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Japan's Fukushima Catastrophe
"Only two things are infinite: The Universe and human stupidity.And I'm not certain about the former." —Albert Einstein
Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water! —Albert Einstein
Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.
The crisis at Fukushima is far, far worse than you have been told. The massive earthquake that struck Japan in March shifted the entire archipelago nearly 8 feet closer to the United States and caused the nation to sink close to 1 inch. The magnitude-9 quake – the largest in recorded history in Japan – also jolted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches.
This ongoing saga at Fukushima is one of the biggest news stories of this century. We are talking about multiple self-sustaining nuclear meltdowns that will not be fully contained for years. In an attempt to keep people calm, authorities in Japan (and around the rest of the world as well) have lied and lied and lied. Most analysts are finally acknowledging that this is the worst nuclear disaster in history. Newly released neutron data from three University of California San Diego scientists confirms that the disaster continues to contaminate the surrounding environment and upper atmosphere with large doses of radioactivity.
In the No. 1 reactor, the overheated fuel may have eroded the primary containment vessel’s thick concrete floor, and it may have gotten almost within a foot of a crucial steel barrier, the utility said the new simulation suggested. Beneath that steel layer is a concrete basement, which is the last barrier before the fuel would have begun to penetrate the earth. Some nuclear experts have warned that water from a makeshift cooling system now in place at the plant may not be able to properly cool any nuclear fuel that may have seeped into the concrete. The new simulation may call into question the efforts to cool and stabilize the reactor, but TEPCO says it is not worried, more than eight months after the accident. The findings are the latest in a series of increasingly grave scenarios presented by Tepco about the state of the reactors.
The company initially insisted that there was no breach at any of the three most-damaged reactors; it later said that there might have been a breach, but that most of the nuclear fuel had remained within the containment vessels. TEPCO said their latest calculations showed the fuel inside the No. 1 reactor at the tsunami-hit plant could have melted entirely, dropping through its inner casing and eroding a concrete base. In the worst-case scenario, the molten fuel could have reached as far as 65 centimeters (2 feet) through the concrete, leaving it only 37 centimeters short of the outer steel casing, according to the report, released November 30, 2011. Almost no fuel remains at its original position, TEPCO said in the report. The exact position of the fuel believed to have eaten its way through the concrete and to what extent it is being exposed to the cooling water is not known. TEPCO and the Japanese government have pledged to bring all the plant's reactors to a state of cold shutdown by the end of 2011.
Japan said that decommissioning the tsunami-wrecked reactors at Fukushima could take as long as 40 years, with melted nuclear fuel possibly stuck where it is for a quarter of a century.
The contaminated water from the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident reached the international date line in 4 to 5 months after the accident. That would be in July-August time frame. The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) announced that the water contaminated with radioactive materials from the Fukushima I Plant spread to the international date line, about 4000 kilometers east of Japan.
Japan gov’t discontinued radiation monitoring program weeks after meltdowns — Had been operating for over 50 years, a world record.
Scientists have issued a dire warning that the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant is at risk of a massive new earthquake. Research using data from more than 6,000 recent tremors has found that last March's disaster has reactivated a seismic fault practically beneath the power station. Now scientists are telling Japanese authorities to urgently shore up the damaged reactor in expectation of more massive 'quakes. The number of tremors in Iwaki increased greatly after the March earthquake. The movements in the Earth's crust induced by the event caused variations in the seismic pressure or stress of nearby faults. Around Iwaki, Japan's seismic network recorded over 24,000 tremors from March 11, 2011 to October 27, 2011, up from under 1,300 detected quakes in the nine years before, the scientists report. The 6,000 of these earthquakes selected for the study were recorded by 132 seismographic stations in Japan from June 2002 to October 2011.
A peer-reviewed study published in the International Journal of Health Services estimates 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear reactors. The article by Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman is the first published in a medical journal. “This study of Fukushima health hazards is the first to be published in a scientific journal. It raises concerns, and strongly suggests that health studies continue, to understand the true impact of Fukushima in Japan and around the world. Findings are important to the current debate of whether to build new reactors, and how long to keep aging ones in operation,” writes Joseph Mangano, who is an epidemiologist.
The authors write that thattheir estimate of 20,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks following the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.Most of the deaths occurred among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks, the authors note.
An inquiry into the Fukushima disaster has revealed the plant operators failed to respond properly to the situation. Christopher Busby, an expert with the European Committee on Radiation Risks thinks the investigation “has not gone far enough.” Busby himself is not satisfied with the findings of the government inquiry saying “there are lots of questions they haven’t asked and there are lots of questions that haven’t been answered.”
The most important question according to Busby is the threat to health resulting from contamination. “It is kind of assumed that everybody knows that these health effects are not going to be serious, but just like I said before, it was much more serious than anyone was suggesting at that time.” He calls the Fukushima accident a “criminal event” and hopes those guilty will be eventually brought to justice. “If they [plant operators and authorities] did concede that there was a big problem, then people could be moved out and other activities could take place which would ensure that fewer people got sick,” he says. “Had the government and International Atomic Energy Agency come clean with the extent of the contamination, people would have left,” Busby explains. He said people who do not want to return to the area are absolutely right and should stay away because of the potential risks of exposure to radiation.
Since last March, radioactive cesium has consistently been found in 60 to 80 per cent of Japanese fishing catches each month tested by Japan’s Fisheries Agency. In November, 65 per cent of the catches tested positive for cesium (a radioactive material created by nuclear reactors). Cesium is a long-lived radionuclide that persists in the environment and increases the risk of cancer, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which says the most common form of radioactive cesium has a half-life of 30 years. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which monitors food safety, says approximately 60 per cent of fish have shown to have detectable levels of radionuclides.
On December 26, 2011 Japanese authorities released an official report into the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant. The inquiry revealed that TEPCO had gravely underestimated the risks of the tsunami and that the workers at the plant were not trained to handle such emergencies. When the disaster struck, workers mistakenly assumed an emergency cooling system was working – an error that only worsened the situation. The report also said that the government had delayed radiation data in the area, which led to unnecessarily exposing nearby residents to radiation.
The arrival of a radioactive plume over the United States following the March 11 disaster was downplayed by the establishment media despite the presence of levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal.
The highest detected levels of Iodine-131 in precipitation in the U.S. were as follows (normal is about 2 picocuries I-131 per liter of water): Boise, ID (390); Kansas City (200); Salt Lake City (190); Jacksonville, FL (150); Olympia, WA (125); and Boston, MA (92), according to a press release posted on December 19 by Joseph Mangano, Janette Sherman and the International Journal of Health Services.
“Based on our continuing research, the actual death count here may be as high as 18,000,with influenza and pneumonia, which were up five-fold in the period in question as a cause of death. Deaths are seen across all ages, but we continue to find that infants are hardest hit because their tissues are rapidly multiplying, they have undeveloped immune systems, and the doses of radioisotopes are proportionally greater than for adults,” said Janette Sherman, an adjunct professor at Western Michigan University, and contributing editor of Chernobyl – Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment published by the NY Academy of Sciences in 2009.
The health impact of the radiation released from Fukushima was downplayed by the Japanese and U.S. governments. “The United States came up with a decision to downplay Fukushima,” said Arnie Gundersen, a energy advisor veteran with 39 years of experience as a nuclear power engineer. “The US government has come up with a decision at the highest levels of the State Department, as well as other departments who made a decision to downplay Fukushima,” he said. “Hillary Clinton signed a pact with Japan that she agreed there is no problem with Japanese food supply and we will continue to buy them so we are not sampling food coming in from Japan.”
Plutonium-238, -239, -240, and -241 were released “to the air” from Fukushima Daiichi during the first 100 hours after the earthquake. The amount of plutonium released is said to be 120 billion Becquerels. There was a release of 7.6 trillion Becquerels of Neptunium-239. As neptunium-239 decays, it becomes plutonium-239. This report was made by TEPCO for a press conference on June 6 and the media knew and “kept concealing the risk for 7 months and kept people exposed.”
In August, the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan estimated that the Fukushima accidents released a total of 570,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances. A preliminary report issued in late October, whose chief writer is Mr. Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, estimates that the accidents released about 36,000 terabecquerels of radioactive cesium 137 from their start through April 20. It is more than three times the estimate by Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission.
The amount of radioactive cesium that has leaked from a tsunami-hit nuclear plant is about equal to 168 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, Japan’s nuclear agency said Friday August 26th. While the remaining radiation from atomic bombs decreases to one-thousandth of the original level after a year,radioactive materials from the nuclear power plant only decrease to one-tenth the original level. That’s like dropping one nuclear weapon a day since the beginning of this disaster and this is what they have been calling safe, no problem, don’t worry about it, go home and go to sleep. The damaged plant has released 36,000 tera becquerels of cesium-137, which lingers for decades and could cause cancer, compared with only 89 tera becquerels released by the U.S. uranium bomb.
As for internal radiation exposure from food and drink, the Food Safety Commission on Oct. 27 said that a cumulative dose of 100 millisieverts or more in one's lifetime can cause health risks. The government has failed to clarify whether the new dose limit is safe enough for children and pregnant women.
In March of 2011, people left the place in haste. Families raced from their homes without closing the front doors. They left half-finished wine bottles on their kitchen tables and sneakers in their foyers. They jumped in their cars without taking pets and left cows hitched to milking stanchions. The cows, who died without being milked, no longer even smelled, their flesh pulled off by other animals. They were dead within 10 or 12 days. Now the land stands empty, frozen in time, virtually untouched since the March 11 disaster that created a wasteland in the 12-mile circle of farmland that surrounds the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant.
Some 78,000 people lived there; only a handful have been permitted to return. Cobwebs spread across storefronts. Mushrooms sprout from living-room floors. Weeds swallow train tracks. A few roads, shaken by the earthquake, are cantilevered like rice paddies. Near the coastline, boats borne inland by the tsunami still litter main roads. Only the animals were left behind, and their picture is not pretty. Starving pigs have eaten their own. Cats and dogs scavenge for food. On one farm, the Tochimotos', the skulls of 20 cows dangle from their milking tethers.
Several thousand Fukushima workers, draped in white protective gear, pass daily through the front gates of the plant, site of the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. But beyond the plant, for at least 12 miles in any direction, the Japanese government maintains a no-entry zone, with teams of policemen sealing off all roads going in. Only emergency workers and select residents with special permits are allowed to enter the zone, and only for brief trips. Nobody is allowed to live there — a condition that could continue for decades.
11/20/2011, Tepco announced they measured 1.6 Sv/h at reactor 3, which is the highest reading of reactor 3. Since that time, Tepco has been measuring radiation in reactor 3 by using human worker to assist robot. 11/14/2011, when they washed off water on the floor and it was 1.32 Sv/h. Now they measured even higher radiation from the floor of the building. Tepco is supposed to declare that they managed to cold shut down the Fukushima plants by the end of this year, but actually, they don’t even know what is going on inside of the reactor.
TEPCO has been insisting that the culprit that caused the nuclear crisis was the huge tsunami that hit the plant after the March 11 earthquake. But evidence is mounting that the meltdown at the nuclear power plant was actually caused by the earthquake itself. According to a science journalist well versed in the matter, Tepco is afraid that if the earthquake were to be determined as the direct cause of the accident, the government would have to review its quake-resistance standards completely, which in turn would delay by years the resumption of the operation of existing nuclear power stations that are suspended currently due to regular inspections.
The journalist is Mitsuhiko Tanaka, formerly with Babcock-Hitachi K.K. as an engineer responsible for designing the pressure vessel for the No. 4 reactor at the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant. He says if the earthquake caused the damage to the plumbing, leading to a "loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA)" in which vaporized coolant gushed into the containment building from the damaged piping, an entirely new problem — "vulnerability to earthquake resistance of the nuclear reactor's core structure" — would surface and that this will require a total review of the government's safety standards for nuclear power plants in Japan, which is quite frequently hit by earthquakes. Such a review will require a number of years of study, making it impossible to restart the now suspended nuclear power stations next year as Tepco hopes.
What puzzles Tanaka most is why the emergency condensers, which turn vaporized coolant (steam) into water and are supposed to lower both the pressure and temperature of the reactor, were not operating at the time of the accident although the condensers have the capability of functioning even when electricity becomes unavailable. It is highly probable, he says, that the plumbing linked with the condensers was damaged by the earthquake, causing water or vapor to leak out, thus leading to the nonfunctioning of the condensers.
An aerial view from Kyodo shows people attending an anti-nuclear rally at Meiji Park in
Tokyo September 19, 2011. Some 60,000 protesters from across Japan including a Nobel-prize-
wnning author Kenzaburo Oe, gathered in central Tokyo for an anti-nuclear rally ,
urging the Japanese government to cut reliance on atomic power.
A man wearing a mask attends an anti-nuclear rally in Tokyo September 19, 2011. Some 60,000
protesters from across Japan including a Nobel-prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe gathered
in central Tokyo for an anti-nuclear rally on Monday urging the Japanese government to cut
reliance on atomic power.
“Already on 15 March, a first isolated 133Xe cloud reached western North America, followed by the arrival of high concentrations of both 133Xe and 137Cs on 19 March.”
“The main part of the radioactive plume entered western North America on 17–18 March. On 18 March at 12:00UTC, the head of the plume had already arrived over the North Atlantic, but the main part was located over the eastern Pacific Ocean and western North America, where it could be detected at monitoring sites. This part of the plume was also rich in 137Cs, as it was still close to the surface south of 50 [Most of US/Canada border is 49°]. At the same time, the plume penetrated the subtropics and arrived at Hawaii on 19 March.”
“A map of the simulated surface concentrations of 133Xe for 22 March shows thatall of western North America was engulfed by the FD-NPP plume, as well as parts of eastern North America and eastern Asia.”
The people who have been most affected by radiation from the Fukushima plant are workers, both from Tepco and from subcontractors, who have been trying to bring the radiation-leaking plant under control. In the nation's history, these workers rank second only to the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in terms of their exposure to radiation. It is of great concern that little has been disclosed regarding the conditions of the workers at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Tepco and the central government should disseminate information on the actual working conditions of these people, even if such information seems repetitious and includes what they regard as minor incidents. People are forgetful. They need to be informed. Such information will help raise people's awareness about the issue of radiation and its impact on health.
Birth Defects After Chernobyl--Fukushima Much Worse
It must not be forgotten that exposure to radiation has long-term effects on human health. In the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the number of leukemia cases started to increase among bombing survivors two years after the bombs were dropped. In the case of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, thyroid cancer began to appear among children several years after the disaster happened. Particular attention should be paid to the health of children.
The news services continue to misrepresent the situation. Millions are too comfortable and many more millions are simply unaware because they are not being told by their governments or the mainstream press. Dr. Chris Busby went to Japan with very sophisticated equipment and found areas in Tokyo that were 1,000 times higher than the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Time is running out for the 35 million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area and, in fact, in a year or two all of northern Japan will become quite uninhabitable for there is no way for them to stop the process once the fissioning materials work their way down into the earth and the water table below, which they have already done. Too many have swallowed hook, line and sinker the “safe, low-level, no harm, nothing to worry about” pronouncements in the press, so much so that they actually believe it. Humanity is stuck with Fukushima and all by itself it will badly pollute the north and, perhaps after some time, the south of our world as well.
No construction on reactors has been carried out in the United States since January 1978. After 34 years, the United States is expected to resume construction of nuclear reactors by the end of 2011, and Toshiba will export turbine equipment for the reactors to the U.S. early next month, it was learned on November 26, 2011. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to shortly approve the construction and operation of the reactors, which have been designed by Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Toshiba. The decision to resume construction of reactors is expected to pave the way for Japan to export related equipment to the United States. The United States has 104 reactors in operation, making the country the world's largest nuclear-energy producer. However, after the Three Mile Island nuclear-power-plant meltdown in 1979, construction of new nuclear-power plants was suspended. Former U.S. President George W. Bush, who called for less dependence on Middle East oil, shifted policy toward resumption of construction of nuclear-power plants. Since 2007, many electric-power companies have applied to build new nuclear-power plants. The NRC is currently screening 26 new reactors.
Now entering the Produce Section of your Grocery Store
The food supply is becoming contaminated by Japanese radiation and the U.S. government—and much of the mainstream media—is studiously ignoring the massive health problem that one nuclear expert claims is 70 times worse than the Ukraine nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. University of California Berkeley (UCB) has discovered rising radiation in selected produce grown in California. Six items were tested: spinach, strawberries, cilantro, topsoil, grass, and mushrooms.Measured in Becquerel per kilogram.Five of six items in U.S. food chain sampling test have radioactive particles.
Since April 2011 the EPA and others have been finding radioactive particles in milk. The last report was in early may, then all information was blacked out. The radiation released by the four damaged TEPCO reactors in the Fukushima Province has vastly increased. Radioactivity has now spread across most of northern Japan and as far south as Tokyo. Plans are being made for a new Japanese capital and talk in Japan is that Tokyo—one of the world's biggest cities—may have to be evacuated, even abandoned.
Meanwhile, the radiation is spreading through the ocean and deadly particles are being carried by prevailing winds to North America.A radioactive isotope of strontium has been detected in American milk for the first time since Japan’s nuclear disaster—in a sample from Hilo, Hawaii—the Environmental Protection Agency revealed. Tests for strontium are triggered by the presence of cesium isotopes, which have been found in milk from Hilo, Montepelier VT, and Oakland and in precipitation from Boise, Richmond CA, Salt Lake City and a few other cities.The Strontium-89 was found in April 4 Hilo samples previously found to contain cesium-134 and cesium-137.
UCB has been monitoring the increasing radiation levels since the earthquake and tsunami destroyed the four reactors in Fukushima. The nuclear science lab has released dozens of reports, reports basically ignored by the American press. In the months following the ongoing reactor breaches, rising radiation is contaminating the U.S. food supply. For the most part the serious consequences are being played down or outright ignored. Some health experts are expecting a rising cancer rate in the U.S. within a decade, especially along the West Coast. The most contaminated regions of farmland in the U.S. (based on established fallout patterns of known radioactive drift and charted by Euro scientific agencies) are: the entire Pacific Coast (note that much of the produce in North America comes from this region, especially California); northern U.S. States close to Canada, and Canadian areas close to the U.S. (including Toronto) ; Eastern States, Central States of the U.S., and Far Northern areas of Canada.
CNN reports that radiation in America's food chain is continuing to rise. Sporadic reports of what's actually happening break through the media static periodically, but America is at risk of radiation poisoning and the mainstream media is focusing primarily on celebrities and the bickering among politicians. After shutting down radiation monitoring stations across the U.S. as "unnecessary" the government and EPA officials continue to lull the American public into a state of soothing catatonic blindness.
Official statements fly in the face of the data that the nuclear scientists at UCB and other nuclear scientists in Western Europe have been obtaining from air, water, soil ,and produce samples. Scientists have found that spirulina plankton can help reduce the deadly affects of radiation poisoning. This is particularly important in the face of the ongoing Fukushima disaster, Japan and the growing evidence amassed by nuclear experts that the radiation is continuing to contaminate parts of Korea, the Philippines, Hawaii, North America and even Western Europe.
Six months after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, the news flow from the stricken nuclear power plant has slowed, but scientific studies of radioactive material in the ocean are just beginning to bear fruit. Off the coast, the early results indicate that very large amounts of radioactive materials were released, and may still be leaking, and that rather than being spread through the whole ocean, currents are keeping a lot of the material concentrated. Most of that contamination came from attempts to cool the reactors and spent fuel pools, which flushed material from the plant into the ocean, and from direct leaks from the damaged facilities.
An independent September 14 radiation survey found up to 307,000 becquerels of cesium per kilogram of soil near Fukushima, triple that of the benchmark above which the government requires tainted mud to be sealed by concrete. Japanese government and utility industry scientists estimated in September that 3,500 terabecquerels of cesium 137 was released directly into the sea from March 11, the date of the earthquake and tsunami, to late May. Another 10,000 terabecquerels of cesium 137 made it into the ocean after escaping from the plant as steam. The leakage very likely isn’t over, either. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the plant, said Sept. 20 that it believed that something on the order of 200 to 500 tons a day of groundwater might still be pouring into the damaged reactor and turbine buildings.
The scientists had expected to find ocean radiation levels falling off sharply after a few months, as radioactive substances were dispersed by the currents, because the ocean’s solution to pollution is dilution. Rather than leveling off toward zero, it remained elevated in late July, up to about 10,000 becquerel per cubic meter. That suggests the release problem has not been solved yet. Contaminated sediments and groundwater near the coast are continuing to contaminate the seas.
A team of atmospheric chemists at UCSD calculated how much radiation must have been released. “You know how much seawater they used, how far neutrons will penetrate into the seawater and the size of the chloride ion. From that you can calculate how many neutrons must have reacted with chlorine to make radioactive sulfur,” said Antra Priyadarshi, a post-doctoral researcher in Thiemens’ lab and first author of the paper. Gerardo Dominguez, another member of Mark Thiemens’ research group, is also an author of the report. After accounting for losses along the way as the sulfate particles fell into the ocean, decayed, or eddied away from the stream of air heading toward California, the researchers calculated that 400 billion neutrons were released per square meter surface of the cooling pools, between March 13-20, 2011.
