Group items tagged

Areva is a process, devised by a French firm of the same name, whereby radioactive isotopes are bound together by chemicals that are injected into the contaminated water of a reactor’s cooling system.

These standards are also being applied to humans. According to Gunderson, “Kids are now allowed to get the same dosages as adult nuclear workers would get in the U.S. It’s a complete distortion of radiation physics.” Another recent development that has Gunderson concerned is the buildup of radioactive sewage that poses a catastrophic risk to drinking water. “Before the accident, they used to turn the sewage into building blocks,” says Gunderson. “Now they can’t. So they have these enormous piles of sewage sludge that can’t be disposed of.  It’s not yet in the ground water, but it’s heading that way.”

Gunderson continued, “They’re cooling the reactors by pouring treated water into the top and onto the floor. That has a tendency to build up lots more radioactivity in the filters that are trapping it, but it’s not building up any more water, and that’s a good thing because they’ve run out of space on site.”

Instead of taking steps to raise public awareness about the dangers of exposure to contaminated food products that will contribute to these cancer risks, the Japanese government is doing just the opposite. “They’re raising the radiation standards,” Gunderson reports. “Before, 600 becquerels [measure of radioactivity] were the most you could have in beef. Now they’ve raised the bar to 6,000. They’re telling people it’s safe.”

“What’s happening off site is frightening,” says Gunderson. “Dangerous levels of radioactive contamination are being found in kids’ urine, mothers’ breast milk and animal meat. I’m estimating that over the course of the next 20 years, there’ll be a million cancers. If they’re not caught soon enough, many of those will be fatal.” “The first cancers will affect the thyroids,” Gunderson predicts. “They take about three years. In three to five years it’ll move on to the lungs. In the northern prefectures, I expect a 20 percent increase in lung cancers.”

The Japanese have also initiated a campaign to get people to return to homes as close as 20 miles from the site of the accident. They’re clearing streets and playgrounds, but everything else is still contaminated. “On the sides of the roads where the runoff is, we’re seeing 50,000- 60,000 becquerels in a pound of dirt,” adds Gunderson.

“My biggest concern is that the Japanese are burning rubbish,” he says. “Farmers in rural areas are burning their contaminated crops and those in urban areas are burning their trash. If two pounds of material has less than 8,000 becquerels, the government allows it to be burned.”

Gunderson says the government also allows blending of highly contaminated material with material that isn’t, creating an even more lethal mix that, when burned, revolatilizes the deadly, cancer-inducing cesium. The resulting plumes not only drift into neighboring communities, he said, but are also caught up in wind currents that reach the western coast of the United States and Canada.

In the disaster-affected areas in Tohoku, the amount of debris from tsunami is simply too huge for the affected municipalities to process by themselves. The national government has requested the prefectures and municipalities not affected by the disaster to take the debris and process. Responding to the request, the Tokyo Metropolitan government has decided to accept the debris from Iwate Prefecture for 2 and a half years till March 2014, and will sign an agreement with the Iwate prefectural government on September 30.

As to the "safe" level of burying the radioactive ashes and debris, that's totally meaningless now that the Ministry of Environment has allowed the burial of just about anything, even the ashes that measures over 100,000 becquerels/kg of cesium, as long as there are measures in place at the processing facilities that will prevent the leakage.

The Tokyo Metropolitan government will conduct public bidding to decide which contractors will get to process (incinerate) the disaster debris before starting to accept debris from Miyako City in Iwate Prefecture starting next month. The debris will arrive in Tokyo in containers by rail. Radioactive materials will be measured when the debris are shipped, and when they are burned. After incineration, the ashes will be buried in the landfill beyond Aomi in Koto-ku.

The landfill beyond Aomi, Koto-ku is the same one in the Tokyo Bay that the Tokyo Metropolitan government has been dumping the radioactive ashes since May. (See my 9/13/2011 post.)

According to the government, the density of radioactive materials measured on the debris and in the ashes from burning the debris in Miyako City was lower than the national standard to allow burying. Outside Tohoku, Tokyo will be the first to accept the disaster debris from Tohoku. The Tokyo government plans to accept the total of about 500,000 tonnes of debris. The Metropolitan bureau of environment says "We want to contribute to the recovery and rebuilding of the disaster-affected areas".

