Deep Politics Forum

The Mayor of Minamisoma tells of how the government never even informed them about the Fukishima nuclear emergency and that he found out from TV.

He says the Japanese government have abandoned him and his people, and are leaving them there to die.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Japanese authorities have begun using military helicopters and water cannon to dump water on the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in an attempt to help cool the plant's reactors and spent fuel rods. But fears of a full-scale nuclear meltdown are increasing as the initial attempts appear to have failed. Water dropped from the helicopters blew off course, and the water from the cannon has failed to reach its target.

There appears to be growing division between Japan and the United States on the severity of the nuclear crisis. On Wednesday, the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, warned that water in the spent fuel pool at one of the plant's six nuclear reactors had boiled away entirely, leaving extremely high radiation levels. Japan disputed his account.

Meanwhile, the United States has urged all Americans living within 50 miles of the plant to evacuate. So far Japan has only issued evacuation orders for residents living within 12 miles of the plant. On Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner explained the U.S. response.

MARK TONER: We've been continuing to assess the situation, obviously. And consistent, obviously, with the guidelines of the Nationalor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we're now telling American citizens who live within 50 miles or 80 kilometers of the Fukushima nuclear power plant to evacuate the area and to take shelters indoors if safe evacuation is not practical. Again, this isthis is based on our most current assessment. We've got nuclear experts on the ground. And it'sfrankly, it's what we would adviseit's based on what we would advise U.S. citizens here to do in a similar situation.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Japan is facing an unprecedented triple crisis caused by the earthquake, tsunami and the partial nuclear meltdown. The official death toll has now risen to above 5,000, while 9,400 people remain missing. Fears of radioactivity have severely hampered relief efforts in parts of northern Japan, which was hit with a snow storm on Wednesday.

Some 850,000 households are without power, and 1.5 million homes with no running water. Food and gas supplies have been nearly exhausted in the ravaged northern part of the country. A 21-year-old Japanese mother named Ayumi Yamazaki says she has had trouble finding enough food to feed her child.

AYUMI YAMAZAKI: [translated] We get one bowl of soup or one piece of bread to share among three people, and get a few snacks. We rarely get white rice. So I'm a little concerned about my daughter not getting enough nutrition. But it's better than not eating at all.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We will go to Japan soon for a report on the recovery efforts, but first we discuss the latest news from the crippled Japanese nuclear plant.

Joining me here in New York is Karl Grossman. He's an investigative journalist and professor of journalism at SUNY College at Old Westbury. He's author of several books on the nuclear industry.

And with us in Washington, D.C., is Paul Gunter. He's a reactor oversight project director at the nuclear watchdog group Beyond Nuclear. He's also a co-founder of the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear group.

Paul, I want to begin with you. The latest reports that we got overnight and early this morning about the situation in the reactors of Fukushima, could you give us your sense of what's happening there?

PAUL GUNTER: Well, obviously, right now, there is a lot of contradictory information. I think that what's most important to understand is that among these six units at Fukushima Daiichi, Units 4, 5 and 6, the fuel in the reactor core was taken out of the reactor vessel, taken out of containment, and placed in these rooftop spent fuel pools. So all of the radioactive inventory was moved. We're very concerned about this very large volume of radioactive material that is now in a conflict of information in its state of, you know, no water or water. But clearly, right now, there is a serious danger of a full core meltdown outside of containment at Unit 4. This could occur at Unit 5 and 6, and we still have the crippled reactors at 1, 2 and 3.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the crippled reactor 3, which has also been releasing, pretty regularly now, radioactive steam, there are reports that there has been a breach in the containment vessel there. And that, of course, is the only reactor that had the more toxic mixed oxide fuel that was brought into it in the last couple of years as fuel. Your sense of reactor 3?

PAUL GUNTER: Well, Unit 3 is burning what they call plutonium oxide. They like to call it MOX as an acronym rather than POX, but in fact it's plutonium oxide. This fuel has a lower melting point, for one, and it's just loaded with plutonium, which is highly toxic at micro levels.

