Missing signs of an impending nuclear doom

Fukushima has largely disappeared from the mainstream news. So, what if the future has another radiation leak waiting for us? asks Harvey Wasserman.

The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches. Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.

At least three extremely volatile fuel assemblies are stuck high in the air at Unit 4.

And three years after the March 11, 2011, disaster, nobody knows exactly where the melted cores from Units 1, 2 and 3 might be. Amid a dicey cleanup infiltrated by organised crime, still more massive radiation releases are a real possibility at any time.

The ice wall

Radioactive groundwater washing through the complex is enough of a problem that Fukushima Daiichi owner Tepco has just won approval for a highly controversial ice wall to be constructed around the crippled reactor site.

No wall of this scale and type has ever been built, and this one might not be ready for two years.

Widespread skepticism has erupted surrounding its potential impact on the stability of the site and on the huge amounts of energy necessary to sustain it.

Critics also doubt it would effectively guard the site from flooding and worry it could cause even more damage should power fail.

Meanwhile, the rate of thyroid cancers among some 2,50,000 area young people is more than 40 times normal.

According to health expert Joe Mangano, more than 46% have precancerous nodules and cysts on their thyroids. This is “just the beginning” of a tragic epidemic, he warns.

There is, however, some good news – exactly the kind the nuclear power industry does not want broadcast. When the earthquake and consequent tsunami struck Fukushima, there were 54 commercial reactors licensed to operate in Japan, more than 12% of the global total.

As of today, not one has reopened.

The six at Fukushima Daiichi will never operate again.

Some 30 older reactors around Japan can’t meet current safety standards.

As part of his desperate push to reopen these reactors, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has shuffled the country’s regulatory agencies, and removed at least one major industry critic, replacing him with a key industry supporter.

But last month, a Japanese court denied a corporate demand to restart two newer reactors at the Ooi power plant in Fukui prefecture.

The judges decided that uncertainty about when, where and how hard the inevitable next earthquake will hit makes it impossible to guarantee the safety of any reactor in Japan.

In other words, no reactor can reopen in Japan without endangering the nation, which the court could not condone.

Such legal defeats are extremely rare for Japan’s nuclear industry, and this one is likely to be overturned.
In Fukushima’s wake, the Japanese public has become far more anti-nuclear.

Deep-seated anger has spread over shoddy treatment and small compensation packages given downwind victims.

In particular, concern has spread about small children being forced to move back into heavily contaminated areas around the plant.

Under Japanese law, local governments must approve any restart. Anti-nuclear candidates have been dividing the vote in recent elections, but the movement may be unifying and could eventually overwhelm the Abe administration.

Truth is out

The country has been rocked by revelations that some 700 workers fled the Fukushima Daiichi site at the peak of the accident.

Just a handful of personnel were left to deal with the crisis, including the plant manager, who soon thereafter died of cancer.

In the meantime, Abe’s infamous, intensely repressive State Secrets Act has seriously constrained the flow of technical information.

At least one nuclear opponent is being prosecuted for sending a critical tweet to an industry supporter.

The American corporate media have been dead silent or, alternatively, dismissive about the radiation now washing up on their shores, and about the extremely dangerous job of bringing intensely radioactive fuel rods down from their damaged pools.

Fukushima’s General Electric reactors feature spent fuel pools perched roughly 100 feet in the air. When the tsunami hit, thousands of rods were suspended over Units 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Gundersen says that beginning in November 2013, Tokyo Electric Power removed about half of the suspended rods there.

But at least three assemblies may be stuck.

And the pools at three other units remain problematic. An accident at any one of them could result in significant radiation releases, which have already far exceeded those from Chernobyl and from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

An angry public, whose children are suffering, has thus far managed to keep all other nukes shut in Japan.

If they keep them down permanently, it will be a huge blow to the global nuke industry – one you almost certainly won’t see reported in corporate media.