Fukushima radiation leaks are poisoning soil and oceans

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12 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2013 The crisis at Fukushima Dai’ichi, the crippled nuclear power facility that was severely damaged by an M 9.0 megath­ rust quake and 40-foot tsunami in March 2011, is deepening. Every living thing in the Northern Hemisphere, if not the entire planet, is in peril from radioactive contami­ nation. It is clear that the steadily deterio­ rating situation is out of control, and those responsible are in way over their heads, coming up with one knee-jerk response af­ ter the other, which often brings more harm than good.

Radioactive wastewater has been hem­ orrhaging from the facility daily for 2 ½ years. It is pouring out of storage tanks and buildings and into the sea at a phenomenal rate. In August, officials from TEPCO, the company that is presiding over the cascad­ ing catastrophe, admitted that 300 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from one of its hastily and poorly built on-site storage tanks. In fact, that much is being released into the ocean on a daily basis! The tanks are used to contain two kinds of wastewater: (1) the millions of gallons used to cool Units 1, 2, and 3, which melted down within days after the accident and the extreme­ ly hot spent fuel rods lying in pools; (2) groundwater, which is flowing through the basements of the irradiated containment buildings.

TEPCO constructed the tanks in miserly fashion, having only bolted rather than welded them together. Consequently, they are anything but watertight, and the company, clueless as usual, has no idea from where ex­ actly the leaks are coming among its 1000 tanks, which hold an alarming 430,000 tons of poisoned water. Part of the difficulty is the deadly level of radiation all around the facility, which prevents engineers and workers from examining the problem up close and getting an accurate assessment of what is going on.

The groundwater flushing through the containment buildings is due to their having been heavily damaged by the shaking from the earthquake, so it is routinely entering through numerous conduits—ruptured pipes, trenches, and cracked foundations. The water is com­ ing into contact with irradiated objects everywhere and becoming contaminated. TEPCO’s woefully inadequate decontamination system filters only about 100 tons of water per day, with 300 running through the complex and out into the Pacific.

In order to block the groundwater from reaching the sea, the company is going to build a “frozen wall” at taxpayers’ expense, adding to the nine-trillion-yen bail­ out it has already received. A chemical solution will be injected into the coastline embankment in an effort to solidify it. Independent nuclear engineers suggested the move immediately after the earthquake, but the skin­ flints did not want to spend the money for fear of putting off their investors.

Over the last 31 months, this deliberate contamination of the ocean now amounts to 280,000 tons of radioac­ tive water. The marine ecosystem is being poisoned with tritium by as much as 20 to 40 trillion Bequerels, along with iodine, cesium, strontium, americium, and other dangerous radioisotopes. They are steadily bioac­ cumulating and biomagnifying through the food web, both terrestrial and aquatic. As a result, the Japanese fishing industry has been destroyed, suffering several billion yen in economic losses. In the first year of the disaster, oceanographers found that all bottom-feeding fish off the Japanese coast consistently showed high counts of cesium-137, which concentrates in the mus­ cles. The contamination began to spread immediately across the Pacific Ocean.

The hydrogen explosions released a radioactive plume that blew with the prevailing winds. The fallout rained down on the U.S. West Coast, and then washed into the sea. As a result, the giant kelp forests off the California coast showed high iodine-131 levels two weeks later. This undoubtedly concentrated in the thyroid glands of the fish that fed off the kelp.

Also full of cesium are top predators such as salmon and albacore and bluefin tuna. Yet, the U.S. government is issuing no warnings against eating irradiated seafood. More alarming are the fish on the West Coast found bleeding from the gills, bellies, and eyeballs, which are showing obvious signs of radiation sickness. The geographic scope of the contamination is enor­ mous. There is a debris field from the tsunami roughly the size of Texas floating in the Pacific in radioactive seawater. It includes people’s personal possessions and the detritus of capitalist civilization as well as a lot of hazardous materials. Some of it has already reached the Pacific Northwest Coast. Observers have reported a frightening scarcity of seabirds, fish, and healthy marine mammals. Instead they’ve spotted whales suf­ fering from hideous tumors. With many species being overfished, other forms of industrial pollution intensify­ ing, and seawater warming and acidifying from climate change, the marine environment is in a steep and rapid decline, and the ocean appears to be dying. All of the buildings and ventilation stacks in the Fu­ kushima complex have suffered structural damage from the quake and are in danger of collapse if there is an­ other severe one. On Oct. 25, Northern Japan experi­ enced a significant M 7.1 in the subduction zone off of its coast. TEPCO’s on-site cameras showed the entire complex shaking; there was a mild one-foot tsunami, and employees were evacuated. More aftershocks were predicted. The ground under the facility is becoming more and more unstable and subject to subsidence and liquefaction of soils made soggy by groundwater. Japan has been battered by 27 storms this year, so saturated soils add to the instability.

Clean-up efforts at the site have amounted to a series of futile stopgap measures. For instance, the ruined, rickety reactor buildings have been wrapped in Kevlar shrink wrap in a pathetic attempt to reinforce and pre­ vent them from crumbling. This does nothing to keep radiation from escaping from the triple meltdowns. Of greatest immediate concern is the spent fuel rod pool above Unit #4, whose structural integrity has been (Above) Nurses check children who live in vicinity of Fukushima reactors for radiation. severely compromised with a concrete wall buckling and on the verge of collapse. Plus, it experienced a hy­ drogen explosion, loss of coolant, and subsequent zir­ conium fire.

TEPCO is planning to begin the removal of over 1300 heavy and unwieldy fuel rods, weighing 2/3 ton each, to another pool in November. Ordinarily, when rods are removed from a cooling pool, it is done with a crane guided by a computer that knows down to the millime­ ter where they are located. Those technologies were de­ stroyed in the accident, so the operation will have to be done manually.

TEPCO has erected a mobile crane above Unit #4, and the spent fuel rods will be pulled from their racks and inserted one by one into a heavy steel chamber while the assemblies are still under water, and then removed from the building. This game of radioactive pick-up sticks by remote control is extremely risky. One false move on the part of the operator could result in the zirconium cladding being exposed to oxygen and catching fire or the fuel heating up, reaching criticality and setting off an unstoppable chain reaction.

The situation is even more precarious because the racks and rods have become brittle and bent due to loss of coolant during the accident and corrosion from saline seawater that was used for emergency cooling. Stress and heavy radiation exposures among the workers will add to the challenge.

All of northern Japan has been contaminated by this horror, and is uninhabitable. All attempts at decontami­ nation are a cruel joke. The air, water, soil, crops, and seafood have been poisoned beyond redemption, and the land should be abandoned. The body burden of the people is increasing daily with the ceaseless ingestion and inhalation of radionuclides and repeated bombard­ ment of their bodies’ cells with ionizing radiation. Chil­ dren are the most vulnerable. With the clean-up and decommissioning of Fukushima expected to take well over 40 years, the nightmare will continue well into the next generation. There seems to be no end in sight, and we may anticipate that things will only get worse if we do not stand up and fight back.

We must counter the lies and cover-ups from the indus­ try, government, and apologists in the scientific commu­ nity who keep telling us that nukes are harmless, and accidents rare. Nuclear power is a horrible perversion of human knowledge, and all humankind should rue the day scientists ever engaged in the Faustian bargain of splitting the atom. The crime against nature and human­ (continued on page 11, in “Bay Area Rapid Transit workers settle strike”)

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All of northern Japan has been contaminated. Fukushima clean-up is expected to take 40 years.