Apparently, when the Tokyo Metropolitan government answered questions from the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly on September 28, it was already a done deal. Assemblyman Hirofumi Yanagase, who has been active in alerting the citizens about dangerous radiation levels at sludge plants and waste incinerators in his district in Tokyo, fumes (link is in Japanese):"The government said during the question and answer session in the Assembly on September 28 that the details were still being worked out. But then less than half a day later they announced a concrete plan of accepting 1,000 tonnes of debris from Iwate Prefecture by the middle of November."

NHK also reports that the Tokyo will launch the campaign to invite the 2020 Summer Olympics to Tokyo but with the reduced budget, after the lavish and unsuccessful campaign by Governor Ishihara the last time (for 2016) was heavily criticized. Now Isihara says he will only use 7 billion yen (US$91.5 million) of taxpayers' money instead of 14 billion yen he spent the last time.

Oh and the national government now wants Tokyo and 7 other Prefectures in Kanto and Tohoku (Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, Chiba) to build intermediate storage facilities of highly contaminated soil in their own prefectures, according to Yomiuri Shinbun (9/28/2011). Half of Tohoku and most of Kanto are to have a nuclear waste dump, and Tokyo wants to invite Olympics

The new policy was revealed during the meeting of experts affiliated with the Ministry of the Environment on August 27. So far, the Ministry's policy has been to allow the ashes with 8,000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium and below to be buried, but require the ashes that exceed that level to be stored temporarily while the Ministry decides on the disposal method.

Under the new policy, if radioactive cesium in the ashes exceeds 8,000 becquerels/kg but does not exceed 100,000 becquerels/kg, the ashes are allowed to be buried after they are bound with cement or put in a concrete container. If radioactive cesium exceeds 100,000 becquerels, then the ashes should be buried in the disposal facilities with a roof and/or with the concrete shield.

Radioactive cesium exceeding 8,000 becquerels/kg has been detected from the ashes from burning the regular household garbage in Kanto and Tohoku regions. The Ministry of the Environment has decided to apply the same rule as the disaster debris and allow the ashes to be buried. The municipalities will be able to bury the ashes that they have stored temporarily, but it may be difficult to obtain consent from the residents living near the disposal facilities.

The number "100,000 becquerels/kg" is significant in a sense, as the highest level of radioactive cesium found from ashes after burning the household garbage is 95,300 becquerels/kg in Fukushima Prefecture (link in Japanese). The number is high enough to clear the Fukushima garbage ashes, and it is probably high enough to clear garbage ashes from anywhere else.

Besides, as the NHK article states, even if it exceeds 100,000 becquerels/kg, all they need to do is to bury it in a disposal site with a roof or the concrete shield. This new policy is to be applied to ashes from disaster debris and regular garbage that are radioactive. It's not mentioned in the article but the ashes and slag from the radioactive sewage sludge will be likely to be disposed under the same policy - i.e. burn and bury. (And remember the "mix and match" scheme.)

In the meantime, some garbage incinerators and sludge incinerators at waste processing plants and sewage treatment plants in cities in Kanto have become so radioactive that they have to be shut down. (More later.) The entire country is to become the nuclear waste disposal site, because of one wrecked nuclear power plant. Talk about socializing the cost.

The higher the TFR number, the more the population will grow and expand. On the other hand, a TFR number below 2 kids per woman means the population is shrinking for the next generation. Nuclear weaponeers who know about these things say it is impossible for a society to recover, or grow again, with a TFR below 1.3 kids per woman. In short, that society is doomed. Japan’s TFR plummeted to 1.2 since the detonation of the two 10,000 lb sperm and ovary destroying uranium poison gas bombs in August, 1945.

A few weeks after the atomic bombing, Australian journalist George Weller managed to sneak into occupied Japan and nuked Nagasaki in spite of US Army General Douglas MacArthur’s prohibition. Weller, an experienced war correspondent, was utterly stunned at the extent of the other worldly devastation and killing of the Atomic Bomb. Mr. Weller coined the term “Atomic Plague” which then swept around the world on a wave of revulsion at what the Americans had done. Diplomats and other people politically or militarily in-the-know knew the Japanese were eager to surrender and that President Truman lied in his bull shit speech about the Atomic Bomb “saving American lives” that would be forfeit if the US were to invade Japan.

