Harvey Wasserman : Fukushima Continues to Spew its Darkness

House in Fukushima. Image from ABC News.

Still on the brink:
Fukushima continues to spew its darkness

A pool containing many tons of highly radioactive used fuel is suspended 100 feet in the air... Should an earthquake or other trauma knock the pool to the ground, there’s a high likelihood the fuel rods could catch fire.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2013

Radiation leaks, steam releases, disease and death continue to spew from Fukushima and a disaster which is far from over. Its most profound threat to the global ecology -- a spent fuel fire -- is still very much with us.

The latest steam leak has raised fears around the planet. A worst-case scenario of an on-going out-of-control fission reaction was dismissed by the owners, Tokyo Electric, because they didn’t find xenon in the plume. The company says the steam likely came from rain water being vaporized by residual heat in one of  the plant’s stricken reactors.

But independent experts tend to disbelieve anything Tepco says, for good reason. Reactor Units One, Two and Three have exploded at Fukushima despite decades of official assurances that commercial atomic power plants could not explode at all. The company has been unable to clear out enough radioactive debris to allow it to put a cover over the site that might contain further airborne emissions.

Tepco has also been forced to admit that it has been leaking radioactive water into the ocean ever since the disaster began on March 11, 2011. In one instance it admitted to a 90-fold increase of Cesium in a nearby test well over a period of just three days.

Earlier this year a rat ate through electrical cables, shorting out a critical cooling system. When Tepco workers were dispatched to install metal guards to protect the cabling, they managed to short out the system yet again.

Early this month Fukushima’s former chief operator, Masao Yoshida, died of esophogeal cancer at the age of 58. Masao became a hero during the worst of the disaster by standing firm at his on-site command post as multiple explosions rocked the reactor complex. Tepco claimed his ensuing cancer and death were “unlikely” to have been caused by Fukushima’s radiation.

The impact of work in and near the reactors has become a rising concern. Critics have warned that there are not enough skilled technicians willing to sacrifice themselves at the plant. Tepco has worsened the situation by applying to open a number of its shut reactors elsewhere in Japan, straining its already depleted skilled workforce even further.

Meanwhile, a staggering 40 percent rise in thyroid irregularities among young children in the area has caused a deepening concern about widespread health impacts from Fukushima’s fallout within the general public. Because these numbers have come in just two years after the disaster, the percentage of affected children is expected to continue to rise.

And the worst fear of all remains unabated. At Unit Four, which apparently did not actually explode, the building’s structural integrity has been seriously undermined. Debate continues to rage over exactly how this happened.

But there’s no doubt that a pool containing many tons of highly radioactive used fuel is suspended 100 feet in the air, with little left to support the structure. Should an earthquake or other trauma knock the pool to the ground, there’s a high likelihood the fuel rods could catch fire.

In such an event, the radioactive emissions could be catastrophic. Intensely lethal emissions could spew for a very long time, eventually circling the globe many times, wrecking untold havoc.

The Japanese have removed two apparently unused rods from the fuel pool so far. But intense international pressure to clear out the rest of them has thus far been unsuccessful.

So while a depleted, discredited, and disorganized nuclear utility moves to restart its other reactors, its stricken units at Fukushima continue to hold the rest of us at the brink of apocalyptic terror.

This article, first published at www.progressivemagazine.com, was cross-posted to The Rag Blog.

[Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org, along with Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States. His Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Show is at www.prn.fm. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Nuclear Industry Meltdown in Japan, France

Participants hold a traditional "Koinobori" carp-shaped banner for Children's Day during anti-nuke march in Tokyo Saturday, May 5, 2012. Photo by Itsuo Inouye / AP.
Nuclear industry melts in Japan, France;
opposition heats up in United States

This weekend’s message from Japan and France could not be more clear: at nuclear power’s historic core, the collapse has come.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2012

There are zero commercial reactors operating in Japan today. On March 10, 2011, there were 54 licensed to operate, well over 10% percent of the global fleet. But for the first time in 42 years, a country at the core of global reactor electricity is producing none of its own.

Worldwide, there are fewer than 400 operating reactors for the first time since Chernobyl, a quarter-century ago.

And France has replaced a vehemently pro-nuclear premier with the Socialist Francois Hollande, who will almost certainly build no new reactors. For decades France has been the “poster child” of atomic power. But Hollande is likely to follow the major shift in French national opinion away from nuclear power and toward the kind of green-powered transition now redefining German energy supply.

In the United States, a national grassroots movement to stop federal loan guarantees could end new nuclear construction altogether. New official cost estimates of $9.5 to $12 billion per reactor put the technology off-scale for any meaningful competition with renewables and efficiency.

