Playing Pass the Parcel With Fukushima

My wife and I landed at Tokyo Narita Airport at 2:00 p.m. local time on March 11, 2011. We were walking towards baggage claim when the 9.0 Magnitude earthquake hit for six terrifying minutes. We were still in the terminal for the first two of three 7.0+ Magnitude after shock quakes hit. We were in the parking lot for the third as the terminal was evacuated.

We spent the night on a bus and in the terminal until the next day. We were taken to our hotel where we remained for the next five days before we could get a flight home. There were about 60 aftershocks of 4.0 a day and about 6 of 6.0. Our hotel swayed.

While we were in Japan we were misled by the media, the government and business about the extent of the damage and lingering threats. Our families knew the news that we did not find out until our return. The Japanese people were courteous, compassionate, hospitable and helpful. And Japanese culture seemed collectively calm and cool in the midst of this national disaster.

I do not trust the Japenese government nor business nor media to be open and honest about Fukushima.

Disappointing but predicable radiophobia. While everything in the piece may well be true, what's missing is any reference to the infinitesimal risk that such low levels of radiation pose to public or environmental health. Which we know, ironically from 65 years of study of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, exposed to MASSIVELY higher doses, which led to tiny increases in radiogenic diseases. Exposure to massively high levels of radiation, of various types (not all ionizing radiation is the same, another critical detail this piece neglects), raised lifetime cancer mortality rates by less than 1%, and caused no multi-generation genetic damage. These levels are tiny by comparison. Without that context, this piece is unduly alarmist, feeding excessive fear of radiation that does real harm all by itself, as with the Fukushima evacuation. For more, see a piece that ran on this pages in 2013, Fear v. Radiation; the Mismatch http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/opinion/fear-vs-radiation-the-mismatch...

I see no mention here today of what I have been told by friends who have been living in Tokyo for years - that the Japanese government has approved the dumping of 400 tons of radioactive nuclear waste every day in the Pacific ocean over the past two or three years due to the absence of adequate storage facilities at Fukushima. Perhaps I have been misinformed on this issue, but if it is true, then why hasn't this been mentioned in this article? I'm told that millions of sardines are lying dead on the shores of Japan and that sea birds are falling from the skies dead from starvation for lack of small fish in the sea. I'm also told that this is also occurring along the Pacific Coast of America as well, and that the radioactivity from the nuclear waste dumping is reaching the Atlantic through the Bering Sea and the Panama Canal. Is this just misguided rumor? I'm told that the wild salmon is showing up with radioactivity now. This, if factual, is devastating!

As a pipe fitter/welder I have worked in shutdowns at nuclear plants and have picked up some "zoomies" as they are affectionately called in the process. I have a half life of my own. I would love to be a proponent of nuclear, but when you look at recorded history that goes back...what +/-2000 yrs, and you consider that the waste which no one is dealing with may last many more thousands of years, well, it takes the term hubris to a new and unimaginable level!

What we need is a sacrificial country, where we could dig a really big hole and dump all our waste. But what leader would allow that? Kim Jong Un seems to be vying for the part.

This editorial points to yet another example of the technological challenges of conventional nuclear power generation. The disaster of Fukushima was entirely man made, not the result of a natural disaster and the same will be true when the next 3 Mile Island occurs here, perhaps this time with more far reaching consequences. We run around, hair on fire, over the prospect of terrorists gaining access to nuclear materials when all they need do is launch a cyber attack from a laptop. Partially disabling a operational plant could easily result in a prolonged release of nuclear material and in a densely populated area, would make 911 look like a car accident. Nuclear power plants are inherently unstable, requiring a complex system of constant support to cool, store and manage large quantities of lethal materials. Plant design requires near perfect management of facilities within their design lifetime, yet all over the country plants are granted extensions well beyond those limits. 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are the tip of a massive iceberg that demands action and Indian Point is the poster plant for high risk operations. In this Presidential election cycle it is an issue worthy of discussion with policy implications rivaling any other existential question of our time.

