Wade Stone — Global Research May 11, 2013

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”― Friedrich Nietzsche

Every Spring and Summer, during a period of low pressure over the Persian Gulf, powerful winds known as the “shamals and sharqi,” sweep down from the north and north east into Saudi Arabia, whipping up ever more grains of sand as they head south and south west across the Arabian Desert. Frequently, these sandstorms become gargantuan in size – hundreds of meters high and kilometers wide and in length of dense roiling particulate, choking the lungs of those exposed, blocking out the sun completely and, by the time they are over, burying whole towns, sometimes even large cities like Riyadh, in a meter deep or more of sand.

Sandstorm hitting Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2012. Click to enlarge

The wind speeds range from 30 to 300 kilometers per hour, and they generally take a semi-circular route, heading back out to the southern gulf and the remaining Gulf States. Indeed, on an annual basis all of the Gulf States combined – UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, suffer through literally hundreds of such sand and dust storms. And most often the winds driving those sandstorms originate from the north and north east (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and sometimes even Turkey).

NASA satellite image of typical shamal wind directions

Below is a map showing the location of Iran’s nuclear facilities and uranium mines. Now look again at the previous NASA satellite image and note the primary shamal wind direction.

Think “Fukushima x 10”: Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would leave the entire Gulf State region virtually uninhabitable.

Fukushima is, without question, the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date. In fact, many scientists believe, and with good reason, that the Fukushima incident, which is far from over, is the world’s worst environmental catastrophe.

“While the long-term repercussions of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are yet to be fully assessed, they are far more serious than those pertaining to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, which resulted in almost one million deaths (New Book Concludes – Chernobyl death toll: 985,000, mostly from cancer” Global Research, September 10, 2010. For a full account of Fukushima, see “Global Research Online Interactive Reader Series, Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War, The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation (Michel Chossudovsky, editor).

Now imagine several large nuclear reactors (Iran’s Bushehr reactor output, for example, is 1000 megawatts, compared to Fukushima Daiichi’s largest reactor which had an output of 784 megawatts), along with several uranium enrichment plants, and certainly military storage sites and quite likely even uranium mines, all bombed to dust within a matter of days. Moreover, unlike the Fukushima Daiichi reactors which suffered only partial meltdowns with much of the fuel rods and spent fuel storages remaining mostly intact, “all” of Iran’s nuclear fuel would be exploded into the atmosphere. And let us not forget that the US-Israeli military ordinances employed to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities would certainly be tipped with depleted uranium, and very likely would include some mini-nukes.

Indeed, in regards nuclear disasters and environmental catastrophes, Fukushima would absolutely pale in comparison to that caused by the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. The nuclear fallout from such an event would be extreme, to put it mildly. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians would likely die within the first year of such a strike, while millions more would die within a decade or two of some form of radiation-induced cancer. And since a significant portion of that nuclear fallout would end up either immediately, or over the course of the next weeks and months in the Arabian Desert, where the winds, year after year, would gather it up along with the particles of sand and dust into gigantic roiling irradiated storms (remember, “hundreds” of such sand and dust storms annually), not a person living anywhere in the Gulf State region would be safe from exposure. The Persian Gulf, too, would soon be so irradiated and toxic and lifeless that it might as well be renamed the New Dead Sea.

Some statistics worth recalling: The half-life of cesium-137 is just over 31 years, while that of strontium-90 is approximately 29 years. Plutonium-239, the most dangerous of the above-mentioned radioactive substances, has a half-life of 24,110 years. And uranium, which is the primary target and which will make up the largest percentage of the fallout, has a half-life ranging between 700 million to nearly 4.5 billion years, depending on the type of uranium used—U-235 or U-238. It’s also worth noting that it takes an estimated 20 x the half-life years listed for the radiation from such contamination to dissipate entirely.

Of course, a lot of that radiation would also enter the jet stream, which would then carry it around the globe, depositing it as nuclear fallout everywhere. No nation, no body of water, would be spared. It takes but “one” inhaled or ingested “hot” particle to produce a life-threatening cancer.

Calling for, even so much as contemplating, such a genocidal event is madness; actually carrying it out would be insanity beyond description.

We must conclude, therefore, that the US-NATO-Israeli alliance is bluffing. Shortly before each and every scheduled P5+1 negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program, the corporate/government controlled mainstream media in the West ratchets up the threats, with Israel insisting that they will soon bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if their nuclear program isn’t shut down. We’ve been hearing these same threats for more than a decade now. The very fact that the other Gulf States in the region are in support of the US-NATO-Israeli alliance also suggests that such threats are all smoke-and-mirrors, attempts to scare Iran into accepting whatever demands US-NATO and Israel want.

Surely, the Gulf State monarchs especially are aware enough to realize that, even if Iran is planning to develop a nuclear weapon (for which no evidence whatsoever exists), a nuclear-armed Iran would be far less of a danger to them than a bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, which would positively guarantee their demise. Even Israel, which is only 1100 kilometers away from Iran, and also experiences regular severe sand and dust storms, would likely suffer dire consequences as a result of the radiation fallout from such an attack.

Has such absolute insanity infected the minds of the Western powers to such a degree that they actually would attack Iran, and in so doing destroy the entire Gulf State region, further irradiate the entire planet and themselves, and quite possibly set off World War III? Or is it all just smoke-and-mirrors, scare tactics and rhetoric, and saner minds will in fact prevail?

Let us all hope and pray for the latter

Source

JD Heyes — Natural News April 24, 2013

The tsunami-caused nuclear accident at the Fukushima power station in Japan is the disaster that never ends, as new reports indicate that a wealth of new radioactive materials have been spewed into the atmosphere.

According to Singapore-based news outlet AsiaOne, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the multi-nuclear reactor power station at Fukushima, announced April 6 that some 120 tons of water that had been contaminated with radioactive substances had leaked from an underground storage facility at the No. 1 atomic power plant site.

Running out of storage room?

TEPCO officials announced the leak late in the day April 5, a Friday, “but said measures to address the problem had not been taken for two days because the cause had not been identified,” AsiaOne reported. The company “assumed the water was still leaking.”

According to company officials TEPCO estimates that the leaked water contains about 710 billion becquerels of radioactive substances, making it the largest leak of radioactive materials ever at the plant. Discovery of the leak led the company to transfer about 13,000 tons of polluted, radioactive water in the questionable storage area to a neighboring underground storage unit.

That storage unit, TEPCO said, is 60 meters long, 53 meters wide and six meters deep. It is pool-like in structure and has a three-layer waterproof sheet with a concrete cover.

According to the company, water that has leaked from damaged nuclear reactors is run through filters and additional devices in order to remove radioactive elements. The water is then stored in facilities for low-level contaminated water.

TEPCO began using the storage facility Feb. 1. As of April 5, 13,000 tons of radioactive water was being stored there – very close to the 14,000-ton limit.

More leaking contamination

AsiaOne reported that water samples taken by TEPCO from soil surrounding the damaged facility a few days later showed 35 becquerels per cubic centimeter of radioactive substances, which is abnormal. “Safe” levels of becquerels is 300 per kilogram of water, according to New Scientist.

However, TEPCO officials did not publicly announce their findings right away after not finding any other unusual changes in water quality data, such as chloride concentration.

On April 5, the report said, two days after the problem was first noticed, water with 6,000 becquerels per cubic centimeter of radioactive substances was located between the first and second layers of the waterproof sheet, which alerted TEPCO engineers and plant officials that a leak had occurred.

Per AsiaOne:

As the sheet’s layers were joined when the facility was constructed, TEPCO assumed that the sheet may have been damaged, or that a mistake had been made during construction. An average of about 400 tons a day of groundwater seeped into buildings housing nuclear reactors and turbines, increasing the quantity of polluted water.

The latest problem will create a storage shortage; TEPCO officials said storage of polluted water at the facility will be reduced from 53,000 tons to 40,000 – a significant reduction. That will make it necessary for the power company to go over procedures for handling polluted water, which will include increasing the number of storage units.

The disaster that keeps on giving

TEPCO said earlier this month it expected the water transfer would take about five days to complete.

“As the height of the water storage facility is relatively low, we think it’s unlikely that the polluted water mixed into underground water and reached the sea 800 meters away,” said Masayuki Ono, the acting chief of TEPCO’s nuclear facilities department, at a press conference April 6.

The plant was damaged by a huge earthquake-caused tsunami March 11, 2011. At the time of the incident, three of the plant’s atomic reactors were shut down: No. 4 had been de-fueled and Nos. 5 and 6 were in cold shut-down for maintenance.

The remaining three automatically shut down at the time of the accident and emergency generators came on to keep coolant systems operating.

Sources for this article include:

http://news.asiaone.com

http://www.newscientist.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/Fukushima.html

Source

All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday. Shutting them all down at once is not practical, he said, but he supports phasing them out rather than trying to extend their lives.

The position of the former chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, is not unusual in that various anti-nuclear groups take the same stance. But it is highly unusual for a former head of the nuclear commission to so bluntly criticize an industry whose safety he was previously in charge of ensuring.

Asked why he did not make these points when he was chairman, Dr. Jaczko said in an interview after his remarks, “I didn’t really come to it until recently.”

“I was just thinking about the issues more, and watching as the industry and the regulators and the whole nuclear safety community continues to try to figure out how to address these very, very difficult problems,” which were made more evident by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, he said. “Continuing to put Band-Aid on Band-Aid is not going to fix the problem.”

Dr. Jaczko made his remarks at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in Washington in a session about the Fukushima accident. Dr. Jaczko said that many American reactors that had received permission from the nuclear commission to operate for 20 years beyond their initial 40-year licenses probably would not last that long. He also rejected as unfeasible changes proposed by the commission that would allow reactor owners to apply for a second 20-year extension, meaning that some reactors would run for a total of 80 years.

Dr. Jaczko cited a well-known characteristic of nuclear reactor fuel to continue to generate copious amounts of heat after a chain reaction is shut down. That “decay heat” is what led to the Fukushima meltdowns. The solution, he said, was probably smaller reactors in which the heat could not push the temperature to the fuel’s melting point.

The nuclear industry disagreed with Dr. Jaczko’s assessment. “U.S. nuclear energy facilities are operating safely,” said Marvin S. Fertel, the president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association. “That was the case prior to Greg Jaczko’s tenure as Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman. It was the case during his tenure as N.R.C. chairman, as acknowledged by the N.R.C.’s special Fukushima response task force and evidenced by a multitude of safety and performance indicators. It is still the case today.”

Dr. Jaczko resigned as chairman last summer after months of conflict with his four colleagues on the commission. He often voted in the minority on various safety questions, advocated more vigorous safety improvements, and was regarded with deep suspicion by the nuclear industry. A former aide to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, he was appointed at Mr. Reid’s instigation and was instrumental in slowing progress on a proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles from Las Vegas.

Source

New data released by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) shows once again that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is far from over. Despite a complete media blackout on the current situation, levels of Cesium-137 (Cs-137) and Cesium-134 (Cs-134) found in produce and rice crackers located roughly 225 miles away from Fukushima are high enough to cause residents to exceed the annual radiation exposure limit in just a few months, or even weeks.

According to Fukushima-Diary.com, which posts up-to-date information about the Fukushima disaster, rice crackers and tangerines produced in the Shizuoka prefecture are testing high for both Cs-137 and Cs-134. Rice crackers, according to the data sheet, tested at 3.7 Becquerels per kilogram (Bq/Kg) of Cs-137, while tangerines tested at 1.46 Bq/Kg of Cs-134 and 3.14 Bq/Kg of Cs-137.

The Shizuoka prefecture is located about 80 miles southwest of Tokyo, which is highly concerning as it is actually farther away from Fukushima than Tokyo. This suggest that potentially deadly levels of radiation are still affecting large population centers across Japan, including those that are not even in close proximity to the Fukushima plant.

It is generally regarded that adult radiation workers should be exposed to no more than 50 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation per year in order to avoid serious health consequences. For children, this number is far lower, probably somewhere around 10 mSv, with this being on the high end. But the average adult and child eating these tainted foods at their current radiation levels will not only reach but exceed the safe maximum in just a few weeks.

Radiation levels continue to increase in lakes, rivers north of Tokyo

But food, of course, is not the only major source of radiation exposure in Japan. Other data also released by Fukushima-Diary.com shows that radiation levels in rivers, lakes and shorelines around Kashiwa City in Chiba, located about 20 miles northeast of Tokyo, are dangerously high and getting even higher.

Since radiation levels were last tested in the Otsu River back in September, detected levels have nearly tripled, jumping from 5,700 Bq/Kg to 14,200 Bq/Kg of radiation. Similar jumps were observed in lakes and shore soils, the former increasing from 7,600 Bq/Kg to 8,200 Bq/Kg of radiation, and the latter increasing from 440 Bq/Kg to 780 Bq/Kg of radiation.

Any increase in disease or death resulting from these continued radiation spikes, however, will more than likely be blamed on other causes besides radiation, so as to cover up the severity of the situation. The radiation component of radiation-induced heart disease, organ failure, and cancer, for instance, will simply be ignored, and any uptick in deaths, particularly among the elderly, declared normal.

Meanwhile, a recent Rasmussen Report found that more than one-third of all Americans believe radiation from Fukushima caused “significant harm” in the U.S. This is likely due to the fact that high levels of radiation were observed in soil, water, and even food all across America in the wake of the disaster.

Sources for this article include:

http://fukushima-diary.com

http://fukushima-diary.com

http://www.rasmussenreports.com
Source

Researchers have discovered that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has had far-reaching health effects more drastic than previously thought: young children born on the US West Coast are 28 percent more likely to develop congenital hyperthyroidism.

In examining post-Fukushima conditions along the West Coast, researchers found American-born children to be developing similar conditions that some Europeans acquired after the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

“Fukushima fallout appeared to affect all areas of the US, and was especially large in some, mostly in the western part of the nation,” researchers from the New York-based Radiation and Health Project wrote in a study published by the Open Journal of Pediatrics.

Children born after the 2011 meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant are at high risk of acquiring congenital hyperthyroidism if they were in the line of fire for radioactive isotopes. Researchers studied concentration levels of radioiodine isotopes (I-131) and congenital hypothyroid cases to make the association.

Just a few days after the meltdown, I-131 concentration levels in California, Hawaii, Alaska, Oregon and Washington were up to 211 times above the normal level, according to the study. At the same time, the number of congenital hypothyroid cases skyrocketed, increasing by an average of 16 percent from March 17 to Dec. 31, 2011. And between March 17 and June 30, shortly after the meltdown, newly born children experienced a 28 percent greater risk of acquiring hyperthyroidism.

