Scientists Find New Kind Of Fukushima Fallout

Some of the radioactive material that escaped the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in 2011 took a form no one was looking for, scientists have discovered. Now they have to figure out what it means for Japan and for future disasters.

Radioactive cesium—specifically, cesium-137—is one of the waste products of nuclear power. It’s also one of the most dangerous substances in a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima.

One reason why is that the type of radiation it emits is particularly damaging to our bodies. Another is that cesium-137 dissolves in water. That means it can spread quickly through the environment and get into the plants, animal and water we consume.

Until now, scientists and disaster experts thought cesium-137 fallout from the Fukushima reactor meltdown was in this soluble form. That guided their cleanup efforts, like removing and washing topsoil, and helped them map where radiation might spread...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2016/06/30/scientists-find-new-kind-of-fukushima-fallout/

600 tons of melted radioactive Fukushima fuel still not found, clean-up chief reveals

The Fukushima clean-up team remains in the dark about the exact locations of 600 tons of melted radioactive fuel from three devastated nuclear reactors, the chief of decommissioning told the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program in an exclusive interview.

The company hopes to locate and start removing the missing fuel from 2021, the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) chief of decommissioning at Fukushima, Naohiro Masuda, revealed.

The fuel extraction technology is yet to be elaborated upon, he added.

Following the tsunami-caused 2011 meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant uranium fuel of three power generating reactors gained critical temperature and burnt through the respective reactor pressure vessels, concentrating somewhere on the lower levels of the station currently filled with water.

The melted nuclear fuel from Reactor 1 poured out completely, estimated 30 to 50 percent of fuel from Reactor 2 and 3 remained in the active zone, Masuda said.

The official estimates that approximately “200 tons of [nuclear fuel] debris lies within each unit," which makes in total about 600 tons of melted fuel mixed up with metal construction elements, concrete and whatever else was down there....

https://www.rt.com/news/344200-fukushima-melted-nuclear-fuel/

Prologue to catastrophe

In this article, a worker at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station gives his eyewitness account of what happened there on March 11, 2011, in the immediate wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami that caused three of the station’s reactor cores to melt.

In September 2011, six months after disaster shook the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, the newly formed Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident launched a national campaign to collect personal testimonials from those who experienced the accident at the plant and those who were forced to evacuate the area close to the plant. The commission launched a website to serve as an online meeting point; it published questions, and the public provided in-depth answers. For half a year, the commission received hundreds of responses to its queries. Though the commissioners found all the reactions to be insightful and useful to the investigation, they needed to hear several responses firsthand.

One such story was from a subcontractor of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, which owns the nuclear power plant. He was among several hundred workers who were at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station when the great earthquake and subsequent tsunami occurred in eastern Japan. He worked in the plant’s Crisis Center, located on the second floor of the earthquake-resistant building, and recounted his story of what happened as the accident unfolded on March 11, 2011. He was promised anonymity as a condition of providing his account...

http://bos.sagepub.com/content/70/2/36.full

Experts: Fukushima disaster victims to include up to 600,000 deaths, over 100,000 still-births, and over 100,000 children with genetic deformations

Anna Sablina, cancer researcher and assistant professor at University of Leuven, Dec. 26, 2013: [...] in case of such high radioactive dose and exposure it obviously can increase a probability of cancer development especially thyroid cancer and leukemia. [...] We can always compare what people already know about the Chernobyl accident because it is a quite similar situation [to Fukushima] [...] the only problem in the Chernobyl area is a really increased rate of thyroid cancer especially for kids. More than 5,000 kids there diagnosed the thyroid cancer after Chernobyl, so I would say it probably could be the same case as in Japan. And for the rest it is a bit difficult to say [...] I think most of the time the only people who were directly involved in cleaning up and fixing the accident could have a really increased rate of cancer but for the rest it will be really difficult to say [...]

http://enenews.com/experts-fukushima-victims-to-include-up-to-300000-deaths-over-100000-still-births-and-over-100000-children-with-genetic-deformations

Removal of nuclear fuel assemblies from Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant

The 'toxic monster' is coming! Texas-sized floating island containing one million tonnes of junk from Japan tsunami drifting towards US

An enormous floating island of debris from Japan’s 2011 tsunami is drifting towards the coast of America, bringing with it over one million tonnes of junk that would cover an area the size of Texas.

The most concentrated stretch – dubbed the “toxic monster” by Fox News - is currently around 1,700 miles off the coast, sitting between Hawaii and California, but several million tonnes of additional debris remains scattered across the Pacific.

If the rubbish were to continue to fuse, the combined area of the floating junkyard would be greater than that of the United States, and could theoretically weigh up to five million tonnes.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-toxic-monster-is-coming-texassized-floating-island-containing-one-million-tonnes-of-junk-from-japan-tsunami-drifting-towards-us-8922358.html

Fukushima apocalypse: Years of ‘duct tape fixes’ could result in ‘millions of deaths’

Even the tiniest mistake during an operation to extract over 1,300 fuel rods at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan could lead to a series of cascading failures with an apocalyptic outcome, fallout researcher Christina Consolo told RT.

Fukushima operator TEPCO wants to extract 400 tons worth of spent fuel rods stored in a pool at the plant’s damaged Reactor No. 4. The removal would have to be done manually from the top store of the damaged building in the radiation-contaminated environment.

In the worst-case scenario, a mishandled rod may go critical, resulting in an above-ground meltdown releasing radioactive fallout with no way to stop it, said Consolo, who is the founder and host of Nuked Radio. But leaving the things as they are is not an option, because statistical risk of a similarly bad outcome increases every day, she said....

...- The process of removing each rod will have to be repeated over 1,300 times without incident...

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse-fuel-removal-598/