Posted on

And the Band Played On…

Read in French, German, Japanese (日本語 ), Korean,, and Spanish

Scott Jones, Ph.D.

There is historical evidence that the Titanic’s orchestra heroically continued to play until the ship made its final plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.  There is some temptation to compare that snippet of history to what is playing out in Japan following the decision of the Olympic Committee to award the 2020 Summer Olympic Games to Tokyo.  The theatrical command that, “The show must go on,” may be an appropriate observation, but there are monumental differences in the situations.

The human loss of life on the Titanic was indeed shocking, partially so because the Titanic was professionally declared to be unsinkable.  The music from Fukushima is decidedly unnerving. It is the sounds from the seriously damaged reactor building number four as its tilt increases in its agonizing slow collapse.  That collapse will trigger a one-hundred foot fall of the spent fuel rod cooling tank, exposing the fuel rod assemblies and creating a nuclear disaster more than a thousand times greater than Hiroshima.

Japan will be well remembered by those who survive the global consequences of the resulting radiation hell.  The memories will be starkly mixed.  Sympathy will soften the memories of the thousands of innocent civilians killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the result of wartime attack of nuclear weapons.  There will be no sympathy for the refusal of Japan to immediately request international assistance to determine what could be done to stem the cascade of increasing risks following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.… Continue reading

Posted on

Japan, Swallow Your Pride and Ask for Help

Akio Matsumura

Read in Japanese (日本語 ), Korean, French and German.

Japan is an island nation, connected to the rest of the world through the Pacific Ocean’s currents. For thousands of years those waterways have carried Japanese sailors to distant shores. Now they carry radioactivity to our coasts. Japan’s reluctance to ask for international help in managing Fukushima’s cleanup would be one thing if it put only its own people at risk. But with the rest of the world facing health risks, Japan’s mismanagement of its nuclear crisis is irresponsible and should not be accepted by other governments, especially the United States, whose food supply stands to be contaminated.

The contaminated water is the result of a process that cools the spent fuel rods at the site. TEPCO is storing the water in almost 1000 tanks on the site. About one-third of these tanks are more vulnerable to leaks because their steel walls are bolted together rather than welded. TEPCO will have to continue to build several hundred more each year. And with the decommissioning of the power plant taking 40 years, where will the new water tanks go?

TEPCO is already having a tough time keeping up with the growing variety of problems that storing the water has caused. The Chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority described the plant to the Japan Times as being like a “haunted house” in which “mishaps keep happening one after the other.” The Guardian reports that extremely high levels of radiation are coming from one tank.… Continue reading

Posted on

More Thoughts on Mt. Fuji’s Risks

Read in Japanese (日本語 ) and Spanish.

 

Dear Mr. Matsumura,

I read with interest your article on the risk of Mt. Fuji’s possible eruption in the not so far future. Such a scenario is not only possible, but according to the experts it is highly probable. Consequently, all measures should be taken to avert any unnecessary risks to the population in the nearby region. This includes protection of all nearby communities, industrial facilities, hospitals, transport and communication infrastructure, etc. Each of these aspects has its own features and requires a different type of protection and safeguards. All of them should be carefully studied and protected, but also the combination of their risks must also be taken into account.

The number of towns and villages around Mt. Fuji appalls me. I don’t know anything about land use planning in Japan, but given the historical information available it seems obvious that the necessary precautions should have been taken before authorizing the construction of residences, industrial facilities, including nuclear power plants. I imagine that the emergency plans must be drawn in the event of an eruption, and this should include evacuation of civilians, protection of infrastructure and critical potentially dangerous facilities of all kinds. Your article draws the attention to the risk of a nuclear accident triggered by an eruption, which is a legitimate concern. It seems to me that a greater hazard would be the lack of a rational plan to handle the emergency, be it nuclear or of any other sort.… Continue reading

Posted on

Japan’s Fault: The Risks of Mt. Fuji’s Eruption and Nuclear Power

Read in Japanese (日本語), Spanish, German, and French.

by Akio Matsumura

 

Please see this response from Jorge Zanelli, theoretical physicist  and former head of a presidential commission to assess the nuclear option for Chile.

 

What if Mt. Fuji erupts? The question seems random and provocative, but it is one we should be asking.

