FUKUSHIMA: Plan to release water into Pacific . . .

[Oscar]

Plan to release radioactive Fukushima water into Pacific provokes furious reaction

[ https://www.dw.com/en/tepco-fukushima-c ... a-55334567 ]

By Julian Ryall, Tokyo, October 10, 2020

SEE BACKGROUND by Dr. Gordon Edwards to follow . . . .

Environmental groups have reacted furiously to reports that the Japanese government is set to approve plans to dump more than 1 million tons of highly radioactive water stored at the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, with their concerns shared by the governments of neighboring countries and people living in northeastern Japan.

A government panel set up to determine the best way of disposing the radioactively contaminated water is scheduled to announce its decision by the end of the month.

Three Fukushima reactors suffered meltdowns following a 2011 tsunami that destroyed wide swaths of the coastline in northern Japan's Miyagi prefecture.

According to reports leaked to Japanese media, the panel will recommend releasing the approximately 1.23 million tons of water currently stored in tanks in the grounds of the nuclear plant.

The alternatives that have been considered are to evaporate the water into the atmosphere or to mix it into concrete and store it underground.

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DR. GORDON EDWARDS - Background: October 26, 2020

Over one million tonnes of radioactively contaminated waste water have been accumulating and are now stored in over a thousand massive tanks crammed into a constricted land area adjacent to the three Fukushima reactors that melted down in March 2011.

Radioactivity cannot be shut off. After irradiated fuel is removed from a reactor, it still has to be cooled for years, because the radioactivity is so intense it continues to generate a lot of heat. That heat will spontaneously drive the temperature of the used fuel upwards unless it is constantly removed by active cooling. Overheating will cause fuel failures, releasing a large variety of radioactive poisons that will find their way into the environment of living things.

The melted fuel from the Fukushima disaster has already failed, but it still has to be cooled to prevent further atmospheric releases of radioactivity due to overheating. Every day for the last nine and a half years, hundreds of tonnes of water have been pumped down into the melted cores to keep them cooled. When that water is pumped back to the surface it has become extremely radioactive, contaminated by dozens of different radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission that have been flushed out of the molten cores.

Forty-two different kinds of radioactive materials were removed, “cleansing" the contaminated water by running it through a complicated filtering device called ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System). But no filtering method is 100 percent effective, and there remains quite a variety of radioactive materials in the 1.2 million tonnes of contaminated water stored on-site. Radioactive varieties of iodine, ruthenium, rhodium, antimony, tellurium, cobalt and strontium have been reduced but not eliminated.

In 2017, more than half of the samples studied showed levels of radioactive contamination for these materials that are above legal limits. In the case of strontium-90, a bone-seeking radioisotope, some 65,000 tonnes of water had levels 100 times above the legal limit even after being treated with ALPS. None of the radioisotopes named above exist in nature to any measurable degree, they are created during the fission process.

One radioisotope that has not been removed from the Fukushima contaminated water at all is tritium, the only radioactive form of hydrogen. Radioactive tritium is chemically identical with non-radioactive hydrogen, so tritium forms water molecules, and hydrocarbons, and proteins, and DNA molecules, just as ordinary hydrogen does – but all of these chemical compounds are now radioactive due to the presence of tritium. Tritium, mimicking hydrogen, enters freely into all living things, and is known to cross the placenta easily and enter the fetus. Tritium has been demonstrated to cause cancer and genetic damage in experimental animals. In an aqueous environment tritium occurs mainly in the form of radioactive water molecules, and it cannot be filtered out – because you cannot filter water from water. So the massive inventory of radioactively contaminated water at Fukushima is absolutely loaded with human-made tritium. (Tritium occurs in nature due to cosmic radiation from outer space, but most of the tritium in our world is human-made from nuclear fission – atomic bomb tests and nuclear reactor emissions.)

I have been interviewed many times about the terrible legacy of radioactively contaminated water from the Fukushima disaster – I have linked to these below in case anyone is interested in checking it out. I have often asked, if a similar accident were to happen anywhere around the Great Lakes, where would all the contaminated water go? How could we adequately protect the 40 million people who depend on the Great Lakes for drinking water?

Dr. Gordon Edwards, President
http://www.ccnr.org

Three past interviews with G Edwards on contaminated water from Fukushima :

CTV, 2019: with Ben Mulroney,
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT2ry_c ... e=youtu.be ]

CTV, Aug 22, 2013, with J Milczarek:
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDxejiu ... e=youtu.be ]

CTV, March 14 2011, with Seamus O’Regan:
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBsSUI4 ... e=youtu.be ]

[Oscar]

Fukushima: How the ocean became a dumping ground for radioactive waste

[ https://www.dw.com/en/fukushima-how-the ... a-52710277 ]

March 11, 2020

The nuclear disaster at Fukushima sent an unprecedented amount of radiation into the Pacific. But, before then, atomic bomb tests and radioactive waste were contaminating the sea — the effects are still being felt today.

Almost 1.2 million liters (320,000 gallons) of radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant is to be released into the ocean. That's on the recommendation of the government's advisory panel some nine years after the nuclear disaster on Japan's east coast. The contaminated water has since been used to cool the destroyed reactor blocks to prevent further nuclear meltdowns. It is currently being stored in large tanks, but those are expected to be full by 2022.

Exactly how the water should be dealt with has become highly controversial in Japan, not least because the nuclear disaster caused extreme contamination off the coast of Fukushima. At the time, radioactive water flowed "directly into the sea, in quantities we have never seen before in the marine world," Sabine Charmasson from the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) tells DW.

Radiation levels in the sea off Fukushima were millions of times higher than the government's limit of 100 becquerels. And still today, radioactive substances can be detected off the coast of Japan and in other parts of the Pacific. They've even been measured in very small quantities off the US west coast in concentrations "well below the harmful levels set by the World Health Organization," according to Vincent Rossi, an oceanographer at France's Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography (MIO).

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