What most of the press and media don't mention-maybe don't know-is that the level of radioactivity in most of Fukushima is lower than in non irradiated communities. The issue of radiation is a political football, now, and the people of Japan are treating the residents of the town like they were guilty-as if they were carriers of a sickness like Leprosy,(Hansen's disease), when actually, the town is cleaner than more than 90% of towns anywhere else!
Fukushima is now a part of the anti or pro nuclear debate in Japan. So fearful of nuclear power generation are many in Japan, that they are ready to dig up and melt sub sea methane ice-which would speed global warming-rather than give up hydrocarbons which they have little of. Japanese media tell the people nothing about the realities of Fukushima and so they deal with it the same way they dealt with survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:they segregate them and consider them personally and physically "tainted". Most Americans would be happy to live in a community so well cared for and radiologically and physically clean as Fukushima is now!
Well, in America we have our gun fixation-the Japanese have their terror of all things "radioactive". Many might try and hide from the sun and demand why government hadn't warned them about it, if the media admitted it was thermonuclear and was irradiating them daily with all kinds of radioactive particles!

SAD & TRAGIC As the nuclear accident in Fukushima may be, it is also ironic in the extreme that the nation that is the only one to have survived nuclear bombs is awash with radioactive waste. My opinion is that the US needs to transition to small indestructible reactors designed by Taylor Wilson, the prodigy who built his first reactor in his parent's garage at age 14. In this case if we want the best and brights we need to listen to his recommendations and encourage safe nuclear power plants worldwide. Meanwhile, I think the US could bring the most radioactive waste here and bury it safely until there are enough safe reactors to burn the fuel with only low level radioactive waste left. That would be great for our sustainable energy programs and good for the security of the US. With thousands of tons of radioactive waste being shlepped around the country, it is only a matter of time till a terrorist sticks a knife into an unsecured plastic storage bag to help him or herself to all the atomic material wanted. Nobody will act on these radical ideas. So the best alternative is to get the US and UN along with allies to develop a program for Japan to store its nuclear waste safely. There are hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste either being shifted around the county or are awaiting decontamination at the unusable Fukushima power plant.

Bill Gates, disc operating system pioneer, on nuclear power:

http://terrapower.com/

"TerraPower® is a nuclear energy technology company based in Bellevue, Washington. At our core, we are working to raise living standards globally. The essential factor? Energy. In 2006, Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries decided that the private sector needed to take action. They believed that business interests could develop a scalable, sustainable, low-carbon and cost-competitive energy source that would allow all nations to quicken their pace of economic development and reduce poverty. TerraPower’s goal is to provide the world with a more affordable, secure and environmentally friendly form of nuclear energy."

---end quote

Probably raising the living standards of folks whose job it is to move bags of nuclear waste around all day. Amiright? Seriously, I'm sure TerraPower(R) is focusing on Next Generation Nuclear Power as a Breakthrough Energy(TM). Not old nuclear power. So we have that going for us. Which is nice.

I was 6 when A-bombshelped end WW2, and I recall how GE and other corporations filled magazine and newspapers with articles about peacetime nuclear power. It was safe. It would make power meters antiques as power became too cheap to monitor. Nowhere that I recall was there mention of decommissioning the plants, which are radioactive-sponges after 3 or 4 decades, regulating ground water radiation leakage, plutonium's more intensely dangerous nature, or the methods and costs of such storage, regulation, and insurance. I was excited by free energy, confident in government and industry controls over radiative material. It was a brave new world.
And cheap, too.
And a fake, a way of using a wartime project paid for by taxpayers to be used by private enterprise to build taxpayer-subsidized nuclear plants, all to enrich a set of corporations. The only results? Not free, safe, clean energy --the terrible dangers of enrichment of plutonium and the securing of corporate profits at the cost of a safe future... or perhaps any future. We won the war with atomic energy, but lost peace and security with energy plants based on atomic power. Nuclear power bombed.

This is the perfect reason for no nuclear plants in the world. Humans will always find a way to botch using the technology...

Faust comes to mind.

The US has the same problem, on a smaller scale. Yucca Mountain was supposed to be the safe storage, but its use was blocked. Waste continues to be stored at the power plants that have produced it. The waste from San Onofre in Southern California continues to sit there and will sit there as the plant is decommissioned and long after, in the center of one of the largest population concentrations in the US, tens of millions of people.

