Editor's Note: It is particularly important that the world media report accurately and factually on the threat of a global nuclear radiation in the wake of the mag 9.0 earthquake in Japan. While we are conducting our own in-depth research we want to avoid fearmongering and alarmist reporting. One Axis of Logic correspondent who has been closely following this nuclear disaster reports a summary of his findings:
"This nuclear situation in Japan looks very serious. The Maho Train situation in Tokyo is full as people leave city. Radiation levels in Tokyo up more than 20 times over normal. Third explosion last night. EU, Russia and India all checking the safety of their nuclear plants. If these plants in Japan are not controlled, this could be a global tragedy due to spread of radiation. This is the biggest drop in the Japanese stock market in 25 years."
These are conclusions drawn from reports on CNN, Bloomberg News and Spain's international channel in Venezuela.
- Les Blough, Editor
Update 16 March 2011
Japanese nuclear crisis escalates as emergency workers withdrawn
Several nuclear reactors in Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear facility remain at risk of total meltdown, following a series of explosions and fires. On Wednesday afternoon, the Japanese government suspended operations at the facility due to a surge in radiation. This temporarily halted the desperate attempts of workers to contain the disaster.
Japanese government spokesman Yukio Edano told a press conference today that radiation levels had spiked to 1,000 millisieverts—1,000 times the level to which people can safely be exposed in one year—but had decreased to 600-800. The number three reactor container at the facility is feared damaged and may be leaking significant quantities of radioactive steam. “So the workers cannot carry out even minimal work at the plant now,” Edano said. “Because of the radiation risk, we are on standby.” Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen told the Washington Post that the stand-down of emergency workers “is a sign to me that they have given up trying to prevent a disaster and gone into the mode of trying to clean up afterward”. Enormous uncertainty has surrounded both the actual amount of radiation leaked so far and the likelihood of a catastrophic meltdown. The response of the nuclear facility’s operator, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), has all the hallmarks of a cover-up, consistent with the company’s appalling safety record, and contradictory statements are being advanced by Japanese and international nuclear experts. At the same time, Japanese emergency personnel are struggling to deal with the destruction caused by last Friday’s 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami. More than 10,000 people are confirmed dead or missing by Japan’s police force, and the final toll is certain to be higher, with nearly 10,000 residents still unaccounted for in Minamisanriku, one of several north-east coastal towns obliterated by the tsunami. Rescue teams are only just beginning to enter some of the worst affected areas, with a small number of people found who managed to survive while being trapped under rubble for more than four days. About 400,000 people have been evacuated. Together with a reported 850,000 households in the north, many of the evacuees are facing near-freezing temperatures at night without electricity. Japan’s NHK public broadcaster has reported that emergency shelters are running out of food and fuel, “leaving weakened survivors cold and hungry”. Many of the evacuees are residents near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Prime Minister Naoto Kan has told people within a 20-kilometre exclusion zone to leave immediately. Another 140,000 residents within 30 kilometres of the facility have been advised to stay indoors, turn off their air-conditioning units, and leave any washing on clotheslines outside to avoid contact with radioactive contaminants. There are six reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi facility. Their power supplies were knocked out when the tsunami breached nearby seawalls and flooded backup generators that were supposed to ensure the maintenance of the reactors’ cooling facilities. Authorities have pumped in sea water in a desperate emergency measure, but the ensuing reaction has seen a build up of hydrogen gas that has triggered multiple explosions. The building encasing reactors number one and three exploded on Saturday and Monday, with the number three incident injuring 11 plant workers and Japanese soldiers assisting the emergency response. More blasts struck reactors two and four yesterday. At reactor two, attempts to pump more sea water into the reactor failed on Monday, after vents releasing the radioactive hydrogen gases stopped working. This exposed the reactor core’s fuel rods, increasing the chances of overheating and meltdown. Another fire blazed at reactor four this morning, reportedly after yesterday’s explosion was not completely extinguished, but is now supposedly under control. Temperatures are reportedly rising in the water pools storing spent fuel rods in reactors five and six. Before their withdrawal earlier today, about 50 power plant workers courageously risked their lives to try to bring the situation under control. The French nuclear safety authority has declared the disaster to be at level six on the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale—just below the classification issued for the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. According to a Reuters report, the French government has instructed its citizens in Tokyo to leave Japan or head to the south of the country, and has asked Air France to provide planes for the evacuation. Radiation levels in parts of the capital, Tokyo, were about 20 times higher than normal, though still described as very low by experts. These measurements were taken before today’s radiation spike at the plant however. A US navy carrier strike group led by the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan had to make a detour after