Fukushima after 7 years

-Fukushima in 2011

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/world/africa/tillerson-chad-nigeria.html   SANTA MARIA, Cape Verde — Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson on Monday called the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain “an egregious act” and added, “It appears that it clearly came from Russia.”

The statement, made in an interview with reporters at the end of a five-nation tour of Africa, was the clearest statement yet from the Trump administration, after several days of equivocation in which American officials declined to explicitly blame Russia for the March 4 attack.

“I’ve become extremely concerned about Russia,” Mr. Tillerson said in the interview. “We spent most of last year investing a lot into attempts to work together, to solve problems, to address differences. And quite frankly, after a year, we didn’t get very far. Instead what we’ve seen is a pivot on their part to be more aggressive.”

He added: “And this is very, very concerning to me and others, that there seems to be a certain unleashing of activity that we don’t fully understand what the objective behind that is. And if in fact this attack in the U.K. is the work of the Russian government, this is a pretty serious action.”

The Trump administration’s relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin has been contradictory, with President Trump often complimenting the Russian leader while Mr. Tillerson has become increasingly critical.

On Monday night, the White House directed reporters to a formal statement from the State Department, which said: “There is never a justification for this type of attack — the attempted murder of a private citizen on the soil of a sovereign nation — and we are outraged that Russia appears to have again engaged in such behavior.”

Mr. Tillerson spoke to reporters while on a flight from Nigeria to Cape Verde. Hours earlier, Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, said it was “highly likely” that Russia was to blame, and she demanded answers from the Kremlin.

Mr. Tillerson said that he had just spoken with his British counterpart, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, and that the State Department would issue a statement affirming the British findings.

“This is a really egregious act,” Mr. Tillerson said. “It appears that it clearly came from Russia. Whether it came from Russia with the Russian government’s knowledge is not known to me at this point.”

He added that he would be stunned if a government was behind the use of a deadly nerve agent. The former spy, Sergei V. Skripal, once an informant for Britain’s foreign intelligence service, and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious on a park bench in of Salisbury, England, and a police officer who helped them has also been hospitalized, in serious condition.

“It’s almost beyond comprehension that a state, an organized state would do something like that,” Mr. Tillerson said in the interview. “A nonstate actor, I could understand. A state actor — I cannot understand why anyone would take such an action.”

He noted that the nerve agent used in the attack “is only in the hands of a very, very limited number of parties.” The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a watchdog agency, is also looking into the attack.

Asked whether the attack would prompt a response in defense of Britain, a NATO ally that the United States is legally obligated to defend if it came under attack, Mr. Tillerson said: “It certainly will trigger a response. I’ll leave it at that.”

Mr. Tillerson cut short his Africa trip a day earlier than expected to start what he described as the intense homework for President Trump’s meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.

In a wide-ranging interview aboard his plane, Mr. Tillerson said he left behind a stronger relationship with President Idriss Déby of Chad, who was angered when Chad was placed on a list of countries whose citizens are virtually barred from entering the United States.

Mr. Tillerson appeared exhausted on the flight home Monday. He had left the United States on the evening of March 6, but after just a day of meetings in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he woke at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday with the news that President Trump had decided to accept Mr. Kim’s invitation for talks.

He had another urgent phone call Friday night — he would not say about what — so that by Saturday he had managed to get just four hours of sleep over three days, he said. And then he got food poisoning.

“So the combination of that, I just said, ‘This is inhumane,’” he said with a chuckle.

Mr. Tillerson canceled his meetings set for Saturday in Nairobi, including a visit to an H.I.V./AIDS clinic, and he decided to fly home Monday night after quick visits to Chad and Nigeria.

The potential North Korean summit meeting dominated much of Mr. Tillerson’s week even though he was halfway around the world from Washington. In a news conference Monday, Mr. Tillerson said that planning for the event was in “very early stages.”

But he said in his later interview on his plane that, in his own experience as the chief executive of oil giant Exxon Mobil, intense preparation — what he referred to as “homework” — was needed to make such a meeting successful.

Without good preparation, he said, “it’s very difficult to map a way forward.”

Early on Monday, Mr. Tillerson spent several hours in Ndjamena, Chad, where he insisted that the people of Chad were “welcome in the United States.”

He said that Chad’s efforts to strengthen its passport controls and increase information sharing may result in its removal from the travel ban.

