WE’RE NOW ENTERING THE FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI DISASTER’S SECOND PHASE – BARRIER BREACHED – GROUNDWATER CONTAMINATION SIGNIFICANTLY AFFECTING THE PACIFIC OCEAN (updated 8/06/13)
Recent disclosures by TECPO of severely contaminated groundwater at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex have been raising eyebrows in activist communities and beyond. TEPCO has recently been finding in boreholes drilled just meters from the ocean stratospheric quantities of radioactivity, including cesium-134, cesium-137, strontium-90 and tritium. At first, TEPCO said this radiation – near the shoreline, but below the surface – originated ‘from initial leaks that have remained since earlier in the crisis’ and that stayed near the plant inside the bay. BUT THEY WERE WRONG! This was from leaks. This was radiation that was bleeding from the reactors or the coriums and contaminated the groundwater, which has been flowing to sea all along. The most recent alarming news is that TEPCO found 2.35 *tuh* trillion becquerels of radioactive cesium per cubic meter of groundwater in a trench beside reactor 2.
Since early July 2013, measurements peaking into the hundreds of BILLIONs of becquerels per cubic meter (denoted as Bq/m3) of beta radiation have been found in groundwater at the plant! Beta radiation includes such radionuclide groups as cesium, strontium, tritium, and dozens of other isotopes of chemical elements formed by nuclear fission (look at a trilinear chart; the betas are in broken-lined boxes). TEPCO is reluctant to test for strontium-90. STRONTIUM-90 IS WORSE THAN CESIUM-134 OR CESIUM 137 OR TRITIUM to human health. That’s why I focus on this radiochemical across many of the hundreds of pages on NuclearCrimes.org. Read more about why Strontium-90 is a worse health threat than cesium.
When The Pacific Was Last Severely Contaminated
In 1954, the U.S. detonated its largest nuclear bomb ever. Code-named ‘Bravo,’ the hydrogen bomb explosion was 10,000 times the explosive yield of the A-bomb device it dropped 9 years earlier on Hiroshima.
The target: Bikini Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. This ultra-radiation release event showered a type ofradioactive snow on a populated island that the U.S. refused to evacuate for 50 hours – this was part of the notorous Project 4.1. The event also tainted the ocean so badly that hundreds of fishing boat hulls became contaminated, fishing sites became too ‘hot’ to fish, etc… and the effects lingered on for years. The currents pushed much of this radiation, and other radiation generated by USSR and U.S. nuclear dumping and bomb testing in the 1950s, to the Eastern Pacific. We’re getting to this point quickly again with Fukushima’s radioactive groundwater ‘flood.’
TEPCO knows what they’re doing. They are trying to keep people apathethic about this disaster and are being advised by the best spin-doctors in the world. For over 2 years now, TEPCO has done their informational ‘drip drop’ thing for all sorts of data, and now they’re doing it with strontium-90 levels measured in groundwater. They’re withholding most of this data and waiting, very carefully, to release this data until people no longer care or remember there was even data to be shared. Yet, we see from the few disclosures to date that strontium-90 levels keep increasing in groundwater with each sample; see chart in light blue color.
So, is strontium-90 going to be (or already is) a problem in the PACIFIC OCEAN from historic AND future groundwater releases at Fukushima? Strontium, like cesium, is WATER SOLUBLE, UNLIKE PLUTONIUM AND MANY OTHER RADIOCHEMICALS, so we can expect groundwater to be full of the stuff. And…THERE IS A LOT OF STRONTIUM LEFT TO BE LEACHED from the coriums, which are water-drenched, meaning they are slowly leaching radiation into the groundwater. The coriums at Fukushima contain MILLIONS OF TRILLIONS of becquerels of strontium-90 just waiting to be released…and since the corium’s whereabouts are unknown, it’s plausible that groundwater contamination could be getting worse, NOT BETTER!
So, let’s say, soon, TEPCO finds 50 billion becquerels per cubic meter of strontium-90 in groundwater. That’s 50,000,000,000 Bq/m3 of sr90. In a leak involving the volume of water in an Olympic sized swimming pool (which holds 2500 m3 of water), that’s 125 TRILLION becqueruels of strontium-90! That’s 125 trillion becquerels of strontium-90 in one big pool’s worth of water !! Scientists are more or less in consensus – though this is a conservative estimate in my estimation – that Fukushima in 2011 released into the marine environment 1,000 TRILLION becquerels of strontium-90 (into the Pacific). So, over time, and we’re talking just a few months from now, a volume of 10 (ten) Olympic pools of contaminated groundwater containing 50 billion bq/m3 of Sr90 would exceed the most conservative estimate of strontium-90 load put into the Pacific from the 2011 meltdowns (volatilized sr90), dumping and leaks combined! On July 12, 2013, a TEPCO worker said 450 tons of groundwater flow into the Pacific everyday; so it would take just 55 days for 10 volumes of Olympic swimming pools to meet this goal! 1 ton of water equals about 1 cubic meter of water). Perhaps this has already happened, or has happened a few times, since TEPCO has confirmed underground leaks to the sea have been happening since 2011.
