Fukushima and its Long Time Threats – PRN Radio Panel

 



Original Source: Progressive Community Hour PRN Radio Dec 16^th, 2013

http://prn.fm/progressive-commentary-hour-121613/

Special broadcast on the conditions at Fukushima and its present and long-term threats with host Gary Null, and experts Arne Gunderson, Helen Caldicott, & Harvey Wasserman

Arne Gundersen is founding chief engineer of Fairewinds Energy Education, a non profit organization dedicated to educating the public about nuclear power and other energy issues. In the past he was an energy advisor with 39-years of nuclear power engineering experience and a former nuclear industry senior vice president. During his industry career, Arne managed and coordinated projects at 70-nuclear power plants around the country. Now an independent nuclear engineering and safety expert, Arne has provided testimony on nuclear operations, reliability, safety, and radiation issues to the NRC, Congressional and State Legislatures, and Government Agencies and Officials throughout the US, Canada, and internationally. In 2008, he was appointed by the Vermont Senate President to be the first Chair of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant Oversight Panel.He is regarded as one of the leading nuclear experts who is conveying the truth about the dangers of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants and the global threats from the on-going release of radiation. His website is http://www.fairewinds.org/

Dr. Helen Caldicott is perhaps the single most articulate and passionate advocate of citizen action to counter the nuclear and environmental crises. She has a medical degree from the University of Adelaide and was a pediatric instructor Harvard Medical School until 1980 when she resigned to work full time on the prevention of nuclear war. She co-founded the Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization of 23,000 doctors committed to educating their colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Dr. Caldicott has received numerous awards, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Linus Pauling and has 21 honorary degress. The Smithsonian has named Dr. Caldicott as one of the most influential women of the 20th century.

She has written many articles and books, her latest being “Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else.” Her website is http://www.helencaldicott.com/

Prof. Harvey Wasserman is a professor of history at Columbus State College and Capital University in Ohio. He is an investigative journalist, author and has been a national voice in the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements for over four decades. He is also a senior advisor for Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service and founder of Solartopia.org, a grassroots endeavor to promote a green-powered earth. Among his many books are “George W Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace” and his articles appear frequently on Counterpunch, Alternet, NukeWatch, Huffington Post and others.

Harvey can also be heard every Monday afternoon at 3 pm Eastern as host of “Green Power and Wellness” on the Progressive Radio Network. His website is http://www.Solartopia.org/

 

Japanese Govt rams state secrets bill through lower house to cover up Nuclear Disasters at Fukushima

UPDATED: 2013 Nov 27th

Fukushiro Nukaga (top R), chairman of the lower house special committee, is surrounded by opposition lawmakers during a vote on a state secrets act at the parliament in Tokyo November 26, 2013. (Reuters/Toru Hanai)

Source: Russia Today

Japan’s lower house has passed a heavy-handed state secrets act despite fears that it will have severe repercussions for state freedoms. Officials will now face a maximum punishment of ten years in prison if they are found to have leaked to the press.

Japan’s Diet (parliament) passed the bill, which is aimed at expanding the definition of a state secret and place increasing penalties upon anyone deemed a leaker. The move will apparently prevent media accessing information on four sensitive areas: defense, diplomacy, counter-terrorism and counter-espionage.

The information will be further divided into 23 types. Top officials from all departments would have the power to declare issues ‘secret’. The ‘secrets’ could then be kept classified for up to 60 years.

Journalists and other private sector parties could also receive up to five years imprisonment if they are found to be using ‘grossly inappropriate’ means to acquire information.

Such restrictions could spill over into the nuclear industry. The topic is particularly sensitive in the face of March 2011’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, which drove over 160,000 residents from their homes.

“Information on the vulnerability of nuclear power plants could be classified as special secrets, along with plans on how to guard the plants,” Yutaka Saito, a lawyer and a member of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations' task force on the bill, told Reuters

 

Protesters raise their fists as they shout slogans during a rally against the government's planned state secrets act in front of the parliament building in Tokyo November 26, 2013. (Reuters/Toru Hanai)

“If so, anyone who has blown the whistle from the inside to warn of the danger of nuclear power plants will be punished,”Saito said.

The bill was adopted through majority vote by the ruling coalition after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), New Komeito, and the Opposition Your Party all agreed to revisions last week to gain the votes of small conservative opposition parties.

The move comes despite overwhelming public opposition, and after members of opposition parties - including the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Japan Restoration Party, the Japanese Communist Party and the People's Life Party – said that insufficient debate had been conducted prior to the vote. Critics allege that changes to the bill were merely cosmetic, and requested that it not be brought to vote. Regardless, the legislation was approved after only a few hours worth of delay.

