Japan PM: No Dumping Of 1.3 Million Tons Of Radioactive Water into Pacifica At Fukushima

8/11/23 Japan PM: No Dumping Off 1.3 Million Tons Of Radioactive Water into Pacifica At Fukushima

Rally & Speakout At San Francisco Japanese Consulate

Friday August 11, 2023 1PM
Japanese Consulate
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Initiated by
No Nukes Action Committee
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Cesium 180 times limit found in fish at Fukushima nuke plant 12 years after disaster

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20230718/p2a/00m/0na/019000c
July 19, 2023 (Mainichi Japan)
Japanese version

A rock fish, known as excellent food fish, is seen in this photo provided by the Fukushima Prefectural Fisheries and Marine Science Research Centre. (The fish in this image is not the specimen with radioactive levels exceeding the legal maximum.)
FUKUSHIMA -- Radioactive cesium 180 times Japan's legal maximum has been found in fish caught in the port at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, revealing that the March 2011 triple meltdown there continues to impact the local ecosystem.

The cesium in the black rockfish caught in May measured 18,000 becquerels per kilogram. The legal limit under the Food Sanitation Act is 100 becquerels per kg. According to plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Holdings Inc., the fish was captured inside the inner breakwater, close to the No. 1 to No. 4 reactors at the seaside plant, where decommissioning work continues.

When it rains, the rainwater streams into the "K drainage" -- one of several drainpipes at the plant -- after running through debris and over the ground, both contaminated with radioactive substances. It is then discharged into the station's small port.

TEPCO claims that it has confirmed the cesium levels in the discharged rainwater are below the government criteria of 60 becquerels per liter for cesium-134 and 90 becquerels for cesium-137. But compared with other drainages at the plant, runoff with higher concentrations of radioactive materials has been discharged within the inner breakwater. The seabed sediment in the area was also found to contain cesium-137 up to 130,000 becquerels-plus per kilogram and cesium-134 up to 3,400 becquerels-plus as of the end of January this year.


The "K drainage" outlet, left, is seen at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on April 4, 2016. The two outlets on the right are "B drainage" and "C drainage." (Pool photo)
A TEPCO public relations official suggested that the high level of cesium detected in the black rockfish is partially attributable to water discharged from the "K drainage," and the sediment inside the breakwater.

Netting has been installed across the port's entrance, one of the measures to prevent fish from getting out in place since February 2013. In 2016, nets were also set up within the inner breakwater. For this reason, TEPCO did not conduct periodical checks of radioactive substance concentrations in fish inhabiting the breakwater for about six years.

But after a heavily contaminated fish was found off Fukushima Prefecture, apparently after it got away from the plant's port, TEPCO resumed its surveys within the inner breakwater in May 2022. Between then and May 2023, fish caught within and near the inner breakwater accounted for approximately 90% of the 44 with radioactive levels topping the 100 becquerels per kg limit.

Of the 44 fish, three caught within this area were found to be tainted with radioactive materials exceeding 1,000 becquerels per kilogram. Apart from black rockfish, 1,700 becquerels per kilogram was detected in an eel in June 2022, followed by 1,200 becquerels in rock trout in April 2023.

A TEPCO PR representative told the Mainichi Shimbun recently that the company had installed more and different kinds of netting starting in 2022, and that it will place nets made of high-strength, corrosion-resistant chemical fiber around the inner breakwater's exit.

Tainted fish also caught offshore

A total of three black rockfish that apparently escaped the port have been caught more than 10 kilometers from the Fukushima plant since commercial shipment restrictions on the species were lifted in January 2017.


The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is seen from a Mainichi Shimbun helicopter in this Aug. 21, 2022 photo. (Mainichi)
According to the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations, one of the three fish was caught off the prefectural town of Shinchi in February 2021, another off the city of Minamisoma in April that year, and the other off the city of Soma in January 2022. The three specimens contained radioactive materials at 500, 270 and 1,400 becquerels per kg, respectively.

Meanwhile, monitoring tests conducted off Fukushima Prefecture by the prefectural government since April 2011 show a decline in the number of fishes with high concentrations of radioactive substances. Since 2016, the black rockfish caught offshore in April 2021 has been the only specimen to exceed 100 becquerels per kg, and no other fish caught have topped 50 becquerels.

