FUK-U-SHIMA by William Thomas Why are we allowing metastasizing multinationals like BP and TEPCO to threaten the long-term habitability of Earth? Arrogantly extending their middle finger to the entire planet, nuclear corporations are urging everyone from Iwaki to Istanbul to go back to sleep and ignore levels of radioactive food contamination now deemed unsafe in Europe and more than a dozen U.S. cities. It is more than scary that something completely unseen can be so permanently devastating. As severe aftershocks continue to knock out electrical power to devastated Honshu communities and cooling systems in nearby nuclear power plants, invisible fallout is raining down on homes and croplands around the Earth, while radioactive runoff from the stricken Fukushima power plant pours into the poisoned Pacific. On April 8, two nuclear power plants in Miyagi prefecture, north of Fukushima lost cooling to their reactors for nearly an hour-and-a-half after a powerful quake knocked out power and emergency generators failed to kick-in. Another big tremblor on Monday, April 11 (North American time) cut power to nearly a quarter-million households and buried three homes in Iwaki under a mudslide. Four people were rescued as all three back-up diesel generators that supply cooling to the Higashidori nuclear reactor in Aomori Prefecture failed to function. At the beleaguered Fukushima power plant, diesel-powered generators and emergency fire pumps were also abandoned as a tsunami warning forced all workers to take shelter. The next day, Masataka Shimizu travelled from Tokyo to Fukushima to apologize to its residents. But TEPCO’s president incurred major loss of face when Governor Yuhei Sato snubbed his request for a meeting. [rt.com Apr 9/11; e.nikkei.com Apr 12/11] INVISIBLE THREAT Gaijin fashion models working in Japan for Louis Vuitton, Gucci and other famous designers were already gracing different runways – the ones leading directly out of the country. The parents of one 19-year old Belgian model wept on the phone, begging their son to come home: "We don't want you to get cancer!" [Asahi Shinbun; japansubculture.com] About that time, Tetsuo Jimbo, CEO and editor-in-chief of videonews.com was driving into the evacuation zone to document radiation levels. “You don’t feel a thing even when the radiation level is high. You don’t smell anything, you don’t feel any heat, it doesn’t hurt. That is the scary thing about radiation – you don’t know if it’s there unless you have a Geiger counter on you,” said Jimbo, who did. “The radiation level varies from place to place there. Quite surprisingly some of the most dangerous places are far from the reactor.” [rt.com Apr 11/11] Welcome to the minefield randomness of invisibly sifting fallout, where lethal radiation readings at Chernobyl were measured less than two meters from a nearly picnic-perfect spot. One month after the world’s latest nuclear calamity began, Japan elevated its nuclear assessment “to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, in an acknowledgement that the human and environmental consequences of the nuclear crisis could be dire and long-lasting,” the New York Times reported. [New York Times Apr 12/11] “The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl,” fretted Junichi Matsumoto, a nuclear executive at the Nikkei-nixed Tokyo Electric Power Company.    Fukushima                                                                                Chernobyl WORSE THAN CHERNOBYL Take that bet. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from the Daiichi disaster is already around 60% of the amount released from Chernobyl. And iodine-131 is currently being released to the prevailing winds at 73% of the daily levels experienced after that 1986 catastrophe. [Kyodo Apr 12/11] It was iodine and caesium that caused most of the health risk, especially outside the immediate area of the Chernobyl plant, relates Malcolm Crick, secretary of a UN body that has recently reviewed Chernobyl’s health effects. These radioactive elements were lofted worldwide by the winds. Caesium-137 lingers because of its long half-life. And human bodies readily absorb iodine and caesium. "Essentially all the iodine or caesium inhaled or swallowed crosses into the blood," says Keith Baverstock, former head of radiation protection for the World Health Organization's European office, who has also studied Chernobyl's effects. Iodine is rapidly absorbed by the thyroid. Caesium is soaked up by muscles, where its “half- life” of slightly reduced risk after 30 years ensures that it remains dangerous beyond the grave. Strobing at trillions of times-per-second like a miniature x-ray machine run amok, relentless radioactive emissions from each ingested or inhaled isotope can severely damage living tissue and