In India, more than 500 women have joined an ongoing hunger strike against construction of reactors at Koodankulam. And in China, more than 30 reactors hang in the balance of a full assessment of the true toll of the Fukushima disaster.

But it seems to have no end. Three melted cores still smolder. New reports from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), confirm that at least one spent fuel pool suspended 100 feet in the air, bearing tons of hugely toxic rods, could crash to the ground with another strong earthquake -- a virtual certainty by most calculations.

Those uncovered fuel rods contain radioactive cesium and other isotopes far beyond what was released at Chernobyl. A fire could render vast stretches of Japan permanently uninhabitable (if they are not already). The death toll could easily claim millions worldwide, including many of us here, where the cloud would come down within a week.

Japan’s total shutdown cuts to the core of the historic industry. The globe’s primary reactor designers, General Electric and Westinghouse, are now primarily Japanese-owned. Pressure vessels, steam generators, and much more of the industry’s vital hardware have long been manufactured in Japan.

But the archipelago’s antinuclear movement also has deep roots. In 1975-6, large, angry crowds I spoke to were already demanding the end of Fukushima and other reactor projects. They warned that all Japanese reactors were vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis, and that disasters on par with what happened at Fukushima were essentially inevitable. Now that it’s happened, the public rage in what has been a traditionally conservative, authoritarian society is almost unfathomable.

Along the way, local governments did win the right (not enjoyed in the United States) to keep shut nearby reactors that were closed for repairs and refueling. On Saturday, May 5, a deep-rooted, highly focused grassroots movement shut the archipelago’s last operating nuke. It’s bound and determined to keep them that way.

As summer air conditioning demand skyrockets, Japan’s Prime Minister will try to prove that atomic power is essential. But an efficiency-oriented public has dealt very well with cutbacks in supply since Fukushima. Each potential restart will have its own dynamic.

Japan’s stunning reality is that its gargantuan capital investment in more than 50 commercial reactors is now dead in the water... and being irradiated by its own deadly fallout. That can only drag the global industry closer to oblivion at a moment when the public’s financial and political commitments to renewables and efficiency are deepening daily.

Likewise the demise of Nikolas Sarkozy. His allies at France’s nuclear-commited utility, EDF, have been Europe’s primary pushers of the “Peaceful Atom.” Now his Socialist rival is running the country, backed by a constituency largely supportive of a green conversion to parallel the one in neighboring Germany.

America’s green activists also want atomic power ended. In Vermont, New Jersey, New York, Florida, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere, escalating grassroots campaigns have put the future of 104 licensed reactors in doubt.

The confrontation may be most immediate at San Onofre, on the Pacific shore between Los Angeles and San Diego. Faulty steam generator tubes have forced two reactors shut. As in Japan, the industry loudly warns of shortages when summer hits. It wants at least one reactor back by June. But experts warn that San Onofre’s design deficiencies threaten the public safety, as does its uninsured vulnerability to earthquakes and tsunamis.

The battle parallels the one over new construction. Already plagued with faulty concrete and design-deficient rebar steel, two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle still await final agreement on federal loan guarantees granted by President Obama last year.

But Progress Energy’s guess that its own double-reactor proposal for Florida’s Levy County could cost a staggering $24 billion casts a long shadow over Vogtle, where tax/ratepayers are already being stuck with huge bills for a project that could be vastly underfunded. A national petition drive has been fired up to stop the guarantees from going through.

And while India’s growing nonviolent army of nuclear opponents vow to fast to the death, the global reactor industry awaits word from China on how many new reactors it thinks it will build. The world will then watch with bated breath as the Middle Kingdom’s own nascent anti-nuclear movement gathers strength in the inevitable race to shut the local reactor before it melts.

But for now, this weekend’s message from Japan and France could not be more clear: at nuclear power’s historic core, the collapse has come. Humankind is running ever-faster toward a green-powered Earth, desperate to win before the next Fukushima strikes.

[Harvey Wassermansoc edits www.nukefree.org. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org. The Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Show airs at www.progressiveradionetwork.com. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Thomas McKelvey Cleaver : Nagasaki and Responding to Calamity

Shinto Shrine in Atomic Ruins, Nagasaki, Japan 1945. Public domain / National Archives / Flickr.
Responding to calamity and
what it says about our character

The people of Nagasaki dedicated their city to promoting international peace and brotherhood.

