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D'coda Dcoda

Vancouver Aquarium 'alarmed' at mass die-off of starfish on B.C. ocean floor [07Oct13] - 0 views

www.vancouversun.com/...story.html

fukushima pacific fish die-off

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 09 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • D'coda Dcoda on 09 Oct 13
     
    [...] aquarium staff don't know just how far-reaching the "alarming" epidemic has been, and whether this and other sea star species will recover. "They're gone. It's amazing," said Donna Gibbs, a research diver and taxonomist on the aquarium's Howe Sound Research and Conservation group. "Whatever hit them, it was like wildfire and just wiped them out." [...] Aquarium staff don't know the cause because they have had trouble gathering specimens for testing, as starfish that looked healthy in the ocean turned up as goo at the lab. [...] "We're just not sure yet if it's all the same thing," Gibbs said. "They're dying so fast." [...] The collaboration came about after a graduate student collected starfish for a research project and then watched as they "appeared to melt" in her tank. [...] Global News, Oct. 3, 2013: [...] starfish wasting or completely disintegrating ever since early September. "Now they are gone. They have disintegrated, and now there is just goo left," says research diver and taxonomist Donna Gibbs. "So we are trying to see as much as we can really fast and get reports from divers in other areas to see how widespread this is." […] "It is shocking to see them all dead. They are just gone. And, are they coming back? We want them back. B.C. is known for its sea stars. We have more species here than anywhere else in the world." [...]
D'coda Dcoda

Fukushima 'alarm': Ground cracking, radioactive steam seeping (Video) [15Aug11] - 0 views

www.examiner.com/...king-radioactive-steam-seeping

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 30 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • As Canadians learned about dangerous radiation falling on them in rain on Tuesday as far east as Toronto registered at 20,000 CPM, equivalent to the highly targeted dose of radiation for cancer radiotherapy,  the Fukushima catastrophe escalated even higher Wednesday with evidence that the ground is cracking under the crippled nuclear power plant, causing radioactive steam to escape, "very serious and alarming" according to Anissa Naouai's guest on Russia Today, Dr. Robert Jacobs, Professor of nuclear history at Hiroshima Peace Institute. 
  • Fukushima nuclear plant workers have reported that the ground under the facility is cracking and radioactive steam is already escaping through the cracks that Dr. Jacobs says is very serious and alarming development because it has happened after two large earthquakes over the past few weeks according to Russia Today. (See embedded Russia Today interviewing Dr. Jacobs on Youtube video on this page left.) "There was a 6.4 earthquake on the 31st of July and a 6.0 earthquake on August 12th," Dr. Jacobs told Russia Today's Naoiai.
  • "What this indicates is there may have been some breaking of the pipes and some of the structures underground that happened during these earthquakes," he said. "There could be radioactive water that is venting into the soil and what's more, as cracks are opening, the steam and radioactivity is working its way up," he said.
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  • Now it is known that radioactive material, the melted core, is moving under the ground away from where it the measuring was being done according to Dr. Jacobs. He said that the reactors were not safe for earthquakes and there is evidence that Reactor #1 was melting down when the tsunami hit, putting reliability in question. 
  • There are continual aftershocks at the level of a 6.0, so when you have a fragile structure and what we have now, the radioactive core has melted down into the basement, into the bottom of the containment vessel. 
  • Russia Today reporting that new evidence suggests Fukushima's nuclear reactors were doomed to cripple even before the massive wave reached them adds weight to the unreliability of nuclear energy according to Dr. Jacobs. Canadians receiving extreme radiation in Tuesday rainout
D'coda Dcoda

