Guest Opinion: Fukushima and the Salish Sea

I highly suggest reading enenews.com. You will find that Fukushima in fact did not just melt down, it exploded- they are finding pieces of the cores up to 300 miles from the power plant. This is many orders of magnitude worse than any other nuclear accident, including Chernobyl. At least the Soviets did something to mitigate the disaster, rather than just denying it outright.

“You will find that Fukushima in fact did not just melt down, it exploded- they are finding pieces of the cores up to 300 miles from the power plant.”

A casual reading of the above sentence may lead one to imagine that somehow coffe-can sized chunks of reactor were somehow blown 300 miles away by the force of the hydrogen gas explosion in the containment vessel.

However, the enenews article states, “the majority of these hot particles were 10 um [micrometers] or less in size…”, which is basically dust.

It is necessary in this day and age to read the source of news articles to get at the real story.

I agree we should all be concerned with inappropriate discharges to our local waters. However, it is premature and glib to dismiss Fukushima as only affecting “the northeast coast of Japan.” Every single day the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is dumping hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water into the ocean and this is likely to continue indefinitely given that last week TEPCO abandoned it’s folly of trying to build an ice wall to hold back the groundwater continually inundating the three melted cores. TEPCO has no “plan B” to deal with this highly radioactive water except to continue to dump it into the ocean. It’s interesting you did not mention any of this in your assurances we have nothing to worry about on our side of the Pacific Ocean.

It’s also important to recognize the problems at Fukushima are getting worse not better as the intense radiation causes steady deterioration of materials and structures. TEPCO and the Japanese government is making it up as they go. They have no plan for dealing with the three melted cores. They do not even know where they are at present. Fukushima’s impacts will go on for many, many decades, if not a century or more. Therefore the ultimate impacts on environment and health on the west coast of North America cannot be known now. There are, however, already peer reviewed journal articles showing bioaccumulation of radioactivity in the Pacific Ocean food chain.

There are many lessons to be learned from Fukushima. But they won’t be learned from the mainstream media blackout that currently exists in the U.S. concerning Fukushima, or from apologists for the nuclear industry. When I was a young Ph.D. student the nuclear industry’s risk assessments assured us there would only be one nuclear accident approximately every 5000 years. We now know there is one significant nuclear accident approximately every 25 years somewhere in the world. We also know that after seventy years of a commercial nuclear industry in the U.S. there is still no nuclear waste repository here, thanks in part to President Obama’s cancellation of the Yucca Flats site as a political favor to Senator Harry Reid, forcing spent fuel rods to be stored at each of the nuclear plants around the country, increasing the risk of future accidents in the U.S.

These are some of the facts that should be included in any balanced discussion of Fukushima and nuclear power, and their relevance to all of us regardless of where we live.

I’d put my money on the Lummi Fisherman who was here last year. He had been finding two-headed fish and deformed crabs.

DR. Michio Kaku, world-renowned Physicist, NYU, calls this an “Extinction Event”. Everyday radioactivity is leaking into the Pacific from the melted bottoms of the reactors. They don’t know how to stop this!

The “mysterious” Die-off of thousands of Marine Mammals, Birds, deformed fish etc off our Pacific coast since the Fukashima disaster just might be indicative of a much bigger problem than world governments would like to acknowledge.

There was only 1 water cachement system closed in the San Juan Islands due to radioactive iodine contamination. Radioactive Cesium from Fukushima has only been found in the Frazier river valley, not here.

Here are three things wrong with ignoring Fukushima.
1. We’re being given incorrect data about Fukushima since then, and continuously. The types and amounts of radioisotopes are always being increased.
2. Nuclear reactor explosions, like the triple total meltdown of Fukushima have never been accurately estimated in cost. From a few billion to start to now, 100s of billions and a statement that ‘it can’t be cleaned up’ it can only be contained, with crazy ideas like freezing the ground around it to the depth of the bedrock. These economic understandings help us as a nation decide if today’s nuclear infatuation is economically reasonable. As most scientists have said, so long as there isn’t an accident, or act of nature, nuclear is pretty safe. Ya, ok.
3. The World response to Fukushima was inept, lame and embarrassing. General Electric, the US company that designed and built the power plant wasn’t even there to help. No engineers, no support staff, no nothing. A complete failure of private industry to step in to help contain the event. The problem may have been contained if an emergency response system delivered cooling to the fuel rods within hours of the loss of power.

Barnegate Bay in NJ has a reactor. During Sandy, it nearly flooded. What was the plan? Emergency spraying of salt water on the nuclear pile, washing tons of nuclear material into the Atlantic, where it would wash up to Maine. Really, that was their plan. The flooding stopped within a few feet of that happening.

So this isn’t just Fukushima, this is our planet, our country.

Finally, we have ZERO early warning of a nuclear accident in the Islands ZERO. I hunted down and applied for Media access to everything out there. Sensors went off line in S. Cal. dubious reasons, RADnet was useless. It wasn’t built for this.

And nuclear materials are complex. Radioactive decay rates are different for different materials. Cesium – 2 kinds, Plutonium, Iodine, Strontium – and lots more came and are coming from Fukushima. Beta, Alpha, Gamma, X-rays, all differ, all have different effects on people.

This means a considered amount of expertise, measurement and interpretation need to be taken into account for planning purposes.

My personal opinion. Today’s nuclear technology is 50 + years old. Reactors are junk today. We’re not building or investigating any new nuclear energy technology (fusion yes) because the costs are so high. We’d need a global pool of capital to build a safe nuclear reactor that produces no nuclear waste.

We have 900 million pounds of insanely deadly nuclear waste sitting around in ‘cooling ponds’ .. no place to store all of it has *ever* been built. If Yucca mountain were completed today, it would be filled with just the crud laying around.

At Hanford, (read about it) the millions of gallons of highly radioactive waste is seeping toward the Columbia river. It will reach it in the not to distant future.

Already billions have been spent to try to contain Hanford. Its our Fukushima, right down there across the river from Washington State. No end to the spending is in sight. What a terrible legacy. Some radioactive iotopes will last a million years. much more just 100,000 years. There is no science to accelerate that breakdown or reverse it. It just needs to be buried and secure, and safe, for an eternity.

Do we worry about it? no. Do we take action and vote against it, YES. Do we fear for our waters? No, we don’t fear, we instrument our heavenly home so we at least get a warning when the crud comes flying in.