86,000 Tons of Nuclear Waste Dumped into Pacific Ocean
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Saturday, January 18, 2014
The Fukushima Fish Story
By William Boardman
Global Research, January 17, 2014
Reassuring the public about something dangerous is tricky
It’s true that the most intensely radioactive part of the Pacific Ocean currently is the area closest to Fukushima, Japan, where the destroyed nuclear power plant continuously adds to the radiation burden in the aquatic food chain. It’s equally true – and somewhat less scary – that Fukushima is but the most recent, best known source of radioactive pollution in a body of water that had a natural, low level of radioactivity long before any human started making it worse.
The Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) has an elaborate sea area monitoring program around Fukushima and publishes the results of its findings in detailed charts that are likely opaque to most people (and offer data that was collected months ago). Looks like the water has plenty of Cesium-134, Cesium-137, and Strontium-90, but not so much Plutonium-238, Plutonium-239, or Plutonium-240. How bad that is is hard to tell, in part because Fukushima’s operator, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), withheld 140 of their measurements of Strontium-90 and other radioactive substances for most of late 2013, TEPCO admitted in early January.
When the available information is either withheld or hard to understand, it’s little wonder there’s almost no public trust in the people in charge. When unofficial information is also unreliable, it gets harder and harder to get a handle on what’s real, other than the fact it’s not good.
“Fish with very high levels of Cesium”
Here’s an example of the problem: A story from Japan on January 11 featured a worrisome headline: “Fish with very high levels of cesium found near Fukushima.” Of course that’s also reassuring for most of us: the fish was found, and it was near Fukushima, not California. But still, radioactive fish – that’s scary isn’t it? Yes and no, actually.
No, not so scary: Turns out the headline meant only “a fish,” a black sea bream in fact, one of 37 black sea bream that scientific researchers caught in October-November 2013. Oh, but actually, the story mentions, there were two other fish with elevated radiation, while 34 “were within the safety limits, according to the Fisheries Research Agency.” The story doesn’t report the actual “safe” level, but says “the black sea bream had 12,400 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium, 124 times the safety standards for foodstuffs,” which supports a calculation that 100 Bq per kg is the “safe” level. The other two unsafe fish were measured with 426 and 197 Bq per kg respectively. The fish were caught within 22 miles of Fukushima, in water where commercial fishing is restricted.
Looked at from the official American perspective, this story gets even less scary. The black sea bream with 12,400 Bq per kg of radiation is still too hot to eat safely, but the other two over the Japanese limit are well within the American safety level of 1,200 Bq per kg. Equally casually, the U.S. Dept. of Energy website for “the situation in Japan” was last updated about a year ago.
Yes, it’s a little scary, or at least cautionary: Any fish that radioactively hot certainly poses some small threat to its handlers, but the greater threat is the potential damage it could do to a diner. External exposure to even the highest of these levels of radiation for brief periods of time is pretty close to harmless under most circumstances, especially the older you are. But someone who eats a hot fish risks internal exposure for a much longer time, with a much greater risk of harm – though there might not be, for any given person, any consequential damage.
Looked at from the official South Korean perspective, this story gets even more scary. In September 2013, South Korea banned the import of all Japanese fish caught within about 200 miles of Fukushima. “The South Korean government made the move because of insufficient information from Tokyo about what steps will be taken to address the leakage of contaminated water from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, according to a statement by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries,” CBS News reported September 6.
A month later, the Japanese government appealed to the supra-national World Trade Organization (WTO) “to intervene on South Korea’s atomic fish ban” (as headlined in the South China Morning Post). Japanese officials said that South Korea was the only country with such an expansive ban on Japanese fish. They said they were hoping that discussion in the WTO would persuade South Korea to withdraw the ban voluntarily, since a WTO lawsuit would likely take years to conclude. As of January 2014, the South Korean ban apparently remains in effect.
Is it a scare story if it’s rational to be scared?
Despite its somewhat misleading headline, the story from Asahi Shimbun did not seem designed to be a scare story. It didn’t even mention the danger from consuming radioactive food, or define a Becquerel of radiation.