In 36 other US states outside of the exposure zone, the risk of congenital hyperthyroidism decreased by 3 percent – a finding that researchers believe may serve as further proof that Fukushima had something to do with the unusually high results found on the West Coast.

The disease is usually rare, but can manifest into a serious condition if left untreated. Affected fetuses and children may suffer serious developmental delay – and a recent report found that 44.2 percent of 94,975 sampled Fukushima children have had thyroid ultrasound abnormalities as a likely result of their exposure to the radiation.

Americans often doubted that radiation from the meltdown would affect the US West Coast, but the latest research sheds light on alarming scientific data that indicates otherwise. Radioactive iodine that enters the human body typically gathers in the thyroid, which release growth hormones. Radiation exposure can therefore stunt the growth of a child’s body and brain. Exposure can have long-lasting effects, which scientists have studied in those who were near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during its 1986 meltdown. Decades after the accident, a 2011 study by the National Institutes of Health found that higher absorption of I-131 radiation led to an increased risk for thyroid cancer among victims of Chernobyl radiation – a risk that has not diminished over time.

The children who were unfortunate enough to be exposed to Fukushima radiation on the US West Coast, Alaska or Hawaii could face similar risks of congenital hypothyroidism or thyroid cancer throughout their lives, although the Radiation and Health Project Researchers said they are still investigating further to see what other factors might be involved in their findings before drawing any solid conclusions about the effects of Fukushima.

Source

Activist physicians on Monday accused the World Health Organization of downplaying the health impact of nuclear fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

In a New York symposium marking the two-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown in Japan, the physicians took issue with WHO’s conclusion in a recent report that it did not expect a significant surge in cancer in Japan or elsewhere due to radiation leaks.

“It’s a report that was meant to reassure people who, almost certainly, many will develop leukemia and cancer,” said Helen Caldicott, whose foundation, the Helen Caldicott Foundation, cosponsored the symposium, along with Physicians for Social Responsibility.

“What is going to happen is there will be a high incidence of cancer and leukemia and genetic disease,” due to the leaks, she said.

Caldicott said the WHO report, released February 28, had numerous major shortcomings, key issues it “ignored” or “glossed over.”

For one, she said, WHO did not take actual radioactive emissions into account, relying on estimates.

The UN health body also did not examine the impacts on children comprehensively, including what the impact would be of eating radiation-contaminated food over a lifetime.

The agency also did not closely examine the impact on workers at the Fukushima plant or on people from the area who evacuated through the plume of radiation that came from the plant, she said.

“As a physician, I abhor what they’ve done,” Caldicott said.

She said data showed that three times as much radioactive xenon, and possibly three times as much cesium, escaped at Fukushima as at Chernobyl, the nuclear plant in the Ukraine that released huge amounts of radioactive particles into the atmosphere after an explosion and fire in 1986.

The WHO report did conclude that the cancer risk was higher for certain groups of exposed people in Fukushima.

That includes a projected seven percent increase in leukemia among males exposed as infants, over what would have normally been, and a six percent higher occurrence of breast cancer among women exposed as infants.

The occurrence of thyroid cancer in females over a lifetime could rise by as much as 70 percent over the normal rate.

But for the general population inside and outside of Japan, WHO said, “the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated.

Source

I sit back, thinking maybe if I distance myself enough perhaps the bigger picture will reveal itself to me; but alas, even that does not help me understand the seemingly planet wide denial regarding Fukushima.  Here we are approaching the two year anniversary of that continuously erupting nuclear volcano in Japan; and not only has no progress been made, but it’s looking like no attempt at progress has been made.  In point of fact, Tepco and the Japanese government have done many things which just make the disaster even worse.  It absolutely defies logic that the evacuation zones were rescinded, back to three miles from the laughably inadequate twelve miles, but they were!  I could scarcely believe it several months ago when Rense.com correspondent Yoichi Shimatsu reported that the Japanese government was collecting tsunami debris and burning it at many incineration sites across Japan. By burning already contaminated material you are essentially causing a re-release of fallout back into the environment, compounding the damage, both short & long term.  It sounds like self-inflicted genocide to keep the population in place and encourage them to eat contaminated food and ignore the fallout, but that is exactly what is happening.  Despite official denial, they say that Tokyo is now as badly contaminated in places as the town of Fukushima.

Continues …

A strong quake centered off northeastern Japan shook buildings as far away as Tokyo on Friday and triggered a one-meter tsunami in an area devastated by last year’s Fukushima disaster, but there were no immediate reports of deaths or serious damage.

The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.3, the U.S. Geological Survey said, adding that there was no risk of a widespread tsunami.

The March 2011 earthquake and following tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and triggered the world’s worst nuclear crisis in 25 years when the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant was destroyed, leaking radiation into the sea and air.

Workers at the plant were ordered to move to higher ground after Friday’s quake. Tokyo Electric Power Co, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, reported no irregularities at its nuclear plants.

All but two of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors have been idled since the Fukushima disaster as the government reviews safety.

The quake measured a “lower 5″ in Miyagi prefecture on Japan’s scale of one to seven, meaning there might be some damage to roads and houses that are less quake resistant.

The scale measures the amount of shaking and in that sense gives a better idea of possible damage than the magnitude. The quake registered a 4 in Tokyo.

The one-meter tsunami hit at Ishinomaki, in Miyagi, at the centre of the devastation from the March 2011 disaster. All Miyagi trains halted operations and Sendai airport, which was flooded by the tsunami last year, closed its runway.

Five people in the prefecture were slightly injured.

“I was in the centre of the city the very moment the earthquake struck. I immediately jumped into the car and started running away towards the mountains. I’m still hiding inside the car,” said Ishinomaki resident Chikako Iwai.

“…I have the radio on and they say the cars are still stuck in the traffic. I’m planning to stay here for the next couple of hours.”

Narita airport outside Tokyo was back in action after a brief closure for safety checks. There were small tsunamis, measuring in the centimeters, elsewhere near the epicenter.

Last year’s quake, which measured 9.0, triggered fuel-rod meltdowns at Fukushima, causing radiation leakage, contamination of food and water and mass evacuations. Much of the area is still deserted.

The government declared in December that the disaster was under control.

“Citizens are now escaping to designated evacuation centers and moving to places on higher ground,” office worker Naoki Ara said in Soma, 30 km (18 miles) from the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda cancelled campaigning in Tokyo ahead of a December 16 election and was on his way back to his office, but there was no immediate plan to hold a special cabinet meeting.

Public spending on quake-proofing buildings is a big election issue.

Japanese were posting photos of their TV screens with tsunami warnings on Facebook, asking each other whether they’re safe, confirming their whereabouts.

“It shook for a long time here in Tokyo, are you guys all right?” posted Eriko Hamada, enquiring about the safety of her friends.

Phone lines were overloaded and it was difficult to contact residents of Miyagi.

“Owing to the recent earthquake, phone lines are very busy, please try again later,” the phone operator said.

The yen rose against the dollar and the euro on the news, triggering some safe-haven inflows into the Japanese currency.

(Additional reporting by Tomasz Janowski, Leika Kihara and Aaron Sheldrick; Writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Ken Wills)

Source

After the discovery of explosives on the premises of Swedish nuclear power plant Ringhals south of Gothenburg on Wednesday afternoon, authorities quickly raised the threat level at all Swedish nuclear facilities.

“They have all raised the threat level as a precaution,” said Maria Stråhle at the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten) to news agency TT.

The explosive device was found on a large truck that had been on the industrial estate belonging to the plant and was returning into the reactor area, which is more heavily guarded.

“Under the first step onto the truck there is a fire extinguisher and that is where the explosive had been placed,” said Gösta Larsen of the Ringhals plant to TT.

He said that police suspect that a civilian has prepared the explosive and that it was the size of a “small fist”.

The device was not primed and was not large enough to do damage to a reactor, according to Larsen. However, he confirmed that the threat levels had been raised as a result of the find and said that any discovery of explosives on the plant’s premises was “worrying”.

According to the county police, the device was in the shape of “plastic explosive” and the truck where it was discovered never leaves the plant’s immediate environs.

“The truck was entering the guarded area when the device was found by the plant’s own sniffer dogs,” said police spokesman Tommy Nyman.

The entire premises were searched with sniffer dogs over night but no other discoveries have been found and police so far have no suspects.

However, a preliminary investigation is under way and the incident has been classified as a suspected sabotage attempt.

Police will question truck drivers and officers are currently trying to find out where and when the suspected explosive could have been placed on the vehicle.

“We will speak to everyone we think could have information about the incident,” Nyman said to TT.

The device was sent off to the National Laboratory of Forensic Science (Statens kriminaltekniska laboratorium – SKL) in Linköping for testing soon after the discovery and scientists have since confirmed that it was an explosive found on the plant premises.

Source

When I met him, Otsuchi city administrator Kozo Hirani, a substantial, balding man in a brown pinstripe suit, was on the upper floor of a warren of small-scale temporary buildings that now house the town’s administration. To reach him I had flown to Tokyo, taken a train more than three hundred miles north to Morioka, the capital of Iwate Prefecture, then got into a van with seven people from Tokyo’s International University who’d decided to see the disaster zone for themselves and help me while they were at it. Two were continental Europeans, five were Japanese, including one young man with the face of a warrior in a 19th-century Japanese print. His only job was to hand over exquisitely wrapped boxes – almost certainly containing some kind of sweet – in pretty shopping bags to everyone we visited, starting with Hirani. A huge cardboard carton of these items had been loaded into the van in which we travelled through the disaster zone.

When the city administrator first saw the wall of black water coming at him, it was so vast and incongruous that he didn’t recognise it for what it was. Hirani survived the tsunami that swept the mayor and most of the small town’s higher-ranking officials away in the middle of the afternoon on 11 March 2011, leaving him with the burden of responsibility for the recovery of his town. ‘I lost five of my subordinates. One sank in front of me. It was 24 hours before the helicopters came,’ he told me through an interpreter. ‘I was rescued by helicopter and when I saw the city from the sky I thought everything was at an end. It is very tough. My subordinates were in their twenties and thirties – I am 55. Why did I survive?’ Almost 10 per cent of the town’s population of about 15,000 died in the tsunami, one of the highest per capita death tolls in the affected area along the north-east coastal prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima (which is the name of the prefecture as well as the inland city).

As we approached Otsuchi through mountainous countryside, we saw heavy equipment dismantling wrecked buildings, their twisted steel girders exposed. I thought we must be near the coast, but we kept going for a long time through wreckage and neat hills of debris; in the flatlands nearer the sea not much was left besides foundations. Some buildings were standing here and there, but they didn’t look as though they would be rehabilitated. A few brightly illuminated drink vending machines stood like crazily cheerful sentinels in the ruins. There and elsewhere along the coast, I saw many buildings whose first storeys were utterly destroyed, their second storeys damaged, and the rest increasingly intact the higher they went. I had been to New Orleans six months after Katrina, before the real clean-up began in many neighbourhoods, but the deluge there now seems gentle by comparison. A long double row of cars – hundreds of them; in Japan even wreckage is made neat – was lined up in the dirt of Otsuchi, twisted and crushed by the extraordinary force of the sea. In one of the houses, still standing but torn open, I saw a family’s pretty blue and white china dishes, a stack of five-sided bowls, flowered side plates, a little oval dish, unbroken and unclaimed.

I hadn’t understood that the tsunami, at its height, was 140 feet – 40 metres – high. It had been about 33 metres high on the peninsula that protects Otsuchi to the south, and so the wall of water that hit the town, according to a map published in the Asahi Shimbun on the anniversary, may have been only about 22 metres high. I say ‘only’, but that’s a wall of water the height of a seven-storey building, and because of the narrowness of the valley and the steepness of its walls it ran far inland, scouring everything it touched, turning a fishing town into splinters strewn with corpses.

As the tsunami approached, Hirani took refuge in the city hall, which was surrounded by water and out of contact with the rest of the world. ‘So our biggest worry was what happened to our families.’ His wife and father, who lived locally, were OK, though they feared he was dead, as did his children further away. He added with a faint smile that the children ‘now appreciate me much more’. But he lost a lot of his friends. ‘This loss is so big. We can rebuild – but the heart, the sorrow.’ There were practical things to deal with – cases of burn-out among emergency service workers, trauma with all the survivors. One government employee killed himself and many were in counselling. A friend of Hirani’s had examined 450 waterlogged bodies in the course of looking for his mother. He found her, but it didn’t end there. ‘In his dreams his mother comes with this changed body and the other bodies come and ask for help.’ He took indefinite leave and died in a traffic accident.

From a practical standpoint Hirani thought they should adopt an approach whereby family members don’t look at a body until there is a DNA match. Bodies were still showing up. The previous day they had found two in a car, and officially 470 people were still missing. Japanese officials are reluctant to classify all the missing as dead, and so the statistics still name thousands of missing along with the nearly twenty thousand dead. ‘We live near the ocean,’ Hirani said to me, ‘and our joy is the ocean. The ocean might get very harsh once in a hundred years but usually people have respect but not fear.’

Some Sea Shepherd activists trying to document porpoise slaughter in the region were also in Otsuchi on 11 March. One of them wrote soon afterwards:

The police, who had taken up a post at the only place we could pass, were frantically motioning for everyone to get through the gates in the tsunami wall. We got through. These walls and gates are massive structures that appear to be built to withstand military bombardment. They extend high up into the air and rim the entire harbour area of the town. It was not long before the water drained from the harbour and then refilled. We learned from the firemen to expect to see several cycles of this draining and refilling. The water then rapidly refilled the harbour and rose right up to inundate all of the areas on the water side of the wall. It happened very quickly. It drained again, this time almost down to the mud. Then the returning water pushed past and over the draining water creating a wall of black howling water. This time the water rose even faster and topped the wall. It kept rising up on the hillsides and filling the valleys and crevices beyond. Several times this happened and all the while aftershocks were happening. Then it started to snow. Mixing in with the snow was ash from the many fires burning in the hills and damaged buildings. The smoke was choking.

They tried to rescue a woman stranded on floating debris and then to direct a boat to get her. But darkness shut them in and they didn’t succeed. Power was out in most of the disaster region and they spent the night in blackness, with the fires gleaming in the hills.

I heard a similar story from a carnation grower in Miyagi Prefecture to the south, who was trying to find his way back to his farm in the darkness that night and heard the cries of trapped people all around him. The roads were blocked with debris, so he walked, through water so cold he went numb, past rubble, past the sounds of the desperate and the dying. He eventually responded to one woman who was pinned against a wall with water up to her neck. He managed to get her to a safer place but ignored many of the others, convinced he could do nothing, torn, and consumed with worry about his farm. In the light of day on the 12th he saw ‘many fires and dead bodies lying on the roadside’. It takes time to get carnations going, and so he had no income last year, but he did at least start growing them again. He complained that those who remained in their own homes, however shattered, did not receive the assistance that the displaced did.