The containment, which is a Mark I General Electric boiling water reactorwe have 23 of these reactors in the United States, dead ringers for Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 through 6it's right now in this state ofit's ruptured. Unit 2 has also compromised its containment. These have all been documented. So, you know, the walls of defense are falling, with the melting of the cores, the collapsing of thewe're expecting the collapsing of the vessels. And then, with these damaged containments, these are all open windows to the atmosphere.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Karl Grossman, you have been following now for decades the claims of the industry, the politicians, about nuclear energy, both in the United States and around the world. Your assessment of what has happened here and what it will mean in terms of nuclear power in the future?

KARL GROSSMAN: What has happened here is an enormous nuclear power tragedy, and we're on the cusp, I fear, of an even more horrific tragedy, with a loss of cool down accidentand we have multiple loss of cool down accidents underwayand, importantly, breach of containment. And as Paul said, that's quite possible now. Just the most enormous disaster, except for a loss of water accident in a spent fuel pool, where you have tons upon tons of nuclear poisonsno containment, except for some corrugated steel ceiling. That stuff gets out in a loss of water accident, and it would get out explosively, because of the fuel rods being made of zirconium. And I could explain that. It will just burst into the environment, become airborne, affect not only Japan but much of the world.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Karl, in the reporting that you've done in the past on the battles over the siting of nuclear plants in the United States, because, obviously, all of the reports are saying, "Well, that's all happening in Japan; here in the United States, we're in a much better situation with our plants." But one of the things that you uncovered was an assessment that the government did back in the 1980s of the potentialthe potential deaths and injuries that might occur from a reactor accident and a breach of containment in the United States. Could you talk about that memo?

KARL GROSSMAN: Yeah. They have known the consequences all along. This is a reportit's called "Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences 2"done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, not Greenpeace, and it projects peak early fatalities, peak injuries, peak cancer deaths, scale cost in billions in terms of property damage, and a large hunk of the earth being rendered uninhabitable for millennia. And just, for example, for the Indian Point 3 nuclear plant, which is about 35 miles from where we sit now in New York, 50,000 peak early fatalities; 167,000 peak early injuries; cancer deaths, 14,000; scale cost of billions, they say $314 billionin 1980s dollars, we're talking about a trillion.

As to the likelihood of a severe core melt accident, in 1985 the NRC acknowledged that, over a 20-year period, the likelihood of a severe core melt accident to be basically 50/50 among the 100 nuclear power plantsthere's 104 nowin the United States. They've known all along here in this country that disaster could come, and there's a good likelihood of it coming, and they've known the consequences.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You're saying that the NRC itself estimated a 50/50 chance of a meltdown in our plants here within 20 years?

KARL GROSSMAN: Over a 20-year period. That was formal testimony provided to a watchdog committee in Congress chaired by Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, when he asked the question, "What does the NRC and its staff believe the likelihood to be of a severe core meltdown?" So, you know, when you hear these lines about, "Oh, the chances of a severe core meltdown, infinitesimal," and if there is, like you're hearing these reports out of Japan, an accident, "Oh, just some minor effects among the population"not at all.

You go to the documents. And many of them were, well, secret for years. In my bookI did a book in 1980, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know about Nuclear Powerthere's a line in a Atomic Energy Commission report, "WASH-740-Update": "The possible size of the area of such a disaster"this is a meltdown with loss of containment"might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania"in other words, covering the whole state of what would be the state of Pennsylvania, which almost occurred with the Three Mile Island accident. We're talking about huge disasters here. And with a loss of water accident in a spent fuel pool, because you've got much more nuclear garbageand again, no containmentit would be even worse.