The World Nuclear Association, an industry group, offers this definition: “Apart from the normal measures of mass and volume, the amount of radioactive material is given in becquerel (Bq), a measure which enables us to compare the typical radioactivity of some natural and other materials. A becquerel is one atomic decay per second, and each disintegration produces some ionising radiation.”
A chart that follows this, which is apparently intended to be reassuring, compares the amount of radioactivity in a variety other substances (uranium ore, smoke detector, coal ash) with the amount of radioactivity in “1 adult human,” which is pegged at 7,000 Bq, or 100 Bq per kg. That’s also the “safe” limit for eating radioactive black sea bream in Japan – and it is enough to temporarily double a person’s radiation load, which doesn’t seem like a naturally good idea, but perhaps it’s a better than multiplying your normal radiation load by 12 as allowed by American safe fish standards. Not surprisingly, those are questions that neither the newspaper nor the nuclear folks chose to explore.
That certainly seems to be the preference of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, 59 – not exploring nuclear questions. The prime minister, an avid nuclear booster, recently injected himself into the current race for Tokyo governor, suggesting that the candidates not focus on nuclear issues, but have a “balanced” debate.
The next day, January 14, a former prime minister and opponent of a nuclear Japan entered the race: Morihiro Hosokawa, 76, who announced that his candidacy would focus on creating a nuclear-free Japan. Hosokawa had resigned as prime minister in April 1994, after less than a year in office, amidst bribery charges that were never resolved. Hosokawa’s candidacy was encouraged by another former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, who has emerged as one of Japan’s leading nuclear-free advocates and who promises to campaign actively for Hosokawa.
The Tokyo prefecture includes the capital city as well as 39 other municipalities and a total population of 35 million people, all under the administration of the Tokyo governor. Tokyo’s government is also the biggest shareholder in Tokyo Electric Power, operator of the Fukushima plant. The former governor resigned in December in the midst of a political funds scandal. The election campaign officially begins on January 23, with the election scheduled for February 9.
With the candidacy of Hosokawa, the race takes on increased national significance since, as Hosokawa said, “I have a sense of crisis myself that the country’s various problems, especially nuclear power plants, are matters of survival for the country.” Hosokawa and Koizumi are trying to make the Tokyo election a referendum on nuclear power for the country.
Meanwhile, the Fukushima site continues to leak radioactive groundwater into the Pacific, it continues to leak radioactive water from damaged containment tanks, Fukushima Unit #3 continues to belch radioactive steam periodically, and the level of radioactivity at the perimeter of the plant hasrisen to 8 times the officially “safe” level. The Nuclear Regulation Authority has increased the number of monitoring stations around Fukushima from 446 to 815. And the Japanese government is saying food produced in the Fukushima region is safe to eat, but neither consumers nor food producers trust the government’s assurances.
And the Fukushima Fish Story continues to circulate on the Internet, getting a little scarier, if not more accurate, all the time.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Global Research, January 17, 2014
Reassuring the public about something dangerous is tricky
It’s true that the most intensely radioactive part of the Pacific Ocean currently is the area closest to Fukushima, Japan, where the destroyed nuclear power plant continuously adds to the radiation burden in the aquatic food chain. It’s equally true – and somewhat less scary – that Fukushima is but the most recent, best known source of radioactive pollution in a body of water that had a natural, low level of radioactivity long before any human started making it worse.
The Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) has an elaborate sea area monitoring program around Fukushima and publishes the results of its findings in detailed charts that are likely opaque to most people (and offer data that was collected months ago). Looks like the water has plenty of Cesium-134, Cesium-137, and Strontium-90, but not so much Plutonium-238, Plutonium-239, or Plutonium-240. How bad that is is hard to tell, in part because Fukushima’s operator, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), withheld 140 of their measurements of Strontium-90 and other radioactive substances for most of late 2013, TEPCO admitted in early January.