An earthquake can be a great social leveller at first, but policy and prejudice will decide who gets aid and recompense and compassion later, and it will never be equitable, as this farmer knew well. Disaster solidarity often fractures along these lines. But it is important to keep the generosity in mind: Hirani estimated that between ten and twenty thousand volunteers had come to his small town alone. Last year young Japanese people were volunteering in large numbers and at least in some cases rethinking their ambitions and purpose in life. Every disaster leaves a small percentage of people committed to ideals they might not have found otherwise.

There is no such thing as a natural disaster, the disaster sociologists say. In other words, no matter what the origins of a disaster, human systems – physical, cultural, political – can amplify, channel or mitigate what happens. In an earthquake it’s not the shaking of the earth but the collapse of buildings that’s responsible for nearly all loss of human life. Japan may be the best country in the world when it comes to seismic safety codes, and its tsunami alert system worked fine too. They even have an earthquake early-warning system that responds to the P-waves which precede the more damaging S-waves, giving people several seconds to prepare – not much, but maybe time enough to get under a table or into a doorway, pull over to the side of the road, turn off power or gas, take stock.

Later I met Yoshiteru Murosaki, the director of the National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster, who told me that one of the reasons for the many tsunami deaths was that a lot of people sought refuge in places that would have been safe in the last several tsunamis. But this one was much higher, as high as the 1896 tsunami, if not quite as high as the monster waves of 869 are said to have been. Others trusted the seawalls to protect them, but the water overtopped them and kept coming. Roughly two-thirds of the dead were over sixty, people less able or willing to evacuate (in Hurricane Katrina the elderly made up a disproportionate percentage of the dead for similar reasons, and the same is true of many disasters). Murosaki told me that the way to deal with tsunamis is to have good evacuation procedures rather than to avoid building on the seacoast. Twenty thousand died here, but in countries without building codes, without sirens and evacuation drills and awareness, the number of dead might have been many times higher. Nevertheless, many communities are retreating from the tsunami zone and rebuilding on higher ground.

That much can be said for the foresight and prudence of the Japanese government. Then there’s Fukushima Daiichi, the six nuclear reactors that were also battered by the tsunami: not by the highest waves, but by waves high enough to overtop the little protection that existed and to flood the basement where the emergency generators were fecklessly located – the generators that instantly became useless. Thus the nuclear power plant was completely disabled as no such plant had been before. As Arnie Gundersen, an energy consultant, put it,

There were numerous red flags indicating potential problems for anyone following Tepco [the Tokyo Electric Power Company] during the past decade. Crucial vulnerabilities in the Fukushima Daiichi reactor design; substantial governance issues and weak management characterised by major frauds and cover-ups; collusion and loose regulatory supervision; as well as understanding but ignoring earthquake and tsunami warnings, were key ingredients of the March 2011 disaster. Moreover, all these crucial vulnerabilities had been publicly highlighted years before the disaster occurred.

One of the casualties of the disaster was the relationship between the people and the government. Almost everyone I spoke to, even the most mild-mannered, said they no longer trusted the government, and they said it bluntly, or angrily, or with a deep sense of betrayal. Activists and radicals – with whom I also spoke – didn’t have a lot of trust to lose. But for many people, recognition of the initial failures and cover-ups, the secrecy, lies and tolerance of contamination, the prioritisation of business over protection of the vulnerable, has meant a great and terrible rupture. ‘We have to fear properly,’ Murosaki said. ‘Not too much, but enough. What is proper fear?’

Governments fear their people. They fear we will exercise our power to change them, and they fear we will panic. The first is a realistic if undemocratic fear, since changing them is our right; the second is a self-aggrandising fantasy in which attempts to alter the status quo are seen as madness, hysteria, mob rule. They often assume that we can’t handle the data in a crisis, and so prefer to withhold crucial information, as the Pennsylvania government did in 1979 at the time of the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown, and the Soviet government did during the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. Panic is what you see in disaster movies, where people run about doing foolish things, impeding evacuation and rescue, behaving like sheep. But governments and officials are not very good shepherds. During the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, the university authorities locked down the administrative offices and warned their own families, while withholding information from the campus community. The Bush administration lied about the toxicity of the air near Ground Zero in New York after 9/11, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk for the sake of a good PR front and a brisk return to business as usual. Disasters often crack open fissures between government and civil society.

Around the time of the anniversary it emerged that, early on, the prime minister had looked at the possibility of evacuating Tokyo. But you cannot evacuate a city of 35 million densely packed people. Where would they go? It would have been a crisis on the scale of the Second World War for Japan and a huge blow to the international economy. A couple of weeks after the anniversary it was revealed that the most damaged Fukushima reactor had nothing like the water-cooling levels it was thought to have and was now hotter than it had been at the time of the accident. This is the worst disaster the country has faced since the end of the war, and it occasioned the first public speech by a Japanese emperor since Hirohito announced defeat on 15 August 1945, less than a week after the second American nuclear bomb exploded over Nagasaki.

Emperor Akihito, Hirohito’s son, made his first broadcast on 16 March last year. Now 78 and recovering from heart surgery, he made his second in Tokyo for the anniversary. Along with an audience of media personnel and local officials, with bereaved families in the front rows, I watched the feed in the huge theatre of the International Centre in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture and the largest city in the disaster region. The stage held an enormous triple bier of white flowers, before which a huge screen dropped down to show the stage in Tokyo, with its own elaborate array of white flowers. The empress was dressed in a traditional kimono, her eyebrows raised into a single line of perpetual distress, next to the emperor in an elegant dark suit. They bowed deeply before the flowers and the inscription – ‘spirit of the victims’ – and the emperor spoke. ‘As this earthquake and tsunami caused the nuclear power plant accident,’ he said, ‘those living in the designated danger zone lost their homes and livelihoods and had to leave the places where they used to live. In order for them to live there again safely, we have to overcome the problem of radioactive contamination, which is a formidable task.’ This passage was censored by the networks when the speech was broadcast.

Overcoming the problem of contamination remains a formidable task. The government’s preferred approach has been to play down the problem and call for team spirit. With radiation present in the vicinity of the nuclear reactors, the official exposure safety limit was at first raised to twenty times its previous level. When no one wanted vegetables from Fukushima the Ministry of Education decided to buy them up and put them in school lunches. This put the burden on parents and children to opt out, not an easy thing to do in a society that values harmony and conformity. Nicely dressed mothers in Tokyo met with the heads of their municipalities to demand that school meals be tested; they were assured that everything was fine. In Fukushima just over half of the 59 municipalities test for radiation in school lunches, some before the children sit down to eat, some afterwards. Whether or not they change the menu when the levels are too high is not clear. Several municipalities complained that they didn’t have the measuring equipment, and citizens have sometimes obtained the equipment themselves. People often find that the government is obstructive or useless in disasters and do much of the crucial work themselves as members of ad hoc or non-governmental organisations. In Japan measuring radiation is now one of those activities.

An old man in Tokyo proposed that the elderly should volunteer to consume the rice from Fukushima, since they are less susceptible to the effects of radiation, but in November it was still being prepared for school lunches in Fukushima Prefecture. There, notices to evacuate were given late or not at all, and by stopping short of declaring many contaminated areas unsafe, the government has avoided the burden of compensation for residents, who of course have no buyers for their homes. Even so, more than 63,000 people have evacuated the vicinity of the plant. Like the people who fled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fukushima evacuees feel they must conceal their origins when they move elsewhere. I also heard about a teacher who was ostracised by his colleagues for expressing a desire to leave. Fear of ostracism sometimes outweighs fear of radiation.

Disasters in the West are often compounded by the belief that human beings instantly revert to savagery in a calamity, with the result that the focus shifts from rescue to law enforcement and the protection of property, as it did recently in Haiti and New Orleans, and in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. In Japan the greater problem seems to be conformity. In Fukushima, children who refused to drink the milk in their school lunches were called to the front of their classes and humiliated by their teachers. ‘They were treated like traitors during the war,’ a woman said in a video clip I saw on television (she was telling the story to the chief cabinet minister and the trade and industry minister, who chuckled in response). A mother I met in Sendai was told by the in-laws she lived with that she could leave if she wanted to, but her husband and child were not going anywhere. Leaving meant leaving the group.

Seigo Kinoshita, a 67-year-old evacuee in Iwate Prefecture, told me in the small parlour of his temporary housing that he was tired of people saying ‘ganbare’, an exhortation that roughly translates as ‘do your best.’ Even the milkbox next to his front door had a sticker on it that said ‘ganbare’ and, in English: ‘Never give up!’ It’s hard to be lectured by your milkbox. There were four calendars on the walls of the tiny room in which we talked, maybe because they were the only decorations he had, maybe to make time pass faster or express how greatly it weighed on him in the little terraced house on a roadside high above the wiped-out town of Rikuzentakata. He had initially taken refuge in a chilly Buddhist temple with three hundred others, including eighty children from a daycare facility, not all of whom had parents to claim them when the roads opened three days later. Now he was a displaced person.

Some of the most powerful anti-nuclear demonstrations since March 2011 have been orchestrated and dominated by mothers. Many disaster-zone families are emotionally or physically divided, since women tend to be more concerned about the radiation and often it is the women and children who have fled, leaving the husband/ father behind because his job ties him down or because he worries less about his health. On 1 November 1961, women in more than sixty American cities demonstrated against nuclear weapons, and for years Women Strike for Peace remained one of the most extraordinary activist organisations in the US. The atmospheric nuclear detonations – dozens a year between 1945 and 1963, mostly in Nevada – were contaminating breast milk and leading to fears about children’s health. Women Strike for Peace played an important role in bringing about the end of above-ground testing and, later, in the creation of the anti-Vietnam War movement. After Fukushima, too, breast milk was contaminated, meaning the most elemental act of nurture could be deadly. You can clean up after an earthquake or hurricane but you can’t see what may be inside you, ready to harm the children you may one day have – that is terrifying at first, then demoralising. Often in disasters people feel tremendous solidarity with all the others who have undergone the same upheaval and loss, but in a situation like this it isn’t clear who has sustained what damage and when, if ever, it will be over.

I met a graduate student in Sendai who told me that one of the major problems survivors reported was the presence of restless ghosts: the spirits of the dead that were still hanging around in need of comfort and propitiation. Right after the disaster and on Obon, the day of the dead in Japan, huge bonfires were lit on the beaches for the ghosts to find their way to shore. In the Tohoko region, my friend Ramona Handel-Bajema codirects large-scale relief with AmeriCares, an independent humanitarian relief organisation, and I drove out with her to see a small garden project that was not yet planted – mid-March is still wintry in northern Japan. Gardens are one way of restoring people’s lives, particularly those of the elderly with time on their hands. Ramona told me about people tending gardens in the foundations of their destroyed houses. To see ‘cabbages growing where their bedroom once was’ represented a consolation and rebirth of sorts. She also told me about a community she works with where the schoolteachers fell into an argument about evacuating the elementary school. One teacher took a handful of students to safety and the rest were drowned. Another of Ramona’s projects is taking care of the older siblings of these drowned children, whose parents are lost in mourning, and teaching them to enjoy the natural world again.

The priest in charge of a Buddhist temple in Sendai showed me how the stands of tall, thin pine trees that had been planted along the coast had been shattered into spears by the tsunami. He was now working on a scheme to turn the huge mountains of rubble into levees of sorts on which mixed forests of native trees might be planted. While many were preoccupied with the suffering in the present, he was thinking about preventing the next calamity, and pressed on me DVDs of a tree-planting superhero’s adventures – in English and in Japanese. In Sendai I met other Buddhist priests and – a rarity there – a Christian priest, all working as counsellors and social organisers dealing with the trauma: one with the Philosophy Café, where people could come and talk about their experiences; another with Café du Monk (monku means ‘complaint’ in Japanese). ‘The only thing I can do is stand beside people in grief – focus on listening,’ one of them said, but the ecumenical group was also working on more practical projects to do with displacement and housing, and with measuring radiation in food and breast milk.

Before I left Japan I went to Hiroshima and met two hibakusha, survivors of the atomic explosion. Both men are now in their eighties. They had been at middle school in that era when students were taken out of school to do manual labour for the war effort; neither had been ready to talk about what had happened to them until a couple of years ago, when their sense of posterity’s need to have this information finally outweighed their desire to leave the horror behind. It can take a very long time to come to terms with catastrophe – a year isn’t very long when it comes to knowing how a society will remember, regenerate and transform itself.

For me, Hiroshima was a stunning place. Throughout Japan, the old buildings, the bamboo groves, the Buddhist temples, all familiar from imitations and representations in the West, were startling at first-hand. I had first seen Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome in my teens in Hiroshima mon amour; as an anti-nuclear activist in the 1980s and 1990s I saw photographs of it all the time. It was the icon of the destroyed city, the symbol of why we were against these weapons. A long train ride from Tokyo, and a taxi ride to my high-rise Hiroshima hotel, and I was looking out of a 19th-floor window in the cold drizzly dusk at the skeletal steel frame of what, before the bomb fell, was the dome of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. As one of the few surviving structures near the hypocentre of the explosion, it became a symbol of the bombing – and perhaps of the survival of some bit of the city even in the face of the most powerful weapon ever made. Walking there the next day I saw, directly in front of the dome, a sort of shrine with water bottles on it, as though the thirst of the survivors – or their ghosts – were still in need of slaking.

The word shima means ‘island’: Fukushima, meaning ‘fortunate island’, is now an ironic name; Hiroshima means ‘broad island’, perhaps because it is situated in the river delta, whose several tributaries divide the city into long narrow islands that stretch to the coast. In the basement of the Peace Memorial Museum, where I met the hibakusha, there was a map of the impact of the American bomb, with the hypocentre coloured red, making the city resemble an unfamiliar internal organ with veins flowing through it. The old men pointed at it as they described walking home through the burning, blackened, deadly heart on the morning of 6 August 1945, and spoke of how the dying walked with their hands outstretched, the skin hanging off them. One of them rolled up his sleeve to expose the burn scars from the fallout that descended on him and described a lifetime of wearing long-sleeved shirts even on hot days when everyone else was in short sleeves. The other talked about the varieties of cancer he’d developed. Children in utero in the summer of 1945 who were born with severe birth defects are now 67, and the care-givers they’ve lived with all their lives are dying off.