DNA. While U.S. and Canadian officials disingenuously downplay the “eight-day half-life” of radioactive Iodine-131, children who ingest it can develop thyroid cancer a decade or more later. Iodine-131 from Chernobyl is still causing new cases of thyroid cancer to appear at an undiminished rate in the most heavily affected regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. [New Scientist Mar 24/11] And caesium is still being found in soil in Germany, Austria and France 25 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  [Daily Mail Apr 11/11] Caesium-137 emissions from Fukushima are now pegged at “the same order of magnitude” as Chernobyl. But the Japanese monster has more than 2,500 tons of uranium and plutonium stored on site, where an unknown amount is already damaged and leaking. The Chernobyl reactor had about 200 tons of these extremely lethal elements. [israelnationalnews.com Mar 30/11] Helmut Hirsch says it’s more. "This is not an exaggeration," this German nuclear expert emphasizes. "There is a gigantic radioactive inventory at Fukushima. At least 20-times as much as there was at Chernobyl." GHOSTS OF CHERNOBYL Operator TEPCO has become the latest international corporate pariah after BP’s similar cost- cutting, multiple-warning-ignoring recklessness contaminated the Caribbean. BP’s underwater toxic plume is now in the Atlantic Gulf Stream, where that warm current’s abrupt slowing has been blamed for this year’s harsh winter weather across Europe. Of course, the alleged connection between BP’s negligence and further climatic chaos cannot be “proven” – any more than each of the 980,000 deaths now attributed to operator error at Chernobyl. This latest mortality estimate is documented in a 2009 report, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" by three scientists: Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko. [Guardian Apr 11/11; Effects of Atomic Radiation: A Half- Century of Studies from Hiroshima and Nagasaki] “Fukushima is not Chernobyl, but it is potentially worse. It is a multiple reactor catastrophe happening within 150 miles of a metropolis of 30 million people. If it happened at Sellafield, there would be panic in every major city in Britain. We still don't know the final outcome but to hear experts claiming that nuclear radiation is not that serious, or that this accident proves the need for nuclear power, is nothing short of disgraceful,” writes The Guardian’s John Vidal.   Five years ago, Vidal visited the still highly contaminated areas of Ukraine and Belarus where the radioactive plume from Chernobyl came down on April 26, 1986. “It was grim,” he writes. “We went from hospital to hospital and from one contaminated village to another. We found deformed and genetically mutated babies in the wards; pitifully sick children in the homes; adolescents with stunted growth and dwarf torsos; foetuses without thighs or fingers and villagers who told us every member of their family was sick. “This was 20 years after the accident but we heard of many unusual clusters of people with rare bone cancers. One doctor, in tears, told us that one in three pregnancies in some places was malformed and that she was overwhelmed by people with immune and endocrine system disorders. Others said they still saw caesium and strontium in the breast milk of mothers living far from the areas thought to be most affected, and significant radiation still in the food chain. Villages testified that ‘the Chernobyl necklace’ – thyroid cancer – was so common as to be unremarkable; many showed signs of accelerated ageing.” [Guardian Apr 1/11] BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND Austria’s Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics reports that for the first two days after Fukushima’s multiple March 11 accidents, the wind blew east to monitoring stations on the U.S. west coast. On day three it blew southwest over a Japanese monitoring station, before swinging east again. Similar readings were made at nuclear test ban monitoring sites in Alaska, Hawaii and Montreal, Canada – where Fukushima fallout continues. On March 20, crops up to 75 miles from the wrecked nuclear plant were found to be unsafe to eat. Tap water used by 30 million people in greater Tokyo was also contaminated by fallout. [nationalpost.com Apr 12/11] By then, France’s Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety was reporting the radioactive plume had reached the western Atlantic. “As of yesterday, the cloud covered most of North America and northeastern Siberia. It is currently passing over the North Atlantic” off Canada’s eastern coast,” IRSN said. The thinning cloud posed “no threat” of course, and was progressively thinning as it headed eastwards in its high altitude tour around the northern hemisphere. Radioactive