We have a real crap-fest on our hands if this keeps going on and no one stops the groundwater flow. On August 5th of 2013, it was learned that tainted groundwater has breached an underground barrier at the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s sea front, an event that Japan’s nuclear regulatory body, the NRA, dubbed an emergency (data now shows that underground water has risen over this underground wall, a sort of chemical liquid glass barrier; the conclusion: tainted water is now leaking uncontrolled into the sea). Critics have long been saying that barriers being built by TEPCO around its reactors will simply back up the groundwater and cause new challenges, from imminent overflow (and faster flows of tainted water) to thwarting or overwhelming pumping AND STORAGE capability to literally crushing the reactor structures from the water pressure! If the entire REACTOR site becomes a type of ‘soup’ – if it is all turned into the saturated zone – the reactors could lose their stability and move, or sink. In an earthquake, the moist ground could experience liquefaction: it could behave as water even though it (the soil) is a solid. This would be very bad.
With this latest breach, TEPCO said that it was going to increase its testing for strontium-90 in seawater/groundwater despite an announcement by the utility in mid July 2013 that it was (a) reducing the frequency of analysis of Sr90 in sea samples and (b) was planning to cease reporting measurements (of Sr90) in becquerels, and instead in (erroneous) units of dose or other parameters meant to confuse and mislead, IMO. We shall see what happens. The fact remains that strontium-90 poses a greater danger, unit for unit, than tritium or cesium to human health and the environment, and strontium-90 will be entering the environment via groundwater flows in amounts many times that released by air during the meltdowns in 2011.
The worrisome part is we could soon be seeing radioactive measurements of strontium, cesium, tritium, and soon perhaps even plutonium, reaching record high levels as TEPCO throws up its hands and says it has no way or plan of dealing with UNCONTROLLED groundwater leaks for years, or decades!
THIS LOOKS LIKE IT WILL HAPPEN.
IT COULD BE WORSE FOR THE ECOSYSTEMS OF THE EARTH AND ITS INHABITANTS THAN THE MELTDOWNS IN 2011.
SEAFOOD LOVERS ACROSS THE WORLD: – The ‘levels’ of radiation in the seafood you are eating now and in the future will be ticking with radiation but will be considered ‘safe’ by government scientists. Why? Because their ‘limits’ are way too high. Yet it is fact that the only safe level of radiation to reduce genetic defects and cancer incidence worldwide is zero becquerels of anything. I COULD ADD TONS MORE….BUT YOU PROBABLY WON’T BELIEVE ME AND THIS WEBSITE IF IT CONTRADICTED THE RHETORIC OF THE AGENCIES YOU HAVE COME TO TRUST WHICH HAVE ACRONYMS THAT SHOULD BE SHORT FOR DEROGATORY AND INSULTING TERMS INSTEAD OF WORDS LIKE ‘REGULATORY’ OR ‘HEALTH’ OR ‘PROTECTION.’ Protect your own health and regulate your genetic stability for the sake of your children, grandchildren, etc…by NOT EATING SEAFOOD OR CONSUMING ANYTHING MADE IN THE SEA.
– TEPCO ADMITS RADIATION HAS BEEN LEAKING TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN ALL THIS TIME JULY 22, 2013 – ARTICLE –
TEPCO has seen the light and now has admitted what the experts were suspecting. Leaks are happening. The plant operator has also validated a theory put forward by a well-known, tireless blogger last week that tidal movements were responsible for some of this leakage. Iori of Fukushima-Diary wrote on his blog’s July 19th post ‘Possibility of seawater coming up to the plant side’ the following:
‘It’s the possibility that seawater may come into the plant, and also contamination is flowing to the sea groundwater….Water flows from high to low. It’s natural to think the contaminated groundwater is flowing to the deeper part of the sea, which is underground of the sea. Wrapping it all, it seems rational to think groundwater and seawater are moving back and forth as full tide repeats. By repeating the motion of the tide, contamination is possibly moving back and forth between land and sea too. As long as they keep injecting water to the reactors, Fukushima plant will keep being the worst contamination source of the Pacific.’
In late July 2013, The Asahi Shimbun stated that TEPCO had ‘confirmed water level variations in monitoring wells as early as in January [2013]’; in other words, TEPCO knew since the beginning of 2013 that the ‘wells where the radioactivity was detected were fluctuating in sync with tide levels.’ TEPCO’s delay in relaying this information to the public was blamed on poor ‘in-house communications,’ which has angered many groups in Japan.