Harm from Fukushima Radiation: A Matter Of Perspective [09Jul11] - 0 views

blogs.forbes.com/...iation-a-matter-of-perspective

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 26 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • A leading biophysicist has cast a critical light on the government’s reassurances that Americans were never at risk from Fukushima fallout, saying “we really don’t know for sure.”
  • When radioactive fallout from Japan’s nuclear disaster began appearing in the United States this spring, the Obama Administration’s open-data policy obligated the government to inform the public, in some detail, what was landing here.
  • Covering the story, I watched the government pursue what appeared to be two strategies to minimize public alarm:
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  • It framed the data with reassurances like this oft-repeated sentence from the EPA: “The level detected is far below a level of public health concern.” The question, of course, is whose concern.
  • The EPA seemed to be timing its data releases to avoid media coverage. It released its most alarming data set late on a Friday—data that showed radioactive fallout in the drinking water of more than a dozen U.S. cities.
  • Friday and Saturday data releases were most frequent when radiation levels were highest. And despite the ravages newspapers have suffered from internet competition, newspaper editors still have not learned to assign reporters to watch the government on weekends. As a result, bloggers broke the fallout news, while newspapers relegated themselves to local followups, most of which did little more than quote public health officials who were pursuing strategy #1.
  • For example, when radioactive cesium-137 was found in milk in Hilo, Hawaii, Lynn Nakasone, administrator of the Health Department’s Environmental Health Services Division, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser: ”There’s no question the milk is safe.”
  • Nakasone had little alternative but to say that. She wasn’t about to dump thousands of gallons of milk that represented the livelihood of local dairymen, and she wasn’t authorized to dump the milk as long as the radiation detected remained below FDA’s Derived Intervention Level, a metric I’ll discuss more below.
  • That kind of statement failed to reassure the public in part because of the issue of informed consent—Americans never consented to swallowing any radiation from Fukushima—and in part because the statement is obviously false.
  • There is a question whether the milk was safe.
  • medical experts agree that any increased exposure to radiation increases risk of cancer, and so, no increase in radiation is unquestionably safe.
  • Whether you choose to see the Fukushima fallout as safe depends on the perspective you adopt, as David J. Brenner, a professor of radiation biophysics and the director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center, elucidated recently in The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists:
  • Should this worry us? We know that the extra individual cancer risks from this long-term exposure will be very small indeed. Most of us have about a 40 percent chance of getting cancer at some point in our lives, and the radiation dose from the extra radioactive cesium in the food supply will not significantly increase our individual cancer risks.
  • But there’s another way we can and should think about the risk: not from the perspective of individuals, but from the perspective of the entire population. A tiny extra risk to a few people is one thing. But here we have a potential tiny extra risk to millions or even billions of people. Think of buying a lottery ticket — just like the millions of other people who buy a ticket, your chances of winning are miniscule. Yet among these millions of lottery players, a few people will certainly win; we just can’t predict who they will be. Likewise, will there be some extra cancers among the very large numbers of people exposed to extremely small radiation risks? It’s likely, but we really don’t know for sure.
  • the EPA’s standard for radionuclides in drinking water is so much more conservative than the FDA’s standard for radionuclides in food. The two agencies anticipate different endurances of exposure—long-term in the EPA’s view, short-term in FDA’s. But faced with the commercial implications of its actions, FDA tolerates a higher level of mortality than EPA does.
  • FDA has a technical quibble with that last sentence. FDA spokesman Siobhan Delancey says: Risk coefficients (one in a million, two in ten thousand) are statistically based population estimates of risk. As such they cannot be used to predict individual risk and there is likely to be variation around those numbers. Thus we cannot say precisely that “one in a million people will die of cancer from drinking water at the EPA MCL” or that “two in ten thousand people will die of cancer from consuming food at the level of an FDA DIL.” These are estimates only and apply to populations as a whole.
  • The government, while assuring us of safety, comforts itself in the abstraction of the population-wide view, but from Dr. Brenner’s perspective, the population-wide view is a lottery and someone’s number may come up. Let that person decide whether we should be alarmed.
D'coda Dcoda

Fukushima radiation alarms doctors [18Aug11] - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...201181665921711896.html

