Note: For those following this from an astrological perspective, one chart to start with in understanding anything of a nuclear nature is the Nuclear Axis, which I covered here last weekend. If you want to explore the industry and anti-nuke sites that I’m using to write summaries like this, we have a special page for that — All Things Nuclear.
While the world’s attention has suddenly shifted to the military crisis in Libya (the UN Security Council approved a war there last week), the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in northeastern Japan continues to develop. CBS News said that radiation has reached the Los Angeles area as of yesterday, but says that the levels are a billion times less than can make someone sick. That suggests authorities believe things would still be fine if 999 million times more radiation reached LA, so if you ask them we have a long way to go.
MSNBC: Japan confirmed the presence of radioactive iodine contamination (a core meltdown byproduct) in food products from near a crippled nuclear plant and ordered a halt to their sale, the U.N. nuclear body said on Saturday. “Though radioactive iodine has a short half-life of about 8 days and decays naturally within a matter of weeks, there is a short-term risk to human health if radioactive iodine in food is absorbed into the human body,” the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement.
Here’s how The New York Times put it: “While officials downplayed the immediate risks to consumers, the findings are likely to further unsettle a nation worried about the long-term effects of the damaged nuclear power plants. The crisis, which has entered its second week, has caused alarm in some countries that fallout from Japan might reach their shores.” Wait, people are just figuring this out now? The Times continues:
“Tokyo Electric Power Company, with help from the Japan Self-Defense Force, police and firefighters, continued efforts to cool the damaged reactors on Saturday. About 500 workers from the utility connected a transmission line almost a mile long to Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station. They hope to restart a cooling system there on Sunday.” Comment: this would have been more helpful last weekend. We had better get the Boy Scouts involved helping out.
World Nuclear News, an industry website, also reported that “Radiation levels exceeding the Japanese government-set level have been detected in samples of milk and spinach collected in the region of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. However, the levels measured are said to pose no immediate threat to health.”
No immediate risk? Get out your doublespeak dictionary.
Meantime, the Nuclear Information Resource Service, a reputable antinuclear website, published the following report Saturday morning:
Officials believe they are having some success using a variety of methods to cool the damaged reactors at the Fukushima site, including fire trucks and a remotely-operated system that can spray water for seven hours at a time. A power cable has apparently finally been placed at the site (after several incorrect reports that this already had happened), and may be hooked up later on Saturday. If successful, this would provide power to the site. However, the condition of the safety systems inside the reactors is unknown, so it is also unknown whether offsite power will prove to be the savior it would have been a week ago.
The condition of the fuel pools, especially at Units 3 and 4, appears to remain more serious.
TEPCO has cut holes in the roofs of the Units 5 and 6 containment buildings in an effort to remove building pressure and prevent explosions such as those that severely damaged Units 1, 3 and 4. This means some radiation is certainly being released through these holes.
Contaminated milk and spinach has been found; the spinach was growing 60 miles from the site. More food contamination can be expected in the coming days and weeks.
Most alarming are reports from AccuWeather and CNN that wind directions—which through the week have been steadily west-east toward the Pacific Ocean—are shifting: first from the site to the north and northwest, then on Monday south toward Tokyo.
Union of Concerned Scientists continues to provide daily press briefings. Here is some audio of Friday’s briefing.
David Lochbaum said, “The spent fuel pools have basically one system to cool them and a very flimsy, nonreliable structure around them in case radioactivity is released. So, you have more fuel that sits in the reactor core in a place where you have one system and no reliable barriers in case something happens. It’s a recipe for disaster, and that disaster is now unfolding in Japan. In the United States, we’re even worse off, because our spent fuel pools are more filled than in Japan, and we’re in the same risk level. So, we need to do something rapidly to better protect Americans.”
He added: “It’s a very common design. It’s a common design. Thirty-one of our reactors are very similar. It wasn’t a cost consideration as much as an oversight. When the plants were originally designed, it was thought that the spent fuel would remain on the sites only two or three months after they came out of a reactor, during refueling outage, and then the fuel would be shipped off-site for reprocessing and disposal. When those plans changed, we just filled the pools up to capacity without ever rethinking whether we should provide more safety and better barriers.”
This part of the transcript is interesting:
REPORTER: If containment were to fail, there’s conflicting reports about whether there’s any water in the Number 4 pool at all. How long does it take for a serious release to happen once that fuel is exposed?
MR. LOCHBAUM: We’re talking hours. Once that condition is reached, it’s hours before you start getting the radioactive cloud.
REPORTER: And this would be mostly cesium?
