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Radiation Levels Skyrocket at Fukushima
Painting by Jonathan RaddatzRecord high levels of radioactive tritium have been observed in the harbor at Fukushima.
Japan Times notes:
The density of radioactive tritium in samples of seawater from near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant doubled over 10 days to hit a record 1,100 becquerels per liter, possibly indicating contaminated groundwater is seeping into the Pacific, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
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Tepco said late Monday it was still analyzing the water for strontium-90, which would pose a greater danger than tritium to human health if absorbed via the food chain. The level of cesium did not show any significant change between the two sample dates, according to the embattled utility.
On June 19, Tepco revealed that a groundwater sample taken from a nearby monitoring well was contaminated with both tritium and strontium-90.
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During a news conference Monday in Tokyo, Masayuki Ono, a Tepco executive and spokesman, this time did not deny the possibility of leakage into the sea, while he said Tepco is still trying to determine the cause of the spike.
Kyoto reports:
A sample collected Friday contained around 1,100 becquerels of tritium per liter, the highest level detected in seawater since the nuclear crisis at the plant started in March 2011, the utility said Monday.
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The latest announcement was made after Tepco detected high levels of radioactive tritium and strontium in groundwater from an observation well at the plant.
Indeed, the amount of radioactive strontium has skyrocketed over the last couple of months at Fukushima.
The New York Times writes:
Tokyo Electric Power, the operator of the stricken nuclear power plant at Fukushima, said Wednesday that it had detected high levels of radioactive strontium in groundwater at the plant, raising concerns that its storage tanks are leaking contaminated water, possibly into the ocean.
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The company has struggled to store growing amounts of contaminated runoff at the plant, but had previously denied that the site’s groundwater was highly toxic….
Xinhua reports:
Very high radioactivity levels were detected in groundwater from an observation well at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, said the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) Wednesday.
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The observation well was set up on the Pacific side of the plant’s No. 2 reactor turbine building last December to find out the reasons why radioactivity levels in seawater near the plant remained high. The company said the sampled water could be from the contaminated water that seeped into the ground.
Reuters points out:
Testing of groundwater showed the reading for strontium-90 increased from 8.6 becquerels to 1,000 becquerels per litre between Dec. 8, 2012 and May 24.
BBC notes:
High levels of a toxic radioactive isotope have been found in groundwater at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator says.
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Strontium-90 is formed as a by-product of nuclear fission. Tests showed that levels of strontium in groundwater at the Fukushima plant had increased 100-fold since the end of last year, Toshihiko Fukuda, a Tepco official, told media.
Other types of radioactive materials will continue to pose a hazard for decades. As nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen explains:
The radiation exposures are going up. What you’re seeing is a lot of this stuff is getting revolitalized. It’s in the first couple of inches of dust, and when the wind blows it moves into areas that have been previously cleaned.
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This will go on for decades, as the cesium goes down in to the soil, the roots bring it back up and into the plant structures and the leaves fall on the ground and the cycle continues.
(Some portion of this radiation will hit the West Coast of North America … which may end up with even higher radioactive cesium levels than Japan.)
The bigger picture is that the Fukushima reactors are wholly uncontained … and radiation will continue to spew for decades … or centuries.
Japan Times reports:
A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission the Fukushima power plant and urged Tepco to improve stability at the facility.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the nuclear plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.
“As for the duration of the decommissioning project, this is something that you can define in your plans. But in my view, it will be nearly impossible to ensure the time for decommissioning such a complex facility in less than 30 to 40 years as it is currently established in the road map,” Lentijo said.
The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. have predicted the cleanup would take up to 40 years. They still have to develop technology and equipment that can operate under fatally high radiation levels to locate and remove melted fuel. The reactors must be kept cool and the plant must stay safe and stable, and those efforts to ensure safety could slow the process down.
The plant still runs on makeshift equipment and frequently suffers glitches.
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The problems have raised concerns about whether the plant … can stay intact throughout a decommissioning process. The problems have prompted officials to compile risk-reduction measures and review decommissioning plans.
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“It is expectable in such a complex site, additional incidents will occur as it happened in the nuclear plants under normal operations,” Lentijo said.
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The IAEA team urged the utility to “improve the reliability of essential systems to assess the structural integrity of site facilities, and to enhance protection against external hazards” and promptly replace temporary equipment with a reliable, permanent system.
Indeed, the locations and condition of melted Fukushima fuel is still totally unknown. Shimbun reports:
The workers have yet to gain a grasp of the locations and condition of the fuel debris. They have yet to develop extraction equipment and determine removal methods.