And just let me mention one other thing. Everybody should, when you hear about these hydrogen explosions, understand that the fuel rods are composed of a substance called zircaloy. It's based on something called zirconium. And way back in the late '40s and '50s, they were looking for something to build thesenot control rodsfuel rods with, and they decided to use zirconium, because it allowed the neutrons to move from fuel rod to fuel rod and keep the chain reaction going. Problem was zirconium, the other major industrial use is the speck on a flashbulb. Zirconium is explosive; at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it explodes. Before that, it emits hydrogen gases, which have exploded in several of these plants. There's, in a nuclear plant itselfthis is in my book20 tons of zirconium. At spent fuel pool, you're talking about, because there's all these old fuel rods, hundreds of tons. That stuff, again, as things get hot, explodes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I also wanted to talk about the history of the type of nuclear reactors. There have been warnings about the design going back for decades. The organization Nuclear Information and Resource Service recently released and posted online three memos [11/11/71, 9/20/72, 9/25/72] from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission on the GE Mark I reactor design. The memos show that the Commission knew of serious problems with the design of these reactors as early as the 1970s. Diane D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service spoke with us last evening.

DIANE D'ARRIGO: Back in 1971, Stephen Hanauer of the Atomic Energy Commission did a memo to the Atomic Energy Commission outlining serious problems with the design of the kind of reactors that are operating, and are failing and melting, in Japan right now. In September of 1971, he did a memo that recommended that the United States stop licensing reactors using this pressure suppression system. But his recommendation was rejected by the upper-level Atomic Energy Commission safety officials. The top safety official, Joseph Hendrie, he agreed with the recommendation, but he rejected it, saying that it could well mean the end of nuclear power. Now, the problems that were raised in those earlier memos are what led to the disaster here in Japan. And I wanted to point out that the United States has, since those memos were written and then ignored or rejected, licensed and has operating 23 of this type of nuclear reactor.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I also wanted tothat was Diane D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, who spoke with us last night. Paul Gunter, I'd like to ask you about thethe news has been worse each day in the efforts to try to get control of these crippled reactors. But if the government is able now to finally bring electricity back, as they've been saying they've been trying to string a new line, and to begin bringing water back into these reactors and into the spent fuel pools, do you envision any problems if they're ablecontinuing problems, if they're able to get the water back on?

PAUL GUNTER: Well, let's first of all realize that what's been demonstrated at this catastrophe is that nuclear power is going to be more of a liability than it is an asset during natural disaster or national crisis. We sincerely hope that the Tokyo Electric Power Company can restore power. But these six units are history. The best we can do right now is see them buried under concrete, and hopefully that can contain it. That's the best scenario right now.

But clearly, if you want to actually have civil defense, the real issue here is to prevent this from happening. And we believe that means to bemean you promptly shut down these most dangerous reactor designs all over the world, and then we begin the rapid phase-out of this inherently dangerous technology and phase in a 21st century energy policy of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Paul Gunter of the nuclear watchdog group Beyond Nuclear, I want to thank you for being with us. Karl Grossman, a professor at SUNY-Old Westbury, thank you, and a continuing investigative journalist on the issue of nuclear power. I want to thank both of you for being with us. We'll be back in a moment with reports on what is going on in Japan right now.

Tokyo Passengers Trigger U.S. Airport Detectors, N.Y. Post Says

By Alan Purkiss - Thu Mar 17 06:08:48 GMT 2011
Radiation detectors at Dallas-Fort Worth and Chicago O'Hare airports were triggered when passengers from flights that started in Tokyo passed through customs, the New York Post reported.
Tests at Dallas-Fort Worth indicated low radiation levels in travelers' luggage and in the aircraft's cabin filtration system; no passengers were quarantined, the newspaper said.
Details of the incident at O'Hare weren't immediately clear, the Post said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17...-says.html

Magda Hassan Wrote:Tokyo Passengers Trigger U.S. Airport Detectors, N.Y. Post Says

By Alan Purkiss - Thu Mar 17 06:08:48 GMT 2011
Radiation detectors at Dallas-Fort Worth and Chicago O'Hare airports were triggered when passengers from flights that started in Tokyo passed through customs, the New York Post reported.
Tests at Dallas-Fort Worth indicated low radiation levels in travelers' luggage and in the aircraft's cabin filtration system; no passengers were quarantined, the newspaper said.
Details of the incident at O'Hare weren't immediately clear, the Post said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17...-says.html

Soon it will be easy to tell someone who is Japanese - even at night, from a distance....as they will glow!:hitball: Seriously, it is another indication that they are NOT telling the full nature of the amount of radiation being released!....as has happened at each and every nuclear accident! The bigger 'they' are, the bigger the lies.....it seems.