particles from Fukushima began falling on Europe a few days later. [ABS-CBN News (Philippines) Mar 20/11] Japanese officials now admit that as much as 630,000 terabecquerels of radioactive material have been lofted into the air from ruined reactors 1 and 3. Each terabecquerel signifies one- trillion small nuclear disintegrations per second taking place within a human body that takes in any part of a radioactive stew consisting of barium-140, cobalt-60, caesium-134, caesium-136, caesium-137, iodine-132, iodine-133, tellurium-129, tellurium-132 and strontium-90. [Forbes.com Apr 10/11] “The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever Level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry,” declared Professor Tetsuo Iguchi at Nagoya University. It better. BIG BANG Lobbying for a change of site spelling to Fuk-U-Shima, this writer notes that on the International Corporate Nuclear Screwup Scale, a Level 7 nuclear nightmare involves “widespread health and environmental effects” and the “external release of a significant fraction of the reactor core inventory.” [nationalpost.com Apr 12/11] “It went up with a bang,” a Japan press briefing was told. “And the radioactive release has continued until now.” That announcement came after an Atomic Energy Agency team measured levels of radiation 20 to 40 miles from the wrecked facility high enough to prompt evacuations at European standards.  The Japanese Government is considering preparing to possibly urge residents in six areas around the spewing reactors to flee long-term radiation exposure. But evacuating Tokyo in the face of a still-possible meltdown is as unlikely as relocating New York City in a similar scenario. Even extending the evacuation zone to 80 kilometres would require relocating two-million people into places already struggling to accommodate hundreds of thousands of earthquake and tsunami victims. Many traditional elders say it would be more stressful to be uprooted from their homes and communities than to swallow radionuclides. [Sunday Mirror Mar 20/11]  YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN How long does it take before an irradiated region can be inhabited again? “There is a rule of thumb,” replies renowned radiation biologist Edmund Lengfelder. “For a nuclide such as cesium-137, the half-life of 30 years. It takes ten half-lives so you can populate an area again, making a total of 300 years.” But… and in nuclear roulette there is always a “but”… “In a boiling water reactor in Fukushima this [radioactive] inventory is 30 to 40 times as high as in Chernobyl, it can thus escape much more radiation,” Lengfelder laments. If we summarize it: In Japan, more people are concerned because the population density is higher than in Chernobyl and there is a higher contamination.” [Nie wieder Sushi, Frankfurter Rundschau Mar 20/11] YELLOW RAIN “What can people do? People tried to protect themselves for the first couple years, but then you just give up. Nothing is ever normal,” said Belarusian Antonina Sergieff a quarter-century after Chernobyl’s yellow rain drenched her neighbourhood. More than 100-times more radiation than the atomic bombs tested on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was released by the Chernobyl accident, which eventually contaminated the entire planet with the same unstable isotopes released at Fukushima. Eighty miles away, Sergieff’s mother, Tatyana Abrazhevich and her friends tried to make and develop photographs. But “it was all blank, the level of radiation was so high in those days, that it was impossible to photograph,” Abrazhevich said. She told her daughter that the government’s explanation was given in such a “calm voice” that no one recognized the danger. [UCLA Bruin Apr 25/06]   “We all jumped in the puddles with the yellow stuff,” Sergieff recalled. “When you see the yellow dust, you see radiation.”   Yellow dusty rain was next seen on March 24, 2011 in the region around Tokyo. After fielding hundreds of inquiries concerning the residue deposited on roofs, cars and clothing, the Japan Meteorological Agency said it was “pollen” – not radioactive fallout. With the entire Kanto plain beset by heavy frost and unseasonably biting winter winds, the sudden appearance of this mystery “pollen” was a biological miracle. It was also downright “odd”, another Kyodo News reader remarked, “that the 200 people who made the phone calls aren’t used to ‘yellow rain’ if it has such a commonplace cause.” [UCLA Bruin Apr 25/06; Kyodo Mar 24/11;] DIRTY BOMBS “Fukushima has become the ‘dirty bomb’ of the Pacific, releasing huge quantities of radiation on an ongoing basis, directly into the environment with no end in sight. The global damage this could cause over the next few decades is incalculable,” Mike Adams advises.  [NaturalNews.com Apr 6/11] The radiation risk is "no longer negligible," agrees CRIIRAD. The French research authority on radioactivity is warning expectant mothers and young children to avoid drinking milk or rainwater, and to avoid certain types of vegetables and cheese due to the dangerously high levels of radiation they may contain as radioactive fallout spreads across the globe. CRIIRAD now says that eating these items qualifies as "risky behaviour." The institute insists that standing in radioactive rain is “safe”. U.S. nuclear authorities make no such distinction. [Sunday Mirror Mar 20/11]   POSITIVELY GLOWING On April 10, Philadelphia became the 14th U.S. city to detect radioactive fallout in its drinking water. Milk from Little Rock, Arkansas and drinking water from Philadelphia contained the highest levels of iodine-131 from Japan yet found by the Environmental Protection Agency. [Forbes.com Apr 10/11] Radioactive rainwater has also been collected in downtown Vancouver, Canada. [SFU Press Release Mar 28/11]  MORE ON BC RADIOACTVITY "The rainwater appears to be contaminated, and that rainwater falls on rangelands and agricultural fields, but we're not getting any data on agricultural crops and little data on milk," complains Dan Hirsch at the nuclear watchdog group, Bridge The Gap. Even though cows “bio-accumulate” radionuclides by eating contaminated grass, guesstimated “Intervention Levels” for iodine-131 in milk are set 1,500 times higher than other criteria used for drinking water. IT’S PERFECTLY SAFE UNTIL YOU GET CANCER According to most experts – including a definitive 2005 report by the National Academy of Sciences – there is no “safe” level of radiation exposure. Depending on age, gender and health, even small doses can cause cancer.   Equating exposure from watching TV to nuclear radiation “is like equating the damage of being hit with ping pong balls (photons) with being hit by bullets (beta particles). Your TV doesn’t shoot bullets at you,” writes reporter Brian Moench. “Even if your TV only shot a few bullets per show, you probably wouldn’t watch much TV.  Furthermore, the damage done by these radioactive “bullets” can vary tremendously depending on which organs are hit. To carry the analogy one step further, spraying a few bullets into a large crowd can hardly be considered harmless even if the ratio of bullets per person is very low. “Bioaccumulation increases the concentration of many contaminants as one moves up the food chain. Beef is much higher in dioxins than cattle feed and tuna fish have much higher mercury than their marine environment. Radioactive iodine, cesium, and strontium, all beta emitters, become concentrated in the food chain because of bioaccumulation. At the top of the food chain, of course, are humans, including fetuses, and human breast milk. [Salt Lake Tribune Apr 9/11] The young of all species are particularly susceptible. “It is inaccurate and misleading to use the term "acceptable levels of external radiation" in assessing internal radiation exposures. To do so, is to propagate inaccuracies and to mislead the public worldwide,” says nuclear expert Dr. Helen Caldicott. “After radionuclides enter and accumulate in the body, “these internal emitters migrate to specific organs such as the thyroid, liver, bone, and brain, where they continuously irradiate small volumes of cells with high doses of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, and over many years, can induce uncontrolled cell replication – that is, cancer. Further, many of the nuclides remain radioactive in the environment for generations, and ultimately will cause increased incidences of cancer and genetic diseases over time.” [Guardian Apr 11/11; Effects of Atomic Radiation: A Half-Century of Studies from Hiroshima and Nagasaki] Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, wants government agencies to reveal the real risks of “low level” radiation so individuals can make informed choices about what they’re willing to swallow. Hirsch is concerned that the Obama administration is ignoring the radiation danger to avoid undermining support for its ironically named, “nuclear renaissance”. Because Wall Street has shunned economically and environmentally stupid nuclear projects for more than a decade, Obama’s latest folly will require $54 billion in taxpayer-extorted loans. [Truthout Apr 12/11] TAKING A DUMP Meanwhile, some 1,850 gallons of seawater are being poured onto Fuk-U-Shima’s hot plutonium and uranium piles – and running off into the ocean every hour, 24/7. As South Korea protestors besieged the Japanese embassy, and the South Korean and Chinese governments lodged official protests over the deliberate dumping of nearly three-million gallons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, fears mounted that the need to make room for even more radioactive reactor water to be stored onshore means that poisoning the Pacific could continue “for decades”. [english.ntdtv.com Apr 8/11; Voice of Russia Apr 11/11; nationalpost.com Apr 12/11] Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told head-scratching reporters “there was no choice” but to dump highly radioactive water 630-times the regulatory limit into the planet-circulating Pacific to prevent even more radioactive water from entering that same ocean. Say what? "The fact that radioactive water is being deliberately dumped into the sea is very regrettable and one we are very sorry about," Edano-san said in excusing the international crime. This apology does not make it okay, responded Mike Adams. “The mass dumping of highly radioactive water [earlier] measured at 7.5 million-times allowable levels into the Pacific Ocean is not just an environmental disaster – it's also a violation of international law. The Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter, passed in 1972, forbids nations and companies from dumping toxic wastes into the ocean. “Although the mainstream media claims that all the deadly iodine-131 gets dissipated across the Pacific Ocean before it can reach North America, the greater truth is that the facts about Fukushima are diluted and dispersed long before they reach our shores. The result is an ongoing dangerous cover-up of what's really happening there.” “We strongly protest and urge you to stop dumping into the sea,” fumed Tetsu Nozaki, chairman of the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Co-Operative Associations. Though radioactive fish caught off the coast of Ibaraki, north of Tokyo are supposedly not harmful for “limited” consumption, such “fishy” sales plummeted by 44% at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market. “Restaurants are losing customers and the demand for fish is falling,” confirmed Kosaka Tsutomu, head of marine and agricultural products section at Tsukiji, as sushi restaurants and hotels – including Asia’s Shangri-La luxury chain – released Japanese seafood from their menus. Japan exported 565,295 metric tons of fish and other marine products worth 195 billion yen ($2.3 billion) last year. [Bloomberg Apr 4/11] Independent nuclear energy consultant Shaun Burnie sees the desperate decanting of radioactive water as a tacit Japanese Government admission that the situation remains out of control. WHERE WE’RE AT NOW Two weeks ago we were assured that Fukushima was "on the verge of stabilizing." "The situation at Fukushima is relatively stable now,” agrees physicist Dr. Michio Kaku, “in the same way that you are stable if you hang by your fingernails off a cliff, and your fingernails begin to break one by one." [bigthink.com] At least three of six reactors are wrecked. Pieces of highly radioactive fuel rods from Unit 4 and possibly other reactors were blown over a mile from the site by the initial hydrogen gas explosion. As the exposed fuel rods boil off, TEPCO has been injecting nitrogen into the Unit 1 reactor to prevent another hydrogen explosion. But these injections were suspended after the big April 11 quake, which also saw a temporary but dangerous cessation of cooling water there. The Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry has stopped reporting the radiation levels in Unit 1 after off-the- scale readings showed that nuclear fuel rods have breached their containment. The very high radiation readings are preventing reconnaissance and repairs. And renewed efforts to cool Unit 1’s red-hot core with firehoses may yet prove futile as the cooling inlets appear to be blocked by melted fuel, as well as by a thick crust of salt deposits from boiled-off sea water. With two-thirds of its fuel core exposed, temperature and pressure levels inside Unit 1 remain dangerously high. "There could easily be more melting of the core," warns Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for Japan's industry-enabling Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. [e.nikkei.com Apr 12/11] Translation: a catastrophic meltdown is still quite possible. If this isn’t enough to silence atomic apologists, the massive amounts of water being forced into all the damaged cores are stressing weakened containment structures beyond already compromised safety limits. And the highly radioactive fuel in Unit 2 appears to have melted through the pressure vessel to the bottom of the containment, where it continues to release the most severe radioactivity into the environment. [bigthink.com Apr 7/11]  Some of the readings now coming out of Fukushima are "immeasurable," reported NHK World, after learning that no one can enter the plant's No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactor buildings because radiation levels are so high that monitoring devices have been rendered useless.  