Fukushima Meltdowns Turn Ten, Still Getting Worse
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
09 March 21
Fukushima Daiichi's multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns started ten years
ago. They are not over. They are not even close to over. Nuclear disasters
don't ever end. The radioactive danger slowly decays over decades, during
which it needs constant safety management until radiation measurements are
below "acceptable levels." That's still not safe.
Fukushima continues to be a low-level nuclear disaster, as it has been for
ten years. The initial explosive accident has been mitigated, but the danger
has never been fully contained. Recent news from Fukushima is hardly
reassuring.
On February 13, a major earthquake hit the region. Not as powerful as the
2001 earthquake that led to the Fukushima meltdowns, the 2021 earthquake
nevertheless unsettled the unstable nuclear complex. This caused one or more
leaks of radioactive water from the damaged reactors, according to public
broadcaster NHK. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that owns and
operates the Fukushima facility promptly denied that there were any new
leaks. TEPCO acknowledge radioactive water spilled from the fuel rod storage
pools but said that caused no danger to the public. Two days later, TEPCO
was reporting: "Currently there are no abnormalities at TEPCO's nuclear
power stations that would have an impact off-site."
More than a week after the earthquake, TEPCO acknowledged that seismometers
at Unit 3 were not working. TEPCO admitted it has been aware of the outage
since the previous July.
There is an unknown number of old leaks in the Fukushima containment
buildings, dating to the original collapse and since. Clean groundwater
infiltrates the reactor buildings, comes into contact with the melted cores,
and is contaminated. Some of this contaminated water is collected in tanks
above ground at the facility. The rest of the contaminated water filters out
of the plant and into the Pacific Ocean. No one has a reliable measurement
of the radioactive water draining continuously into the ocean.
Maintaining the coolant water level inside the reactors is critical to
prevent further meltdown of the cores at the bottom of the containment
structure. TEPCO pumps 3 tons of water per hour into the reactors to cool
the fuel debris (a ton of water is about 240 gallons). A week after the
earthquake of February 13, TEPCO acknowledged that the water levels in Unit
1 and Unit 3 had dropped by a foot or more and that water levels continue to
drop every day. TEPCO does not know why the water level is dropping or where
the water is going. TEPCO is responding to the water drop by pumping more
water into the reactors to keep the water level up. While this will keep the
melted nuclear fuel covered, it will also create more contaminated water for
TEPCO to store in surface tanks that are running out of capacity (about 1.37
million tons, or 328 million gallons). Ten days after the earthquake, TEPCO
reported that the quake had shifted 53 of them (out of 1,074), but that
there were no leaks.
TEPCO did not know whether the water level in Unit 2 was dropping because
Unit 2 instruments had been removed.
Another source of contaminated water is the numerous nuclear fuel pools on
the site. The stored fuel rods also need to be covered in water to keep from
melting down.
On February 28, TEPCO announced it had completed the two-year process of
removing 566 fuel assemblies from the fuel pool at the top of the Unit 3
building. The fuel is now stored at ground level in another part of the
facility, where it still needs to be cooled to be safe. While this is
relatively good news, it is a miniscule part of the decommissioning of the
Fukushima plant. Even with Unit 3, the hardest part is ahead: locating and
removing the melted nuclear core under water at the bottom of the building.
Media coverage of Fukushima is generally scanty, and much of the mainstream
coverage is little more than press-release-based happy talk, like the
Washington Post story on March 6 with the headline:
A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, contaminated water symbolizes
Japan's struggles
Little about that headline is based in reality. It is not a decade "after"
the nuclear disaster, it is a decade after it began. It is a decade into the
disaster, with decades to go before it can be even close to over. Arguably,
"contaminated water symbolizes Japan's struggles," depending on what that
might mean. Contaminated water is hardly the biggest part of the Fukushima
clean-up or the most dangerous or the most expensive. Contaminated
symbolizes the "sorcerer's apprentice" aspect of Fukushima in the way it
self-multiplies without actually accomplishing anything more than making the
situation worse. The Post doesn't explain what its headline is supposed to
mean.
The Japanese government and TEPCO have been trying to dump their radioactive
water in the Pacific at least since 2019. They claim that the water will be
treated, most but not all radionuclides removed, and that dumping it will be
perfectly safe. The Post treats this claim as if it were reasonable, but the
Post talks to no nuclear scientists (rather relying on non-nuclear
environmentalists for "balance"). As far as this "perfectly safe" dumping
goes, the Post quotes unnamed experts as saying, "The only thing holding
them back appears to be the Olympics and the bad publicity it could generate
before the Games begin in July."
While outlining the government position in sympathetic details, the Post is
more dismissive of the opposition, which is led by the regional fishing
industry, which is only halfway recovered from 2011. "Also angry is South
Korea, even though it is more than 600 miles away across the sea," snidely
reports the Post without mentioning that South Korea has banned Fukushima
seafood. The Post also omits Japanese resistance from the Coastal Science
and Societies and other environmental organizations, as well as the Catholic
bishops of Japan and South Korea.
As for the routine sampling of fish caught off Fukushima, the Post writes
rather dismissively: "Tests routinely come back clear, although last month a
solitary black rockfish was found to have cesium levels five times the
national standard, the first fish to fail the test in 16 months." Cesium at
five times the "safe level?" Not important? Perhaps it's an anomaly, but the
understanding of Fukushima's radioactive particle is still rudimentary. In
2011 it became well known that Cesium particles spread as far as Tokyo. In
2021, a team of international scientists has announced the discovery of a
previously unknown, larger and more radioactive Cesium particle. This Cesium
particle was apparently formed in the Fukushima Unit 1 hydrogen explosion
and spread to the northwest of the reactor. Ten years later and they're
still discovering what needs to be cleaned up. That's on land. So how much
more is unknown about radioactivity in the ocean?
On March 3, Yonhap News Agency summed up the status of Fukushima radioactive
water dumping this way:
A Japanese government official said Wednesday that Tokyo cannot continue to
delay the disposal of contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear
power plant due to tank storage limits, though it has yet to decide when and
how to release it.
There is no plan in place but the government and TEPCO argue that they have
to carry it out because they will run out of storage space for contaminated
water by the summer of 2022. At the same time, the radiation level at the
perimeter of the Fukushima facility is already eight times the "safe level"
set by the government.
TEPCO told press that the predominant reason behind the sharp increase in
radiation at the plant was X-rays coming from storage tanks holding
radioactive water that has been leaking from the Fukushima facility. The
water in the tanks contains traces of radioactive strontium along with other
substances that react with the materials the tank is composed of, producing
X-rays, said officials.
Apparently they didn't know how the tanks would interact with radioactive
materials before they set about filling more than a thousand of them. Or if
they did know, they went ahead anyway. That would be consistent with the
government's allowing TEPCO to build the Fukushima plant in 1967 at sea
level rather than on a bluff less vulnerable to tsunamis or groundwater
flow. And it would be consistent with the government allowing TEPCO to
ignore safeguards in the government's 2002 long-term earthquake assessment.
Nuclear power has always been a corrupt enterprise, but in Japan now that
corruption is coming back to hold its perpetrators accountable. On February
19, the Tokyo High Court ordered the government and TEPCO to pay damages of
$2.63 million to 43 people who were forced to evacuate from their homes by
the Fukushima disaster. The presiding judge called the government's
regulatory inaction "extremely unreasonable." There are as many as 30 more
such suits pending in Japanese courts.