This report is truly alarming, but not surprising - It may be preposterous to dump high level waste 10 km offshore, but the Japanese government can not be trusted to do what is right. To consider the vast majority of Japans 56 nuclear reactors are situated on the coasts of Japan, and tsunamis hit Japan every 15-20 years, its only a matter of time before the next disaster. Where I surfed in Wakayama, a huge reactor with pathetic 20 foot wall, on the Japan Sea coast in Fukui, many reactors - All disasters waiting to occur.

This is the reason that nuclear industry cannot underwrite the necessary insurance to cover accidents and only operate covered with government insurance.

Fossil fuels with the threat of global climate annihilation is the most dangerous energy source. So we are left with wind power that is the least expensive clean and safe energy source, solar that is becoming increasing less expensive, geothermal and hydropower that have long been economically competitive where available.

Converting our economy to 100% clean renewable energy cannot come soon enough.

Well, I suppose the Japanese can make a deal with the Russians to transport and dump the waste from Fukushima to Chernobyl....paying them a hefty rent for the space. Then we can do the same thing with what's left of NYC when Indian Point finally blows.

Wouldn't we all like to hear this question posed to the potential next President of the USA.

The USA has more nuclear power plants than any other country in the world but has no facility for the permanent disposal of the radioactive wastes produced at these plants. Sweden and Finland have such facilities and are developing them further.

What would you do to provide such facilities in the United States? You do know something about radioactive wastes, don't you?

Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Dual citizen - USA SE

It seems governmental ineptitude is a global epidemic and idiocracy is here.

Japanese Seismologists,Volcanologists and Geophysicists still oppose restart of Nuclear Plants.
But Nuclear industry and Japan's Nuclear Regulation Committee ignore their warning.

Stopgap Evacuation plans is full of impracticability.

Nuclear industry and Advertising industry spend immense money to forge optimistic atmosphere at Japan social.

Nuclear policy of Japan disregard safety for immediate profit as before.

Nuclear policy of Japan will repeat same failure.

Use of Nuclear plants of the country where Huge Natural Disaster occur should be banned internationally.

"So for now the radioactive waste is either lying around or being moved around."

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Abe Govt of Japan still insist that "Radiation leaks at Fukushima is controlled".
but some independent media have reported uncontrollable Radioactive contamination and effluence of contaminated water to the Pacific Ocean.

Abe Govt has deceived the world
for Olympics or Nuclear industry of Japan.

Nuclear policy of Japan is still "dominant political-economic relationships".

Not only Nuclear power,
Abe Govt who disregard the Fundamental Human Rights and Freedom of expression
is dangerous regime.

Despite all of this and more regarding Fukushima, the Nuclear Lobby continues telling us how green the process is and how safe it is.

The very day of this article (March 7, 2016) elsewhere the NYT tells of of Indian Point, which is just upriver from New York City:
"Poor maintenance at Indian Point has caused groundwater radiation levels to soar to 740 times federal limits, yet the commission just handed Entergy a five-year delay of the deadline for testing for possible leaks from the No. 2 reactor — the suspected source of this latest leak of radioactive contamination. The commission admits that tritium in the groundwater will reach the Hudson River and that the radioactive isotope, for which there is no safe dose, can cause cancer.

Indian Point also has about 1,500 tons of radioactive waste in the form of spent fuel rods packed into pools. These, too, are leaking radiological contamination that violates the Clean Water Act. In addition, the plant’s cooling system has devastating effects on the Hudson’s ecology, killing more than a billion fish, eggs and larvae each year as it draws millions of gallons of water per day from the river."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/opinion/indian-point-past-its-expirati...

When are we going to stop pretending that there is such a thing as a safe Nuclear Plant? Every DoE site is a Superfund site and no state is willing to take even a low level waste facility.

In submitting a comment at 03:28 the Submit System got hung up with the result that the final lines of the submission were lost. I use this 2d submission to add that information but more important to point to the two excellent comments from Verifieds sfdphd and RC since they note as I do the appalling failure on the part of the USA and Japan to provide full information on the situations in these countries and to "things never said".

sfdphd notes that it took a Nobel Prize winner and a decision on the part of the Nobel Awards committee to select a writer of non-fiction to give us information about Chernobyl sorely lacking in more official reports. Read that book.