The concentrations predicted by the models were lower than those detected at the monitoring stations. Rain near Toronto, Canada measures 20,000 CPM per square meter August 14, 2011. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, observed the highest levels ever detected of radioactive sulfur in the atmosphere, 15 days after Fukushima’s operators cooled the damaged reactors by pumping in seawater, according to a study published August 15, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
China sent a survey ship and taking seawater samples off the coast of Fukushima back in June and July. The State Oceanic Administration now says the contamination of the Pacific Ocean may extend as far as 800 kilometers (497 miles) off the coast of Fukushima, as reported by the Science and Technology Daily in China. The area said to be affected by radioactive materials is a 252,000 square-meter area inside the 800 kilometer off the coast of Fukushima. Concentrations of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope with a 30-year half-life, at the plants' discharge points to the ocean peaked at more than 50 million times normal/previous levels.
How Sea Water Could Corrode Nuclear Fuel
Japan used seawater to cool nuclear fuel at the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant after the tsunami in March 2011 -- and that was probably the best action to take at the time, says Professor Alexandra Navrotsky of the University of California, Davis. But Navrotsky and others have since discovered a new way in which seawater can corrode nuclear fuel, forming uranium compounds that could potentially travel long distances, either in solution or as very small particles. The research team published its work Jan. 23 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This is a phenomenon that has not been considered before,” said Alexandra Navrotsky, distinguished professor of ceramic, earth and environmental materials chemistry. “We don’t know how much this will increase the rate of corrosion, but it is something that will have to be considered in future.”
Japan used seawater to avoid a much more serious accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, and Navrotsky said, to her knowledge, there is no evidence of long-distance uranium contamination from the plant. Uranium in nuclear fuel rods is in a chemical form that is “pretty insoluble” in water, Navrotsky said, unless the uranium is oxidized to uranium-VI — a process that can be facilitated when radiation converts water into peroxide, a powerful oxidizing agent. Peter Burns, professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame and a co-author of the new paper, had previously made spherical uranium peroxide clusters, rather like carbon “buckyballs,” that can dissolve or exist as solids. In the new paper, the researchers show that in the presence of alkali metal ions such as sodium — for example, in seawater — these clusters are stable enough to persist in solution or as small particles even when the oxidizing agent is removed. In other words, these clusters could form on the surface of a fuel rod exposed to seawater and then be transported away, surviving in the environment for months or years before reverting to more common forms of uranium, without peroxide, and settling to the bottom of the ocean. There is no data yet on how fast these uranium peroxide clusters will break down in the environment, Navrotsky said.
A group of researchers led by Hiroshima University professor Satoshi Tashiro tested 1,149 children in the prefecture for radiation in their thyroid glands in March following the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Radioactive iodine was detected in about half of the children's thyroid glands. A researcher found neptunium-239 in Iitate-Mura, about 38 kilometers from the plant, in approximately the same amount as he found at the front gate of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. Uranium-239, whose half life is about 24 minutes, decays into neptunium-239 through beta-decay. Neptunium-239, is a gamma-emitter whose half-life is about 2.4 days; it decays into plutonium-239, whose half-life is 24,200 years.The amount of plutonium-239 has increased 23,000-fold.
Radioactive xenon-133 some 400,000 times normal levels was detected in the atmosphere here immediately after the initial crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant. The average amount of xenon-133 in the atmosphere was 1,300 becquerels per cubic meter of air in Chiba between March 14 and 22, as compared with zero to 3.4 millibecquerels before the crisis. Xenon-133 is generated in the process of nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium used as fuel at nuclear power stations.
Tepco has announced that there are 1,331 spent fuel rods in the pool of reactor 4. However, 10/14/2011, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency announced that the pool contained 204 units of new fuel rods as well. They assumed that once an aftershock hits the pool and it’s damaged, the fuel rods get to 900 C, melting out of the zirconium cover in 2.3 hours later. As the zirconium alloy cover (Zircaloy) is destroyed, it emits hydrogen, which is likely to cause hydrogen explosion. The melted fuel rods are estimated to have reached 2,800 C and started to melt down some 7.7 hours later. Currently Tepco is reinforcing the fuel pool, which is now exposed to the outside because it lost the walls from the explosion.
On October 29, 2011 Hokkaido University stated that there is a possibility that another M9.0 will hit north Japan again. They say they caught the same earthquake echo of 89.9MHz as what they caught before 3-11. According to their report, another M9.0 may hit from December to January, the epicenter may be from South Miyagi prefecture offshore to Ibaraki offshore, which is beside the Fukushima plant.
The Japan government has found 165 locations over wide area with cesium-137 exceeding Chernobyl evacuation levels — Data shows that radiation could be “spreading to other areas.” There’s a very, very high level of contamination even as far south as Tokyo. One recent sample in Tokyo had levels of radioactivity higher than levels inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. This is a very serious matter. When the news broke August 15 that a previously unreported type of fallout from Fukushima—radioactive sulfur—had reached the United States in late March, nearly all mainstream media reports made the claim that it poses no threat to the health of Americans. And if you’re a man, some portion of it could be in your testicles. The California Air Resources Board estimates that Californians inhale 10-50 liters of air per minute during normal activities ranging from sitting to running. A liter equals 0.001 cubic meters, meaning Californians may have inhaled only about 360 radioactive sulfur atoms on that day—or more.Sulfur-35 is absorbed by the entire body but is of particular concern to men because it tends to concentrate in the testicles, according to a Nuclide Safety Data Sheet from the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Beta radiation occurring there could damage neighboring cells.
60,000 People in Tokyo Stood up Against Nuclear Power
50,000 people were assumed to attend but at least 60,000 people are in the demonstration for now. From an unconfirmed report,over 100,000 people are in the demonstration September 19, 2011. This time,a lot of lawyers attended at the demonstration,also, they have learnt to take videos of police,so police could not touch the demonstration. Demonstration was on the live stream at 6 different locations. Even major media,such as Kyodo and Tokyo shimbum reported the demonstration. The feature of this demonstration is the variety of the attendance. From young family with babies and old people attended at the demonstration. A 94 years old man attended with a wheel chair.
There are 440 nuclear power plants operating across 30 countries around the world today. There are an additional 250 so-called “research reactors” in existence, making a total of roughly 700 nuclear reactors to be dealt with.
The disaster at Fukushima will be seriously affecting our environment and the health of millions of people for decades to come. Large numbers of people living in northern Japan now have radioactive urine. 186,000 bq/kg of radioactive cesium has been found 100 km from Fukushima plant. More than 3 millisieverts of radiation has been measured in the urine of people living 30 to 40 kilometers away from Fukushima. How would you feel if that happened to you?
Hotspots contain up to 500-700 times what is normal. At those levels of exposure this is certainly risking the health and lives of people. Soviets decided to evacuate everyone that was living in areas where radiation was 3-4 times lower than what is found in Fukushima City. Radiation meters are now being handed out to approximately 34,000 children that live near Fukushima. This should have been done about 3 months ago. The way that the Japanese authorities have handled Fukushima has been a complete and total nightmare. We may never know the full truth about what has been going on. But what we do know is that Fukushima is now the worst nuclear disaster in history. Sadly, our politicians and those that control the media apparently believe that it is better for us “not to panic” than to receive the truth.
Nuclear energy is the deadliest, costliest form of energy on record; on average, there has been one nuclear accident resulting in at least $330 million in damage every year for the past 30 years.Nuclear power plants provide about 40 years of electricity while producing radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years. Despite this reality, the NRC is currently developing plans for safe storage of nuclear waste up to only 300 years. TEPCO says that the removal of melted nuclear fuel rods at the plant may begin in 10 years, starting in 2021, if technology essential for the work has been developed before that. TEPCO admits that treating Fukushima’s highly radioactive water will take up to three years.
Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind, ashighly radioactive gases and liquids continue to be released into the environment unabated. The scope of this problem is almost unimaginable. We are getting confirmation across the board of worst-case scenarios from experts but, again, not much from the crowd-controlling mainstream press. Sex scandals are more important, though the one about the IMF chief does seem like a setup. Osama bin Laden celebrations are ebbing and even the Libyan war is old news. “Plutonium Rain” would not be a very appealing headline so we are not going to see it. Royal weddings are much more pleasant even if it is for the children of families who own the most uranium mines!
In America today, if the mainstream media does not cover something it is almost as if it never happened. Why would the current administration go so far to cover up this disaster? Ever since the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, Barack Obama has struggled to get congressional funding for the construction of a whole new generation of nuclear power plants. This is all part of his clean energy initiative—a $54 billion cash cow that will be levied upon the already broken backs of American taxpayers. The last thing Obama needs now is negative publicity that exposes the nuclear power industry’s dirty underbelly. These recent setbacks have only emboldened the nuclear lobby to intensify its efforts to secure Washington, D.C. support. According to the Associated Press, “The main trade group for the nuclear power industry spent $545,000 in the first quarter lobbying financial support for new reactors and safety regulations.” The article went on to report, “The Nuclear Energy Institute spent 26 percent more than the $405,000 it spent in fourth quarter of last year, and 21 percent more than the $430,000 it spent in the first quarter of 2010.”
"A lot of nuclear scientists … actually have the nerve to claim that radiation is good for you, and they have this theory called 'radiation hormesis' and they claim that radioactivity exercises the immune system and it's a healthy thing for people. Essentially what they are doing is promoting their technology with this incredible lie," said Karl Grossman, a professor at State University of New York College. Of 10 nuclear power plant workers who have developed cancer and received workers’ compensation in the past, nine had been exposed to less than 100 millisieverts of radiation, it has been learned. According to Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry statistics, of the 10 nuclear power plant workers, six had leukemia, two multiple myeloma and another two lymphatic malignancy. Only one had been exposed to 129.8 millisieverts but the remaining nine were less than 100 millisieverts, including one who had been exposed to about 5 millisieverts.
Right now, the worst nuclear disaster in human history continues to unfold in Japan, U.S. nuclear facilities are being threatened by flood waters, a large celestial object is approaching our solar system, the U.S. military is bombing Yemen, gigantic cracks in the earth are appearing all over the globe and the largest wildfire in Arizona's and New Mexico's history is causing immense devastation. But Anthony Weiner, Bristol Palin and Miss USA are what the mainstream media want to tell us about and most Americans are buying it. In times like these, it is more important than ever to think for ourselves. The corporate-owned mainstream media is not interested in looking out for us. Rather, they are going to tell us whatever fits with the agenda that their owners are pushing.
Why Fukushima Can Happen Here: What the NRC and Nuclear Industry Don't Want You to Know
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is an independent agency of the United States government that was established by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 from the United States Atomic Energy Commission, and was first opened January 19, 1975. Independent agencies of the United States federal government are those agencies that exist outside of the federal executive departments (those headed by a Cabinet secretary). More specifically, the term is used to describe agencies that, while constitutionally part of the executive branch, are independent of presidential control, usually because the president's power to dismiss the agency head or a member is limited.
There are 14 potentially active fault lines in areas near the crisis-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and other nuclear-related facilities, the Japanese government has announced. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency announced the results of research undertaken by power utilities following the Great East Japan Earthquake. The 14 faults discovered to be potentially active were previously considered unlikely to cause earthquakes. According to the research, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake could occur on the potentially active Hatakawa fault line in Fukushima Prefecture, the largest magnitude earthquake estimated. Five of the 14 fault lines are near Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear power plants. The other nine are near Japan Atomic Power Co.'s Tokai No. 2 power plant and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency's Tokai reprocessing plant in Ibaraki Prefecture.
Earthquakes are more numerous in the US, for instance in the New Madrid seismic zone centered on southeastern Missouri, in the Charlevoix-Kamouraska seismic zone of eastern Quebec, in New England, New York, Philadelphia, and Wilmington urban areas. A magnitude-5.9 quake centered in Virginia rocked the East Coast, with tremors felt as far south as North Carolina, as far north as Buffalo and Boston, and as far west as Detroit on 8-23-11. The epicenter was only 12 miles from a Virginia nuke plant.That same day, a moderate 5.3-magnitude earthquake that rattled southern Colorado in the early morning, was the largest to hit the state in more than 40 years, the U.S. Geological Survey said.The nuclear reactors at quake-hit Virginia nuke plant are sitting on a fault line.That particular fault was discovered in 1970 when the plant was under contruction, but was not reported until 1973 to the Atomic Energy Commission.
Two nuclear reactors at the North Anna Power Station in Louisa County, Va., were automatically taken off line by safety systems around the time of the earthquake. The Dominion-operated power plant is being run off three emergency diesel generators, which are supplying power for critical safety equipment. A fourth diesel generator failed, but it wasn’t considered an emergency because the other generators are working, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It was uncomfortably close to the maximum quake that nuke plant was designed to withstand. According to Jim Norvelle with Dominion Power, North Anna was only designed to withstand a magnitude 5.9 – 6.1 earthquake.Paul Gunter, Beyond Nuclear: "I think without a question there has been structural damage to the plant. We’re most concerned about buried pipe that carries radioactive water underneath the plant that could very well have ruptured, broken and is leaking into groundwater. This plant was 4 miles away from the epicenter so I would say without question there would be damage to pipes, concrete retaining walls, things like that.
The earthquakes that occurred in Colorado and the Washington DC area, surrounding August 22nd and 23rd, apparently were nuclear strikes against underground military facilities. These underground bases have been built by the US government, ostensibly since the early 1960s, at the cost of trillions of dollars of undocumented taxpayer money that is going into these“black projects.”The sudden spike shown in both the very unusual DC and Denver earthquakes on August 23 are consistent with an explosion from a sub-surface nuclear bomb.
The differences in seismic P- and S-wave energy provide one method of discriminating explosions from earthquakes. Seismic P waves are compressional waves, similar to sound waves in the air. Shear (S) waves are transverse waves, like those that propagate along a rope when one end is shaken. Because underground explosions are spherically symmetric disturbances, they radiate seismic P waves efficiently. In contrast, earthquakes result from sliding or rupture along a buried fault surface and strongly excite the transverse motions of S waves. Thus, we expect that explosions will show strong P waves and weak S waves and that earthquakes will show weak P waves and strong S waves.
The elites were supposedly planning to hide in these underground bases after they set off a nuclear holocaust. The original plan was to start a nuclear war between Iran and Israel, and use that as an excuse to set up martial law in the G7 countries—and then prepare for war against China. There was a group within the Pentagon and the agencies and stuff that realized this plan was insane. They knew that the plan to kill 90 percent of humanity was wrong. They then blew up the underground bases the elites were going to use to hide in when they carried out their nuclear holocaust. The knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss it as "impossible." Just as it's healthy to challenge what you're told NOT to believe, it's also a very sane reaction to challenge what you are told TO believe.
What Is Mt. Weather?
Just 46 miles from Washington DC, a mysterious and secretive underground military base exists, located deep inside a mountain near the rural town of Bluemont, Virginia. Here lies Mount Weather, also known as the Western Virginia Office of Controlled Conflict Operations. Mount Weather is virtually an underground city, according to former personnel. Buried deep inside the earth, Mount Weather was equipped with such amenities as:
private apartments and dormitories
streets and sidewalks
cafeterias and hospitals
a water purification system, power plant and general office buildings
a small lake fed by fresh water from underground springs
its own mass transit system
a TV communication system
Mount Weather is the self-sustaining underground command center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency - FEMA. The facility is the operational center of approximately 100 other Federal Relocation Centers, most of which are concentrated in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. Together this network of underground facilities constitutes the backbone of America's "Continuity of Government" program. In the event of nuclear war, declaration of martial law, or other national emergency, the President, his cabinet and the rest of the Executive Branch would be "relocated" to Mount Weather. Mount Weather and NORAD are the only two acknowledged government-involved underground bases in the US and they're both near where these almost simultaneous, atypically large quakes struck.
The Cheyenne Mountain Underground Base
An unusually large 5.3 quake hit central Colorado within hours of the big DC/Virginia quake in question. Again, this time it's a huge "defense" installation under Cheyenne Mountain operated by NORAD. Cheyenne Mountain is a mountain located just outside the southwest side of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and is home to the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station and its Cheyenne Mountain Directorate, formerly known as the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC).
Throughout the Cold War and continuing to this day, the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center and the Cheyenne Mountain Directorate collect data from a worldwide system of satellites, radar, and other sensors and process that information in real time. Operations are conducted year-round in the Air Warning Center, Missile Correlation Center, Operational Intelligence Watch, Systems Center, Weather Center, and the Command Center.
It's doubtful we'll get any kind of disclosure of anything of that nature. They haven't admitted to Pearl Harbor or Vietnam, never mind Oklahoma City, 9/11, chemtrails etc...or even who the hell Obama is!
As many as 30,000 people were supposedly in each of these two underground cities at the time that the explosions went off. So we’re talking about the potential of 60,000 deaths. The situation is now considered Code Red. Here is a government website that gives a comparison of a nuclear test and an earthquake on seismograph. Here is a comparison they show between the May 11, 1998 Indian Nuclear Test, and the April 4, 1995 earthquake in Pakistan.
With that in mind, now look at this image of the seismic signature of the DC quake as shown at NBC17:
Readings from a seismograph at Washington and Lee University, about 85 miles southwest of the earthquake's epicenter in Mineral.
Seismology charts are now revealing that the 5.8 magnitude tremor that rattled the entire East Coast including Washington DC was not a natural earthquake but an earthquake that resulted from an underground nuclear detonation. The image above is a seismograph from Washington and Lee University, about 85 miles southwest of the earthquake’s epicenter in Mineral. The green lines indicates the tremor that was felt in Washington DC which caused damaged to the Washington Memorial and the Washington National Cathedral. The black lines is a transparent overlay of a seismograph from a pdf file from Virginia Division Mineral Resources on Earthquakes.
A seismogram of the Trinidad earthquake as recorded on the Kent Denver School seismograph.
The immediate onset of the large quake at the bottom is indicative of an explosion-induced quake, not a natural quake. Its as obvious as theWTC Building #7 being brought down by pre-placed demolition charges on 9/11.
Some people might not realize there is any evidence that Fukushima was not a natural disaster. If you look at the seismic chart, you will see a sudden explosion. It’s not like a natural earthquake, where you have pre-shocks. It was just suddenly huge, and then it started fading down. There was a Japanese drilling ship known as the Chikuyu Maru that can drill ten kilometers into the seabed. They were drilling at the exact epicenter of the earthquake. They could have put the bomb in the seabed.
The NRC and IAEA
The nuclear industry and nuclear regulators worldwide, as well as specifically in the United States, have continually covered up disasters and radiation releases as if they never happened or posed no danger to the public. They actually fund their regulators, The NRC in the United States and the IAEA for the world. Just as the BP oil spill one year ago heaped scrutiny on the United State’s Minerals Management Service, harshly criticized for lax drilling oversight and cozy ties with the oil industry, the nuclear crisis in Japan is shining a light on that nation’s safety practices.
This is only a fake organization because every regulatory organization which depends on the nuclear industry–and the IAEA depends on the nuclear industry–cannot perform ethically and subjectively. The NRC is nobetter. The NRC has long served as little more than a lap dog to the nuclear industry, unwilling to crack down on unsafe reactors. The agency is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the nuclear power industry. Even resident Obama denounced the NRC during the 2008 campaign, calling it a “moribund agency that needs to be revamped and has become captive of the industries that it regulates.”
How can we trust the credibility of the IAEA and the NRC when it is documented fact that they depend on the very industry they supposedly regulate? Nuclear experts warn that the consequences of the agency’s inaction could be dire. The NRC has consistently put industry profits above public safety. In America there are numerous vulnerabilities at multiple nuclear power plants and areas contaminated with radiation that are literally being ignored by almost every single expert who has the know how to expose the dangers. One exception is nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen. Gundersen has raised many startling issues at our own nuclear power plants that should open the eyes of all Americans.
What Is Really Happening
The disaster is hitting the Japanese where it really hurts by destroying their crops and fish, and we now have contaminated meat from cows in the area. This is only the beginning and we should know what to expect—governments and the media will not be honest with the public—and this is just another in what is destined to be many nuclear incidents. We have already had too many catastrophic nuclear accidents and we are destined to have more, probably many more as earthquakes continue to push and shove on fault lines. It just turns out that one of the nuclear industry’s favorite places to build these nightmarish nuclear plants is on fault lines.
A group of Japanese researchers say that a total of 15,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances is estimated to have been released from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea. Researchers at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Kyoto University and other institutes made the calculation of radioactivity released from late March through April.
The combined amount of iodine-131 and cesium-137 is more than triple the figure of 4,720 terabecquerels earlier estimated by TEPCO.
TEPCO said August 1, it had measured the highest radiation level since the start of the nuclear crisis, a news report said, with more than 10 sieverts per hour of radiation was recorded on the surface of a pipe located outdoors between reactor 1 and reactor 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The fact that such high levels of radiation [at least 10 sieverts per hour] were detected near piping connected to the outer atmosphere is further evidence that radioactive materials have spewed from the crippled reactors at much higher levels than previously believed. Because that level of radiation was detected on the outside of the piping, the level inside the piping could be even higher. “It’s probably the first of many more to come,” said Michael Friedlander, who spent 13 years operating nuclear power plants. “If nuclear fuels melted through containment chambers, Tepco will find even higher radiation readings after water in building basements is removed. Radiation can damage human cells and DNA, with prolonged exposure causing leukemia and other forms of cancer, according to the World Nuclear Association. Children are more susceptible as their cells grow at a faster rate. “It’s all invisible. The trees are still trees, people are shopping, the birds are singing and dogs are walking in the street,” said Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster’s school of biomedical sciences. “When you bring out the Geiger counters, you can see everything is sparkling and everyone is being bitten by invisible snakes that will eventually kill them.