When the available information is either withheld or hard to understand, it’s little wonder there’s almost no public trust in the people in charge. When unofficial information is also unreliable, it gets harder and harder to get a handle on what’s real, other than the fact it’s not good.
“Fish with very high levels of Cesium”
Here’s an example of the problem: A story from Japan on January 11 featured a worrisome headline: “Fish with very high levels of cesium found near Fukushima.” Of course that’s also reassuring for most of us: the fish was found, and it was near Fukushima, not California. But still, radioactive fish – that’s scary isn’t it? Yes and no, actually.
No, not so scary: Turns out the headline meant only “a fish,” a black sea bream in fact, one of 37 black sea bream that scientific researchers caught in October-November 2013. Oh, but actually, the story mentions, there were two other fish with elevated radiation, while 34 “were within the safety limits, according to the Fisheries Research Agency.” The story doesn’t report the actual “safe” level, but says “the black sea bream had 12,400 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium, 124 times the safety standards for foodstuffs,” which supports a calculation that 100 Bq per kg is the “safe” level. The other two unsafe fish were measured with 426 and 197 Bq per kg respectively. The fish were caught within 22 miles of Fukushima, in water where commercial fishing is restricted.
Looked at from the official American perspective, this story gets even less scary. The black sea bream with 12,400 Bq per kg of radiation is still too hot to eat safely, but the other two over the Japanese limit are well within the American safety level of 1,200 Bq per kg. Equally casually, the U.S. Dept. of Energy website for “the situation in Japan” was last updated about a year ago.
Yes, it’s a little scary, or at least cautionary: Any fish that radioactively hot certainly poses some small threat to its handlers, but the greater threat is the potential damage it could do to a diner. External exposure to even the highest of these levels of radiation for brief periods of time is pretty close to harmless under most circumstances, especially the older you are. But someone who eats a hot fish risks internal exposure for a much longer time, with a much greater risk of harm – though there might not be, for any given person, any consequential damage.
Looked at from the official South Korean perspective, this story gets even more scary. In September 2013, South Korea banned the import of all Japanese fish caught within about 200 miles of Fukushima. “The South Korean government made the move because of insufficient information from Tokyo about what steps will be taken to address the leakage of contaminated water from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, according to a statement by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries,” CBS News reported September 6.
A month later, the Japanese government appealed to the supra-national World Trade Organization (WTO) “to intervene on South Korea’s atomic fish ban” (as headlined in the South China Morning Post). Japanese officials said that South Korea was the only country with such an expansive ban on Japanese fish. They said they were hoping that discussion in the WTO would persuade South Korea to withdraw the ban voluntarily, since a WTO lawsuit would likely take years to conclude. As of January 2014, the South Korean ban apparently remains in effect.
Is it a scare story if it’s rational to be scared?
Despite its somewhat misleading headline, the story from Asahi Shimbun did not seem designed to be a scare story. It didn’t even mention the danger from consuming radioactive food, or define a Becquerel of radiation.
The World Nuclear Association, an industry group, offers this definition: “Apart from the normal measures of mass and volume, the amount of radioactive material is given in becquerel (Bq), a measure which enables us to compare the typical radioactivity of some natural and other materials. A becquerel is one atomic decay per second, and each disintegration produces some ionising radiation.”
A chart that follows this, which is apparently intended to be reassuring, compares the amount of radioactivity in a variety other substances (uranium ore, smoke detector, coal ash) with the amount of radioactivity in “1 adult human,” which is pegged at 7,000 Bq, or 100 Bq per kg. That’s also the “safe” limit for eating radioactive black sea bream in Japan – and it is enough to temporarily double a person’s radiation load, which doesn’t seem like a naturally good idea, but perhaps it’s a better than multiplying your normal radiation load by 12 as allowed by American safe fish standards. Not surprisingly, those are questions that neither the newspaper nor the nuclear folks chose to explore.
That certainly seems to be the preference of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, 59 – not exploring nuclear questions. The prime minister, an avid nuclear booster, recently injected himself into the current race for Tokyo governor, suggesting that the candidates not focus on nuclear issues, but have a “balanced” debate.