Chad’s foreign minister, Mahamat Zene Cherif, called the inclusion of Chad on the travel ban an “injustice,” and said that widely reported disparaging remarks attributed to Mr. Trump about Africa “shocked almost all Africans.”

State Department and Pentagon officials wanted to keep Chad — a partner in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel — off the travel ban list when it was formulated but were overruled by the White House. Mr. Tillerson said he hoped the country’s inclusion would soon be corrected.

At his last stop on the continent, in Abuja, Nigeria, Mr. Tillerson met with President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria and then held a news conference with Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama. They discussed cooperation on trade and in the fight against Boko Haram, an offshoot of the Islamic State.

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radioactive-rubble-heap-that-was-fukushima-daiichi-7-years-on/3-8-18    Seven years after one of the largest earthquakes on record unleashed a massive tsunami and triggered a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials say they are at last getting a handle on the mammoth task of cleaning the site before it is ultimately dismantled. But the process is still expected to be a long, expensive slog, requiring as-yet untried feats of engineering—and not all the details have yet been worked out.

When the disaster knocked out off- and on-site power supplies on March 11, 2011, three of the cooling systems for the plant’s four reactor units were disabled. This caused the nuclear fuel inside to overheat, leading to a meltdown and hydrogen explosions that spewed out radiation. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), responded by cooling the reactors with water, which continues today. Meanwhile thousands of people living in the surrounding area were evacuated and Japan’s other nuclear plants were temporarily shut down.

In the years since the disaster and the immediate effort to stanch the release of radioactive material, officials have been working out how to decontaminate the site without unleashing more radiation into the environment. It will take a complex engineering effort to deal with thousands of fuel rods, along with the mangled debris of the reactors and the water used to cool them. Despite setbacks, that effort is now moving forward in earnest, officials say. “We are still conducting studies on the location of the molten fuel, but despite this we have made the judgment that the units are stable,” says Naohiro Masuda, TEPCO’s chief decommissioning officer for Daiichi.

Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion. The Japan Center for Economic Research, a private think tank, said the cleanup costs could mount to some $470 billion to $660 billion, however.

Under a government roadmap, TEPCO hopes to finish the job in 30 to 40 years. But some experts say even that could be an underestimate. “In general, estimates of work involving decontamination and disposal of nuclear materials are underestimated by decades,” says Rod Ewing, a professor of nuclear security and geological sciences at Stanford University. “I think that we have to expect that the job will extend beyond the estimated time.”

The considerable time and expense are due to the cleanup being a veritable hydra that involves unprecedented engineering. TEPCO and its many contractors will be focusing on several battlefronts.

Water is being deliberately circulated through each reactor every day to cool the fuel within—but the plant lies on a slope, and water from precipitation keeps flowing into the buildings as well. Workers built an elaborate scrubbing system that removes cesium, strontium and dozens of other radioactive particles from the water; some of it is recirculated into the reactors, and some goes into row upon row of giant tanks at the site. There’s about one million tons of water kept in 1,000 tanks and the volume grows by 100 tons a day, down from 400 tons four years ago.

To keep more water from seeping into the ground and being tainted, more than 90 percent of the site has been paved. A series of drains and underground barriers—including a $325-million* supposedly impermeable “wall” of frozen soil—was also constructed to keep water from flowing into the reactors and the ocean. These have not worked as well as expected, though, especially during typhoons when precipitation spikes, so groundwater continues to be contaminated.

Despite the fact contaminated water was dumped into the sea after the disaster, studies by Japanese and foreign labs have shown radioactive cesium in fish caught in the region has fallen and is now within Japan’s food safety limits. TEPCO will not say when it will decide what to do with all the stored water, because dumping it in the ocean again would invite censure at home and abroad—but there are worries that another powerful quake could cause it to slosh out of the tanks.