8,300 Bq/m3 | sample date: 1?/?/12 | publish date: 12/12/12 beside reactor3
850,000 Bq/m3 | sample date: 3/26/12++ | publish date: 6/7/13
1,000,000 Bq/m3 | sample date: 5/24/13 | publish date: 6/19/13
1,200,000 Bq/m3 | sample date: 6/07/13 | publish date: 7/11/13 boring no. 1
++During a four-hour leak event (into the ocean) in March 2012, TEPCO had measured – 10 minutes BEFORE finding the leak! – 17 million Bq/m3 of beta radiation in water and five percent of that was strontium-90.
Thanks Fukushima Diary for their work! It’s helping us.
Maritime Safety Agency, ‘Sr-90 and Cs-137 density in seawater became the highest in past 40 years’
SEAWATER RESULTS: 5,800 Bq/m3 (157 pCi/L) | sample date: 6/26/13 | publish date: 7/31/13 | north side of units 5 & 6 water outlet
If Iori is right, then deep contamination may be a huge problem, and TEPCO isn’t looking for it; they’re just looking at seawater in its port. Radiation could be emerging in large quantities daily from a spring or whatchamacallit hundreds of meters out at sea – or even miles or tens of miles away – where TEPCO is barely monitoring; according to Fukushima Diary, TEPCO has ‘only three monitoring points outside of the port…’ Two are ‘close to the coastal line’ and in a 1 kilometer radius area offshore they have just one monitoring point.’ (source)
What this means…is there’s an entire set of NEW plumes of highly contaminated seawater that are floating about and no one has any idea of when these plumes left the plant, their toxicity level or makeup. Some of this undiagnosed leaked radiation in the ocean is mixing with OLDER plumes, especially near the coast, to create significant spikes in contamination in ocean water and fish (seafood).
FLOOD, NOT LEAK – from ‘The Food Lab’ guy: ‘They use the word leak, to play it down. Their estimate is 450 tons a day of ground water flowing into the Pacific Ocean. This is probably a very conservative estimate! It’s a flood, not a leak!’
Carbon 14 and the 411 on Corium – July 29, 2013 – Bobby1, a blogger at WordPress, explores the hidden story of the latest at Fukushima. Excerpts:
‘The neutrons from the chain reactions, along with neutron-emitting isotopes like plutonium and curium, interact with the nitrogen injections to cause carbon-14 to be released. There have been no measurements made of this isotope. Along with tritium (from neutrons and boric acid injections), this isotope is most deleterious to plant life. Linus Pauling, the two-time Nobel Prize-winning chemist, felt that carbon-14 was the most dangerous isotope of them all.’…
‘Unit 3, which has been giving off a light show on the Daiichi wecams the past few weeks, has been giving off steam. Nitrogen has been injected into this reactor continuously, in order to prevent a hydrogen explosion. There is a shortfall in nitrogen recovered from the gas management system. This shows that the steam is coming from the reactor, or from the hole in the ground underneath the reactor, with MOX corium down there…The underground corium has encountered water. So there is a risk of a hydrovolcanic explosion with this plutonium-rich fuel.’ {More:Cesium density in reactor3 “steam” higher than the gas inside of PCV}
More articles about Fukushima and health
Skyrocketing Levels of Strontium-90 Being Found in Groundwater at Fukushima. A Look at ‘Why?’ – July 2013
FAQs on radioactive contamination of food in U.S.
‘Japan Finds Radioactivity in More Foods from California: The California Radiation Report’– chart of contamination levels
‘Vital Information that U.S. Scientists and the U.S. Government Isn’t Telling You about Pacific Seafood Tainted by Fukushima,’ by NuclearCrimes.org; update on tuna situation update on bluefin tuna study
The threat posed to health by eating radioactive foods
Fukushima’s NOT over. IT’S ACTUALLY GETTING WORSE. Please donate if you like seeing our coverage on this situation. DUST OFF YOUR BLOGS AND GET ACTIVE AGAIN ABOUT FUKUSHIMA! Share, like, tweet, flip out!
IS THE PACIFIC OCEAN FOOD CHAIN DOOMED? – May 2013 – Incredibly worrisome levels of cesium, including short-lived radioactive cesium-134, have been found near Hawaii in the LOWEST part of the marine food chain: plankton. Levels up the food chain, i.e. fish, whales, seals, due to bioaccumulation, MUST be magnitudes higher in contamination now or soon – stop eating Pacific wild seafood now – Researchers find high cesium in some Pacific plankton
