Unfolding Fukushima Nuclear Disaster ‘Worse than Chernobyl’ – Meet the Victims
Soaring cancer rates in Japan and the US, devastated communities, a poisoned landscape, radioactive plants and animals. After the 2011 magnitude 8.9 earthquake and resultant tsunami, the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant in North East Japan has suffered core meltdowns, leaked thousands of tonnes of radioactive water into the ground water of Japan and the Pacific Ocean, and a series of other calamities. The results have been devastating – and are only getting worse.
Cancers Soar Among First Responders and Locals
It was revealed this week that the number of U.S. sailors who say their health was devastated when they were irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant is continuing to soar. Seventy one of those serving on the USS Ronald Reagan at the time of the meltdown now have cancer.
As Op Ed news reports:
Within a day of Fukushima One’s March 11, 2011, melt-down, American “first responders” were drenched in radioactive fallout. In the midst of a driving snow storm, sailors reported a cloud of warm air with a metallic taste that poured over the Reagan.Then Reagan crew members were enveloped in a warm cloud. “Hey,” joked sailor Lindsay Cooper at the time. “It’s radioactive snow.”
Cooper spoke out to the US media ahead of a class action law suit that US first responders are brining against TEPCO, the Japanese energy firm responsible for the nuclear site:
“[But now], my thyroid is so out of whack that I can lose 60 to 70 pounds in one month and then gain it back the next. My menstrual cycle lasts for a six months at a time, and I cannot get pregnant. It’s ruined me.”
There has also been a surge in Thyroid cancers among young people around Fukushima.
An average of 1.7 people per 100,000 in the general population between the ages of 15 and 19 contracted Thyroid cancer in 2007. This year, 12 per 100,000 people younger than 18 at the time of the disaster in Fukushima were diagnosed with the disease.
A Lost Region
TEPCO’s clean-up is estimated to take 40 years and cost £62bn. This however is just the latest estimate – just a year ago, the figures were 30 years and £50bn. Worse, it is still the best case scenario. The Japanese government has just admitted to the 160,000 evacuees of the 12 mile exclusion zone that they will likely never return home.
The disaster in March 2011 pumped 733,000 Curies of radioactive caesium into the Pacific, the largest discharge of radioactive material into the ocean in history. Fifteen months later, 56% of all fish catches off japan were contaminated. Since then, matters have steadily worsened.
Beaches surrounding the area have been closed and all fishing has stopped in this former fishing region. But concerns are that the contamination is being carried well beyond the exclusion zone, making it into the drinking water and food being consumed in Japan by rain water. Radiation has been found in waters off Alaska and the West coast of the US, having spread over 2000 miles across the Pacific.
According to Physicians for Social Responsibility:
“The precise value of the abandoned cities, towns, agricultural lands, businesses, homes and property located within the roughly 310 sq miles (800 sq km) of the exclusion zones has not been established. Estimates of the total economic loss range from $250[iv]-$500[v] billion US. As for the human costs, in September 2012 Fukushima officials stated that 159,128 people had been evicted from the exclusion zones, losing their homes and virtually all their possessions. Most have received only a small compensation to cover their costs of living as evacuees. Many are forced to make mortgage payments on the homes they left inside the exclusion zones. They have not been told that their homes will never again be habitable.”
The Japanese government have also been seeking to cover up the environmental impacts of the catastrophe by quietly slaughtering irradiated animals. A plan blown apart by one determined Japanese farmer this week. According to the New York Times:
Angered by what he considers the Japanese government’s attempts to sweep away the inconvenient truths of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Masami Yoshizawa has moved back to his ranch in the radioactive no-man’s land surrounding the devastated plant. He has no neighbors, but plenty of company: hundreds of abandoned cows he has vowed to protect from the government’s kill order.
“These cows are living testimony to the human folly here in Fukushima,” said Mr. Yoshizawa, 59, a gruff but eloquent man with a history of protest against his government. “The government wants to kill them because it wants to erase what happened here, and lure Japan back to its pre-accident nuclear status quo. I am not going to let them.”
Japan’s Homeless
Last December, it was discovered that homeless Japanese men and women were being recruited to clean up the site of the disaster for minimum wage.
The Independent writes:
Japan’s most vulnerable citizens are being employed at minimum wage for one of the most undesirable jobs in the industrialised world.
One recruiter, Seiji Sasa, told the news agency that he scouts out potential labourers at Sendai Station in northern Japan and then sells them on to contractors for $100 (£60) a head.
“I don’t ask questions; that’s not my job,” 67-year-old Sasa said. “I just find people and send them to work. I send them and get money in exchange. That’s it. I don’t get involved in what happens after that.”
What is Going on at Fukushima?