The northern tip of the central island in Hiroshima is a memorial space. On both banks of the rivers are shrines and sculptures; the Peace Memorial Museum includes dioramas, photographs and relics of the first nuclear bomb dropped on human beings. The walls near the diorama showing the city before and after the blast are papered with letters that the mayors of Hiroshima began writing in the 1960s, objecting to all nuclear testing, whether Soviet, American, British or French. Hiroshima has recovered in part by redefining its identity. Once a military garrison town, it considers itself a ‘city of peace’. And prosperity: it has elegant cafés, a vast mall where expensive European designer products are on sale along with more quotidian furnishings, clothes and snacks. Hiroshima has a major Mazda auto plant. What it means to be a city of peace is defined fairly narrowly, as being against nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

Japan is in crisis about nuclear power. While I was there the mayor of Kyoto told Kepko, the regional electrical power company, to close down its nuclear power plant and seek renewable alternatives. Fifty-two of Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants have been shut down and local governors are refusing contractors permission to continue with the building of new plants. On the face of it the country is fine without them but the long-term problems are serious. If Japan doesn’t return to nuclear power, the world’s third largest economy will have to step up its scramble for fossil fuels to keep its manufacturing and its cities running. It would have to backtrack on its carbon-emissions commitments, which would throw the delicate process of global carbon reductions even further off track. Japan can continue with nuclear power, which has proven so dangerous and mismanaged; it can abandon nuclear power and increase its reliance on oil and coal; or it can opt for decline. Add an ageing population and a low birth rate, and the tsunami begins to seem like the least of Japan’s problems. It’s possible to imagine a fourth option in which Japan embraces renewable energy and takes pride in building a new green identity, as Hiroshima built a new identity on its charred remains. But nothing suggests that this future is likely to be realised.

Disasters are often like revolutions, moments when people and government move far apart, and if government doesn’t seem criminal at such times it may seem superfluous, out of touch or incompetent. In Mexico City in 1985, an earthquake with casualties comparable to those of the tsunami in Japan changed the face of grassroots and national electoral politics. The authorities have reason to fear the aftermath of disaster. Mikhail Gorbachev regards the mishandling of the Chernobyl meltdown as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. Perhaps Japan’s disaster will come to seem like an integral part of an extraordinary year of upheaval – from Tunisia, Egypt and the Arab Spring to Chile, Spain and Greece, as well as everywhere that Occupy has reached. As in these other places, the relationship between people and government in Japan has been ruptured, but in Japan there is no insurrection as yet.

I met anti-nuclear activists who were proud of a demonstration in Tokyo in which ten thousand people had participated, raucously: impressive for Japan, but in a city of 35 million not so huge. Demonstrations and protests do not yet seem to be a force that catalyses change in civil society, though the shift away from nuclear power may be happening anyway (and the impact of Fukushima Daiichi on the global future of nuclear power should not be underestimated). The alienation and distrust that is everywhere has yet to find an adequate outlet. Perhaps change here will be subtle and slow. But it’s clear that Japan will never be the same.

Rebecca Solnit would like to thank Yayoi Mashimo, Masako Tsuno, Etsuko Yamasaki, Sabu Kohso and Rin Odawara.

Source

For more than a year, I have been hoping that the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company would find the courage to bear the unbearable and repair the breathtaking damage from last spring’s earthquake and tsunami. But a better tomorrow is not in sight. A deathly silence still pervades the desolate landscape of Fukushima and the long coastal line of northern Japan—the cesium road.

The Japanese government grows more incompetent and dysfunctional, while Tokyo Electric has dug a deep foxhole of self-preservation and clings tightly to its monopoly. I am embarrassed as a Japanese citizen to list some of the most glaring shenanigans that the government and the power company have been acting out in public over the past year:

• 1. Governmental study committees were supposed to investigate why Tokyo Electric failed to minimize the damage, but the “open” hearings were suddenly closed. The entrenched bureaucracy, as if fed by perpetual radioactivity, continues to grow while failing to disclose any new findings.
• 2. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, the sixth premier in the past five years, along with his cabinet and the largest opposition party, have agreed to raise the consumption tax from the current 5 percent to 10 percent. Apparently even that is not enough to cover the disaster damage. The government is talking about raising it to 17 percent within a year or so. When Japan achieved its famous “miracle,” its great postwar economic renaissance, there was no consumption tax.
• 3. Only five of Japan’s fifty-four nuclear reactors are still operating. People were urged during last summer’s extraordinary heat to use less electricity to prevent outages, having been convinced (falsely) that Japan had no excess power capacity. Patriotic citizens complied, enduring days and nights of acute discomfort. But because everyone used less electricity, Tokyo Electric and its subsidiaries made less money. The government, which favors Tokyo Electric, approved rate hikes of 15 percent for an ordinary household and 35 percent for large stores and industry.
• 4. Few in the mass media, in Japan or abroad, talk about Japan’s biggest nuclear secret: Monju. Named after a Buddhist saint of wisdom, Monju, Japan’s first fast-breeder reactor, squats right on a fault line. Its stated goal is to recycle the nation’s fifteen thousand tons of spent fuel and supply endless energy. But despite swallowing $15 billion of our tax money for its construction, which began on January 5, 1983, Monju has never produced any usable energy, not even for a day. It stands north of our most beautiful ancient city of Kyoto and on the shore of the Sea of Japan. Plutonium, I hear, is lethal for more than twenty thousand years. Nuclear energy is like fire, a good servant but a bad master.
• 5. Japan’s government, like its U.S. counterpart, continues raising the debt ceiling to astronomical levels. It has shown absolutely no interest in reducing the number of well-paid government employees (Japan’s only growth industry), even during the past two “lost decades,” or reducing the crowd of representatives and senators (the island nation, smaller than California, has 722 senators and representatives in the Diet for its 125 million people, compared to 535 Congress members for a U.S. population of 307 million). The 2011 catastrophe has provided only another excuse to expand government-sponsored rescue measures and justify more hiring.
• 6. Dysfunctional or corrupt actions by the government are, at last, being exposed by some muckraking in the mass media.
• News leaks have shown how Toshiba, which built the ruined Fukushima Daiichi reactors, had submitted to then–prime minister Naoto Kan one month after the nuclear disaster a worst-case scenario. Kan decided to keep it “ultra top secret” and let only four confidants view it. If the Japanese people were to read it, he feared, Tokyo would be instantly emptied. Is this the real reason the government and Tokyo Electric kept admonishing Japanese not to panic?
• The media have also been following the water—in this case, the seawater that brave firefighters and Self-Defense troops poured in immeasurable quantities onto the burning reactors. Where did all that water, contaminated by plutonium, disappear to? Into the Pacific Ocean or the ground, of course. But the truth about the contamination has been hard to find. Meanwhile, radioactive water leaks have been reported inside the ruined Fukushima complex as recently as February 2012. 
• The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s premier daily, published in January the names of prominent politicians who have been regularly receiving “money donations” from Tokyo Electric. Former prime minister Taro Aso and some current members of Prime Minister Noda’s cabinet were on the list. The intimacy between the government and the nuclear industry was again laid bare.
• 7. The earthquake and tsunami destroyed one small town after another, one fishing village after another. Those who survived and were old had nowhere to go. The government built “refugee cottages” for those who had lost everything. These were built in remote mountainous regions, supposedly for safety. Many of those who had no choice but to relocate died of despair. Some committed suicide, abandoned on the lush green archipelago where residents are expected to live longer than anywhere else in the world.                    

FALSE REASSURANCE

Is the Japanese government lying to us? Yes. Perhaps it violates good manners to say so, but good manners should no longer be expected from ordinary Japanese who have been inhaling highly radioactive dust and vapor since March 11, 2011. But we continue to behave. I assume it is a matter of pride that each of us refuses to be selfish in a crisis.

Cesium, a new word in our daily vocabulary, began showing up in dangerous concentrations in our national beverage, green tea. Green tea is supposed to be good for our health, perhaps a secret ingredient of that celebrated Japanese longevity. Japan’s largest tea farm happens to be in Shizuoka, about two hundred miles south of Fukushima. Soon after high levels of radioactivity showed up in tea, radioactive elements began invading our dairy products, poultry, pigs, cattle, vegetables, fruit, and mother’s milk. They cast their cloud over seafood caught off Fukushima, in one of the world’s richest fishing zones. Who can comprehend the apparent and hidden magnitude of radioactive contamination that threatens never to end?

• Expert reassurances abounded. As soon as the disaster hit Fukushima and for months after, one scientist after another from famous universities and government agencies appeared on nightly news programs, intoning with an air of superior knowledge that radioactive dust and vapor in the air or fish or rice failed to pose “an immediate health risk.” We, unschooled in the fields of radioactivity or medicine, wondered, if not immediately, then when? Will we have cancer?

 The experts lectured us that our intense anxiety and aversion about all things radioactive were groundless. They even implied, with little subtlety, that our deepening fear resembled herd thinking, a panic attack. Were they paid to say that the lethal leak was actually a small amount when it was the largest in the world? Or that the accident could be controlled with available safety procedures when the reactors still lie in ruins and no one can account for the deadly water and steam?

Those scholars and experts do not appear on national TV anymore. No one wonders why.

But when the experts disappeared, Tokyo Electric Power Company appeared, acknowledging on television that a reactor meltdown had indeed occurred within the first few hours of the quake and tsunami. This admission of a triple meltdown popped up two months after the accident, during which time Tokyo Electric had obstinately refused to admit to any such thing. The confession came too late for those people who had stayed but a little distance away from the reactors and were unknowingly rained upon by radioactive dust and vapor day after day. Tens of thousands of children lived nearby.

• The prime minister’s top aide said on television that Tokyo Electric had not kept the cabinet informed during the first two months and that it was shocked, very shocked. We too were shocked—at the incompetence and arrogance. 

AN END TO A SEDUCTIVE MYTHOLOGY

We realize now that the government and the power executives think we are not intelligent enough to understand the technical jargon about nuclear power. Of course, we were not familiar with those esoteric terms when the disaster struck. But we do understand we are facing a nuclear winter on this beautiful archipelago, placed on the Ring of Fire, and may not live long enough even to see such a winter.

Historically, and to this day, we have respected authority (the government) and faithfully observed our laws and regulations to the point of overdoing it. We don’t riot. We don’t loot. We don’t kill. We are taught in our schools and families that the central government, composed of our best and brightest, strives hard every day to guide our nation to safety, prosperity, and fulfillment.

• Are the best and brightest betraying us now? Is Japan’s postwar democracy failing us at the moment when we most need its collective wisdom? Our government seems neither willing nor able to reciprocate our loyalty, or foster the courage and resilience we need to recover from the disaster. Worse, we fear that what our government wants is a leap of faith and a blind eye toward its glaring incompetence. Political parties continue squabbling for power and exploiting our worst postwar disaster, which continues degenerating beyond anyone’s ability to stop it. Government bureaucrats who regulate the nuclear industry retire and then find new, higher-paying jobs working for the industry they used to monitor. Officials are still looking for ways to dispose of hundreds of thousands of tons of rubble, much of it radioactive, a far bigger burden than can be disposed of in the disaster area itself.

 Japan may have buried its twenty thousand dead—at least those who did not vanish under the debris or the waves—but thousands of people continue to await the return of their livelihoods, lost amid the wreckage and the nuclear nightmare. They hope for the day when they might go back to their homes and work to rebuild their lives. Most do not know, and have not been informed by the government or Tokyo Electric, that they can never return to the hometowns where contamination will remain lethal far beyond their life spans.

The power company and the government, joined at the hip, lecture Japanese that we have received the benefit of nuclear power generation and, because of such power, we enjoyed postwar prosperity. Hence we should not complain. Did ordinary people have any choice in deciding that Japan would develop nuclear power? No, other than the residents of small, remote communities on the shoreline who were wooed by promises of huge tax benefits, jobs for local people, and new infrastructure such as bridges, roads, swimming pools, auditoriums, and gyms. They had little choice but to accept.

The government and Tokyo Electric together constructed a most seductive mythology that nuclear power is safe, cheap, and clean. To maintain that facade, they hid numerous nuclear accidents or underplayed their health hazards.

Since bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan has cultivated a religion that condemns nuclear arms. Along the way, however, Japan metamorphosed into a strange creature that felt immune to things nuclear. Few Japanese left the country within the first weeks after the Fukushima meltdown. We can remain calm even in the midst of a horrible reality. Meanwhile, the falsehood of safe, cheap, and forever clean energy is swept away like the receding sea.

Source

Devastating nuclear reactor meltdowns like those at Chernobyl and Fukushima could happen every decade, according to a disturbing new study.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, fear similar catastrophes could occur around the world every ten to 20 years – 200 times more frequently than previously thought.

And they said people in Western Europe have a higher risk than anybody else in the world of being affected by radioactive fallout from such a disaster.

The researchers based their gloomy predictions on the operating hours of all civil nuclear reactors and how many meltdowns there have been.

They also warned that half the radioactive caesium-137 produced, which was released following the Chernobyl and Fukushima meltdowns, would spread over an area reaching as far as 1,000 kilometres (about 620 miles) from the reactor.

Western Europe is likely to be contaminated once every 50 years, according to the research team led by Jos Lelieveld, director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.

The International Atomic Energy Agency designates an area as ‘contaminated’ if it has a reading of more than 40 kilobecquerels of caesium-137 per square metre.

Prof Lelieveld said Germany needed to carry out an ‘in-depth and public analysis of the actual risks of nuclear accidents’.

And he added: ‘In light of our findings I believe an internationally coordinated phasing out of nuclear energy should also be considered.’

Accidents at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 made nuclear power a politically toxic issue.

Radioactive contamination spread across much of Europe following the meltdown at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl plant.

The meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant following the March 2011 tsunami triggered a worldwide debate on the future of the energy source, leading to Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022.

Before the crisis, Japan provided almost a third of its electricity from 54 reactors.

But earlier this month it closed its last nuclear reactor on the island of Hokkaido for maintenance – leaving the country without electricity from atomic energy for the first time in more than four decades.

Worldwide, there are currently 440 nuclear reactors in operation, with 60 more planned.

The team in Mainz found German citizens in the densely populated southwestern part of the country run the highest risk of radioactive contamination in the world because of the numerous nuclear power plants near the borders between France, Belgium and Germany and the prevailing westerly wind.

If a nuclear meltdown happened in Western Europe, an area with a population of around 28 million people would be contaminated, they said.

This figure would be even higher in southern Asia, due to the dense populations.

A major nuclear accident there would affect around 34 million people, while in the eastern USA and east Asia this would be 14 to 21 million people, said the German scientists.

Prof Lelieveld, who is an atmospheric chemist, said: ‘Germany’s exit from the nuclear energy programme will reduce the national risk of radioactive contamination.

‘However, an even stronger reduction would result if Germany’s neighbours were to switch off their reactors.’

