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Saturday, June 18, 2011

Fukushima: It's much worse than you think. Scientific experts believe Japan's nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public.

Readers, my 25-year-old daughter lives in San Jose and
works in San Francisco, and I am here wondering why
our government doesn't bother to inform us about the
dangers of the hot particles.  It is really reprehensible!


Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
Scientific experts believe Japan's nuclear disaster to be far 
worse than governments are revealing to the public.
Many Japanese citizens are now permanently displaced from their homes 
due to the Fukushima nuclear disaster [GALLO/GETTY]

"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," 
Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al 
Jazeera.

Japan's 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled 
the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) 
nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and 
reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km 
radius of the plant.

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power 
engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear 
power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has 
more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores 
exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear 
reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate 
need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel 
cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation 
being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well 
as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea 
water that has to be disposed of.

"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are 
pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with 
the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain 
plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"

Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as 
uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.

"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," 
Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. 
A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, 
and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That 
blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. 
The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more 
water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly 
radioactive water."

Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive 
"hot spots" around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.

"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, 
that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. 
"The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than 
we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was 
the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. 
We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from 
the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in 
Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."

Radiation monitors for children
Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted 
earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant 
experienced full meltdowns.

TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive 
material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst
nuclear accident on record.

Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government 
reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - 
an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely 
uninhabitable.

In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph 
Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in 
infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima 
meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear 
plant.

The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San 
Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and 
the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately 
following the disaster.

"There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, 
and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to 
children," Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science 
and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of 
nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.

Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat 
continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, 
but added: "There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese 
government's 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. 
So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well."

Gundersen points out that far more radiation has been released than 
has been reported.

"They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is 
really not talking about this," he said. "The new calculations show that 
within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much 
radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."

According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are 
continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium 
isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles."

"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," 
he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days 
these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high 
concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."

Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are 
now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air 
filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.

The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer.

"These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant," 
he explained, "One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. These 
[hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger 
counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large 
amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US 
has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April."

Blame the US?
In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of 
its nuclear reactors over the next decade. In a referendum vote this 
Monday, 95% of Italians voted in favour of blocking a nuclear power 
revival in their country. A recent newspaper poll in Japan shows nearly 
three-quarters of respondents favour a phase-out of nuclear power in Japan.

Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?

Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's 
biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois 
where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to 
his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John 
Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus
at Nagoya University in Japan. 

He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the 
fact that most of them are of US design.

"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did 
not care for the effects of earthquakes," Dr Sawada told Al Jazeera. 
"I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan."

Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the 
nuclear policy of the US, something Dr Sawada feels is also a large 
component of the problem.

"Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered 
that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not 
established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use," 
he explained. "The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese 
government not use this technology yet, but the government accepted to 
use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power stations, and was thus 
subjected to US government policy."

As a 13-year-old, Dr Sawada experienced the US nuclear attack against 
Japan from his home, situated just 1400 metres from the hypocentre of 
the Hiroshima bomb.

"I think the Fukushima accident has caused the Japanese people to abandon 
the myth that nuclear power stations are safe," he said. "Now the opinions 
of the Japanese people have rapidly changed. Well beyond half the 
population believes Japan should move towards natural electricity."   

A problem of infinite proportions
Dr Ramana expects the plant reactors and fuel cores to be cooled enough 
for a shutdown within two years. 

"But it is going to take a very long time before the fuel can be removed 
from the reactor," he added. "Dealing with the cracking and compromised 
structure and dealing with radiation in the area will take several years, 
there's no question about that."

Dr Sawada is not as clear about how long a cold shutdown could take, 
and said the problem will be "the effects from caesium-137 that remains 
in the soil and the polluted water around the power station and 
underground. It will take a year, or more time, to deal with this."

Gundersen pointed out that the units are still leaking radiation.

"They are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount 
of radioactive liquid," he said. "It will be at least a year before it stops 
boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive 
steam and liquids."

Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how 
to cool two of the units.

"Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple," he said. "After the 
earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days 
later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you're at a point where, 
if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined 
having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They've not figured 
out how to cool units three and four."

Gundersen's assessment of solving this crisis is grim.

"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, 
that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment 
for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they 
will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for 
infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up 
the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking 
that up from the floor."

Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive 
materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to 
dispose of the radioactive waste safely.

"Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated 
by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause 
further harm to future generations," he explained. "To do otherwise is simply 
an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor 
of the Hiroshima atomic bombing."

Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and 
implement the plan.

"So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been 
dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water," 
Gundersen said. "We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the 
allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water 
tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated 
aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come."


Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen's 
assessment.


"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can
pinpoint the 
exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."

Follow Dahr Jamail on Twitter: @DahrJamail

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