News & Articles

Recent news of the triple reactor meltdowns and radiation catastrophe stemming from the Great Northeast Japan Earthquake is barely covered in U.S. papers, and if it is reported it’s often pushed to back pages or the business section. Even then, the choice of stories can be suspiciously telling. The same day that cesium-137, a long-lived radioactive poison, was reported to be found in the urine of children not far from the destroyed Fukushima reactors, the New York Times decided that story wasn’t fit to print, but highlighted the announcement that Japan had restarted its first two reactors since the all 54 of the country’s nukes had been shut down following the 2011 disaster hat trick of quake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns.
 
        Still, if you follow the Japanese press and the more internationalist news services, you can get a glimpse of what the future of nuclear power holds.
 
June 16: Inadequate cooling of radioactive wreckage
        Arnold Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience managing and coordinating projects at 70 reactors around the U.S., told Al Jazeera June 16: “Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed. You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.”
 
June 18: Government withheld fallout details, twice
        Japan’s central government was found for a second time to have refused to make public detailed, up-to-the-minute high radiation measurements that had been provided to it by the U.S. Energy Department. The DOE’s Aerial Measuring System compiled maps noting the direction and radiation levels in plumes of radiation spewed by the three meltdowns and possible fuel pool fire, and sent them to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. With no knowledge of the danger, thousands of Fukushima families evacuated directly into the high radiation areas. The government also withheld its own forecasts of radioactive fallout made by its System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information.
 
July 20: A third of Fukushima children at risk of cancer
        Fukushima Prefecture’s Health Management Survey, in its sixth report since the disaster began, reported in July that 36 percent of children in the heavily contaminated Fukushima Prefecture have abnormal thyroid growths and could be prone to thyroid cancer. After examining over 38,000 children from the area, medics said more than 13,000 have cysts or nodules as large as five millimeters on their thyroid glands. “The lesions on the ultrasounds should all be biopsied, and they’re not being biopsied. . . . that’s ultimately medical irresponsibility, because if some of these children have cancer and they’re not treated, they’re going to die,” pediatrician Helen Caldicott told Business Insider.
 
July 21: Workers told to falsify their radiation doses
        Workers struggling in high radiation areas of the wrecked Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex in the aftermath of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake, Japan’s most severe ever, were told to lie about their heavy doses so they could keep working. Radio Netherlands and Tokyo’s daily Asahi Shimbun reported that an executive of the construction firm Build-Up, a subcontractor of Fukushima-Daiichi owners Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), told workers to cover their dose meters with lead. If they didn’t fake their exposure levels, the executive told the workers, they would quickly reach the legally permissible annual exposure limit of 50 milliSieverts, according to Asahi Shimbun. The workers had a recording of this meeting, the newspaper said. “Unless we hide it with lead, exposure will max out and we cannot work,” the executive was heard saying in the recording, the paper reported.
 
July 23: Experts warn improvements “not enough”
        A state-sponsored investigation of the disaster called on the government to immediately do more to prepare for potential disasters. In particular, the panel, led by University of Tokyo engineering professor Yotaro Hatamura, said that reactor complexes must have off-site management centers protected against “massive radiation leaks” like the ones at Fukushima that rendered its control center useless. The report also found that data supplied to the panel by Tokyo Electric Power Co. were full of errors and told the company to reconsider it.
 
July 28: Dump site disputes stall decontamination
        Political stalemate over the location of dump sites has halted most removal of contaminated topsoil in districts evacuated because of radioactive fallout. Because of disputes over where to dump the waste, and for how long, negotiations between the central government and prefectural authorities in the dead zones have ground to a halt, the Japan Times reports.
 
 
July 29: Strong quake shakes Fukushima again
        A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 6.4 jolted northeast Japan at 3:45 a.m. directly off Fukushima Prefecture and was felt in Tokyo 150 miles away. Reuters reported that a Tepco spokesperson said, “There were no abnormalities at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant,” as if triple meltdowns are the new normal. One of the world’s most seismically active countries, Japan accounts for nearly 20 percent of all earthquakes greater than magnitude six.
 
August 2: Public demands permanent shutdown
        The number of protesters soared to about 200,000 in front of the home of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda in downtown Tokyo, where the activists have been demanding a meeting with the PM since March. The first of the Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes’ regular Friday vigils began with 300 people. The Japanese network finally got a 30-minute meeting Aug. 1 where they insisted that Japan must do without the restart of any of its 52 closed-down reactors.
 
August 13: Site manager says reactors “not stable”
        The Australian reported that Masao Yoshida, the former manager of the Fukushima-Daiichi complex, said in a video message that the reactors where still unstable. “People won’t come back to Fukushima until the plant is stabilized and we still need to find a way to do that,” Yoshida said. He led the “Fukushima 50,” workers who reportedly were ordered by the prime minister to stay on-site for days throughout the harrowing ordeal caused by the earthquake, tsunami, three tritium/hydrogen gas explosions, and three reactor meltdowns. The site manager’s warning flatly contradicts Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s statement to radiation regulators Dec. 16, 2011, that Tepco had finally brought leaking reactors at Fukushima under control. Noda said then that the wrecked reactors “have reached a state of cold shutdown to the point where the accident is now under control.”
 
August 21: Record cesium levels found in local fish
        Radioactive cesium measuring 258 times the amount that Japan’s government deems allowable for consumption has been found in fish near the damaged Fukushima nuclear power complex, the Kyodo news agency reported. Tepco found 25,800 becquerels per kilogram of cesium in two greenlings within 12.4 miles of the site Aug. 1, a record for the thousands of area fish caught and tested since the radiation disaster began. Japan’s government considers fish with more than 100 becquerels per kilogram unsafe for consumption. Independent experts warn that the Japanese standard is based on outdated risk models that must be replaced with stricter limits.
 
August 29: Cesium contamination in cod leads to ban
        Aomori Prefecture was ordered to halt shipments of Pacific cod after some of the bottom-feeding, long-distance swimmers were found with exceptionally high levels of cesium-137. The ban was imposed by the central government Aug. 27 after some of the cod, caught 250 miles from Fukushima-Daiichi, had already been sold to consumers. The poisoned cod had 133 becquerels of cesium per kilogram, an amount the daily Asahi Shimbun called “far above” the government’s permitted contamination level.
 
September 1: Three studies say disaster could strike again
        According to lead authors of three studies completed this year, misunderstanding of the exact nature and causes of the Fukushima disaster mean another catastrophic release of radiation could happen again, Asahi Shimbun reported. The studies warned that in part because the site’s 24 outside radiation monitors and its control room’s instruments were all knocked out, because of “difficulty gathering evidence inside four destroyed reactor buildings,” and because the extent of earthquake damage (prior to the tsunami’s arrival) is still hotly contested, the “complete picture remains unknown,” the paper said.
 
        Don’t be lulled into thinking the Fukushima crisis has passed, just because the U.S. press would like you to forget it.
 
– John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.