Mainichi notes:
Uncertainty over the location of melted fuel inside the crisis-hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant continues to cast a shadow over plans to remove the fuel at an early date…. Reactor Nos. 1-3 at the plant contained a total of 1,496 rods of nuclear fuel in their cores…. Each fuel rod weighs about 300 kilograms, and a high level of technical expertise would be required when undertaking a remote control operation to cut up and retrieve clumps of scattered radioactive materials weighing a combined 450 tons or thereabouts…. the cores of reactors at the Fukushima plant have holes, and the task at hand is finding which parts have been damaged.
Indeed, the technology doesn’t yet exist to contain – let alone clean up – Fukushima.
Mainichi notes:
In a news conference on June 10, a representative of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Agency for Natural Resources and Energy said that bringing forward the plans would be dependent on developing technology, and suggested that the plans might even end up being delayed.
Scientists are considering freezing the ground around the Fukushima reactors. Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports:
The Japanese government has ordered the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant to freeze the soil around its crippled reactor buildings to stop groundwater seeping in and becoming contaminated…. According to a report compiled by a government panel on Thursday, there are no previous examples of using walls created from frozen soil to isolate groundwater being used for longer than a few years. This means the project at the Fukushima plant poses “an unprecedented challenge in the world”.
Japan Times reports:
The panel’s draft report said the government and Tepco hope to create the frozen-soil walls between April and September 2015…. A rough estimate suggests that groundwater seepage into the basements would be reduced from 400 tons [every day] to 100 tons once the frozen-soil walls are built.
Another high-tech solution being proposed: injecting cement into the Fukushima reactors.
And then there are the spent fuel pools, which continue to be one of the main threats to Japan, the United States … and all of humanity.
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Big Pharma and banditos aren't real? Joking...
Thanks for taking the time & effort to collect and present all of this info GW. Very much appreciated.
GW, Thanks for the research, and keeping this on the collective radar.
"while he said Tepco is still trying to determine the cause of the spike."
Is it because you had a nuclear fucking melt down?
The spike is from the coriums continuing to experience recriticality. Due to the nature of decay rates, and the new radioisotopes they decay into, radiation levels will continue to increase, not decrease. We're talking thousands of tons of uranium and plutonium (MOX) continuing to light off.
Come on people.... did you not see it on TV? THE THING BLEW UP FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!!
And its 'all under control'???
When an entire power generation complex grenades itself, there is no 'auto cleanup' button.
They are screwed, and if they can't face up to the scale of this issue, we are all screwed.
Wailing and gnashing isn't good enough. There's no clear plan of action. It's as if the thing is run by children. Do we have some nuclear technologists aboard? There must be a few bright lights in the community with an idea or two about how to deal with this thing. We are supposed to be the dominant species on the planet. Simply standing around "waiting to die" is unacceptable. This requires international response. Where are all the agencies that prattle endlessly about the need for more power to counter global threats like "global warming?" WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
There is nothing anyone can do. It's permanent, and we're over. In two to three generations, in the Northern Hemisphere, the mutations will be the dominant population.
Google up 'chernobyl babies' under images. That's what's coming, by the millions, eventually billions.
And George, I know you're reading this, many people, very well educated and highly trained, think the Spent Fuel Pools and the big Common Spent Fuel Pool have already gone up. Care to extrapolate what that means for the human race?
So, I should run up my charge cards, and get a house and car while I still can?
Fairwinds, Arnie Gunderson.
shouldve done a massive sarcophagus and water remediation from day one with global involvement - the fact that this did not occur, the fact that they are letting the US nuke infrastructure go to shit on porpoise (subtle Japanese joke never mind) while building next-gen lightwater/pebble beds all over China and simply increasing the "official" safety levels and ignoring the impact - kinda says it all.
inb4 NWO eugenics operation
as always, fuckin amazing work, ene news ftw - too bad about the entire planet being poisoned eh, decades of open-air nuclear testing is like lollipops compared to this shit.
They are letting the reactors in the US go to Sh*t because they now it was a bad design in the first place and trying to take it apart and decommission it will be expensive. Also by putting a sarcophagus around any american reactor it will say to the rest of the country that the reactors weren't safe in the first place.
The sarcophagus idea won't work, due to ground instability and liquifaction - too heavy. In the not too distant future, with the hundreds of earthquakes they are experiencing daily, the whole site is going to slide into the ocean, with the coriums continuing to experience criticality for millions of years. The site lost something like 16 inches the day of the original quake. There isn't a straight building line on the site.