Engineers consider burying Fukushima to block radiation

Japanese engineers said Friday they are weighing-up the possibility of burying Fukushima in sand, the same method used to contain the radiation leak in Chernobyl in 1986, as efforts to restore power in the Fukushima plant remain unsuccessful.
By News Wires (text)
REUTERS - Japanese engineers conceded on Friday that burying a crippled nuclear reactor in sand and concrete may be the only way to prevent a catastrophic radiation leak, the method used to seal huge leakages from Chernobyl in 1986.
Officials said they still hoped to fix a power cable to at least two reactors to restart water pumps needed to cool overheating nuclear fuel rods. Workers also sprayed water on the No.3 reactor, one of the most critical of the plant's six.
It was the first time the facility operator had acknowledged that burying the sprawling complex was an option, a sign that piecemeal actions such as dumping water from military helicopters were having little success.
"It is not impossible to encase the reactors in concrete. But our priority right now is to try and cool them down first," an official from the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, told a news conference.
As Japan entered its second week after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and 10 metre (33-foot) tsunami flattened coastal cities and killed thousands of people, the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl looked far from over.
Millions in Tokyo remained indoors on Friday, fearing a blast of radioactive material from the complex, 240 km (150 miles) to the north, although prevailing winds would likely carry contaminated smoke or steam away from the densely populated city to dissipate over the Pacific Ocean.
Radiation did not pose an immediate risk to human health outside the vicinity of the plant, said Michael O'Leary, the World Health Organisation's representative in China.
"At this point, there is still no evidence that there's been significant radiation spread beyond the immediate zone of the reactors themselves," O'Leary told reporters in Beijing.
Japan's nuclear disaster has triggered global alarm and reviews of safety at atomic power plants around the world. President Barack Obama, who stressed the United States did not expect harmful radiation to reach its shores, said he had ordered a comprehensive review of domestic nuclear plants and pledged Washington's support for Japan.
The Group of Seven rich nations, stepping in together to calm global financial markets after a tumultuous week, agreed to join in rare concerted intervention to restrain a soaring yen.
The top U.S. nuclear regulator said it could take weeks to reverse the overheating of fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
"This is something that will take some time to work through, possibly weeks, as you eventually remove the majority of the heat from the reactors and then the spent-fuel pools," Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko told a news conference at the White House.
Yukiya Amano, head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), arrived in his homeland on Friday with an international team of experts after earlier complaining about a lack of information from Japan.
Graham Andrew, his senior aide, called the situation at the plant "reasonably stable " but the government said white smoke or steam was still rising from three reactors and helicopters used to dump water on the plant had shown exposure to small amounts of radiation.
"The situation remains very serious, but there has been no significant worsening since yesterday," Andrew said.
The nuclear agency said the radiation level at the plant was as high as 20 millisieverts per hour. The limit for the workers was 100 per hour.
Even if engineers restore power at the plant, it was not clear the pumps would work as they may have been damaged in the earthquake or subsequent explosions and there are fears of the electricity shorting and causing another blast.
Japan's nuclear agency spokesman, Hidehiko Nishiyama, said it was also unclear how effective spraying water on the reactors from helicopters had been on Thursday. The priority was to get water into the spent-fuel pools, he said.
"We have to reduce the heat somehow and may use seawater," he told a news conference. "We need to get the reactors back online as soon as possible and that's why we're trying to restore power to them."
Asked about burying the reactors in sand and concrete, he said: "That solution is in the back of our minds, but we are focused on cooling the reactors down."
Jaczko said the cooling pool for spent-fuel rods at the complex's reactor No.4 may have run dry and another was leaking.
An official at the plant operator said he expected power to be restored at its most troubled and damaged reactors -- No.3 and No.4 -- by Sunday. Engineers are trying to reconnect power to the least damaged reactors first.
Dollar gains as financial leaders intervene
The U.S. dollar surged more than two yen to 81.80 after the G7's pledge to intervene, leaving behind a record low of 76.25 hit on Thursday.
Japan's Nikkei share index ended up 2.7 percent, recouping some of the week's stinging losses. It has lost 10.2 percent this week.
U.S. markets, which had tanked earlier in the week on the back of the crisis, rebounded on Thursday but investors were not convinced the advance would last.
The yen has seen steady buying since the earthquake, as Japanese and international investors closed long positions in higher-yielding, riskier assets such as the Australian dollar, funded by cheap borrowing in the Japanese currency.
Expectations that Japanese insurers and companies would repatriate billions of dollars in overseas funds to pay for a reconstruction bill that is expected to be much costlier than the one that followed the Kobe earthquake in 1995 also have helped boost the yen.
Radiation levels in Tokyo barely above average
The government had warned Tokyo's 13 million residents on Thursday to prepare for a possible large-scale blackout but later said there was no need for one. Still, many firms voluntarily reduced power, plunging parts of the usually neon-lit city in darkness.
The U.S. embassy in Tokyo has urged citizens living within 80 km (50 miles) of the Daiichi plant to evacuate or remain indoors "as a precaution", while Britain's foreign office urged citizens "to consider leaving the area". Other nations have urged nationals in Japan to leave the country or head south.
Japan's government has told everyone living within 20 km (12 miles) of the plant to evacuate, and advised people within 30 km (18 miles) to stay indoors.
At its worst, radiation in Tokyo has reached 0.809 microsieverts per hour this week, 10 times below what a person would receive if exposed to a dental x-ray. On Thursday and Friday, radiation levels were within average levels.
The plight of hundreds of thousands left homeless by the earthquake and tsunami worsened following a cold snap that brought heavy snow to worst-affected areas.
Supplies of water, heating oil and fuel are low at evacuation centres, where many survivors wait bundled in blankets.
About 30,000 households in the north were still without electricity in near-freezing weather, Tohuku Electric Power Co. said, and the government said at least 1.6 million households lacked running water.
The National Police Agency said on Friday it had confirmed 5,692 deaths from the quake and tsunami disaster, while 9,522 people were unaccounted for in six prefectures.
http://www.france24.com/en/20110318-engi...tion_japan

