Japan, South Korea agree on visit to Fukushima nuclear plant ahead of planned water release
Source: AP
By MARI YAMAGUCHI today
Japanese and South Korean officials held hourslong talks into early Saturday and agreed on a visit later this month by South Korean experts to the Fukushima nuclear plant before it begins the controversial release of treated but radioactive water into the sea. The safety of the water is a major sticking point as the two sides work to improve long-strained ties.
Discussions were held Friday in Seoul and online, in which the Japanese government also provided an update on the status of the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Officials are preparing to release the water, saying it’s an unavoidable step for the decommissioning process.
Japan’s Foreign Ministry, after a nearly 12-hour meeting that ran past midnight, issued a statement early Saturday saying the two sides agreed to have a four-day visit by a South Korean delegation to Japan that includes a Fukushima nuclear plant tour, and that “further details, including its program” need to be finalized.
The government and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, say the water release will begin between spring and summer and take decades to finish.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/japan-south-korea-fukushima-nuclear-water-release-2ae706b9f95c55208683a6c807f22b9c
= new reply since forum marked as read
A little bit goes a long way.
News Coverage of Fukushima Disaster Found Lacking
American University sociologist’s new research finds few reports identified health risks to public
By Rebecca Basu
American University, March 10, 2015
Four years after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the disaster no longer dominates U.S. news headlines, though the disabled plant continues to pour three tons of radioactive water into the ocean each day. Homes, schools and businesses in the Japanese prefecture are uninhabitable, and will likely be so forever. Yet the U.S. media has dropped the story while public risks remain.
A new analysis by American University sociology professor Celine Marie Pascale finds that U.S. news media coverage of the disaster largely minimized health risks to the general population. Pascale analyzed more than 2,000 news articles from four major U.S. outlets following the disaster's occurrence March 11, 2011 through the second anniversary on March 11, 2013. [font color="green"]Only 6 percent of the coverage—129 articles—focused on health risks to the public in Japan or elsewhere. Human risks were framed, instead, in terms of workers in the disabled nuclear plant.[/font color]
Disproportionate access
"It's shocking to see how few articles discussed risk to the general population, and when they did, they typically characterized risk as low," said Pascale, who studies the social construction of risk and meanings of risk in the 21st century. "We see articles in prestigious news outlets claiming that radioactivity from cosmic rays and rocks is more dangerous than the radiation emanating from the collapsing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant."
Pascale studied news articles, editorials, and letters from two newspapers, The Washington Postand The New York Times, and two nationally prominent online news sites, Politico and The Huffington Post. These four media outlets are not only among the most prominent in the United States, they are also among the most cited by television news and talk shows, by other newspapers and blogs and are often taken up in social media, Pascale said. In this sense, she added, understanding how risk is constructed in media gives insight into how national concerns and conversations get framed.
Pascale's analysis identified three primary ways in which the news outlets minimized the risk posed by radioactive contamination to the general population. Articles made comparisons to mundane, low-level forms of radiation;defined the risks as unknowable, given the lack of long-term studies; and largely excluded concerns expressed by experts and residents who challenged the dominant narrative.
The research shows that corporations and government agencies had disproportionate access to framing the event in the media, Pascale says. Even years after the disaster, government and corporate spokespersons constituted the majority of voices published. News accounts about local impact—for example, parents organizing to protect their children from radiation in school lunches—were also scarce.
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SOURCE with Links: http://www.american.edu/media/news/20150310-Fukushima.cfm
A lot of money riding on using nuclear power to boil water.
This is from Canada…
How much plutonium does it take
to overdose a person?
Excerpt…
We feel compelled to point out that, although the probability of a severe accident that would release plutonium to the atmosphere is admittedly small, the potential health and environmental consequences of such an accident can be serious due to the extraordinary toxicity of plutonium when inhaled.
It is for this reason alone that the United States of America has made it illegal to transport plutonium by air in US territory. Such a prohibition does not exist for any other radioactive material.
