Unlimited Nuclear Disaster Updates

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At Fukushima Daiichi, decommissioning the nuclear plant is far more challenging than water release

For the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, managing the ever-growing volume of radioactive wastewater held in more than 1,000 tanks has been a safety risk and a burden since the meltdown in March 2011. Its release marks a milestone for the decommissioning, which is expected to take decades.

But it's just the beginning of the challenges ahead, such as the removal of the fatally radioactive melted fuel debris that remains in the three damaged reactors, a daunting task if ever accomplished.

Here's a look at what's going on with the plant's decommissioning:

Fukushima Daiichi has struggled to handle the contaminated water since the 2011 disaster. The government and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, say the tanks must be removed to make way for facilities needed to decommission the plant, such as storage space for melted fuel debris and other highly contaminated waste.

WILL THE WASTEWATER RELEASE PUSH DECOMMISSIONING FORWARD?
Not right away, because the water release is slow and the decommissioning is making little progress. TEPCO says it plans to release 31,200 tons of treated water by the end of March 2024, which would empty only 10 tanks out of 1,000 because of the continued production of wastewater at the plant.

The pace will later pick up, and about 1/3 of the tanks will be removed over the next 10 years, freeing up space for the plant's decommissioning, said TEPCO executive Junichi Matsumoto, who is in charge of the treated water release. He says the water would be released gradually over the span of 30 years, but as long as the melted fuel stays in the reactors, it requires cooling water, which creates more wastewater.

https://apnews.com/article/fukushima-daiichi-decommission-nuclear-radiation-wastewater-release-4745dff09d17a7de47b3e3dc4653724a

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The science behind the Fukushima waste water release

Japan has begun releasing treated radioactive water from its damaged Fukushima power plant into the Pacific Ocean - 12 years after a nuclear meltdown.

That's despite China slapping a ban on Japanese seafood and protests in Japan itself and South Korea.

The UN's atomic regulator says the water will have "negligible" radiological impact on people and the environment.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66610977

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What about the rest? Huge sums have been spent simply to keep large, aging facilities around the country, such as Oak Ridge, Savannah River and Hanford, from collapsing while cleanup awaits. Plants and laboratories in Texas, New Mexico, Idaho and Kentucky spend hundreds of millions per year to stay in state environmental compliance while awaiting final disposition. The government is still employing thousands of people per year to deal with issues created more than 50 years ago. No end is in sight.
Cleaning up the mess: The unfinished legacy of Robert Oppenheimer


The biggest problems revolve around the disposition of high-level nuclear waste primarily at Hanford and Savannah River. Millions of gallons of toxic stew were originally scheduled to be encased in glass and shipped to Yucca Mountain, Nevada (along with civilian spent fuel) for deep underground storage; no realistic technology exists to neutralize the wastes. The citizens of Nevada and their politicians rightfully rebelled against this option, and have made their support of any presidential candidate conditional on keeping Yucca Mountain closed. Every candidate for the last 30 years has taken the pledge.

Consequently, cleanup, particularly at Hanford, is stuck. Not only is there no place to send the waste, but there are technological problems making vitrification work safely in a monstrous plant that has already consumed over $14 billion and is only half built.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/cleaning-up-the-mess-the-unfinished-legacy-of-robert-oppenheimer/ar-AA1fTp9s?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=ee383291fb024c55b9bbd895b8c949fa&ei=14

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What Radioactive Animals Teach Us About Nuclear Fallout

When you hear the words "radioactive wildlife," your brain probably jumps to Chernobyl's wolves, which—despite the odds—are still thriving at the site of the nuclear disaster. Or maybe you've heard of the rat snakes in Fukushima that pick up radioactive contamination as they slither around.

Well, it's time to add two more to that list of radioactive critters: turtles and wild boar. They're the subjects of two new studies that looked at radioactivity in wildlife and mapped out where it came from.

Ira talks with Dr. Cyler Conrad, archaeologist at Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Washington who worked on the turtle study, and Dr. Georg Steinhauser, professor of applied radiochemistry at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, who studied boar. They chat about the two studies, how wildlife can clue us into radioactive contamination, and what we can learn from critters in nuclear fallout zones.

https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/animals-indicators-nuclear-fallout/

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Atomic veterans were sworn to secrecy for years. Now they're getting recognized

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Pentagon conducted numerous nuclear bomb detonations in the American Southwest and the Pacific Ocean. These tests involved "atomic soldiers" who observed, worked on or supervised the explosions to study the effects of radiation exposure.

Nearly six decades have passed since those events, and the U.S. Department of Defense is recognizing these soldiers with a commemorative medal. Today, most of these veterans have died, with cancer and old age causing the number of survivors to dwindle.

Holland resident Ron Benoit, who grew up during World War II, was drafted into the Army in 1953 and trained as a military police officer. He and 29 other MPs were sent to the Marshall Islands. Benoit was aboard ship with other servicemen to witness hydrogen bomb tests.

https://www.telegram.com/story/news/local/2023/09/16/atomic-veterans-from-central-mass-discuss-their-sacrifices/70862055007/

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Inside West Virginia's Chernobyl
A highly radioactive oil and gas facility has become a party spot in Marion County.

t's around 4 p.m. one fine summer afternoon on a West Virginia hilltop when Dr. Yuri Gorby, a former Department of Energy scientist, gets the first clicks on his Geiger counter. He is wearing a full-body plastic protective suit, and using the device to survey a span of odd brownish dirt near the dilapidated main building of Fairmont Brine Processing, a fracking waste treatment plant that ceased operations in 2017.

