Worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl

An accident occurs in Japan’s nuclear industry; those in charge fail to deal with it well; people suffer; those in charge lie to the public; finally they admit it and apologize profusely.

An accident occurs in Japan’s nuclear industry; those in charge fail to deal with it well; people suffer; those in charge lie to the public; finally they admit it and apologize profusely. Then the cycle is repeated.

Radiation of 1,800 millisieverts per hour – enough to kill an exposed person in four hours – was detected near the bottom of one storage tank on Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co, also known as Tepco, said.

Radiation near a tank holding highly contaminated water at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has spiked 18-fold, the plant’s operator said on Sunday, highlighting the struggle to bring the crisis under control after more than two years.

Of course, “nuclear meltdown” itself was denied for months. Even up to May 2011, while the foreign media had long labeled the Fukushima disaster “a triple meltdown,” Tepco — and the national government — stonewalled, insisting that meltdown had not been confirmed.

Then finally, just a week before members of an International Atomic Energy Agency investigation team were to arrive in Japan, the government and Tepco admitted the facts — with the usual ritual apologies.

The current leakage problems at the Fukushima plant are even more baffling to those of us blessed with a memory. That’s because, in December 2011, the government announced that the plant had reached “a state of cold shutdown.” Normally, that means radiation releases are under control and the temperature of its nuclear fuel is consistently below boiling point. Great! Mission accomplished! Let’s go home.

Unfortunately, though, if Tepco stops pumping coolant into the reactors to keep their temperature down, then they won’t be in “a state of cold shutdown” anymore.

And thanks to the haphazard cleanup at the plant, even just a few rats can jeopardize that shutdown. Yes, rats — not Tepco executives, but real furry rodents.

An August 22 readings measured radiation of 100 millisieverts per hour at the same tank. Japanese law has set an annual radiation exposure safety threshold of 50 millisieverts for nuclear plant workers during normal hours.

Last month, Tepco revealed that water from the tank was leaking. Japan’s nuclear regulator later raised the severity of the leak from a level 1 “anomaly” to a level 3 “serious incident” on an international scale for radiation releases.

The Fukushima Daiichi power plant north of Tokyo was devastated by a tsunami on March 11, 2011 that resulted in fuel-rod meltdowns at three reactors, radioactive contamination of the air, sea and food and the evacuation of 160,000 people.

It sparked the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl a quarter of a century earlier.

While there were no new leaks found at the tank, a Tepco spokesman said another leak had been detected from a pipe connecting two other tanks nearby.

“We have not confirmed fresh leakage from the tank and water levels inside the tank has not changed,” the Tepco spokesman said, “We are investigating the cause.”

Tepco said the radiation measured was beta rays, which would be easier to protect against than gamma rays.

The Tepco spokesman also said the higher level of radiation from the latest reading was partly because investigators had used a measuring instrument capable of registering greater amounts of radiation.

Instruments used previously had only been capable of measuring radiation up to 100 millisieverts, but the new instruments were able to measure up to 10,000 millisieverts.

Radiation of 220 millisieverts was also recorded near an adjacent storage tank, where a reading of 70 had been registered last month.

Radiation of 230 millisieverts was detected from the new leak from the pipe connecting two nearby tanks, a new measurement of 70 was taken from another, separate storage tank.

Those tanks are built of steel plates stuck together by bolts – the same structure as the tank that was found last month to have leaked 300 tons of highly toxic water.

With no one seeming to know how to bring the crisis to an end, Tepco said last week it would invite foreign decommissioning experts to advise it on how to deal with the highly radioactive water leaking from the site.

Japan has also signaled it might dip into a $3.6 billion emergency reserve fund to help pay for the clean-up of a situation the chief cabinet secretary has described as “deplorable”.

Its nuclear regulator has also expressed fear that the disaster was beyond Tepco’s ability to cope in some respects.

Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida visited Chernobyl in Ukraine, the site of the 1986 disaster, hoping to apply lessons learned there to Fukushima.

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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