The Fukushima fisheries federation has set its own criteria of up to 50 becquerels per kg, stricter than the national standard, and has tested one specimen per fish species caught off the prefecture. If the specimen has more than 25 becquerels, the federation sends it to the Fukushima Prefectural Fisheries and Marine Science Research Centre for further testing. If the sample has no more than 50 becquerels, then the species gets the green light to be shipped out.

Thanks to these efforts, restrictions on commercial shipments of all fish species were lifted in February 2020 for fishing operations off Fukushima Prefecture. Trial catches limited to certain species and areas confirmed safe were wrapped up in March the following year.

Regardless, black rockfish shipments were restricted whenever specimens above the radioactive substance concentration limit were caught after they had apparently got away from the nuclear plant port. Even though prefectural testing has revealed no contamination above detectable levels in any black rockfish specimen for over a year, shipment restrictions continue.

"We urge that TEPCO take thorough measures to prevent radioactive materials from getting into the ocean, even within the port," a fisheries federation official urged, refering to the black rockfish with more than 100 becquerels per kg caught in May at the nuclear complex's port.

Toshihiro Wada, an associate professor of fish ecology at Fukushima University, said of the heavily contaminated fish, "It's likely that cesium was concentrated within the fish from the food chain, confined as it is by the inner breakwater where radioactive substances have accumulated from the drainages flowing into the port."

He continued, "Unless fundamental measures are taken to lower the concentrations of radioactive materials discharged from the 'K drainage,' fish surpassing the maximum will likely keep being found," even as TEPCO has stepped up measures to prevent fish from getting away.


The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is seen from a Mainichi Shimbun helicopter in this Feb. 9, 2022 photo. (Mainichi)
TEPCO explained that it has taken measures such as "facing" -- or paving the ground's surface to reduce radioactive doses -- and removing debris at the Fukushima plant to prevent radioactive materials from seeping into the water due to rain. The company says it aims to get cesium concentrations within the inner breakwater below 1 becquerel per liter.

Radioactively contaminated water has been swelling daily at the plant as water injected to cool nuclear fuel debris that melted down in the 2011 disaster has been accumulating with groundwater and rainwater mixing into it. TEPCO processes the contaminated water using ALPS, or multi-nuclide removal equipment, and stores the treated water in tanks after reducing the radioactive levels apart from tritium, which is difficult to remove from water.

'Set treated water aside'

The Japanese government plans to release treated water from the Fukushima plant into the ocean around the summer, after diluting it to get tritium concentrations below 1,500 becquerels per liter, or one-fortieth of the national standard. It plans to release the water about 1 kilometer offshore via an undersea tunnel.

"Unlike cesium, tritium does not concentrate in fish even if they ingest it, according to data," associate professor Wada said. "Experimental results have shown that if treated water is put into regular seawater, the concentration (of tritium) is reduced. We need to consider (tritium) separately from cesium."

(Japanese original by Riki Iwama, Fukushima Bureau, and Hideyuki Kakinuma, Iwaki Local Bureau)

Failed Fukushima System Should Cancel Wastewater Ocean Dumping
https://countercurrents.org/2023/07/failed-fukushima-system-should-cancel-wastewater-ocean-dumping/

in World — by John LaForge — 26/07/2023

From the Fukushima-Daiichi triple-reactor meltdown wreckage, Japan’s government and “Tepco,” the owner, are rushing plans to pump 1.37 million tons (about 3 billion pounds) of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific.

Their record is poor. Their lies are documented. This is not safe, at all.

To keep the three meltdowns’ wasted fuel from melting again, Tepco continuously pours cold water over 880 tons of “corium,” the red-hot rubblized fuel amassed somewhere under three devastated reactors. “That water leaks into a maze of basements and trenches beneath the reactors and mixes with groundwater flowing into the complex,” Reuters reported Sep. 3, 2013.

Most of this water is collected and put through Tepco’s jerry-rigged mechanism dubbed ALPS, for Advanced Liquid Processing System, which it turns out hasn’t processed much of anything.