The next day, January 14, a former prime minister and opponent of a nuclear Japan entered the race: Morihiro Hosokawa, 76, who announced that his candidacy would focus on creating a nuclear-free Japan. Hosokawa had resigned as prime minister in April 1994, after less than a year in office, amidst bribery charges that were never resolved. Hosokawa’s candidacy was encouraged by another former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, who has emerged as one of Japan’s leading nuclear-free advocates and who promises to campaign actively for Hosokawa.
The Tokyo prefecture includes the capital city as well as 39 other municipalities and a total population of 35 million people, all under the administration of the Tokyo governor. Tokyo’s government is also the biggest shareholder in Tokyo Electric Power, operator of the Fukushima plant. The former governor resigned in December in the midst of a political funds scandal. The election campaign officially begins on January 23, with the election scheduled for February 9.
With the candidacy of Hosokawa, the race takes on increased national significance since, as Hosokawa said, “I have a sense of crisis myself that the country’s various problems, especially nuclear power plants, are matters of survival for the country.” Hosokawa and Koizumi are trying to make the Tokyo election a referendum on nuclear power for the country.
Meanwhile, the Fukushima site continues to leak radioactive groundwater into the Pacific, it continues to leak radioactive water from damaged containment tanks, Fukushima Unit #3 continues to belch radioactive steam periodically, and the level of radioactivity at the perimeter of the plant hasrisen to 8 times the officially “safe” level. The Nuclear Regulation Authority has increased the number of monitoring stations around Fukushima from 446 to 815. And the Japanese government is saying food produced in the Fukushima region is safe to eat, but neither consumers nor food producers trust the government’s assurances.
And the Fukushima Fish Story continues to circulate on the Internet, getting a little scarier, if not more accurate, all the time.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Fuel Removal From Fukushima's Reactor 4 Threatens 'Apocalyptic' Scenario
Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams, October 24, 2013
An operation with potentially “apocalyptic” consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now—“as early as November 8”—at Fukushima’s damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor’s upper floor.
While the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event.
The Japan Times explained: To remove the rods, TEPCO has erected a 273-ton mobile crane above the building that will be operated remotely from a separate room.
[…] spent fuel rods will be pulled from the racks they are stored in and inserted one by one into a heavy steel chamber while the assemblies are still under water. Once the chamber is removed from the pool and lowered to the ground, it will be transported to another pool in an undamaged building on the site for storage.
Under normal circumstances, such an operation would take little more than three months, but TEPCO is hoping to complete the complicated task within fiscal 2014.
A chorus of voices has been sounding alarm over the never-been-done-at-this-scale plan to manually remove the 400 tons of spent fuel by TEPCO, who so far has been responsible for mishap after mishap in the ongoing crisis at the crippled nuclear plant.
Arnie Gundersen, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, warned this summer that “They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” and said that “To jump to the conclusion that it is going to work just fine is quite a leap of logic.” Paul Gunter, MD, Director of the Reactor Oversight Project with Takoma Park, Md.-based Beyond Nuclear, also sounded alarm on Thursday, telling Common Dreams in a statement that “Given the uncertainties of the condition and array of the hundreds of tons of nuclear fuel assemblies, it will be a risky round of highly radioactive pickup sticks.” Gundersen offered this analogy of the challenging process of removing the spent fuel rods:
If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out—but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November, December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated, they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing. […]
I suspect we’ll have more airborne releases as they try to pull the fuel out. If they pull too hard, they’ll snap the fuel. I think the racks have been distorted, the fuel has overheated—the pool boiled—and the net effect is that it’s likely some of the fuel will be stuck in there for a long, long time.
The Japan Times adds: Removing the fuel rods is a task usually assisted by computers that know their exact location down to the nearest millimeter. Working virtually blind in a highly radioactive environment, there is a risk the crane could drop or damage one of the rods—an accident that would heap even more misery onto the Tohoku region.