 

Protesters raise their fists as they shout slogans during a rally against the government's planned state secrets act in front of the parliament building in Tokyo November 26, 2013. (Reuters/Toru Hanai)

Nearly 63 percent of respondents to a Kyodo news agency survey expressed concerns about the bill last week, and its discussion triggered protests by hundreds of people outside of parliament on Tuesday. Thousands gathered in a Tokyo park the previous week to rally against the bill.

“We revised the proposal as much as possible to address the concerns held by the public,” Gen Nakatani, an LDP director, said following the vote, while Atsushi Oshima, a DPJ director declared that it had been a “defeat for the legislative branch.”

The bill has now been sent to the Diet’s Upper House for consideration, where it will likely pass without any difficulty. The LDP and its junior partner hold a solid majority in both houses.

“Clearly, there will be a chilling effect on access to a wide range of information,” said Meiji University law professor, Lawrence Repeta, said. “It is clearly aimed at news media to block reporting in a way that may be critical of the government on a wide range of sensitive issues,” he added.

Abe has stated that the law is vital in the development of a US-style National Security Council to coordinate foreign policy and security while negotiating with allies such as the US over the possible sharing of information.

“My biggest concern is that it would be more difficult for the people to see the government's decision-making process,” said Kyouji Yanagisawa, a former defense official who was in charge of national security in the Prime Minister's Office in 2004-2009. “That means we can't check how or where the government made mistakes, or help the government make a wise decision.”

 

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks during a lower house special committee on a state secrets act at the parliament in Tokyo November 26, 2013. (Reuters/Toru Hanai)

Close up Footage of Fukushima Ruins – March 21 – 2011

Video Source: Russia Today

UPDATE: 2013 Nov 27th

Analysis on Unit 4, evidence on Unit 3, Plume-Gate highlights

Source Video: Patrick Henry

PDF: Leaked Documents - N.R.C. Official Transcript of Proceedings:

Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Audio File Communication - March 12^th, 2013

Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Audio File Communication - March 16^th, 2013

NRC Transcript – TEPCO relayed information Unit 4 SFP Dry – Walls collapsed and incapable of holding inventory – Unit 3 “everything else gone”

MORE INFO:

Video Playlist News from March 11^th 2011 to Today of the Fukushima Disaster

Can Fukushima's Spent Fuel Pools Catch Fire?

Source: Global Research TV

In this Fairewinds’ feature, Fairewinds Associates Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen analyzes a US government national laboratory simulation video that shows nuclear spent fuel rods do catch fire when exposed to air.

This simulation video proves Fairewinds’ assertions that nuclear fuel rods can catch fire when exposed to air, and Arnie discusses the ramifications of this phenomena if the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent fuel pool were to lose cooling water.

The Sandia National Laboratories video in its entirety can be seen here.

Transcript:

Arnie Gundersen: Hi, I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds and today I would like to talk to you about fuel pool fires: are they possible, what causes them and what are the consequences. Related to that is why is everybody focused on Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4. Before I get into the details, I need to go back and touch on a couple of basics. Inside a nuclear reactor, uranium splits and when it splits, it gives off 95% of the heat. That is what makes nuclear fission so neat is that one atom can give off an incredible amount of heat. The problem is that 5% of the heat remains in these pieces called fission products. That heat gradually decays away over 5 years, but for at least 5 years, these pieces, these fission products, have to be cooled. That part of the reaction does not occur in the nuclear reactor, it occurs in the spent fuel pool. Remember now, that the uranium is in a pellet, about the size of my pinkie, and these pellets are put into about 12 foot long rods. The rods are made of a material called zircaloy and that is the problem. Zircaloy can burn in air if it gets hot enough. And it is called pyrophoric, so when it starts to burn, water cannot put out the combustion.

Now these pellets and rods are put into bundles. The bundles are about that big and 12 feet high. And those bundles are then lifted out of the nuclear reactor and put into the spent fuel pool. Now we know zircaloy can burn. Back in April of 2011, Fairewinds put a video up where we showed a single zircaloy rod burning in air. And on that video, you can actually see the piece of zircaloy bouncing across the table top. And it was combusting on it's own, there was no flame, and it was basically burning in air with no internal source of heat.