High levels of cesium isotopes are cropping up in dust at 42 incineration plants in seven prefectures, an Environment Ministry survey of the Kanto and Tohoku regions shows. The highest cesium levels in the dust ranged from 95,300 becquerels in Fukushima Prefecture and 70,800 becquerels in Chiba Prefecture to 30,000 becquerels in Iwate Prefecture. But even the lower levels in the dust exceeded 8,000 becquerels per kilogram in Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Tokyo. A 16-prefecture survey covered 469 incinerator operators in Tohoku and Kanto. Local governments have been instructed to temporarily store their ash and dust at disposal sites until the panel reaches a conclusion. Incinerator ash containing cesium was detected at seven facilities in Fukushima Prefecture. The Environment Ministry asked prefectures to monitor cesium levels after dust with 9,740 becquerels per kilogram was found at an incineration plant in Tokyo's Edogawa Ward.
Through interviews with dozens of officials, workers and experts, and hundreds of pages of newly released documents, The Associated Press found the early response to the crisis was marked by confusion, inadequate preparation, a lack of forthrightness with the public and a reluctance to make quick decisions. These problems set the tone for the troubled recovery effort since. The plant's operator was in disarray. Phone calls to the utility, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, went unanswered, and what little information trickled out was conflicting. In those critical first hours, the government was flying blind.
The situation in Japan is unprecedented, unappreciated, unmanageable and it remains out-of-control: it is the worst industrial accident that humanity has ever faced. For the Fukushima nuclear apocalypse and the people of Japan—and with lethal nuclear poisons spreading all over the earth—the end is nowhere in sight. An air sample in Tokyo was 270 times more contaminated with Cesium-137 than the global weapons fallout peak.
As ultra-hot spots exceeding 5 sieverts/hour are being discovered and as the situation of serious radiation contamination is finally starting to sink in, what do they do in Fukushima Prefecture? Hold the annual high school cultural festival, gathering 12,600 high school students from all over Japan to Fukushima, in cities where high-radiation hot spots have been discovered throughout, or highly radioactive rice hay/meat cow has been found, or both. In one of the cities, Fukushima City, cobalt-60 has been detected in the soil in a park. Business as usual, extend and pretend that everything is back to normal. Radiation? What radiation?
Nearly 50,000 tons of sludge at water treatment facilities has been found to contain radioactive cesium. A total of 1,557 tons in 5 prefectures, including Fukushima and Miyagi, was found to contain 8,000 or more becquerels per kilogram. This sludge is too radioactive to be buried for disposal. The most contaminated sludge, with 89,697 becquerels per kilogram, was discovered at a water treatment facility in Koriyama City, Fukushima.
Tokyo Elecric Power Company (TEPCO) announced thatthe accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record. Meanwhile, a nuclear waste adviser to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometers near the power station—an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan—is now likely uninhabitable. Former Minister for Internal Affairs Haraguchi Kazuhiro has alleged that radiation monitoring station data was actually three decimal places greater than the numbers released to the public. If this is true, it constitutes a “national crime,” in Nishio’s words. The reason for official reluctance to admit that the earthquake did direct structural damage to reactor one is obvious. If TEPCO and the government of Japan admit an earthquake can do direct damage to the reactor, this raises suspicions about the safety of every reactor they run. They are using a number of antiquated reactors that have the same systematic problems, the same wear and tear on the piping.”
The radiation is everywhere - air, soil, water, sludge, garbage, tea, vegetables, fish, meat. Fukushima Prefecture announced on July 16 that 84 additional meat cows that had been fed the potentially radioactive rice hay were shipped inside Fukushima, and to Tokyo, Saitama, Yamagata, and Miyagi Prefectures. Cattle feed used at that farm was saturated with 500,000 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium. The checks involved electronically measuring the amount of radioactive material on the surface of the animals’ bodies. Shipment is allowed if the detected radioactive emissions are below 100,000 counts per minute. The same amount of radioactive material on a human would require that person to undergo full-body decontamination. It is impossible to trace back to who bought the contaminated meat. In the latest tally,at least 1,698 cows may have eaten the rice hay with high level of radioactive cesium, and they have been shipped and sold in every prefecture in Japan except Okinawa. An increasing number of Japanese don't believe it's just about the rice hay and the cows, although the government has been trying its best to focus people's attention to them.
(And where there's cesium, there's strontium, as the Nuclear Safety Commission said in early June. The Japanese government estimated in April that some 1600 workers will be exposed to high levels of radiation in the course of handling the reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima power plant.
The Japanese burn program will launch massive amountss of radioactive material into the air....and how it will be carried on the winds to America. And the Obama administration does NOTHING to protect us... The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is set to dispose in the capital rubble from earthquake- and tsunami-hit areas in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, officials said. There is far more rubble in areas hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant than local bodies can dispose of.
The metropolitan government intends to transport approximately 500,000 metric tons of rubble to facilities in the capital and dispose of them over a 2 1/2-year period from this coming October to March 2014. To start with, it will accept about 1,000 tons of rubble stored at a temporary storage site in Miyako, Iwate Prefecture. The waste will be transported by freight train to Tokyo from October. The waste will be separate into burnable and unburnable items. Burnable waste will be incinerated while unburnable waste will be buried in a garbage landfill area in the Tokyo Bay area.
Such waste generated in coastal areas alone amounts to some 4.35 million metric tons. But the capacity at disposal facilities in the prefecture is about 800 tons short per day to meet the central government's deadline. To make up for the shortage, the prefectural government asked local governments outside Iwate via the Environment Ministry to accept rubble generated by the quake and tsunami. The ministry responded to Iwate Prefecture that non-industrial waste disposal facilities in 41 prefectures can handle such waste.
In the following video, Arnie Gunderson comments on the Japanese plans to burn ALL radioactive debris, putting massive amounts of radiation into the air...
Revelations that radiation-contaminated rice straw used as feed for beef cattle was produced far away from the crippled Fukushima Plant have sent shockwaves through the livestock farming community in Fukushima Prefecture. Consumers have also been filled with a sense of growing distrust in the government over delays in responding to the problem of radiation-tainted beef. The rice straw had been supplied by farms up to 105 kilometers away from damaged nuclear power station. If the rice hay left on the rice fields accumulated that much radioactivity, particularly in Koriyama, it is definitely not fit for humans to remain. Not to mention the rice field is not fit for growing rice, though it is far too late, as the rice fields in Tohoku are already long planted.
Hundreds of inexperienced contractors at the Fukushima plant are working in searing heat and high radiation levels for as little as 10,000 yen ($50) a day. Then they get fed Fukushima produce and meat on top of it. As Japan succumbs to a heatwave,Tepco has moved to address rising concerns over the health of almost 3,000 workers battling to bring its stricken reactors under control. The longer the crisis drags on, the more the firm will have to depend on hundreds of small subcontractors who hire inexperienced labourers to perform the dirtiest jobs on one of the most hazardous industrial sites on earth. TEPCO has been feeding employees with Fukushima produce since March 28. TEPCO stated, "We actively purchase farm products from Fukushima Prefecture for our company's cafeterias and dormitories." A Japanese health official downplayed the dangers Tuesday after cesium contaminated meat from Fukushima cows was delivered to Japanese markets and ingested. Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of consumer affairs and food-safety, said he hoped to head off any overreactions. "If we were to eat the meat everyday, then it would probably be dangerous," Hosono said at a news conference Tuesday. "But if it is consumed only in small portions, I don't think it would have any long-lasting effects on the human body."
There has been a strange silence in the UK following the Fukushima disaster; in the UK, new nuclear sites have been announced before the results of the Europe-wide review of nuclear safety has been completed. British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known. Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse. Officials stressed the importance of preventing the incident from undermining public support for nuclear power. The office for nuclear development invited companies to attend a meeting at the NIA's headquarters in London. The aim was "to discuss a joint communications and engagement strategy aimed at ensuring we maintain confidence among the British public on the safety of nuclear power stations and nuclear new-build policy in light of recent events at the Fukushima nuclear power plant." We have a weak government, captured by a powerful industry colluding to at least misinform and very probably lie to the public and the media. This deliberate and (sadly) very effective attempt to ‘calm’ the reporting of the true story of Fukushima is a terrible betrayal of liberal values.
The medical media has been quite pathetic through these four months of live fission from multiple core meltdowns and has not wasted any opportunity dragging their experts out to center stage telling us not to worry and that there is no reason to load up on supplements. Medicine gets a big fat zero in terms of helpfulness in our present circumstance. It is so bad, in a medical sense, that most doctors are not even being doctors since they don’t have the slightest clue about what they need to be doctoring. No one in the official world is telling them so they don’t have a clue about the dangers of heavy metals like mercury and the heavy toxicity of nucleoid particles that have both chemical and radioactive effects once they enter the body. The Japanese national government will spend 100 billion yen (US$1.26 billion) to observe the health of 2 million Fukushima residents for 30 years, instead of evacuating them ASAP. About 1600 yen (US$20) per year per resident. Life is cheap. Since the national government is utterly broke, it will be ultimately paid for by the taxpayers of Japan.
On May 15, TEPCO said there might have been pre-tsunami seismic damage to key facilities including pipes. This means that assurances from the industry in Japan and overseas that the reactors were robust, is now blown apart. It raises fundamental questions on all reactors in high seismic risk areas. Eyewitness testimony and TEPCO’S own data indicates that the damage done to the plant by the quake was significant. All of this, despite the fact that shaking experienced at the plant during the quake was within it’s approved design specifications.
The core of Reactor 2 is still in at least intermittent fission and has melted through the bottom of the containment. Thus, there is a hole in the bottom of the reactor where the core is melting through—it's several thousand degrees down there. Water pours through holes, and what doesn't, boils at 212 degrees. So, there is no water in the bottom of the reactor. Then they tried to toss in some instruments, but they melted—like the little helicopter and the robot—which was built to go into reactors, except no one bothered to see if it would work BEFORE IT WAS TOO LATE—which it didn't.
Tepco began sending nitrogen into the No. 2 unit's containment vessel June 28, but the high level of radiation within the No. 3 building is obstructing preparation work needed to send workers in. Liquid nitrogen freezes at -346 degrees F and boils at -321 degrees F. (A 25 degree F difference.) But, they will probably never actually get any liquid nitrogen near the core—it will boil away immediately upon being pumped into the containment (they tried it at Chernobyl—and it didn't work there, either).If, by some physical quirk they manage to pump some on a nuclear core at 3,000 degrees F, they will be surprised at what happens. The expansion ration of liquid nitrogen is about 1:7. They could asphyxiate everyone within a block if it doesn't blow up in their face. But maybe they will get lucky—maybe they will only release a few billion more lethal doses of radiation. Will it cool the core? Not really, but it will certainly rupture anything that goes from 3,000 degrees to -300 in a microsecond—basically anything it touches at the bottom of that reactor. Within about five seconds after they finish screwing THAT up - they will run out of liquid nitrogen.
TEPCO has begun adding boric acid to the spent fuel storage pool of the No.3 reactor to prevent fuel racks from being corroded by alkaline water. They started the operation on June 26. About 90 tons of water containing boric acid will be poured into the pool through June 27. Concrete debris from the March hydrogen explosion of the reactor building was detected in the fuel pool. In April, TEPCO found that the water in the pool was strongly alkaline, with a pH level reaching 11.2. The leaching of calcium hydrate from the debris is believed to be the cause. TEPCO says the condition may accelerate corrosion of aluminum racks holding spent fuel rods and may cause the rods to topple in the worst case, which could lead to re-criticality.
A shocking discovery at Fukushima was that zirconium (used as a "transparent" - allowing passage of neutrons - protective cladding around the fuel rods) when superheated can become a catalyst for an esoteric type of nuclear fission. At extreme temperatures, zirconium ignites even the tiniest quantities of airborne nuclear isotopes, releasing "blue lightning." This means that zirconium catalysis could also be occurring underground, triggering mini-fission events. This sort of nuclear reaction is terra incognita, a yet unexplored frontier of physics, the joker in the deck. Much of the danger comes from simpler processes. Extremely hot magma, consisting of nuclear residues mixed with soil minerals, will boil any sea water seeping underground, creating pressurized steam.Think of oatmeal cooking in a pot and how bubbles create blow holes. The same is happening inside the landfill. The steam-created tubes harden when they cool, leaving lines of structural weakness. Eventually, these air pockets will collapse, and the massive weight of the water-filled reactors, piles of spent rods and their supporting structures will drop into deep sinkholes. If the magma tubes become filled with sea water, the landfill will resemble a gigantic sponge, prone to liquefaction and collapse under earthquake motion. Even the resonance vibrations from large machines could trigger the sudden opening of new sinkholes.
Water holds other dangers as well, since it is a better medium for nuclear fission than the mix of stones, dirt and concrete now under the reactors. Once sea water seeps into the newly opened underground channels, the fissile particles will become free-floating and fire neutrons into bits of uranium, plutonium and other isotopes, triggering cascades of fission. The resulting steam pressure is volcanic, bursting out of the ground and spewing vast amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. The oatmeal spatters across the stove top. The problem with concrete is that it not only keeps sea water out but also traps any liquid inside the seal. A concrete sarcophagus then becomes a witches' brew of nuclear fission. Entombment of a reactor built on landfill over the seabed is therefore practically impossible. After the reactors drop into sinkholes, the meltdowns could go on for decades.
TEPCO is still dumping all its radioactive water into the ocean. The radiation from the melted reactor cores is so bad that even the small drone 'helicopter' they tried to fly over the plant to 'gather air samples' was cooked by the radiation and crashed onto the roof of reactor 2. But you won't know of the danger you are facing because the NRC and EPA aren't bothering with public readings anymore. In fact, the EPA actually REMOVED its monitoring equipment from Boise, Idaho. Coincidentally, Boise registered some of the highest readings of Fuksuhima radiation in America. These instruments are reading radioactive decay. Not every particle that flies through the tube decays—we can't see those—we can only see the ones that do decay while we are looking at them. The input grid to a typical professional-grade Geiger-Mueller tube is about the size of a silver dollar. If 20 particles per second are decaying in that tube, twenty more are decaying in every silver-dollar-sized area within miles of that meter and you are breathing a hell of a lot more than that because the meter just reads what is falling on it—you are actually sucking in air—a LOT of it. If the NRC told you that minor fact, everyone would suddenly realize that the radiation isn't all vacuumed up in the meter. It's all over everything. The meter just gives you a wild guess as to how soon the radiation is going to kill you. Right now, pretty slowly—but radiation is bio-accumulative. Once that radionuclide gets in you, something breaks.
Far more radiation has been released than has been reported. They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this. On June 6, the Japanese government more than doubled the estimate for the amount of radiation released from the plant in the immediate aftermath of the crisis in March. The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days.
TEPCO began late Sunday June 19, to release air containing radioactive substances from the building of reactor 2 by opening its doors. An estimated 1.6 billion becquerels of radioactive materials were released,compared with 500 million becquerels when the double doors of the building of reactor 1 were opened in May, the Jiji Press agency reported, citing TEPCO. Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission now admits that 154 Terabecquerels Per Day, (1 tera is 1 trillion) Every Day of radioactive iodine and cesium are still spewing out of the plant.
The mid- and long-term roadmap was presented when officials from TEPCO, the NRC, and manufacturers of nuclear reactors met in early July. The work is considered to be the most important phase in the decommissioning process. The roadmap indicates that removal will start in 2021 if technology essential for the work has been developed before that. The timeline is believed to have been set based on measures taken following the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States. But unlike the US case, as reactor containment vessels were damaged at the Fukushima complex, they need to be fixed and filled with water.
People of Fukushima and the rest of Japan are highly aware that they have robbed their children, their future—having been conned (admitted, their own fault and ignorance) about the safety, and all the positive (lucrative) possibility that nuclear energy could bring into their area... The very irony of the town's slogan, "Brighter Future through Nuclear Power/Energy" that still hangs above the—involuntarily abandoned-ghost town, sums up the situation.
A government-led panel looking into the future of TEPCO. is keen to wrest monopoly power away from Japan’s largest utility, but it has for now put aside more radical proposals to break up the company and sell off its transmission networks, which are estimated to be worth as much as ¥5 trillion ($62 billion), enough to handle the likely compensation claims from the nation’s worst-ever nuclear accident. A senior government official who favors such a plan said the government won’t push for it at present as it doesn’t want to panic the markets but a breakup is only a matter of time as the company runs out of cash under the weight of compensation payments and other costs.They’re basically waiting for the natural death of TEPCO, a move that would likely wipe out shareholders and force banks to accept debt waivers.
Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns at three reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March, the country's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters said June 6. Reactors 1, 2 and 3 experienced a full meltdown, it said. The plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), already said fuel rods at the heart of reactor No. 1 melted almost completely in the first 16 hours after the disaster struck. The remnants of that core are now sitting in the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel at the heart of the unit and that vessel is now leaking. The meltdowns of the plant's reactor cores happened much more quickly than Tepco has previously suggested, making it clear that the plant operators' desperate attempt to cool the reactors by dumping sea water on them was largely unsuccessful.
The No.1 reactor's core began suffering damage three hours after the March 11 earthquake. The pressure vessel of the No. 1 reactor was damaged five hours after the earthquake, according to an analysis by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). A "major part" of the fuel rods in reactor No. 2 melted and fell to the bottom of the pressure vessel (a melt-through) 80 hours after the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the plant, Tokyo Electric said May 24. The same thing happened within the first 60 hours at reactor No. 3, TEPCO said, in what it called its worst-case scenario analysis, saying the fuel is sitting at the bottom of the pressure vessel in each reactor building. A "melt-through"is far worse than a core meltdown and is the worst possibility in a nuclear accident. A massive hydrogen explosion—a symptom of the reactor's overheating—blew the roof off the No. 1 unit the day after the earthquake, and another hydrogen blast ripped apart the No. 3 reactor building two days later. The smoke from this explosion contained aerosolite plutonium, which is blowing, with the help of the westerly winds, to the USA. In fact, plutonium has been found in areas in the west. A suspected hydrogen detonation within the No. 2 reactor is believed to have damaged that unit on March 15.
Japan is located on the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines spanning the Pacific Basin, and is regularly hit by earthquakes. Authorities in the US assure us that our nuclear power plants are “safe” and built with proper containment units which would protect us should a major earthquake hit there. When U.S. nuclear power plants fail to meet safety standards, regulators simply lower the bar so that they can pass … no matter how egregious or dangerous those violations are.
There is overwhelming evidence that a nuclear power catastrophe in the United States—or somewhere in North America—is highly probable. It matters little if you are pro- or anti-nuclear. It is a tribute to our nuclear engineers that a worst-case accident has to date been avoided. The threat is real—it has always been real—but it has been dismissed. One must wonder what would happen to the citizens of the US if a meltdown took place and how the problem would be handled by the powers that be. Would the government cover-up the dangers and keep the information suppressed as many stand-by waiting for their leaders and media to tell them what to do? What would be the health implications to the general public? The documentation on increased cancer rates throughout the populace is alarming, as the effects of radiation are accumulative and compounding thus signifying the importance of maintaining a healthy thyroid gland. It is important to keep the thyroid pumped with the proper type and amount of daily iodine so it blocks the amount of radioactive iodine absorbed by the body from all of the nuclear releases that have taken place in the earth atmosphere.
With the recent 35% spike in infant mortality in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. following the Fukushima disaster one must worry and wonder; why are young children and babies dying? New findings are starting to link radiation from the Fukushima disaster to these deaths, showing the absolute importance (necessity) to maintain proper thyroid health in today’s trying times.
TEPCO explained that there is only one monitoring station, located at the western gate, but the device is used only about 20 minutes each day. This means that during the remaining 98.6 % of the time, the contamination of the air around the plant is not measured. TEPCO said that it is not a money issue but a lack of personnel qualified to change the filters of the instruments. The air dose monitor located in Fukushima city is no longer operational due to contamination by the accident.
Government watchdog The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) now estimates the total amount of radiation released into the atmosphere in the first week of the crisis at 770,000 terabecquerels. This compares with NISA's previous estimate, released on April 12, of 370,000 terabecquerels for the first month of the crisis. NISA has pointed out that most of the radiation was released in the first week. The amended estimate further undermines the credibility of Tepco, NISA and the IAEA in the aftermath of the crisis. The nuclear industry has long suffered from a "credibility gap" and low-level of trust from the public. The global community needs to know as quickly and as accurately as possible what's going on in a nuclear emergency. If there is a level of uncertainty about the situation—as there was at Fukushima—officials should emphasize that.
Curium-244 has been detected for the first time outside of the Fukushima I plant. Curium requires alead shield 20 times thicker than Plutonium-238. Plutonium is the most deadly substances known to man. Minuscule amounts can kill if ingested. It can also be used to make nuclear weapons, which is why governments around the world are so concerned about where and how it is stored. Curium-244 emits a 500 times greater fluence of neutrons, and its higher gamma emission requires a shield that is 20 times thicker — about 2 inches of lead for a 1 kW source, as compared to 0.1 in for 238Pu. Curium was found in soil samplings in Okuma town 2 or 3 km away from the plant. This is the first time curium has been found outside of the plant. It is a by-product of plutonium. The Education and Science ministry says it is a concern for internal exposure.
Tokyo Electric knew that the amount of radiation in seawater was 7.5 million times the legal limit even before it started dumping radioactive water in the ocean on June 6. TEPCO now wants to release about 3,000 tons of more water in the reactor buildings and turbine buildings, of Fukushima II ("Daini") Nuclear Power Plant. TEPCO fears that water in the basement of Fukushima II needs to be treated to remove the radioactive materials. it contains radioactive cobalt-60 which probably came from the rusty pipes, and cesium-137 and cesium-134 which are considered to have flown from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant 10 kilometers north. The level of contamination is 10 to 30 times the limit allowed for the discharge into the ocean. The reactors at Fukushima II Nuke Plant are in "cold shutdown." But the tsunami inundated the reactor buildings and the turbine buildings. The power supply equipment in the basements are degrading from sitting in the salt water, from tsunami, for nearly 3 months—a brilliant design by GE, having the power supply in the basement in a nuclear power plant right by the ocean in an earthquake/tsunami-prone country.