Source

Japan farmer harvests hope in our soil

Fukushima prefecture rice farmer Takemi Shirado tends his test crop in Queensland's Burdekin valley. Click to enlarge

JAPANESE farmer Takemi Shirado still sounds grief-stricken and shell-shocked when talking about last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster that so devastated his rural community.

Catastrophic radiation contamination of the soil means his family won’t be able to sow rice on their Iwaki rice paddies, about 60km from the crippled defunct power plant, for at least 300 years.

Other local farmers are starting to grow leafy vegetables on less-contaminated fields, but are finding consumers too scared to buy their risky produce.

But Mr Shirado is clearly not a man to moan and mope.

Instead he has come to Australia as head of a consortium of Fukushima farmers to see if north Queensland’s fertile Burdekin valley might hold the solution to his prefecture’s long-term fallout-affected food problems.

Mr Shirado’s dream now is to turn the sugarcane fields around Ayr into fertile flooded rice paddies growing Japanese rice varieties in traditional organic ways, to supply the people of his ruined home prefecture once again with their staple food.

Yesterday Mr Shirado, official representative of the Fukushima farmers co-operative, was celebrating.

More than 15 months after the tsunami and nuclear explosion destroyed his community’s quiet way of life, the proud Japanese rice grower could be found standing knee deep in green rice stalks, small Japanese sickle in hand, harvesting his first Kochi rice trial in tropical north Queensland.

“It is looking good; even though it is still early days,” said a satisfied Mr Shirado.

“So far this looks like being a very good area for growing rice; I think we can grow four crops a year here and the water is very pure too.”

With strict quarantine restrictions on importing Japanese varieties of rice into Australia, Mr Shirado’s Burdekin rice scheme has had to start from scratch.

Three months ago he had just a handful of the required kochi rice seeds — only 100g — to plant in three small test plots at the Ayr agricultural research station.

After yesterday’s hand harvest, he now has 10kg of rice grain to grow his next Ayr crop on more irrigated land. By August, Mr Shirado hopes to have turned that 10kg of rice into one tonne of seed, before expanding exponentially.

Local Queensland agricultural regional development manager Gareth Jones admits the plans of the Fukushima Farmers co-operative are ambitious; particularly their certainty of harvesting a rapid four crops of rice a year, each taking just three months to grow.

But he says the Burdekin needs diversity, and that new varieties of sushi or short-grain rice grown using flood irrigation, might fit well into fallow rotations of local canegrowers.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that when this project started, the Japanese delegation felt they were planting seeds of hope for the future,” Mr Jones says.

Original source

Despite some remaining differences, a deal has been reached with Iran that will allow the UN nuclear agency to restart a long-stalled probe into suspicions that Tehran has secretly worked on developing nuclear arms, the UN nuclear chief said Tuesday.

The news from International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano, who returned from Tehran on Tuesday, comes just a day before Iran and six world powers meet in Baghdad for negotiations and could present a significant turning point in the heated dispute over Iran’s nuclear intentions. The six nations hope the talks will result in an agreement by the Islamic Republic to stop enriching uranium to a higher level that could be turned quickly into the fissile core of nuclear arms.

Iran insists its nuclear program is only for power and medical applications, not weapons.

On Tuesday, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported that Iranian scientists had inserted a domestically made fuel rod, which contains pellets of 20 percent enriched uranium, into the core of a research nuclear reactor in Tehran.

The advance would be another step in achieving proficiency in the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Iran said in January that it had produced the first nuclear fuel rod, and that it had to find a way to make them because Western sanctions prohibit their purchase from foreign markets.

By compromising on the IAEA probe, Iranian negotiators in Baghdad could argue that the onus was now on the other side to show some flexibility and temper its demands. Although Amano’s trip and the talks in Baghdad are formally separate, Iran hopes progress with the IAEA can boost its chances Wednesday in pressing the US and Europe to roll back sanctions that have hit Iran’s critical oil exports and blacklisted the country from international banking networks.

It was unclear, though, how far the results achieved by Amano would serve that purpose, with him returning without the two sides signing the deal, despite his upbeat comments.

After talks in Tehran between Amano and chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, “the decision was made … to reach agreement” on the mechanics of giving the IAEA access to sites, scientists and documents it seeks to restart its probe,” Amano told reporters at Vienna airport after his one-day trip to Tehran.

Amano said differences existed on “some details,” without elaborating but added that Jalili had assured him that these “will not be an obstacle to reach agreement.” He spoke of “an almost clean text” that will be signed soon, although he could not say when.

Western diplomats are skeptical of Iran’s willingness to open past and present activities to full perusal, believing it would only reveal what they suspect and Tehran denies – that the Islamic Republic has researched and developed components of a nuclear weapons program. They say that Tehran’s readiness to honour any agreement it has signed is the true test of its willingness to cooperate

The United States is among those skeptics. In a statement released soon after Amano’s announcement, Robert A. Wood, America’s chief delegate to the nuclear agency, said Washington appreciated Amano’s efforts but remained “concerned by the urgent obligation for Iran to take concrete steps to cooperate fully with the verification efforts of the IAEA, based on IAEA verification practices.”

“We urge Iran to take this opportunity to resolve all outstanding concerns about the nature of its nuclear program,” said the statement. “Full and transparent cooperation with the IAEA is the first logical step.”

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle also urged Iran to put professed good intentions into action.

“Enduring and substantial cooperation by Iran with the International Atomic Energy Agency to clear up the open questions surrounding the Iranian nuclear program would be an important and at the same time overdue step in the right direction,” he said in a statement.

On the Baghdad talks, “the aim is to make progress not just atmospherically but also on substance,” he said, reflecting Western views that the feel-good effect achieved at a previous round in Istanbul last month must now be built upon with concrete steps aimed at reducing international concerns over Tehran’s nuclear agenda.

For the six powers – the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany – a main concern is Iran’s production of uranium enriched to 20 percent, which is far higher than needed for regular energy-producing reactors but used for one Iran says it needs for medical research. The US and its allies fear the higher-enriched uranium could be quickly boosted to warhead-grade material.

US officials have said Washington will not backpedal from its stance that Iran must fully halt uranium enrichment. But speculation is increasing that the priorities have shifted to block the 20 percent enrichment and perhaps allow Iran to maintain lower-level nuclear fuel production – at least for now.

Iranian officials could package such a scenario as a victory for their domestic audience. In Israel, it would likely be greeted with dismay and widen rifts between President Barack Obama’s US administration and Israeli officials who keep open the threat of military action against Iran’s nuclear sites.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned against concessions, saying world powers should make “clear and unequivocal demands” that Iran stop all of its nuclear enrichment activity.

“Iran wants to destroy Israel and it is developing nuclear weapons to fulfill that goal,” Netanyahu said at a conference in Jerusalem. “Against this malicious intention, leading world powers need to display determination and not weakness. They should not make any concessions to Iran.”

Jalili, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator who met with Amano and will also be the lead envoy at the Baghdad talks, said his country hopes for a new beginning when the talks start on Wednesday.

“We hope that the talks in Baghdad will be a kind of dialogue that will give shape to … cooperation,” Jalili said after arriving in Baghdad late Monday.

As part of any agreement, Amano and his agency are focused on getting Iran to let agency experts to probe various high-profile Iranian sites, including the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran, where the agency believes Iran in 2003 ran explosive tests needed to set off a nuclear charge. The suspected blasts took place inside a pressure chamber.

Iran has never said whether the chamber existed, but describes Parchin as a conventional military site. Iran, however, has blocked IAEA requests for access to sites, scientists and documents needed for its investigation for more than four years.

Amano’s talks included Jalili as well as Iran’s foreign minister and other officials including the head of Iran’s nuclear agency, Fereidoun Abbasi.

Iranian lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahtpisheh told The Associated Press on Monday that Tehran will likely accept more inspections of Parchin “if it feels there is good will within the (IAEA).”

But Falahtpisheh warned that this new openness will likely come with expectations that the West would in return ease international sanctions on Iran.

“In opening up to more inspections, Iran aims at lowering the crisis over its nuclear case,” he said. “But if the sanctions continue, Iran would stop this.”

A political analyst in Tehran, Hamid Reza Shokouhi, said Iran is carefully watching to see if the West shows more “flexibility and pays attention to Iranian demands” during Amano’s trip.

“Then Iran will show flexibility, too,” Shokouhi said.

But some Iranian media was critical of Amano and the IAEA, possibly reflecting internal divisions on how far to go compromise on nuclear issues.

In a sign of ebbing market worries, oil prices have steadily fallen since Iran and world powers resumed talks in April in Istanbul. Fears of supply disruptions because of military conflict or Iranian shipping blockades helped drive prices above $106 a barrel earlier this year. Oil rose to slightly above $92 per barrel Monday in New York.

Source

Hundreds of Alaska Airlines flight attendants have filed a formal complaint about uniforms they suspect might be causing their skin to rash and develop lesions, and their hair to fall out. But based on the timing of the symptoms and their relation to similar symptoms in local marine life and polar bear populations, it appears as though radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster may also be a potential culprit.

KING 5 News in Seattle, Wash., first broke the news about the “mystery illness” that has reportedly affected at least 280 flight attendants thus far. According to accounts, those afflicted by the condition say they have developed persistently itchy skin, skin lesions, and hair loss, all of which they suspect may have to do with newer flight uniforms that allegedly contain tributyl phosphate, a toxic organophosphorus compound linked to skin problems (http://www.rightdiagnosis.com).

But not everyone is convinced that the uniforms are to blame, including Alexander Higgins who recently connected the dots to discover a potential link to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. After comparing the flight attendants’ symptoms to those reported on polar bears and marine life from the northwest U.S. throughout the past year, the timing and correlation of the two is highly suspect.

Are Alaska Airlines flight attendants suffering the effects of nuclear radiation fallout?

Back in April, AlaskaPublic.org reported that an alarming number of polar bears living in the Beaufort Sea, which is located just north of Alaska and Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories, were turning up with skin lesions and Alopecia, which is another name for hair loss. And before the polar bears, it was apparently ice seals and walruses living in the arctic that were suffering similar symptoms (http://www.alaskapublic.org).

Upon these discoveries, it seemed as though scientists and biologists tried every which way to avoid tagging nuclear radiation as the cause, blaming viruses, bacteria, and other factors as potential causes. But all of these hypotheses have failed, under further scrutiny, to prove true, which leaves one major elephant in the room that is not being discussed: nuclear fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

Based on the timing of when these creatures began to suffer their horrible symptoms, as well as the nature of their symptoms, it appears as though radiation from Fukushima may at least be one of the causes of this mystery disease. And the striking similarity of the animals’ symptoms to those of the Alaska Airlines flight attendants points even more heavily towards a nuclear radiation link in the latter case as well.

In any case, there is little or no chance that the mainstream media, the Association of Flight Attendants, or any other prominent group will dare question radiation of Fukushima as a cause. After all, the public has been deliberately left in the dark the whole time about the true severity of Fukushima radiation, which we recently reported has been far worse than what we have all been told in the official story (http://www.naturalnews.com/035847_plume-gate_Fukushima_radiation.html).

Sources for this article include:

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com

Source

When Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from the U.S. state of Oregon, visited the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on April 6, he spent about an hour looking at a building constructed under strict anti-quake standards and observed the facility that processes water contaminated by radiation.

Although he was driven by car past the reactor buildings, he did not actually enter any of the reactor buildings, according to officials of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the plant.

But after his return to the United States, Wyden, who sits on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, fueled concerns of possible catastrophic events at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima plant, specifically what would happen if a huge quake damaged the spent fuel rod pool there.

TEPCO has issued statements reassuring the public that such a disaster would not occur, saying the structure has been reinforced to withstand serious shaking.

But these days, even politicians may seem more reliable than TEPCO about information concerning nuclear safety.

Wyden sent a letter dated April 16 to Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan’s ambassador to the United States, that said the storage pool holding spent nuclear fuel at the No. 4 reactor could collapse if the reactor building was hit by another major earthquake or tsunami. The senator also warned that emissions of radioactive materials in such an event would be much greater than after last year’s accident.

The letter also said that work should be accelerated to remove the nuclear fuel from the pool and stated that the United States was prepared to provide all forms of support for such efforts.

Copies of the letter were sent to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

In its April 17 edition, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that included Wyden’s claim that there was a serious and unresolved understatement of the earthquake risk at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

The Huffington Post carried a report that included an analysis by an expert who said that if radiation spewed from nuclear fuel in the No. 4 reactor pool because of insufficient cooling, the total amount of cesium-137 emitted would be at least 10 times the amount released during the Chernobyl disaster.

The Washington Post also ran an article about the dangers of the No. 4 reactor.

Alarms about the No. 4 reactor were also being raised in Japan.

Mitsuhei Murata, 74, a professor emeritus at Tokaigakuen University who once served as Japan’s ambassador to Switzerland, said, “The existence of the No. 4 reactor has become a major national security issue for the entire world that does not take a back seat even to North Korea’s missile issue.”

He had called for a halt to operations at the Hamaoka nuclear power plant even before the Great East Japan Earthquake struck last year, leading to the nuclear crisis.

“If an accident should occur at the No. 4 reactor, it could be called the start of the ultimate catastrophe for the world,” Murata said as a witness at an Upper House Budget Committee hearing in March.

According to Murata, his comments at the hearing were translated into English and posted on a blog by Akio Matsumura, who once worked at the United Nations. The post was accessed by individuals from 160 nations.

Compared with the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, which all experienced meltdowns, the No. 4 reactor was not seriously damaged by the March 11, 2011, quake and tsunami because it was undergoing a periodic inspection at the time.

However, the No. 4 reactor building houses a storage pool containing 1,535 spent fuel rods, the largest number of any of the reactors.

An explosion and fire at the No. 4 reactor blew away the walls and roof of the steel-reinforced concrete building, so the reactor building was hit by major structural damage.

Moreover, the storage pool is still not covered and remains exposed to the atmosphere. That situation has raised serious questions about what would happen if another quake with an intensity of 7 struck the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

Murata has his own predictions.

“If the storage pool should collapse and the 1,535 fuel rods began burning in the atmosphere, an endless amount of radiation would be emitted. Of course, that would mean that Tokyo would become unlivable,” he said.

Murata continued: “Just 50 meters from the No. 4 reactor is the common pool for the No. 1 to No. 6 reactors. The common pool holds 6,375 spent nuclear fuel rods. If a fire should occur at the No. 4 reactor pool, the common pool would also not stand a chance.”

That is the potential crisis at the No. 4 reactor that is causing so much fear around the world.

In fact, immediately after last year’s accident, the biggest concern raised by the United States was the storage pool at the No. 4 reactor.

