Rice From Inside Fukushima 30-Kilometer Zone Delivered to Emperor

Rice from Hirono, Fukushima prefecture, will be served at dining halls and imperial residences.

As requested by Japanese Emperor Akihito, some of the first rice harvested in Fukushima prefecture since the March 11, 2011 disaster and subsequent nuclear meltdown has been delivered to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The Imperial Household Agency confirmed that 120 kilograms of Koshihikari premium rice from the town of Hirono arrived on Tuesday.

Hirono, a seaside municipality of less than 6,000 people, is located just 20 kilometers from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The town was included in the emergency evacuation zone after the earthquake and tsunami that created one of the world’s most severe nuclear disasters. Public health concerns about irradiated Fukushima produce have devastated the livelihoods of local residents.

While that's nice that the Emperor is voting with his health, in actuality Hirono is south of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  Most of the radiation released from the power plant went in a north-westerly direction.  While Hirono was within the evacuation zone, it did not receive much radiation.

In other words the Emperor is not taking much of a risk, but it's a nice symbolic gesture.

Fukushima radioactive water decontamination delayed by hydrochloric acid leak

Water storage tanks at Fukushima

The trouble-prone water decontamination system at TEPCO's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant sprang a hydrochloric acid leak and had to be shut down on Sunday. The acid is used to neutralize alkaline water used in decontaminating the radioactive water that cools the damaged nuclear reactor piles. While only a tiny amount of acid leaked, it forced the shutdown of a system that was to have played a crucial role in the Fukushima site cleanup.

The Fukushima nuclear reactors were damaged and had nuclear meltdowns following a massive earthquake and Tsunami in March 2011. The damage is so extensive that the normal cooling systems aren't functioning, and TEPCO is having to pour massive quantities of water onto the nuclear piles to cool them down.

In an inspection of the Advanced Liquid Processing System, TEPCO engineers found Hydrochloric acid leaking from a pipe joint. They surrounded it with a plastic bag, which has collected only 1 liter of acid.

This system was in trial operation, and has been expected to play a crucial role in treating contaminated water at the Fukushima site. The system was due to have gone into full operation on Sunday.

In late September, plastic padding was found clogging pipes in the same system. In October, it had to be shut down due to a programming mistake.

TEPCO is facing a huge task, with storing hugely massive quantities of water that had been used to cool the nuclear pile. That radioactive water cannot be released, and given the massive amounts of water required to keep the nuclear piles cool, TEPCO has built a huge array of storage tanks. However the problem is not scalable due to the number of years that will be required to cool the nuclear piles, hence the amount of water and storage tanks that will be required. Any kind of water decontamination system will alleviate the need for on-site water storage.

Source: theaustralian.com.au - phys.org

Originally published: http://www.examiner.com/article/fukushima-radioactive-water-decontamination-delayed-by-hydrochloric-acid-leak

True facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster

This piece, on deepseanews.com, was written by an Oceanographer, and is a debunking of fears around the radiation risks.  The bottom line is - Dilution means that by the time radioactive seawater makes it to the US West Coast, it'll be so far diluted to be barely an effect.

It claims 538,100 terabecquerels (TBq) have been emitted from Fukushima, making it worse than Three-Mile-Island, and less than Chernobyl.

The writer goes over several Maps of Doom that have been bandied around on various blog posts, two of which are completely useless.  This one was described as being a Map of Terror, but at least it shows what the colors mean:

The red shows areas where the radiation concentration is 10,000 times less than the concentration near Fukushima, and the band further out near the US West Coast is 1 million times less concentrated.

The prediction from models are that the Hawaiian Islands will see concentrations of 30 Bq / Cubic-Meter of seawater, and on the US West Coast the concentration will be 20 Bq or less.  (Bq == Becquerels)

I could write a small novel explaining why the numbers differ between the models. For those that love the details, here’s a laundry list of those differences: the amount of radiation initially injected into the ocean, the length of time it took to inject the radiation (slowly seeping or one big dump), the physics embedded in the model, the background ocean state, the number of 20-count shrimp per square mile (Just kidding!), atmospheric forcing, inter-annual and multi-decadal variability and even whether atmospheric deposition was incorporated into the model.

To put the numbers into context they provide this map, coming from the Woods Hole Oceonographic Institute (http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=83397&tid=3622&cid=94989):

It shows the Pacific Ocean concentration of Cs 137 in 1990 was 4 Bq / cubic meter.  That makes the new concentration, thanks to Fukushima, about 10x the 1990 concentration.  The amount measured in 1990 would have been leftover from the Atomic Bomb testing in the Pacific occurring during the 1950's.

The writer of the piece concludes that it'll be safe to eat the fish and to swim in the ocean.

As for leaking groundwater - 300 tonnes per day leaking into the ocean - is that a concern?  It means the radiation won't be a one-time release, but is being released over time.  However the bulk of the release occurred early on.  

Most of what's being released now is Tritium and Strontium.  Strontium is a concern because it collects in bones, hence the risk is from eating fish that have bones in them.  However, the Strontium risk is only for such fish caught near the Japanese coast.

Source: http://deepseanews.com/2013/11/true-facts-about-ocean-radiation-and-the-fukushima-disaster/

Japan mulls more than $100 million new spending on Fukushima water-crisis: sources

(Reuters) - Japan is considering more than $100 million in extra government spending to handle contaminated water at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, boosting the budget allocation by at least a fifth, government officials familiar with the matter said.