The Great Tohoku Earthquake that caused the Fukushima nuclear power plants disaster in March 2011 has caused scientists to worry that Mt. Fuji could erupt in the next two years.

Several indicators – increased pressure in the magma chamber, receding lake water levels nearby, cracks in the crust – signal that the volcano, dormant for 300 years, has been affected by recent seismic activity (Japan Today). A study released July 27 by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan concluded that Mt. Fuji has erupted 43 times in total over the past 2,000 years, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

There is a strong precedent for large earthquakes (>M9.0) causing volcanic eruptions within three years:

  • December 26, 2004 at Sumatra, Indonesia. Earthquake M9.2 –Talang Volcano erupted April 12, 2005. And Tangkuban Perahu at West Java, Indonesia erupted March 13, 2005.
  • March 27, 1964 at Alaska, USA. Earthquake M9.2 – Redoubt Volcano erupted January 24, 1966.
  • May 22, 1960 at Valdivia, Chile. Earthquake M9.5 – Cordon Caulle erupted May 24, 1960.

 

No one can predict with accuracy when an eruption will occur, but to ignore the possibility that an eruption might occur — whether in 1, 5, 20, or 100 years — is dangerous and irresponsible.… Continue reading

Posted on

VIDEO – Nuclear Risks: All It Takes Is One

Akio Matsumura speaks with nuclear expert and educator Arnie Gundersen about the continued risks of Fukushima. The two come to the conclusion that Tokyo Electric must be removed from the clean-up process. Arnie also discusses his 40 years in the nuclear industry, and how the worst day of that career led him to conclude that a nuclear power plant can have “Forty Good Years and One Bad Day.”

 

The conversation starts at 4:15.

40 good years and one bad day from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.… Continue reading

Posted on

Global Education: Austrian Students Search for the Missing Link

DCF compatable JPEG Img DCF compatable JPEG Img

Read in German.

I am proud to introduce the work of a unique class of high school students in Austria, under the guidance of two teachers, Hermann and Lenore (pictured left). They have spent their semester looking at different facets of the Fukushima disaster and preparing essays expounding on their reactions. They have relied heavily, but not entirely, on the work available on this site.

 

Read the class pamphlet

 

For the past 36 months this site, www.AkioMatsumura.com, has focused on the Fukushima Daiichi disaster and provided expert scientific, medical, and political commentary to better understand the implications of an ongoing nuclear issue. We have connected nuclear experts, diplomats, medical experts, and power plant technicians in order to provide a complete picture. In other words, we see the importance of establishing horizontal connections between professions, rather than limiting our perspective to one area of expertise.

The Fukushima disaster is only one example of why we need to Find the Missing Link. Before this I worked to stem religious conflict, create political unity in Asia, and create global environmental awareness.

To me, finding the missing link is discovering solutions to the gaps that exist between the silos of our vertical thinking. What problems do we face that we had never anticipated, or at least not discussed appropriately? Fukushima is certainly one.

A pivot to true horizontal thinking – connecting groups and fields otherwise unconnected – is the only viable approach to resolve the issues we will face throughout the 21st century.… Continue reading

Posted on

NYT: High Levels of Strontium Found in Groundwater Near Fukushima Plant

Read in Japanese (日本語 ), French and German.

 

A June 18 New York Times article by Hiroko Tabuchi — “High Levels of Radioactive Strontium Found in Groundwater Near Fukushima Plant” — alerted us that Tepco has found strontium-90 and tritium well above their legal limits in the groundwater at the Fukushima Daiichi site:

20130620-171112.jpg

Diagram from the Asahi Shimbun

Tokyo Electric Power, the operator of the stricken nuclear power plant at Fukushima, said Wednesday that it had detected high levels of radioactive strontium in groundwater at the plant, raising concerns that its storage tanks are leaking contaminated water, possibly into the ocean. The operator said it had found strontium-90 at 30 times Japan’s safety limit in groundwater near its No. 2 reactor, which suffered a fuel meltdown in 2011. The company has struggled to store growing amounts of contaminated runoff at the plant, but had previously denied that the site’s groundwater was highly toxic. If ingested, strontium-90 can linger in bones, emitting radiation inside the body that can lead, in time, to cancer.