In order to have a reactor in "cold shutdown," you need to have the reactor pressure vessel (RPV)intact so that the cooling water can circulate. No point in talking about cold shutdown when we don't even know whether the fuel is still inside the reactor. The reactors can NEVER be placed in 'cold shutdown' because the cores are partially melted together. We are talking about hundreds of tons of fissile material inside reinforced concrete containment vessels. The containment vessels are cracked. They are releasing radiation. Fission excursions are still occurring and no one can go inside those containments for hundreds of years--even if they could crack one open. The fuel rods are now molten blobs at the bottom of the reactors. The blobs are incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water. They can continue to pour water on them and drain it off into the ocean because there is nothing else they can do. If they stop pumping water, the genie comes out. If they keep pumping water, it has to go somewhere and that somewhere is the ocean. It is still stop-gap.
Even when in shutdown mode, a nuclear plant requires electricity to keep key components cool in order to avoid any degradation or melting of the core that could result in the release of radiation.Those reactor cores cannot be put into 'cold shutdown' or dismantled or entombed. Never. They are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount of radioactive liquid. It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids.
Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist.Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor. The creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely. Arnie Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan. "So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water," Gundersen said. "We are already seeing Strontium at 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come." The history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen's assessment.
Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in Japan. He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the fact that most of them are of US design. "Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care about the effects of earthquakes," Dr Sawada said. "I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan." “Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US, and is also a large component of the problem. Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use. The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese government not use this technology yet, but the government agreed to use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power stations, and was thus subjected to US government policy.”
The UK government’s response to the unfolding crisis is revealed in documents prepared for Sir John Beddington, the chief scientist and chair of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), and released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. The 30 documents include advice from the National Nuclear Laboratory on damage to the plant, public safety assessments from the Health Protection Agency (HPA), computer models of the radioactive plume from Defra’s Radioactive Incident Monitoring Network (Rimnet), and the worst case scenario that might unfold at the plant. A substantial number of documents were withheld on grounds that they contained “information which, if disclosed, would adversely affect international relations,” the government’s civil contingencies team said. They said ‘the reasonable worst case scenario’ was if there was leaking radiation from six spent fuel ponds at the plant and all three reactors were damaged. They worked out that if this happened, 9.92 million terabecquerels of radiation could be been propelled into the air – almost double that released during the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986. Britain’s crisis plan was based on a scenario where almost double the amount of radiation was released into the air than the 1986 Chernobyl power plant disaster.
Map of ground deposition of cesium-137 for the Chernobyl accident.
Map of ground deposition of cesium-137 for the Fukushima-Daichii accident.
The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened; it's going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it, but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme is to build more nuclear plants. Indeed, June 21st and 22nd 2011, in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants, and U.S. government officials.
Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.
Over 3 months after the Fukushima disaster began, radiation is still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived. "No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington. An excessive level of radioactive cesium has been found in the meat of cows taken to a meat packing plant in Tokyo from Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture July 28, the most highly contaminated beef found contained radioactive cesium of 4,350 becquerels per kilogram, according to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. The government bans distribution of contaminated meat when radioactive cesium in meat, eggs and fish, reaches the maximum limit of 500 becquerels per kg. Remember, where there's cesium there's strontium. The government banned the shipment of cows from Fukushima Prefecture on July 26, and will not allow a resumption until safety can be ensured.
"They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.
We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11. There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses, as well as genetic effects, as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”
The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are “professionals” in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial camp. “Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident,” it declares on its website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: “There is no health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United States.” Acknowledging that “radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the United States,” the American Nuclear Society asserts that’s because we are able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking water due to the Fukushima incident…The radiation from Fukushima, though detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern.”
The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. “For anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant,” Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has insisted. “We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30 countries and these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of background radiation…and they do not constitute a public health risk.” WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.
As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, says: “We do live with background radiation—but it does cause cancer.” That’s why there is concern, he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium in some soils. “That’s background radiation but it’s not safe. There are absolutely no safe levels of radiation and adding more radiation adds to the health impacts.”There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology,” says Dr. Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, “large populations of people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t agree to.”
Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: “The generally accepted thinking about the safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of the cancer or genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there’s a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears.”Of the claims of 'no threat to health' from the radioactivity emitted from Fukushima, that “just flies in the face of all the standard models and all the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and cancer.” As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other continents and around the world, the doses are spread out,” notes Dr. Wing. “But it’s important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person’s individual risk, it doesn’t reduce the number of cancers that result from that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a few thousand people exposed to that same dose.” He believes “we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that minimizes harm,” is a “sane energy policy.” Those who have “led us into this situation” have caused “big problems.”
And they are still at it, even with radioactivity still coming out at Fukushima and expected to for months. On June 21st and 22nd, in Washington, the “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held; organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council. Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi. Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979; Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to expand into the U.S. and worldwide. Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor technologies; William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future set up by the Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch nuclear power supporters.
TEPCO began a trial run of a radioactive water treatment system at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant on June 15 in a desperate effort to break away from the vicious cycle of injecting water into reactors to cool them and ending up with more contaminated water. But even if the system, developed by France's Areva SA, were to operate smoothly, it would produce a massive amount of high-level radioactive waste that could affect TEPCO's roadmap to bring the troubled nuclear reactors under control by early next year. But while contaminated water is treated,the system is expected to produce about 2,000 cubic meters of radioactive sludge by the end of this year. The sludge is likely to be highly radioactive with 100 million becquerels per cubic centimeter. In addition, abouttwo to four 2.3-meter-tall cesium-absorbing containers are expected to be needed each day, but the roadmap does not take into account work to dispose of the containers.
The situation is worse than bad, it's worse than dire, it is history-altering horrific.
NOAA predicted four extreme solar emissions which could threaten the planet this decade. Similarly, NASA warned that a peak in the sun’s magnetic energy cycle and the number of sun spots or flares around 2013 could enable extremely high radiation levels. This type of storm could also induce geomagnetic currents that could debilitate transformers on the power grid.Electric power would be out for years or even decades. Nuclear plants would also be negatively affected as supplying power systems with enough fuel despite main power grids being offline for years would be a grave problem. Furthermore, spent fuel rods losing connection to the power grid could cause pools to boil over, fueling fires and releasing deadly radiation. A report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity enables a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss, a risk that significantly outweighs that of major earthquakes and tsunamis.
What, you don't think radiation is that bad? Here are a few examples of what ionizing radiation can do:
Chernobyl is over. Fukushima hasn't really begun. It will easily exceed the fallout created by all 2000+ nuclear tests. Those melting nuclear cores aren't going away. There are additional differences. Chernobyl didn't dump radioactive water into the world's primary fishing waters. Fukushima is dumping highly radioactive water into the oceans and will for many years. Fukushima will be many times worse than Chernobyl and will continue for, possibly, hundreds of years.
The Japanese national government is going to buy up processed seafood from the earthquake-affected areas and offered them to developing nations. It's not clear whether these seafood packages will be free or they will make the developing nations pay, even a token amount. Under the plan, the government will also accept more foreign "trainees" in the affected areas. Foreign "trainees" usually means cheap laborers from developing nations. The Japanese government wants to buy up fish and other seafood from fishermen in Tohoku, package them and sell them to developing nations so that Tohoku can recover. This is what the national government (and probably the prefectural governments in Tohoku) wants, and not the fishermen themselves, who simply stopped fishing when they became aware that the fish are contaminated with radioactive materials.
“Huge spike” in US infant mortality in the four months after Chernobyl vs. Is a “dramatic increase” in US baby deaths a result of Fukushima Fallout?
In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 percent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant. The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time-frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.
In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear reactors over the next decade. Ninety five percent of Italians voted in favor of blocking a nuclear power revival in their country. All 54 of Japan’s nuclear reactors may be shut by April 2012. Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US? We don’t really know how much radiation has leaked from Fukushima. Since the insides of the reactors are too hot for anyone to go into, there is no way of knowing how many of the approximately 600,000 fuel rods were exposed to the air.We don’t know how much has fallen with the rain. We don’t know how much has been dumped in the ocean.
The exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of cesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles." Hot particles are being discovered everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo. Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days, these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters. Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common. People are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well. The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter.These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant. One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. People in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April.
Maps of the plume of radiation being given off by the plant show that an elongated cloud will stretch across the Pacific. They said there was nothing to worry about but that does not change the fact that they admitted that such a plume exists and that it has been blowing most of the radiation toward North America. The wind is about to shift and the Japanese further South, including Tokyo, are in for a greater bite from the nuclear hell their nuclear industry has unleashed on them. The health effects of low-level radiation exposure can take as much as 20 or even 30 years to show up. It’s one of the reasons that people can dismiss the effects so easily.
Japanese researchers said radioactive substances spewed from a damaged Japanese nuclear plant were carried to Europe through the United States by the jet stream, Jiji news agency reported June 22, 11. A Japanese research group led by Toshihiko Takemura, associate professor at Kyushu University, tracked the flow of leaked radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant through a computer simulation. Radioactive substances rose to about 5 kilometers when a low pressure system passed over eastern Japan on March 14-15, the researchers said. The substances were blown eastward by a jet stream traveling at a speed of some 3,000 kilometers a day, arriving on the US West Coast on March 18, in Iceland on March 20, and many other European countries on March 22, the researchers said.
Even as thousands of Japanese workers struggle to contain the ongoing nuclear disaster, low levels of radiation from those power plants have been detected in foods in the United States. Milk, fruits and vegetables show trace amounts of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daichi power plants, and the media appears to be paying scant attention, if any attention at all. Consuming food containing radionuclides is particularly dangerous. If an individual ingests or inhales a radioactive particle, it continues to irradiate the body as long as it remains radioactive and stays in the body. Children are much more susceptible to the effects of radiation and stand a much greater chance of developing cancer than adults. So it is particularly dangerous when they consume radioactive food or water.
On U.S. soil, radiation began to show up in samples of milk tested in California, just one month after the plants were damaged. Radiation tests conducted since the nuclear disaster in Japan have detected radioactive iodine and cesium in milk and vegetables produced in California. According to tests conducted by scientists at the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering, milk from grass fed cows in Sonoma County was contaminated with cesium 137 and cesium 134. Milk sold in Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Vermont and Washington has also tested positive for radiation since the accident. Additionally, drinking water tested in some U.S. municipalities also shows radioactive contamination.
Thanks to the jet stream air currents that flow across the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. is receiving a steady flow of radiation from Fukushima Daichi. And while many scientists say that the levels of contamination in food pose no significant threat to health, scientists are unable to establish any actual safe limit for radiation in food. Detection of radioactive iodine 131, which degrades rapidly, in California milk samples shows that the fallout from Japan is reaching the U.S. quickly.
The fallout detection in the USA is totally inadequate.All the major governmental agencies in the United States are cutting back on their radiation monitoring.
The ongoing crisis at Fukushima has been all but forgotten in the minds of the mainstream media. The Fukushima nuclear facility was hit by a tsunami as high as 15 meters (45 feet) on March 11th. Tokyo Electric Power Company, reporting on its survey of high-water marks left on the plant's buildings, said it found that the tsunami reached up to 15 meters on the ocean side of the reactor and turbine buildings. TEPCO confirmed that the 6 reactors at Fukushima Daiichi power plant had been under as much as 5 meters of water. The tsunami destroyed 12 of the 13 emergency backup generators. If the water which cools the reactor core containing 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of radioactive fuel, stops flowing, the emergency back-up cooling system must immediately send water in to cool the core. It takes less than a minute for the nuclear fuel to reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This excessive heat burns through the cement bottom of the plant and bores downward into the earth. U.S. Nuclear scientists have called this the China Syndrome.
The nuclear power plant crisis in Fukushima prefecture is designated at the highest possible designationlevel-7, indicating a serious accident on the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale. As of May 13, more than 15,000 people had been killed, 9,506 were still missing, and about 115,500 were still living in 2,425 evacuation shelters, according to the National Police Agency.
After more than 2 months since the quake and tsunami, the disaster-hit areas look almost the same as on March 11 after the tsunami. There are many areas still without power and water, and at some shelters the lack of food and water is chronic.
It is nothing short of astonishing that the nuclear catastrophe we were all told was “no big deal” has now escalated into the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human civilization. It’s so bad now that soil samples taken from outside the 12-mile exclusion zone (the zone considered safe enough by the Japanese government for schoolchildren to attend school there) are higher than the 1.48 million becquerels a square meter limit that triggered evacuations outside Chernobyl in 1986. In other words, the radiation level of the soil 12 miles fromFukushima is now higher than the levels considered too dangerous to live in near Chernobyl.
If workers are unable to get additional cooling water into the reactor vessel, the molten fuel core will collapse into the water in bottom of the vessel. Eventually the heat from the decaying fuel will boil away the water that’s left, leaving the core sitting on the vessel’s lower head made of steel. Should that happen, It’ll melt through it like butter. That, in turn, would cause a “high-pressure melt-injection” into the water-filled concrete cavity below the reactor. Because the concrete is likely to be unheated, the reaction created by the sudden injection of the reactor’s ultra-hot content is immense. It’s like somebody dropped a bomb, and there’s be a big cloud of very, very radioactive material above the ground, containing uranium and plutonium, as well as the fission products. This has already happened!
What we’re facing here, folks, is aFukushima dead zone where life will never return to its pre-Fukushima norms. The radiation level is similar to a nuclear bomb test site. Tetsuya Terasawa said the radiation levels are in line with those found after a nuclear bomb test, which disperses plutonium. He declined to comment further. One soil sample taken 25 kilometers away from Fukushima showed Cesium-137 exceeding 5 million becquerels per square meter. This level makes it uninhabitable by humans, yet both the Japanese and U.S. governments continue to downplay the whole event, assuring their sheeple that there’s nothing to worry about. The government released a model showing that Tokyo got a serious dusting of Fukushima fallout on the 15th of March.
“Nuclear radiation is the most carcinogenic thing that exists – said AIOM president Carmelo Iacono – and it cannot be kept under control, as the Fukushima tragedy proved.“ 8,000 schoolchildren in Date City, 60km from the ruined Fukushima nuclear power plant, are being given dosimeters to measure radiation. Thousands more children in day-care centres, kindergartens and primary schools in towns and villages around the area are likely to follow suit. It’s hard to imagine something much more frightening than five-year-olds marching off to irradiated school playgrounds in the morning with Geiger counters strapped to their chests. Toshiso Kosako, professor of radiation safety at the University of Tokyo’s graduate school said the government delayed the release of forecasts on the spread of radiation compiled by the Nuclear Safety Technology Center’s computer system. He urged the government to conduct an epidemiological study in Fukushima and neighboring prefectures as thyroid cancer is expected to develop among children.
Both Japan and the U.S. have made huge efforts to raise the limits of allowed radiation exposure in foods and beverages. This was, of course, a deceitful tactic to try to reclassify radiation contamination as somehow magically being “safe” by redefining it. The outright lying and tactics of deception that have been used to try to downplay the severity of the radioactive fallout from Fukushima are nothing less than despicable. In a time when radiation threatens the safety and food supply of hundreds of millions of people, we are getting nothing but a Fukushima whitewash.Fukushima is now far worse than Chernobyl ever was and yet we’re all being told it’s no problem and that the government has it all under control. How is 5 million becquerels per square meter not a problem? Barely two weeks ago, TEPCO finally admitted Fukushima suffered multiple core meltdowns in the hours following the tsunami. This was the first time TEPCO openly admitted to something the alternative media had been reporting for months.
What has become perfectly clear in the reporting on Fukushima is that only the alternative media was correct in reporting the severity of the core meltdowns and the release of radioactive material into the environment.That’s why more and more people are turning away from traditional sources of (mis)information “presstitutes” and instead relying on the alternative media to get accurate information about world events.
Fukushima may be in an apocalyptic downward spiral. Forget the corporate-induced media coma that says otherwise…or nothing at all. Radiation continues to be a serious problem for residents of Japan and in America, increased radiation levels are being found across the country. Lethal radiation is spewing unabated. Emission levels could seriously escalate. There is no end in sight. The potential is many times worse than the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. After Chernobyl, those living in areas with more than 555,000 becquerels of cesium-137 per square meter were forced to relocate. However, the accumulated radioactivity exceeds this level at some locations outside the official evacuation zones, including the village of Iitate and the town of Namie.
Containing this disaster is beyond the abilities of Tokyo Electric or the Japanese government. There is no reason to incur further unnecessary risk. With all needed resources, it's time for the world's best scientists and engineers to take charge. Even then the outcome is unclear. A huge outcry is erupting in Fukushima over what parents say is a blatant government failure to protect their children from dangerous levels of radiation.
Molten fuel at Unit One has burned through 3 reactor pressure vessels, with water poured in to cool it merely pouring out the bottom. A growing pond of highly radioactive liquid is softening the ground and draining into the ocean. There is no way to predict where these molten masses of fuel will yet go. Especially in the event of an aftershock, steam and hydrogen explosions could blow out what's left of the containments. At least one spent fuel pool has been on fire. The site has already suffered at least two hydrogen explosions. Many believe a fission explosion may also have occurred. All have weakened the structures and support systems on site. These shocks and the soft ground may be why Unit Four has partially sunk and is tipping, possibly on the brink of collapse. Even a relatively minor aftershock could mean catastrophe.
More explosions are possible. More leaks are virtually certain. Escalated radiation levels from any one of the reactors could force all workers to evacuate, leaving the entire site to chance. The New York Times has now reported that critical valve failures that contributed to the Fukushima disaster are likely at numerous US reactors. Significant radioactive debris has been found thousands of yards from the plant. Radiation levels in Tokyo, nearly 200 miles away, have risen. Fallout has been detected in North America and throughout Europe. Radiation pouring into the sea has begun to spread worldwide.
The extra plutonium in the MOX fuel at Unit Three is an added liability. Reactor number 3, which is the only reactor to contain MOX (mixed oxide) reclaimed plutonium, exploded on March 13. The problem is that reactor 3 used "dirty" fuel. Western nuclear engineers have said that the release of MOX into the atmosphere would produce a more dangerous radioactive plume than the dispersal of uranium fuel rods at the site. MOX fuel plutonium, is a substance so toxic that a teaspoon-sized cube of it would suffice to kill 10 million people. It is a combination of plutonium and uranium.
MOXis two million times more deadly than normal enriched uranium. The Half-life of Plutonium-239 in MOX is 24,000 years and just a few milligrams of P-239 escaping in a smoke plume will contaminate soil for tens of thousands of years. According to the Nuclear Information Resource Center (NIRS), this plutonium-uranium fuel mixture is far more dangerous than typical enriched uranium, as a single milligram (mg) of MOX is as deadly as 2,000,000 mg of normal enriched uranium. Plutonium-239 has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years, while Uranium-235's half-life is 700-million years. Multiply that by the 600,000 spent fuel rods at Fukushima's Unit 3 Reactor (no longer under 45-feet of water to keep them cool).Once there wasn't any more cooling water, fission took place and the destruction of "unit 3 Reactor was the cause of the massive mushroom-cloud explosion. There was a massive explosion—maybe a nuclear critical mass explosion—which would explain howfuel rods containing plutonium were found one-and-a-half miles from the reactor. Witnesses reported a big explosion and dark smoke.
In the 1990s, the industry proposed dealing with the growing plutonium stockpile by "recycling" it as MOX nuclear fuel for burning in thermal reactors. The idea, like so many in the nuclear industry, looked good on paper. By mixing relatively small amounts of plutonium dioxide with bigger amounts of uranium oxide from spent nuclear fuel, it would be possible to fabricate MOX fuel rodscontaining about 7 percent "recycled" plutonium from reprocessed reactor fuel.
In a lapse of professionalism, the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA) has never seriously addressed nuclear-waste disposal as an industrywide issue. Based on the ration of spent rods to reactor fuel inside U.S. nuclear facilities, there are close to 200,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste at the 453 civilian nuclear-energy plants worldwide. Yet not a single permanent storage site has ever been opened anywhere.
There is much more, none of it good.
All nuclear power plants are operated in a near-meltdown status. They operate at very high heat, relying on nuclear fission to boil water that produces steam to drive the turbines that generate electricity. Critically, the nuclear fuel is prevented from melting down through the steady circulation of coolants which are pushed through the cooling system using very high powered electric pumps. If you stop the electric pumps, the coolant stops flowing and the fuel rods go critical (and then melt down).
Nuclear coolant pumps are usually driven by power from the electrical grid. They are not normally driven by power generated locally from the nuclear power plant itself. Instead, they’re connected to the grid. In other words, even though nuclear power plants are generating megawatts of electricity for the grid, they are also dependent on the grid to run their own coolant pumps. If the grid goes down, the coolant pumps go down, too, which is why they are quickly switched to emergency backup power — either generators or batteries.
The on-site batteries can only drive the coolant pumps for around eight hours. After that, the nuclear facility is dependent on diesel generators (or sometimes propane) to run the pumps that circulate the coolant which prevents the whole site from going Chernobyl. And yet, critically, this depends on something rather obvious: The delivery of diesel fuel to the site. If diesel cannot be delivered, the generators can’t be fired up and the coolant can’t be circulated. When you grasp the importance of this supply line dependency, you will instantly understand why a single solar flare could unleash a nuclear holocaust across the planet.
