Post by Ex_Nuke_Troop on Apr 9, 2014 5:26:10 GMT
The Bulletin : Tons of radioactive soil, wrapped up in plastic bags
By Laurie Garrett / Foreign Policy Published Feb 21, 2014 at 12:01AM
WASHINGTON — On March 11, 2011, an enormous plate of the Earth’s surface plunged more than 160 feet toward the deep-sea Japan Trench — about the height of a 10-story building — releasing so much energy that, two years later, scientists could still measure a nearly half-degree centigrade temperature increase along the Tohoku-Oki fault. What had been at “sea level” for millennia was, in an instant, plummeting toward the depths.
Forty minutes after the earthquake, towers of water slammed Japan’s Pacific coastline, with the largest wave reaching the Sendai region at a height of 133 feet. Combined, the earthquake and tsunami claimed about 19,000 lives, destroyed or severely damaged nearly 1 million buildings, left 4.4 million households without electricity, and created the nation’s worst catastrophe since World War II.
These events were only the prelude to what has come to be known as the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station, which ignited a series of radiation horrors that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is still struggling to cope with nearly three years later.
More challenges
Today — just a few weeks before the three-year anniversary of the disaster — the radiation problem is not contained in and around the Fukushima plant operated by Tepco, the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Thousands of gallons of radioactive water have leaked into the Pacific, or have been stored in containers that Japanese authorities know will not survive intact for years — much less for the decades of their radioactive timeline. But the water-storage challenge is simply the most public struggle the Japanese government and Tepco are confronting.
They now face a series of radiation challenges that no nation in the world is prepared to cope with — least of all, perhaps, the United States.
In December 2013, I visited Fukushima prefecture, where government-hired contractors were charged with personally bagging 250,000 tons of low-level radioactive topsoil and piling these bags outdoors in 30 locations around the prefecture — and where local citizens were left to ensure that these bags do not break, leak or fall over. Stored atop manmade plateaus built on nearby mountains and around people’s homes and rice fields, the bags are temporary and designed to withstand the environment for five years.
But, then, after that? Therein, as they say, lies the rub.
During my visit, Tokyo Medical University professor Shinzo Kimura, his associate Yukako Komasa, and I piled into a vehicle and headed into the Iwaki City mountains in Fukushima prefecture. We navigated some rough dirt roads until we encountered a large sign in Japanese that read: “Temporary Disposal Area for Contaminated Soil.”
Yoshiro Yanai, whose construction company is under contract with the Japanese government to remove the soil, was ahead of us, leading the way in his truck. Yanai explained that all the soil we drove over was “clean,” meaning it was imported from outside the radioactive zones to make the road. About five minutes into the drive, we pulled up to an almost incomprehensible sight: Crews of construction workers manned 18-wheeler diesel flatbeds mounted with four-story tall cranes, which lifted 40,000 tons of radioactive soil. The cranes moved identical blue plastic bags — each containing one ton of earth — and neatly stacked them, one by one, along the plateau.
The dirt was extracted from radioactive farms and gardens in an area outside the immediate “hot” zone encircling the plant. Workers hauled this soil through the sea-level plains and pine-covered Fukushima foothills and up the mountain, where they ultimately sealed it in the blue “weatherproof” bags guaranteed to hold the contents safely inside for five years. Some of the soil was bagged in 2011 — months after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant — so the clock is already ticking on bag integrity.
The thousands of bags neatly stacked on this plateau will eventually be loaded back onto the trucks and hauled to a permanent burial place — that is, as soon as the Tokyo bosses can figure out where that will even be.
Living alongside the radiation
In total, 250,000 tons of soil are bagged and stacked in 30 locations throughout Fukushima prefecture. But not all the bags are up on a mountain, conveniently removed from the Japanese population. Thousands of bags are in the middle of communities, waiting to be relocated.
One evening in December 2013, an elderly man named Toshio Okoshi showed me around his village in the Shidamyo district of Fukushima. He took me to a vantage point where I could see piles of thousands of blue bags, from village to village, rice field to rice field, home to home.
Upon taking in the sight, I yelped so loud that Okoshi had to adjust his hearing aid. He explained that the region’s village have been abandoned by the young — with elderly like himself left to farm the rice, hoping its radiation levels will be low enough to allow commercial marketing. “Our only hope,” he told me, “is that we will restore farming so that the young will return and bring life back to Shidamyo.”
In Shidamyo, about 140 elderly residents are left to manage 45,000 tons of blue-bagged waste, ensuring that the bags don’t spill or break before they are trucked up the mountain.
Radiation in the Pacific
Though Tepco and the Japanese government have been at pains to downplay the ongoing dangers related to the Fukushima power plant, containment water leaks in October and November 2013 doubled, and oceanographic studies showed that cesium-137, which has a 30-year half-life, has leached into the sea and is being carried on Pacific currents.