The question is, can that happen in a nuclear fuel pool? And what is it about Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4 that has everyone concerned? There are 4 reactors in jeopardy at Fukushima-Daiichi. But everyone's attention now has been focused on the fuel pool at Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4. Why is that? Well, in the Mark I design, there is no containment over the fuel pool. And that means that if there is a problem in the fuel pool, there is nothing to trap the radiation and prevent it from going airborne. At Fukushima-Daiichi, Unit 4 though, an entire nuclear fuel core had just recently been removed from the containment, from the nuclear reactor, and was put into the spent fuel pool. That is what makes Daiichi Unit 4 unique. It has got an entire nuclear core, out of the reactor, out of the containment, and in the fuel pool. Related to that though, is the fact that Fukushima-Daiichi 4 is also damaged. There is a bulge in the bottom of it and I believe it is something called a first mode Euler strut bulge. And it clearly is an indication of a seismic damage. This is not something that happened from the explosion. The building has been damaged from a seismic event. So Daiichi Unit 4 has an entire nuclear core out of the containment in a spent fuel pool and the building it is housed in, has been previously damaged by the explosions in the building and by the seismic events that occurred since March 11th of 2011. That is why all eyes in the world are focussed on what is going on in Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wanted to know if a fuel bundle can burn in air too. And they commissioned Sandia National Labs to run a test. Just by coincidence, the test was done about 2 weeks before the Fukushima-Daiichi accident. Now this was a test of a nuclear fuel bundle, but I need to be clear: there was no spent nuclear fuel in the bundle. The heat from the pellets was simulated using electric resistance heaters, pretty similar to what you have got inside your toaster. So, this was a test to create the same amount of heat that the fuel pellets would create, but it was done with electricity, not with spent nuclear fuel. Other than that though, the fuel bundle was identical to the bundle that is in a nuclear fuel pool.

Now, this is a 5 hour video that we've condensed down to about 1 minute. The screenshots that we've taken for this show, in the upper left, a picture of a fuel bundle with wires going into it - that's the electricity - that's designed to heat the fuel and wires coming out - those are monitoring wires. And, on the far right, is top to bottom looking at the fuel bundle from the side. There's an enormous amount of data collected in these 5 hours and all of it is on the Sandia site which we linked to/from the Fairewinds site. The first video shows a bundle immediately before the heat was applied. Shortly after, it's the same bundle, the heat is on, and it's already beginning to smoke. A little further on is the bundle, again, smoking considerably. Well, where's there smoke there is fire. The last one in the sequence shows the bundle on fire. Now, what you're seeing is zircaloy burning in air. There was no match applied to start this fire, it just got hot enough so that it began to combust of its own volition - in air.

Just to be clear one last time, that was a simulated test we just watched using electricity in place of spent nuclear fuel. But it is clear that a single nuclear fuel bundle can burn in air. Now Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4 would be even worse. Inside Daiichi's fuel pool, are 1500 fuel bundles, not one, 1500 fuel bundles, 300 of which are just removed from the nuclear core. So instead of one very hot bundle, we have got 300 very hot bundles.

Now it is even worse than that. The Japanese put all of their nuclear fuel from this latest core offload in a very confined space in the pool. In America, we do not do that. We call it checker-boarding. We will put hot nuclear fuel next to cold nuclear fuel in a checkerboard pattern so that there is a gap between them. But the Japanese did not do that. This entire nuclear core is side by side by side with other physically hot bundles.

So, is a fuel pool fire possible at Fukushima-Daiichi? We have got the video evidence to show it is. What can make it happen is the real question.

In early July, the fuel pool cooling system failed at Fukushima-Daiichi. Both the primary pump and the back-up pump failed and for a period of several days, there was no water circulating in the fuel pool. During those days, the pool began to heat up and it heated up at about 18 degrees Fahrenheit or 10 degrees Centigrade every day. This is a huge pool, it is 300,000 gallons of water. And to think about 300,000 gallons of water heating up at 18 degrees a day gives you a feel for the amount of heat that is in that pool. So after about a week, the pool would begin to boil, and after about another week, the pool would begin to boil to the point where the top of the nuclear fuel was exposed. And an event like we saw on the Sandia Labs video would indeed become possible.

So the Japanese have about 2 weeks in the event of the fuel pool cooling system fails to fix it. I do not think that that will be a problem. I think they could fix almost every cooling problem in two weeks.

The real problem is if there is an earthquake. The building is already structurally damaged and if the pool were to drain from an earthquake, then all bets are off. There is no way to cool the pool and we know that the heat source is astronomical. The fuel in the pool would catch fire, and the uranium that is then encased in the zircaloy, would go airborne.