When the generators fail and the coolant pumps stop pumping, nuclear fuel rods begin to melt through their containment rods, unleashing ungodly amounts of life-destroying radiation directly into the atmosphere. This is precisely why Japanese engineers worked so hard to reconnect the local power grid to the Fukushima facility after the tidal wave — they needed to bring power back to the generators to run the pumps that circulate the coolant. This effort failed, of course, which is why Fukushima became such a nuclear disaster and released countless becquerels of radiation into the environment (with no end in sight).
And yet, despite the destruction we’ve already seen with Fukushima, U.S. nuclear power plants are nowhere near being prepared to handle sustained power grid failures.
A meltdown occurred at the No. 1 reactor three and a half hours after its cooling system started malfunctioning, according to the result of a simulation using "severe accident" analyzing software developed by the Idaho National Laboratory. Chris Allison, who had actually developed the analysis and simulation software, reported the result to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in late March. Tepco took more than two months to confirm the meltdowns in three reactors.It was only May 15 when Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) admitted for the first time that a meltdown had occurred at the No. 1 reactor. According to Allison's report obtained by the Mainichi, the simulation was based on basic data on light-water nuclear reactors at the Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Mexico that are about the same size as that of the No. 1, 2, and 3 reactors in Fukushima.
According to the simulation, the reactor core started melting about 50 minutes after the emergency core cooling system of the No. 1 reactor stopped functioningand the injection of water into the reactor pressure vessel came to a halt.About an hour and 20 minutes later, the control rod and pipes used to gauge neutrons started melting and falling onto the bottom of the pressure vessel.After about three hours and 20 minutes, most of the melted fuel had piled up on the bottom of the pressure vessel. At the four hour and 20 minute mark, the temperature of the bottom of the pressure vessel had risen to 1,642 degrees Celsius, close to the melting point for the stainless steel lining, probably damaging the pressure vessel.
Naoto Kan, Japan's beleaguered prime minister, has acknowledged for the first time since March 11 that he may step down — but not until he's done doing what he needs to do. Kan has come under increasing pressure from both inside and outside his party to give up his post after his handling of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and continuing nuclear crisis. In a televised meeting with his party on Thursday morning, Kan said: “I'd like to pass on my responsibility to a younger generation once we reach a certain stage in tackling the disaster and I've fulfilled my role.” He did not indicate when that might be.
TEPCO, the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, had tried to fill the containment vessel of the No. 1 reactor with water, but it decided to abandon the plan after it discovered that a meltdown had occurred at the reactor. Masanori Naito, director in charge of safety analysis at the Institute of Applied Energy, said,"TEPCO could have conducted similar analysis at an early stage and assumed the meltdown had occurred. TEPCO should have prepared other cooling methods besides the method of filling the reactor with water."
Here's the summary of the simulation by Allison:
The emergency core cooling system (ECCS) fails;
50 minutes later: reactor core starts to melt;
1 hour 20 minutes later: control rods and other pipes inside the RPV start to melt;
3 hours 20 minutes later: most of the melted jumble ("corium") drops to the bottom of RPV;
4 hours 20 minutes later: temperature at the bottom of the RPV reaches 1,642 degrees Celsius, damaging the RPV stainless steel lining [melting point of stainless steel is 1,510 degrees Celsius].
It is not clear from the TEPCO's log on the day exactly when the emergency core cooling system failed. After the earthquake on March 11 at 2:46PM JST, the ECCS for the Reactor 1 started to operate at 2:52PM JST, but failed only after 10 minutes. And that was before the tsunami arrived at about 3:30PM JST. Attempts were made to restart the ECCS until 1:48AM JST on March 12, when the pump that feeds water to the ECCS broke.
Radiation leaks from fuel rods are suspected” at Japan’s Tsuruga nuclear plant in Fukui prefectural, with Radioactive Xenon up 75,000%. According to Japan Atomic, 4.2 becquerels of iodine-133 and 3,900 becquerels of xenon gas were detected per cubic centimeter.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) held a special ACRS meeting Thursday May 26, 2011 on the current status of Fukushima. Arnie Gundersen was invited to speak for only 5 minutes concerning the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident as it pertains to the 23 Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors (BWR's) in the US and containment integrity, and was repeatedly interrupted during his presentation. Mr. Gundersen was the first engineer to brief the NRC on the implication of Main Steam Isolation Valve (MSIV)Leakage in 1974, and he has been studying containment integrity since 1972. The NRC has constantly maintained in all of its calculations and reviews that there is zero probability of a containment leaking. For more than six years, in testimony and in correspondence with the NRC, Mr. Gundersen has disputed the NRC's stand that containment systems simply do not and cannot leak. The events at Fukushima have proven that Gundersen was correct. The explosions at Fukushima show that Mark 1 containments will lose their integrity and release huge amounts of radiation, as Mr. Gundersen has been telling the NRC for many years.
From very early on—as early as 1964—US government officials knew that there were serious potential dangers with the design of the type of reactor that was used to build the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But their warnings were repeatedly ignored. In the rise of nuclear power in America, Britain and the Soviet Union, the technologies developed were shaped by the political and business forces of the time. And that led directly to inherent dangers in the design of the containment of many of the early plants. Those early plants in America were the Boiling Water Reactors. And that is the very model that was used to build the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Three of them were supplied directly by General Electric.
In 1966 the US government Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards tried to force the industry to redesign their containment structures to make them safer. But the chairman of the committee claimed that General Electric in effect refused. And in 1971 the Atomic Energy Commission did a series of tests of Emergency Core Cooling systems. Accidents were simulated. In each case the emergency systems worked—but the water failed to fill the core. Often being forced out under pressure.
As one of the AEC scientists said: "We discovered that our theoretical calculations didn't have a strong correlation with reality. But we just couldn't admit to the public that all these safety systems we told you about might not do any good"And again the warnings were ignored by senior members of the Agency and the industry. That was the same year that the first of the Fukushima Daiichi plant's reactors came online. Supplied by General Electric. These BWRs were designed long before computers allowed detailed simulations, and even they can’t predict things like somebody using a candle that burned up all of the electrical connections at one plant.
"A is For Atom" Foretold Fukushima Core Melt
Japan and Germany have had the good survival sense to abandon future reactor construction, and to shut some existing sites. But here, the corporate media blackout is virtually complete. Out of sight, out of mind seems the strategy for an industry desperate for federal loan guarantees and continued operation of a rickety fleet of decaying old reactors. The Obama Administration has ended radiation monitoring of seafood in the Pacific.It does not provide reliable, systematic radiological or medical data on fallout coming to the United States. But we may all be in unprecedented danger. A national movement is underway to end atomic give-aways and turn to a green-powered Earth. Now we must also move ALL the world's governments beyond denial to focus on somehow bringing Fukushima under control. After two months of all-out effort, four reactors and at least that many spent fuel pools remain at risk. Our survival depends on stopping Fukushima from further irradiating us all.
The Japanese government has continued to downplay the magnitude of this disaster and the long-term effects it will have on the world. Toshiso Kosako, a professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo and a special advisor to the Japanese government on radiation safety resigned April 29, saying that he was stepping down as a government adviser over what he lambasted as unsafe, slipshod measures with the handling of the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The residents of Japan have good cause to mistrust the media, TEPCO officials, and members of their government when it comes to assurances about radiation levels, plutonium dispersal, and the related health risks. Americans also have good cause to mistrust these same sort of assurances issued to American residents. Over the past few weeks, Japan, the US, and EU all have issued public statements that confirm the total disregard for safety, protection, and well being of their citizens. On April 26, the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl's nuclear catastrophe, Physicians for Social Responsibility, "underscored the ongoing health risks of nuclear energy to the public—a clear reminder that standard evacuation zones cannot protect the public from a nuclear accident."
It is now evident almost three months after March 11th 2011, that Cold Shutdown will 'never' occur.
Substantial damage to the fuel cores at three reactors has taken place, TEPCO said May 15, further complicating the already daunting task of bringing them to a safe shutdown while avoiding the release of high levels of radioactivity. Ehen engineers from Tepco entered the No.1 reactor for the first time, they sawthe top five feet or so of the core's 13 ft-long fuel rods had been exposed to the air and melted down.Coolant was escaping through newly discovered openings in reactors No. 1, 2 & 3 pressure vessels, a development that is slowing efforts to prevent potential further radiation releases. The reactor core, or the nuclear fuel, was exposed to the air within five hours after the plant was struck by the earthquake.The temperature inside the core reached 2,800 degrees Celsius in six hours, causing the fuel pellets to melt away rapidly. Within 16 hours, the reactor core melted, dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel and created a hole there. So this leakage has been going on for some time. The situation could escalate rapidly when "the lava melts through the vessel.
TEPCO reported on May 23 that the Reactors 1, 2 and 3 at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant had a core meltdowns. Haruki Madarame, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, said in a news conference that the meltdowns should not come as a surprise. Immediately after the crisis erupted at the nuclear power plant in March, experts pointed out that meltdowns probably occurred at all three reactors. But TEPCO's measures to contain the crisis have been based on the assumption of lighter damage to the reactor cores. TEPCO said it appears that all parts of the fuel rods have melted. Hiroaki Koide of Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute is quoted as saying that the melted core of the Reactors 1, 2, and 3 are not just out of the Reactor Pressure Vessel but out of the Containment Vessel.
Earlier, Tepco found the basement of the unit No. 1 reactor building flooded with 4.2 meters of water from the leaking containment vessel, a beaker-shaped steel structure that holds the pressure vessel. The water flooding the basement is highly radioactive. Workers are unable to observe the flooding situation because of strong radiation coming out of the water, Tepco said. A survey conducted by an unmanned robot May 14 found radiation levels of 1,000 to 2,000 millisieverts per hour in some parts of the ground level of unit No. 1, a level that is highly dangerous for any worker nearby. Japan has placed an annual allowable dosage limit of 250 millisieverts for workers. After the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the US, where a meltdown of nuclear fuel rods also occurred,it took almost 10 years to remove melted fuel at the bottom of the reactor, which resembled hardened lava. Failure to release radiation data in the early stages of the crisis delayed the evacuations of communities near the plant. TEPCO could have foreseen the core melt at an early stage when the cooling of the reactor stopped due to the power failure. TEPCO's assessment that the damage to the fuel was limited has turned out to be completely wrong. The disclosure of the data came too late.
There has been one cover-up after another, putting everyone in danger. So, the reactor's workers were the first to die. Actual numbers of dead clean-up workers haven't been reported yet. Recruiting ads for temporary workersdo not warn potential employees of any possible nuclear dangers on the job. By sub-contracting this hazardous labor, costs are brought down, and profits soar. Further, "TEPCO and other power companies have always refused to disclose the list of subcontractors." Without any public disclosure or accountability, no one knows who is doing what. There are about 700 workers at Fukushima's radioactive site. At a daily rate of about US $122, this is hardly worth getting cancer and dying. These temporary contract day workers, doing the most dirty and dangerous jobs in the nuclear plants and who fall ill, will not even appear in the statistics.
40,000 units of Geiger counters and dosimeters donated by the United States, France, and Canada after the accident still sit in a warehouse at Narita International Airport. These Geiger counters and dosimeters are under the jurisdiction of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Donations from foreign countries are handled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Distributing the Geiger counters and dosimeters to the plant workers is done by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Distributing the Geiger counters and dosimeters to civilians is done by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Beside the Geiger counters and dosimeters, mountains of ramen noodles, water bottles, sneakers, blankets, underwear, socks, canned food, rice, mattresses, soap may be sitting at official distribution centers. There are still many, many people living in shelters with scant food and water.
Sludge that will be generated in the process of treating radioactive water at the tsunami-hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant is estimated to contain 100 million becquerels of radioactive substances per cubic centimeter, the plant operator said. TEPCO estimates that about 2,000 cubic meters of sludge will be generated. However, because it is so highly radioactive, the sludge is extremely difficult to manage. Areva acknowledges that it has never handled sludge generated through the treatment of water emitting more than 1,000 millisieverts of radiation per hour.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) is going to allow radioactive sewage sludge to be recycled as cement materials. Starting with the sludge with several hundred becquerels per kilogram of cesium, and gradually expand to the sludge with higher radiation as long as it is "confirmed "safe." Several cement companies will start taking the sewage sludge as early as next week. If the safety of the cement products is ascertained, the Ministry will gradually expand the use of the sewage sludge [with higher radioactive materials]. It must be a shock to many Japanese to finally realize that the government ministries are for the benefit of the industries and the ministries themselves, not the citizens and residents of Japan. This is just another proof that the safety and security of the industries ( in the MLIT's case, big ones like construction, railroad, aerospace) is the primary concern of the government, at the expense of "small people."
It does make a difference who's at the top. The fish rots from the head.
The Japanese government has discovered thousands of cases of workers at nuclear power plants outside Fukushima Prefecture suffering from internal exposure to radiation after they visited the prefecture, the head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said. Most of the workers who had internal exposure to radiation visited Fukushima after the nuclear crisis broke out following the March 11 quake and tsunami, and apparently inhaled radioactive substances scattered by hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant. The revelation prompted local municipalities in Fukushima to consider checking residents' internal exposure to radiation.
The head of the NISA said there were a total of 4,956 cases of workers suffering from internal exposure to radiation at nuclear power plants in the country excluding the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, and 4,766 of them involved workers originally from Fukushima who had visited the prefecture after the nuclear crisis. The Agency said it received the data from power companies across the country that measured the workers' internal exposure to radiation with "whole-body counters" andrecorded levels of 1,500 counts per minute (cpm) or higher.In 1,193 cases, workers had internal exposure to radiation of more than 10,000 cpm. Those workers had apparently returned to their homes near the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant or had moved to other nuclear power plants from the Fukushima No. 1 and 2 nuclear power plants.
We're in the uncharted territory that we entered for the first time ever since the human race started to use nuclear power. Radioactive material concentrations in nearly 500 square miles of land either meet or exceed the evacuation threshold for the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to measurements collected in April by the Japanese government and the U.S. Energy Department. Plutonium was detected in a rice paddy by a food manufacturer more than 50 kms away from Fukushima power plant.
At least 250 tons of radioactive water spilled into the Pacific Ocean from the No. 3 reactor at the site. TEPCO said the radiated water leaked for 41 hours beginning May 10. They cannot treat as much radioactive water as they need to keep pumping in. No one can. So the radiation is coming across the Pacific and impacting the US and, certainly, Hawaii. The Pacific Ocean is a TEPCO Fukushima dumping ground, with the Humbolt or Black Currentcarrying toxic death to Alaska, Canada, Washington, Oregon, California and Baja California. They claim that they are going to start treating it, but it is impossible. The inside of reactor cores have to be maintained in a 'clean room' environment or the water picks up particles—which then become radioactive—which then irradiate the reactor plumbing—and, eventually, become fuel. That's why they have to keep pumping fresh water in and dumping it out. They cannot recirculate it, even if they manage to get new plumbing installed. The next major earthquake there will begin an extinction event.
TEPCO said June 6 that it plans to release water containing radioactive materials into the sea. The total amount to be released will be 11,500 tons and the concentration of contaminants in the waste water is estimated at about 100 times the legal limit. The company said it plans to release 10,000 tons of water being kept in a plant facility and 1,500 tons of underground water, also found to be contaminated with radioactive substances, near the Nos. 5 and 6 reactors.
EPA, CDC, and FDA came out early after Fukushima to quell American fears of internal contamination singing, "Don't Worry, Be Happy"! Now EPA has announced after purposely dropping the environmental and individual monitoring ball on the Gulf Oil Disaster Last year,they will reduce and discontinue existing inadequate testing of air, water, rainwater, soil, crops and people downwind of Fukushima.
MichioIshikawa, the former head of the Japan Nuclear Technology Institute and the current "most senior" advisor to the Institute and known as one of the most ardent proponents of nuclear power generation said, "Reactors 1, 2, 3 All Had Complete Meltdown." He says not only the fuels have melted down completely but some of them may already be outside the Pressure Vessels. (He also talks about potentially extremely high concentration of radioactive materials ("like we've never seen before") in the water inside the Pressure Vessel, as the result of core meltdown and continuous water injection.
The safety of nuclear power goes beyond national boundaries. Contaminated Fukushima particles are highly radioactive and are joining the Jetstream giving off very toxic, dangerous radioactive waves. Fukushima is not the only facility with cooling problems and 40-year-old technology. In addition to Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear plants at Onagawa, Fukushima Daini, Tokai, and Kashiwazaki, were ALL damaged by the MAG 9.0 EQ of March 11 and are in shut-down status. Fukushima Daiichi is releasing 154 teraBecquerels of radionuclide particulate matter a day.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan has asked a utility firm in central Japan tohalt operations of all active reactors at the Hamaoka nuclear power plant, due to the risk of earthquakes. Some seismologists have called Hamaoka the world's most dangerous nuclear power facility. A damaged nuclear fuel rod was stuck inside a reactor at the ageing Hamaoka plant after an accident 17 years ago and is still there, the plant’s operator said. The operator, Chubu Electric Power Co., said experts were unable to remove the spent fuel rod from the plant. The company sought help from domestic and foreign experts on how to safely extract it, but no solution was found so far. The Hamaoka complex is known to sit directly above the projected focus of the Tokai Earthquake that experts have long warned of. Hamaoka is presently built to withstand only an 8.5-magnitude quake and an eight-meter tsunami. Government forecasts have predictedan 87 percent chance of a magnitude-8-class earthquake in the area, which sits on two major subterranean faults. A major accident would be likely to force the evacuation of Greater Tokyo, home to 28 million people.
The shutdown of all reactors at the Hamaoka nuclear power plant could lead to dwindling power supplies of other regional utilities. TEPCO, already facing huge electricity shortages mainly because of the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, is counting on other utilities, including Chubu Electric, for 1 gigawatt in power supply. But with the Hamaoka reactors offline, Chubu Electric will have no surplus power to provide to TEPCO.
TEPCO said that up to 700 millisieverts per hour were detected in areas where workers would be expected to spend prolonged periods of time inside of the No. 1 reactor, restoration work is possible. They found several radiation " hot spots," especially around pipes suspected to be clogged with highly radioactive material. But the utility firm opened the main access points to reactor 1 on May 8, and freely released500 million becquerels of radioactive substances into the atmosphere.
The amount of radioactivity in seawater near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is about to hit the highest-ever level recorded in history. Officials measured 186 becquerels per liter of radioactive substances in the sea just 34 kilometers from the crippled power plant on April 15th. This level is about 20-thousand times higher than the permissible annual standard set by the Japanese government. Right now at Fukushima Daiichi, more than 70,000 long tons of highly radioactive 'stagnant' water is sitting in the turbine rooms of Reactors 1, 2 and 3, all dressed up and nowhere to go except the ocean—where it is being quietly dumped.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is the fourth largest electric power company in the world and the largest from Asia. TEPCO has one-third of the Japanese electric market and is the largest of the 10 electric utilities in Japan. Therefore, TEPCO is really a state-endorsed monopoly that has a great deal of control over the Japanese government and political puppets the world-over. It is clear that the leadership of TEPCO, the owner and operator of the Fukushima nuclear facility, cares more about preserving its income-generating assets than killing its workers and others from radioactive fallout. Bloomberg reported that “Tokyo Electric Power Co. was reluctant to use seawater to cool one of the six reactors at the plant and hesitated because it was concerned about harming its long-term investment in the plant…” It was a power failure caused by the earthquake that triggered the accident, andthe only transmission tower TEPCO owned that fell during the earthquake was the one that supplied power to the plant.
TEPCO wanted to re-start the three reactors at Kashiwazaki (which were damaged in a 2007 earthquake and have been off ever since). That is not an example of forward thinking - it is pure, naked desperation. Their idea of restarting Fukushima Daiichi reactors #5 and #6 further supports desperation. There are so many problems at SEVERAL of their nuclear plants that rolling blackouts are now the norm. Every functional nuclear plant is being pushed to the limit and beyond in order to maintain a semblance of normality - but they are ALL in bad repair and are sitting ducks for the next mega-quake....or for ONE overworked plant manager to make a bad decision. Or simply overuse.
The March 11 earthquake was so powerful it pulled the entire country out and down into the sea. The mostly devastated coastal communities now face regular flooding with each high tide, because of their lower elevation and damage to sea walls from the massive tsunamis triggered by the quake. Twice a day, the flow steadily increases until it is knee-deep, carrying fish and debris by people's front doors and trapping them in their homes. Those still on the streets slosh through the sea water in rubber boots or on bicycle.
Tetsuo Matsui at the University of Tokyo, says the limited data from Fukushima indicates that nuclear chain reactions must have reignited at Fuksuhima after the accident. Matsui says the evidence comes from measurements of the ratio of cesium-137 and iodine-131 at several points around the facility and in the seawater nearby. As of March 23, neutron beams have been reported at least thirteen times at Fukushima Daiichi. Nuclear criticality is the only thing that produces a neutron beam. It has been weeks of intensifying contamination with no end in sight. Every day the news gets worse. Robots are telling us that radiation is so hot inside the nuclear plant in Japan that workers will have a hard to impossible time to work in certain areas to recover the plant from worst case scenarios. Radiation levels are heading up across the board and across continents.
All it would take is one thing like a pipe breaking or another earthquake to make this situation even more catastrophic than it already is. TEPCO, using a robotic aerial vehicle known as the T-Hawk, to survey the damaged nuclear site, clearly shows the extremely devastating impact the large explosions had on the facility. With spent nuclear fuel rods being housed directly next to the main reactor shielding this footage only intensified concerns over their condition. "It's graver than Chernobyl in that no one can predict how the situation will develop," said Atsushi Kasai, a former senior researcher with the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute.
