Workers
wearing protective suits and masks are seen near tanks of radiation
contaminated water at Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) tsunami-crippled
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (Reuters / Issei Kato)
Source: Russia Today
http://rt.com/op-edge/chernobyl-fukushima-crisis-catastrophe-715/
Christopher Busby from the European Committee on
Radiation Risks for RT
I recently pointed out, this operation has to go on
forever - a long sickness, but at least not a sudden death. However, this week
begins a new development in the potential sudden death department.
There is a curious and bizarre reversal of the natural at
Fukushima: a looking-glass world inversion. Unlike the standard marine
catastrophe, for example the Titanic, where the need is to manically pump water
out of the ship to stop it sinking, at Fukushima the game is to madly pump water in, in order to stop it melting down and
exploding.
Probably because it is now clear that the saturation of
the ground from all the pumping water for cooling the several reactors and
spent fuel pools has destabilized the foundations of the buildings, TEPCO is
bringing forward its operation to try and deal with what is perhaps the most
dangerous of the four sites, the spent fuel pond of Reactor 4. For this pond
contains a truly enormous amount of radioactive material: 1,331 spent fuel
grids amounting to 228.3 tons of Uranium and Plutonium buried inside a swimming
pool which has already dried out once and exploded. That explosion blasted a
significant, but unknown, quantity of lethally radioactive bits and pieces of
fuel element around the site (where I heard they were bulldozed into the ground
- who knows?), but it also blew the top off the building, covered the fuel
elements under the water with rubble and pieces of crane machinery, and no
doubt twisted and melted a large proportion of the remaining spent fuel.
The operation involves the kind of game that we are all
familiar with in those machines in penny arcades. You know the ones. You stick
in some coins. You have levers which manipulate a claw which you position over
a teddy bear or a doll and then you let this down, pick the item up and drop it
down a chute to win it. In the TEPCO version of this game, you build a crane
over the spent fuel tank (or what’s left of it) and manoeuver a grab down into
the rubble to deftly pick out a spent fuel assembly, like a 4.5meter long and
24cm square birdcage containing the zirconium metal clad fuel elements, each
unit weighing about one third of a ton.
Of course, to make the game more interesting, they are
not just sitting there like they were when the tank was being used. They are
under water (sea water), covered in debris, corroded, busted, twisted,
intertwined and generally impossible to deal with. And here is the really scary
thing: if you manage to bust a fuel element, the best outcome is that huge
amounts of radioactivity escape into the air and blow over Japan, just like
before. The worst outcome is when two of these things get too close, perhaps
because in pulling one out it breaks and falls against another one in the tank.
Because then you suddenly have lots of fission, a lot of heat, a meltdown,
possibly a big blast like before, and the destruction of the entire cooling
pond. Or else the water boils off and the whole thing catches fire.
This photo
taken on August 6, 2013 shows local government officials and nuclear experts
inspecting a monitoring well where high levels of radioactive materials were
detected at Tokyo Electric Power's (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant
(Japan out AFP Photo / Japan Pool via JIJI Press)
Then what happens? Not quite Armageddon, but as far as
Japan is concerned, almost. I bet they have contingency plans to evacuate the
northern island to Korea, China, anywhere. A lot of this radiation will end up
in the USA, a long way downwind, admittedly, but then there is an awful lot of
radioactivity involved.
Let me lead you through what the spent fuel pond of
Reactor 4 contains in the way of radionuclides. I was taken to task after my
last article for not listing enough of the radionuclide contaminants. So for
the record, though some may find it boring, let me remedy that. It is an
impressive list of lethal material:
Strontium-89, Strontium-90, Yttrium-90, Zirconium-95,
Niobium-95, Ruthenium-106, Rhodium-106, Antimony-125, Iodine-131, Xenon-133,
Caesium-137, Caesium-134, Cerium-144 (loads of this), Protoactinium-147,
Europium-154, Plutonium-238, 239, 240, 241, Americium (Yes)-241 and 243,
Curium-242,243,244, and of course Uranium 238,235 and 234.
These are the main ones. There are a lot more, and decay
daughters of these also. It is a scary amount of invisible death. The total
quantity of all these in the spent fuel pool of reactor 4 is about 1021
Becquerels, if we leave out the noble gases and iodines maybe 1020
(that is, 1 with 20 zeroes). Maybe 50 to 100 Chernobyl accidents worth, or more
depending on what you believe came out of Chernobyl.
I list these because it should be made quite clear that
the concentration of the media on the radio-caesiums and plutoniums and iodines
is a very partial story. More discourse manipulation.
What lies within
Which brings me to another aspect of this grim piece of
contemporary history. My expertise is in the health effects of internal
radionuclides: what happens when these substances I list above get into human
beings. Just after the Fukushima catastrophe I made a calculation and a
prediction based on the scientific model of the European Committee on Radiation
Risk (ECRR).
I presented
it at the German Society for Radioprotection/ ECRR conference in
Berlin in May 2011.
This showed that there would be some 200,000 extra
cancers in roughly 10 million population in the 200km radius of the site in the
next 10 years, and 400,000 over 50 years. The current risk model adhered to and
employed by the Japanese government is that of the International Commission of
Radiological Protection, the ICRP. This predicts that no detectable cancers
will be seen as a result of the “very low doses” received by the population.