On Feb. 8, 2014, Tepco conceded it had grossly understated the levels of strontium-90 in emitted water: The radiation is five times higher than previously stated. A variety of laboratories along the California, Oregon, and Washington coastlines have begun routine testing of Pacific and sea-life samples, looking for cesium-137 and strontium-90. So far, the labs have not found anything dangerous.
The Japanese government and Tepco have considered everything from creating a wall of ice to contain the nuclear plant (to stop the flow of contaminated water) to mass burial of gallons of radioactive water — but concrete plans have yet to be presented that would actually solve the waste problem. In January 2014, Reuters reported that Tepco, desperate to find cleanup workers willing to brave the Fukushima power plant crisis, is recruiting from among the homeless population of Tokyo.
All over the world waste disposal is the primary conundrum facing the nuclear power industry: Though there are more than 400 nuclear plants in some 30 countries, there is no repository anywhere in the world for high-level nuclear waste and few sites or standards apply to lower-level radioactive substances like the soils of Fukushima.
Japan is learning that cleaning up a mess requires moving trash to a dump.
But where does a nation dump hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive trash and millions of gallons of isotope-emitting water?
How would the U.S. fare?
One of the most stunning parts of this trip was that — upon seeing these blue bags piled high and wide — I realized that no country would do better than Japan. And, in fact, many might perform worse. No nation is equipped to handle the human displacement, anxiety, and waste-disposal crisis Japan now faces.
Where in the United States of America would a power company or government authority safely bury 250,000 tons of radioactive soil, millions of gallons of high-radiation water, and the detritus of abandoned homes and farms across thousands of acres of land?
The United States has one deep cavern site outside Carlsbad, N.M., which houses highly radioactive waste from weapons programs. And in parched clay land near Andrews, Texas, a private company buries very low-level waste, such as the uniforms worn by lab technicians. There is no location in America designated to handle the sorts of water, soil and radioactive detritus that Japan is now struggling to cope with.
As the third anniversary of Japan’s greatest post-WWII catastrophe looms, it behooves Americans to pay close attention: Consider the questions that now stymie scientists and government authorities, and think about just how ready and wise we are in the good old USA.
www.bendbulletin.com/home/1810446-151/tons-of-radioactive-soil-wrapped-up-in-plastic#
By Laurie Garrett / Foreign Policy Published Feb 21, 2014 at 12:01AM
WASHINGTON — On March 11, 2011, an enormous plate of the Earth’s surface plunged more than 160 feet toward the deep-sea Japan Trench — about the height of a 10-story building — releasing so much energy that, two years later, scientists could still measure a nearly half-degree centigrade temperature increase along the Tohoku-Oki fault. What had been at “sea level” for millennia was, in an instant, plummeting toward the depths.
Forty minutes after the earthquake, towers of water slammed Japan’s Pacific coastline, with the largest wave reaching the Sendai region at a height of 133 feet. Combined, the earthquake and tsunami claimed about 19,000 lives, destroyed or severely damaged nearly 1 million buildings, left 4.4 million households without electricity, and created the nation’s worst catastrophe since World War II.
These events were only the prelude to what has come to be known as the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station, which ignited a series of radiation horrors that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is still struggling to cope with nearly three years later.
More challenges
Today — just a few weeks before the three-year anniversary of the disaster — the radiation problem is not contained in and around the Fukushima plant operated by Tepco, the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Thousands of gallons of radioactive water have leaked into the Pacific, or have been stored in containers that Japanese authorities know will not survive intact for years — much less for the decades of their radioactive timeline. But the water-storage challenge is simply the most public struggle the Japanese government and Tepco are confronting.
They now face a series of radiation challenges that no nation in the world is prepared to cope with — least of all, perhaps, the United States.
In December 2013, I visited Fukushima prefecture, where government-hired contractors were charged with personally bagging 250,000 tons of low-level radioactive topsoil and piling these bags outdoors in 30 locations around the prefecture — and where local citizens were left to ensure that these bags do not break, leak or fall over. Stored atop manmade plateaus built on nearby mountains and around people’s homes and rice fields, the bags are temporary and designed to withstand the environment for five years.
But, then, after that? Therein, as they say, lies the rub.
During my visit, Tokyo Medical University professor Shinzo Kimura, his associate Yukako Komasa, and I piled into a vehicle and headed into the Iwaki City mountains in Fukushima prefecture. We navigated some rough dirt roads until we encountered a large sign in Japanese that read: “Temporary Disposal Area for Contaminated Soil.”