The head of the emergency operation at the plant, Masao Yoshida warned: “If a similar strength earthquake or tsunami hits us it would cause fatal damage, especially a tsunami.” There has been no time to clear away debris around the power station. The emergency teams have been preoccupied trying to minimise the radioactive contamination of the air and the sea. Radiation levels are rising so rapidly that it's not even safe to work near the plant. The level of radiation was above 1,000 millisieverts per hour, meaning a worker would reach the annual maximum exposure limit of 250 millisieverts in 15 minutes or less. This means the levels are about 100,000 times those at a normally functioning reactor. This is very rapidly headed into a situation where suicidal volunteers are going to have to "rush in" and do some work on the plant, spend only a few minutes there, then evacuate as quickly as possible. And they'll still get cancer.
People near the site face the greatest danger. A person taking a walk inside the area of the nuclear power plant without any protection would burn up on a cellular level as fast as you can drop a hat. This nastiness is growing worse as each day, week and month passes, but amazingly this situation quickly starting to receive less media attention. The workers who are battling to stop a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant said they all expect to die from radiation sickness 'within weeks.' The so-called Fukushima-50 are all repeatedly being exposed to dangerously high radioactive levels as they attempt to restore vital cooling systems following the earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
External radiation is what happened when the US dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Internal radiation is what is happening now where radioactive elements continue to enter our bodies: through the air we breathe; and eating from an already highly contaminated food chain; and what is absorbed though our skin [the largest organ in our bodies]. We are now exposed to all of these different avenues of radioactive contamination. We are at the top, as it bio-accumulates up the food chain. As it enters the body, these elements - called internal emitters - migrate to specific organs such as the thyroid, liver, bone, and brain, continuously irradiating small volumes of cells with high doses of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, and over many years often induce cancer. Further, many remain radioactive in the environment for long periods, posing danger for future generations. The grave effects of internal emitters are of the most profound concern at Fukushima—as indeed they continue to be at Chernobyl. It is erroneous and misleading to use the term 'acceptable levels of external radiation' in assessing internal radiation doses. To do so is to propagate inaccuracies and to mislead the public worldwide and journalists who are seeking the truth about radiation's hazards.
Anything over 150 rads [a measurement of radiation] is going to produce radiation sickness. At about 100 to 400 rads you drastically increase death risk. Once you get above 600 rads, about 95 percent of people are going to die within two weeks. This is what they're worried about. Unfortunately, modern medicine has little to offer in the way of treatment to people who absorb dangerous amounts of ionizing radiation. What is at risk, to the nuclear industry, is not our lives. The risk issues for them are their profits and the future of nuclear energy. We live at a time devoid of ethics; so the corporations involved will do anything to keep it going, even sacrifice our lives for their greed.
Conditions at Fukushima are atrocious. A TEPCO employee described "the extremely difficult conditions for intervention and safety and the patched together systems they are compelled to use to protect themselves, like wrapping themselves in plastic bags, a worthless attempt, for lack of appropriate protective suits." This is exactly the same corporate modus operandi that BP used in hiring temporary workers throughout the BP oil-rig blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico. Workers there had little-to-no protective gear while they cleaned up deadly dispersants; and reporters were either kept away from clean-up sites or threatened if they reported what was actually happening. While BP was barely protecting temporary workers it hired [many of whom are now critically ill or have died], it continues to make repulsive, yet record corporate profits.
Real evacuation for millions of Japanese has never happened. Japanese children, elders, and pregnant women are the most vulnerable. How many women have already had miscarriages or given birth to stillborns, or those with serious deformities? How many women who are still in their first or second trimester of pregnancy will still have to face this kind of life-changing tragedy? There are no mainstream media reports of critical nuclear reproductive dangers. For decades, the media has been silent. The only reports of extreme and tragic birth deformities usually stay in obscure medical journals. The public's right to know about these environmental hazards that affect all our lives never figures into any governmental policy equation. This also goes for all of us in North America, as the onslaught of invisible ionizing radiation is hitting us 24/7 and we, too, are in danger.
In the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was a limited amount of uranium, maybe a ton; what we are talking about here, is several thousand tons. The amount of fuel rods there was about 1,700 tons of spent fuel, and each of these reactors contains about 100-150 tons of uranium, plutonium and mixed radionuclides so there's a lot more of it. The damaged reactors at Fukushima are now continuing to fission. The reactors remain open to the air and will continue to fission and release radionuclides for years unless something drastic is done. No country has stepped up to help do anything. And they are getting away with pumping millions of gallons of radiation into the Pacific.
TEPCO data suggest that fission is ongoing, despite the reactor shutdowns. Data released on April 28, 2011 by TEPCO is now unequivocal in showing ongoing criticalities at Unit 2, with a peak on April 13. TEPCO graphs of radioactivity-versus-time in water under each of the six reactors show an ongoing nuclear chain reaction creating high levels of "fresh" I-131 in Unit 2, the same reactor pressure vessel (RPV) with a leak path to reactor floor, aux building, and outdoor trenches, that is uncontrollably leaking high levels of I-131, Cs-134, Cs-137 into the Pacific Ocean. This is bad news.
When a nuclear reactor goes "critical" it means thatthe fissioning of U-235 or Pu-239 becomes a self-sustaining process, called a chain reaction, where fissile material hit by a neutron then spilts (or fissions) into two atoms with atomic numbers between ~90 and ~140 while "throwing off" a few neutrons which then hit other fissile atoms and so the reaction then continues until it's stopped, usually by dropping the control rods, or reactor scram. Reactor scram means that neutron-absorbing control rods are dropped into the reactor core to absorb enough neutrons that the chain reaction ceases.During normal reactor operation, short-lived nuclides like I-131 (8 day) that pose high radiological hazard decay as quickly as they are created, because its halflife is much shorter than the refueling cycle, so I-131 reaches an equilibrium value quickly. In contrast, because the cesiums decay slower than they are created, reactor inventories of Cs-134 (2 year) and Cs-137 (30 year) gradually rise during the cycle, reaching a maximum at end of cycle.
Nuclear power plants use vast amounts of water, diesel, petrol and coal to keep cool. They are never economical or green. In order to keep the nuclear reaction in check and to prevent overheating, huge amounts of coolant are used and up to a million gallons of water per minute is used, which is why Nuclear power plants are located on the coast or near lakes or other water sources.The water must keep flowing. 20 cubic meters of it an hour, or the genie wakes up.Basically they are used to boil water into steam which is syphoned off into a container vessel, built up under pressure, which gushes through a turbine that turns the dynamo (where the electricity comes from), and does not come from the core. Huge amounts of radioactive material are made to go through a chain reaction, a process in which atomic particles bombard the nuclei of atoms, causing them to break up and generate heat. Experts also worry about possible re-criticality, defined as a return to a point at which a nuclear reaction becomes self-sustaining or unstoppable.
Some amount of fissile material continues to fission. It is in a steel can which is partially full of boiling water. There is not enough water to cover the fuel rods and too much to risk putting more water in – the container was not designed to hold water and it may rupture from the weight. It is, in effect, a nuclear cauldron. If they pump the boiling water out (and into the ocean), the core will probably explode. If they don't pump it out, the next earthquake will breach the can and spill boiling radioactive water all over... and THEN the core will explode. They don't know the status of the fuel core. They cannot get near it. The heat and radioactivity melts robots and cameras. The core is protected by a hardened concrete caisson (called a containment vessel) which surrounds the reactor itself and is designed to protect them from bombs and airplane strikes and TO KEEP THIS VERY THING FROM HAPPENING – but it is now cracked – so the bad stuff can get out. And the core is generating deadly radiation.
If a core melts down and concentrates at the bottom of the vessel, it can melt through the vessel and then burn through the concrete of the foundation. One element of such an event is a resumption of the nuclear chain reaction, in a molten mass in which no control would be possible because there would be no control rods to slide smoothly between neatly arrayed bundles of fuel.
A training manual developed by the companies that operate this type of reactor and dated 2009 refers to the possibility of creep rupture, in which molten core material begins seeping through a hole in the vessel and creates a bigger hole as it works; the document says the molten core material can "ablate" a bigger hole. It can then burn through the steel at the bottom of the drywell and interact with the concrete, producing carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which could react explosively.
MULTIPLY THAT FOUR OR FIVE OR SIX TIMES.People will start dying in a big way by 2020.
A coordinated cover-up of the severity of the situation is underway. This sort of behavior is typical of governments, especially when they are interested in protecting their power base and protecting the interests of transnational corporations. So now that Japan is suffering the worst nuclear accident of all time—the government is not riding to the rescue to help fix the problem, or at least to provide accurate information to its citizens so they can make informed decisions.
Instead of warning us about exposure dangers, more deception has been handed to us. Both the EU and US have raised "acceptable" radiation levels for food. In the US, Congressional approval is not legally required. So, the EPA's new standards would result in a 'nearly 1,000-fold increase for exposure to Strontium-90, a 3,000 to 100,000-fold hike for exposure to Iodine-131, and an almost 25,000 rise for exposure to radioactive Nickel-63' in drinking water.
On April 4, the Japanese government requested the Japan Meteorological Society and Japanese universitiesnot to release data from radiation measurement to avoid "public panic." Rainwater samples have all demonstrated elevated concentrations of radioactive Tellurium-02, Ruthenium-04 and Technetium-04. 280 sensors to measure radiation release from atomic bomb testing were established under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996. These sensors are detecting levels equivalent to Chernobyl releases. One scientist, Gerhard Wotawa, noted, 'I've never seen data like this in my career.'
On April 12 during the joint press conference with Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) where they jointly announced the Fukushima I Plant accident was INES Level 7, the Commission assured the world that said that the release of radioactive materials from the plant had decreased to less than 1 terabecquerel per hour, or 24 terabecquerels per day. It took the Commission 11 days to go from 24 terabecquerels per day to 154 terabecquerels per day. They say they miscalculated. What else have the nuclear "experts" miscalculated? If it has been 154 terabequerels per day instead of 24 since March 23, that's already an additional 4,160 terabequerels by now.
Arnold Gundersen, a 39-year veteran of the nuclear industry, Gundersen has worked as a nuclear plant operator and served as an expert witness on the Three Mile Island accident said, "Fukushima is going to kill 200,000 from increased cancers over the next 50 years.” Likewise, Dr. Christopher Busby, Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, states that400,000 people will develop cancer within a 200 kilometer radius of Fukushima. He believes that TEPCO and the Japanese government were criminally negligent for failing to inform the public of the true danger.
On April 21, the FDA refused to test Alaska fish for radiation. Both the ocean and air currents coming from Japan are both highly radioactive as they continue to travel around the globe wrecking invisible havoc. No one is safe, while the collusion continues between malfeasant corporate decisions and those officials in charge. None of this is any accident. This is planned incompetence for massive criminal cover-ups.
Despite finding high doses of radiation in our water, soil, milk, and fruits, radiation dose exposure levels have also been increased for both the Japanese and US populations.22 April, 2011 – Greenpeace called on the Japanese government to drop plans to raise the official limits of radiation exposure for children in Fukushima Prefecture, 20 milliSievert per year – the same level as nuclear power plant workers, andtwenty times the internationally recognized annual allowable dose for adults. The international environmental organization has also asked the governments of nations including Germany, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Canada, Greece, India, France and Italy, to raise the issue with Japan. “It is utterly outrageous to raise the exposure levels for children to twenty times the maximum limit for adults.
The Japanese government cannot simply increase safety limits for the sake political convenience or to give the impression of normality,” said Junichi Sato, Greenpeace Japan Executive Director. “One of the lessons learned from Chernobyl was that children are far more vulnerable to the effects of radiation, and the Fukushima nuclear crisis will expose them to much higher risks of developing radiation related diseases due to contamination.
It is now clear that TEPCO and the corporate-controlled Japanese and U.S. governments would rather allow toxic radiation to spread than to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. Radiation is one of the “elites” favorite methods of depopulation. The globalists favor using depleted uranium weapons on Third World countries they are conquering, sending travelers throughairport naked body scanners, and encouraging medical-related radiation exposures that cause cancer. Radiation sickness and deaths occur over time, not immediately. Therefore, these are soft-kill technologies that allow for plausible deniability; most of the victims will not know why or how they develop cancer or other health issues.
The EPA has pulled 8 of its 18 radiation monitors in California, Oregon and Washington because "they are giving readings which seem too high." The government has covered up nuclear meltdowns for fifty years to protect the nuclear power industry. And now, the EPA is considering drastically raising the amount of allowable radiation in food, water and the environment.The European Union implemented a secret "emergency" order, without informing the public, that increases the amount of radiation permitted in food by up to 20 times the previous food standards. According to EU bylaws, radiation limits may be raised during a nuclear emergency to prevent food shortages.
The EPA RADnet database for radiation reports began monitoring for Plutonium from Day 1. All results were detected by actinides extraction chromatography as part of either the RadNet Radiation Network Alert or the Fukushima deployables.
· Plutonium was found from Alaska. to San Francisco California. and down into Guam from 03/18/2011
· Strontium was detected in the United States on 03/18/2011
· Isotopes found not released in public reports Plutonium, Strontium and Cesium
The valiant and ever vigilant FDA and EPA have determined they will not be testing ANY fish from the Gulf of Alaska. The Feds have chosen to protect the Alaskan fishing industry...the public's right to know and to be kept safe. The Feds are already protecting the Dairy and Beef and Big Ag industries, so why not the Alaska fisheries, too. Just like when BP—through criminal negligence—blew out the Deepwater Horizon oil well, the government helped cover it up (the cover up is ongoing, as is the leak). The government also changed the testing standards for seafood to pretend that higher levels of toxic PAHs in our food was business-as-usual. Contrary to government propaganda distributed by the mainstream media, there is no safe dose of radiation. The same people telling us that the levels are miniscule and the radiation 'harmless,' are from the same organizations who assured us that the Chernobyl disaster only killed 9,000 people, when in reality it exposed 550 million Europeans, and 150 to 230 million others in the Northern Hemisphere to marked contamination and led to close to a million deaths.
The amount of natural cosmic radiation we are exposed to in our daily lives is about 1 millisievert per year. Recently the Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary admitted that 1,500 millisieverts, per hour, were spewing from Fukushima. When you multiple 365 days in a year by 24 hours in a day, you get 8,760 yearly hours. Multiply 1,500 millisieverts, per hour, by the yearly 8,760 hours and that is 12,690,000 times normal! And that's just the figures that they admit to. This will continue 24/7 until it's stopped.
The situation at Japan's damaged nuclear reactors is dire in the extreme. The Japanese government is in a state of "maximum alert." Three of the reactors at Fukushima are in a state of melt down, and if they can't be stopped, the radioactive result may be "permanent dead zones" in Japan. Two prominent nuclear radiation scientists have now publicly declared that the northern 1/3 part of Japan has become uninhabitable because of radiation and should be evacuated. This is a worst-case scenario of multiple meltdowns with a consequent cloud of radioactive particles following the jet stream over to the U.S.
The prevailing jet stream winds are impacting Los Angeles to Alaska, and include Hawaii. The North Pacific Current jaunts straight across the Pacific and then SPLITS...with half going directly north into the Gulf of Alaska where it swirls and swirls in a sweeping counter-clockwise vortex. The southern portion of the split heads straight for the West Coast where it becomes the California Current as it flows south and down the West Coast into Baja California before eventually fading into the North Equatorial Current and a return trip back to Asia.
Dozens of leopard sharks have been washing up dead in California since April, and now a necropsy shows at least one of the sharks died of massive internal bleeding, such that blood was even coming out of the shark's skin. The necropsy, conducted by the California Department of Fish and Game, uncovered inflammation, bleeding and lesions in the brain, and hemorrhaging from the skin near vents. The results suggest the 50 sharks that have washed up dead at Redwood Shores in Redwood City, California, since April must have died a slow and agonizing death.
Water containing radioactive material has been found flowing in pits outside of the reactors.
The flow was confirmed on May 10 at a pit linked to a utility tunnel near the reactor's water intake.
Workers could not confirm whether the water was leaking out into the sea, but they reported seeing froth near the water intake. TEPCO says the concentration of radioactive Cesium in water sampled from the pit was 620,000 times higher than the safety limit set by the government.
The old fuel rods have bean spread out due to the explosion and the surrounding area is contaminated with plutonium which means you can never return to this place again. There has been little reporting on the repercussions of the deadly nature of the mixed oxide (MOX) plutonium releases from the spent fuel rods stored on this site for 40 years. The leakage of plutonium and uranium from reactor number 3 is the nightmare scenario that many experts predicted would turn the situation at Fukushima from a crisis to a catastrophe. Radioactive materials in the ocean near the Fukushima Daiichi plant rose to 3,300 times the legal limit on May 15. TEPCO measured 200 becquerels of cesium-134 per cubic centimeter near the water intake of the No. 3 reactor.
Workers are exposed to immeasurable levels of radiation. No one can enter the plant's No. 1 through 3 reactor buildings because radiation levels are so high that monitoring devices have been rendered useless. Levels outside the buildings exceed 100 millisieverts in some places. Plant instruments are likely damaged and unreliable because of the intense heat that was generated, and pumping more water into the reactors is only making the contamination problem worse.
Fuel rods in reactors 1, 2, and 3 have melted and burned through the bottom of their containment vessels. Cooling to the core of Unit 1 was possibly blocked by melted fuel and also by salt deposits left over from the use of sea water. That's the same sea water that has been sprayed onto the fuel rods in an attempt to prevent a melting down. A side-effect of boiling huge amounts of sea water is the salt that is left. This salt is caked on top of the spent fuel rods and actually preventing water from cooling them. It's only a matter of time, before the salt insulation makes it impossible to keep the molten mass below meltdown temperatures. The Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry has mysteriously stopped reporting the dry well radiation reading in Reactor No. 1 right after an "off-the-charts" reading of radiation there. The only way a drywell reading can attain such high readings is if the fuel rods have breached their containment core.
Fukushima has already released something on the order of 50,000 trillion becquerels of radiation, warranting a Level-7 rating. However, radiation keeps leaking. The situation is not stable at all. So, we're looking at basically a ticking time bomb. The slightest disturbance causing more damage could increase the disaster's magnitude many-fold. Other concerns include sea water radiation millions of times beyond legal levels and radiation readings throughout much of the country, including Tokyo drinking water.
The radioactive cesium levels are extremely high. TEPCO said its examination of water in a tank connected to the spent fuel pool of the reactor at the Fukushima plant in mid-April, found 4,100 becquerels of radioactive iodine per cubic centimeter and 4,000 to 160,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium. The levels, compared with data on leaks from the reactor vessel, indicate that spent fuel rods have been exposed and damaged. The spent fuel pool contains 615 fuel assemblies. Concerned people wonder if they should leave. Some are voting with their feet. A lot of people are voluntarily evacuating from Tokyo because they simply don't believe....consistently lowballed TEPCO and government radiation level reports.
The operator of the nuclear plant said April 5 that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawatersample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish. The reading of iodine-131 was recorded April 2. On Saturday April 16th it was reported that levels of radioactive materials in the seawater rose again. The level of radioactive iodine 131 jumped to 6,500 times the legal limit, up from 1,100 times the limit in samples taken the day before. Levels of cesium 134 and cesium 137 rose nearly four-fold. Radioactive cesium has a half-life of 30 years, making it extremely toxic. Even low levels of radiation can hurt you badly, even kill you.
Those who believe in a quick fix for the Fukushima disaster would be wise to remember Chernobyl's legacy. The Chernobyl disaster, to this day, is a continuing threat to the people of Ukraine.It will be hundreds of years before the area around the destroyed reactor is inhabitable again and there are disputes over whether or not Chernobyl's nuclear fuel still poses a threat of causing another explosion. Only one Chernobyl reactor blew, and it was only three months old with relatively little radiation. It burned out of control for only 10 days.
Fukushima's have been operating for 40 years, and hold about 30 times more radiation than Chernobyl. There are several years worth of fuel in the spent fuel pools of units 1 through 4. Added together, that’s roughly the equivalent of eight reactor cores. Chernobyl killed nearly one million people and counting, according to the New York Academy of Sciences. Many deaths will never be included in the official count, because their cancers won't be connected to Chernobyl. The long term impact of a compromised immune system and the subsequent health challenges will never be officially traced to Chernobyl. The Chernobyl death estimates (from burning just 10 days) from April 1986 through 2004 estimate the mortality rates at 985,000, or a hundred times more than the WHO/IAEA calculations.
There is no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from food, water or other sources—Period. Exposure to radionuclides, such as iodine-131 and cesium-137, increases the incidence of cancer. For this reason, every effort must be taken to minimize the radionuclide content in food and water.
Iodine tablets only protect against Iodine 131, not against Cesium, Plutonium, Uranium, and Strontium 90 radioactive particles. Officials are measuring only radioactive Iodine-131 and not the longer lasting (effectively permanent) radioactive elements. Radioactive Iodine has a half-life of around 8 days—Plutonium 239 radiates half of its mass (half-life) only after 24,000 years. We are only getting readings for the radioactive iodine isotope, we are not getting it for Plutonium and the other effectively permanent contaminants.
Japan's science and technology ministry reports strontium, a heavy radioactive metal that is a catalyst for leukemia, has been detected around the crippled reactors. In addition to leukemia, strontium causes cancers of the bone, nose, lung, and skin. Like calcium, strontium enters the human body through plant and animal products and is mainly deposited in teeth and bones. New blood is formed in the bone marrow. Leukemia is a cancer of the blood. Other deadly radioactive elements released included iodine, cesium and plutonium. The alpha-emitter plutonium is especially deadly. Plutonium transforms into americium and enters the water table. It can contaminate a water supply for centuries. The half-life of americium is 433 years. Cesium has a tendency for adhesion to particulates in soil and sediment, making it less mobile than strontium.