The Japanese have slyly let out that they are 'considering' burying the entire six reactor plant [as was done at Chernobyl] with special Barium-Lead Cement....translation, they can't think of any way to shut it down and protect the population and Planet from the radiation. Such an undertaking is certainly possible, but will be one of the largest engineering projects in recent times....both is size and the speed it would have to be done [fast!!!]; and difficulty! [without very special structures above them, pouring concrete directly on the top spent fuel pools would cause more problems than it would solve]

......cement futures in Japan should soar. Stay tuned.

Well, after a week and a day, the new powerline is said to be at the plant and will today be connected to the various reactor pumps. Whether or not the pumps and other needed equipment is operational and will remain so, will not be known for a day or three. Elevated levels of radiation have been noted in local milk and vegetables...and no doubt there is much more, not yet detected in almost everything. There is still a slim chance at the brink of time they have eluded the worst case scenario; however, the situation at this point is horrible and will have effects - mostly locally, but as well worldwide - to some, as yet, unknown level. What it does to the Nuclear Industry will be most interesting......

Today's update [so far]. They say they have connected one [I believe reactor 5] power supply and will now test to see if the pumps are working. At least one fireman working at the plant collapsed from acute radiation exposure and is in hospital - indicating just how powerful the radiation is around the plant [not surprising]. All food from the surrounding area is now illegal to be sold or consumed and the water all over Japan shows varying increased levels of radiation. They continue to spray water to fill the spent fuel pools and cool the reactors. It is a race against time...and I'd guess they have little of it left.....

...oh yes, and Reactor three is in trouble again [melting].

Reactor #3 is increasingly in trouble!~.....if the authorities are to be believed some of the reactors are now connected again to the power mains and slowly cooling. Some of the pumps are missing parts, blown away by the hydrogen explosions. Persons leaving the area have been found to have very high levels of radiation on their shoes [ground contamination - no surprise there!]. It is very hard to get much exact news!....

good article with information a few days old and some photos of the damage to the reactors here.

Isn't number three the dirty one with the plutonium mox?