Yep. Arnie Gundersen said a couple years ago that they should drive those thick corrugated steel piles into the ground all around -- the kind they make cofferdams out of for big hydro projects. To cut down on ground water movement.
How many trillion$ did they spend in the first place, to separate isotopes in order to start it up?
And now they can't be bothered. The nuke industry is like those dog owners who won't pick up the poop. . .
If the dog owners then took that poop and put it on everyones food! That's really unfair to people who let their dogs shit all over the sidewalk for people to step in. What they do is practically heroic in its laziness compared to this willful madness.
Nevile Shute wrote a book and later turned into a movie called "On the Beach" in the late 50's describing where in the hell we are at. Mankind evolved out of the Ocean and in the book and movie the last of man died in the Ocean thus completing the cycle. We may be truely be standing on the beach.
Tokyo is doomed as is all of Japan; and maybe all of us.
We have fucked with things we do not truly understand. Milestones
'On The Beach' is available on YouTube in two parts. Well worth the watch. Fred Astaire's last movie, if I remember correctly.
Very well done.
Upvote for "On The Beach", and here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxvx9gQ8k0
Worse than that -- we continued fucking with them long after we understood.
Generic Electric designed the thing. They must know what to do. Why aren't their people front and center?
What do they mean about "remote control?" Where are the retired staff and others who were called up to enter the facilities in person?
What do they mean, "They don't know where [the stuff] is? Have they not set foot inside the place since the tsunami? WTF have they been doing?
They poured water on the shit for months. Where did they think all that water would go?
Please tell me the Japanese are not exporting agricultural and food products.
The reactors were designed and built decades ago. The people that designed them are mostly dead and/or retired.
This won't get me many green up arrows, but here goes. This accident and the current state of the nuclear power industry can and should be blamed on anti-nuclear activists over the past 20 - 30 years. Opponents of nuclear power have frozen technological advancement, leaving the world with dinosaurs like Fukushima, instead of fourth generation facilities that can't melt down and generate tiny amounts of waste.
You may be right, but only on the average. I don't see many sites upgrading their designs after initial build. I would guess your point would work for new designs. But these units weren't being run beyond their live expectancy, were they? (real question, I don't know).
Another point that has not been mentioned is that AssHat Neutron Jack and his mini-me follow-up. That bastard and his numbers management is designed to shit on technical knowledge that cannot fit into a MBA's formula. That mentality and the management processes it fosters could be just as much to blame....
They should send Neutron Jack and his trouphy snach over there to clean it up with his bald ego...
Your argument doesn't make sense. The objections to nuclear power are based on lack of safety. Allowing additional generations of plants to go on line does not erase fukushima, which would still be operating. More plants equals more risk. And even one accident is catastrophic, international, insidious, long lasting etc.
In fact, to blame those who resisted nukes is clearly delusional. Like endorsing the Fed in their wonderful management of the dollar.
A better analogy might be to equate those who resisted more advanced 'nukes' with those who resisted more advanced (sound) money. Many is the writer who uses the term 'meltdown' in the context of neo-Keynesianism.
Really???
Those activists actually prevented the industry from making the existing power plants safer?
And it kinda seems those activists were not totally against the pebble reactors (thorium) which indeed are very safe and produce far far less dangerous waste.
But those type of plants don't provide certain other .....uh...industries like the U.S. brand plants do.
Nuclear power generation is only a side benefit of plutonium production, graciously built in primarily civilian areas. Yes, some protests did result in a few plants either not being built, or shut down. But none of this stopped the nuclear engineering companies from developing new designs, that have been further built around the world.
The problem with an NPP is the material used for construction. There isn't a material made that will withstand decades of exposure to the ionizing radiation emitted during nuclear plant operation. It will eventually fail, period. Obviously, the waste is an issue, also, as it cannot be stored in any present structural design for the millions of years necessary.
All this will be left to our mutant great-grandchildren to deal with.
You were right on your comment, above, as far as I know, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on this one. Sounds crazy enough it's probably true, anyway. Up arrow.
I can imagine the "fossil fuels" industry licking their chops every time a Nuke Plant blows it's lid. "See! You still need us!" Stop putting resources into nuclear, which is incapable of ever being safe. In fact, shut them all down. Spend it on us, instead.
I dunno. Seriously, can a "safe" nuclear plan be built? I mean, so there is effectively zero chance of a radioactive release? I still have my doubts.