What’s more, the dominant owners of the NYT, the Sultzberger family, like it that way. The family has had a slash and burn radiation policy ever since Hiroshima in 1945. No Lie was too Big, in fact, the Bigger and more Bizarre the better. Germany’s WWII Fuhrer Adolph Hitler may have coined the concept “The Big Lie;” but, the New York Times spun it out to a degree that would make even Hitler proud.

The Radiation Warfare Committee controlled Manhattan Project to build the Atomic Bomb got its name from its organizer, the Manhattan Engineering District of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Sultzbergers’ NY Times was only too eager to help the fledgling CIA and the US War Department lie about the nuke bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan that incinerated hundreds of thousands of people. Many were literally vaporized into nothingness. The Big Lie Lives On with the NY Times

The coming Fuku Kid Disaster and Fuku Kill Off First and foremost will be the ever nasty New York Times (NYT.) When it comes to something really, vitally important to all our futures, our families and friends, we can always count on the NYT to lie through their teeth for the nuclear industry criminals and mass murderers. That is nothing new for the Times, they always have.

The six devastated US Navy/GE reactors at Fukushima Daiichi finished the Kill Truman ordered 65 years, 7 months, and 6 days later on March 3, 2011. Sayonara, Japan, you are history. “Who’s Next?” Good question. There are 438 big reactors, just stationary nuclear weapons really, in the world. 104 big nuke reactors are in America and many, like the Fuku reactors,  are by the sea due to the exorbitant, one billion gallons a day water demand of the reactors. Even the inland reactors are exquisitely vulnerable to becoming another Fukushima. If any lose electricity and off site feeds, a Fuku type meltdown is guaranteed.

The people in the Japanese NHK TV video below live in Northern Japan. They must evacuate and many are dying. Many won’t leave, preferring Denial as the better course to reality and Evacuation. After all, you can’t see, feel, hear or taste radiation as it liquefies your insides. Any of us could be next.

The US Military and probably Russia’s Military, the former Soviet Union, possess weapons that can accomplish this kind of devastation. They should, at least the US has devoted billions to controlling what the DOD calls “earth processes” for 60 years. That would be your basic hurricanes, tornadoes, rain, drought, earthquakes, tsunamis, rogue waves and volcanoes. Even a medium sized tropical storm, not even big enough to be a hurricane or typhoon, contains as much energy as 10,000 Hiroshima sized Atomic Bombs. If the War Department, later renamed to the Department of Defense to confuse the do-gooders, could control the weather or “Earth Processes” they would control the world. That’s the long held dream of Psychos and control freaks everywhere.

The company emphasised in its submission that it is based on technology that has operated successfully for 30 years in the US in an experimental facility.

Britain's previous attempts to convert plutonium into Mox fuel which could then be burned in conventional reactors have proved disastrous, culminating in the premature closure last year of the £1.34bn Sellafield Mox Plant, which was a commercial and technical failure. Despite the debacle over Mox fuel, however, the NDA and officials with the Department for Energy and Climate Change have advised the Government to build a second Mox fuel plant, for an estimated cost of £3bn, as a way of dealing with the plutonium problem.

This plan would involve the French nuclear company Areva, which is also involved in building a similar Mox operation in the US to deal with its military plutonium stockpile. However, this troubled plan is 11 years behind schedule and between six and 10 times over budget.

The whole plan is moot, because, on the side, the ministry has already told municipalities that they can "mix and match" - burn radioactive debris and sludge with non-radioactive debris and sludge to lower the radiation below whatever the limit the ministry sets, which has been 8,000 becquerels/kg and now 100,000 becquerels/kg if the plan gets an approval from the expert committee. The ministry set the limit for Fukushima Prefecture, then notified other prefectures to "refer to the Ministry's instruction to Fukushima Prefecture and notify the municipalities accordingly".

In June, the ministry announced that the ashes that test up to 8,000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium can be buried in the final disposal facilities. It called for the temporary storage of the ashes that exceed 8,000 becquerels/kg but didn't specify the final disposal procedure. In the base plan announced on August 10, to bury the ashes whose radioactive cesium exceeds 8,000 becquerels/kg, some measures need to be taken to prevent radioactive cesium from making contact with ground water, or to process the runoff appropriately. For the ashes that measure 8,000 to 100,000 becquerels/kg, the plan calls for: 1) processing facilities with roofs; 2) durable containers; 3) mixing the ashes with cement to solidify.