RC points to the absence of first class reporting on the radioactive wastes spread around Fukushima and to the absence of a concerted effort on the part of leading nuclear-power nations, USA included, to "address the problems in this article". I add to that my disappointment that the author did not provide better technical information or links to such information.

Therefore in my first submission I provide links to information about the facilities already in operation and/or ready for final decision in Sweden and Finland. Examination of these documents will show you, New York Times reader, how far behind Japan and the USA are.

Also strange that such an important article has only 2 comments.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Dual citizen-USA-SE

This article is important chiefly in illustrating that yet another country, Japan, does not have a well developed plan for dealing with the various kinds of radioactive waste that are produced by every nuclear power plant and with the particular problems arising from accidents.

The author provides no link to a source providing technical information about these wastes. Commenter RC Verified MN points to the remarkable failure of nuclear nations, the USA included to provide information. The author might at the very least compared the Fukushima wastes with the kinds of wastes stored at the Forsmark facility in Forsmark, Sweden, north of Stockholm. I visited Forsmark many years ago in order to provide an introduction in Environmental Geology 2d edition (out of print).
Readers might be interested in learning what Sweden and Finland have done in dramatic contrast with the USA.
Finland chose an island Okiluoto off the west coast:
http://www.nature.com/news/why-finland-now-leads-the-world-in-nuclear-wa...
http://users.abo.fi/tlonnrot/hyvaa-nucl-waste-manag.pdf
Sweden chose Forsmark on the other side of
http://powerplants.vattenfall.com/forsmark

There are 439 nuclear power plants around the world, 100 here in the US. Japan has 48 plants, none currently in operation. France has 58 plants that generate 75% of its electricity. China has 30 and will add 24 more. Germany has 9 but is phasing them out, as is Switzerland. India has 21 plants, Pakistan 3. Nuclear power is illegal in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta and Portugal.

As Mr. Kirby points out, Japan has no viable secure long-term storage for waste disposal. The Fukushima incident alone overwhelmed Japan's nuclear waste capacity. And Japan has deep economic resources and advanced technological capacity. Imagine how less advanced nations -- India, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary -- would respond or how their growing nuclear waste is secured. And how they'll afford the costs of clean-up. We haven't even figured it out yet.

There's little reason to think the political regimes of these nations would act responsibly or be held accountable in the face of overwhelming consequences. Turkey and Egypt, both politically unstable, are currently building 6 nuclear plants between them. How long before terrorists figure out they don't need a bomb to cripple a country? In Spain, a passenger train runs a few hundred feet next to a nuclear plant and the chain link fence protecting it.

No one wins nuclear roulette. Just fiddling while a time bomb ticks.

Fukushima is the worst environmental disaster humankind has caused -- so far -- and it's ongoing, and there's nothing we can do about it. And if we don't move quickly to decommission and mothball the world's many other nuclear plants -- especially the coastal ones -- soon we will have more Fukushimas. The reason is climate change. You don't need a tsunami to swamp backup generators. A good hurricane or storm surge will do the trick. All these plants are stuffed with still-radioactive "spent" fuel that has nowhere to go. Stop cooling it, and the result is disaster. Permanent disaster.

Excellent article.
(Cue the nuclear-industry lackeys with their practiced rebuttals).

Seems all we hear is how none of the hazards predicted from Chernobyl & Fukushima ever materialized, like we might as well be bathing in those holding tanks sipping strontium martinis & nobody would get cancer from nuclear power plants.

How much radiological contamination & spent fuel waste is enough already?

When Indian Point finally vents its plume down & up the Hudson & across Westchester county, & they try to put all that real estate into those garbage bags & look for a neighborhood to truck it through & a backyard to bury it in, then we may find out.

Nuclear is not the answer.

Accidents and taxpayer cleanup is an inevitable consequence of nuclear power. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when. Five meltdowns in 40 years with a about 500 plants operating worldwide. NP is not cost effective even without accidents. Enormous government subsidies let it survive. The power companies can't afford to pay for these cleanups, the cost gets passed on to the taxpayer wherever accidents happen, Japan, the US or Russia. Power companies like nuclear power because their rates are based on capital investment and nuclear power has high capital costs. And the worst thing about nuclear power is that the plants produce large amounts of Plutonium that is easy to chemically separate (no centrifuges or big plants) and is great for making bombs.