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited has admitted, in documents submitted to Transport Canada, that in four out of eight categories of serious road transportation accidents, the MOX containers would be completely destroyed and a plume of plutonium dust would be spread downwind to a distance of about 80 kilometers.
Snip…
Industry and government spokespersons have insisted that 120 grams of plutonium is too small an amount to raise legitimate health and environmental concerns. They have made the irrelevant observation that 120 grams of plutonium is about the size of two A-A batteries.
Such remarks are manipulative in nature; they do not help people to weigh the risk. The important quantity is not the VOLUME or MASS of plutonium, but its TOXICITY. Based on data supplied by AECB (see letter above) we can address the toxicity question as follows:
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http://www.ccnr.org/max_plute_aecb.html
One-tenth of a microgram of plutonium, a microscopic amount, attached to a dust particle, is lethal. Tons of mixed plutonium-uranium oxide fuel rods were stored at Fukushima Reactor 3, all exposed to the environment when the containment building exploded.
When I first started posting on DU I was a little less radical, but still on the anti-nuclear side of the fence.
I thought renewable energy could save the world.
Alas that experiment has been done and the numbers are in. It's clear that aggressive renewable energy schemes in places like California, Denmark, and Germany have failed. They're not economically viable without substantial fossil fuel inputs, especially natural gas. No amount of hand waving about batteries, hydrogen, pumped hydro, or any other energy storage scheme changes that. It has to do with thermodynamics. Human laws and creative accounting can't change that.
California, for example, already has many gigawatts of solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage schemes. You can subtract fossil fuels out of California's energy mix and model any sort of renewable energy utopia you like. None of them look good, none of them scaled up can support eight billion people.
If we don't quit fossil fuels now billions of humans are going to suffer and die because of global warming.
It's not much better if we switch to fully "renewable" energy sources. Billions of people would suffer and die, mostly for lack of food, clean water, and adequate shelter.
We've worked ourselves into a corner. Eight billion humans are dependent on high density energy sources for food, shelter... our very survival. Most of that energy now comes from fossil fuels.
The only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, which we must do, is nuclear power.
Claiming that renewable energy will save the world is just another flavor of climate change denial.
Many of the arguments I hear from renewable energy enthusiasts remind me of the arguments I hear from Creationists. These arguments somehow make sense to the creationist, but they make no sense to anyone living outside their bubble.
For many of the anti-nuclear activists I used to work with, some of them I'm still in occasional contact with, their activism was essentially a religious belief. Atomic bombs and atomic power were the apple in the garden of Eden that Satan was tempting mankind with.
It might not be coincidence that I first met Helen Caldicott when I was an impressionable (and slightly psychotic teen) in the community room of a Lutheran church. That's how I fell in with an anti-nuclear crowd. They could use a university library researcher and dumpster diver. I loved university libraries and dumpsters.
Like any otherwise sane human I abhor nuclear weapons. I remember as a kid the cold war nuclear drills, diving under our desks when the alarm went off with our butts facing the windows, ready to kiss our asses good-bye. I'm glad my children only knew the fire and earthquake drills. The earthquake drills were similar to the cold war drills, but you got to leave the classroom when the shaking stopped. When I was teaching we had a big earthquake, and we spent most of the rest of the day out on the playground until the buildings had been inspected for serious damage. That wouldn't have been the case if the USSR had dropped a bomb on us. My students and my children didn't worry about "The Bomb" as I had as a kid. There is some sanity in the world, all these years since Fat Man.
As I've said, I've changed my mind about nuclear power. In a world where toxic wastes of every kind imaginable, most with a half life of fucking FOREVER, I'm not going to worry about a little plutonium unaccounted for amidst the horrific death toll of a tsunami. I'm absolutely certain worse shit was spilled in the tsunami, carcinogens and mutagens of all sorts, but it was the kind of familiar shit we ignore in our daily lives.
She went public to express concerns over plutonium safety at the Kerr-McGee plant where she worked.