Nuclear expert Dr. Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, helps explain the effects of exposure to Tritium and Strontium-90.

20130620-171522.jpg
Dr. Gordon Edwards

 

Explaining Radiation
During the Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster in March 2011, hundreds of different types of radioactive materials were disseminated into the environment.

Like all material things, radioactive substances are made up of atoms. However, the atoms of a radioactive material are unstable, unlike most of the atoms in most of the materials around us in everyday life, which are stable.… Continue reading

Posted on

Take Action at Fukushima: An Open Letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

20130430-232128.jpg

Read in Japanese, French, Spanish , Portuguese, or German.

Dear Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

You no doubt observed the Fukushima disaster on March 11, 2011, with terror and worry: what would another nuclear disaster mean for state relations, especially in your home region of East Asia? Fortunately, it seemed, the effects were largely kept to Japan’s islands and were less than many experts anticipated. Within weeks the stories dissipated if not disappeared from the major media outlets, only to be resurrected with personal interest stories of a hero or an especially tragic case of a lost loved one.

But the crisis is not over. Today, Martin Fackler reported in the New York Times that radioactively polluted water is leaking out of the plants and that the site is in a new state of emergency. Mitsuhei Murata, Japan’s former ambassador to Switzerland, wrote a letter last year that brought international attention to the thousands of radioactive spent fuel rods at the site and the danger their vulnerability presents; he has testified to this several times before Japan’s parliament. International experts, independent and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, have commented that the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s plans for the removal of the rods from the site and their storage in a safer, if still temporary, location are optimistic if not unrealistic.

The news media has done an adequate if meager job of reporting the many issues the fuel rods present. The radioactive fuel must be continuously cooled in order to stay safe; the improvised electric system that maintains this cooling has failed several times, once for more than 24 hours, both on its own and because of hungry rats.… Continue reading

Posted on

Former Chairman of Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Reactors Should Be Phased Out

Read this in German and Japanese (日本語).

Dr. Gordon Edwards, a well respected nuclear expert, explains the background of Chairman Jaczko’s decision:

Gregory Jaczko, Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission until last year, has arrived at a very basic realization: every potentially dangerous machine should have an emergency “off” switch that shuts everything down completely. And nuclear power reactors don’t have one. So, he concludes, all power reactors should be phased out.

How many action adventure movies show the hero disabling an explosive device or cutting the power to some monstrous killing machine just in the nick of time — mere seconds before total disaster erupts? In the blink of an eye the device or machine goes from malevolent to benign — from catastrophic to harmless — because someone pushed the “off” switch.

But a nuclear power reactor cannot be turned off completely, no matter what the emergency may be. Talk about a design flaw! Imagine a car that can’t be stopped, or a fire that cannot be put out.

Yes, there are “fast shutdown systems” in every nuclear reactor that can stop the nuclear chain reaction in less than two seconds, and they usually work quite well. The Three Mile Island reactor was “shut off” instantly, at the first sign of trouble; it only melted down later. The three operating Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors all “shut themselves off” automatically before the tsunami hit; but they all melted down anyway.

The problem is, shutting off the nuclear chain reaction does not stop the heat production.… Continue reading

Posted on

What Did the World Learn from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident?

Akio Matsumura gave this speech at the conference “The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident” sponsored by the Helen Caldicott Foundation and Physicians for Social Responsibility at the New York Academy of Medicine. You can read a translation in German, French, and Japanese (日本語).

I would like to express my thanks to Helen and the New York Academy of Medicine for organizing this timely event.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to the many participants who have worked so hard to increase the public awareness of the risks of Fukushima. In the realm of nuclear power, science must be linked to political action. And so we are here today.

I have worked at the United Nations and other international organizations in London and New York for 40 years, and I have organized and attended many international conferences, starting with the UN Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, in 1974. Over the years we’ve discussed in public and private what you might consider the defining issues of the 20th century: population, environment, social economic issues, disarmament, women, children, and democracy.

But we never discussed how one accident in a nuclear power plant could affect our lives for several hundred years, or how we lack a permanent nuclear waste repository, one that could store our spent fuel rods for one hundred thousand (100,000) years. Discussions of political systems and human rights now seem shortsighted when compared to a potential nuclear disaster that could affect our descendants for perhaps twenty thousand years.… Continue reading