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 19 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Scientists and doctors are calling for a new national policy in Japan that mandates the testing of food, soil, water, and the air for radioactivity still being emitted from Fukushima's heavily damaged Daiichi nuclear power plant."How much radioactive materials have been released from the plant?" asked Dr Tatsuhiko Kodama, a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo's Radioisotope Centre, in a July 27 speech to the Committee of Health, Labour and Welfare at Japan's House of Representatives. "The government and TEPCO have not reported the total amount of the released radioactivity yet," said Kodama, who believes things are far worse than even the recent detection of extremely high radiation levels at the plant. There is widespread concern in Japan about a general lack of government monitoring for radiation, which has caused people to begin their own independent monitoring, which are also finding disturbingly high levels of radiation. Kodama's centre, using 27 facilities to measure radiation across the country, has been closely monitoring the situation at Fukushima - and their findings are alarming.According to Dr Kodama, the total amount of radiation released over a period of more than five months from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster is the equivalent to more than 29 "Hiroshima-type atomic bombs" and the amount of uranium released "is equivalent to 20" Hiroshima bombs.
  • Kodama, along with other scientists, is concerned about the ongoing crisis resulting from the Fukushima situation, as well as what he believes to be inadequate government reaction, and believes the government needs to begin a large-scale response in order to begin decontaminating affected areas.Distrust of the Japanese government's response to the nuclear disaster is now common among people living in the effected prefectures, and people are concerned about their health.Recent readings taken at the plant are alarming.When on August 2nd readings of 10,000 millisieverts (10 sieverts) of radioactivity per hour were detected at the plant, Japan's science ministry said that level of dose is fatal to humans, and is enough radiation to kill a person within one to two weeks after the exposure. 10,000 millisieverts (mSv) is the equivalent of approximately 100,000 chest x-rays.
  • t is an amount 250 per cent higher than levels recorded at the plant in March after it was heavily damaged by the earthquake and ensuing tsunami. The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), that took the reading, used equipment to measure radiation from a distance, and was unable to ascertain the exact level because the device's maximum reading is only 10,000 mSv. TEPCO also detected 1,000 millisieverts (mSv) per hour in debris outside the plant, as well as finding 4,000 mSv per hour inside one of the reactor buildings.
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  • he Fukushima disaster has been rated as a "level seven" on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). This level, the highest, is the same as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, and is defined by the scale as: "[A] major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures."The Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters are the only nuclear accidents to have been rated level seven on the scale, which is intended to be logarithmic, similar to the scale used to describe the comparative magnitude of earthquakes. Each increasing level represents an accident approximately ten times more severe than the previous level.
  • Doctors in Japan are already treating patients suffering health effects they attribute to radiation from the ongoing nuclear disaster."We have begun to see increased nosebleeds, stubborn cases of diarrhoea, and flu-like symptoms in children," Dr Yuko Yanagisawa, a physician at Funabashi Futawa Hospital in Chiba Prefecture, told Al Jazeera.
  • She attributes the symptoms to radiation exposure, and added: "We are encountering new situations we cannot explain with the body of knowledge we have relied upon up until now.""The situation at the Daiichi Nuclear facility in Fukushima has not yet been fully stabilised, and we can't yet see an end in sight," Yanagisawa said. "Because the nuclear material has not yet been encapsulated, radiation continues to stream into the environment."
  • Al Jazeera's Aela Callan, reporting from Japan's Ibaraki prefecture, said of the recently detected high radiation readings: "It is now looking more likely that this area has been this radioactive since the earthquake and tsunami, but no one realised until now."Workers at Fukushima are only allowed to be exposed to 250 mSv of ionising radiation per year.
  • radioactive cesium exceeding the government limit was detected in processed tea made in Tochigi City, about 160km from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, according to the Tochigi Prefectural Government, who said radioactive cesium was detected in tea processed from leaves harvested in the city in early July. The level is more than 3 times the provisional government limit.
  • anagisawa's hospital is located approximately 200km from Fukushima, so the health problems she is seeing that she attributes to radiation exposure causes her to be concerned by what she believes to be a grossly inadequate response from the government.From her perspective, the only thing the government has done is to, on April 25, raise the acceptable radiation exposure limit for children from 1 mSv/year to 20 mSv/year.
