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Nuclear Risk in Japan – The Need for Independent Assessment

Read this post in Japanese and German.

Dear Akio Matsumura,

I write in response to your blog post of 11 June 2012, titled “What is the United States Government Waiting for?”  Your post addressed the radiological risk currently associated with the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear generating station in Japan, especially the risk associated with the spent-fuel pool at Unit 4.

Your concern is appropriate.  The radiological risk at Unit 4 will remain high until all spent fuel in that pool has been removed and transferred to dry storage.  Options are available for reducing the risk in the interim period until transfer of spent fuel to dry storage has been accomplished.  Please note, however, that risk is not unique to the Unit 4 spent-fuel pool.  Various risks are associated with the nuclear-energy sector in Japan, and options are available to reduce those risks.

You have called for an independent assessment of risks and risk-reduction options at the Fukushima Dai-ichi station.  Such an assessment, if properly conducted, could be very useful.  Experience suggests that major Japanese institutions, in industry and government, may not be fully aware of the risks and the risk-reduction options.

At various times and places, there have been independent assessments of risks and risk-reduction options associated with the nuclear-energy sector.  An example is the Gorleben International Review of 1978-1979.  I had the privilege of participating in that Review as one of 20 international scientists.  The Review was commissioned by the government of the state of Lower Saxony, in what was then West Germany, to examine a proposal to construct a nuclear fuel center at Gorleben. … Continue reading

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What Is the United States Government Waiting for?

By Akio Matsumura

 

Read in Japanese, Spanish, German, French and Russian.

 

We continue to post the opinions of many international scientists on the potential global catastrophe that would result from the collapse of Reactor 4 at Fukushima Dai-ichi. The message now is simple and clear—Japan’s government will not act; it is the United States who must step forward—yet no action has been taken.

I was amazed when I heard that one million Japanese had read our article that introduces Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata’s courageous appeal at the public hearing of the House of Councilors of Japan and Robert Alvarez’s famous figure that there is 85 times greater Cesium-137 at Fukushima than at Chernobyl accident. People from 176 nations have visited our blog and Ambassador Murata and Robert Alvarez have been quoted in online and print media in many of them. Despite this global attention, the Japanese government seems to be further from taking action to deal with the growing dangers of Fukushima Dai-ichi. In April I flew to Japan to meet with government and opposition party leaders to convey how dangerous the situation is. Ambassador Murata and I met with Mr. Fujimura, Chief Cabinet Secretary, who assured us he would convey our message to Prime Minister Noda before his departure for Washington to meet with President Obama on April 30. It was to our great disappointment that the idea of an independent assessment team and international technical support for the disaster were not mentioned publicly. I was also astonished to hear that many Japanese political leaders were not aware of the potential global catastrophe because they were not told anything about it by TEPCO.… Continue reading

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On the Cesium Road

by Toshio Nishi. Originally published in the Hoover Digest. Read in Japanese and German.

 

Japanese feel angry and ignored, prisoners of both radiation and bureaucracy.

 

For more than a year, I have been hoping that the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company would find the courage to bear the unbearable and repair the breathtaking damage from last spring’s earthquake and tsunami. But a better tomorrow is not in sight. A deathly silence still pervades the desolate landscape of Fukushima and the long coastal line of northern Japan—the cesium road.

 

The Japanese government grows more incompetent and dysfunctional, while Tokyo Electric has dug a deep foxhole of self-preservation and clings tightly to its monopoly. I am embarrassed as a Japanese citizen to list some of the most glaring shenanigans that the government and the power company have been acting out in public over the past year:

 

  1. Governmental study committees were supposed to investigate why Tokyo Electric failed to minimize the damage, but the “open” hearings were suddenly closed. The entrenched bureaucracy, as if fed by perpetual radioactivity, continues to grow while failing to disclose any new findings.
  2. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, the sixth premier in the past five years, along with his cabinet and the largest opposition party, have agreed to raise the consumption tax from the current 5 percent to 10 percent. Apparently even that is not enough to cover the disaster damage. The government is talking about raising it to 17 percent within a year or so.
… Continue reading
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Fukushima Daiichi: It May Be too Late Unless the Military Steps in

by Akio Matsumura

This article is available in Japanese and German.

The highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima-Daiichi power plants present a clear threat to the people of Japan and the world. Reactor 4 and the nearby common spent fuel pool contain over 11,000 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies, many of which are exposed to the open air. The cesium-137, the radioactive component contained in these assemblies, present at the site is 85 times larger than the amount released during the Chernobyl accident. Another magnitude 7.0 earthquake would jar them from their pool or stop the cooling water, which would lead to a nuclear fire and meltdown. The nuclear disaster that would result is beyond anything science has ever seen.  Calling it a global catastrophe is no exaggeration.