As long-time anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman explained, the “spent fuel rods must be kept cool at all times. If exposed to air, their zirconium alloy cladding will ignite, the rods will burn and huge quantities of radiation will be emitted. Should the rods touch each other, or should they crumble into a big enough pile, an explosion is possible.”
"In the worst-case scenario," RT adds, the pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and cause an explosion many times worse than in March 2011.
Wasserman says that the plan is so risky it requires a global take-over, an urging Gunter also shared, stating that the “dangerous task should not be left to TEPCO but quickly involve the oversight and management of independent international experts.”
Wasserman told Common Dreams that
The bring-down of the fuel rods from Fukushima Unit 4 may be the most dangerous engineering task ever undertaken. Every indication is that TEPCO is completely incapable of doing it safely, or of reliably informing the global community as to what’s actually happening. There is no reason to believe the Japanese government could do much better. This is a job that should only be undertaken by a dedicated team of the world’s very best scientists and engineers, with access to all the funding that could be needed.
The potential radiation releases in this situation can only be described as apocalyptic. The cesium alone would match the fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs. If the job is botched, radiation releases could force the evacuation of all humans from the site, and could cause electronic equipment to fail. Humankind would be forced to stand helplessly by as billions of curies of deadly radiation pour into the air and the ocean.
As dire as Wasserman’s warning sounds, it is echoed by fallout researcher Christina Consolo, who told RT that the worst case scenario could be “a true apocalypse.” Gunter’s warning was dire as well.
"Time is of the essence as we remain concerned that another earthquake could still topple the damaged reactor building and the nuclear waste storage pond up in its attic," he continued. "This could literally re-ignite the nuclear accident in the open atmosphere and inflame it into hemispheric proportions," said Gunter.
Wasserman says that given the gravity of the situation, the eyes of the world should be upon Fukushima:
This is a question that transcends being anti-nuclear. With 11,000 fuel rods scattered around the place, as a ceaseless flow of contaminated water poisoning our oceans, our very survival is on the line.
An operation with potentially “apocalyptic” consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now—“as early as November 8”—at Fukushima’s damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor’s upper floor.
While the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event.
The Japan Times explained: To remove the rods, TEPCO has erected a 273-ton mobile crane above the building that will be operated remotely from a separate room.
[…] spent fuel rods will be pulled from the racks they are stored in and inserted one by one into a heavy steel chamber while the assemblies are still under water. Once the chamber is removed from the pool and lowered to the ground, it will be transported to another pool in an undamaged building on the site for storage.
Under normal circumstances, such an operation would take little more than three months, but TEPCO is hoping to complete the complicated task within fiscal 2014.
A chorus of voices has been sounding alarm over the never-been-done-at-this-scale plan to manually remove the 400 tons of spent fuel by TEPCO, who so far has been responsible for mishap after mishap in the ongoing crisis at the crippled nuclear plant.
Arnie Gundersen, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, warned this summer that “They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” and said that “To jump to the conclusion that it is going to work just fine is quite a leap of logic.” Paul Gunter, MD, Director of the Reactor Oversight Project with Takoma Park, Md.-based Beyond Nuclear, also sounded alarm on Thursday, telling Common Dreams in a statement that “Given the uncertainties of the condition and array of the hundreds of tons of nuclear fuel assemblies, it will be a risky round of highly radioactive pickup sticks.” Gundersen offered this analogy of the challenging process of removing the spent fuel rods:
If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out—but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November, December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated, they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing. […]
I suspect we’ll have more airborne releases as they try to pull the fuel out. If they pull too hard, they’ll snap the fuel. I think the racks have been distorted, the fuel has overheated—the pool boiled—and the net effect is that it’s likely some of the fuel will be stuck in there for a long, long time.
The Japan Times adds: Removing the fuel rods is a task usually assisted by computers that know their exact location down to the nearest millimeter. Working virtually blind in a highly radioactive environment, there is a risk the crane could drop or damage one of the rods—an accident that would heap even more misery onto the Tohoku region.