"These are the highest readings I've ever seen!" he shouts. "You want to come over here!"

I follow Ohio organizer Jill Hunkler past a graffiti-covered security shack and a vaguely Satanic-looking circle of busted up furniture to find the 62-year-old scientist wearing a look of deep concern. The clicking — hauntingly familiar from Hollywood depictions of Chernobyl and post-Apocalyptic scenarios — continues to quicken as Gorby walks toward the flame-scarred husk of the frack waste processing building. Bending over the odd brownish dirt, the clicks become furious beeps, like a smoke alarm gone haywire, before merging into a high-pitched wail, a sound reminiscent of an emergency room patient flatlining. Gorby freezes. A microbiologist who worked for years at a federal radiological lab in Washington state, he understands very well the meaning of the nerve-rattling screech.

"The unit is maxed out," he says.

His Geiger counter, known as the Ludlum 3000 Digital Survey Meter, is reading around 7,000 counts per minute, or just under 2 millirems per hour. Working at those levels for one week (never mind the 70- or 80-hour weeks common in the oil and gas industry) could take a worker over yearly safety limits set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The radioactive dirt is far from the day's only disturbing discovery. The moat of scuzzy water surrounding the processing building also reads radioactive. So, too, the mud that coats the floor of a second building, littered with empty beer cans that testify to the site's popularity as a party spot, presumably for local teenagers. "Kids are screwing there," a former oilfield worker would later tell me, pointing to a soiled mattress we found at the site, with the authority of an Appalachian who grew up partying at shuttered industrial sites. Indeed, condoms litter the facility grounds.


>>>Most Americans do not realize that fuel is far from the only thing that comes to the surface at an oil or gas well, be it a modern fracked well, or an older conventional one. Every day, 2.9 billion gallons of toxic and often radioactive liquids are brought to the surface at oil and gas fields across the country. The industry has a number of innocent names for this waste: oilfield brine, produced water, salt water. Sometimes, they simply call it "water." While it is natural, brine contains extraordinary levels of salts, toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead and strontium. It can also be rich in the radioactive element radium.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/inside-west-virginias-chernobyl/

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A poison in our island
Rising seas caused by climate change are seeping inside a United States nuclear waste dump on a remote and low-lying Pacific atoll, flushing out radioactive substances left behind from some of the world's largest atomic weapons tests.


https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-27/the-dome-runit-island-nuclear-test-leaking-due-to-climate-change/9161442

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TICKING TIME BOMB
Inside Russian nuke sub graveyard where reactors rot 'like slo-mo Chernobyl' & '6 Hiroshimas' could BLOW under surface


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EXPERTS have warned of a "slo-mo Chernobyl" disaster forming in icy waters north of Russia as dozens of nuclear submarines rot deep below the surface.

In the Kara and Barents Sea, thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste equivalent to 6.5 Hiroshimas lie in a frigid underwater graveyard, slowly leaking radiation.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/9140122/russia-nuclear-grave-yard-ocean-chernobyl-kara-sea/

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Why Japan should stop its Fukushima nuclear wastewater ocean release

On August 24, 2023, Japanese electric utility holding company Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) announced that it has started discharging so-called "treated" and "diluted" water from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. This is not the end of controversy over the release of "treated water." Rather, it may be the beginning of what might be a long-lasting struggle where science meets politics and lack of public trust, both inside and outside of Japan.

To understand TEPCO's decision and why this operation caused such a big controversy, one must explain what this "treated water" being released is, the scientific debates over this operation, and the underlying social and political issues.

"Treated" or "contaminated" water? When underground water, including rainfall, passes through the damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactor site and is used to cool the melted fuel debris inside the reactors, it becomes contaminated with oil as well as many harmful radioactive nuclides, including cesium and strontium. Generation of "contaminated water" has been gradually declining due to various measures, such as pumping up water by sub-drains and the construction of impermeable, land-side frozen walls (see Figure 1). According to TEPCO, contaminated water generation declined from 540 cubic meters (m3) per day in 2014 to 90 m3 per day in 2022.

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https://thebulletin.org/2023/09/why-japan-should-stop-its-fukushima-nuclear-wastewater-ocean-release/

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Japan to release second batch of wastewater from Fukushima nuclear plant next week
UN-approved release to go ahead despite China's ban on all Japanese sea imports following first batch

apan will begin releasing a second batch of wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant from next week, its operator has said, an exercise that angered China and others when it began in August.

On 24 August, Japan began discharging into the Pacific some of the 1.34m tonnes of wastewater that has collected since a tsunami crippled the facility in 2011.

"The inspections following the first release have been completed ... The (second) discharge will start on 5 October," Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said on Thursday.

China banned all Japanese seafood imports after the first release, which ended on 11 September, despite Tokyo's insistence that the operation poses no risk.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/29/japan-fukushima-nuclear-powerplant-wastewater-release-second-batch