A major factor behind the NRC’s decision to issue an evacuation recommendation for U.S. citizens within an 80-kilometer radius of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, much wider than the one set by the Japanese government, was because of information obtained that the storage pool at the No. 4 reactor was empty of cooling water.

That information later proved false. And cooling of the storage pool has now been maintained.

But Arnie Gundersen, a U.S. nuclear engineer who visited Japan in February, has raised other concerns.

In an interview with Shukan Asahi at that time, Gundersen said the nuclear fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor still has the power to physically split the Japanese archipelago.

He said the spent nuclear fuel in the No. 4 reactor pool is equivalent to several reactor cores and contains radiation equal to the amount released in the atmosphere by all past nuclear experiments.

Gundersen has also written that the No. 4 reactor building’s structure has weakened, the building is tilted, and that he has advised friends in Tokyo to immediately evacuate should the No. 4 reactor collapse.

TEPCO on April 26 issued a press release that disputed Gundersen’s claims.

“The No. 4 reactor building is not tilted and it, including the storage pool, will not be destroyed by a quake,” it said.

According to the release, measurements were taken to confirm that the floor where the storage pool is located is parallel to the water surface of the pool.

TEPCO officials also explained that the steel support at the base of the pool and concrete wall had been reinforced by last July, which has increased by 20 percent the leeway against a possible quake.

In addition, the utility conducted a simulation exercise using analytical models that showed that even if a lower-6 intensity quake were to strike the plant again, it would not collapse.

TEPCO has also begun work to cover the entire No. 4 reactor building in order to start removing the spent nuclear fuel from the storage pool. Work to remove the fuel rods could begin as soon as next year.

However, one problem is that TEPCO’s information is now generally greeted with doubts.

“The trust in the central government and TEPCO which allowed the accident to happen has fallen around the world,” Murata said. “There is no nation that wholeheartedly believes those releases.”

In the United States, plans have been devised to set up a neutral and independent evaluation committee consisting of experts from around the world to look into the situation at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant and consider ways to resolve the problems there. Such moves show that many feel TEPCO and the Japanese government can no longer be depended upon to deal with the accident.

“Since TEPCO is, after all, a for-profit company, it cannot be said to be making every possible effort,” Murata said. “There is no time to waste. Knowledge from around the world should be gathered as soon as possible to begin the work of removing the nuclear fuel from the storage pool.”

Murata has sent a letter to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda asking that action be taken, but so far nothing specific has been done.

Source

Odaka under mountains of debris a year after 311. Click to enlarge

For the media, time is of the essence in a news story.  The March 11, 2011 disaster attracted thousands of reporters and photographers from around the world.  There was a brief deluge of Japanese and international media coverage on the first anniversary, this spring.  Now the journalists have packed up and gone and by accident or design Japan’s government seems to be mobilizing its agenda, aware that it is under less scrutiny.

The press pack has disappeared like a ghost since this April.  The influx of foreign media has suddenly stopped, as I can attest since I worked as a translator and aid to many foreign journalists in the year up to the 3.11 anniversary in 2012.  Using the keywords ‘Fukushima’ and ‘nuclear plant’ in Japanese to scour the Nikkei TELECOM 21 search engine shows 9,981 domestic news items in April 2012, just over half the 17,272 stories the previous month.

As if to take advantage of the precise timing of the media evacuation, the municipal government of Minami-soma city, Fukushima Prefecture began implementing a blueprint planned some time earlier.  In the dead of night on Monday April 16th, the city lifted the no-entry regulations and changed evacuation zone designations that had stood since March 12, 2011.  The decision allowed people to return to the district of Odaka and some parts of the Haramachi district.

Watanabe Ichie, a volunteer from Tokyo who witnessed the scene near the roadblock into the zone observed that: “several police vehicles with flashing red lights arrived after 23:00 on April 15th. By 0:15, all the vehicles had gone”. “After that, all that remained was the light from the traffic signals.”  The following morning, cars moved freely inside the once-prohibited area.

Mayor Sakurai’s Drive to Reopen Minami-Soma

20 kilometer evacuation zone around Fukushima. Click to enlarge

The home of Minami-soma’s mayor, Sakurai Katsunobu, is located in the newly reopened part of Haramachi.  He has often complained about what he calls the irrational policy of the government, calculating the exclusion zone by distance rather than the spread of radiation. A former dairy farmer and a passionate booster of the region, he is attached to his land and desperate to quicken the reconstruction of his devastated city, despite the risks.

The 56-year-old mayor has been single all his life and has no children. In interviews, he tends to downplay the risk of radiation. In the first week of May 2011, he even joked:  “Fukushima is not the same as Hiroshima or Nagasaki. No one even knows for sure how many people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. Regardless of radiation, the cancer rate in our world is quite high. Yet people appear to be afraid of radiation, which is like a ghost that never appears.”

The city reopened the no-entry zone in May, insisting that radiation levels in Odaka and some parts of Haramachi had fallen enough to be safe.  However, some residents are unhappy with this decision. Shibaguchi Takashi (42), a former acupuncturist and the father of a 6-year-old daughter Nana, refuses to return to his home inside the former exclusion zone, preferring his temporary accommodation.  “The city says that the radiation level is completely safe, but when my neighbors checked the radiation level under the eaves of my house, it was over two microsieverts.” (henceforth, μSv) He added:  “I am sure that radioactive materials released immediately after the explosion are unchanged on the leaking roof. I believe it is too dangerous to go back there.”

Even if it were safe, Odaka has other problems: “There is no reconstruction of public facilities and infrastructure, and I wonder how we can make a living there.”  There is also growing anxiety over the compensation process among evacuees inside the newly liberated zone.  Does this mean that compensation is going to be halted, as many fear?

On April 21st, with cherry blossoms in full bloom in Minami-soma, I was shown around Odaka and parts of Haramachi by 73-year-old Otome Takao, the head of a group of local volunteers and owner of a business hotel called “Rokkaku” near a former security check point. The roadblocks were gone and I saw many cars going back and forth inside the area. Lots of police cars were patrolling – neighbors said that as soon as the security check points were lifted, thieves began sneaking into houses.

The area is like a wasteland.  There is almost no life, most facilities are closed, the shopping street is dead and everything has basically frozen in time since March 11, 2011.

In many places, water is leaking as the tsunami and earthquake shifted the ground. Debris from the disaster is scattered everywhere, and houses, shrines and infrastructure are badly damaged. By contrast, the cherry trees were in full bloom as if nothing was wrong, regardless of the chaos caused by contamination and radiation.

Some residents, including small children who looked to be under 10 years old were cleaning up the streets in front of their houses from the mud and vegetation washed up by the Tsunami. Near the coastline, others were clearing out the mud from houses that had been partially swallowed up by the water.

April is a symbolic month in Japan because thousands of students enter new schools. Some public schools in the city that were closed amidst fears of high radiation are now able to reopen, based on the results of the local governmental reports on decontamination.

But Miura Bansyo, a Buddhist priest and anti-nuclear activist, has disputed government claims that schools are safe.  He and other members of his NGO confirmed radiation of 2 – 9 uSv per hour at a number of spots on the school route around the Ishigami Daiichi Elementary School in February 2012. Disregarding his warnings, the elementary school was reopened on February 27th, accommodating hundreds of pupils.

Growing concern about the health risks for children aside, residents of the city appear to be leading ordinary lives. At Yonomori Park, the most popular site for “Hanami” viewing in the city, about a dozen children played in the sand under the beautiful cherry blossom on April 21th – admittedly a much smaller number than usual.

Suzuki Tokiko (64), who lives near the park, detected 0.97 uSv per hour there with her own dosimeter on April 20th. When she informed the city, she says they responded that “The radiation level is low and you can enjoy cherry blossom viewing without problems.”

After the crisis began on April 19th, 2011, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology announced that the amount of radiation a child can be exposed to in one year is 20 millisieverts. This figure is 20 times higher than the former exposure ceiling of 1 millisievert per year.

Despite growing concern about the health of children, an experts-panel commissioned by the Cabinet last December 15th rubber-stamped the 20-millisievert cap for exposure per year.  The report said, “the risk to health, compared to other cancer-promoting factors, is low.  Smoking contains a risk equivalent to 1000-2000 millisieverts, obesity 200-500 millisieverts, and lack of vegetables and passive smoking is equal to 100-200 millisieverts.”¹

Dr. Koide Hiroaki, assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Nuclear Reactor Experiment Research Center, criticized those standards in a discussion with the author in January:  “Japan is supposed to be a law-abiding country. So, legally, we should not expose ordinary people to more than 1 millisievert a year”, he said. He explained, “I am considered ‘a radiation worker’ since I work at a radiation research laboratory at Kyoto University. The upper limit of radiation exposure per year for me is 20 millisieverts as I am paid in accordance to my exposure to radiation.  Only those with such specialized jobs are allowed exposure to that level of radiation and if they exceed the cap, they have to leave their jobs.”

“The government is pushing this standard on ordinary people, including children. That is a very high exposure level that goes beyond the imagination,” he said angrily.

A fifth grader (age 11) at Haramachi Daisan Elementary School, alluded to the fact that, among those who remained in the city, radiation has become the elephant in the room.  “Now, no one talks about radiation. Teachers used to talk about it but it has stopped since 3 months ago. I no longer hear anything about it.”

He reported that 21 students have returned to his class, down from 30 before March 11. He lives in the city with his father, his mother having fled to Hiroshima with his 1-year-old sister. The boy innocently disclosed that his parents’ marriage is probably on the rocks because his mum has found a new boyfriend in Hiroshima. Indeed, marriages have been strained by the divisions since 3.11.

Apart from lifting the no-go zone in Odaka and parts of Haramachi, the city government plans to start “disaster area reconstruction support tours”, as early as June. The city wants to bring back tourists and is even planning to allow people to experience nuclear hazards by providing them with dosimeters, a city official said.

Spring, Sakura and Suicide

Odaka shrine: deformed by the earthquake. Click to enlarge

In the beautiful season of spring, under a bed of Sakura petals, there is a hidden facet of life here that the Japan media and the state do little to publicize — the surging suicide rate among evacuees.

Local counselors in northeast Japan agree that suicide cases among the evacuees in temporary houses is rising due to their isolated and hopeless situation after being evacuated from their communities.

The National Police Agency (NPA) announced in January, however, that the three disaster-affected prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima boasted a record-low suicide rate in the decade until 2011.  Citing the NPA, the Mainichi newspaper on January 11th reported suicide figures for the year 2011:  Iwate (400), Miyagi (483) and Fukushima (525). The national average for the year per prefecture was 652.  In 2010, the figure for suicides in Iwate was 467, in Miyagi 620 and in Fukushima 540.²

However, many people in the devastated areas are suspicious of the official statistics. Has the government fabricated the figure to avoid panic?  Why is the suicide rate in Tohoku so low despite the fact that articles even in the mainstream media have highlighted the problem of suicides in temporary housing?

Domae Syogo, who heads a local NGO called  “Kyodo-No-Tsudoi Net” in Iwaki city, 40 kms from the radiation exclusion zone, does not believe the government’s figure. He reports that at least 50 people have taken their own lives in temporary houses in Iwaki city. The elderly are the most vulnerable. “In most cases, the evacuees live in isolation and lack communication with others. They choose to die by starvation, refusing to eat.”   Domae himself has been a witness to inspections conducted after the suicide of an evacuee.

Domae says that the official suicide figures have been fabricated to save face.  “Nobody in the bureaucracy wants to take responsibility for the deaths of these people. In order to conceal their fault, police and city officials press hard for cover-ups, such as by classifying the suicides as accidents or death from sickness.”

Suicide cases are expected to grow. Dr. Noda Fumitaka, a psychiatrist at Yotsuya Yui Clinic in Tokyo, explains why.  “In the first year after the disaster, people do not have enough room to consider their own psychological health as they are striving so hard to restore their material lives to where they were before the disaster.  What they lost returns to them with the strongest impact at around the first-year anniversary.”

“Mental care, especially during this crucial period is vital and we need to take care of these people,” he stresses. At the same time, the number of volunteers coming to Fukushima and northeast Japan has plummeted and many volunteer groups face bankruptcy and the shutdown of their activities for want of donations and staff.

A Crime Wave in the Wake of Disaster

Behind the doors, in Iwaki city, there is another story that rarely appears openly in the media. Violent crimes conducted by nuclear workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Iwaki city is the staging area for workers from the plant. Every three months, hundreds of new faces have been coming to the city in rotation; the average period that a worker can work on site is about three months due to the cap on radiation exposure.

Local people near Iwaki’s downtown area complain that the atmosphere and security in their district has changed dramatically for the worse because of these workers. On January 12th, when I tried to tour the entertainment areas of the city’s downtown at around 9 p.m., three female high school students stopped me.  “Never go there alone,” they warned. There have been so many rapes in the Tamachi district because stressed-out nuclear workers have been attacking girls!”

One of the girls, 16-year-old Kikuchi Maki, told me the story about an incident involving her 19-year-old friend last April. She said her friend was raped by a man who looked like a nuclear worker in a back alley when she was alone after saying goodbye to her friends downtown between 1:00-2:00 a.m.  Although she reported the rape, a policeman in his fifties refused to accept her complaint and sent her home. The three girls said that such rapes were unheard of before 3.11. They have become very cautious even during daytime, avoiding visiting the downtown district alone.

That story is likely the tip of the iceberg.  In Iwaki’s entertainment district, there are many similar stories and rumors of rape by nuclear workers whose victims include young hostesses and even the elderly manager of a bar. Alongside the rape cases, Mr. Saito a local resident in his early thirties who works at the Fukushima Daiichi plant tells of a friend who was beaten up by four or five unfamiliar people who spoke the Kyushu dialect.  He said the assault, which took place one late night last August after a friend’s wedding, was carried out with a wooden sword and required hospitalization. Saito is sure that the assaulters were nuclear workers.

According to the testimony of residents in the downtown area, nuclear workers have become quieter since last August partly because their companies have slapped a curfew at their hotels after 21:00 and also because temporary houses were built last August to accommodate them.

When I searched for articles on “Rape” and “Iwaki” from the period of March 11th, 2011 to today, I found not a single result. Yet local people claim that these crimes have occurred. Fujinami Keiko, a mother of a high school girl, explained why journalists have not publicized these cases: “The Japanese media do not want to escalate the confrontation against TEPCO, a major sponsor, by picking up on the crimes of their subcontracted workers.”

In Hirono, which hosts the J-Village temporary crisis center, some residents believe that nuclear workers were responsible for a string of thefts inside the red zone. The owner of an inn that accommodates dozens of these workers confided: “I am sure that the thefts have been done by the nuclear workers. In my inn, I see many suspicious people with tattoos and so on.” Rumors are also rife about yakuza who enter the red zone to steal new cars and even expensive pets.