As long-time anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman explained, the “spent fuel rods must be kept cool at all times. If exposed to air, their zirconium alloy cladding will ignite, the rods will burn and huge quantities of radiation will be emitted. Should the rods touch each other, or should they crumble into a big enough pile, an explosion is possible.”
"In the worst-case scenario," RT adds, the pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and cause an explosion many times worse than in March 2011.
Wasserman says that the plan is so risky it requires a global take-over, an urging Gunter also shared, stating that the “dangerous task should not be left to TEPCO but quickly involve the oversight and management of independent international experts.”
Wasserman told Common Dreams that
The bring-down of the fuel rods from Fukushima Unit 4 may be the most dangerous engineering task ever undertaken. Every indication is that TEPCO is completely incapable of doing it safely, or of reliably informing the global community as to what’s actually happening. There is no reason to believe the Japanese government could do much better. This is a job that should only be undertaken by a dedicated team of the world’s very best scientists and engineers, with access to all the funding that could be needed.
The potential radiation releases in this situation can only be described as apocalyptic. The cesium alone would match the fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs. If the job is botched, radiation releases could force the evacuation of all humans from the site, and could cause electronic equipment to fail. Humankind would be forced to stand helplessly by as billions of curies of deadly radiation pour into the air and the ocean.
As dire as Wasserman’s warning sounds, it is echoed by fallout researcher Christina Consolo, who told RT that the worst case scenario could be “a true apocalypse.” Gunter’s warning was dire as well.
"Time is of the essence as we remain concerned that another earthquake could still topple the damaged reactor building and the nuclear waste storage pond up in its attic," he continued. "This could literally re-ignite the nuclear accident in the open atmosphere and inflame it into hemispheric proportions," said Gunter.
Wasserman says that given the gravity of the situation, the eyes of the world should be upon Fukushima:
This is a question that transcends being anti-nuclear. With 11,000 fuel rods scattered around the place, as a ceaseless flow of contaminated water poisoning our oceans, our very survival is on the line.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
With a Plant's Tainted Water Still Flowing, No End to Environmental Fear
By Martin Fackler and Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times, October 24, 2013
TOKYO—For months now, it has been hard to escape the continuing deluge of bad news from the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Even after the company that operates the plant admitted this summer that tons of contaminated groundwater was leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day, new accidents have added to the uncontrolled releases of radioactive materials. This week, newly tainted rainwater overflowed dikes. Two weeks before that, workers mistakenly disconnected a pipe, dumping 10 more tons of contaminated water onto the ground and dousing themselves in the process.
Those accidents have raised questions about whether the continuing leaks are putting the environment, and by extension the Japanese people, in new danger more than two and a half years after the original disaster—and long after many had hoped natural radioactive decay would have allowed healing to begin.
Interviews with scientists in recent weeks suggest that they are struggling to determine which effects—including newly discovered hot spots on a wide swath of the ocean floor near Fukushima—are from recent leaks and which are leftovers from the original disaster. But evidence collected by them and the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, shows worrisome trends.
The latest releases appear to be carrying much more contaminated water than before into the Pacific. And that flow may not slow until at least 2015, when an ice wall around the damaged reactors is supposed to be completed. Beyond that, although many Japanese believed that the plant had stopped spewing radioactive materials long ago, they have continued to seep into the air.
"This has become a slowly unfolding environmental misery," said Atsunao Marui, a geochemist at the Geological Survey of Japan who has studied contaminated groundwater flowing from the plant. "If we don’t put a stop to the releases, we risk creating a new man-made disaster."
Even the most alarmed of the scientists who were interviewed did not extend their worries about the new releases to human health. With more than 80,000 residents near the plant evacuated almost immediately after the disaster, and fishing in nearby waters still severely restricted, they say there is little or no direct danger to humans from the latest releases. But, they say, that does not rule out other impacts on the environment.
And while the air and water releases are a small fraction of what they were in the early days of the disaster, they are still significantly larger than what would normally be permitted of a functioning plant.