Thank you, Mr. Kirby, for this article. It's been needed for a long time.

We've been waiting decades on a solution for perpetual toxic nuclear waste storage, monitoring, upkeep, and security. We still don't have it.

Nuclear "power" is a brief flash-in-the-pan byproduct of nuclear waste, which lasts basically forever. It makes much less sense than if, say, all homes were built without bathrooms...think about it.

Does anyone know whether the Olympics will still be held in Japan in 2020?

This is jaw-dropping. Moving plastic bags full of toxic radioactive waste around? Willy-nilly, round and round? Even considering burying it on the sea floor just a few kilometeres away from the coast in an earthquake prone area? Having no waste facilities for 50+ reactors?

Humans are so.....stupid.

Why isn't this the number one priority to solve on a world-wide scale with people from all over trying to find a solution? This is not just Japan's problem. It's the world's problem.

Better reporting in the U.S. is also needed. Some electric power companies are
making token investment in solar, so they can say in their monthly newsletters
sent to customers, that they 'like' solar. At the same time, they quietly lobby state legislatures with big bucks. for some help delaying the inevitable transition to renewable energy production. Stockholders are not happy when
they see their dividend checks reduced, due to their companies having to purchase customer-generated power.

The customer ought to be able to choose between solar panels on his house with the ability to sell power back to the company, or the possibility of having to abandon the house after a nuclear facility disaster.

The cost of installing solar panels goes down, almost monthly, while the cost of
dealing with nuclear waste goes up, and up, and up, almost daily- even if there
is no disaster.

im not sure the good ole usa is any more prepared.Antartica ?

This is an important article with many excellent points. Unfortunately, the underlying assumption that the problem can be solved by shipping waste out of Japan follows the flawed logic that safe repositories are available. In the 60 years of commercial nuclear power there have been many ideas, plans and attempts to construct high-level waste repositories. Few have progressed far and all have failed. Engineering hubris is a long way from demonstrated results. It is about more than just people not wanting waste in the backyards. The US, Germany, Japan, and others have all spent billions on the problem and failed. Geologic change appears slow, but the decay of long-loved, dangerous isotopes moves more slowly and defies human containment.

As bad a spectacle as this makes, the story of evasion of responsibility, denial of the reality of the situation, and half-measures is familiar from other nuclear incidents in other countries, such as Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. It makes me, at least, believe that the owners of these facilities and the government agencies which are supposed to control them, know perfectly well that there is no real way to provide safe, economically viable nuclear power; and that they are just milking the situation for all they can get before people finally realize the truth and shut these facilities down once and for all.

This disaster is only getting worse. Nuclear power is a curse, not a blessing.

..To say nothing of the millions of gallons of radioactive water sitting in tanks on the Fukushima Daiichi plant itself. Leaks are common - and guess where that water goes? Yep- straight into the Pacific Ocean, as it has been doing for 5 years.

The Japanese government is allowing the radioactive pollution of the largest body of water on Earth.

The people who profited from building this plant should be paying for its clean up.

Mr. Kirby's article on Fukushima highlights the mess we've made with nuclear power and radioactive wastes. Would you like to live in a 'decontaminated' Fukushima? Hot spots and particles of the various hundreds of radionuclides that result from fissioning uranium are still present. Particles of plutonium are radioactive for 240,000 to 480,000 years (hazardous life = 10-20 half-lives), with only one MILLIONTH of a gram the lung cancer causing dose (454 grams in one pound=454 MILLION potential lung cancers, if plutonium inhaled in small enough particles 2 deposit in the sacs of the lung). The cores of the 3 units that exploded & melted down into the earth will be dispersing radioactivity & radionuclides into the soil and water under the plant for centuries. 300-400 TONS of radioactive water have been flowing out into the Pacific since the accident occurred in March 2011. The Japanese govt figured out how to make everything seem logically 'safe' (but immoral). Just raise the acceptable background level of radiation exposure in Fukushima to 2000 millirems per year, when it should be 100 millirems at sea level (200 millirems in mountainous areas like Colorado). Never mind that that would raise expected cancer rates to 1 out of 6 people getting cancer over a lifetime. But then you could open shuttered nuclear plants across Japan, that the Japanese people do NOT want. & force people with nowhere to go to move back into the Fukushima area, subsidies for evacuees end March 2017.