This photo
taken on August 6, 2013 shows local government officials and nuclear experts
inspecting a facility to prevent seeping of contamination water into the sea at
Tokyo Electric Power's (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (Japan out AFP
Photo / Japan Pool via JIJI Press)
It is this nonsense that allows them to say it is safe to
live in contaminated areas so long as the annual “dose” is lower than about
20mSv and to refuse to evacuate the children from such places. The ECRR has
predicted and explained all the increased rates of illness seen after the
Chernobyl accident in the contaminated territories and of course predicts that
the first effects will be increases in thyroid cancer in children, just like
Chernobyl. But the ICRP and those employing its model deny there are such
effects in Chernobyl: the problems there are due to vodka, radiophobia etc. Or
that the children in Belarus who did develop thyroid cancer were iodine
deficient. So in effect, Fukushima is a test of the two models. A test which
has now begun.
It was reported recently that a survey of thyroid
conditions in young people age 0-18 by Fukushima Medical University found 12
confirmed cases and 15 suspected cases of thyroid cancer in 178,000 individuals
screened. This is in a two-year period. The 2005 Japanese national incidence
rate for thyroid cancer aged 0-18 is given in a recent peer reviewed report as
0.0 per 100,000. That is to say there are no cases. Let me be generous and say
that the annual rate per 100,000 is 0.05. That means in the last two years we
would expect 0.18 cases: we actually see at minimum 12 cases but most likely 27
cases.
In epidemiology we calculate the excess risk as 27/0.18
which is 150 times the expected rate. Japan Times tells us “Researchers at
Fukushima Medical University, which has been taking the leading role in the
study, have said they do not believe the most recent cases are related to the
nuclear crisis.” Right, that’s OK then. This must have been a random cluster,
unluckily, but coincidentally near Fukushima, a source of radioiodine which is
a known cause of thyroid cancer.
The risk model
The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of
Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR would agree. Also the World Health Organization
(since 1959 part of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] as far as
research into radiation and health is concerned). In its preliminary report on
Fukushima Health effects, issued in 2012, it states that the maximum thyroid
dose was 35mSv and that most received a lot less. On the basis of the ICRP
model you would not expect (says radiation and health supremo Dr. Wolfgang Weiss)
to see what is clearly happening: an accelerating thyroid cancer epidemic,
worse than and earlier than the Chernobyl thyroid cancer epidemic.
It is one more piece of evidence that the current ICRP
risk model, employed by the Japanese (and all other world governments) is
totally wrong and unsafe and must urgently be abandoned. Internal radiation
exposure, as the ECRR approach shows, cannot be assessed by the simple concept
of ‘Absorbed Dose’. For those who want a more technical explanation you can see
my recent article.
I met Weiss in 2011 at a conference of radiation research
in Paris which he was running. At this MELODI conference I took the microphone
and told the 650 delegates that the ICRP model was dead in the water and its
use continued to kill the people it was intended to protect. I was pursued up
the aisle by the Chair, Dr. Sisko Salomaa (of the Finnish Radiation Protection
organization STUK), to wrestle the microphone away from the dangerous lunatic
Busby
A worker
checks radiation levels on the window of a bus during a media tour at Japan's
Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Pool / Toshifumi Kitamura)
But Weiss, Salomaa, and the other radiation agency
apparatchiks well know that the ICRP and the other global radiation protection
agencies UNSCEAR, IAEA and WHO are run by people (like themselves) who are not
experts on internal radiation pollution and health, and rarely have any real
hands-on research expertise. They rely exclusively on the Hiroshima bomb
studies which ignored internal radiation, the black rain of uranium that
affected the controls outside the city and the control entrants after the bomb.
I have checked out their research publications: it is
just the case. Ask them. Their job has been - and still is - to protect, not
the public, but the nuclear industry and the military. After Chernobyl, some of
them turned up in Kiev when I was there in 2000 and talked down the effects of
the radiation. Watch them in action here. By 2005, these Chernobyl cancer effects were turning
up in Europe. One study in Sweden by Martin Tondel found an 11 percent excess
cancer risk for every 100kBq/sq metre of caesium-137 contamination. Tondel was
swiftly dealt with by his boss, Lars Erik Holm, one-time head of ICRP and now
Medical Officer of Health of Sweden (Yes).
Again and again, these agencies and their spokespersons
have denied what was in front of their very eyes. Billions of dollars are
poured into cancer research, research on radiation, but any attempt to carry
out epidemiological studies of those exposed to internal radiation, from
depleted uranium in Iraq, to Chernobyl contamination, to the shores of the
massively-contaminated Baltic Sea have been turned down for funding. I know. I
applied with colleagues from Latvia Technical University and from the
Karolinska Institute to look at cancer on the shores of the Baltic; no way were
we going to be allowed to even get the data, let alone be funded.
As more evidence emerges from this ghastly inadvertent
Fukushima experiment, we will see more and more that we have governments and
radiation agencies who are wielding unsafe and incorrect scientific assessments
of reality. Additionally, we have what might become one of the most serious
global public health events of human history being overseen by a private
profit-making company, TEPCO, with no good track record of competence or
believability.
And appropriately, in this looking-glass world, in a
bizarre echo of these two inversions of justice and democracy, we have a
sinking ship that can only be saved by pumping water into it.
What are we going to do with these people who have let us
down, who are letting us down? They all should be put into a court and tried
and sent to jail for what are effectively war crimes, in this new war, the
invisible genetic poisoning of the planet and its innocent inhabitants.
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