Japan nuclear crisis is here to
stay By Victor Kotsev
Almost a month after the deadly earthquake
and tsunami that triggered the worst nuclear
crisis in the world since Chernobyl in 1986, one
struggles to find good news coming out of Japan.
Even reports of cheerful cooperation between
Israeli and Iranian rescue teams in the afflicted
areas [1] ring bitter as the island country is
forced to dump into the Pacific ocean large
amounts of radioactive water and to apologize to
its neighbors citing dire emergency. An ecological
disaster looms.
The meltdown of the cores
of reactors one, two and three at the Fukushima
nuclear power plant appears to be have been halted
for now, but officials are not out of the woods
yet. "It would take a few months until we finally
get things under control and have a better idea
about the future," said Japanese nuclear safety
agency spokesman Hidehiko
Nishiyama, quoted by The Associated Press on
Sunday. Among other concerns, the emergency use of
large amounts of sea water to cool the melting
cores at the plant, 240 kilometers north of Tokyo,
may have caused large salt deposits on them that
could raise the temperatures again.
At the
same time, another crisis is quickly developing:
the plant is running out of storage capacity for
all the highly contaminated water (some of it over
five million times more radioactive than the legal
limit) used to cool the reactors. This prompted
the controlled release into the ocean of 11,500
tons of the less-contaminated water ("only" 100
times over the norm).
There are more than
60,000 tons of highly radioactive water at
Fukushima, and a "breach" at unit number 2 caused
some of it to leak into the ocean over the past
few days. On Wednesday, workers finally managed to
stem the leak, but there is a very real danger of
a large-scale environmental catastrophe. On
Tuesday, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric
Power Co (TEPCO), admitted that radiation levels
7.5 million times over the legal limit had been
measured at one point in sea water near the plant.
Accurate data are hard to come by: "There
is a lot of information which is not available,"
the head of the International Atomic Energy
Agency's safety department, Denis Flory, told
Reuters. Much of what is known comes from
laboratory simulations conducted thousands of
kilometers away; a lot of that information,
according to a New York Times report, is
classified. "Public authorities have sought to
avoid grim technical details that might trigger
alarm or even panic," The New York Times adds.
The disaster, however, is impossible to
hide. Even Japanese government officials have
scaled down their habitual optimism. Chief cabinet
secretary Yukio Edano admitted on Monday that the
uncontrolled release of contamination "will have a
huge impact on the ocean".
We can only
speculate at this point about the precise effects.
Previously, marine ecosystems were thought to be
relatively invulnerable to the release of
radiation. According to the Science Insider:
Radioactive isotopes are most
dangerous when animals' bodies absorb them,
thinking they're something else. For instance,
cesium-137 mimics potassium and is absorbed by
muscles, while strontium-90 mimics calcium and
is taken up by bones. Since ocean water is full
of potassium and calcium in the form of salts,
this lowers the chance of an animal's body
taking up radioactive particles by mistake.
Furthermore, since the Pacific is so
massive, radioactivity will be diluted to levels
far too low to be toxic to aquatic life. A much
bigger concern is the plume blowing over land
and contaminating plant life or the freshwater
supply, which would affect animals (including
humans) further up the food
chain.
Now, however, high levels of
radiation are being found in fish as well, and
many countries have banned Japanese seafood
imports. On Tuesday, India became the first
country to ban all food imports from Japan for
three months.
This may not be sufficient
to protect consumers - as The Japan Times Online
reports, "Experts fear the contamination may
spread well beyond Japan’s shores to affect
seafood overseas." Of particular worry is
radioactive cesium, one of the isotopes of which
(Cesium-137) has a half-life of 30 years. "The
longer half-life means it will probably
concentrate in the upper food chain," the report
adds.
Translation: radioactive cesium and
other toxic elements will take years to make their
way up the aquatic food chains. Fish - larger fish
in particular - can travel thousands of
kilometers, and consequently, nowhere in the ocean
will be completely safe to fish. This brings
distant echoes of Chernobyl, as even today,
radioactively contaminated wild boars are
regularly found in Germany, over 1,000 kilometers
from the Ukrainian plant.