Another issue is the mass amounts of contaminated water used to cool and what they do with this material.(hopefully not being released into the Pacific)

Lots of criticism of Japan's nuclear waste disposal process... which begs the question: In a similar situation, is the U.S. prepared to do better? Or even as well?

I think the analysis here is spot-on. However, one of the solutions offered - namely asking a foreign country or countries to agree to store Japanese nuclear waste (and a higher-level one at that!) on its or their soil - seems wildly unrealistic. If you think about it, the only countries with enough sparsely populated land and a reasonable level of nuclear sophistication to accommodate such waste are probably US, Russia and China (and possibly Canada and Australia as well). I find it difficult to imagine any one of these countries agreeing to sacrifice a part of their land and expose its people to potential nuclear contamination just to make life easier for the feckless Japanese nuclear industry complex. Even if that was well-funded, I think that would rightly trigger a violent popular opposition. No sane political leader would or should take such risks.

And what kind of example does the USA provide after President Obama froze further development of Yucca Mountain in 2011 without an alternative plan? Aren't we doing much the same thing as Japan, storing nuclear waste at reactors all over the country. Plus we have the tremendous radiation deposits of Savannah River and Hanford gradually leaking into groundwater. Etc.

Doesn't France recycle almost all of its nuclear waste? Don't Thorium nuclear plants burn uranium waste as well as non-toxic Thorium (they are also self-limiting and can't breed plutonium.
Failure is not an option here. And the writer should present failures as the only options either.

True. I think the quality of the facilities was not only old but second rate in the first place, because the first Japanese nuke facilities were models the US pushed on Japan because we had newer and better ones for ourselves.

Big Nuke is the same everywhere.
Even if one could make a "safe nuke" bean counters and bureaucrats would find a way to mess it up.
Another nuke should never be suit.

There is a simple solution to the low level waste problem that experts have suggested from the start. Haul it out to sea and dump it. The dilution effect is enormous. The main component -- cesium, since the Iodine has long since decayed -- is not something that accumulates in ocean life and it will decay in a modest time.

An unwillingness to do recognize that one must do something and that this IS a reasonable alternative has led to the dismal shuffling state described in the article.

There IS an alternative to long-term storage of the more serious high level waste. Ship it to France to be reprocessed. France has an excellent record with nuclear power and that should be considered by other countries as we seek energy sources that do not contribute to global warming.

Meanwhile, here in the US we have a staggering number of spent fuel rods being stored in precisely the kinds of water pools that were the primary source of concern at Fukushima because zealots oppose putting them in Yucca mountain. One has two choices. Either dispose of this spent fuel once and for all at Yucca mountain OR begin a new nuclear power effort with better designed plants and start reprocessing the fuel.

This is a good article as it shows the almost impossible task of dealing with radioactive soil. It is hard to believe that the housing isn't somewhat contaminated too. What the article fails to mentions is that the reactor is still not contained and sending plumes of radiation into the air and water to the West Coast of North America. And yet ours and other governments pursue this dangerous source of energy.
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2015/06/17/massive-radiation-plume-from...

I just read Voices of Chernobyl, where they also described the absurdity of moving around sacks of contaminated nuclear waste. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima are sites of human tragedy.

The nuclear waste problem and climate change that is denied and/or ignored until it is too late are two examples of our stupidity as a species that will likely lead to our demise. As if war and genocide weren't bad enough...

Better reporting on Fukushima is needed. Examples include the extent of contamination of the food supply due to radiation from Fukushima entering the Pacific ocean; the potential for mixing of contamination with other oceans; and whether radionuclides from Fukushima which entered the Pacific ocean (or were distributed atmospherically) include long-lived and/or hazardous isotopes of strontium, uranium, plutonium, etc. It is hard to understand why a concerted effort by all major nations has not been mounted to address the problems identified in this article.