By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver / The Rag Blog / September 14, 2011

Watching the Tenth Anniversary celebration of national victimhood over the terrorist attacks of 9/11, I had some mixed thoughts. I thought using all this to celebrate and build support for the failed policies of the Bush-Cheney cabal (i.e., our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the aftermath of those attacks was an insult to the dead.

I thought about how societies remember calamities. It's said that how one deals with disaster is a better indicator of character than any other event. If that is true, then Americans beating their breasts about how singularly awful 9/11 was, how singularly different and vastly more important our victimhood is to any other anywhere else ever, clearly demonstrates the shallowness of character much of the rest of the world generally ascribes to us as a people.

I thought of another city that experienced a calamity so great it could only be termed a catastrophe, and what their response was to that event, and what it said about their character.

Sixty-six years ago last month, on August 9, 1945, the city of Nagasaki was hit by the last atomic bomb ever dropped in anger. 96,000 people died in the immediate aftermath, with thousands of others dying over the years that followed. It would be difficult to imagine a worse catastrophe that could happen to a city.

But wait, it gets worse.

The bomb was dropped in desperation by a crew that didn't want to return to base with "unexpended ordnance" aboard, who were desperately afraid that if they didn't drop the thing, they wouldn't be able to get back home. They'd tried bombing two other possible targets, but couldn't comply with the "visual drop only" orders they were operating under.

As it was, they had to make three passes over the city, with the bombardier finally telling the pilot he had "visual contact" at the last moment, which was later exposed as a lie; the bomb was dropped blind by radar fix, a violation of all the rules. "Bock's Car" had to divert from returning to Tinian and land at Okinawa, where the airplane had to be towed off the runway after running out of gas within moments of touchdown.

They really did have to get rid of the extra weight, and there was certainly no way this particular bomb would be abandoned over the open sea.

But wait, it gets worse.

Of all the cities in Japan to bomb, Nagasaki was the last place to consider. For over 300 years, since the first European explorers finally reached Japan, it had been Japan's door to the West, and the most traditionally pro-Western city in the country. It was the city that most opposed the military coup d'etat that took over the Japanese government in the late 1920s, and the city most opposed to the Pacific War.

As a result of the European influence beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, Nagasaki was overwhelmingly Christian. When the Shogunate was imposed in the seventeenth century, Nagasaki and the surrounding communities on Kyushu rebelled. Over 200,000 people where killed in the ensuing civil war, and Christianity was outlawed, with the death penalty for its practice. For the next 200 years, until Japan was forcibly opened to the West in 1854 by Commodore Perry's "black ships," the Christians of Nagasaki and Kyushu practiced an underground religion.

Following the Meiji Restoration in 1880, the official persecution of Christians was ended. Over the next 30 years, the Christians of Nagasaki built the Urakami Catholic Church, which was the largest Christian church in Asia, built entirely by the donations of the parishioners.

"Ground Zero" for the bomb was the bell tower of that church. The tower was the only structure remaining upright afterwards, and is today the site of the Museum of the Atomic Disaster.

How does all that strike you for terrible irony? Is that worse enough?

You'd pretty much figure the citizens of Nagasaki would never forget that one, wouldn't you? They'd probably hate the people responsible, too, right?

Wrong.

Unlike Hiroshima, where an American can still be made to feel guilty by the attitude of the citizens today, Nagasaki made a different choice.

The people of Nagasaki looked at what had happened, and concluded (as Americans did after 9/11): "Never again!" But they made a far different choice in how to achieve that. For the people of Nagasaki, the way to be sure such a terrible event never happened again was to work to promote international peace and brotherhood, and they dedicated their city to that principle.

All kinds of cities have all kinds of dedicated mottos, and most of their citizens never know what they are, or if they do, what they mean. That is certainly true here in America.

In Nagasaki, they know. They practice it every day. In 1964, less than 20 years after the event, wearing the uniform of the armed forces of the country that had committed that act, I was in Nagasaki, along with the rest of the ship's company of the old USS Rustbucket.

The young people of the city came down to the pier where we were docked and waited to meet us as we left the ship, and invited us to allow them to guide us through their city, to go to dinner with them, to even visit their homes (that is an amazing act, that gaijin would be brought into a Japanese home -- they're the most private people on the planet). And they told us why they were doing it.

I don't think I have ever experienced such a truly Christian act in my life

[Thomas McKelvey Cleaver is an accidental native Texan, a journalist, and a produced screenwriter. He has written successful horror movies and articles about Second World War aviation, was a major fundraiser for Obama in 2008, and has been an activist on anti-war, political reform, and environmental issues for almost 50 years. Read more articles by Thomas Cleaver on The Rag Blog.]

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