  • This has caused controversy, from the medical point of view," Yanagisawa told Al Jazeera. "This is certainly an issue that involves both personal internal exposures as well as low-dose exposures."Junichi Sato, Greenpeace Japan Executive Director, said: "It is utterly outrageous to raise the exposure levels for children to twenty times the maximum limit for adults."
  • The Japanese government cannot simply increase safety limits for the sake of political convenience or to give the impression of normality."Authoritative current estimates of the health effects of low-dose ionizing radiation are published in the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation VII (BEIR VII) report from the US National Academy of Sciences.
  • he report reflects the substantial weight of scientific evidence proving there is no exposure to ionizing radiation that is risk-free. The BEIR VII estimates that each 1 mSv of radiation is associated with an increased risk of all forms of cancer other than leukemia of about 1-in-10,000; an increased risk of leukemia of about 1-in-100,000; and a 1-in-17,500 increased risk of cancer death.
  • r Helen Caldicott, the founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, is equally concerned about the health effects from Japan's nuclear disaster."Radioactive elements get into the testicles and ovaries, and these cause genetic disease like diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and mental retardation," she told Al Jazeera. "There are 2,600 of these diseases that get into our genes and are passed from generation to generation, forever."
  • So far, the only cases of acute radiation exposure have involved TEPCO workers at the stricken plant. Lower doses of radiation, particularly for children, are what many in the medical community are most concerned about, according to Dr Yanagisawa.
  • Humans are not yet capable of accurately measuring the low dose exposure or internal exposure," she explained, "Arguing 'it is safe because it is not yet scientifically proven [to be unsafe]' would be wrong. That fact is that we are not yet collecting enough information to prove the situations scientifically. If that is the case, we can never say it is safe just by increasing the annual 1mSv level twenty fold."
  • Her concern is that the new exposure standards by the Japanese government do not take into account differences between adults and children, since children's sensitivity to radiation exposure is several times higher than that of adults.
  • Al Jazeera contacted Prime Minister Naoto Kan's office for comment on the situation. Speaking on behalf of the Deputy Cabinet Secretary for Public Relations for the Prime Minister's office, Noriyuki Shikata said that the Japanese government "refers to the ICRP [International Commission on Radiological Protection] recommendation in 2007, which says the reference levels of radiological protection in emergency exposure situations is 20-100 mSv per year. The Government of Japan has set planned evacuation zones and specific spots recommended for evacuation where the radiation levels reach 20 mSv/year, in order to avoid excessive radiation exposure."
  • he prime minister's office explained that approximately 23bn yen ($300mn) is planned for decontamination efforts, and the government plans to have a decontamination policy "by around the end of August", with a secondary budget of about 97bn yen ($1.26bn) for health management and monitoring operations in the affected areas. When questioned about the issue of "acute radiation exposure", Shikata pointed to the Japanese government having received a report from TEPCO about six of their workers having been exposed to more than 250 mSv, but did not mention any reports of civilian exposures.
  • Prime Minister Kan's office told Al Jazeera that, for their ongoing response to the Fukushima crisis, "the government of Japan has conducted all the possible countermeasures such as introduction of automatic dose management by ID codes for all workers and 24 hour allocation of doctors. The government of Japan will continue to tackle the issue of further improving the health management including medium and long term measures". Shikata did not comment about Kodama's findings.
  • Kodama, who is also a doctor of internal medicine, has been working on decontamination of radioactive materials at radiation facilities in hospitals of the University of Tokyo for the past several decades. "We had rain in Tokyo on March 21 and radiation increased to .2 micosieverts/hour and, since then, the level has been continuously high," said Kodama, who added that his reporting of radiation findings to the government has not been met an adequate reaction. "At that time, the chief cabinet secretary, Mr Edano, told the Japanese people that there would be no immediate harm to their health."
  • Kodama is an expert in internal exposure to radiation, and is concerned that the government has not implemented a strong response geared towards measuring radioactivity in food. "Although three months have passed since the accident already, why have even such simple things have not been done yet?" he said. "I get very angry and fly into a rage."
  • Radiation has a high risk to embryos in pregnant women, juveniles, and highly proliferative cells of people of growing ages. Even for adults, highly proliferative cells, such as hairs, blood, and intestinal epithelium cells, are sensitive to radiation."
  • Early on in the disaster, Dr Makoto Kondo of the department of radiology of Keio University's School of Medicine warned of "a large difference in radiation effects on adults compared to children".Kondo explained the chances of children developing cancer from radiation exposure was many times higher than adults.