Besides the discovery of widespread radioactive hot spots, the government’s fisheries agency said that more than 1 in 10 of some species of bottom-feeding fish caught off Fukushima are still contaminated by amounts of radioactive cesium above the government’s safety level.
Less attention has been paid to the continued airborne releases of cesium from the site’s crippled reactors, whose layers of protection were damaged or destroyed. The plant still emits 10 million becquerels per hour into the atmosphere, according to Tepco.
Tepco has tried to stop these continuing releases by taking steps like erecting a cover over one damaged reactor, but it acknowledges that radioactive materials still escape through tiny gaps in the cover, or through damaged ventilation systems and cracks in the reactor buildings. So long as such air and water releases continue, experts warn, there will be no end to Fukushima’s slowly unfolding environmental damage.
"These aren’t levels that are going to directly affect human health," Masashi Kusakabe, a researcher at an institute that has monitored cesium in the ocean for the government, said, referring to releases into the Pacific.
"But that doesn’t mean that therefore these releases are good or acceptable," he said. "There is no precedent for what is happening, so we are on untrodden ground."
TOKYO—For months now, it has been hard to escape the continuing deluge of bad news from the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Even after the company that operates the plant admitted this summer that tons of contaminated groundwater was leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day, new accidents have added to the uncontrolled releases of radioactive materials. This week, newly tainted rainwater overflowed dikes. Two weeks before that, workers mistakenly disconnected a pipe, dumping 10 more tons of contaminated water onto the ground and dousing themselves in the process.
Those accidents have raised questions about whether the continuing leaks are putting the environment, and by extension the Japanese people, in new danger more than two and a half years after the original disaster—and long after many had hoped natural radioactive decay would have allowed healing to begin.
Interviews with scientists in recent weeks suggest that they are struggling to determine which effects—including newly discovered hot spots on a wide swath of the ocean floor near Fukushima—are from recent leaks and which are leftovers from the original disaster. But evidence collected by them and the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, shows worrisome trends.
The latest releases appear to be carrying much more contaminated water than before into the Pacific. And that flow may not slow until at least 2015, when an ice wall around the damaged reactors is supposed to be completed. Beyond that, although many Japanese believed that the plant had stopped spewing radioactive materials long ago, they have continued to seep into the air.
"This has become a slowly unfolding environmental misery," said Atsunao Marui, a geochemist at the Geological Survey of Japan who has studied contaminated groundwater flowing from the plant. "If we don’t put a stop to the releases, we risk creating a new man-made disaster."
Even the most alarmed of the scientists who were interviewed did not extend their worries about the new releases to human health. With more than 80,000 residents near the plant evacuated almost immediately after the disaster, and fishing in nearby waters still severely restricted, they say there is little or no direct danger to humans from the latest releases. But, they say, that does not rule out other impacts on the environment.
And while the air and water releases are a small fraction of what they were in the early days of the disaster, they are still significantly larger than what would normally be permitted of a functioning plant.
Besides the discovery of widespread radioactive hot spots, the government’s fisheries agency said that more than 1 in 10 of some species of bottom-feeding fish caught off Fukushima are still contaminated by amounts of radioactive cesium above the government’s safety level.
Less attention has been paid to the continued airborne releases of cesium from the site’s crippled reactors, whose layers of protection were damaged or destroyed. The plant still emits 10 million becquerels per hour into the atmosphere, according to Tepco.
Tepco has tried to stop these continuing releases by taking steps like erecting a cover over one damaged reactor, but it acknowledges that radioactive materials still escape through tiny gaps in the cover, or through damaged ventilation systems and cracks in the reactor buildings. So long as such air and water releases continue, experts warn, there will be no end to Fukushima’s slowly unfolding environmental damage.
"These aren’t levels that are going to directly affect human health," Masashi Kusakabe, a researcher at an institute that has monitored cesium in the ocean for the government, said, referring to releases into the Pacific.
"But that doesn’t mean that therefore these releases are good or acceptable," he said. "There is no precedent for what is happening, so we are on untrodden ground."