radiation was detected downwind of the nuclear plant. Prime Minister Kan is now heading an emergency response command, comprised of government officials and senior TEPCO executives. The Japanese media reported that after the explosion at reactor two, TEPCO did not inform the government for more than an hour. The government’s chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, added that the information that was finally divulged “was not correct”. Kan reportedly chastised TEPCO executives, asking “what the hell is going on?” and warned, “that’ll be the end of TEPCO, period,” if the executives withdrew all their personnel from the facility. That the Japanese government was provided with incorrect information by the private operator of the nuclear plant underscores the fact that none of the official assurances that the situation is under control can be believed. Fukushima prefecture governor Yuhei Sato has reportedly told the prime minister that “residents are angry and about to reach breaking point”. The Associated Press spoke with people in the coastal town of Soma, about 50 kilometres away from the nuclear facility. “I don’t think they are telling us the truth,” 63-year-old Toshiaki Kiuchi said. “Maybe even they don’t know.” Shinako Tachiya added: “We are really afraid, as if we didn’t already have enough to worry about. You can’t see fallout so we are totally relying on them for our lives. I used to believe the nuclear power officials, but not now. I think they are not being open with us. They aren’t telling us anything.” TEPCO and other nuclear power companies, in league with Japanese government authorities, have a long record of trying to cover up nuclear accidents. In 1995, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency concealed the impact of an accident at its Monju fast-breeder reactor. In 1999, three workers at the Tokaimura reactor suffered high doses of radiation after safety measures were breached. Three years later, TEPCO personnel were found to have falsified safety data on 200 occasions. And in 2007, after a 6.6 magnitude earthquake, the company admitted that another of its plants had not been designed to withstand such an event. The New York Times cited an unnamed senior nuclear industry executive as saying the Japanese power industry managers are now “basically in a full-scale panic ... they’re in total disarray, they don’t know what to do”. Successive Japanese governments bear responsibility for allowing the privately-owned nuclear corporations free reign. A leaked US diplomatic cable, published via WikiLeaks in the Guardian, revealed that prominent Liberal Democratic Party parliamentarian Taro Kono told American officials in 2008 that the Japanese government department responsible for the nuclear sector had been “covering up nuclear accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry”. Information is emerging about the impact of TEPCO’s drive to extract maximum profits from the Fukushima facility, at the expense of public safety. All the affected reactors have an allegedly substandard, but considerably cheaper, type of primary containment vessel—the steel and concrete outer reactor shell that is supposed to prevent radiation from spewing into the atmosphere in the event that cooling systems fail. The New York Times has noted that the “Mark 1” containment vessels, designed in the 1960s by General Electric (GE), were condemned by nuclear safety experts from the early 1970s. Despite this, it appears that nothing was done—the Mark 1 vessels are still used in 23 American reactors as well as in Japan. In 1972, a safety official with the US Atomic Energy Commission, Stephen Hanauer, advised that the GE vessels, marketed by the company as a cheaper alternative to other models, ought to be discontinued due to “unacceptable safety risks”. In 1975, three GE engineers—Dale Bridenbaugh, Gregory Minor, and Richard Hubbard—resigned in protest after concluding that the Mark 1 vessel they were reviewing was so dangerous that it would cause a devastating accident. In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, an official with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, concluded that Mark 1 reactors had an extraordinary 90 percent probability of breaching if fuel rods overheated and melted. The Times added: “A follow-up report from a study group convened by the commission concluded that ‘Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely’. In an extreme accident, that analysis held, the containment could fail in as little as 40 minutes.” Questions have also been raised about the Fukushima facility’s storage of thousands of spent nuclear rods, which may pose an even greater danger than the reactor cores. The spent fuel rods are stored in large pools of water above each reactor, without any protective casing vessel. At least two of these pools have lost their roofs due to the hydrogen explosions, and it is unclear whether all the rods remain covered in water. If they do not, they may overheat and combust within a fortnight, sending radiation high into the atmosphere that would then be widely spread. “It’s worse than a meltdown,” David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of GE reactors used in Japan, told the New York Times. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.” Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev, who was involved in the Chernobyl cleanup, told the Guardian that the storage of large numbers of spent fuel rods in large concentrations directly above the nuclear reactors, “looked like an example of putting profit before safety”. He explained: “The Japanese were very greedy and they used every square inch of the space. But when you have a dense placing of spent fuel in the basin you have a high possibility of fire if the water is removed from the basin.” Source: WSWS
15 March 2011
Japan’s nuclear emergency worsened today, highlighting the dangers to the lives and health of perhaps millions of people, even as the full horror of the death and destruction left by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami continued to emerge.