  • Children's bodies are underdeveloped and easily affected by radiation, which could cause cancer or slow body development. It can also affect their brain development," he said.Yanagisawa assumes that the Japanese government's evacuation standards, as well as their raising the permissible exposure limit to 20mSv "can cause hazards to children's health," and therefore "children are at a greater risk".
  • Nishio Masamichi, director of Japan's Hakkaido Cancer Centre and a radiation treatment specialist, published an article on July 27 titled: "The Problem of Radiation Exposure Countermeasures for the Fukushima Nuclear Accident: Concerns for the Present Situation". In the report, Masamichi said that such a dramatic increase in permitted radiation exposure was akin to "taking the lives of the people lightly". He believes that 20mSv is too high, especially for children who are far more susceptible to radiation.
  • n early July, officials with the Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission announced that approximately 45 per cent of children in the Fukushima region had experienced thyroid exposure to radiation, according to a survey carried out in late March. The commission has not carried out any surveys since then.
  • Now the Japanese government is underestimating the effects of low dosage and/or internal exposures and not raising the evacuation level even to the same level adopted in Chernobyl," Yanagisawa said. "People's lives are at stake, especially the lives of children, and it is obvious that the government is not placing top priority on the people's lives in their measures."Caldicott feels the lack of a stronger response to safeguard the health of people in areas where radiation is found is "reprehensible".
  • Millions of people need to be evacuated from those high radiation zones, especially the children."
  • Dr Yanagisawa is concerned about what she calls "late onset disorders" from radiation exposure resulting from the Fukushima disaster, as well as increasing cases of infertility and miscarriages."Incidence of cancer will undoubtedly increase," she said. "In the case of children, thyroid cancer and leukemia can start to appear after several years. In the case of adults, the incidence of various types of cancer will increase over the course of several decades."Yanagisawa said it is "without doubt" that cancer rates among the Fukushima nuclear workers will increase, as will cases of lethargy, atherosclerosis, and other chronic diseases among the general population in the effected areas.
  • Radioactive food and water
  • An August 1 press release from Japan's MHLW said no radioactive materials have been detected in the tap water of Fukushima prefecture, according to a survey conducted by the Japanese government's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters. The government defines no detection as "no results exceeding the 'Index values for infants (radioactive iodine)'," and says "in case the level of radioactive iodine in tap water exceeds 100 Bq/kg, to refrain from giving infants formula milk dissolved by tap water, having them intake tap water … "
  • Yet, on June 27, results were published from a study that found 15 residents of Fukushima prefecture had tested positive for radiation in their urine. Dr Nanao Kamada, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Hiroshima University, has been to Fukushima prefecture twice in order to take internal radiation exposure readings and facilitated the study.
  • The risk of internal radiation is more dangerous than external radiation," Dr Kamada told Al Jazeera. "And internal radiation exposure does exist for Fukushima residents."According to the MHLW, distribution of several food products in Fukushima Prefecture remain restricted. This includes raw milk, vegetables including spinach, kakina, and all other leafy vegetables, including cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and beef.
  • he distribution of tealeaves remains restricted in several prefectures, including all of Ibaraki, and parts of Tochigi, Gunma, Chiba, Kanagawa Prefectures.Iwate prefecture suspended all beef exports because of caesium contamination on August 1, making it the fourth prefecture to do so.
  • yunichi Tokuyama, an expert with the Iwate Prefecture Agricultural and Fisheries Department, told Al Jazeera he did not know how to deal with the crisis. He was surprised because he did not expect radioactive hot spots in his prefecture, 300km from the Fukushima nuclear plant."The biggest cause of this contamination is the rice straw being fed to the cows, which was highly radioactive," Tokuyama told Al Jazeera.
  • Kamada feels the Japanese government is acting too slowly in response to the Fukushima disaster, and that the government needs to check radiation exposure levels "in each town and village" in Fukushima prefecture."They have to make a general map of radiation doses," he said. "Then they have to be concerned about human health levels, and radiation exposures to humans. They have to make the exposure dose map of Fukushima prefecture. Fukushima is not enough. Probably there are hot spots outside of Fukushima. So they also need to check ground exposure levels."
  • Radiation that continues to be released has global consequences.More than 11,000 tonnes of radioactive water has been released into the ocean from the stricken plant.
  • Those radioactive elements bio-concentrate in the algae, then the crustaceans eat that, which are eaten by small then big fish," Caldicott said. "That's why big fish have high concentrations of radioactivity and humans are at the top of the food chain, so we get the most radiation, ultimately."
D'coda Dcoda

