
Forbes Magazine

The Environmental Protection Agency has halted accelerated testing of precipitation, drinking water, and milk for radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the agency announced yesterday.

"After a thorough data review showing declining radiation levels related to the Japanese nuclear incident, EPA has returned to the routine RadNet sampling and analysis process for precipitation, drinking water and milk," according to yesterday’s Daily Data Summary.

Milk and drinking water will return to a regular quarterly schedule and will next be tested in three months. Preciptation will be tested monthly.

The agency will continue to monitor air samples—where radiation is likely to appear first—in near real time and post the results, but "EPA is evaluating the need to continue operating the additional air monitors deployed in response to the Japan nuclear incident," the summary states.

Mobile air monitors were deployed on Pacific Islands, in Alaska and along the West Coast to act as an early warning system for coming fallout.

Other U.S. radiation monitors have also recorded a decline in Fukushima radiation. Levels have dropped almost consistently in graphs posted by the Berkeley Radiological Air and Water Monitoring Team. The Community Environmental Monitoring Program based in Las Vegas last posted air filter results on April 18 after noting the radiation levels had peaked March 25.

But the situation at Fukushima remains unstable, with plumes of white smoke continuing to escape from two reactors.

"I would describe the situation as being not quite stable, but certainly not as highly dynamic as it was on march 21 when we last met on this subject," said Marty Virgilio, an NRC deputy executive director, in testimony before the commission Thursday.

Radioactive emissions continue at the plant, Virgilio said, and they are difficult to monitor accurately:

There’s still feed and bleed operations in progress. That is a somewhat dynamic situation, as well as unfiltered and unmonitored release paths that remain to be a concern at the Fukushima site.

"One of the things that make it difficult for the Japanese in responding to this event—and for us to understand the exact situation—is that there’s suspect accuracy and failed instrumentation at the site, affecting all the units, that really impair our ability to get a clear and consistent picture of the situation."

Japanese authorities have also been reporting declining levels of radiation in air and drinking water. The International Atomic Energy Agency issued this statement on gamma radiation at the plant:

A general decreasing trend has been observed in all locations since around 20 March."

And this statement on coastal seawater:

The analysis for almost all sampling positions has shown a general decreasing trend in concentrations of the relevant radionuclides over time."

But that "almost" is a big one: levels of Iodine-131 remained steady in coastal seawater from April 26 to April 30, the IAEA reported, a finding that belies Iodine-131’s short half-life and the dilution power of the ocean. I-131 was detected consistently at about 2.7 million picoCuries per liter. (For comparison, the EPA’s maximum contaminant level for I-131 in drinking water is 3 picoCuries per liter).

The Japanese dumped about 11,500 tons of water intentionally that contained the following concentrations of contaminants, according to the IAEA. (Amounts are given in megaBecquerels, one of which equals 27 million picoCuries):

• 5400 MBq/L of Iodine-131

• 1800 MBq/L of Cesium-134 and

• 1800 MBq/L of Cesium-137.

An unknown amount of contaminated water leaked into the ocean from a damaged reservoir.

Nothing Fishy

The ocean dumping has raised fears of seafood contamination, particularly in species that are imported or that migrate from Japanese waters. Three U.S. government agencies sought to quell those fears with a joint statement yesterday.

The threat of radioactive contamination reaching American waters is so low that the Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration do not plan to test American seafood for it, those agencies said in the joint statement with EPA:

FDA and NOAA do not anticipate contamination of living marine resources in U.S. waters at this time. For this reason, sampling of U.S. harvested seafood is not currently planned.

via U.S. Seafood Safe… (pdf)

The joint statement follows an April 29 meeting between Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Takeaki Matsumoto. The two agreed to fight "rumors and reputation damage" that might harm Japan’s place in the supply chain, Matsumoto said.

FDA measures gamma radiation in 40 percent of seafood imported from Japan, according to the joint statement, and so far has detected nothing above background levels.

Japanese regulators have only found radiation in the sand lance, a fish that does not leave Japanese waters, the FDA said. None has been found in albacore tuna, a species known to migrate from Japanese waters to the U.S. West Coast:

The migration of tuna and other species of fish from the coast of Japan to U.S. waters would take days or months under the best of circumstances, and vessels fishing beyond U.S. waters must also travel several days to return to port. During that time needed for a fish contaminated by radiation in Japan to migrate, be caught and reach the market, the level of short-lived radionuclides such as I-131 would drop significantly through natural radioactive decay. To date, no significantly elevated radiation levels have been detected in migratory species, including North Pacific albacore.

The agencies said they would respond quickly if radioactive materials were deposited into the Kuroshiro Current, which flows from Japan to the U.S. West Coast, but it was not clear how they would determine that had happened.

"To screen for longer term impacts, NOAA’s National Ocean Service and the Environmental Protection Agency are exploring approaches to monitor seawater and sediment in areas along the western U.S. coast, with sampling stations co-located with sites in NOAA’s Mussel Watch program."

The nuclear engineers at Berkeley have already begun testing seaweed on the Northern California Coast, they announced this weekend. Most foods passed their most recent food tests, but they reported a tiny amount of radioactive cesium in strawberries:

There are no isotopes from Japan detected in the new spinach, kale, arugula, and seaweed samples. The new strawberry samples from 4/20 show no I-131, but Cs-134 and Cs-137 are present. The highest levels of radioisotopes detected would require the consumption of more than 3 tons of strawberries in order to receive the same equivalent dose as a cross-country airplane flight.

via UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Air Monitoring Station.

Rain on Both Coasts

EPA also released a new batch of test results yesterday, reporting non-detects in samples from 16 of 18 U.S. cities, with these two exceptions:

• 7.2 picoCuries per liter of iodine-131 in rainwater collected April 20 in Boston.

• 5.2 pCi/L of cesium-134 and 5.5 pCi/L of cesium-137 in rainwater collected April 22 in Richmond, CA.

The EPA’s maximum contaminant level for both of these radionuclides—3 pCi/L for drinking water—anticipates continuous ingestion over a 70-year lifetime.

"It is important to note that all of the radiation levels detected by RadNet monitors and sampling have been very low, are well below any level of public health concern, and continue to decrease over time," EPA said.