A second major issue at Fukushima is how to handle the fuel, the melted uranium cores as well as spent and unused fuel rods stored at the reactors. Using robotic probes and 3-D imaging with muons (a type of subatomic particle), workers have found pebbly deposits and debris at various areas inside the primary containment vessels in the three of the plant’s reactor units. These highly radioactive remains are thought to be melted fuel as well as supporting structures. TEPCO has not yet worked out how it can remove the remains, but it wants to start the job in 2021. There are few precedents for the task. Lake Barrett—director of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant during its decommissioning after a partial meltdown at the Middletown, Pa., facility in 1979—says TEPCO will use robots to remotely dig out the melted fuel and store it in canisters on-site before shipping to its final disposal spot. “This is similar to what we did at Three Mile Island, just much larger and with much more sophisticated engineering because their damage is greater than ours was,” Barrett says. “So although the work is technically much more challenging than ours was, Japan has excellent technological capabilities, and worldwide robotic technology has advanced tremendously in the last 30-plus years.”

Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany, doubts the ambitious cleanup effort can be completed in the time cited, and questions whether the radioactivity can be completely contained. Until TEPCO can verify the conditions of the molten fuel, he says, “there can be no confirmation of what impact and damage the material has had” on the various components of the reactors—and therefore how radiation might leak into the environment in the future.

Although the utility managed to safely remove all 1,533 fuel bundles from the plant’s unit No. 4 reactor by December 2014, it still has to do the same for the hundreds of rods stored at the other three units. This involves clearing rubble, installing shields, dismantling the building roofs, and setting up platforms and special rooftop equipment to remove the rods. Last month a 55-ton dome roof was installed on unit No. 3 to facilitate the safe removal of the 533 fuel bundles that remain in a storage pool there. Whereas removal should begin at No. 3 sometime before April 2019, the fuel at units No. 1 and 2 will not be ready for transfer before 2023, according to TEPCO. And just where all the fuel and other radioactive solid debris on the site will be stored or disposed of long-term has yet to be decided; last month the site’s ninth solid waste storage building, with a capacity of about 61,000 cubic meters, went into operation.

As for what the site itself might look like decades from now, cleanup officials refuse to say. But they are quick to differentiate it from the sarcophagus-style containment of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in the Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. Whereas the Chernobyl plant is sealed off and the surrounding area remains off-limits except for brief visits—leaving behind several ghost towns—Japanese officials want as many areas as possible around the Daiichi site to eventually be habitable again.

“To accelerate reconstruction and rebuilding of Fukushima as a region, and the lives of locals, the key is to reduce the mid- and long-term risk,” says Satoru Toyomoto, director for international issues at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Nuclear Accident Response Office. “In that regard, keeping debris on the premises without approval is not an option.”

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8 August 2011   Across the northeast, millions of people are living with its consequences and searching for a consensus on a safe radiation level that does not exist. Experts give bewilderingly different assessments of its dangers.

Some scientists say Fukushima is worse than the 1986 Chernobyl accident, with which it shares a maximum level-7 rating on the sliding scale of nuclear disasters. One of the most prominent of them is Dr Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician and long time anti-nuclear activist who warns of "horrors to come" in Fukushima.

Chris Busby, a professor at the University of Ulster known for his alarmist views, generated controversy during a Japan visit last month when he said the disaster would result in more than 1 million deaths. "Fukushima is still boiling its radionuclides all over Japan," he said. "Chernobyl went up in one go. So Fukushima is worse."

On the other side of the nuclear fence are the industry friendly scientists who insist that the crisis is under control and radiation levels are mostly safe. "I believe the government and Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco, the plant's operator] are doing their best," said Naoto Sekimura, vice-dean of the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. Mr Sekimura initially advised residents near the plant that a radioactive disaster was "unlikely" and that they should stay "calm", an assessment he has since had to reverse.

Slowly, steadily, and often well behind the curve, the government has worsened its prognosis of the disaster. Last Friday, scientists affiliated with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said the plant had released 15,000 terabecquerels of cancer-causing Cesium, equivalent to about 168 times the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the event that ushered in the nuclear age. (Professor Busby says the release is at least 72,000 times worse than Hiroshima).

Caught in a blizzard of often conflicting information, many Japanese instinctively grope for the beacons they know. Mr Ichida and his colleagues say they no longer trust the nuclear industry or the officials who assured them the Fukushima plant was safe. But they have faith in government radiation testing and believe they will soon be allowed back to sea.

That's a mistake, say sceptics, who note a consistent pattern of official lying, foot-dragging and concealment. Last week, officials finally admitted something long argued by its critics: that thousands of people with homes near the crippled nuclear plant may not be able to return for a generation or more.  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/why-the-fukushima-disaster-is-worse-than-chernobyl-2345542.html

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