Plutonium, which
so far has not been reported in the sea water, but
which was found in soil samples taken over two
weeks ago near the plant, is particularly
dangerous to human and animal health. In the words
of prominent Japanese-American physicist Michio
Kaku, interviewed by Natural News, it is "the most
toxic chemical known to science. A spec of
plutonium a millionth of a gram could cause cancer
if it is ingested." Plutonium is a by-product of
uranium fission, and is also found in the fuel
mixture at reactor number 3.
New data also
suggest a greater threat than previously assumed
to land ecosystems - and by extension to human
populations. This is true specifically about
Japan, but also beyond the Japanese islands.
According to a report by the Institute for Science
and International Security (ISIS):
Ground level winds often blew inland
in the days immediately after the earthquake,
contrary to many reports that stated that the
radiation was carried out to sea by prevailing
winds. While prevailing winds would also have an
effect on the longer-range dispersal of
radiation, the area outside the plant received
elevated levels of radiation as a result of
these local wind patterns. In the first 24-48
hours after the shutdown of the reactors, these
releases would have contained significantly more
radioactivity due to relatively short-lived
volatile and gaseous radionuclides. As a result,
these releases could have resulted in higher
doses to the local population than has been
assumed.
Meanwhile, traces of the
contamination have spread practically to the
entire northern hemisphere. Winds carried the
airborne particles first over the Pacific Ocean to
North America, and then over the Atlantic to
Europe and the western parts of Asia. Natural News
reports that radiation was detected in rainwater
as far away from Japan as Massachusetts, on the
east coast of the United States. While the levels
mentioned are far too low to cause real concern
for human safety, it is important to look out for
updates as the crisis continues.
New
threats are likely to emerge; late on Tuesday, The
New York Times published information from a
confidential report it obtained, prepared by
American scientists sent to Japan to help with the
crisis. The engineers offered a dark assessment of
the situation, cautioning that flooding the
reactors to cool them may have made them more
vulnerable to aftershocks of the level 9
earthquake that initially caused the crisis. They
warned also of the possibility of hydrogen buildup
as a result of the sea water injection, as well as
of other dangers. [2]
The report also
validates concerns that I covered three weeks ago
in my article Japan
catastrophe sends shock waves Asia Times
Online, March 17, 2011) - over the status of spent
fuel at the plant, and specifically over the
integrity of spent fuel tanks located on top of
the reactor buildings that exploded early in the
crisis. In the words of The New York Times:
The document also suggests that
fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from
spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown
"up to one mile from the units," and that pieces
of highly radioactive material fell between two
units and had to be "bulldozed over," presumably
to protect workers at the site. The ejection of
nuclear material, which may have occurred during
one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may
indicate more extensive damage to the extremely
radioactive pools than previously
disclosed.
As a whole, the situation
remains extremely volatile, and according to some
reports, Japan is even considering wrapping the
reactors in "giant sheets'.' [3] Most observers
(including the ISIS and Dr Kaku) have raised their
assessment of the severity of the accident
to level six "serious accident" on the INES scale
(where level seven, "major accident',' assigned so
far only to Chernobyl, is the highest possible).
Some have even speculated that another upward
revision may ensue.
Meanwhile, few doubt
that Japan will ultimately recover from the
disaster, but for now its prospects look bleak.
Aside from the public health consequences of the
ongoing nuclear crisis, economic challenges are
mounting. Estimates of the total price of the
crisis currently top US$300 billion, and will
likely rise.
According to a Reuters
report, "Analysts suggest power blackouts will
ultimately cause the biggest economic damage to
Japan." Reuters points out that "power demand
tends to peak" in the summer, and that "the power
crunch could get worse" then. This comes on top of
worries over the loss of food export revenues -
specifically from the fishing industry. In 2009,
the Wall Street Journal reported, that industry
alone produced close to $17.5 billion.
In
short, while the worst-case scenarios have been
averted to date, it is much too early to breathe a
sigh of relief. The crisis is here to stay, and
its full consequences are still to be felt.
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