Friday, March 2, 2018

Fukushima Daiichi's Ongoing Assault Against the Ocean


The Asahi Shimbun has a very interesting article today about Fukushima Daiichi's very expensive ice wall that was designed as a barrier preventing contaminated ground water from flowing into the sea:
Masanobu Higashiyama and Yusuke Ogawa (2018, March 2). TEPCO defends Fukushima ‘ice wall,’ but it is still too porous. THE ASAHI SHIMBUN, http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201803020042.html

This is a very interesting article worth reading carefully.

What it says is that the ice wall reduced the amount of contaminated water reaching the ocean by approximately 95 tons a day.

That is a significant amount but raises the question of how many tons of contaminated water continue to penetrate the ice wall. This is what the article reports:
“Contaminated groundwater was cut in half due to the wall,” a TEPCO official said.

TEPCO estimated that the volume of polluted groundwater would have amounted to about 189 tons if the ice wall had not been in place during that period.

The utility also said the amount of polluted groundwater was reduced by about 400 tons a day now due to combined measures, such as the wall and wells pumping up water, compared with before such measures were taken.http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201803020042.html
This is getting confusing. TEPCO reduced the ground water by 400 tons a day, using wells and pumping, and is able to filter out 95 tons of what would be 189 tons a day of radioactive water.

But it gets more confusing because the 189 tons of radioactive water produced daily aren't actually representative of the tons of radioactive water produced when it rains hard, as reported in the article:
The water volume rose to 1,000 tons or so a day in late October when two typhoons struck the area.
So, when it rains hard, which it often does in Fukushima I've noted in my nearly daily webcam checks for 7 years, up to a thousand tons of radioactive water can be produced, with the ice wall filtering out approximately 95 tons a day.

That is a lot of very contaminated water that is flowing into the ocean.

The problems with the ice wall were well anticipated, as this article in the Mainichi reported in August 2017 when the wall neared completion:
High-priced Fukushima ice wall nears completion, but effectiveness doubtful August 16, 2017, https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170816/p2a/00m/0na/016000c
But while 34.5 billion yen from government coffers has already been invested in the wall, doubts remain about its effectiveness.  Meanwhile, the issue of water contamination looms over decommissioning work..... during screening by the NRA, which had approved the project, experts raised doubts about how effective the ice wall would be in blocking groundwater. The ironic reason for approving its full-scale operation, in the words of NRA acting head Toyoshi Fuketa, was that, "It has not been effective in blocking water, so we can go ahead with freezing with peace of mind" -- without worrying that the level of groundwater surrounding the reactor buildings will decrease, causing the contaminated water inside to flow out.
At that time, TEPCO reports success in reducing the volume of contaminated water produced everyday from 400 tons to approximately 130 tons.

All these numbers don't seem to add up cleanly. The one thing clearly concluded is that quite a lot of contaminated water is flowing from the plant directly into the ocean.

This is water contaminated from direct contract with melted nuclear reactor fuel.

What impact will this have on the Pacific Ocean?

I've posted on this subject but the truth is that no one really knows what this unprecedented radiological assault will do to an eco-system already imperiled by human degradation.

Recently a friend - Douglas - sent me a link describing decimation of California's kelp forests. 

If you Google these disappearing forests off California's northern coast, you will see articles that blame the sea lions for the disappearing kelp (e.g., here), while other articles place the blame on warmer water produced by climate change (e.g., here).

I'm sure that both these factors may play a role but what is completely marginalized from conversation is the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

There were plenty of research studies that projected and detected empirically radiological contamination off of North America's coast as marine currents bring Fukushima Daiichi's contaminated water across the Pacific and back again, forever adding new contaminants.

We must find a way to prevent the death of life in our oceans or we will soon follow.


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Jan 8, 2016 - But the real killer is the catastrophic ongoing ocean contamination. I've documented in my published work the scale and ongoing nature of contamination of the Pacific Ocean. TEPCO doesn't deny it. TEPOC is trying to filter water they dump into the ocean deliberately, but has acknowledged incapacity to ...

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That means yet greater contamination of the ground water, ocean, and atmosphere (through radioactive steam emissions). By SHUNSUKE KIMURA(8 April 2013) 'Defect could affect all radioactive water storage tanks at Fukushima plant' Asahi Shimbun, http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201304080089


8 comments:

  1. This post also relevant
    http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/animal-anomalies-is-fukushima-daiichi.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Is anyone having problems with ENE News? Tried to have a look but got message : You have reached a domain that is pending ICANN verification.
    Feeky McGee

    ReplyDelete
  3. http://www.nonukes.it/rna/news326.html

    Thorium church

    ReplyDelete
  4. In the end enenews was total shit. They puplished a propaganda article, that implied n korean radiation is worse on its people, than so called good radiation from fukushima might be in japan , on japanese people. It was referenced from the arupert murdoch publication, Sun.
    Enenews had political trolls, who claimed to care about nukes, yet support yucca mtn, support arming japan w nucs and nuc bombing n korea. Political trolls who actively campaign for Trump there and support leaving nuclear reactors open, who are white nationalists and climate deniars.some out and out fascists. Extreme trolls who glorify sandy hook, the las vegas massacre and recent parkland hs massacre with their psychotic evil conspiracy bullshit.
    There were only ringers in the end on enenews. Some were probably nsa operatives. Obebot , heart of crap, etc were problably some sort of manipulated chatbots. Potasaium 40 obesessors and disnfo agent that promotes cold fusion. In the end about 9 bogus ringers that had chased of antinuke commenters and people, who truly care about the ongoing crisis at fukushima. Good riddance to bad shit and garbage..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's people like you with the he's a bot and she's a operative and it's all a conspiracy and blablabla and cursing while saying nothing that is the cause of the ene downtime.

      So it's some great conspiracy that a bunch of crazies (like you perhaps) that couldn't find the truth in a giant pile of facts caused the site to be stopped until such a time as this kind of TOTAL disinformation bad language and attitudes can be stopped.

      Way to go ya big dummy.

      Delete
  5. Looks like a lot of flakey bs with the ownership of the website , or someone was trying to commandere it. Just like people thought. Hhd was right!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ene news was invaded by conspiracy nuts that spouted all kinds of provable crazy lies and conspiracy theories so ridiculous that anyone with a good brain and solid mental health were a gassed that these few nuts were even allowed to post. Then this same little click of nut cases insulted and belittled anyone that posted the obvious truth about their lies.

    I'll never forget reading a post that stated the rescuers in Huston after the hurricane last year were actually taking people to be locked up.

    When proven it was a lie and rumors like that could endanger rescuers these posters and their cohorts went on a smear campaign against the person that proved them wrong...

    And then from this same group of posters one poster said that the fires in California were set intentionally by the government using lasers from helicopters and even posted a fake news report.

    After being proven to have posted a totally fake news video about it the poster had the audacity to reply and say... "why don't you let them make up their own minds". So the intention was to spread lies to see how many they could fool into a fantasy world?

    Another story so ridiculous any sane person reading it would never give credence to anything posted there after that.


    So the loonies thought they had taken over the asylum. But they were wrong.

    It's no wonder that the admin is in no particular hurry to reactivate this site.

    Any sane person would distance themselves from that madness.

    ReplyDelete

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