If political leaders understand the situation and the potential catastrophe, I find it difficult to understand why they remain silent.

The following leaves little to question:

  1. Many scientists believe that it will be impossible to remove the 1,535 fuel assemblies in the pool of Reactor 4 within two or three years.
  2. Japanese scientists give a greater than 90 percent  probability that an earthquake of at least 7.0 magnitude will occur in the next three years in the close vicinity of Fukushia-Daiichi.
  3. The crippled building of Reactor 4 will not stand through another strong earthquake.
  4. Japan and the TEPCO do not have adequate nuclear technology and experience to handle a disaster of such proportions alone.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote a letter to Japan’s Ambassador to the United States, Mr.… Continue reading

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U.S. Senator Concerned with Reactor 4 Urges U.S. to Help

Read the senator’s letter in German.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), a senior member of the Committee on Energy and Natural resources, recently toured the Fukushima power plant site. Among his concerns was the exposed spent fuel assemblies at Reactor 4. Watch him on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown. He issued his concerns in a letter (PDF) to Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki. Senator Wyden also requested Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and Gregory Jaczko, Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to have their departments prepare reports of what they can do to assist TEPCO in securing the site as quickly as possible.

The senator wrote:

Loss of containment in any of these pools, especially the pool at Unit 4, which has the highest inventory of the hottest fuel, could result in an even greater release of radiation than the initial accident.

TEPCO’s December 21, 2011, remediation roadmap proposes to take up to ten years to complete spent fuel pool removal from all pools on the site. Given the comprised nature of these structures due to the events of March 11th, this schedule carries extraordinary and continuing risk if further severe seismic events were to occur. The true earthquake risk for the site was seriously underestimated and remains unresolved [ed: see this article on the safety assumptions we make with nuclear power.] . I look forward to hearing from you on what efforts can be made to accelerate this schedule and how the United States can be of assistance to the Japanese regulatory agencies to help oversee TEPCO’s response activities.

… Continue reading
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Fukushima Daiichi Site: Cesium-137 is 85 times greater than at Chernobyl Accident

[*Ed: This page was updated on 4/5/12 to reflect corrected calculations]

By Akio Matsumura

This article is available in Japanese and German and Russian.

Japan’s former Ambassador to Switzerland, Mr. Mitsuhei Murata, was invited to speak at the Public Hearing of the Budgetary Committee of the House of Councilors on March 22, 2012, on the Fukushima nuclear power plants accident. Before the Committee, Ambassador Murata strongly stated that if the crippled building of reactor unit 4—with 1,535 fuel assemblies in the spent fuel pool 100 feet (30 meters) above the ground—collapses, not only will it cause a shutdown of all six reactors but will also affect the common spent fuel pool containing 6,375 fuel assemblies, located some 50 meters from reactor 4. In both cases the radioactive assemblies are not protected by a containment vessel; dangerously, they are open to the air. This would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced. He stressed that the responsibility of Japan to the rest of the world is immeasurable. Such a catastrophe would affect us all for centuries. Ambassador Murata informed us that the total numbers of the spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima Daiichi site excluding the assemblies in the pressure vessel is 11,421 (396+615+566+1,535+994+940+6375).

I asked top spent-fuel pools expert Mr. Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Adviser to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment at the U.S. Department of Energy, for an explanation of the potential impact of the 11,421 assemblies.… Continue reading

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Correspondence on the New Photo of Reactor Unit no. 4 at Fukushima

This letter is now available in Japanese and German.

Dear Akio —

This photo is quite sobering. As you know the pool at Unit No. 4 contains 1,538 fuel assemblies, including a full core that was freshly discharged prior to the accident.

As I might have mentioned, based on data from the U.S. Department of Energy, a spent fuel assembly from a typical boiling water reactor contains about 30,181 curies ( ~1.1E+15 becquerels) of long-lived radioactivity. So the Unit No. 4 pool contains roughly 49 million curies (~1.8E+18 Bq), of which about 40 percent if Cs-137.  (Source:  U.S. Department of Energy, Final Environmental Impact Statement, for a Geologic Repository for the Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada, 2002, Appendix A, Tables A-7, A-8, A-9, A-10, BWR/ Burn up = 36,600 MWd/MTHM, enrichment = 3.03 percent, decay time = 23 years.)

