March 11, 2016 will
commemorate five years since the catastrophic disaster at Fukushima,
Japan. In spite of the fact that there
has been sparse mainstream media coverage, the situation remains a stunningly
dangerous and expensive challenge for Japan and the whole world.
In the past five years,
basically nothing resembling cleanup and/or decommissioning has really
occurred. The quiet “official”
consensus is that it will be 40-50+ years and hundreds of billion of dollars
before any type of stable condition is achieved. Other experts predict that the site can/will never be cleaned or
decommissioned. As with so many aspects
of nuclear power, there are no easy solutions or fixes, which enforces the
belief that nuclear power is potentially dangerous, complex and beyond our
current technological ability, extremely expensive, and a moral albatross we
place upon all future generations.
Four reactors at the site
were damaged in the earthquake and tsunami, three suffering the ultimate
complete meltdown of fuel forcing the unprecedented challenge of what to do.
The fourth reactor had damage to the fuel handling building, and two years were
spent moving the fuel rods from the damaged spent fuel pool to a new pool at an
adjacent site. No one knows what is
really going on with the other three reactors, since they are so radiologically
hot that the electronics in the various robotics attempting to survey the
damage fried within a few minutes of exposure.
No one/nothing can get near the internals of the reactors to see what
has realistically happened, let alone begin to figure out how to
disassemble/dismantle/stabilize the melted fuel. The situation is similar, but more severe than Chernobyl; and a
simple solution would be to entomb the site…bury the whole area with sand,
build a sarcophagus of some sort, and just walk away from it. However, it’s not that simple. Meanwhile, thousands of “workers,” ranging
from nuclear professionals to common laborers, have been knowingly exposed to
higher than acceptable levels of radiation, endangering their own health and
that of their offspring.
All the reactors were bermed into the adjoining hillside,
and groundwater runs downhill and below the buildings. The explosions and meltdowns cracked the
bottom concrete layers, so that this water infiltrates into the substructures
where the melted fuel has probably congregated, and picks up
radioactivity. This water, as well as
the water that is continuously being pumped into the reactors to keep the fuel
cool, amounts to an enormous volume of contaminated water that needs to be
treated before being released to the environment. Unfortunately, the treatment processes cannot begin to deal with
the 80+ million gallons of water; so the majority of it is being stored in
1800+ makeshift tanks, some of which are already starting to fail and
leak. A lot of the contaminated
groundwater cannot be captured, and just seeps out into the ocean, releasing
radioactivity that is being detected in ocean currents on the west coast of the
US and Canada, in the fisheries off the coast of Japan; and in air monitors
around the world as some of this radioactivity evaporates into the
atmosphere. An attempt ($250+m) to
build an ice dam to exclude the intrusion of groundwater into the buildings has
failed some preliminary trials, but they are still moving ahead with the 1½
mile project. We’ll see what happens
there. They are running out of room and
the ability to construct new storage tanks for the contaminated water, and it
is inevitable that they will soon have to deliberately dump huge quantities of
radioactivity into the ocean. How this
plays in the international arena of nuclear treaties, global water pollution,
etc. remains to be seen.
The bottom line is NOBODY knows what to do! There have been no real concrete ideas from
the US, China, Russia, or the European nuclear powers, because these three
“meltdowns” were never supposed to happen.
The chief engineer at Fukushima just died of cancer at the age of 58,
and he really didn’t have a clue as to what they could do. Three former
executives of TEPCO, the responsible utility, have just been indicted on
charges of criminal negligence.
Fukushima was not an accident, but a ”failure of the safety analysis”
which the global nuclear industry has falsely prided itself on. In a way it’s
very similar to the Flint lead water crisis here…silence, hoping nothing bad
happens, and that it will all just go away.
The nuclear industry is notorious for its mis-statements, cover-ups,
silencing critics, and absolute lies…just like the Exxon campaign against
climate change, Monsanto and its dangerous chemicals entering our food supply,
and, just now, France’s cover-up of serious malfunctions at its nukes near the
German border.
Back to Japan…it is a small island with little room to store
not only the radioactive water, but also the thousands of bags full of
contaminated soil and debris. Here in
the US, we have Utah, Texas, and Nevada to put the stuff! Add to this the ultimate storage of spent
fuel and decommissioning wastes from the remaining 50+ reactors and nuclear
infrastructure, and Japan is in quite a quandary. All 54 of their nuclear power plants were shut down in 2011. Two have recently been restarted, and a
third was briefly started and re-shut down, even after five years of
theoretical safety upgrades and fixes.
The costs of Fukushima has so far topped $113B, with the actual work
still ahead. This will far exceed the
initial capital investment in their entire nuclear plants and infrastructure,
and will continue to be a huge drain ($500B?, $1T?) on what was once a model
economy. In addition, there are/have
been tremendous impacts on the various ecosystems on this small island; and
what that means for future land use as living space, agricultural use, mineral
extraction, and recreational use, and ocean and fisheries has yet to be
determined. Add to this that the
unknown costs of their entire nuclear program decommissioning, waste
management, environmental cleanup, and human/social costs, and it’s difficult
to see where they will be down the road.
Their economy has limped along, aided by building and implementing
available renewable energy technologies, which have filled in for the loss of
nuclear electricity. But in time, it is
the backend costs that will hurt Japan, as well as all the other global nuclear
powers. We all HAVE to deal with the
man-made radioactive atoms…their neutrons, protons, electrons, and morons.
What have we in the US learned from all this? Interesting that the Fukushima reactors were
all US technology, the GE Mark I design, many of which are still operating here
in and other countries around the world.
We continue to blindly believed the industry and have faith in this “superior” technology by re-licensing old
reactors and running them well beyond their appropriate life. It is just a matter of time before one of
these old dinosaurs drops dead, and its huge tail continues to flail and wreak
havoc for years to come.
Aside from occasional stories in the mainstream media, here
are a few sites for more updates:
