Fri, 02/24/2017 - 10:29
While media attention has largely drifted away
from the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in the
years since the disaster, a recent and disturbing development has once again
made Fukushima difficult if not impossible to ignore.
On Feb. 2, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or
TEPCO, quietly
released a statement regarding
the discovery of a hole measuring 2 meters in diameter within the metal grating
at the bottom of the containment vessel in the plant’s No. 2 reactor.
Though news of this hole is indeed concerning,
even more shocking was the associated jump in radiation detected in the area.
According to estimates taken at the time of the hole’s discovery, radiation
inside the reactor was found to have reached 530 sieverts per
hour, a massive
increase compared to the 73 sieverts per hour recorded after the disaster. To
put these figures in perspective, NASA’s maximum amount of radiation exposure
permitted for astronauts over
their entire lifetime is
1 sievert.
Human exposure to 5 sieverts would
kill half of
those exposed within a month, while 10 sieverts would prove fatal to nearly all
exposed within a matter of weeks. An official with Japan’s National Institute
of Radiological Sciences told the
Japan Times that
medical professionals with the organization had never even considered working
with such high levels of radiation.
A nearly 1-square-meter hole is seen in a walkway in the containment vessel of
the No. 2 reactor at Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. It is thought that the heat
of the melted nuclear fuel caused the walkway to give way. (Photo: TEPCO)
TEPCO initially tried to counter public fears
by stating that most of the reactor’s nuclear fuel remained in the containment
vessel despite the hole. However, on Feb. 3, TEPCO spokesman Yuichi Okamura was
quoted as saying that “it’s
highly possible that melted fuel leaked through.” At the time, TEPCO said that
it would send a robot into the area to survey the full extent of the damage in
order to definitively determine whether fuel had leaked outside of the reactor
into the surrounding environment.
The first robot, deployed on Feb. 16, was
unable to conduct any meaningful measurements, as the extreme conditions within
the reactor forced operators to abandon it within the containment vessel. The
“scorpion” robot, manufactured by Toshiba, was meant to record images of the
reactor’s interior and collect accurate — instead of estimated — data on the
levels of radiation within. Within three hours of deployment, the
device stopped responding to operators despite its stated ability to withstand high levels of
radiation. TEPCO has not commented on its new plans to gauge the damage
recently uncovered in the reactor in the wake of the robot’s malfunction.
When a second robot was sent to investigate, it also failed.
One of the world’s worst nuclear disasters
grows even worse
Despite a lack of widespread media coverage
and TEPCO’s reassurances that things are under control, there is concern that
the nuclear disaster at Fukushima — already one of the
worst nuclear disasters in human history — is quickly growing even worse.
PBS News reported
last year that
more than 80 percent of the radioactivity from the three damaged reactors was
released into the Pacific Ocean, as 300 tons of radioactive water have leaked
from the reactors every day since an earthquake and subsequent tsunami crippled the plant in
2011.
The Pacific Ocean may have diluted much of the
radiation, due to its massive volume, yet radiation and debris from the
disaster have been detected along the western coast of Canada and the United
States. Traces of Fukushima radiation were first detected in early 2015, when
trace amounts of cesium-134 and cesium-137 appeared in
samples collected
near Vancouver Island. Then, in December of last year, researchers at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution detected seaborne cesium-134 along the Oregon coast.
Though no link between the presence of
radiation has been officially established, fisheries along the entire western
coast of North America have been collapsing. Last month, the U.S. secretary of
commerce reported on the failure of
nine salmon and crab fisheries in Alaska, California, and Washington — all
due to “unexpected” yet steep declines in fish populations.
While scientists and government authorities
alike are “stumped” as to the cause, fish caught along the West Coast have
shown high increases in the levels of cesium for years — as far back as 2014.
Researchers have maintained that fish, however, are still “safe” to eat despite
the fact that at least one
group of doctors agrees that there is “no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from
food, water or other sources, period.”
The Japanese government, TEPCO, and mainstream
media continue to insist that this massive release of radiation into the
environment has had no effect on human or environmental health. However,
thyroid cancer rates have soared in Japan, with 131
children developing thyroid cancer in the six years since the disaster. That
total is equivalent to about 600 thyroid
cancer cases per million children, while the child thyroid
cancer rate elsewhere is
about one or two children per million per year.
Despite the marked increase in cancer rates,
TEPCO and the Japanese government insist that Fukushima radiation is “unlikely”
to result in a greater incidence of cancer cases. However, exposure to
Iodine-131, the main
radionuclide released into
the air and water during the meltdown, is known
to increase human risk of thyroid cancer and is the most
clearly defined environmental factor associated with thyroid tumors, suggesting
that a correlation between radiation and exposure likely exists.
This latest breach in one of the plant’s
damaged reactors as well as TEPCO’s inability to even properly gauge the extent
of the damage suggests that we have yet to see the full devastating potential
of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
This article (Concern Over Fukushima Increases As Radiation
Cripples Two Robots) by Whitney Webb is free and open source. You have
permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author
and True Activist.
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