I still can't wrap my (engineer) mind around putting ALL the waste, which needs to be kept cool otherwise recriticality, in concrete (tends to crack) pools directly above the reactors... on a fault-line, in a tsunami zone. I honestly don't think I could conceive of a more precarious design. OMGWTF~radioactive~BBQ!!111!!!!11!!!
The interesting thing is that the entire plant would have been fine if the electrical switching equipment had been in a secure room. The switching equipment for reactors 1 - 4 were in an unsecure building near the water that was destroyed by the tsunami. The emergency generators were built on higher ground and survived. The switching equipment for reactores 5 and 6 (which were built later) was in a reinforced building and survived - that's why 5 & 6 didn't melt down.
but they probably saved about $1mm in construction costs.....you know, these projects don't build themselves.....there are palms to be greased and pockets to be lined.....everywhere (including Japan).
The emergency generators were the wrong design for the job, and the ones that didn't flood blew up. There isn't a gen set in the world right now that is designed for the load needed to power a reactor scram and keep it cool. A real cost saving that .gov allowed without question.
Greg Palast addresses this in his book, 'Vulture's Picnic'.
Probably those damn activists made them put it there. LOL
That's pretty much exactly what my brother told me. He's military and they taught him all about different kinds of reactors and how they operate. In his case, it was because he needs to know how to "hit" one to disable it without blowing fissile/radioactive material all over the planet.
Damn, I guess he wasn't shittin' me about that!
What did they tell him about DU munitions?
The the Iraqi's are a HUGE test subject for them? I hear they are a great pre-natal vitamin.
'And, with the backup generators in a basement in a flood zone (was there any doubt that the generators would fail during a flood)!
Could they have possibly designed a system more likely to catastrophically fail?
The path of least resistance always wins - where money is to be made.
Don't forget the control rod holes are on the bottom of the vessel, not the top. Straight path for molten corium to flow down.
That is correct, and just in case someone is interested in the technical details, I'll post GE's "General Description of a Boiling Water Reactor" for the BWR 6 (which is a later series of the BWRs, in Fukushima those reactors are in unit 5 and 6 [IIRC], but the BWR 4 in the other units is quite similar, if smaller.)
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~doster/NE405/Manuals/BWR6GeneralDescription.pdf
Attention, it's a 'PDF'
They don't have the slightest clue what to do themselves. You don't need to trust my word, but can read it in their own "Containment and Release Management" handbook for that reactor:
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/purl.cover.jsp;jsessionid=155625E943B180513B3...
You are right, but what's even worse is that nobody cares. They are probably dumpin it knowingly, because no one will stop them from doing it the cheapest (meaning dirtiest) way they can hope to get away with...
I am sure you are right and they are dumping it intentionally. They were recently complaining about their inability to store the amounts of contaminated water accumulating on site and mentioned the possibility of dumping it in the Pacific. Nuclear experts immediately screamed about the insanity of the dumping and Tepco backed off. Now they are claiming leakage? Unreal. I have lost what little respect I had for the Japanese government and their sheeple. What a bunch of moronic turds.
"Reactors that can not be contained, will not be contained" - Mish
(no, he didn't really say that, but you get the idea)
The Japanese people will no longer be among the longest living in the world....
Nobody can see it, so it doesn't exist. The majority of the population is willfully, intentionally blind to this stuff. It's hardly even any work to cover it up, because so little cover-up is required.
"Nobody can see it, so it doesn't exist. The majority of the population is willfully, intentionally blind to this stuff. It's hardly even any work to cover it up, because so little cover-up is required."
Yes. A horrible, extinction level event fire, with no smoke.
On the mark. Most people are not just ignorant. They are willfully and maliciously ignorant.
Look at the public schools. We spend something like $6000 a year per pupil. Most teachers are doing their best to teach. But the majority of the students will fight and struggle to avoid learning.
People dislike knowledge because it makes the brain have to start working in order to tie the pieces of knowledge into a whole. But the masses are too lazy and drugged out on booze, soda, candy, fast food and TV to want anything to do with thinking.
Of course this doesn't stop them from spouting off with their precious air-headed "opinions" which they have basically just absorbed like a sponge from government propaganda and reality TV.
Thinking makes my Brain hurt, Binko.
You may want to sit down for this.... That $6,000/pupil figure is a little stale, er, 15 years old. Current spending is just shy of $11,000 per pupil. (And that's light because it doesn't reflect all the "creative" financing schemes school districts are using, e.g. zero coupon munis)
On average superintendent can take home half mil plus generous benefits. That's why.