” A nuclear worker who was in charge of supervising the construction site under Kajima Construction company commented: “The thieves are ‘nuclear workers’. Putting the entry-permit issued by TEPCO on the front window of a car means that any nuclear worker can easily pass the security checkpoint.  It is very hard to catch them.”  In fact, there has not been a single news story about the arrest of nuclear workers for theft within the prohibited zone.

On the one hand, such charges may express the inclination of local people to blame crime on outsiders. On the other hand, we know from places like Okinawa that a concentration of men constrained to tough discipline and stressful working conditions might provoke such crimes. And Fukushima Daiichi has indeed become another war front.

Young Nuclear Workers at Risk

Another aspect of the Daiichi story has not been adequately discussed: the growing number of young nuclear subcontract workers.  Approximately half of the workers at the plant since last August are aged 19-35.  A radiation expert who has checked hundreds of workers for a major construction company told me that young workers are favored because they can endure physically demanding tasks like lifting heavy objects and climbing heights.

“Older laborers are not useful at all,” a radiation expert said. A 33-year-old nuclear worker in charge of treating the contaminated water at the Daiichi plant indicated that the number of young workers from across Japan has rapidly increased since last summer. “It is double the pay of a normal construction job,” he said.  “They make themselves believe that everything will be all right since others the same age are already there”.

High unemployment in rural areas appears to be playing a role in boosting the numbers of young nuclear workers. Last December, at newly constructed temporary houses in J-Village, Hirono town, I met dozens of young nuclear workers aged 19-23, originally from Niigata prefecture.  They said that they came to Fukushima Daiichi because there was no work at home.

Since the 3.11 memorial event in March, newspaper and TV coverage of nuclear issues and nuclear workers have sharply declined. Will they too be forgotten as the government and TEPCO align their agenda?

Continuous Dumping of Contaminated Water 

Possibly angry at this situation, on April 21st a 62-year-old nuclear worker broke the silence on the continued leakage of contaminated water from Fukushima Daiichi.  Speaking to me, he requested anonymity for fear of losing his job. He supervises a construction site aimed at building a new facility to extract radioactive materials such as cesium and strontium from the contaminated water used to cool the plant’s crippled reactors. He revealed that the current facility removes only cesium and that other radioactive materials such as strontium cannot be cleaned up.

He expressed astonishment at the scale of the cleanup operation.  “You know how much contaminated water is stored at the Fukushima Daiichi site? It is 200,000 tons. It is an enormous amount!” “In reality,” he said, raising his voice, “it is impossible to store that much water on site. So, it is obvious that some of the contaminated water has been leaked into the ocean.”

TEPCO announced on March 26th, 2012 that approximately 120 tons of water had leaked from a treatment pipe, forcing them to halt operating the treatment facility. Thi was the second time in two weeks that contaminated water leaked from the nuclear power plant.³

After being used to cool the reactors, the water contains massive amounts of radioactive substances and is put into the water-processing facility so it can be recycled for use as a coolant. “Everyone there knows that the amount of water is huge but does not speak about it. Anyone who works there understands that nothing can be done except to leak the water!” he stressed. “Everyone criticizes North Korea for its missiles. But what about Japanese morality? The contamination will spread all over the world, reaching to Kamchatka, Hawaii and the U.S. soon,” he added.

Toward the end of our conversation, he said, “You know, in Japan, there is ‘honne’ (honest feeling) and ‘tatemae’ (polite-face). “Our tatemae is that we are doing our utmost to stop the leakage of contamination, and our honnne is that we are dumping massive amounts of contaminated water into the ocean.”

After hearing his testimony, on April 25th I watched Japan’s Nippon TV special program, “Continued Days of Inspection: The Safety of Tap Water.”  The program focused on the efforts made by the Water Bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to deal with concerns over radioactive materials in the water.  Officials spoke while the screen showed TV crews at the bureau’s site examining the cleanup of radioactive materials.  A mother of small children who refuses to drink tap water and instead buys bottled water appeared as a consumer representative.  The water official held a lump of soil taken from the water facility and said: “Even though we found 38 becquerels of cesium per kilogram, this is below government standards. So, we can safely drink the water.”  The announcer stated that the Tokyo Water Bureau updates its water examination every day on their website.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in December announced a new standard for safe drinking water of 10 becquerels of cesium per kilogram.  The ministry had previously set a provisional standard of 200 becquerels per kilogram (cesium), 300 bec (iodine), 20 bec (uranium) and 1 bec (plutonium) for drinking water, according to the official press release on March 17th.⁴

At the end of the program, a young male announcer concluded saying, “I have an impression that there is still a gap between the endeavors of the water bureau and the mentality of consumers. Today, also, no radioactive materials were detected in the water.”

Reflecting on the nuclear whistleblower who warned about the Daiichi cleanup, we must ask whether this assurance of the safety of Tokyo’s tap water is  ‘tatemae’ or ‘honnne’?

Makiko SEGAWA is a freelance journalist based in Japan, as well as a translator and guide to overseas media. Her clients include France 24, The Wall Street Journal and other European television production companies such as RAI TV, the U.K Performgroup, AB International and Seven Saint Production. She can be contacted at makikosegawa@gmail.com

Recommended citation: Makiko Segawa, “After The Media Has Gone: Fukushima, Suicide and the Legacy of 3.11,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 19, No. 2, May 7, 2012.

Notes

¹ See here.

² NPA Statistics: see here and here.

³ See here.

⁴ See here and here.

Source

On March 11, 2011, Japan endured a massive earthquake and tsunami that caused a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. A year later, the site remains a toxic wasteland, and only now is the full extent of the catastrophe being revealed.

The mainstream news reported that the deadly earthquake and tsunami killed at least 16,000 people and that airborne radiation levels in parts of Fukushima prefecture were expected to remain near dangerous levels at least until 2022.

However, now Reactor 4 is currently on the verge of collapse. Its collapse, according to published reports, could result in the evacuation of 1/3 of Japan’s population.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently visited the scene and had some alarming impressions. In a letter to Japan’s ambassador to the U.S., he commented upon the fact that “the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amid the reactor ruins may have far greater potential offsite consequences than the molten cores.”

The Fukushima site, he wrote, has an “extremely large radioactive inventory without a strong containment structure,” and “several pools could possibly topple or collapse from structural damage coupled with another powerful earthquake.”

If that were to occur, the lack of water would “cause melting and ignite its zirconium metal cladding—resulting in a fire that could deposit large amounts of radioactive materials over hundreds of miles.” This is significant, as the “Fukushima Daiichi site is storing nearly 85 times the amount estimated to have been released at Chernobyl.”

Wyden is calling for “an international effort” to fund the placement of “spent reactor fuel into dry, hardened storage casks. This will require about “244 additional casks, at a cost of $1M per cask.”

Much like what happened with the economic meltdown in the U.S., those behind Japan’s nuclear disaster are asking for financial assistance. Associated Press reports that TEPCO, Japan’s power company, “needs to fund billions of dollars of compensation payments as well as the massive cost of scrapping the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant,” and “it intends to cut $37B in costs and raise electricity bills by 10% in exchange for a $12B public bailout.”

Online news outlet The Huffington Post added that in January former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan “said that a meltdown at Unit 4 would force the evacuation of Tokyo and close half of Japan. “Where would all these people go? The Japanese government reportedly spoke with Chinese and Russian officials about sending them 40M Japanese citizens because of the “extreme danger of life-threatening radiation poisoning.”

It’s estimated the majority of municipalities around the Fukushima plant will likely maintain high levels of radiation for at least a decade. The soil in and around Fukushima is heavily contaminated and will likely never be safe again.

The nightmare has already led to some changes. According to Greenpeace, “safety and maintenance concerns have led the country to at least temporarily shut down all but one of 54 reactors, and the last one will likely shut down by the beginning of May.”

Frank Whalen has been a radio talk show host for the past 17 years, and worked as a consultant for Maxim magazine. For more news and views from Frank, see www.frankwhalenlive.com

Source

More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site’s current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.

But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel — 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.

Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat

The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core’s reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean — just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored — but it’s also open to the elements because a hydrogen explosion blew off the roof during the early days of the accident and sent the building into a list.

Alarmed by the precarious nature of spent fuel storage during his recent tour of the Fukushima Daiichi site, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, subsequently fired off letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko and Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Ichiro Fujisaki. He implored all parties to work together and with the international community to address this situation as swiftly as possible. 

A press release issued after his visit said that Wyden, a senior member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources who is highly experienced with nuclear waste storage issues, believes the situation is “worse than reported,” with “spent fuel rods currently being stored in unsound structures immediately adjacent to the ocean.” The press release also noted the structures’ high susceptibility to earthquakes and that “the only protection from a future tsunami, Wyden observed, is a small, makeshift sea wall erected out of bags of rock.”

As opposed to units 1-3 at Fukushima Daiichi, where the meltdowns occurred, unit 4′s reactor core, like units 5 and 6, was not in operation when the earthquake struck last year. But unlike units 5 and 6, it had recently uploaded highly radioactive spent fuel into its storage pool before the disaster struck.

Robert Alvarez, a nuclear waste expert and former senior adviser to the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, has crunched the numbers pertaining to the spent fuel pool threat based on information he obtained from sources such as Tepco, the U.S. Department of Energy, Japanese academic presentations and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), the U.S. organization created by the nuclear power industry in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

What he found, which has been corroborated by other experts interviewed by AlterNet, is an astounding amount of vulnerably stored spent fuel, also known as irradiated fuel, at the Fukushima Daiichi site. His immediate focus is on the fuel stored in the damaged unit 4′s pool, which contains the single largest inventory of highly radioactive spent fuel of any of the pools in the damaged reactors.

Alvarez warns that if there is another large earthquake or event that causes this pool to drain of water, which keeps the fuel rods from overheating and igniting, it could cause a catastrophic fire releasing 10 times more cesium-137 than was released at Chernobyl.

That scenario alone would cause an unprecedented spread of radioactivity, far greater than what occurred last year, depositing enormous amounts of radioactive materials over thousands of miles and causing the evacuation of Tokyo.

Nuclear experts noted that other lethal radioactive isotopes would also be released in such a fire, but that the focus is on cesium-137 because it easily volatilizes and spreads pervasively, as it did during the Chernobyl accident and again after the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi last year.

With a half-life of 30 years, it gives off penetrating radiation as it decays and can remain dangerous for hundreds of years. Once in the environment, it mimics potassium as it accumulates in the food chain; when it enters the human body, about 75 percent lodges in muscle tissue, including the heart.

The Threat Not Just to Japan But to the U.S. and the World

An even more catastrophic worst-case scenario follows that a fire in the pool at unit 4 could then spread, igniting the irradiated fuel throughout the nuclear site and releasing an amount of cesium-137 equaling a doomsday-like load, roughly 85 times more than the release at Chernobyl.

It’s a scenario that would literally threaten Japan’s annihilation and civilization at large, with widespread worldwide environmental radioactive contamination.

“Japan would suffer the worst, but it would be a global catastrophe,” said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste expert at the watchdog group Beyond Nuclear. “It already is, it already has been, but it would dwarf what’s already happened.”

Kamps noted that these pool fires were the beginning of the worst-case analysis envisioned by the Japanese government in the early days of the disaster, as reported by the New York Times in February. 

“Not only three reactor meltdowns but seven pool fires at Fukushima Daiichi,” Kamps said. “If the site had to be abandoned by all workers, then everything would come loose. The end result of that was the evacuation of Tokyo.”

In an interview with AlterNet, Alvarez, who is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that the Japanese government, Tepco and the U.S. NRC are reluctant to say anything publicly about the spent fuel threat because “there is a tendency to want to provide reassurance that everything is fine.”

He was quick to note, “The cores are still a problem, make no mistake, and there will be some very bad things happening if they don’t maintain their temperatures at some sort of stable level and make sure this stuff doesn’t eat down through the concrete mats.”

But he said that privately “they’re probably more scared shitless about the pools than they are about the cores. They know they’re really risky and dangerous.”

AlterNet asked the NRC if it is concerned about the vulnerability of the spent fuel at Fukushima Daiichi and what, if anything, it had expressed to the Japanese government and Tepco on the matter.

“All the available information continues to show the situation at Fukushima Dai-ichi is stable, both for the reactors and the spent fuel pools,” NRC spokesman Scott Burnell replied via email. “The available information indicates that Spent Fuel Pool #4 has been reinforced.”

But nuclear experts, including Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president who coordinated projects at 70 U.S. nuclear power plants, and warned days after the disaster at Fukushima last year of a “Chernobyl on steroids” if the spent fuel pools were to ignite, strongly disagreed with this assessment.

“It is true that in May and June the floor of the U4 SFP [spent fuel pool] was ‘reinforced,’ but not as strong as it was originally,” Gundersen noted in an email to AlterNet. “The entire building however has not been reinforced and is damaged by the explosion in both 4 and 3. So structurally U4 is not as strong as its original design required.”

Gundersen, who is chief engineer at the consulting firm Fairewinds Associates, added that the spent fuel pool at unit 4 “remains the single biggest concern since about the second week of the accident. It can still create ‘Chernobyl on steroids.’”

Alvarez said that even if the unit 4 structure has been tentatively stabilized, it doesn’t change the fact “it sits in a structurally damaged building, is about 100 feet above the ground and is exposed to the atmosphere, in a high-consequence earthquake zone.”

He also said that the urgency of the situation is underscored by the ongoing seismic activity around northeast Japan, in which 13 earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 to 5.7 have occurred off the northeast coast of Honshu between April 14 and April 17. 

“This has been the norm since 3/11/11 and larger quakes are expected closer to the power plant,” Alvarez added.

A recent study published in the journal Solid Earth, which used data from over 6,000 earthquakes, confirms the expectation of larger quakes in closer proximity to the Fukushima Daiichi site. In part, this conclusion is predicated on the discovery that the earthquake that initiated last year’s disaster caused a seismic fault close to the nuclear plant to reactivate.

“There are a few active faults in the nuclear power plant area, and our results show the existence of similar structural anomalies under both the Iwaki and the Fukushima Daiichi areas,” lead researcher Dapeng Zhao, a geophysics professor at Japan’s Tohoku University, said in a press release. “Given that a large earthquake occurred in Iwaki not long ago, we think it is possible for a similarly strong earthquake to happen in Fukushima.”

AlterNet asked Sen. Wyden if he considers the spent fuel at Fukushima Daiichi a national security threat.

In a statement released by his office, Wyden replied, “The radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States.”

Alvarez agrees, saying, “My major concern is that this effort to get that spent fuel out of there is not something you should be doing casually and taking your time on.”