Brookhaven National Labs did a study back in 1998 about this and they estimate that over 180,000 cancers would result from a fuel pool fire and that an area of about 40 mile radius would have to be permanently evacuated. Now the Brookhaven study had less uranium in it than the Fukushima fuel pool. So the odds are that if a fuel pool fire were to occur at Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4, it would, in fact, be worse than the Brookhaven study.

Regardless of what the nuclear industry claims, a fuel pool fire is possible if the water were to drain from a seismic event. Now this is not just a Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4 problem. There are 23 Mark I reactors in the United States and they have even more nuclear fuel in them than Unit 4 at Fukushima-Daiichi. This is an international problem, especially in the United States, because we have the most of these Mark I reactors. What can we do about it? We can put the pressure on Tokyo Electric and on the Japanese Government to get the fuel out of that pool just as quickly as possible. We cannot wait for an earthquake to be proven right or wrong. In the United States, we can demand that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission take the fuel out of these fuel pools in the 23 nuclear reactors that are identical to Fukushima-Daiichi. Right now, industry pressure to save money is preventing those fuel pools from being emptied.

Fairewinds Energy Education has tried to bring forward several really important worldwide technical issues since the accident at Fukushima-Daiichi. One of them is the condition of spent fuel pools in the Mark I design.

This August, again, we are asking for your help to continue with our energy education efforts. Maggie and I take nothing from Fairewinds Energy Education. But it does cost money to produce these videos and to do the research and development that support the videos. We are very grateful for the donations we have received so far, and we would appreciate your considering a donation now in August again, so we can continue into the future.

Thank you very much. I will keep you informed.

Kan steps down as Japan's premier

Naoto Kan announces his resignation as president of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), effectively ending his tenure as Japanese leader on August 26, 2011.

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/195828.html

Japan Prime Minister Naoto Kan has stepped down amid plunging approval ratings over his government's handling of the nuclear crisis that followed the March 11 quake and tsunami.

"I resign as the (party) president effective today," Kan told senior party officials, quoted by AFP on Friday.

The expected announcement was made after the parliament passed into law two key bills. Kan had set the passage of these bills as conditions for his departure.

The first bill was on promoting the use of renewable energy and the other on issuing deficit-covering bonds.

Kan, in office for only 15 months, has been criticized for his handling of the nuclear crisis which erupted after the March 11 twin disasters.

The outgoing premier's approval ratings had fallen in recent months due to what critics have described as his little grasp of foreign, domestic and economic affairs. Recent polls show that his public support has plummeted to below 20 percent.

"Under the severe circumstances, I feel I've done everything that I had to do. Now I would like to see you choose someone respectable as a new prime minister," Kan said.

The Democratic Party will vote on August 29 for a new leader who is set to become the Asian country's sixth prime minister since 2006.

The hopefuls include former Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara and the present Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda.

Noda said on Friday he is ready to take the lead in national politics.

German nuclear plants fail safety test

A German nuclear power plant (file photo)

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/180678.html

A “worst-case scenario” test of Germany's nuclear reactors has revealed that none of the European country's seventeen nuclear reactors would withstand a disastrous event.

The study by the country's Reactor Safety Commission concluded that all the power plants are vulnerable when it comes to an “event of extreme disaster,” the German magazine, Spiegel, reported.

The plants fell short in meeting the highest safety standard, level three, in different facets of the tests. They even failed to achieve an overall average of the medium standard, level two.

Among the events envisaged in the tests were earthquakes, flooding, power failure and plane crashes.

The report, however, did not recommend the closure of any of the reactors.

Germany's Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen, also responsible for the country's energy affairs, also said there was no urgent need to shut any reactor.

"There is no reason for us to make a mad rush to stop using nuclear power overnight," he said, adding, "It remains the case that a way must be found for us to leave nuclear power behind as soon as possible."

However, he pointed out that the plants lacked the "required safety features," and would probably have to be closed before their scheduled shutdown date.

Rottgen also acknowledged that four reactors would not even withstand the impact of a small airplane crash.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has attempted to respond to public concerns over the safety of nuclear energy in the country by holding two commissions that sought advice on the future of the atomic energy in the European country.

She also ordered the review of the reactors' safety after a nuclear disaster was triggered by an earthquake in Japan, and imposed a moratorium on her last year's decision to extend the lifetimes of Germany's nuclear plants.

The plants were due to be taken offline by 2021 under legislation passed by the government of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder.

The current legislation requires all of Germany's nuclear plants to be shut down by 2036.