People working at, living near Fukushima, say Abe is in the dark [20Sep13] - 0 views

ajw.asahi.com/...AJ201309200083

fukushima workers

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • D'coda Dcoda on 24 Sep 13
     
    More contamination is leaking at Fukushima than Tepco announces, says worker - Alarms inevitably go off during radiation inspections at end of day - Officials: Nothing's being controlled; Prime Minister has no idea what's happening
Jan Wyllie

Scosche Launches Radiation Detector and App for iPhone and iPod touch [31Aug11] - 0 views

maxborgesagency.com/...-app-for-iphone-and-ipod-touch

shared by Jan Wyllie on 08 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Scosche Industries, award-winning innovator of consumer technology, is excited to announce the RDTX-PRO radiation detector and app for iPhone and iPod touch. The radiation detector requires no calibration and allows users to accurately detect gamma radiation above 60keV within +/- 5% accuracy.  The device attaches to an iPhone or iPod touch via the dock connection and is extremely compact for ease of use.  It can also be used as a radiation alarm independently from the iOS device.  When being used as a standalone alarm the RDTX-PRO runs on one AA battery and provides up to 96 hour of radiation detection. “I was extremely impressed with the accuracy and performance of the RDTX-PRO from Scosche,” said Julius James, Radiation Specialist of Fluke Global Calibration Laboratories.  “The detector is as accurate as units that cost significantly more and is much smaller in size.” After connecting the Scosche RDTX-PRO with an iPhone or iPod touch users are prompted to download the free accompanying radTEST app.  The app offers a consumer friendly meter display that shows radiation levels as safe (green), elevated (yellow) or dangerous (red).  For the advanced user the digital display mode can be used to determine exact radiation levels.   Users can also share their results using Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps.
  • The Scosche RDTX-PRO retail for $329.99 and will be available in September from Synexx in Tokyo Japan.  $10 of each unit sold will be donated to a group of charities with a goal of reaching 1 million dollars within two years.  The charities include the Bikki Children’s Fund, Samaritan’s Purse, All Hands Volunteers, and others committed to aiding those that were affected by the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.
D'coda Dcoda

If Indian Point Nuclear Closes, Plenty of Profits (for natural gas suppliers) [13Jul11] - 0 views

atomicinsights.com/...for-natural-gas-suppliers.html

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 14 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • D'coda Dcoda on 14 Jul 11
     
    (Diigo won't highlight this correctly, putting it in description!) "Matt Wald of the New York Times has finally figured out why there is such a strong push from well connected political types to close the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station. Unfortunately, he and his editor have chosen to put that answer at the very bottom of his recent article titled If Indian Point Closes, Plenty of Challenges . When the demand for natural gas increases, the balance between supply and demand shifts in favor of the sellers, so price inexorably increases. Here is the closing paragraph of that article. It should raise alarm bells for anyone who is a power purchaser instead of a power seller. That description applies to the vast majority of us; part of the challenge is that it only costs each of us a little while concentrating the spoils in the hands of a few victors. Closing the Indian Point reactors would, however, hardly be gloom and doom for everyone. Any company that runs a generator in downstate New York ends up selling its output at a higher price, and would share in the $1.4 billion a year that Con Edison says its customers will pay if the nuclear plant closes."
D'coda Dcoda

RSOE EDIS - HAZMAT in USA on Wednesday, 22 August, 2012 at 03:18 (03:18 AM) UTC. E[22Au... - 0 views