But the Daiichi reactors remain too hot to be entombed in concrete as at Chernobyl. Even this small concrete patch to stop a radioactive water leak has failed to harden. [CNN Apr 10/11] HOPE IS STILL NOT A PLAN Tetsunari Iida, an engineer-turned-industry critic, alleges that the situation is "beyond the reach" of Japan's insular nuclear establishment. "I don't think this is an accident that is going to go away anytime soon," concurs Dr. Michael Allen, after spending 14 years at Sandia National Labs studying nuclear reactor accidents. "These things play out over a long period of time, longer than people would think," [blogs.knoxnews.com Mar /11] A leaked confidential assessment by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also concludes: “The Fukushima plant is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely." “We hope the worst doesn’t happen – an explosion releasing an even larger amount of radioactivity into the environment,” Shaun Burnie concludes. “But they’ve got such huge problems… the scale of the problem they are facing is really beyond them at this stage.” [rt.com Apr 4/11; rt.com Apr 11/11] Even as European nations express concern that BP’s highly toxic dispersant and crude oil mix may soon be reaching their shores, this latest outrage by a corporation convicted of doctoring safety data and covering up faults in its Fukushima reactor cooling systems is irradiating their food sources – after ignoring repeated earthquake preparedness warnings. Is anyone making these corporate connections? OUTLOOK: RADIOACTIVE RAIN AND PRECOOKED FISH A month into the crisis, TEPCO acknowledges that the only clear end in sight is a Chernobyl-scale calamity. The problems are so far "beyond the design capacity" of the plant that the Japanese are working in uncharted territory, says Michael Friedlander. "No nuclear power plant has ever considered the inability to get on long-term core cooling for more than a week, much less three weeks." [nationalpost.com Apr 12/11] How about the next three months? Three years? Three decades? How can long-term core cooling be restored when the cooling pipes and pumps are wrecked, radiation levels are far too high to fix them, and at least one and possibly two radioactive cores are holed and exposed to the atmos- fear?  Additionally, partially-melted fuel rods have formed a highly radioactive slag that must somehow be removed and “safely” sequestered for many hundreds and thousands of years before the radioactive ruins can be buried. After the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania, it took more than two years for operators to just get a video camera into the reactor to assess its condition. Japanese nuclear industry consultant Satoshi Sato dismisses TEPCO’s current ad hoc approach as a "waste of effort." Relying on instruments that are likely damaged and unreliable is worse than useless, and pumping more water into the reactors is only making the contamination problem worse, he says. "There is no happy end with their approach." Given these odds and the amount of radioactivity already released over this densely-populated island nation – as well as the rest of the globe – one British expert predicts that the death toll in the years ahead could top Chernobyl’s mortalities. “The Japanese don’t know how to deal with it. They’re ad-libbing. Just throwing water on to the reactors, when they cannot get inside to see what the situation is, could mean the fuel goes critical again. And while the radiation leak so far is only a tenth of that at Chernobyl, that was in a rural area with a low population. In Japan it’s an urban, densely packed area so the potential numbers of deaths and cancers are much higher,” points out British nuclear engineer John Large.  [nationalpost.com Apr 12/11] For now, Japan has "no choice" but to continue pouring seawater into the reactors, says Michael Friedlander, a former senior operator at U.S. nuclear power plants. Admitting that radioactivity is still escaping and stable, long-term cooling is far from being achieved, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Hidehiko Nishiyama now admits, “We cannot say what the outlook is for the next stage.” In other words, at this point Japanese government and nuclear industry officials are fervently hoping to somehow someday find some way to make this global nightmare go away. Don’t hold your breath. On second thought… Hold your breath! Fukushima Fubar Radioactive B.C. "When you hear 'no immediate danger' [from nuclear radiation], then you should run away as far and as fast as you can." - Alexey Yablokov, member of Russian academy of sciences and adviser to President Gorbachev when Chernobyl went critical [Guardian Apr 1/11]