the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami Friday, a second explosion has hit a Japanese nuclear plant. Monday’s explosion, caused by a hydrogen buildup, blew the roof off a containment building at Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor 3, two days after a blast hit reactor 1. Eleven people were injured in the blast.
Officials say the reactor core inside was undamaged, but now a third reactor at the plant has lost its cooling system, and news agencies are reporting a meltdown of the fuel rods cannot be ruled out.
While Japanese officials are playing down any health risk, Pentagon officials reported Sunday helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates, suggesting widening environmental contamination. And the U.S. Navy moved one of its aircraft carriers from the area after detecting low-level radiation 100 miles offshore. The New York Times reports radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from the area around the plant. At least 22 people have tested positive for radiation exposure, with the number expected to rise.
Technicians have been battling to cool reactors at the plant since Friday. They’re using an untested method of pouring in a mixture of seawater and boric acid. Re-establishing normal cooling of the reactors would require restoring electric power, which was cut in the earthquake and tsunami and now may require plant technicians working in areas that have become highly contaminated with radioactivity.
The New York Times reports, quote, “In a country where memories of a nuclear horror of a different sort in the last days of World War II weigh heavily on the national psyche and national politics, the impact of continued venting of long-lasting radioactivity from the plants is hard to overstate.”
The latest one is the threatening of meltdown by nuclear reactor 2 at Fukushima 1 site. So, this is the third reactor that’s going to be in a very critical situation. All of the fuel rods seems to be out of water, and they are pouring in seawater, but they couldn’t detect how much water they’ve put in, in the beginning, and now they said it’s going in, but still there is a lot of—the whole rod is exposed. And the latest news is that they found some radioactive materials, like—they didn’t say the name, but I feel it’s like cesium—around the site. So, there must be melting going on inside the reactor.
Harvey Wasserman talking:
It means that these fuel rods, superheated fuel rods, could melt if they are exposed to water, which they’re trying to pour water in there. It could create radioactive steam, conceivably blow off the containment and result in another Chernobyl and a horrific, horrendous release of radiation that could, and in fact would, come to the United States within a week or so, as the Chernobyl radiation came to California within 10 days. This is about as bad as it gets. And we are not 100 percent sure we’re getting fully accurate information. We only know that the worst case scenario is very much a possibility. There are 10 reactors at the Fukushima site—two separate sites, one with six reactors and one with four. And the fact that a U.S. aircraft carrier has detected significant radiation 60 miles away is very much a dangerous sign. It means that radiation releases are ongoing and probably will only get worse.
Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the energy industry, speaking with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press said their nuke plants can withstand the maximum credible earthquake.
Well, that’s what he’s paid to say. That’s exactly what they said about Fukushima. Harvey Wasserman spoke at the Kashiwazaki plant, which, less than five years ago, was also hit by a huge earthquake, and seven reactors shut there. The people of Japan were repeatedly assured that this could not happen. Those reactors in Japan, and the ones in United States, are designed to withstand a 7.5-Richter earthquake, and this is a 9.0, which is a significantly higher impact than what they’re designed to withstand. We’re also seeing pressures inside these reactor pressure vessels and containment domes that are in excess of design capacity. The nuclear industry is defending a product that cannot withstand Mother Nature, both in the United States and Japan.
You have to remember that the Japanese industry is highly advanced. Both Westinghouse and General Electric, the two major purveyors of nuclear plants in the United States, are now owned by Japanese companies. This is not the Soviet Union. This is a highly advanced country that cannot cope with nuclear power plants that have been—sustained damage that was predicted. We predicted that these nuclear plants would be hit by earthquakes and by tsunamis, and the Japanese government and the nuclear industry laughed it off, just as Mr. Fertel has done yesterday. Every nuclear plant in the United States is susceptible to this kind of damage and this kind of disaster, and it’s time that they be shut, in any kind of prudent mindset that will protect the people of this country and our economy, by the way, as we’re going to see what’s happening to the Japanese economy.
Kevin Kamps talking:
the cores of at least three reactors now at Fukushima Daiichi are uncovered from water, and so, therefore, a meltdown is likely underway at three reactors. Something that has not gotten much mention yet are the pools of high-level radioactive waste at these very same reactors, which also need cooling. They need electricity to cool, to circulate the water with circulation pumps. And each of the—well, two of these three reactors have suffered explosions, as your guests may have seen online in videos. And the pools that hold the high-level radioactive waste are located above, just slightly above, and to the right of the reactors. So, our hope and our prayer at this point is that not only the reactor itself, the containment around the reactor, but also the pools, which contain massive amounts of radioactivity, have somehow remained intact. That’s what the officials are saying. As Harvey said, we don’t know whether to believe them or not.
In the pools, you have a lot of radioactive waste, which contains a lot of hazardous radioactivity. And now, because those explosions took place at two of those reactors, that is open to the sky at this point. There is no roof or walls over the pools. And the hope is—but we have indications that at Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, that the pool is experiencing difficulty in cooling the waste, because electricity has been lost. They lost the electricity grid with the earthquake. They lost the emergency diesel generators with the tsunami. The backup batteries only had a life of four to eight hours. That’s long passed.
And I just wanted to comment on what Fertel of Nuclear Energy Institute said—”Oh, we have great earthquake regulations in the United States.” The reactor that got me involved in this issue, in southwest Michigan, Palisades nuclear power plant, has been storing its high-level radioactive waste in outdoor silos of concrete and steel on the beach of Lake Michigan, a hundred yards from the water, in violation of NRC earthquake regulations since 1993. An NRC whistleblower in Chicago called attention to this problem in 1994. Nothing’s been done. There are two dozen containers, dry casks, of high-level radioactive waste next to the drinking water supply for 40 million people downstream in the U.S. and Canada, in violation of NRC earthquake regulations.
