Saturday, April 9, 2016

Contaminated Water at Fukushima Daiichi Escapes Human Control


Contaminated water continues to defy human control at Fukushima (also at places such as Hanford):
Contaminated water, fuel extraction stand in way of decommissioning Fukushima plant. The Mainichi, April 3, 2016 (Mainichi Japan) http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160403/p2a/00m/0na/010000c 
With about five years having passed since the start of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster, nuclear workers still lack a method of treating the around 1,000 tanks of contaminated water stored on site, and the start of work to remove melted nuclear fuel from the plant remains at least five years away.
 

"Until the contaminated water issue is solved, decommissioning of the reactors remains far off. We have to stop the water," says Tetsuo Ito, professor of nuclear energy safety engineering at the Kinki University Atomic Energy Research Institute. Akira Ono, chief of the Fukushima plant, says, "We're still at step one" of the decommissioning process, which is estimated to take until 2041 to 2051. 
Meanwhile at Daiichi, visible emissions continue to be lower than they have been the last couple of weeks, perhaps due to the ice wall. Still, as you can see below, (radioactive?) steam is still quite visible:

 



From Majia Nadesan, Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability: The Threat of Financial and Energy Complexes in the Twenty-First Century, https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739194959/Crisis-Communication-Liberal-Democracy-and-Ecological-Sustainability-The-Threat-of-Financial-and-Energy-Complexes-in-the-Twenty-First-Century



Ground water contamination has also been rising steadily at the Daiichi site, especially since the summer of 2013. TEPCO reported that samples from the well between the ocean and unit 1 measuring a record 5 million Becquerels per liter of radioactive Strontium-90 alone in July 2013. In January 27, 2015, TEPCO measured 31,000,000 Bq/m3 of Strontium-90 in boring well nearest unit 2, a level which was more than 10 percent more than reported in December of 2014.[iii] By February of 2015, TEPCO was reporting even higher levels of Strontium-90 in the same location, with the highest sample measured at 590,000,000 Bq/m3 of Strontium-90. The spiking strontium levels are consistent with the predictions of the German melt-through scenario.
TEPCO has also detected increased radionuclide contamination in the Fukushima port. On June 19, 2015 TEPCO’s reported that it had detected Strontium-90 measuring 1,000,000 Bq/m3 in two locations in Fukushima Daiichi’s port located near the water intake for reactors 3 and 4, exceeding the previous reported high of 700,000 Bq/m3. The highest Strontium level measured in Fukushima’s port jumped still more in data reported in July 17, 2015 to 1,500,000 Bq/m3.
TEPCO is also facing severe problems filtering and storing the contaminated water it does pump out from the ground and ruined buildings. In May of 2013 The Asahi Shimbun reported the TEPCO was going to begin dumping groundwater at the Daiichi site because its storage capacities for contaminated water were nearly exhausted. [vii] There was considerable resistance from local fisherman because TEPCO lacked the capacity to remove Strontium-90 from captured water and even the filtered water was quite contaminated. At that time in 2013, filtered water measured 710 million Becquerels per liter while unfiltered water was reported as twice as radioactive, from tritium and strontium. TEPCO was not able to eliminate Strontium until the fall of 2014. In 2015 the NRA approved a plan to allow TEPCO to dump decontaminated groundwater into the sea if the water registered less than 1 Becquerel per liter of cesium, less than 3 Becquerels per liter of beta emitters such as Strontium-90, and 1,500 Becquerels per liter of tritium



2 comments:

  1. My suggestion would be to always refer to corporations as People with the capital P suggesting their importance over mere people with the small p. That way we remind ourselves that corporations come first, even before governments. Thus if some agent is harmful to children(p) but if it were prohibited it would damage the corporations(P), then everyone has a clear understanding as to why it is not prohibited. This may seem immoral and ruthless but it is realistic. Hence, being a corporation, Tepco is a Person. Its needs trump the Japanese gov as well of course as the people of Japan and elsewhere. Now we can see clearly why nothing much is said or done or why it appears that no one is concerned at this time even if the death rate on the West Coast were to rise or is even now rising--because we are using the proper calculus. Everything humanly possible is done to benefit the corporation, then the gov and the crumb fall to the people(p). Human sacrifice is apparently necessary to the thriving of the People,

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Very well said. People, capitalized, share a collective psychosis.

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