The plan was given on the same day to the ministry's committee of experts to evaluate the safety of disaster debris disposal, and the ministry hopes to finalize the plan before the end of August.

The Ministry of the Environment, which is likely to be selected as the new regulatory authority over the nuclear industry in Japan, is not very known for timely disclosure of information online. This base plan, if it is announced on their site, is buried so well that I can't find it. The latest information on the earthquake/tsunami disaster debris is dated July 28, which specified the "temporary" storage of the ashes that exceed 8,000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium.

It looks like the ministry is simply making this "temporary" storage into permanent.

Hokiaido

Akita

Yamagata

Gunma

For all the other cities and prefectures, residents beware. Beware of the mass media too, who is very quick to mislead by branding the residents as "selfish" and "uncaring" for refusing to burn the radioactive debris. Or firewood. Like a heap of abuse dished out to Kyoto City residents. Glancing through the tweets of people in Japan knowledgeable about waste management, I'm beginning to realize that there is a figurative "waste management village" whose residents are made up of experts, industry people, government officials with vested, common interest in promoting waste processing facilities - just like the "nuclear power plant village" that may or may not be unraveling.

Tokyo

Kanagawa

Toyama

Ishikawa

Yamanashi

Shizuoka

Aichi

Plutonium belongs to the class of elements called transuranic elements whose atomic number is higher than 92, the atomic number of uranium. Essentially all transuranic materials in existence are manmade. The atomic number of plutonium is 94. Plutonium has 15 isotopes with mass numbers ranging from 232 to 246. Isotopes of the same element have the same number of protons in their nuclei but differ by the number of neutrons. Since the chemical characteristics of an element are governed by the number of protons in the nucleus, which equals the number of electrons when the atom is electrically neutral (the usual elemental form at room temperature), all isotopes have nearly the same chemical characteristics. This means that in most cases it is very difficult to separate isotopes from each other by chemical techniques.

Plutonium-239 and plutonium-241 are fissile materials. This means that they can be split by both slow (ideally zero-energy) and fast neutrons into two new nuclei (with the concomitant release of energy) and more neutrons. Each fission of plutonium-239 resulting from a slow neutron absorption results in the production of a little more than two neutrons on the average. If at least one of these neutrons, on average, splits another plutonium nucleus, a sustained chain reaction is achieved.

The even isotopes, plutonium-238, -240, and -242 are not fissile but yet are fissionable–that is, they can only be split by high energy neutrons. Generally, fissionable but non-fissile isotopes cannot sustain chain reactions; plutonium-240 is an exception to that rule. The minimum amount of material necessary to sustain a chain reaction is called the critical mass. A supercritical mass is bigger than a critical mass, and is capable of achieving a growing chain reaction where the amount of energy released increases with time.

The amount of material necessary to achieve a critical mass depends on the geometry and the density of the material, among other factors. The critical mass of a bare sphere of plutonium-239 metal is about 10 kilograms. It can be considerably lowered in various ways. The amount of plutonium used in fission weapons is in the 3 to 5 kilograms range. According to a recent Natural Resources Defense Council report (1), nuclear weapons with a destructive power of 1 kiloton can be built with as little as 1 kilogram of weapon grade plutonium(2). The smallest theoretical critical mass of plutonium-239 is only a few hundred grams.

In contrast to nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors are designed to release energy in a sustained fashion over a long period of time. This means that the chain reaction must be controlled–that is, the number of neutrons produced needs to equal the number of neutrons absorbed. This balance is achieved by ensuring that each fission produces exactly one other fission. All isotopes of plutonium are radioactive, but they have widely varying half-lives. The half-life is the time it takes for half the atoms of an element to decay. For instance, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24, 110 years while plutonium-241 has a half-life of 14.4 years. The various isotopes also have different principal decay modes. The isotopes present in commercial or military plutonium-239 are plutonium-240, -241, and -242. Table 2 shows a summary of the radiological properties of five plutonium isotopes. The isotopes of plutonium that are relevant to the nuclear and commercial industries decay by the emission of alpha particles, beta particles, or spontaneous fission. Gamma radiation, which is penetrating electromagnetic radiation, is often associated with alpha and beta decays.

