Official Fukushima Thread

Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

A nuclear expert has told the BBC that he believes the current water leaks at Fukushima are much worse than the authorities have stated.

Mycle Schneider is an independent consultant who has previously advised the French and German governments.

He says water is leaking out all over the site and there are no accurate figures for radiation levels.

Meanwhile the chairman of Japan's nuclear authority said that he feared there would be further leaks.

The ongoing problems at the Fukushima plant increased in recent days when the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) admitted that around 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank on the site.

Moment of crisis

The Japanese nuclear energy watchdog raised the incident level from one to three on the international scale that measures the severity of atomic accidents.

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It is leaking out from the basements, it is leaking out from the cracks all over the place”
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Mycle Schneider

Nuclear consultant
This was an acknowledgement that the power station was in its greatest crisis since the reactors melted down after the tsunami in 2011.

But some nuclear experts are concerned that the problem is a good deal worse than either Tepco or the Japanese government are willing to admit.

They are worried about the enormous quantities of water, used to cool the reactor cores, which are now being stored on site.

Some 1,000 tanks have been built to hold the water. But these are believed to be at around 85% of their capacity and every day an extra 400 tonnes of water are being added.

"The quantities of water they are dealing with are absolutely gigantic," said Mycle Schneider, who has consulted widely for a variety of organisations and countries on nuclear issues.

"What is the worse is the water leakage everywhere else - not just from the tanks. It is leaking out from the basements, it is leaking out from the cracks all over the place. Nobody can measure that.

"It is much worse than we have been led to believe, much worse," said Mr Schneider, who is lead author for the World Nuclear Industry status reports.

At news conference, the head of Japan's nuclear regulation authority Shunichi Tanaka appeared to give credence to Mr Schneider's concerns, saying that he feared there would be further leaks.

``We should assume that what has happened once could happen again, and prepare for more. We are in a situation where there is no time to waste," he told reporters.

The lack of clarity about the water situation and the continued attempts by Tepco to deny that water was leaking into the sea has irritated many researchers.

Dr Ken Buesseler is a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who has examined the waters around Fukushima.

"It is not over yet by a long shot, Chernobyl was in many ways a one week fire-explosive event, nothing with the potential of this right on the ocean."

"We've been saying since 2011 that the reactor site is still leaking whether that's the buildings and the ground water or these new tank releases. There's no way to really contain all of this radioactive water on site."

"Once it gets into the ground water, like a river flowing to the sea, you can't really stop a ground water flow. You can pump out water, but how many tanks can you keep putting on site?"

Several scientists also raised concerns about the vulnerability of the huge amount of stored water on site to another earthquake.



New health concerns

The storage problems are compounded by the ingress of ground water, running down from the surrounding hills. It mixes with radioactive water leaking out of the basements of the reactors and then some of it leaches into the sea, despite the best efforts of Tepco to stem the flow.

Some of the radioactive elements like caesium that are contained in the water can be filtered by the earth. Others are managing to get through and this worries watching experts.

"Our biggest concern right now is if some of the other isotopes such as strontium 90 which tend to be more mobile, get through these sediments in the ground water," said Dr Buesseler.

"They are entering the oceans at levels that then will accumulate in seafood and will cause new health concerns."

There are also worries about the spent nuclear fuel rods that are being cooled and stored in water pools on site. Mycle Schneider says these contain far more radioactive caesium than was emitted during the explosion at Chernobyl.

"There is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't a crack in the walls of the spent fuel pools. If salt water gets in, the steel bars would be corroded. It would basically explode the walls, and you cannot see that; you can't get close enough to the pools," he said.

The "worsening situation" at Fukushima has prompted a former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland to call for the withdrawal of Tokyo's Olympic bid.

In a letter to the UN secretary general, Mitsuhei Murata says the official radiation figures published by Tepco cannot be trusted. He says he is extremely worried about the lack of a sense of crisis in Japan and abroad.

This view is shared by Mycle Schneider, who is calling for an international taskforce for Fukushima.

"The Japanese have a problem asking for help. It is a big mistake; they badly need it."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23779561

wonder when they are gonna start doing cbc's and reporting the oddities?

Sudden disappearance of sardines has serious economic and ecological effects on the B.C. coast

A $32-million commercial fishery has inexplicably and completely collapsed this year on the B.C. coast.