Radioactive pollution is reaching the U.S. within 36 hours. It then travels the typical jet stream across the U.S. that you see on your daily weather programs. Tokyo Electric found water at No. 1 reactor with radiation levels 100,000 times higher than normal cooling water. These particles have already been detected on passengers arriving into the United States from Japan. The EPA and the Energy Department detected quantities of the radioactive isotope xenon-133 from monitors in Washington state and California as early as March 16th. The Radioactive Iodine-131 in rainwater sample near San Francisco has been found to be 18,100% above the U.S. federal drinking water standard. Radioactive iodine was detected in the atmosphere in South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida less than two weeks after the tsunami.
There are many ways in which radioactive particles can travel. They can bind to rain droplets and fall with the rain, or they can just travel in the wind and be inhaled by animals and humans. Either way, radioactive particles eventually end up embedding in soil and water where they contaminate the environment, wildlife, crops, and drinking water. Even cows grazing on radioactive grass will produce dangerous milk and meat unsuitable for consumption. Higher than usual levels of radiation were detected by monitoring stations in Alaska, Alabama, California, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, and Washington State. Radiation has been detected in milk in Washington state and California; the first sign Japan's nuclear crisis is affecting American food.
As the jet stream continues around the world some radioactive particles will fall with rain, snow or as dust particles, before it continues it's deadly circle. The number of radioactive particles may diminish but the STRENGTH of each particle does not diminish. That means that the STRENGTH of radiation that leaves Fukushima is the same strength that reaches California or the East Coast etc. There may be fewer particles with distance, but when you're dealing with low levels of radiation it doesn't matter how few there are.
The reactors and spent-fuel-rod-cooling-pools have been shredded. For the first two days after the accident, the wind blew east from Fukushima towards monitoring stations on the US west coast; on the third day it blew south-west over the Japanese monitoring station at Takasaki, and then swung east again. Each day, readings for iodine-131 at Sacramento in California, or at Takasaki, both suggested the same amount of iodine was coming out of Fukushima.
Reactor core covers have exploded, sending plumes of radioactive dust in all directions. Its' a giant radioactive wasteland like Chernobyl. Good jobTEPCO and GE. There are up to 1,000 dead bodies in the countryside around the Fukushima nuclear reactors that can't be collected, because the corpses are too radioactive.A lot of people are going to die from what is happening in Fukushima, into the millions for sure, that is not in question. The only question is how many millions. If we are "lucky," only one or two million persons will die. And if we are unlucky, well, things could get really grim, unimaginably hellish, on this planet we call home.
The groundwater underneath the Fukushima nuclear power facility is now showing 100,000 times the level of radiation normally allowed by government authorities. This is from iodine-131 measured at 15 meters below one of the reactors. A nuclear expert is now warning that it will take 50 to 100 years before the spent nuclear rods at Fukushima will cool enough to be removed from the site.The reactors remain too hot to pour concrete over them. In the meantime, Japan must keep pouring water on the fuel, and that creates highly radioactive water that's being flushed directly into the ocean. TEPCO now calls deadly radioactive water wastewater. So now we're looking at the possibility of a century-long radiation leak. A U.S. recruiting company is signing up U.S. workers, being promised extra pay to go to Fukushima and work on-site there as part of the crew trying to save the reactors.
The human body absorbs iodine and cesium readily. Essentially all the iodine or cesium inhaled or swallowed crosses into the blood.Iodine-131 is rapidly absorbed by the thyroid, and leaves only as it decays radioactively, with a half-life of eight days. Cesium is absorbed by muscles, where its half-life of 30 years means that it remains until it is excreted by the body. It takes between 10 and 100 days to excrete half of what has been consumed. Cesium-137 lingers in the environment because of its long half-life.
While in the body the isotopes' radioactive emissions can do significant damage, mainly to DNA. Children who ingest iodine-131 can develop thyroid cancer 10 or more years later. Iodine-131 from Chernobyl is still causing new cases of thyroid cancer to appear at an undiminished rate in the most heavily affected regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Some researchers think it could still cause thousands of new cases of cancer across Europe.
On average, spent fuel ponds hold five to ten times more long-lived radioactivity than a reactor core. A single spent fuel pond holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined. The Fukushima power plant stored spent fuel rods on-site rather than shipping them to another location. In addition to the fires that are damaging the reactors, these storage areas of their spent fuel bundles have exploded and are now on fire. This vastly compounds the problem of any meltdown, as this spent fuel will add to the contamination because it is extremely toxic. In other words, as well as dealing with three meltdowns, we also have the toxic products from the depleted fuel rods adding to the pollution. This is extraordinarily bad. The spent fuel bundles should have been relocated away from the reactor core a long, long time ago. Given the earthquake vulnerability of Japan, these reactor buildings were basically dirty bombs waiting to be set off by a natural disaster.
The damaged number three reactor was undergoing its first fuel cycle using MOX at Daiichi. When one of those MOX reactors blows, spewing plutonium dust across Japan and elsewhere, it is lights out via cancer for anyone who breathes the stuff. Plutonium has now been found in soil samples taken from five locations around Fukushima. The media is reporting "Officials insist that the plutonium poses no threat to humans."
The half-life of various plutonium isotopes ranges from minutes to 80 million years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years meaning it takes that long to lose half of its radioactive potency—nothing compared to depleted uranium, which counts its time in billions of years. Uranium-235 has a half-life of 700 million years. And cesium, which tends to go airborne easily, has a half-life of 30 years.
On March 14, reactor number 3 was hit with a massive explosion that sent fuel rods hurtling thousands of feet into the air in an orange fireball. As part of the bizarre sweeping apathy that the mass media has cultivated surrounding the Fukushima crisis, the threat of MOX plutonium has been completely downplayed. The longer the crisis drags on and the worse it gets, the less the media pays attention, despite disturbing reports of yellow rain now falling in Tokyo and surrounding areas. Just like the victims of Chernobyl, Japanese authorities are telling the people that it is pollen.
Nearly 25 years after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, exposure to radioactive iodine-131 (I-131, a radioactive isotope) from fallout may be responsible for thyroid cancers that are still occurring among people who lived in the Chernobyl area and were children or adolescents at the time of the accident. Nearly a million people have been killed from cancers caused by the disaster over the course of the last 25 years. When we look at Chernobyl, most of West Germany was heavily contaminated. Norway, Sweden. Hungary was terribly contaminated. The radiation was taken up into the plants. The food was radioactive. They took the milk and turned it into cheese. The cheese was radioactive. That's the big danger—the crops in this country being contaminated, the milk in particular—with Strontium 90. That radiation is incorporated into the bones and stays for a lifetime.
Since the Environmental Protection Agency began detecting radiation in rainwater and milk at levels above its maximum contaminant level, government officials have been downplaying the importance of EPA's maximum contaminant level. They would much prefer us to speak in terms of the Food and Drug Administration's Derived Intervention Level.
The two levels could hardly be more different:
EPA does not allow drinking water to contain more than 3 picoCuries per liter of radioactive istotopes like iodine-131 and cesium-137.
FDA allows up to 4,700 picoCuries of iodine-131 in a liter of milk and up to 33,000 picoCuries of cesium-137.
The EPA's level is calculated so that in a population of one million people, the radiation will result in no more than one additional cancer fatality. The FDA standard, on the other hand, accepts two extra cancer fatalities in a population of 10,000. Why does the FDA tolerate more radiation, and more mortality, than the EPA? FDA's 4,700 picoCurie limit for one liter of milk is almost seven times higher than EPA's exposure maximum for a year. FDA's limit for Cesium-137 in a single liter of milk is 47 times higher than EPA's annual maximum for human exposure.
The leaked radiation from Fukushima will have a negative health impact on the people of Japan and the United States. Katrina and other incidents have instructed the people in the uselessness of government and its desire to protect them. People understand they have to be proactive and protect themselves and not rely on self-serving bureaucrats. Radiation interaction within your body generates massive amounts of damaging free radicals, in turn potentially inducing DNA damage that may lead to future cancer – often manifesting a decade or two later. This means it is a good idea to maximize your overall antioxidant defenses. Ideally, this system of defense should be bolstered in advance to provide maximal defense. Unfortunately the antioxidant defense systems of a majority of Americans are in shoddy condition.
Growing food in enclosed greenhouses protects from fallout and the organic uptake of radionuclides.
TSURUGA, Japan—Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle. Japan's most dangerous reactor, perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, has a history of safety problems and lies on an active fault. The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor—a long-troubled national project—has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core.
Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt, but critics warn that the recovery process is fraught with dangers because the plant uses large quantities of liquid sodium, a highly flammable substance, to cool the nuclear fuel.
The Monju Reactor
The Monju reactor forms the cornerstone of a national project by Japan to reuse and eventually produce nuclear fuel. The plant, a $12 billion project, has a history of safety lapses. It was shuttered for 14 years after a devastating fire in 1995, one of Japan’s most serious nuclear accidents before the Fukushima catastrophe. Prefecture and city officials found that the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide the scale of the disaster. A top manager at the plant recently committed suicide, on the day that Japan’s atomic energy agency announced that efforts to recover the device would cost almost $21.9 million. And, like several other reactors, Monju lies on an active fault.
Even if the device can be removed, restarting the reactor will be risky, given its safety record and its use of highly toxic plutonium as fuel. The plant is 60 miles from Kyoto, a city of 1.5 million people, and the fast-breeder design of the reactor makes it more prone to Chernobyl-type runaway reactions in the case of a severe accident. Even if they make this fix, which is very complicated, the rest of the reactor remains highly dangerous. Andan accident at Monju would have catastrophic consequences beyond what we are seeing at Fukushima. Critics have been fighting the project since its inception in the 1970s. “It’s Japan’s most dangerous reactor,” said Miwako Ogiso, secretary general of the Council of the People of Fukui Prefecture Against Nuclear Power. “It’s Japan’s most nonsensical reactor.”
After promises of safety upgrades, as well as lavish subsidies and public works, the government has wooed local officials into allowing a restart of the reactor. Monju was reopened in May 2010, and just three months later, the 3.3-ton fuel relay device fell into the pressure vessel when a loose clutch gave way. In the two decades since the reactor started tests in 1991, the atomic energy agency has managed to generate electricity at the reactor only for one full hour.
In Monju, Japan is pursuing a technology that most countries have long abandoned. Decades ago, a handful of countries, including the United States, started exploring similar programs. But severe technical difficulties, as well as fears about the weapons-grade plutonium that the cycle eventually produces, have led most countries to scrap their programs. But Japan has remained staunchly committed to the Monju project.
Under a government plan, Japan would use technology developed at Monju to commercialize fast-breeder reactors by 2050. Mr. Kan has recently hinted at an overhaul of Japan’s nuclear policy, though he has not commented specifically on the fate of the Monju reactor.
The commitment to Monju is rooted in the way Japan has sold its nuclear program to local communities. In persuading towns and villages to provide land for nuclear power stations, Japan has promised that the spent nuclear fuel—which remains highly radioactive for years—will not be stored permanently on site, but used as fresh fuel for the nuclear fuel cycle. Giving up on any part of the fuel cycle would mean the government would have to find communities willing to become the final resting ground for the spent fuel.
“Of course, no community would accept that, and suddenly Japan’s entire nuclear program would become unviable,” said Keiji Kobayashi, a retired fast-breeder reactor expert formerly at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute. But the technology comes with risks. Instead of water, which is used in commercial nuclear reactors, the prototype reactor uses 1,600 tons of liquid sodium, a hazardous material that reacts fiercely with water and air, to cool its fuel. The presence of an estimated 1.4 tons of highly toxic plutonium fuel at the reactor makes it more dangerous than light-water reactors, which use mainly uranium fuel, critics charge.
National Security News Service reporters spent the last two years investigating the most secretive institution in the federal government: the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its radioactive weapons facility – the Savannah River Site (SRS). The 600,000-square-foot complex – a $4.86 billion facility under construction at Savannah River Site – is scheduled to open in 2016, will dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus, weapons-grade plutonium. Clay Ramsey, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s MOX federal project director, said TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] has expressed strong interest in using the fuels in some of its six existing commercial reactors. “We’re very comfortable right now in the level of interest in our fuel,” Mr. Ramsey said September 13, 2011, adding that a second potential client — whose identity he could not disclose — has opened discussions about using the fuel.
Risk From Spent Nuclear Reactor Fuel Is Greater in U.S. Than in Japan
A typical nuclear power plant in a year generates 20 metric tons of used nuclear fuel.The nuclear industry generates a total of about 2,000 - 2,300 metric tons of used fuel per year.Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced about 65,200 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. If used fuel assemblies were stacked end-to-end and side-by-side, this would cover a football field about seven yards deep.
High-level radioactive waste is the byproduct of recycling used nuclear fuel which, in its final form, will be disposed of in a permanent disposal facility.
Low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) consists of items that have come in contact with radioactive materials, such as gloves, personal protective clothing, tools, water purification filters and resins, plant hardware, and wastes from reactor cooling-water cleanup systems. It generally has levels of radioactivity that decay to background radioactivity levels in less than 500 years. About 95 percent decays to background levels within 100 years or less.
Active low-level waste licensed disposal facilities include the following:
Barnwell, located in Barnwell, SC. Previously, Barnwell accepted waste from all U.S. generators. As of July 2008, Barnwell only accepts waste from the Atlantic Compact States (Connecticut, New Jersey, and South Carolina). Barnwell is licensed by the State of South Carolina to receive all classes of LLW.
Energy Solutions, located in Clive, UT. Energy Solutions accepts waste from all regions of the United States. It is licensed by the State of Utah for Class A waste only.
Hanford, located in Hanford, WA. Hanford accepts waste from the Northwest and Rocky Mountain compacts. Hanford is licensed by the State of Washington to receive all classes of LLW.
The threat of a catastrophic release of radioactive materials from a spent fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant is dwarfed by the risk posed by such pools in the United States, which are typically filled with far more radioactive material, according to a study released on Tuesday 5-24-2011, the Institute for Policy Studies. It recommends that the United States transfer most of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel from pools filled with cooling water to dry sealed steel casks to limit the risk of an accident resulting from an earthquake, terrorism or other event.
“The largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future,” the report’s author, Robert Alvarez wrote. “In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree.”At one plant that is a near twin of the Fukushima units, Vermont Yankee on the border of Massachusetts and Vermont, the spent fuel in a pool at the solitary reactorexceeds the inventory in all four of the damaged Fukushima reactors combined, the report notes.
After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit, US officials urged Americans to stay at least 50 miles away, citing the possibility of a major release of radioactive materials from the pool at Unit 4. The warning has reinvigorated debate about the safety of the far-more-crowded fuel pools at American nuclear plants. Adding to concern, President Obama canceled a plan for a repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert last year, making it likely that the spent fuel will accumulate at the nation’s reactors for years to come.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission maintains that both pool and cask storage are safe, although it plans to re-examine the pool issue in light of events at Fukushima.
Nearly all American reactors, especially the older ones, have far more spent fuel on hand than was anticipated when they were designed, a former senior adviser at the Department of Energy, wrote. In general, the plants with the largest inventories are the older ones with multiple reactors. By Mr. Alvarez’s calculation, the largest amount of spent fuel is at the Millstone Point plant in Waterford, Conn., where two reactors are still operating and one is retired. The second-biggest is at the Palo Verde complex in Wintersburg, Ariz., the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, with three reactors. Companies that run reactors are generally reluctant to say how much spent fuel they have on hand, citing security concerns. But Mr. Alvarez, drawing from the environmental impact statement for the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, estimated the amount of radioactive material at all of the nation’s reactors.
In the 1960s, when most of the 104 reactors operating today were conceived, reactor manufacturers assumed that the fuel would be trucked away to factories for reprocessing to recover uranium. But reprocessing proved a commercial flop and was banned in the United States in the 1970s out of concerns that the plutonium could find its way into weapons worldwide. Today roughly 75 percent of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel is stored in pools, the report said, citing data from the Nuclear Energy Institute. About 25 percent is stored in dry casks, or sealed steel containers within a concrete enclosure. The fuel is cooled by the natural flow of air around the steel container. But spent fuel is transferred to dry casks only when reactor pools are nearly completely full. The report recommends instead that all spent nuclear fuel older than five years be stored in the casks. It estimated that the effort would take 10 years and cost $3.5 billion to $7 billion.
“With a price tag of as much as $7 billion, the cost of fixing America’s nuclear vulnerabilities may sound high, specially given the heated budget debate occurring in Washington,” Mr. Alvarez wrote. “But the price of doing too little is incalculable.” But, $7 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the 17 trillion dollars given to offshore banks during the bailout…
The casks are not viewed as a replacement for a permanent disposal site, but as an interim solution that would last for decades.
The security of spent fuel pools also drew new attention after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, partly because one of the planes, supposedly hijacked by terrorists, flew down the Hudson River, over the Indian Point nuclear complex in Westchester County, before crashing into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Indian Point has pressurized water reactors with containment domes, but its spent-fuel pools are outside the domes. The pools themselves are designed to withstand earthquakes and other challenges, but the surrounding buildings are not nearly as strong as those that house the reactors.
In a 2005 study ordered by Congress, the National Academy of Sciences also concluded that the pools are a credible target for terrorist attack and that consideration should be given to moving some fuel to dry casks.
Safety has Taken a Back Seat to Cost-Cutting at Most of the Nation's Nuclear Power Plants
An investigation by the Associated Press has revealed federal regulators are repeatedly weakening—or simply failing to impose—strict rules. Officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have frequently decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril. The constant danger of aging reactors operating without the highest standards has resulted in rising fears the NRC is significantly undermining safety. Such negligence is destined to to bring the plants closer to a catastrophic accident that could harm millions and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the U.S.
Examples abound:
When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed—up to 20 times the original limit.
When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
Failed cables. Cracked concrete, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes—all of these and thousands of other problems linked to aging were uncovered in the AP's year-long investigation. Yet despite the growing problems linked to aging, not a single official body in government or industry has studied the overall frequency and potential impact on safety of such breakdowns in recent years. All the while the NRC keeps extending licenses of dozens of reactors.
Industry and government officials defend their actions, and insist that no chances are being taken. But the AP investigation found thatwith billions of dollars and 19 percent of America's electricity supply at stake, a cozy relationship prevails between the industry and its regulator, the NRC. Records show a recurring pattern: Reactor parts or systems fall out of compliance with the rules. Studies are conducted by the industry and government, and all agree that existing standards are 'unnecessarily conservative.' Regulation are loosened, and the reactors are back in compliance.
Waste Disposal
Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher said on Monday, September 19, 2011, that high-level nuclear waste once destined for the Yucca Mountain repository will be sent, instead, to the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site. The decision to use the Savannah River Site in South Carolina as a permanent storage facility is controversial. It is the most radioactive site in the United States. Currently, millions of gallons of high-level nuclear waste are stored in 49 leaking tanks on the site as well as huge amounts of surplus plutonium.Deadly chemicals and radiation will contaminate the facility for thousands of years. “The Bomb Plant,” as locals refer to the site, is uniquely unsuitable for a permanent nuclear waste repository, according to leading geologists. It sits on an earthquake fault and one of the most important aquifers in the South. The sandy soil and swampy conditions make it highly vulnerable to waste seepage.
The Obama Administration has spent more than $1 billion in Stimulus Act funds cleaning up legacy Cold War nuclear and chemical waste at the site. Despite this effort, there is now more radioactive waste at SRS than when the clean-up started. The idea of bringing nuclear reactor waste and surplus weapons plutonium from around the world to SRS only exacerbates already chronic problems. The 312 square mile site near Aiken, South Carolina, was once the home of five reactors that churned out nuclear materials for H-bombs. The last reactor at SRS had to be shuttered for safety reasons during the Reagan Administration. Tritium, which is needed for nuclear weapons, is produced by Tennessee Valley Authority reactors and processed into gas for nuclear weapons at SRS.
DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration is paying the French-government-owned-company AREVA to supervise the construction of a new, multi-billion dollar facility to convert excess weapons plutonium into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for use in civilian nuclear power reactors. (AREVA provided a less potent MOX fuel to Fukushima Daiichi Reactor Number Three last September that suffered a hydrogen explosion after the March earthquake and tsunami.) NNSA’s MOX plant is behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. It does not have any paying customers for its fuel if it is ever made. It will create its own new waste stream.
Decommissioning
The decommissioning of the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant is delayed by a single problem: Where to dispose of the uranium fuel rods? Many of those rods are extremely radioactive and partially melted, and some contain highly lethal plutonium. Besides the fissile fuel inside the plant's six reactors, more than 7 tons of spent rods have to be removed to a permanent storage site before workers can bury the Fukushima facility under concrete. The rods cannot be permanently stored in Japan because the country's new waste storage centers on the northeast tip of Honshu are built on unsuitable land. The floors of the Rokkasho reprocessing facility and Mutsu storage unit are cracked from uneven sinking into the boggy soil.
Entombment of the rods inside the Fukushima reactors carries enormous risks because the footing of landfill cannot support the weight of the fuel rods in addition to the reactors and cooling water inside the planned concrete containment walls. The less reactive spent fuel would have to be kept inside air-cooled dry casks. The powerful earthquakes that frequently strike the Tohoku region will eventually undermine the foundations, causing radioactive wastewater to pour unstoppably into the Pacific Ocean. The rods must therefore go to another country.
