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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

Half life of xenon-131m is about 12 days. The measurement of density of radioactive materials in the air inside the Reactor 2 Containment Vessel was delayed because there was water in the temporary sampling instrument that TEPCO installed outside the CV. It looks like they decided to measure the water anyway, as well as the air. According to the measurement, the air is more radioactive than the water inside the Containment Vessel, but less radioactive than the air inside the Reactor 1 CV.

So the melted fuel is probably not even inside the Containment Vessel in Reactor 2 either. But what's with krypton and xenon? I also read a tweet by one of the workers at the plant who said there is still radioactive iodine being released, even though TEPCO's monitoring says iodine-131 is not detected at the plant any more. From TEPCO's handout for the press on August 10:

Place: Audio Conference Call via FTS Conferencing. The USA toll- free, dial-in number is 1-866-659-0537 and the pass code is 9933701. Status: Open to the public, but without a public comment period. Background: The Advisory Board was established under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000 to advise the President on a variety of policy and technical functions required to implement and effectively manage the new compensation program. Key functions of the Advisory Board include providing advice on the development of probability of causation guidelines, which have been promulgated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a final rule; advice on methods of dose reconstruction, which have also been promulgated by HHS as a final rule; advice on the scientific validity and quality of dose estimation and reconstruction efforts being performed for purposes of the compensation program; and advice on petitions to add classes of workers to the Special Exposure Cohort (SEC).

In December 2000, the President delegated responsibility for funding, staffing, and operating the Advisory Board to HHS, which subsequently delegated this authority to the CDC. NIOSH implements this responsibility for CDC. The charter was issued on August 3, 2001, renewed at appropriate intervals, most recently, August 3, 2009, and will expire on August 3, 2011. Purpose: This Advisory Board is charged with a) Providing advice to the Secretary, HHS, on the development of guidelines under Executive Order 13179; b) providing advice to the Secretary, HHS, on the scientific validity and quality of dose reconstruction efforts performed for this program; and c) upon request by the Secretary, HHS, advising the Secretary on whether there is a class of employees at any Department of Energy facility who were exposed to radiation but for whom it is not feasible to estimate their radiation dose, and on whether there is reasonable likelihood that such radiation doses may have endangered the health of members of this class.

Matters To Be Discussed: The agenda for the conference call includes: HHS Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to Amending 42 CFR Part 81 (to add Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia as a ``radiogenic cancer'' for the determination of probability of causation under Subpart B of EEOICPA); NIOSH SEC Petition Evaluation for Ames Laboratory (Ames, Iowa) and General Electric Company (Evendale, Ohio); NIOSH 10-mkYear Review of Its Division of Compensation Analysis and Support (DCAS) Program; Subcommittee and Work Group Updates; DCAS SEC Petition Evaluations Update for the August 2011 Advisory Board Meeting; and Board Correspondence.

Why on earth would anyone choose to work at what’s left of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power station? The job description probably goes something like this: - must spend day in full body suit, gloves, thick rubber boots and full-facial mask

- must endure extremely high temperatures in aforementioned suits - must work on badly damaged site containing the remains of 4 crippled nuclear reactors

Employees are under strict instructions not to speak to journalists – and supervisors from their various employers keep an active eye on them when they return to Iwaki in the evening. We were thrown out of one hotel when we had the audacity to approach a group of men employed to clear rubble from the site. Yet there were others who wanted to talk – albeit anonymously. Their working conditions I asked? Terrible, they said: “a burning-hell”, “terrifying” and “very troubling” – phrases I recorded in my notebook. But I wasn’t getting any closer to answering my question – why work there?

Breaking News: High level of radiation is making hydrogen from H2O, Fukushima Diary by Mochizuki, September 26, 2011:

These are the tonight’s tweets of actual Fukushima worker called Happy20790 I managed to come back safely today. We couldn’t work at reactor 1 today, again. Last week, they said they detected 4% of hydrogen but it turned out to be over 100%. The current measurement tool is to detected only flammable gas, but Tepco says probably it is all hydrogen. [...] We would have been all dead if we cut of the pipe [reportedly using blow torches]. Unbelievable story, but as our original schedule, we didn’t plan to check the presence of flammable gas. The process was added the day before the day. It’s so scary. [...] [T]hen we are going to inject nitrogen to cut out to pipes. but normal air contains 18% of oxygen, which is enough to cause a hydrogen explosion even without fire. It’s so scary. Injecting nitrogen may also cause lack of oxygen. [...] It’s probably that high radiation is producing hydrogen out of H2O. [...] From his valuable statements, we can tell the hydrogen is still being produced by the very high radiation hitting H2O in the reactor. Nobody has seen it by their own eyes, but the melted fuel rods must be very active still. TEPCO: It May Be 100% Hydrogen Gas Inside the Pipe Connecting to Reactor I Containment Vessel, EX-SKF, September 24, 2011:

Soon after Japan's triple disaster, I suggested that an official cover-up of a nuclear-weapons program hidden inside the Fukushima No.1 plant was delaying the effort to contain the reactor meltdowns. Soon after the tsunami struck, the Tokyo Electric Power Company reported that only three reactors had been generating electricity on the afternoon of March 11.. (According to the initial report, these were the older GE-built reactors 1,2 and 6.). Yet overheating at five of the plant's six reactors indicated that two additional reactors had also been operating (the newer and more advanced Nos. 3 and 4, built by Toshiba and Hitachi). The only plausible purpose of such unscheduled operation is uranium enrichment toward the production of nuclear warhead

On my subsequent sojourns in Japan, other suspicious activities also pointed to a high-level cover-up, including systematic undercounts of radiation levels, inexplicable damage to thousands of imported dosimeters, armed anti-terrorism police aboard trains and inside the dead zone, the jamming of international phone calls, homing devices installed in the GPS of rented cars, and warning visits to contacts by government agents discouraging cooperation with independent investigations. These aggressive infringements on civil liberties cannot be shrugged off as an overreaction to a civil disaster but must have been invoked on grounds of national security.

One telltale sign of high-level interference was the refusal by science equipment manufacturers to sell isotope chromatography devices to non-governmental customers, even to organizations ready to pay $170,000 in cash for a single unit. These sensitive instruments can detect the presence of specific isotopes, for example cesium-137 and strontium-90. Whether uranium was being enriched at Fukushima could be determined by the ratio of isotopes from enriched weapons-grade fissile material versus residues from less concentrated fuel rods.

What is actually going to take place at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, where word is that the four reactors that were crippled in the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami will eventually be decommissioned? The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) defines "decommissioning" as the process of removing spent fuel from reactors and dismantling all facilities. Ultimately, the site of a decommissioned reactor is meant to be reverted into a vacant lot.

In 1996, the then Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) -- now the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) -- finished decommissioning its Japan Power Demonstration Reactor. The decommissioning process of the Tokai Nuclear Power Plant in the Ibaraki Prefecture village of Tokai began in 1998 and is set to end in fiscal 2020, while the No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear reactors at the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant in the Shizuoka Prefecture city of Omaezaki are slated for decommissioning by fiscal 2036. Around the world, only around 15 nuclear reactors have thus far been dismantled.

The standard decommissioning process entails six major steps: 1. Remove spent fuel rods, 2. Remove radioactive materials that have become affixed to reactor pipes and containers, 3. Wait for radiation levels to go down with time, 4. Dismantle reactors and other internal vessels and pipes, 5. Dismantle the reactor buildings, and 6. Make the site into a vacant lot.

Radioactive substances from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant have now been confirmed in all prefectures, including Uruma, Okinawa Prefecture, about 1,700 kilometers from the plant, according to the science ministry. The ministry said it concluded the radioactive substances came from the stricken nuclear plant because, in all cases, they contained cesium-134, which has short half-life of two years. Before the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, radioactive substance were barely detectable in most areas.

the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's survey results released on Nov. 25 showed that fallout from the Fukushima plant has spread across Japan. The survey covered the cumulative densities of radioactive substances in dust that fell into receptacles during the four months from March through June. Figures were not available for Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, where the measurement equipment was rendered inoperable by the March 11 disaster. One measurement station was used for each of the other 45 prefectures. The highest combined cumulative density of radioactive cesium-134 and cesium-137 was found in Hitachinaka, Ibaraki Prefecture, at 40,801 becquerels per square meter. That was followed by 22,570 becquerels per square meter in Yamagata, the capital of Yamagata Prefecture, and 17,354 becquerels per square meter in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward.

The current air radiation level in Ibaraki Prefecture is about 0.14 microsievert per hour, equivalent to an annual dose of about 1 millisievert, the safety limit for exposure under normal time international standards. Large amounts of radioactive dust fell in Tokyo, but a separate survey has detected relatively low accumulations of cesium in the soil. "Tokyo has smaller soil surfaces than other prefectures, but road and concrete surfaces are less prone to fixate cesium deposits, which were probably diffused by the wind and rain," a ministry official explained.

Teeth and toenails falling off and clumps of hair coming off, she reports in her blog. She doesn't seem to care any more if people dismiss her as fabricating the story, and just tells as a matter of fact what's been happening to her and her husband, probably both in their early 40s. They live in Minami Soma City in Fukushima Prefecture, within 25 kilometers from the wrecked plant. The district she and husband live have somehow escaped the designation of any "evacuation zone", even though she says the radiation is just as high or higher.