hisz.rsoe.hu/...site

nuclear incidents USA waste

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 23 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • As part of the biggest, costliest environmental cleanup project in the nation's history - disposing of 53 million gallons of radioactive waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state - one thing was supposed to be sure: Waste stored in the sturdy, double-wall steel tanks that hold part of the toxic ooze wasn't going anywhere. But that reassurance has been thrown into question with the discovery of a 3-foot-long piece of radioactive material between the inner and outer steel walls of one of the storage tanks, prompting new worries at the troubled cleanup site. "We're taking it seriously, and we're doing an investigation so we can better understand what it is," Department of Energy spokeswoman Lori Gamache said
  • The discovery marks the first time material has been found outside the inner wall of one of the site's 28 double-shell tanks, thought to be relatively secure interim storage for the radioactive material generated when Hanford was one of the nation's major atomic production facilities. It opened in 1943 and began a gradual shutdown in 1964. Cleanup started in 1989. The $12.2-billion cleanup project eventually aims to turn most of the waste stored at Hanford into glass rods at a high-tech vitrification plant scheduled to be operational in 2019, assuming the formidable design and engineering hurdles can be overcome. In the meantime, plant engineers have been gathering waste stored in the facility's 149 aging, leaky single-wall storage tanks and redepositing them in the double0-shell tanks for safekeeping. Over the years, more than 1 million gallons of waste has leaked out of 67 single-wall tanks into the surrounding soil.
  • "There's been this presumption that the double-shell tanks at least are sound and won't fail, and they'll be there for us," said Tom Carpenter of the advocacy group Hanford Challenge. Several days ago the group obtained a memo from the cleanup site detailing discovery of the mysterious substance. "This changes everything. It is alarming that there is now solid evidence that Hanford double-shell has leaked," Carpenter said in a separate statement on the discovery. The 42-year-old tank, known as AY-102, holds about 857,000 gallons of radioactive and other toxic chemical waste, much of it removed several years ago from a single-shell storage tank where it was considered unsaf
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  • Workers who relocated the material fell ill simply from inhaling the fumes, Carpenter said. Department of Energy officials said none of the material has leaked outside the outer steel wall or the concrete casing that surrounds the structure, and there is no present hazard to workers or groundwater. They said they were trying to determine whether the material leaked from the inner tank or oozed from a nearby pit into the space between the two walls, known as the annulus. "There's no evidence of it leaking the liquid from the inner shell right now," Gamache said. The material – a mound 2 feet by 3 feet by 8 inches -- is dry and doesn't appear to be growing. It was discovered during a routine video inspection of the annulus conducted last month from a viewpoint not normally used. The possibility that it could have come as overflow from a nearby pit arises because a pipe runs into the annulus from the pit, Gamache said.
  • But Carpenter, who has talked extensively with workers at Hanford and was briefed Tuesday by one of the Department of Energy's senior officials at the tank farm, said he believed the evidence was strong that there was a leak. "I know Hanford would like it not to be so. But the people I'm talking to at the Hanford site say, no, it really does look like a leak," he said.
  • "From what I'm being told and looking at the pictures, it appears it's coming from under the tank and going up. Which is a far cry from it coming from the pit." Gamache said an initial sample of the material revealed that "the contamination levels were higher than expected" and it definitely contained radioactive waste. "There wasn't enough material to fully characterize the material, so we're preparing to pull another sample. That will probably happen around the mid-September time frame," she said. Carpenter said that if the inner tank leaked, it would probably prompt the need to reevaluate expectations that the tanks could safely act as interim storage vessels for several decades.
  • D'coda Dcoda on 23 Aug 12
     
    Hanford Nuclear Plant, USA
D'coda Dcoda

Russia announces enormous finds of radioactive waste and nuclear reactors in Arctic se2... - 0 views

www.bellona.org/...Russia_reveals_dumps

russia reactors arctic seas

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 30 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Enormous quantities of decommissioned Russian nuclear reactors and radioactive waste were dumped into the Kara Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia over a course of decades, according to documents given to Norwegian officials by Russian authorities and published in Norwegian media.
  • Bellona is alarmed by the extent of the dumped Soviet waste, which is far greater than was previously known – not only to Bellona, but also to the Russian authorities themselves.
  • The catalogue of waste dumped at sea by the Soviets, according to documents seen by Bellona, and which were today released by the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, includes some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; 735 other pieces of radiactively contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel.
D'coda Dcoda

EPA Finds Compound Used in Fracking in Wyoming Aquifer [10Nov11]f - 0 views

www.propublica.org/...ng-compound-in-wyoming-aquifer

fracking natural gas fresh water contamination

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 11 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • As the country awaits results from a nationwide safety study on the natural gas drilling process of fracking, a separate government investigation into contamination in a place where residents have long complained [1] that drilling fouled their water has turned up alarming levels of underground pollution. A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results [2] released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • The findings are consistent with water samples the EPA has collected from at least 42 homes in the area since 2008, when ProPublica began reporting [3] on foul water and health concerns in Pavillion and the agency started investigating reports of contamination there. Last year -- after warning residents not to drink [4] or cook with the water and to ventilate their homes when they showered -- the EPA drilled the monitoring wells to get a more precise picture of the extent of the contamination.
  • The Pavillion area has been drilled extensively for natural gas over the last two decades and is home to hundreds of gas wells. Residents have alleged for nearly a decade [1] that the drilling -- and hydraulic fracturing in particular -- has caused their water to turn black and smell like gasoline. Some residents say they suffer neurological impairment [5], loss of smell, and nerve pain they associate with exposure to pollutants. The gas industry -- led by the Canadian company EnCana, which owns the wells in Pavillion -- has denied that its activities are responsible for the contamination. EnCana has, however, supplied drinking water to residents.
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  • The information released yesterday by the EPA was limited to raw sampling data: The agency did not interpret the findings or make any attempt to identify the source of the pollution. From the start of its investigation, the EPA has been careful to consider all possible causes of the contamination and to distance its inquiry from the controversy around hydraulic fracturing. Still, the chemical compounds the EPA detected are consistent with those produced from drilling processes, including one -- a solvent called 2-Butoxyethanol (2-BE) -- widely used in the process of hydraulic fracturing. The agency said it had not found contaminants such as nitrates and fertilizers that would have signaled that agricultural activities were to blame.
D'coda Dcoda