And another reactor in the U.S., Fermi 2, also in Michigan, just another example of how safety is being just thrown to the wind, the emergency diesel generators, which have proven to be such a central component of this disaster in Japan, because they were located vulnerable to the tsunami—what appears to have happened is the tsunami flooded the basements where these emergency diesel generator connections are at. So, even though they brought in mobile units, new emergency diesel generators, to hook them up to run the safety systems, the basements were flooded, where they needed to do the hook-up. Well, at Fermi 2 in Michigan, again, the same exact design as the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, the emergency diesel generators in the year 2006 were discovered to have not been operable for 20 years. From 1986 to 2006, the emergency diesel generators at Fermi 2 in Michigan would not have operated if called upon. So, thank God that they were not needed during that 20-year period of time, or we could have lost Detroit, or we could have lost Toledo, or we could have lost Windsor, Ontario. That’s the level of safety with the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry in this country.
If the U.S. Navy, which is a hundred miles away, has to move an aircraft carrier away from the shore because the radioactivity levels are of concern, then all of these assurances by Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government that everything’s really OK, a statement made two days ago by the chief spokesman for the government, the secretary of the cabinet, was that the evacuation is underway, and the wind is blowing out to sea, so everything is really going to be OK. Well, we have indications that the wind direction may change towards the mainland of Japan. So, those false assurances are not helping the situation.
And another question that needs to be asked is, well, if the wind is blowing out to sea, what’s in that direction? Well, the United States is in that direction. And we see, again, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission saying no harmful level of radioactivity could reach the United States. While we’re in the middle of this crisis, a new reactor is now melting down. How did they determine that the containments are going to hold? How did they determine that the radioactivity will not blow in large quantities to the United States?
Arnie Gundersen talking:
When the reactor shuts down, what that means is that the uranium atom doesn’t split anymore. But these pieces that are left behind are still radioactive, and they generate about five percent of the reactor’s heat. And you’ve got to dump that heat for as long as a year or two or three. So, what’s happened is that there has been no way to remove that heat, and that’s caused the nuclear fuel to hit 2,200 degrees. At that point, the nuclear fuel begins to suck up the oxygen atoms in water. Water is H2O. And that gives off hydrogen gas. So the hydrogen explosions that we’re seeing at two of these reactors are an indication that the water is being stripped of its oxygen and creating hydrogen. So, the cores are uncovered, and when the cores are uncovered, unfortunately, that’s what happens. Now, the problem in the long haul is that now that these cores have been uncovered and there’s no way to cool them, they will have to continuously vent these containments. And as the Times said, you’re not going to get back into these villages in the next week or two. It could easily be months, if not years, before these villages can be inhabited again.
It’s too early to tell, but as your previous speaker said, you know, they tested—they talk about 160 people that have been contaminated. That’s all they’ve tested. Basically, everything they’re testing is coming up contaminated in that inner couple of miles around the plant. You’ve got radiation being detected 60 miles to the north in a Navy helicopter, a hundred miles to the east on a Navy aircraft carrier. So, it’s not clear to me that that cloud is not looping around and affecting Japan. And, of course, I think the worst case, as Mr. Kamps suggested, is that the fuel pools on these reactors, that sit very high, and they’re designed just like the Vermont Yankee one, if the fuel pools are not cooled, they will melt down, in which case we’re going to have Chernobyl on steroids.
Switzerland, they’ve suspended the approvals process for three nuclear power stations, so safety standards can be revisited after the crisis in Japan. The German government, facing pressure to reverse its plan to extend the life of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors, as domestic opponents of atomic power took Japan’s worsening nuclear crisis as validation of their views.
Harvey Wasserman talking:
we’re facing in the Congress pressure from the Obama administration and from supporters of the nuclear industry to give them $36 billion in loan guarantees to build still more nuclear plants. This is something that really has to be stopped, because we’ve seen in Japan—and both Kevin and I have been there, and we’ve seen the kinds of things that the industry has said, the kind of safety that they claim that they can deliver—that these are false promises. And I tell you that the Japanese industry assured the Japanese public that Fukushima—and there are 55 reactors in Japan, all of which are on earthquake faults and near the ocean. The Japanese industry assured the Japanese public that these reactors could withstand exactly these kinds of events. This is not a surprise, what’s happened at Fukushima. This was predicted. We’ve predicted similar things here in the United States, especially at those reactors in California. They are going for license extension at Diablo Canyon. This is unconscionable, especially in light of what’s happened here.
So these are tangible things that are happening. These demonstrations around the world will certainly escalate, because we’ve seen now that the nuclear industry cannot be trusted, and this technology simply does not belong on this planet.
None of the reactors in the United States are insured. None of the reactors in the United States are insured beyond $12.4 billion. If such an accident happened here, the burden, the economic burden, will fall directly on the taxpayers and on the victims, not on the owners of the plants.
Discussion with Yurika Ayukawa, Harvey Wasserman, Kevin Kamps, Arnie Gundersen.
Yurika Ayukawa, Professor of Climate, Energy, and Environment at Chiba University of Commerce in Japan. She is formerly with the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center.
Harvey Wasserman, longtime anti-nuclear activist and the editor of nukefree.org. He is also a senior adviser to GreenPeace USA and the author of the book SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth.
Kevin Kamps, specialist in nuclear waste at the nuclear watchdog, Beyond Nuclear. Last year he was in Japan assessing the state of its nuclear facilities.
Arnie Gundersen, nuclear industry executive for many years before blowing the whistle on the company he worked for in 1990, when he found inappropriately stored radioactive material. He is now chief engineer at Fairewinds Associates.
– from democracynow.org