The additional budget allocation of between 10 billion and 15 billion yen ($98 million-$147 million) aims to accelerate work on containing leaks and decontaminating the water, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/28/us-japan-fukushima-budget-idUSBRE9AR03520131128

NRC documents show all nuclear material had been released from Fukushima reactors - or maybe not

A newly released document from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a transcript dated March 16, 2011 concerning phone calls between US Officials who were dealing with the Fukushima crisis.  I've uploaded a copy to my Google Drive account in case the original copy on the NRC website is mysteriously removed.  My source of knowing about this comes from Michael Ruppert, in Facebook posts that I've embedded below.

A transcript of a critical part is here: NRC Transcript – TEPCO relayed information Unit 4 SFP Dry – Walls collapsed and incapable of holding inventory – Unit 3 “everything else gone” 

My reading of the transcript sounds like the speakers were in a state of confusion and dealing with conflicting evidence.  However, it clearly says that at that moment they believed the spent fuel pools in reactors 2, 3 and 4 were completely emptied, and perhaps unit 1 as well, meaning that there was a complete release of all nuclear material from both spent fuel pools.  In each case the spent fuel pools had a huge amount of highly toxic stuff in them.

According to fukuleaks.org the transcript was one of a group of transcripts released by the NRC in February 2012.

Enformable Nuclear News has a complete list of FOIA Documents Related to Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 4

A blog post from that time period discussing the documents says 

The transcripts document two things that this blog, and others, reported months ago.  First, the spent fuel pool at Fukushima Reactor #4 was never empty of water.  Second, remote sensing platforms, both aerial and in low earth orbit, were able to establish the status of the pool and that it had water in it.

If the pool had been empty of water, the infra red heat signature of the pool would have been a white hot spot visible even in the surrounding wreckage caused by a hydrogen explosion.  The Japanese government has declined to reveal their low earth orbit remote sensing data about Fukushima citing national security reasons.

He went on to connect the transcripts with the 50 mile exclusion zone ordered for all American Citizens, prohibiting approach by Americans to the reactor site.  With the documents it's clear the NRC made this order in reaction to reports that "the spent fuel pool at reactor #4 had lost all of its water and was spewing huge amounts of radiation as a result."  It's that part of the transcript that Ruppert is focusing on.  However, it's clear later in the transcripts, according to this report, that "NRC transcripts report that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flew over the reactor persuading NRC executive Chuck Casto, who was the NRC's man in Tokyo, that there was after all some water in the pool."

A Washington Post news report from Feb 2012 agrees with that blog post:

The transcripts also include lengthy discussions justifying NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko’s controversial decision to urge Americans within a 50-mile radius of the Japanese nuclear plant to evacuate. They show that the decision was based in part on an assessment, now thought to be false, that one of the Fukushima Daiichi spent fuel pools was dry and that its walls had, in the words of one official, “crumbled,”

A NY Times news report on the documents also focus on the confusion apparent in them.

The issue of water in the spent fuel pond is important because "If the pool had been empty of water, the infra red heat signature of the pool would have been a white hot spot visible even in the surrounding wreckage caused by a hydrogen explosion."  Further emptied fuel ponds would indicate the nuclear material had been released into the wild.

That's ultimately what we're all concerned about - how much of the nuclear material has been released, and just how big is the problem we're all facing?

Post by Michael C. Ruppert.

Post by Michael C. Ruppert.

The 10 most radiation-polluted places on the planet

Source: http://brainz.org/ten-most-radioactive-places-earth/

Hanford, CT, USA - former Uranium/Plutonium factory for atomic bomb production --- etc ... with Chernobyl and Fukushima topping out the list at #2 and #1 respectively.

The list of locations are on land and surrounding either the factories for producing atomic materials, the former nuclear bomb test sites, or sites of nuclear power plant accidents.

Followup: http://climateviewer.com/2013/11/24/10-most-radioactive-places-on-earth/

This source made a somewhat more alarmist view on the list from brainz.org.  However, this one includes a lot of useful links to resource sites.

Radiation from Japan nuclear plant arrives on Alaska coast

Radiation from the Fukushima power plant has been detected in Canada and Alaska.  The report doesn't say how much radiation has arrived.  It just gives a vague fear that we don't know what the effect on seafood and wildlife will be.

Yes, we don't know that - but if we don't know the quantity of radiation how do we know whether this is a major thing, or a minor thing?

The only statement of the severity is this - "The levels they are projecting in some of the models are in the ballpark of what they saw in the North Pacific in the 1960s," said Douglas Dasher, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The article does point out that there is no routine monitoring, so therefore it's not known whether radiation levels are increasing or decreasing.

The statement, "North Pacific in the 1960's," refers to the fallout from US Nuclear testing on islands in the Pacific during the 1950's and 1960's.  That testing was deemed necessary to fend off Communism.  But it obviously left a fair bit of radioactive contamination in the Ocean. 

But that level of contamination doesn't seem to have been a serious problem.  So if the radiation from Fukushima only gets to that level then the overall thing isn't a big deal?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/radiation-from-japan-nuclear-plant-arrives-on-alaska-coast-1.2335668