The American nuclear industry has its own stockpile of more than 60,000 tons of spent fuel—not counting waste from reactors used for military and research purposes—leaving no space for Fukushima's rods inside the Nevada disposal site, if indeed it is ever opened. Tepco has allocated 1 trillion yen ($12 billion) in funds for nuclear waste disposal. China is the top choice for the Japanese nuclear establishment, which has confidence in Beijing's ability to safeguard nuclear secrets from its citizenry and even from the top leaders. A nuclear disposal deal would require trucks loaded with radioactive cargo to roll through a densely populated port, perhaps Tianjin or Ningbo, in the dead of night. There is no way that secret shipments wouldn't be spotted by locals with smart phones, triggering a mass exodus from every city, town and village along the route to the dumping grounds in China's far west.
A more logical choice for overseas storage is in the sparsely populated countries that supply uranium ore to Japan, particularly Australia and Canada. As exporters of uranium, Canberra and Ottawa are ultimately responsible for storage of the nuclear waste under the legal principle of industrial recovery. Under the principle, uranium mining giants like Rio Tinto and CAMECO would be required to take back depleted uranium. The cost of waste storage would then be factored into the export price for uranium ore. The added cost is passed along to utility companies and ultimately the consumer through a higher electricity rate. If the market refuses to bear the higher price for uranium as compared with other fuels, then nuclear power will go the way of the steam engine.
Australian and Canadian politicians are bound to opportunistically oppose the return of depleted uranium since any shipments from Fukushima would be met by a massive turnout of "not-in-my-backyard" protesters. The only way for Tokyo to convince the local politicos to go along quietly is by threatening to publish an online list of the bribe-takers in parliament who had earlier backed uranium mining on behalf of the Japanese interests. The question then arise whether nuclear power, when long-term storage fees are included, is competitive with investment in renewable energy such as wind, solar, hydro and tidal resources. Renewable energy has the edge since they don't create waste. Natural gas remains the undisputed price beater wherever it is available in abundance. In a free market without hidden subsidies, nuclear is probably doomed.
The Fukushima 1 dilemma shows that the issues of cost-efficiency and technological viability can no longer be deferred or ignored. Ratings agencies report that Tepco's outstanding debt has soared beyond $90 billion, meaning that it cannot cover future costs of storing spent rods from its Kashiwazaki and Fukushima 2 nuclear plants. The Japanese government's debt has soared to 200 percent of GDP. Neither entity can afford the rising cost of nuclear power.The inability of Tepco or the government to pay for nuclear waste disposal puts the financial liability squarely on its partner companies and suppliers, including GE, Toshiba, Hitachi, Kajima Construction and especially the sources of the uranium, CAMECO and Rio Tinto and the governments of Canada and Australia. A fundamental rule of both capitalism and civil law is that somebody has to pay.
Since Australia and Canada aren't in any hurry to take back the radioactive leftovers, that leaves Japan and treaty-partner United States with only one option for quick disposal—Mongolia. Ulan Bator accepts open-pit mining for coal and copper, which are nothing but gigantic toxic sites, so why not take the melted-down nuclear rods? Its GDP, ranked 136 among the world's economies, is estimated to be $5.8 billion in 2010. Thus, $12 billion is an unimaginable sum for one more hole in the ground. Not that Mongolia would get the entirety of the budget, since the nuclear cargo would have to transit through the Russian Far East.
The Mongolian people are unlikely to receive a penny, since the money will go into a trust fund for maintenance costs. That's because $12 billion spread over the half-life of uranium - 700 million years - is equivalent to $17 in annual rent. That doesn't even cover kibble for the watchdog on duty, much less the cooling system. Not that anyone will be counting, since by the time uranium decays to a safe level, fossils will be the sole remnant of human life on Earth.
HAARP
The giant 11 March 2011 magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake off Japan not only shook the Earth and caused devastating tsunamis but also rattled the ionosphere, according to a new study. The researchers say, the quake generated the greatest seismotraveling ionospheric disturbances (STID) ever seen containing signatures of following waves: Rayleigh, acoustic, and tsunami-generated waves. The disturbance reached as high as 350 kilometers. Most scientists believe that earthquakes are inherently unpredictable, and reports of various kinds of earthquake precursor signals have been difficult to verify. However, in a new study, a researcher from Hokkaido University in Sapporo has reported a possible ionospheric precursor to the devastating magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake in Japan on 11 March, 2011.
Analyzing data from the Japanese GPS network the team, Kosuke Heki from the University’s Department of Natural History Sciences has detected an increase in the total electron content (TEC) in the ionosphere above the focal region of the earthquake beginning about 40 minutes before the quake. The TEC enhancement reached about 8 percent above the background electron content. The increase in TEC was greatest above the earthquake epicentre and diminished with distance from the epicentre.
The researcher, whose report is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, also analysed GPS records from previous earthquakes and found that similar ionospheric anomalies occurred before the 2010 magnitude 8.8 Chile earthquake, possibly the 2004 Sumatra magnitude 9.2 earthquake, and possibly the 1994 magnitude 8.3 Hokkaido earthquake. However, TEC enhancements were not seen before smaller earthquakes. Although previous studies have shown that earthquakes could trigger atmospheric waves that travel upward and disturb the ionosphere, it is unclear how an ionospheric disturbance could occur before an earthquake begins. In addition, the ionosphere is highly variable, and solar storms can trigger large TEC changes, so non-earthquake causes of any TEC enhancement need to be ruled out.
Kosuke Heki states that, unlike previously suggested earthquake precursors, the TEC enhancement before the Tohoku quake had obvious spatial and temporal correlation between the quake and precursor signal as well as clear magnitude dependence. Scientists agree that further research is needed to verify that TEC enhancements can indeed be a precursor to large earthquakes.
For two years before the Japan disaster, Benjamin Fulford was on record saying the Powers that were had planned to attack Japan with an earthquake weapon — and set off the nuclear reactors. This is a matter of public certainty, as he announced these plans in two different videos as well as in numerous updates. This is the main reason why the Internet exploded with articles about HAARP in the aftermath of the Japan disaster. These same negative groups are now apparently trying to set off the New Madrid Fault, which runs parallel with the Mississippi River—as there are some fifteen different nuclear reactors along the fault line. Apparently the floods are a precursor to this—in an attempt to lubricate the fault line and increase the likelihood of it happening. The size and scope of what they are hoping to accomplish with this New Madrid quake is significantly larger and more damaging than what was done in Japan.
We’ve heard a lot about the New Madrid Fault. Despite the dangers and warnings, the area continues to be flooded, fracked, drilled, HAARPed and tornadoed, all while being home to 15 nuclear reactors. As if that’s not enough, there’s also a little known factor that will really make your hair stand on end. The fault zone is criss-crossed with major gas and oil pipelines delivering these volatile energy sources all over the United States.ProLiance Energy delivers Billions of cubic feet of gas per year through 19 major pipelines. Virtually every natural gas pipeline in the nation is built over that fault; they come right through the soup in New Madrid, the soft alluvial soil; they carry gas all the way to Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh.
"If the earthquake happens during the winter, you’re going to have major-league problems on your hands. Try to explain to somebody why you cannot heat a nursing home or keep a hospital warm.”– Ed Gray, Missouri State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA).
An earthquake in the middle of the country, along the precarious New Madrid fault, could have enormous fiscal and energy consequences. Now, if someone wanted to bring this nation to its knees, where do you think they’d strike? Looks to me the US has an exposed jugular. The globalists’ hidden hand is already tanking the economy, adulterating and hindering food supplies and deliberately toxifying the environment, all the while setting Americans at variance against each other and every imaginable enemy possible in order to create an atmosphere of fear, scarcity and ultimate dependence on some central power to save them.
The New Madrid Seismic Zone overlaps eight states: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, Arkansas and Missouri. It is the most seismically active area of the United States east of the Rockies. Scientists are pursuing research on numerous aspects of the hazard; this work has shown that there have been several sequences of big earthquakes during at least the past several thousand years. Because earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S. are more infrequent than in the western U.S., there are fewer observations and therefore greater uncertainties about future hazards.
Independent scientist Leuren Moret also believes that the Japan earthquake was triggered by a HAARP aerosol/chemtrails plasma weapon. Her hypothesis is supported by the research of Clifford E. Carnicom, one of the world’s foremost experts on the global covert spraying of aerosols (chemtrails). Carnicom and Moret know that covert aerosol-spraying operations have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere into a plasma for carrying out weaponized applications such as tectonic (earthquake) warfare. Additionally, there is substantial evidence that HAARP was active before and during the March 11th earthquake.
The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is a congressionally initiated program jointly managed by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy. The United States Congressional records show that HAARP is funded by the US government. The U.S. Senate set aside $15 million dollars in 1996 (Clinton administration) to develop the ability to penetrate the earth with signals bounced off of the ionosphere. This earth-penetrating-tomography has since been developed and used by the US government to look inside the planet to a depth of many kilometers in order to locate underground munitions, minerals and tunnels. The problem is that the frequencies used by HAARP for earth-penetrating tomography is also within the frequency range most cited for disruption of earth’s own electromagnetic field.
HAARP patents states that HAARP can beam radio energy into the Auroral electrojet, the curved, charged-particle stream formed at high latitudes where the solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field. The radio energy then disperses over large areas through duct-like regions of the ionosphere, forming a virtual antenna that can be thousands of miles in length.
Such an ELF antenna can emit waves penetrating as deeply as several kilometers into the ground, depending on the geological makeup and subsurface water conditions in a targeted area. HAARP uses ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to beam pulses of polarized high-frequency radio waves into the ionosphere. These pulses can be finely-tuned and adjusted so that the bounced ground penetrating beam can target a very specific area and for a specific length of time. Beaming a very large energy beam into the ground for an extended period can cause an earthquake. After all, an earthquake is the result of a sudden release of energy in the Earth’s crust that creates seismic wave resonances. The same array of antennas that are used by HAARP for ground penetrating tomography can also be used to penetrate deep into the ground and cause an earthquake anywhere around the World.
Geophysical events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions – the kinds of things that may already be on the edge of discharge – can, with the right resonant energies added into the system, cause them to overload and actually fracture. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen actually made the statement regarding weapons of mass destruction and the idea of generating earthquakes artificially. In a April 28, 1997 DoD News Briefing at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy at the Georgia Center, Mahler Auditorium, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. Cohen stated: “Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”
On April 7th, 2011, a 7.4 earthquake aftershock struck 25 miles of the Japanese coast. During the quake, there was a strange blue light show, which has been referred to as an “earthquake light.” Were the lights caused by HAARP or a similar program tampering with the ionosphere?
The HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) website has been ordered taken down by the US government to conceal US weather modification and earthquake inducing warfare activities against foreign states. The HAARP website was publishing very damaging evidence of US military weather modification and earthquake triggering operations against foreign states. HAARP's waterfall charts and magnetometer charts gave evidence of an ongoing weather war between the United States government and foreign states. The magnetometer presented concrete evidence that HAARP triggered the Japan earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
HAARP's magnetometer can be used to predict as well as give evidence of a HAARP created earthquake. A magnetometer measures disturbances in the magnetic field in Earth's upper atmosphere. HAARP was broadcasting a 2.5 Hz frequency (the signature frequency of an earthquake) from just before midnight on March 8, 2011 and continued to broadcast the frequency for the entire days of March 9, 2011 and March 10, 2011. The 2.5 Hz frequency continued to be broadcasted and recorded by the magnetometer for another 10 hours the day of the Japan 9.0 magnitude earthquake.
Scientists at the HAARP institute discovered that a 2.5 Hz radio frequency is the signature frequency of an earthquake. Since this discovery the HAARP phased array antennas have been used by the US military to beam the earthquake frequency into the ionosphere and the ionosphere reflects it back to Earth – penetrating as deeply as several kilometers into the ground, depending on the geological makeup and subsurface water conditions in a targeted area. By beaming the frequency at a specific trajectory HAARP can trigger an earthquake any place on Earth.
A short burst isn't enough to disturb solid matter (the Earth crust) so they keep beaming the 2.5 Hz earthquake frequency for hours or days – until the desired effect is achieved.
The Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) prohibits the military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques. It opened for signature on 18 May 1977 in Geneva and entered into force on 5 October 1978. The Convention bans weather warfare, which is the use of weather modification techniques for the purposes of inducing damage or destruction.
Evidence from HAARP's own website revealed that the US government was acting in violation of the ENMOD treaty – use of weather modification techniques (HAARP) for the purposes of inducing damage or destruction. HAARP broadcasting data published on the HAARP website coincided with a number of recent major catastrophes such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2010 heat wave in Russia, the major flooding in 2010 in China and Pakistan and the major earthquakes in Haiti and Japan – all occurred since US president and commander-in-chief of the United States military Barry Soetoro, aka: Barack Hussein Obama, took office.
The Japan 9.0 earthquake offered the most damaging evidence of the US government using HAARP to induce major damage and destruction against a foreign state. HAARP's magnetometer data showed the World that HAARP (jointly managed by the US Air Force and the US Navy) began broadcasting the earthquake inducing frequency of 2.5 Hz on March 8, 2011 and continued to broadcast the frequency for the entire days of March 9, 2011 and March 10, 2011. HAARP wasn't turned off until 10 hours after the Japan 9.0 magnitude earthquake that was triggered on Friday, March 11, 2011 at 05:46:23 UTC.
Smaller earthquakes have continued for weeks without being registered on the HAARP magnetometer. Why? Because, as stated before, a magnetometer measures disturbances in the magnetic field in Earth's upper atmosphere. It is not a seismometer, which measures motions of the ground. The magnetometer doesn't measure seismic activity it measures and records electromagnetic frequencies in the Earth's atmosphere. HAARP's antenna array beams the 2.5 Hz earthquake inducing radio frequency into the atmosphere where a magnetometer can record and provide concrete evidence of a US weather modification and earthquake triggering attack against foreign states.
Where Fukushima meets Stuxnet
It can now be reported that the four nuclear reactors in Japan (one facing a meltdown) had their computer system hacked by a NSA computer virus, Stuxnet, one month before the 9.0 - 9.1 earthquake and tsunami aka a meteorological "black op" hit the nation of Japan. Japanese nuclear plant in Fukushima ran on Siemens computers that the Stuxnet worm was programmed to infect—in fact the virus was found in Fukushima systems last year.
The reportedly U.S. and Israeli-led Stuxnet cyber attacks on the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz and the calamities at the Fukushima power facilities over the past week have a common denominator. While seemingly unconnected, the stories together speak to the before and after of what cyber conflict may look like. Enemies will be able to target one another's critical infrastructure as was done by the U.S. and Israeli team (likely working with British and German assistance) targeting the Iranian program and burrowing into their operating systems, they will seek to produce malfunctions that bring economies to their knees, put societies in the dark, or undercut national defenses.
Those infrastructures might well be nuclear power systems and the results could be akin to what we are seeing in Japan.
A computer virus designed to attack servers isolated from the Internet, such as at power plants, has been confirmed on 63 personal computers in Japan since July, according to major security firm Symantec Corp. The virus does not cause any damage online, but once it enters an industrial system, it can send a certain program out of control. After Stuxnet finds its way onto an ordinary computer via the Internet, it hides there, waiting for a USB memory stick to be connected to the computer, when it transfers itself to the memory stick. When the USB device is then connected to a computer linked to an isolated server, it can enter the system and take control of it.
As computers that harbor Stuxnet do not operate strangely, the virus can be transferred to a memory stick inadvertently. According to the security company, the virus is designed to target a German-made program often used in systems managing water, gas and oil pipelines. The program is used at public utilities around the world, including in Japan. The virus could cause such systems to act erratically, and it could take months to restore them to normal.
Stuxnet is a U.S.-Israeli NSA computer virus that was developed to destabilize the nuclear program in the nation of Iran." Simply put, it directly attacks the coolant rods of a nuclear reactor. Accordingly, this computer virus "Stuxnet" effectively disabled the fail-safe defense system of the Japanese nuclear reactors and was synchronized to take place at the time of the 9.0 (newest calculations: 9.1) quake.
It now appears that our interconnected smart grid is actively under attack, as evidenced by a new Stuxnet-style trojan that has been detected by major cyber security leaders Symantec and McAfee. Much like its predecessor, the trojan dubbed “Duqu” is designed to infilitrate the networks that control everything from power production facilities to oil refineries. It is not yet clear exactly how the trojan operates, what its intended purpose is, or who designed it (though it is believed that the code for Duqu and Stuxnet likely originated with U.S. intelligence agencies). Both Symantec and McAfee continue to investigate the threat
Security researchers have detected a new Trojan, scarily similar to the infamous Stuxnet worm, which could disrupt computers controlling power plants, oil refineries and other critical infrastructure networks. The Trojan, dubbed “Duqu” by the security firm Symantec, appears, based on its code, to have been written by the same authors as the Stuxnet worm, which last July was used to cripple an Iranian nuclear-fuel processing plant. “Duqu shares a great deal of code with Stuxnet; however, the payload is completely different,” researchers for the security firm Symantec wrote on its Security Response blog. Instead of directly targeting the SCADA system, Duqu gathers “intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party. The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility.” “Duqu is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack,” the researchers added.
Stuxnet was so advanced that it crashed the physical centrifuges used to enrich uranium in Iran’s nuclear facilities. Stuxnet did this by exploiting software and hardware vulnerabilities, essentially reporting to Iranian research facility engineers that everything was functioning properly by controlling the software interface, while in the background it sent centrifuges spinning out of control to the point of hardware failure.
Duqu, which is apparently a similar piece of advanced code with a slightly different modus operandi, is not yet completely understood, but like Stuxnet in Iran, it is now actively functioning inside of critical infrastructure systems gathering information. To what end? The answer to that question may remain elusive until it’s too late.
In reportedly unrelated news, the Department of Homeland Security, in an unclassified National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center Bulletin (pdf), has issued warnings about the hacking group Anonymous and the possibility that they are becoming increasingly capable of targeting advanced Industrial Control Systems (ICS).
Curiously, the Duqu trojan doesn’t seem to have originated from individual hackers or hacking groups, or foreign intelligence services. Rather, like Stuxnet, the virus was likely written under control and/or guidance of U.S. intelligence, possibly in collaboration with Israeli intelligence. While DHS has issued warnings about Anonymous and other hacking groups potentially attacking the grid, someone – and it’s likely not a lone hacker or the Anonymous hacking group – is actively involved in probing for vulnerabilities in our infrastructure control systems. These are the systems that monitor and control our electricity, water supplies, gas pipelines, oil refineries, financial exchanges, and even certain military operations.
There seems to be no immediate danger at this time, as the Duqu trojan is reportedly gathering intelligence, as opposed to actively attempting to bring down the systems via a hardware style attack like Stuxnet. But once it acquires all of the necessary information, such as personnel access codes, security certificates and a mapped layout of a particular grid infrastructure, it wouldn’t take much to take things to the next level.
Imagine for a moment the effect of an attack on major refining operations, cascading electrical outages, urban water purification systems that added excessive chemicals to water supplies, or the massive flooding that might result if a dam were compromised. Or, consider that the U.S. drone fleet was recently attacked by an unknown trojan or malware, which was logging access commands and passwords for high security military systems. What would happen if an enemy of the people of the United States gained access to our entire drone fleet, weapons systems and all? The possibilities for damage via compromised infrastructure systems would be nothing short of a digital apocalypse, with the potential to adversely affect the lives of tens of millions of unsuspecting Americans virtually overnight.
Considering all of this, it’s sure looking like the 9.0 - 9.1 earthquake and tsunami that hit the nation of Japan was a meteorological terrorist attack launched against Japan by the out-of-control New World Order (NWO) elite who have decided that at least 25% of the world's population must be eliminated before the final financial meltdown collapses the world economy.
The technology used in these meteorological black ops are commonly known as HAARP and Tesla. HAARP and Tesla were WWII secret Nazi technology captured by both the U.S. and Soviet Union after WWII ended. This secret Nazi technology has now been developed and perfected by the New World Order elite leaving the entire planet earth defenseless against the Satanic cabal. Not only does the apparent success of the Stuxnet worm demonstrate that such approaches are now in play but it may just be the tip of the iceberg.
It was no coincidence that Federal Reserve Chairman Bernard Bernanke announced that the QE2 program aka the purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds, will end on June 30th. The massive earthquake in Japan now opens the way for the Central Bank of Japan to begin printing millions of Japanese yen on a nightly basis (the Central Bank of Japan just printed 15 trillion of yen). The yen, with the assistance of the Federal Reserve itself, will then be laundered through the forex currency exchange and converted into U.S. dollars. This currency disguise aka ponzi scheme, will then be jointly used by the Central Bank of Japan and the U.S. Federal Reserve to continue to roll over their toxic assets aka derivatives, that still pollute the world banking system.
Now the Fed doesn't need a QE3. The earthquake in Japan has turned Japan into a gigantic ATM card for the conspiratorial Federal Reserve aka QE3, QE4, QE5, QE6 and QE7.
General Keith Alexander, head of U.S. Cyber Command, recently testified before Congress seeking support to pump up his agency budget, the general argued that all future conflicts would involve cyber warfare tactics and that the U.S. was ill-equipped to defend itself against them. What makes the nuclear threat so unsettling to many is that it is invisible. It shares this with the cyber threat. Not only are they invisible but it is hard to detect who has launched them. There is a growing consensus that the threats posed by both state-sponsored and non-state actors to power grids, telecom systems, water supplies, transport systems and computer networks are reaching critical levels.
Countries With The Most Operational Nuclear Power Reactors In The World