The sardine seine fleet has gone home after failing to catch a single fish. And the commercial disappearance of the small schooling fish is having repercussions all the way up the food chain to threatened humpback whales.

Jim Darling, a Tofino-based whale biologist with the Pacific Wildlife Foundation, said in an interview Monday that humpbacks typically number in the hundreds near the west coast of Vancouver Island in summer. They were observed only sporadically this year, including by the commercial whale-watching industry.

“Humpbacks are telling us that something has changed,” he said. “Ocean systems are so complex, it’s really hard to know what it means. For one year, I don’t think there’s any reason to be alarmed, but there is certainly reason to be curious.”

Humpbacks instead were observed farther offshore, possibly feeding on alternative food sources such as herring, sandlance, anchovies, or krill, but not in the numbers observed near shore in recent years.

The sardine, also known as pilchard, has a uniquely fascinating history.

Sardines supported a major fishery on the B.C. coast in the mid-1920s to mid-1940s that averaged 40,000 tonnes a year.

Then the fish mysteriously disappeared — for decades — until the first one was observed again in 1992 during a federal science-based fishery at Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

With the re-emergence of the sardines came the humpbacks, around 1995, becoming so numerous in coastal waters off Vancouver Island that they supplanted grey whales as the star attraction of the whale-watching industry.

Peter Schultze, a senior guide and driver with Ocean Outfitters, said humpbacks are normally found seven to 10 kilometres or closer to shore, but this year were about 18 to 32 kilometres out. That meant for more travel time and fuel burned and less time with the humpbacks, if they were observed at all. “There were a lot of days where people got skunked.”

Overfishing had long been blamed for the disappearance of sardines from B.C. waters. But scientists today attribute the overriding cause to changes in ocean conditions that proved unfavourable to sardines.

B.C. started commercial fishing for sardines in 2002, and in 2013 had an allowable catch of about 25,000 tonnes, which compares with a total estimated population of 659,000 tonnes.

“This year was unexpected,” said Lisa Mijacika, a resource manager with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Vancouver, noting fishing did take place in California and Oregon. “They are a migratory fish heavily influenced by ocean conditions.”

Scientists from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico will meet in December to try to find answers to the sardine’s movements.

There are now 50 B.C. commercial sardine licences, half held by First Nations.

The fishery normally operates from July to November, but not this year.

“They’ve given up looking, pulled the plug,” confirmed Lorne Clayton, executive-director of the Canadian Pacific Sardine Association. “It certainly was disappointing. It’s cost them time, fuel, and crew to go out and look, with no compensation.”

While seiners fishing close to the surface got skunked, he noted that commercial hake fishermen with trawl nets at depths of 200 to 350 metres reported catching hake “filled with sardines,” Clayton said.

“I think they didn’t come to the surface this year. Right now, it’s all speculation.”

Darling said that doesn’t explain the sudden change in humpback behaviour off the island. “If sardines were there in any number, you’d think the whales would have figured that out,” he said. “I don’t think anyone really has a bead on what’s going on.”

Clayton said the B.C. sardine fishery has a wholesale value of about $32 million, with the fish going into the canned market, as well as for reduction and oil. The loss of the fishery this year could have repercussions for next.

“Not only does it affect their livelihood but it puts a hole in the marketplace,” he said. Even if sardines come back next season, “you may have to claw your way back into the marketplace.”

Clayton said that ocean temperatures tides, plankton and light are all factors that could be influencing the sardines.

“In a given year, fishermen have to search them out to go fishing. They don’t just arrive at your boat.”

He noted that the sardine fishery also collapsed this year in South Africa. “They disappeared entirely with no evidence at all.”

Darling said society should question whether the greater value of sardines is as prey for natural predators in the ocean, including the humpbacks upon which the whale-watching industry depends so heavily.

“Would it not make sense to leave the fish that are driving the whole system and supporting virtually everything? There are some important questions to be asked about the sardine fishery.”

www.vancouversun.com/travel/Sudden%20disappearance%20sardines%20serious%20economic%20ecological/9034961/story.html

Radioactive water leaks at Fukushima as operator underestimates rainfall

TOKYO (Reuters) - Highly radioactive water overflowed barriers into Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, its operating utility said on Monday, after it underestimated how much rain would fall at the plant and failed to pump it out quickly enough.