From the entry on 1/2/2012:Went to see the dentist on duty for the holidays, as I just couldn't stand the pain of my "dens caninus" tooth which was all exposed to the nerve.However, no matter how I explained to the dentist, he kept insisting that it would never go bad like this in such a short period of time (3 months).When I told him that my dental treatment had been completed before March 11, he didn't believe it. He just said "It's not possible".He said this could only happen if one didn't brush one's teeth for 2 to 3 years.I simply lost interest in trying to explain. My husband was there, and he tried to tell him, but he shut up when the doctor said "I only accept objective data."Until this summer, my teeth were healthy. My teeth were sturdy. Until this summer.

From the entry on 12/31/2011, on her friend's hair:A very good friend of mine since high school just dropped by to say hello. We occasionally talked over the phone about my head (balding and hair falling off) and her condition. She's 42 years old.She came wearing a wig. When she took it out, I had no words to say.She evacuated [after the accident] to the inland area near the Fukushima-Miyagi border. But when the reactors were exploding and when the vent was being done, she was right near by [in Minami Soma].

After drilling a hole in the containment vessel of Fukushima reactor 2, Tepco cannot find the fuel. As AP notes: The steam-blurred photos taken by remote control Thursday found none of the reactor’s melted fuel …. The photos also showed inner wall of the container heavily deteriorated after 10 months of exposure to high temperature and humidity, Matsumoto said.

TEPCO workers inserted the endoscope — an industrial version of the kind of endoscope doctors use — through a hole in the beaker-shaped container at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant’s No. 2 reactor …. The probe failed to find the water surface, which indicate the water sits at lower-than-expected levels inside the primary containment vessel and questions the accuracy of the current water monitors, Matsumoto said.

And while cold shutdown means that the water inside the reactors is below the boiling point, CNN reports: Massive steam and water drops made it difficult to get a clear vision…. Given that steam forms when water boils, this is an indication that the reactor is not in cold shutdow

Information from Iwakami Yasumi's USTREAM channel netcasting the workshop of an Osaka citizens' group "Kansai network to stop the disaster-debris acceptance" with a panel of experts including European experts.One Japanese expert, Hiromitsu Ino, said a Containment Vessel at Fukushima II (Daini) is broken, and they are trying to repair it. It was probably caused by the earthquake, not tsunami.

The workshop is on-going at this link: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iwj-osaka1#utm_campaign=t.co&utm_source=8481429&utm_medium=socialHiromitsu Ino is professor emeritus at Tokyo University. His area of specialty is metallic materials science. He is the head of the Group of Concerned Scientists and Engineers Calling for the Closure of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant.

I still remember a tweet last summer (I think) saying an acquaintance fleeing from the area near Fukushima II Nuke Plant right after the earthquake saw a smoke coming out of one of the reactor buildings (there are 4). Fukushima II, unlike Fukushima I, has 4 Mark-II type boiling water reactors built by Toshiba and Hitachi.

This is an estimation of Asahi newspaper so it is not trustworthy enough. However, it would be some kind milestone to judge something. One of the propaganda mass media – Asahi newspaper – yet tried to estimate the total amount of leakage of strontium. They are based on the Tepco’s press release. They assumed it only leaked from reactor 2 in April and from reactor 3 in May for some reason. Also, they ignored the strontium from the fall-out as well. However, it turned out to be as bad as the worst historical sea contamination of Sellafield in 1970′s, which was about 500 trillion Bq. Probably this “500 trillion Bq of leakage” is a false data as well. Even Asahi newspaper warns about the biological concentration in the sea. They requires radiation measuring of the sea to be conducted as soon as possible.

A whistle-blower of Tepco leaked the actual situation of Fukushima plant. He left his comments on a Japanese forum. Here are the messages.

Boring survey around reactor 2 is coming to the climax. As a result, the announcement of the government and Tepco has to be denied. If it’s soft material, they can do horizontal boring with such a weak equipment (like the top picture ) but when it comes to the concrete of the reactor building it’s impossible. They need to do boring with a foreign heavy equipment at an angle. They do boring to reach to under the container vessel. (like the bottom 2 pictures)

When they do boring where they don’t need to take a sample they drill roughly with this green rotary diamond bit but the dust is lethal because it’s too radioactive. When they need to take a sample, they change the diamond bit to hole saw type of bit. However, diamond is weak for the heat so when it’s hotter than 500℃ they use the standard type of the tungsten carbide instead.    The bottom 3 pictures are the samples taken.

"Absolutely no progress is being made" towards the final resolution of the crisis, Suzuki told reporters at a Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan news conference on Dec. 15. Suzuki, 55, worked for a Toshiba Corp. subsidiary as a general laborer there from July 13 to Aug. 22, documenting sloppy repair work, companies including plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) playing fast and loose with their workers' radiation doses, and a marked concern for appearances over the safety of employees or the public.