KAREN SILKWOOD
UAW News, November 12, 2018
On Nov. 13, 1974, one of the most famous whistleblowers of all time was killed in what is now believed a company-supported murder when she died in a car accident after exposing wrongdoing at a plutonium plant where she worked.
28-year old Karen Silkwood was a Kerr-McGee plutonium plant technician in Oklahoma City and a member of her union’s health and safety committee (Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, OCAW). Two months before her death, she went to the federal Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to report dangerous levels of radioactivity at the plant when monitors showed she had radiation contamination.
After testifying before the AEC, Silkwood was working November 5, polishing plutonium pellets for nuclear power plant fuel rods when a radiation detector went off. It indicated her right was arm was covered in plutonium and that it had come from the inside of her work gloves, or from her arm and hand, and not from plutonium exposure. Doctors performed further tests and the results showed high levels of radioactive contamination in her body and the apartment she shared with a co-worker, but it was inconclusive how the radioactivity got in her body at such high levels.
On the night of her death, she was driving to meet with a union representative and a New York Times reporter when she hit a concrete culvert. She had with her paperwork showing the company’s safety negligence, paperwork that was missing from the car after the accident. There was no explanation for the crash and she was dead almost instantly. Investigators found she had taken a large dose of Quaaludes before driving. But they also found skid marks and an unexplained dent in her rear bumper, strongly suggesting she was driven off the road by another driver. After she was killed an autopsy showed she had mysteriously ingested plutonium.
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https://uaw.org/karen-silkwood/
I'm pretty sure you remember her story, hunter, but I bet many newer DUers -- and almost all Americans born since 1974 -- have no idea about her or what happened to her.
To me, the real questions are: Who would silence a whistleblower by murder and why?
The upper side of the unit 3 reactor building at Fukushima Daiichi was damaged by a hydrogen explosion. This area housed the spent fuel pool and the fuel handling machines. (Courtesy: TEPCO)
Physics World, 20 Jul 2020
Tiny fragments of plutonium may have been carried more than 200 km by caesium particles released following the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011. So says an international group of scientists that has made detailed studies of soil samples at sites close to the damaged reactors. The researchers say the findings shed new light on conditions inside the sealed-off reactors and should aid the plant’s decommissioning.
The disaster at Fukushima occurred after a magnitude-9 earthquake struck off the north-east coast of Japan and sent a 14 m-high tsunami crashing over the plant’s seawalls. With low-lying back-up generators knocked out, the site’s three operating reactors overheated and melted down. At the same time, hot steam reacted with the zirconium cladding of the nuclear fuel, generating hydrogen gas that exploded when it escaped from containment.
Caesium is a volatile fission product created in nuclear fuel. During the Fukushima meltdown, it combined with silica gas created when melting fuel and other reactor materials interacted with the concrete below the damaged reactor vessel. The resulting glass particles, known as caesium-rich microparticles (CsMPs), measure a few microns or tens of microns across.
Snip…
Utsunomiya and co-workers also used mass spectrometry to measure the relative abundance of different plutonium and uranium isotopes within the microparticles. They found that three ratios – uranium-235 to uranium-238, as well as plutonium-239 compared to both plutonium-240 and -242 – all agreed with calculations of the proportions that would have been present in the fuel at the time of the disaster. This agreement, coupled with the fact that the measured amount of uranium-238 was nearly two orders of magnitude greater than would be the case if it had simply evaporated from the melted fuel, led them to conclude that the uranium and plutonium existed as discrete fuel particles within the CsMPs.
Implications for decommissioning
The researchers note that previous studies have shown that plutonium and caesium are distributed differently in the extended area around Fukushima, which suggests that not all CsMPs contain plutonium. However, they say that the fact plutonium is found in some of these particles implies that it could have been transported as far afield as the caesium – up to 230 km from the Fukushima plant.
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https://physicsworld.com/a/fukushima-may-have-scattered-plutonium-widely/
So. That’s only three years old. Bet a lot of people have never seen it before.