A fourth explosion at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (Tepco) Fukushima nuclear power plant, and a government warning of health-threatening serious radiation leaks, have heightened fears that the disaster could worsen.
Officially, the death toll from the magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami that struck the Pacific coast of north-eastern Japan has risen beyond 2,400, with at least 15,000 unaccounted for. The actual number of deaths is much higher. Police said the total in the Miyagi Prefecture port town of Minamisanriku alone was expected to surpass 10,000. Searchers found 2,000 bodies in the Miyagi region yesterday, including 1,000 recovered from beaches along the Oshika Peninsula, washed back in with the tide.
Entire communities have yet to be reached by relief teams, and shocking video and photographic images are just emerging from remote areas, showing almost incomprehensible devastation. Whole towns have been wiped out, with many residents, particularly the elderly and frail, given little chance to escape. Although 66,000 military personnel had been deployed in six prefectures by last night, some coastal towns in northern Miyagi and in adjoining Iwate Prefecture had still not been contacted.
Last night, millions of people faced a fourth night without sufficient water, food and heating in near-freezing temperatures. “People are surviving on little food and water. Things are simply not coming,” Hajime Sato, a government official in Iwate Prefecture, one of the hardest hit, told journalists. Sato said deliveries of food and other supplies were just 10 percent of what was needed. Body bags and coffins were also running short, he warned.
As of 8 p.m. last night, the government said, nearly 450,000 people had been taken to some 2,500 evacuation centres in nine affected prefectures, but some shelters were yet to receive relief supplies such as water and food. Relief efforts were reportedly being hampered by blocked roads, disrupted communications and a shortage of petrol for ambulances and trucks.
“It’s a scene from hell, absolutely nightmarish,” Patrick Fuller of the International Red Cross said from the north-eastern coastal town of Otsuchi. “The situation here is just beyond belief, almost everything has been flattened. The government is saying that 9,500 people, more than half of the population, could have died, and I do fear the worst.”
Evacuees expressed concern to journalists about their future after losing not just their homes and all their possessions, but their means of livelihood. In the city of Ishimaki, for example, as many as 111,295 people, or about 70 percent of residents, have sought refuge in shelters, according to city officials. More than 53,000 houses and buildings have been damaged, if not completely destroyed by the force of the tsunami, leaving vast areas of rubble that will need to be cleared up.
Repeated aftershocks—more than 200 measuring magnitude 5 or more on the Richter scale—are further hindering rescue and assistance operations, and authorities have warned of a 70 percent likelihood of a major quake of magnitude 7 within days. On Sunday, a magnitude 6.2 quake from a separate fault system about 100 kilometres due east of Tokyo also rocked the capital. Yesterday, a new tsunami scare triggered evacuations along the north-east coast after a large wave was spotted rolling into shore, but authorities later lifted the alert.