For example, the no-entry zones around the plant -- the 20-kilometer radius exclusion zone and the extension covering most of the village of Iitate and other municipalities -- have more to do with convenience that actual safety, Suzuki says. "(Nuclear) technology experts I've spoken to say that there are people living in areas where no one should be. It's almost as though they're living inside a nuclear plant," says Suzuki. Based on this and his own radiation readings, he believes the 80-kilometer-radius evacuation advisory issued by the United States government after the meltdowns was "about right," adding that the government probably decided on the current no-go zones to avoid the immense task of evacuating larger cities like Iwaki and Fukushima.

The situation at the plant itself is no better, where he says much of the work is simply "for show," fraught with corporate jealousies and secretiveness and "completely different" from the "all-Japan" cooperative effort being presented by the government.

Since a tsunami and earthquake destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant last March, radioactive cesium has consistently been found in 60 to 80 per cent of Japanese fishing catches each month tested by Japan’s Fisheries Agency.

In November, 65 per cent of the catches tested positive for cesium (a radioactive material created by nuclear reactors), according to a Gazette analysis of data on the fisheries agency’s website

In November, 18 per cent of cod exceeded a new radiation ceiling for food to be implemented in Japan in April – along with 21 per cent of eel, 22 per cent of sole and 33 per cent of seawee

The Japanese government feared that millions of Tokyoites might have to be evacuated during the worst of last year's nuclear crisis, but kept the scenario secret to avoid panic in some of the world's most crowded urban areas, according to an internal report. The 15-page report, by the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission, was delivered to the then-Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, two weeks after the 11 March earthquake and tsunami triggered the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

It warned that if the situation spiralled out of control, compulsory or voluntary evacuation orders would have to be issued to residents living within 250 kilometres (155 miles) of the damaged facility, a radius that would have included the Tokyo metropolitan area that is home to around 30 million people. The directive would also have covered several large cities to the north and west of the plant, including Sendai. Some of the areas would be contaminated for "several decades", the report warned. Last May, Fukushima's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), admitted that uranium fuel inside three of the plant's reactors had melted down in the early days after disaster struck. A series of hydrogen explosions had showered thousands of square miles of land and sea with radioactive substances but officials from the government and Tepco repeatedly denied the meltdown scenario.

Mr Kan and his government insisted throughout March and April that the nuclear crisis was being contained and ignored calls to widen the evacuation area. But after he left office, the Prime Minister admitted in a newspaper interview that he feared the Fukushima disaster would leave the capital uninhabitable, and that evacuating it would have been "impossible". He said the "spine-chilling thought" of a deserted capital convinced him to scrap nuclear power.

During the 1970s and 1980s, at the peak of the nuclear reactor construction, organized groups of protestors mounted dozens of anti-nuke campaigns. They were called Chicken Littles, the establishment media generally ignored their concerns, and the nuclear industry trotted out numerous scientists and engineers from their payrolls to declare nuclear energy to be safe, clean, and inexpensive energy that could reduce America’s dependence upon foreign oil. Workers at nuclear plants are highly trained, probably far more than workers in any other industry; operating systems are closely regulated and monitored. However, problems caused by human negligence, manufacturing defects, and natural disasters have plagued the nuclear power industry for its six decades. It isn’t alerts like what happened at San Onofre that are the problem; it’s the level 3 (site area emergencies) and level 4 (general site emergencies) disasters. There have been 99 major disasters, 56 of them in the U.S., since 1952, according to a study conducted by Benjamin K. Sovacool Director of the Energy Justice Program at Institute for Energy and Environment  One-third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.

At Windscale in northwest England, fire destroyed the core, releasing significant amounts of Iodine-131. At Rocky Flats near Denver, radioactive plutonium and tritium leaked into the environment several times over a two decade period. At Church Rock, New Mexico, more than 90 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Rio Puerco, directly affecting the Navajo nation. In the grounds of central and northeastern Pennsylvania, in addition to the release of radioactive Cesium-137 and Iodine-121, an excessive level of Strontium-90 was released during the Three Mile Island (TMI) meltdown in 1979, the same year as the Church Rock disaster. To keep waste tanks from overflowing with radioactive waste, the plant’s operator dumped several thousand gallons of radioactive waste into the Susquehanna River. An independent study by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina revealed the incidence of lung cancer and leukemia downwind of the TMI meltdown within six years of the meltdown was two to ten times that of the rest of the region.

Although nuclear plant security is designed to protect against significant and extended forms of terrorism, the NRC believes as many as one-fourth of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants may need upgrades to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters, according to an Associated Press investigation. About 20 percent of the world’s 442 nuclear plants are built in earthquake zones, according to data compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The NRC has determined that the leading U.S. plants in the Eastern Coast in danger of being compromised by an earthquake are in the extended metropolitan areas of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chattanooga. Tenn. The highest risk, however, may be California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, both built near major fault lines. Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, was even built by workers who misinterpreted the blueprints.