Yoshiro Yanai, whose construction company is under contract with the Japanese government to remove the soil, was ahead of us, leading the way in his truck. Yanai explained that all the soil we drove over was “clean,” meaning it was imported from outside the radioactive zones to make the road. About five minutes into the drive, we pulled up to an almost incomprehensible sight: Crews of construction workers manned 18-wheeler diesel flatbeds mounted with four-story tall cranes, which lifted 40,000 tons of radioactive soil. The cranes moved identical blue plastic bags — each containing one ton of earth — and neatly stacked them, one by one, along the plateau.
The dirt was extracted from radioactive farms and gardens in an area outside the immediate “hot” zone encircling the plant. Workers hauled this soil through the sea-level plains and pine-covered Fukushima foothills and up the mountain, where they ultimately sealed it in the blue “weatherproof” bags guaranteed to hold the contents safely inside for five years. Some of the soil was bagged in 2011 — months after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant — so the clock is already ticking on bag integrity.
The thousands of bags neatly stacked on this plateau will eventually be loaded back onto the trucks and hauled to a permanent burial place — that is, as soon as the Tokyo bosses can figure out where that will even be.
Living alongside the radiation
In total, 250,000 tons of soil are bagged and stacked in 30 locations throughout Fukushima prefecture. But not all the bags are up on a mountain, conveniently removed from the Japanese population. Thousands of bags are in the middle of communities, waiting to be relocated.
One evening in December 2013, an elderly man named Toshio Okoshi showed me around his village in the Shidamyo district of Fukushima. He took me to a vantage point where I could see piles of thousands of blue bags, from village to village, rice field to rice field, home to home.
Upon taking in the sight, I yelped so loud that Okoshi had to adjust his hearing aid. He explained that the region’s village have been abandoned by the young — with elderly like himself left to farm the rice, hoping its radiation levels will be low enough to allow commercial marketing. “Our only hope,” he told me, “is that we will restore farming so that the young will return and bring life back to Shidamyo.”
In Shidamyo, about 140 elderly residents are left to manage 45,000 tons of blue-bagged waste, ensuring that the bags don’t spill or break before they are trucked up the mountain.
Radiation in the Pacific
Though Tepco and the Japanese government have been at pains to downplay the ongoing dangers related to the Fukushima power plant, containment water leaks in October and November 2013 doubled, and oceanographic studies showed that cesium-137, which has a 30-year half-life, has leached into the sea and is being carried on Pacific currents.
On Feb. 8, 2014, Tepco conceded it had grossly understated the levels of strontium-90 in emitted water: The radiation is five times higher than previously stated. A variety of laboratories along the California, Oregon, and Washington coastlines have begun routine testing of Pacific and sea-life samples, looking for cesium-137 and strontium-90. So far, the labs have not found anything dangerous.
The Japanese government and Tepco have considered everything from creating a wall of ice to contain the nuclear plant (to stop the flow of contaminated water) to mass burial of gallons of radioactive water — but concrete plans have yet to be presented that would actually solve the waste problem. In January 2014, Reuters reported that Tepco, desperate to find cleanup workers willing to brave the Fukushima power plant crisis, is recruiting from among the homeless population of Tokyo.
All over the world waste disposal is the primary conundrum facing the nuclear power industry: Though there are more than 400 nuclear plants in some 30 countries, there is no repository anywhere in the world for high-level nuclear waste and few sites or standards apply to lower-level radioactive substances like the soils of Fukushima.
Japan is learning that cleaning up a mess requires moving trash to a dump.
But where does a nation dump hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive trash and millions of gallons of isotope-emitting water?
How would the U.S. fare?
One of the most stunning parts of this trip was that — upon seeing these blue bags piled high and wide — I realized that no country would do better than Japan. And, in fact, many might perform worse. No nation is equipped to handle the human displacement, anxiety, and waste-disposal crisis Japan now faces.
Where in the United States of America would a power company or government authority safely bury 250,000 tons of radioactive soil, millions of gallons of high-radiation water, and the detritus of abandoned homes and farms across thousands of acres of land?
The United States has one deep cavern site outside Carlsbad, N.M., which houses highly radioactive waste from weapons programs. And in parched clay land near Andrews, Texas, a private company buries very low-level waste, such as the uniforms worn by lab technicians. There is no location in America designated to handle the sorts of water, soil and radioactive detritus that Japan is now struggling to cope with.
As the third anniversary of Japan’s greatest post-WWII catastrophe looms, it behooves Americans to pay close attention: Consider the questions that now stymie scientists and government authorities, and think about just how ready and wise we are in the good old USA.
www.bendbulletin.com/home/1810446-151/tons-of-radioactive-soil-wrapped-up-in-plastic#
so whats happening in the Solomons, is haarp missing its mark?