Yet Tepco’s current plans are to hold the majority of this spent fuel onsite for years in the same elevated, uncontained storage pools, only transferring some of the fuel into more secure, hardened dry casks when the common pool reaches capacity.

For the moment, though, and for the foreseeable future — unless the international community substantively comes to Japan’s aid — Tepco couldn’t transfer the irradiated fuel from the damaged reactor units into dry cask storage even if it wanted to because the equipment to do so, such as the crane support infrastructure, was destroyed during the initial disaster.

“That’s kind of shocking,” said Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear. “But that’s why we’re still sitting on this gamble that there won’t be another earthquake that could topple a very precarious unit 4.”

Gunter is concerned that even a minor earthquake or a subsidence in the earth under unit 4 could cause its collapse.

“I think we’re all on pins and needles every day with regard to unit 4,” he said. “I mean there’s any number of things that could happen. Nobody really knows.”

Gunter added, “Right now its seismic rating should be zero.”

Alvarez echoed Wyden’s letters to the Japanese ambassador and U.S. officials.

“It really requires a major effort,” he said. “The United States and other countries should begin to get involved and try to help the Japanese government to expedite the removal of that spent fuel and to put it into dry, hardened storage as soon as possible.”

Same Spent Fuel Pool Designs at Dozens of U.S. Nuclear Sites

So why isn’t the NRC and the Obama administration doing more to shed light on the extreme vulnerability of these irradiated fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, which threaten not only Japan but the U.S. and the world?

Nuclear waste experts say it would expose the fact that the same design flaw lies in wait — and has been for decades — at dozens of U.S. nuclear facilities. And that’s not something the NRC, which is routinely accused of promoting the nuclear industry rather than adequately regulating it, nor the pro-nuclear Obama administration, want to broadcast to the American public.

“The U.S. government right now is engaged in its own kabuki theatre to protect the U.S. industry from the real costs of the lessons at Fukushima,” Gunter said. “The NRC and its champions in the White House and on Capitol Hill are looking to obfuscate the real threats and the necessary policy changes to address the risk.”

There are 31 G.E. Mark I and Mark II boiling water reactors (BRWs) in the U.S., the type used at Fukushima. All of these reactors, which comprise just under a third of all nuclear reactors in the U.S., store their spent fuel in elevated pools located outside the primary, or reinforced, containment that protects the reactor core. Thus, the outside structure, the building ostensibly protecting the storage pools, is much weaker, in most cases about as sturdy, experts describe in interviews with AlterNet, as a structure one would find housing a car dealership or a Wal-Mart.

Not what Americans might expect to find safeguarding nuclear material that is more highly radioactive than what resides in the reactor core.

The outer containments surrounding these spent fuel pools in these U.S. reactors patently fail to meet the NRC’s own “defense in-depth” nuclear safety requirements. 

But these reactors don’t merely suffer from the same storage design flaw as those at Fukushima Daiichi.

In the U.S., the nuclear industry has been allowed to store incredible volumes of spent fuel for decades in high-density pools that were not only originally designed to retain about one-fourth or one-fifth of what they now hold but were intended to be temporary storage facilities. No more than five years. That was before the idea of reprocessing irradiated fuel in this country failed to gain a foothold over 30 years ago. Once that happened, starting in the early 1980s, the NRC allowed high-density storage in fuel pools on the false assumption that a high-level waste repository would be opened by 1998. But subsequent efforts to gain support for storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have also been scrapped.

More recently, the NRC arbitrarily concluded these pools could store this spent fuel safely for 120 years.

“Our pools are more crammed to the gills than the unit 4 pool at Fukushima Daiichi, much more so,” noted Kamps of Beyond Nuclear. “It’s kind of like a very thick forest that’s waiting for a wildfire. It would take extraordinary measures to prevent nuclear chain reactions in our pools because the waste is so closely packed in there.”

Experts say the only near-term answer to better protect our nation’s existing spent nuclear fuel is dry cask storage. But there’s one catch: the nuclear industry doesn’t want to incur the expense, which is about $1 million per cask.

“So now they’re stuck,” said Alvarez, “The NRC has made this policy decision, which the industry is very violently opposed to changing because it saves them a ton of money. And if they have to go to dry hardened storage onsite, they’re going to have to fork over several hundred million dollars per reactor to do this.”

He also pointed out that the contents of the nine dry casks at the Fukushima Daiichi site were undamaged by the disaster.

“Nobody paid much attention to that fact,” Alvarez said. “I’ve never seen anybody at Tepco or anyone [at the NRC or in the nuclear industry] saying, ‘Well, thank god for the dry casks. They were untouched.’ They don’t say a word about it.”

The NRC declined to comment directly to accusations it’s reluctant to draw attention to the spent fuel vulnerability at Fukushima Daiichi because it would bring more awareness to the dangers of irradiated storage here in the U.S. But the agency did respond to a question about what it has done to address the vulnerability of spent nuclear fuel storage at U.S. nuclear sites with the Mark I and II designs.

“All U.S. spent nuclear fuel is stored safely and securely, regardless of reactor type,” NRC spokesman Burnell replied in an email. “Every spent fuel pool is an inherently robust combination of reinforced concrete and steel, capable of safely withstanding the same type and variety of severe events that reactors are designed for.”

He continued, “After 9/11, the NRC required U.S. nuclear power plants to obtain additional equipment for maintaining reactor and spent fuel pool safety in the event of any situation that could disable large areas of the plant. This ‘B5b’ equipment and related procedures include ensuring spent fuel pools have adequate water levels. The B5b measures are in place at every U.S. plant and have been inspected multiple times, including shortly after the accident at Fukushima.

“The NRC continues to conclude the combination of installed safety equipment and B5b measures can protect the public if extreme events impact a U.S. nuclear power plant.”

But nuclear experts told AlterNet that the majority of Burnell’s response could’ve been made prior to the disaster at Fukushima. In fact, Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, investigated these so-called “B5b” safety measures the NRC ordered post-9/11 and published his findings in a May 2011 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article. 

Directly reflecting Burnell’s response to AlterNet, Lyman wrote that after the Fukushima disaster, “the NRC and the industry invoked the mysterious requirements known as ‘B5b’ as a cure-all for the kinds of problems that led to the Fukushima crisis.

“Even though the B5b strategies were specifically developed to cope with fires and explosions, the NRC now argues that they could be used for any event that causes severe damage to equipment and infrastructure, including Fukushima-scale earthquakes and floods.”

But contrary to these NRC assurances, then and now, Lyman’s report found B5b requirements inadequate, containing flaws in safety assumptions that suggest the NRC has not applied the major lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster. Additionally, he revealed emails showing that the NRC’s own staff members questioned the plausibility of these procedures to effectively respond to extreme weather events like floods, earthquakes and concomitant blackouts.

Burnell sent a follow-up email, noting, “I also should have mentioned the NRC issued an order in March to all U.S. plants to install enhanced spent fuel pool instrumentation, so that plant operators will have a clearer understanding of SFP status during a severe event.”

This is a curiously roundabout way of saying that spent fuel pools at U.S. reactors currently have no built-in instrumentation to gauge radiation, temperature or pressure levels.

Kamps also pointed out that the NRC commissioners voted 4 to 1, with Chairman Gregory Jaczko in dissent, to not require such requested safety upgrades to U.S. reactors until the end of 2016.

He added, “Burnell’s flippant, false assurances prove that pool risks, despite being potentially catastrophic, are largely ignored by not only industry, but even NRC itself, even in the aftermath of Fukushima.”

Brad Jacobson is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and contributing reporter for AlterNet. His reporting has also appeared in The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, Billboard and other publications. Follow him on Twitter @bradpjacobson.

Source

To: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

An Urgent Request on UN Intervention to Stabilize the Fukushima Unit 4 Spent Nuclear Fuel

A helmeted man walks past the rubbles and a burning building after a powerful earthquake, the largest in Japan's recorded history, slammed the eastern coasts in Iwaki city, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, Friday, March 11, 2011. Click to enlarge

Recently, former diplomats and experts both in Japan and abroad stressed the extremely risky condition of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool and this is being widely reported by world media. Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), who is one of the best-known experts on spent nuclear fuel, stated that in Unit 4 there is spent nuclear fuel which contains Cesium-137 (Cs-137) that is equivalent to 10 times the amount that was released at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Thus, if an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain, this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident.

Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima Daiichi plant sit in pools vulnerable to future earthquakes, with roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl.

Nuclear experts from the US and Japan such as Arnie Gundersen, Robert Alvarez, Hiroaki Koide, Masashi Goto, and Mitsuhei Murata, a former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland, and, Akio Matsumura, a former UN diplomat, have continually warned against the high risk of the Fukushima Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool.

US Senator Roy Wyden, after his visit to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on 6 April, 2012, issued a press release on 16 April, pointing out the catastrophic risk of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4, calling for urgent US government intervention. Senator Wyden also sent a letter to Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan’s Ambassador to the United States, requesting Japan to accept international assistance to tackle the crisis.

We Japanese civil organizations express our deepest concern that our government does not inform its citizens about the extent of risk of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool. Given the fact that collapse of this pool could potentially lead to catastrophic consequences with worldwide implications, what the Japanese government should be doing as a responsible member of the international community is to avoid any further disaster by mobilizing all the wisdom and the means available in order to stabilize this spent nuclear fuel. It is clearly evident that Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool is no longer a Japanese issue but an international issue with potentially serious consequences. Therefore, it is imperative for the Japanese government and the international community to work together on this crisis before it becomes too late. We are appealing to the United Nations to help Japan and the planet in order to prevent the irreversible consequences of a catastrophe that could affect generations to come. We herewith make our urgent request to you as follows:

1. The United Nations should organize a Nuclear Security Summit to take up the crucial problem of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool.

2. The United Nations should establish an independent assessment team on Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 and coordinate international assistance in order to stabilize the unit’s spent nuclear fuel and prevent radiological consequences with potentially catastrophic consequences.

30 April 2012
Shut Tomari (Japan) [...]
Green Action (Japan) [...]

Endorsed by:
Hiroaki Koide Kyoto University Nuclear Reactor Research Institute (Japan)
Mitsuhei Murata Former ambassador to Switzerland and to Senegal
Board member, Global System and Ethics Society (Japan)
Akio Matsumura Former United Nations diplomat
Robert Alvarez Senior Scholar, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C. (USA)
Masashi Goto Former Nuclear Plant Engineer (Japan)

Signing organizations: 72 Japanese organizations have signed this petition (as of 30 April 2012)

1. Shut Tomari, Hokkaido
2. Green Action, Kyoto
3. Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center, Tokyo
4. Osaka Group against Mihama・Ooi・Takahama Nuclear Power, Osaka
5. Aging Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Group, Tokyo
6. Stop Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant!, Shizuoka
7. Espace des Femmes, Hokkaido
8. “Let’s learn Pluthermal” Shiribeshi Citizen’s Network, Hokkaido
9. Hairo Action Fukushima, Fukushima and Evacuation Areas in Japan
10. STOP MOX! Fukushima, Fukusima
11. Fukushima Moonlight, Fukuoka
12. Yawatahama Women’s Group to Protect Children from Nuclear Power Plant, Ehime
13. Ikata People Against Mox, Ehime
14. We Do Not Want Plutonium! , Tokyo
15. Genkai Nuclear Power Pluthermal Trial Support Group, Fukuoka
16. Genkai Nuclear Power Pluthermal Trial support Group, Fukuona
17. Pluthermal and 100 Years of Saga Prefecture Group, Saga
18. No Nuclear Plants! Yamaguchi Network, Yamaguchi
19. Food Policy Center・Vision21
20. Genpatsu Yamenkai, Fukuoka
21. Japan Environmental Law Lawyers Association （JELF）
22. Nonviolent Direct Action Network (HANET)
23. Anti-Nuclear-Power and Nuclear Fuels Reprocessing Protest Advertising Group, Tokyo
24. Kochi Green Citizen’s Network, Kochi
25. Kaku-no-Gomi Campaign, Chubu, Nagoya, Aichi
26. Aloha from Hawaii
27. Tohoku Asia Information Center, Hiroshima
28. No-Nukes Citizen’s Network, Tokushima
29. No-nukes Net Kushiro, Hokkaido
30. Fukushima Meeting for Environment, Human Rights and Peace, Fukushima
31. FoE (Friends of the Earth Japan), Tokyo
32. Citizen’s Group on Nuclear Waste, Horonobe, Hokkaido
33. Team From Now On, Hokkaido
34. No Nukes! Protect Children from Radioactivity
35. Concerned Citizens for Children’s Human Rights, Ehime
36. Protect the Sea of Sanriku from Radioactivity, Iwate
37. Iwate Organic Farming Study Group, Iwate
38. Dandelion House, Tokyo
39. Decommission All Nuclear Power! Women’s Group for Protection of Kariwa Village, Niigata
40. Sapporo Shoku Machi Network, Hokkaido
41. Citizens Wind for Peace, Tokyo
42. Together with the Earth NPO, Osaka
43. Kawauchi Tsuyukusa Group, Kagoshima
44. Group against Construction of Kawaunchi Nuclear Plant, Kagoshima
45. Hassei Group against Ikata Nuclear Plant, Ehime
46. For Citizen’s Autonomy, Hokkaido
47. No-Nukes Women Group・Hokkaido, Hokkaido
48. Hokkaido Peace Net, Hokkaido
49. Future for Fukushima Children, Hokkaido
50. Good Bye Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Project, Niigata
51. Weaving A Better Future Mothers’ Group
52. Group Aozora MeeMee
53. Mothers and Fathers’No-Nukes Declaration 2011
54. Southern Osaka Network for Protection from Radioactivity, Osaka
55. Kansai Network on Protection of Children from Radioactivity, Kansai
56. Journey To the Future
57. Morinokoya
58. Kaburaya
59. Nishiyashiki
60. Dandelion Fortress, Fukuoka
61. Dohatsuten Wo Tsuku Kai, Fukuoka
62. Global Ethics Association
63. Buppouzan Zenngennji
64. STOP Nuclear Plants BEFORE Huge Quake Strikes！
65. Lee Group to Prevent Earthquake Disaster and Nuclear Accident
66. Rokkasho Village・ Home of Flowers and Herbs, Aomori
67. Anti-TEPCO-Nuclear-Power Consumers Group, Tokyo
68. Miyazu Mitsubati Project, Kyoto
69. Citizen’s Plaza, Minoh , Osaka
70. Monoh Citizen’s Group on Good Bye Nuclear Power, Osaka
71. Campaign Fukuoka against Nuclear and Uranium Weapons, Fukuoka
72. Seeking for Japan-US Security Treaty Termination Notice, Tokyo

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