In today’s emergency at Fukushima, one of four nuclear power facilities shut down by the quake and tsunami, workers were reported to have evacuated the plant. A Tepco spokesman said there had been a “huge explosion” this morning at the No. 2 reactor, where officials had earlier said fuel rods were exposed and at risk of meltdown. Two hydrogen explosions had rocked the Fukushima No. 1 and No. 3 reactors on Saturday and Monday, with at least 11 people injured in the second blast.
At 11 a.m. local time today, Prime Minister Naoto Kan called a media conference to announce that mandatory evacuations had taken place around Fukushima. He advised people living within a 30-kilometre radius of the plant to stay indoors.
“The level seems very high, and there is still a very high risk of more radiation coming out,” Kan said. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukido Edano said: Now we are talking about levels that can damage human health.”
Edano revealed that the radioactivity levels around the plant had been previously misreported in microsieverts, when they should have been reported in millisieverts, which are 1,000 times stronger and much more damaging to human health.
Shortly after Kan and Edano had addressed the media, it was reported that the plant’s No. 4 reactor had also exploded. The prevailing winds were blowing in the direction of Tokyo, where the French embassy warned its citizens to stay indoors, saying that that the fallout could arrive within 10 hours.
Kan’s government and Tepco, the private company that operates the ageing Fukushima facilities and supplies Tokyo’s electricity, warned yesterday that there was the danger of a catastrophic full meltdown in the facilities’ reactors. Such a meltdown could result in a breach of a container vessel and cause a possible radiation leak into the environment.
Part of the container of a reactor appeared to be damaged, the Japanese government also admitted. Edano told reporters “damage appears on the suppression pool”—the bottom part of the container that contains water used to cool the reactor and control air pressure inside. “But we have not recorded any sudden jump in radiation indicators,” Edano said, continuing the efforts of the government and Tepco to play down the dangers. Earlier, Edano had insisted that the problem “will not develop into a situation similar to Chernobyl”.
However, the Kyodo news agency said higher radiation levels had been recorded at Ibaraki between Fukushima and Tokyo. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that the government had distributed 230,000 units of stable iodine, which is used to protect against thyroid cancer when radiation exposure occurred to evacuation centres in Fukushima.
Tepco has been pumping seawater into the reactors in a desperate, and previously untested, effort to cool the reactor cores. This last-ditch procedure will render the 40-year-old plant unusable in the future. Nuclear experts warned that even if a full meltdown were averted, the emergency could last for up to a year, due to the difficulties in cooling the cores, necessitating long-term evacuations.
Authorities have declared an exclusion zone within a 20-kilometre radius of the plant and evacuated 210,000 people. At one shelter, a young woman holding her baby told public broadcaster NHK: “I didn’t want this baby to be exposed to radiation. I wanted to avoid that no matter what.”
Despite Japan being the most earthquake-prone island chain in the world, its ruling elite has over the past four decades turned to nuclear power plants, run by profit-seeking conglomerates, to generate a third of its electricity.
Among ordinary working people, anger is reportedly mounting, not just over the nuclear breakdown but also Tepco’s mismanagement of a series of planned blackouts in the country that caused mass confusion and train delays in and around Tokyo yesterday. The giant utility company failed to provide timely information and constantly changed its plans. Its web site crashed, and the company also made mistakes in naming cities and areas on its list of blackouts, which are scheduled to last until next month.
Even before yesterday’s confusion, the company took out a full-page ad in the Nikkei, Japan’s leading financial paper, apologising for the inconvenience of the blackouts and asking for cooperation in conserving energy.
The level of international aid appears to be minuscule compared to the scale of the catastrophe. As of last night, about 750 foreign search and rescue workers from 12 countries, accompanied by 35 sniffer dogs, had arrived in Japan. The US aid consisted primarily of a large-scale mobilisation of US armed forces stationed in Japan and elsewhere, which marked the first such wide-ranging joint operation with a host country’s military forces to deal with a disaster, according to Kyodo News.
Even that intervention was affected by the nuclear emergency. The US Navy’s Seventh Fleet was forced to detour after encountering radiation downwind of the Fukushima plant, the Yokota-based US Forces Japan said in a statement.