Fukushima Update

April 20, 2013
The Economist

For a few days last year it looked as if Japan would phase out nuclear energy entirely. After an earthquake and tsunami created a creeping nuclear catastrophe two years ago the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) said it would get the country out of nuclear energy by 2040. Although it quickly backtracked, almost all of Japan’s 50 commercial reactors are still lying idle.

In February this year, Shinzo Abe, leader of the then incoming Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), said the new government would restart reactors after they passed a forthcoming set of new safety tests. The country’s “nuclear village”, a cosy bunch from industry and government, cheered. But now the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi plant is starting to alarm the public once more. On April 15th the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN body, flew in to investigate a series of dangerous incidents.

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Shunichi Yamashita was in the United States on March 11, 2013, giving a keynote address at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. http://www.ncrponline.org/

The video of the address was transcribed, word for word as much as possible, so that it might be translated into Japanese.

The original English transcript is published below for those interested in knowing what Yamashita said. The image of each slide is followed by what he said about it.

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10th Annual Warren K. Sinclair Keynote Address: Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Accident and Comprehensive Health Risk Management
Shunichi Yamashita, M.D., Ph.D.

Video for Yamashita’s lecture at the March 11 NCRP annual meeting:
http://echo.colostate.edu:8080/ess/echo/presentation/d6ddb666-85bd-48a3-8d83-a691910906be

PowerPoint slides:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3fFCVXEJlbvWmJRTlZXSTJhS28/edit

 
For slides with transcript click here
 

April 3, 2013
Truth Out, The Asia Pacific Journal
By Anders Pape Møller and Timothy A. Mousseau

Twenty nuclear accidents at the official International Nuclear Event Scale of 4 to 7 have occurred between 1952 and 2011 (Lelieveld et al. 2012). The risk of another major accident during the next 50 years is high and it has been estimated that some 30 million people could be directly affected by such an accident (Lelieveld et al. 2012). The highest risks occur around major metropolises such as New York, Washington, Atlanta, Toronto, Western Europe, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo and Osaka. The lessons that have emerged from Chernobyl and Fukushima reveal a range of serious questions that must be answered appropriately, above all for the sake of citizens, but also for the credibility of the nuclear industry, and for framing the ongoing debate over energy alternatives. Because recent models suggest that more than half of released radioactive material from a nuclear disaster would be transported more than 1000 km from the site of release (Lelieveld et al. 2012), these questions are important even for citizens in distant countries. It is in this spirit that we have produced a list of unpleasant questions that have been a cause of concern since we first started conducting research at Chernobyl in 1992, and have grown in urgency since conducting research at Fukushima beginning in 2011.

Question 1: Why are nuclear reactors frequently clustered making problems much greater in case of emergencies? How to get to the other reactors if one melts down completely? Nuclear reactors are clustered with pairs, quadruplets or even planned clusters with six reactors located at a single site….

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Title: The ambient gamma dose-rate and the inventory of fission products estimations with the soil samples collected at Canadian embassy in Tokyo during Fukushima nuclear accident
Source: Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry
Author:  Weihua Zhang, Judah Friese, Kurt Ungar
Date: April 2013, Volume 296, Issue 1, pp 69-73

“The results have demonstrated that the significant volatile fission
products carried with aerosol were deposited on the ground by wet or
dry precipitation within 300 km around Fukushima plant. The actinide
data suggests that there was not a measurable amount of nuclear fuel
from Fukushima reactors present in this distance”

In this study, soil samples were collected at Canadian embassy in Tokyo (about 300 km from Fukushima) on 23 March and 23 May of 2011 for purposes of estimating concentrations of radionuclides in fallout, the total fallout inventory, the depth distribution of radionuclide of interest and the elevated ambient gamma dose-rate at this limited location. Some fission products and actinides were analyzed using gamma-ray spectrometry, alpha spectrometry and liquid scintillation counting. The elevated activity concentration levels of 131I, 132I, 134Cs, 137Cs, 136Cs, 132Te, 129mTe, 129Te, 140Ba and 140La were measured by the gamma-ray spectrometer in the first sample collected on 23 March. Two months after the accident, the 134Cs and 137Cs became only detectable nuclides. A mass relaxation depth of 3.0 g/cm2 was determined by the activities on the depth distribution of 137Cs in a soil core. The total fallout inventory was thus calculated as 225 kBq/m2 on March sampling date and 25 kBq/m2 on May sampling date.

Source: http://enenews.com/study-fukushima-fallout-at-tokyo-embassy-was-225000-bqm%C2%B2-exceeds-limit-set-for-radiation-control-zones

The New York Academy of Medicine, New York City, NY

A unique, two-day symposium at which an international panel of leading medical and biological scientists, nuclear engineers, and policy experts will make presentations on and discuss the bio-medical and ecological consequences of the Fukushima disaster, will be held at The New York Academy of Medicine on March 11-12, 2013, the second anniversary of the accident. The public is welcome.
A project of The Helen Caldicott Foundation, the symposium is being co-sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Live Stream link: http://www.totalwebcasting.com/view/?id=hcf