As you know,  the risk of yet another highly destructive earthquake occurring even closer to the Fukushima reactors has increased, according to the European Geosciences Union.  This is particularly worrisome for Daiichi’s structurally damaged spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4 sitting 100 feet above ground, exposed to the elements. Drainage of water from this pool, resulting from another quake could trigger a catastrophic radiological fire involving about eight times more radioactive cesium than released at Chernobyl.

Best Regards,

Bob Alvarez

 

 

Dear  Bob:

I thank you very much for your comments on the photo of the Fukushima reactor unit 4.… Continue reading

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Letter from Spent-Fuel Pools Expert Robert Alvarez

Now available in Japanese.

Dear Akio —

There are several people I know in the nuclear industry who are well aware that spent fuel pools at power reactors pose potentially serious hazards. But, they prefer to keep silent in public about this matter.

While working for the U.S. Department of Energy, as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary, in 1993, I took part in a vulnerability assessment of the agency’s spent reactor fuel. We found that more than 90% of DOE’s spent fuel (~2,300 metric tons) left over from plutonium production for weapons, was stored in two aged reactor water-filled, unlined concrete basins at the Hanford Site in Washington State. The basins were next the Columbia River, a major fresh-water source for the northwestern United States.

It had been neglected for about 25 years. The spent fuel in the one basin was severely degraded, and the basin was cracked and had leaked. Since Hanford sits in an active earthquake zone, we soon realized that drainage of the basins could result in a catastrophic radiological fire. We promptly took action and established a 24 hour-7-days a week capability to provide water to the basins if they were damaged and to seek funds to remove the spent fuel and place it in dry storage at the center of the site, away from the river. It took about 10 years to accomplish this goal.

After the 9/11 attacks I became quite concerned about the vulnerability of spent fuel storage at U.S. commercial power reactors, and wrote an essay in the January/February 2002 issue Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about this matter.… Continue reading

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Why Nuclear Scientists Have Missed the Danger of Spent Fuel Pools

Dear friends: 

Since the Fukushima nuclear power plants accident in March 2011, there have been two types of contributions by nuclear scientists. One type, who represents the voice of TEPCO, has influenced the decision makers of the solutions to the accident, the government strategy of the evacuation zone, the timing of announcement of the core meltdown and the constant public campaign to give the impression that the situation is improving rapidly. The other type, who has been warning the government of the worsening situation, finds their influence over the decision makers and the media circle limited. However, I find it puzzling that there has been so little warning from the nuclear community about the potential for catastrophic accidents or terrorist attack involving the hundreds of spent fuel pools worldwide.  I received a clear explanation from Dr. Gordon Edwards, one of Canada’s best known independent experts on nuclear technology, uranium, and weapons proliferation. 

I hope you will better appreciate the serious issues of the spent fuel pools from these comments.

Akio

 

This article is now available in Japanese.

Dear Akio,

You asked me why there has been so little warning from the “nuclear establishment” (TEPCO and the regulatory agency) about the potential for catastrophic accidents involving the spent fuel pool in reactor number 4.

In the field of nuclear safety, the focus of attention has always been on analyzing and preventing catastrophic accidents involving the core of the reactor.  In comparison, little attention has been paid over the years to catastrophic accident scenarios involving the spent fuel pool.… Continue reading

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Keeping Vigilant: Why Fukushima Will Remain in 2012 Headlines


2011 has not passed quietly. We witnessed massive grass-root protests, a natural disaster and nuclear accident, the end of the Iraq War, and the still-threatening collapse of the Euro. All will continue to transform the political and economic trajectories of their respective regions for years to come. Nevertheless, if the fourth reactor unit of Fukushima collapsed after another earthquake, the radiation from the resulting disaster would affect the people of Tokyo and Yokohama—an impossible evacuation zone—as well as East Asia and the rest of the world. I explain below why I believe this is the most serious issue to respond to as we enter 2012.

The Arab Spring, originating in Tunisia, has spread through Egypt, Bahrain, Morocco, Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Iran, and affected almost every country in the North Africa-Middle East region. Young Arabs have turned a new page and erased their negative image that permeated in the West throughout the last decade. Change in these countries will continue to be slow and will not always amount to progress, but we must acknowledge that we are witness to the 21st century revolution. And other protests sparked outside the region: in New York and eventually across the world the Occupy movement protested inequality, while in Russia a new generation voiced its disapproval of political cronyism. Time chose the Protesters for its Person of the Year.

A month after Mubarak stepped down in Egypt an earthquake triggered a tsunami that drowned part of Japan and heavily damaged four reactors in the Fukushima-Daiichi complex.… Continue reading