The Meltdown
On March 11th 2011, the worst happened. There are six reactors at the plant. Four in a row by the sea, and two slightly further back and higher. On March 11th, Reactor 4 had been defueled for planned maintenance, meaning the fuel was not in the containment area, but in the fuel pool. Reactors 5 and 6 were in cold shutdown for planned maintenance. Reactors 1- 3 were in normal operation. When the quake hit, emergency protocols were implemented and 1-3 shut down and emergency generators kicked in to maintain the cooling systems. However, 50 minutes later, the tsunami hit. A 13m wall of water crashed over the 10m high sea wall quickly the engulfing and crippling the low lying electricity generators, their diesel back-up and the cooling pumps themselves, all of which lay on the low land, right behind the sea wall, between the ocean and the reactors. This knocked out the power to the control room too. Between March 12th and 15th, as the reactors overheated and gases built up to dangerous levels, all four reactors suffered hydrogen-air explosions, which resulted in their outer casing being blown off, exposing their spent fuel pools to the elements.
If the fuel pools empty of water, there is nothing to keep the fuel rods cool and they will heat up, become unstable and ultimately explode, releasing their radioactive payload immediately into the atmosphere.
The Botched Response
Prior to the disaster of 2011, the basements of the reactors were kept free of groundwater (which would otherwise flood them daily) by evacuation pumps. When power was cut off during the tsunami, these pumps were lost. So, ever since, groundwater runs down from the higher land behind the reactors, through the basements and contaminated groundwater around the tanks, and, this newly highly contaminated water, then runs straight into the Pacific Ocean.
In efforts to refill the fuel pools and cool the plant, TEPCO workers poured thousands of tonnes of water onto the reactors. This water then became radioactive and needed to be stored until it was decontaminated. TEPCO now has 1,000 tanks and other containers, holding 370,000 tonnes of highly contaminated water on site. Around a third of these tanks are easy-to-assemble light steel, with rubber-sponge seals tightened with bolts. Workers have reported some have no lids and are simply covered with masking tape.
“We were in an emergency and just had to build as many tanks as quickly as possible, and their quality is at bare minimum,” said Teruaki Kobayashi, an official in charge of facility control for the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co.
Unsurprisingly, these tanks have been leaking – with 9 publicised leakages in 2013 alone, contaminating the groundwater of the area.
Initially, TEPCO said that the groundwater radiation levels as a result were 100millisieverts/hr (within safe levels). However, they were later forced to concede that the gauges they were using were not sufficient to provide a true reading. When proper equipment was used, radioactivity levels in the groundwater were found to be 18 times higher than TEPCO had stated – at 2,200msv/hr. The World Nuclear Organisation states:
“1,000 mSv (1 sievert) in a short-term dose is about the threshold for causing immediate radiation sickness in a person of average physical attributes, but would be unlikely to cause death. Above 1000 mSv, severity of illness increases with dose.
“If doses greater than 1000 mSv occur over a long period they are unlikely to have health effects, but they may create some risk that cancer will develop many years later.”
“If doses greater than 1000 mSv occur over a long period they are unlikely to have health effects, but they may create some risk that cancer will develop many years later.”
Strontium-90 (a radioactive by product that is easily absorbed by the human body and causes bone cancer) has been found at 70 times higher than legal limits.
The tanks continue to leak.
Unfolding Crisis
The biggest crisis at Fukushima though are the impacts of three meltdowns in reactors 1-3, and the fate of the fuel pools.
In the case of reactor 4, the fuel pool is exposed to the elements, 18m in the air on a buckled and tilting structure. Inside this fuel pool is 400 tonnes of highly radioactive spent fuel. TEPCO need to remove more than 1,500 assemblies from the pool before it collapses.
Nuclear and fuel rod expert Arnie Gunderson uses an excellent metaphor to explain the issues.
“Now nuclear fuel is like cigarettes in a pack of cigarettes. If the pack is new, you can pull a cigarette out pretty easily. But if the pack is distorted and you pull too hard, you’ll snap the cigarette. Same thing can happen inside this fuel pool.”
According to independent consultants Mycle Schneider and Anthony Froggatt, writing in the recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report:
“Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date,”, releasing three times the radioactive material of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, or 14,000 Hiroshimas.”
This piece of work is now underway.
It’s time for us to start focussing on what’s happening in Fukushima. It may seem a faraway matter, on another continent – but disaster at Fukushima could mean disaster for us all. If any of the reactors fully dispatch their toxic contents into the atmosphere, it is the end of Japan – and a global catastrophe. There is increasing global support behind a campaign for UN intervention in the Fukushima clean up – and surely it is time to gather the world’s best nuclear experts to deal with the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