Tepco, Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and much of the media endlessly repeat that ALPS removes over 62 radioactive materials from the ever-expanding volume of wastewater. Reports regularly claim the planned dumping is routine, safe, and manageable.

This unverified PR loop has fooled a lot of people, but the ALPS is a fraud. As early as 2013, the filter system stalled and the IAEA reported that April that ALPS had not “accomplished the expected result of removing some radionuclides,” Reuters reported.

In September 2018, the ALPS was revealed to have drastically failed, forcing Tepco to issue a public apology and a promise to re-filter huge volumes of the waste.

According to Reuters, Oct. 11, 2018, documents on a government committee’s website show that 84 percent of water held at Fukushima contains concentrations of radioactive materials higher than legal limits allow to be dumped.

Among the deadly isotopes still in the waste are cesium-137, strontium-90, cobalt-60, ruthenium, carbon-14, tritium, iodine-129, plutonium isotopes, and more than 54 more.

In a June 14, 2023 op/ed for the China Daily, Shaun Burnie, the Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia, reported that the ALPS “has been a spectacular failure,” and noted:

“About 70 percent or 931,600 cubic meters of the wastewater needs to be processed again (and probably many more times) by the ALPS to bring the radioactive concentration levels below the regulatory limit for discharge. Tepco has succeeded in reducing the concentration levels of strontium, iodine, and plutonium in only 0.2 percent of the total volume of the wastewater, and it still requires further processing. But no secondary processing has taken place in the past nearly three years. Neither Tepco nor the Japanese government has said how many times the wastewater needs to be processed, how long it will take to do so, or whether the efforts will ever be successful. … none of these issues has been resolved.”

Tepco says it will re-filter more than 70 percent of the wastewater through ALPS again, a process that itself leaves massive amounts of highly radioactive sludge that must be kept out of the environment for centuries.

Hoping to slow the rush to dump, Professor Ryota Koyama from Fukushima University, said in an interview with China Media Group last May, “If the Japanese government or the Tokyo Electric Power Co. really wants to discharge contaminated water into the sea, they need to explain in more detail whether the nuclides have really been removed.”

International law governing state-sponsored or corporate pollution of the seven seas is relatively useless in challenging Tepco’s outrageous transfer of private industrial poison into the public commons. The global ban on ocean dumping of radioactive waste adopted in 1993 applies only to barrels. It has allowed Britain and France to pump billions of gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Irish Sea and the North Sea respectively, for decades.

The Law of the Sea might be able to bring Japan’s deliberate poisoning to an end only after a victim or class of victims harmed by Tepco’s meltdown waste brings a lawsuit that proves it. But showing that your illnesses or cancers were caused by ingested or inhaled radiation is so difficult that the nuclear power and weapons industry has skated along for 70 years — routinely and legally venting, leaking, releasing and dumping radioactive materials — without comeuppance.

Radioactivity is colorless, odorless, and invisible. Birth defects and cancers caused by exposure to ionizing radiation are entirely too visible.

John LaForge, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.


Initiated by No Nukes Action Committee

The Japanese government led by Prime Minister Kishida is moving ahead to dump more than 1.3 million tons of radioacive water into the Pacific ocean at Fukushima. More than 12 years after the meltdown of 3 nuclear reactors the melted rods have still not been removed and
must be cooled with water which then becomes contaminated with tritium.
Despite protest from people from the Pacific rim and throughout the world and the fisherman and people of Fukushima this government doesn’t give a damn.
It is time to let the Japanese government that the people of the United States are opposed to this massive release of this contaminated water and don’t believe the propaganda of the government and TEPCO that this is not a threat to all the people in the Pacific rim.
Former Prime Minister Abe also told the Olympic committeee and the people of the world that the broken reactors was under control and no longer a threat to Japan and the world after the 2011 disaster.
The government is also opening up more nuclear plants and wants to expand US nuclear bases including in Okinawa and develop nuclear weapons and spending for the war machine that is threatening a war in Asia that would kill millions of people throughout the region.
Join us and speak out to stop this madness and threat to our world.