The Hindu :AEC chief puts odds of N-plant accidents at '1-in-infinity' [10Nov11] - 0 views

www.thehindu.com/...article2615375.ece

india

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 11 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The probability of an accident due to a nuclear plant is one is to infinity and all atomic power plants in the country conform to safety standards, chairman of Atomic Energy Commission Srikumar Banerjee said on Thursday. “At least 1.75 lakh people die due to road accidents in a single year whereas there are nearly 14,000 nuclear plants in the world and the casualty rate till date is just 52,” Dr. Banerjee told reporters on the sidelines of the golden jubilee celebrations of Terminal Ballistic Research Laboratory (TBRL) at Ramgarh, near Chandigarh. Pointing out that no human activity can be risk-free, he said there was a definite need for creating awareness and programmes should to be intensified to convince the people in the neighbourhood of a proposed or existing nuclear plant. He said human body faces more radiation during a CT scan than working in a nuclear power plant.
  • Referring to the recent Fukushima nuclear accident, Dr. Banerjee said it happened after a gap of 25 years and the cause and effect of the accident was earthquake followed by a tsunami. “It was not a nuclear accident... immediately after the earthquake, the nuclear reactor shut down and nuclear chain reaction stopped,” he said adding it was a complete station blackout as the decay heat produced in the plant could not be taken out. He, however, said the total casualty due to the nuclear accident was zero. “The spread of radiation was not as high as it was projected,” he said talking about the nuclear accident in Japan. After a nuclear reactor is shut down the energy level comes down to around 2 per cent from 100 per cent due to heat decay, Dr. Banerjee said. He, however, exuded confidence all nuclear plants in the country are safe and conform to the standards of Atomic Energy Regulatory Board and are taken care of by Nuclear Power Corporation. “India too experienced earthquakes and tsunami in the past but there was no nuclear accident as the nuclear plants had all the gadgets to give signal much in advance,” he said. Dr. Banerjee rejected that alarm bells had rung in India after the Japanese nuclear accident. “All steps needed for safety and security for nuclear plants have been taken by Nuclear Power Corporation,” he added.
  • He, however, stressed that it was necessary to strengthen the mechanism in the passive cooling system in nuclear plants in India. In the passive cooling system, heat can be taken out from the plant. Responding to a query regarding protests by habitants before setting up a nuclear plant in their neighbourhood, he said what is needed is to explain things to local people in simple local language and also convince them what actually the plant is. After land acquisition, a package must be given to the affected people and at all costs excellent relationship is needed with people living around the plant. He termed it as “baseless,” the allegation that nuclear radiation comes out from the nuclear plant. Besides, the plants along the coastal areas do not have any effect on the lives of fish, he added.
Jan Wyllie

Full Meltdown: Fukushima Called the 'Biggest Industrial Catastrophe in the History of M... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/..._in_the_history_of_mankind%27_

nuclear capability practice science biodiversity pollution emergence record risks

shared by Jan Wyllie on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • "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?"
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  • 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."
  • "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."
  • 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.
  • far more radiation has been released than has been reported.
  • "We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,"
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • 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
  • Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US
  • 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."
  • "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."
    • D'coda Dcoda
      D'coda Dcoda on 18 Jun 11
       
      Actually, this is exactly what I expected given the history of nuclear energy and the history of inadequate safeguards, ignoring safety regulations, etc.
  • Jan Wyllie on 18 Jun 11
     
    A "NEVER ENDING DISASTER" - A new rendition of Hofstadter's Law about how things take longer than expected ... it's always worse than expected, even when you expect the worse.
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