Table 3 describes the chemical properties of plutonium in air. These properties are important because they affect the safety of storage and of operation during processing of plutonium. The oxidation of plutonium represents a health hazard since the resulting stable compound, plutonium dioxide is in particulate form that can be easily inhaled. It tends to stay in the lungs for long periods, and is also transported to other parts of the body. Ingestion of plutonium is considerably less dangerous since very little is absorbed while the rest passes through the digestive system.

Plutonium-239 is formed in both civilian and military reactors from uranium-238. The subsequent absorption of a neutron by plutonium-239 results in the formation of plutonium-240. Absorption of another neutron by plutonium-240 yields plutonium-241. The higher isotopes are formed in the same way. Since plutonium-239 is the first in a string of plutonium isotopes created from uranium-238 in a reactor, the longer a sample of uranium-238 is irradiated, the greater the percentage of heavier isotopes. Plutonium must be chemically separated from the fission products and remaining uranium in the irradiated reactor fuel. This chemical separation is called reprocessing. Fuel in power reactors is irradiated for longer periods at higher power levels, called high “burn-up”, because it is fuel irradiation that generates the heat required for power production. If the goal is production of plutonium for military purposes then the “burn-up” is kept low so that the plutonium-239 produced is as pure as possible, that is, the formationo of the higher isotopes, particularly plutonium-240, is kept to a minimum. Plutonium has been classified into grades by the US DOE (Department of Energy) as shown in Table 5.

It is important to remember that this classification of plutonium according to grades is somewhat arbitrary. For example, although “fuel grade” and “reactor grade” are less suitable as weapons material than “weapon grade” plutonium, they can also be made into a nuclear weapon, although the yields are less predictable because of unwanted neutrons from spontaneous fission. The ability of countries to build nuclear arsenals from reactor grade plutonium is not just a theoretical construct. It is a proven fact. During a June 27, 1994 press conference, Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary revealed that in 1962 the United States conducted a successful test with “reactor grade” plutonium. All grades of plutonium can be used as weapons of radiological warfare which involve weapons that disperse radioactivity without a nuclear explosion.

Benedict, Manson, Thomas Pigford, and Hans Wolfgang Levi, Nuclear Chemical Engineering, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1981). Wick, OJ, Editor, Plutonium Handbook: A Guide to the Technology, vol I and II, (La Grange Park, Illinois: American Nuclear Society, 1980). Cochran, Thomas B., William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Honig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, Vol I, Natural Resources Defense Council. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1984) Plutonium(IV) oxide is the chemical compound with the formula PuO2. This high melting point solid is a principal compound of plutonium. It can vary in color from yellow to olive green, depending on the particle size, temperature and method of production.[1]

The government and plant operator TEPCO are trumpeting the operation of the circulation cooling system, as if it marks a successful resolution to the disaster. However, radiation continues to leak from the reactors. The longer the circulation cooling system keeps running, the more radioactive waste it will accumulate. It isn't really leading us in the direction we need to go.

It's doubtful that there's even a need to keep pouring water into the No.1 reactor, where nuclear fuel is suspected to have burned through the pressure vessel. Meanwhile, it is necessary to keep cooling the No. 2 and 3 reactors, which are believed to still contain some fuel, but the cooling system itself is unstable. If the fuel were to become overheated again and melt, coming into contact with water and trigger a steam explosion, more radioactive materials will be released.

TEPCO says it is aiming to bring the No. 1, 2 and 3 reactors to cold shutdown by January 2012. Cold shutdown, however, entails bringing the temperature of sound nuclear fuel in pressure vessels below 100 degrees Celsius. It would be one thing to aim for this in April, when the government had yet to confirm that a meltdown had indeed taken place. But what is the point of "aiming for cold shutdown" now, when we know that fuel is no longer sound?

In the days ahead, the storage of enormous quantities of radiation-contaminated waste, including tainted mud resulting from the decontamination process, will become a major problem.

When the Three Mile Island accident took place in 1972, the melted nuclear fuel had stayed within the pressure vessel, making defueling possible. With Fukushima, however, there is a possibility that nuclear fuel has fallen into the ground, in which case it will take 10 or 20 years to recover it. We are now head to head with a situation that mankind has never faced before.