IAEA rubber-stamped release of radioactive Fukushima water without finishing sample analysis
http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1099039.html
Posted on : Jul.6,2023 17:14 KST Modified on : Jul.6,2023 17:14 KST
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The lack of follow-through on analyzing samples deals a blow to the agency’s monitoring credibility
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IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi shakes hands with those attending an event regarding the disposal of irradiated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant held in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture on July 5. (Yonhap)
The Hankyoreh’s examination of the document shows that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published its final report on the discharge of radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean after only completing one round of sample analysis of the contaminated water, despite previously promising to carry out three rounds of safety reviews for the release.
Moreover, the IAEA released its final report even though the results of its environmental sample analysis, conducted in order to corroborate environmental monitoring results, had yet to come out. Critics say the IAEA undermined the credibility of its own report by coming to the conclusion that dumping the irradiated water into the ocean is fine even before analyses of its core samples were completed.
In its final report made public on Tuesday, regarding its plan to conduct three rounds of sample analysis of the irradiated water, the IAEA revealed that “a report including the analysis of these samples” — the second and third samples collected in October 2022 — “is expected to be published later in 2023.”
Sample analysis is part and parcel of “independent sampling, data corroboration, and analysis,” one of three components of a safety review. In other words, the IAEA released its final report even though analyses of its second and third samples of the radioactive water have yet to be completed.
Previously, in its third interim report published in December 2022, the IAEA had revealed that it would collect and analyze a total of three samples of the Fukushima water in accordance with its safety review process. As per this plan, an IAEA task force collected samples of the radioactive water through the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), once in March 2022 and twice in October 2022.
Through its sixth interim report published in May this year, the IAEA revealed that, according to analyses of the first radioactive water sample collected in March 2022 conducted at four different laboratories around the world including an IAEA-affiliated lab and the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety (KINS), radionuclides other than tritium were not detected beyond the safety limit. As this first sample was collected from the K4-B tank group, which TEPCO deemed ready for discharge, after it had been homogenized for 14 days with circulation and agitation equipment, observers had commented that this result was as expected.
But results of analyses of the second and third radioactive water samples collected in October have yet to come out. The two samples were collected from the G4S-B10 and G4S-C8 tanks, standard storage tanks for water processed by the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), without undergoing circulation and agitation for sample homogenization. The results of their analyses were scheduled to be submitted to the IAEA earlier this year.
The IAEA’s final report was released when analysis results of not just radioactive water samples, but environmental samples have yet to come out. The IAEA had collected environmental samples such as seawater, marine sediment, fish, and seaweed last November, saying it would “corroborate the data from TEPCO and the Government of Japan associated with the ALPS treated water discharge.”
But IAEA’s Tuesday report only mentioned that “the results from the first ILC for environmental samples [. . .] will be available later in 2023.” In a sense, the IAEA reached the conclusion that dumping the irradiated water would have “a negligible radiological impact on people and the environment” when the accuracy and credibility of data submitted by Japan haven’t been fully corroborated.
Even more, the results of interlaboratory comparisons (ILC) conducted by the IAEA to determine occupational radiation exposure haven’t come out yet either. “Occupational radiation protection” is one of eight technical subjects of IAEA safety reviews. The IAEA announced that results of occupational radiation exposure ILCs would be provided later this year as well.
Experts criticized the IAEA for concluding that Japan’s plan to release irradiated water into the sea is “consistent with international safety standards” even before completing its analyses of core samples. Han Byeong-seop, the director of the Institute for Nuclear Safety, especially took issue with the fact that the contaminated water underwent only one round of sample analysis.
“Conducting three rounds of sample analysis in order to reach reliable results is a universal principle in chemical analysis, which is probably why the IAEA said it would carry out three rounds [of sample analysis],” Han said, adding, “But by releasing a report with only one round of analysis completed, [the IAEA] has proved for itself that the results of its analysis are insignificant.”
Another safety regulations expert who previously worked for KINS remarked, “I suspect that the IAEA caved to Japan’s wish to have the report as soon as possible by cutting short its service period and announcing results that haven’t even been reached yet,” stressing that “this is a matter of credibility.”
By Kim Jeong-su, senior staff writer