The utility, Tokyo Electric Power Co, also known as Tepco, has been battling to contain radioactive water at the nuclear complex, which suffered meltdowns and hydrogen explosions following a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

Dealing with hundreds of tonnes of groundwater flowing through the wrecked nuclear plant daily is a constant headache for the utility and for the government, casting doubt on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's promises that the Fukushima water "situation is under control."

After heavy rain on Sunday, water with high levels of radioactive strontium overflowed containment areas built around some 1,000 tanks storing tonnes of radioactive water at the plant, Tepco said. The radioactive water is a by-product of an improvised cooling system designed to keep the wrecked reactors under control in case of further disaster.

Tepco said it had planned to pump out the accumulating rainwater into empty tanks, check it for radioactivity, and if it was uncontaminated, release into the sea. But the company was overwhelmed by the amount of rainwater.

"Our pumps could not keep up with the rainwater. As a result, it flowed over some containment areas," said Tepco spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai. The company had planned for 30 to 40 millimeters of rainfall on Sunday, but by late afternoon the rainfall already stood at around 100 millimeters, he said.

The ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, 220 km (130 miles) north of Tokyo, highlight the immensity of the task of containing and controlling radioactive water and eventually decommissioning the plant, processes expected to take decades.

Earlier this year, Tepco lost power to cool spent uranium fuel rods at the plant after a rat shorted wiring at the plant.

In the latest incident, containment areas surrounding 12 of 23 groups of tanks overflowed, with one of them containing Strontium-90 as highly concentrated as 710 Becquerels per liter - 71 times higher than the level set by the company as safe for release.

Strontium-90 is a by-product of the fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says on its website.

Tepco said it will prepare some 30 extra pumps and lay additional 10 kilometers of pipes to prevent overflowing from happening again.

The utility has come under increased scrutiny after it found in August that 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water had leaked from one of the hastily built storage tanks at the Fukushima site. Japan stepped up support for the embattled utility in September, pledging half a billion dollars to help contain contaminated water at Fukushima.

Tepco is seeking permission to restart its only remaining viable plant - Kashiwazaki Kariwa, the world's largest nuclear power station, to cut high fuel costs and restore its finances.

ca.news.yahoo.com/radioactive-water-leaks-fukushima-operator-underestimates-rainfall-023633953--finance.html

Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Spreading Across The Pacific Ocean?

Here is a version of the map that has been circulating the web, along with the hype that this is the radioactive Cesium leaking out of the Fukushima reactor over the last 2 years:



I looked back through some older images from NOAA that helped me identify that my “hunch” was correct. While I am not trying to disprove that the world’s governments are trying to cover up this ecological disaster, I would at least like to shed some light on the “evidence” that is being reported elsewhere. It is still most likely that the Fukushima reactor leaked enough harmful radiation into the atmosphere to spread across the Pacific Ocean in measurable amounts. You may recall the desperate attempts in the days following the 2011 tsunami that struck the Eastern coast of Japan. Helicopters attempted to poor sea water onto the open reactor to prevent it from overheating any further, meanwhile deadly radiation levels leaked carelessly out of the damaged facility.

Now take a look at this map below, from a different perspective. This map was the Tsunami Wave Height predictive index set out by NOAA prior to the tsunami landing on the shores of Japan. You will notice the same exact pattern and colors used. Also notice on the other map that the Legend is also in (CM) Centimeters. Do they even measure nuclear radiation in Centimeters? Most maps would also contain a title, so that we would be able to understand the context of the map as well.

Either someone out there misread the above map, or they intentionally are spreading it with misinformation in hopes of furthering their cause for spreading panic. While there is truth to the radiation leak and it spreading across the Pacific, it probably does not reach quite as far as the map suggests, and would also not conveniently stop once it reaches land.



Notice that even though the above map is a 3D satellite map, it’s legend is in the same 0-240 cm scale as the 2D map up top. Also, the coloring and patterns match up perfectly with the 2D map as well. When taking in a map as evidence, be sure to check all of the relevant information available on the map to tell what it is illustrating. Do you still think that the map circulating the Internet is really showing the Fukushima nuclear radiation spreading across the Pacific Ocean?

americanlivewire.com/fukushima-nuclear-radiation-spreading-across-the-pacific-ocean/