MR. LOCHBAUM: Cesium would be the worst, but there’s an awful lot of other radioisotopes that would follow along. You have krypton. There’s just a whole litany of things that are in that spent fuel that are posing the risk. You have to remember, the reason it’s in the spent fuel pools in the United States and elsewhere is that no one has come up with a repository to safely isolate that material for 10,000 years into the future. The material—it’s not just the cesium; it’s a bunch of other things that have that hazard for that length of time. So, that radioactive cloud will contain cesium and a bunch of other things that people downwind need to be protected from.
REPORTER: Would you expect, absent some sort of extraordinary weather event, that this would tend to fall within the 30-kilometer zone?
MR. LOCHBAUM: The challenge there is that the most likely outcome of a spent fuel problem of this nature is a fire, and a fire tends to propel the radionuclides higher up into the atmosphere than if it was just the metal rods breaking and the gases leaking out. Because of the mode of force of the smoke carrying materials higher into the air, they tend to get spread further and over a wider area [by the jet stream] and other winds, and further complicating that situation is the meteorological conditions.
This is not good:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/20/us-nuclear-usa-idUSTRE72J2L820110320
Japan quake may alter where U.S. builds nuke plants
WASHINGTON | Sun Mar 20, 2011 11:07am EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Japan’s nuclear crisis will influence where the United States builds its nuclear power plants, and the operation of a facility near New York City will be reviewed in the wake of the disaster, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Sunday.
“Certainly where we site reactors — and where we site reactors going forward — will be different than where we might have sited them in the past,” Chu said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Japan restored power to a crippled nuclear reactor on Sunday at the Fukushima power plant wrecked by an earthquake and tsunami in a step seen as crucial to attempts to cool it down and limit the leak of deadly radiation.
The crisis in Japan has prompted nations around the world to review their own nuclear power efforts.
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Thursday he has ordered a comprehensive review of U.S. nuclear facilities, maintaining his support for nuclear energy while seeking to apply lessons from the situation in Japan.
Asked whether the Indian Point plant, located about 40 miles north of New York City, should continue operations in light of the events in Japan, Chu said, “We’re going to have to look at whether this reactor should remain.”
But he added that the decision was up to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and he believed the plant owned by Entergy Corp is safe.
The Indian Point plant in New York, on the banks of the Hudson River, could endanger 20 million people within a 50 mile- radius, including 8 million in New York City, if there were an accident on the scale of what occurred at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The Indian Point plant is situated near two geological fault lines. Entergy said it was built to withstand a 6.0 magnitude earthquake.
Thank you Linda.
To buy vitamins and minerals in the States which are good quality and less expensive. Knowledgable helpful people.
Nutrichoice
W1683 Starks Road
Unity
WI 54488
715 223 3941 – they ask you not to ring on a sunday.
yeah I’m wondering how the Bay Area is impacted. But I’m taking a philosophical approach. We are all going to die someday you know, and being fearful about something you can’t do anything about is not conducive to mental health.
Genevieve:
Here is another outside-of-the-box recommendation for keeping your self healthy:
http://tomkenyon.com/medicines-of-light
Love from an ex-pat Californian,
LGM
Of course take what I say with a grain of salt cause I’m not a doctor, just a martial artist and qigong/yoga practitioner with almost 20 years of experience.
In addition to dietary things I’d highly recommend some kind of movement that cultivates qi sensitivity. Yoga, qigong, internal martial arts, other styles I don’t know as well help move stuff through your system to break up qi blockages and prevent harmful materials from gathering in tissues that don’t get proper movement. A Tai Ji form for example or a sequence of Yoga postures moves you through various combinations of pressure and release so that all your parts receive more circulation of blood, lymph and qi. Also in particular Bagua circle walking is a powerful immune enhancer because of the way your pelvis basically opens and closes as you take each step, and then change directions so both legs experience being the inside leg and the outside. Your biggest lymph nodes are right there in the inguinal crease so the relaxed but firmly rooted motion of walking the circle stimulates them and helps keep them clean.
In addition to movement, sitting and breathing with mindfulness of posture and a lengthening and deepening of the breath can increase your internal awareness while the deepening movement of the diaphragm helps move stuff through your internal organs instead of collecting in them because of shallow breathing. The diaphragm isn’t only for breathing, it’s part of the system that gently squeezes all your soft inner parts to aid circulation of blood and qi.
Breathing much easier in SF Bay Area when I just now learned that HEPA (High Efficiency Particle Arresting) filters (and one is currently running on the highest fan setting in my studio) were originally designed by the Manhattan Project to filter radioactive particles.
HI Eric
thought you might find this animation from Japan -of interest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6nbEFhPVM_k
Here’s more info from
1. Conscious Media Network:
http://www.cmn.tv/blog/more-on-natural-detox/
and
2. 3HO.org: meditations, de-tox baths, food, juices
http://www.3ho.org/ecommunity/2011/03/meditation-for-atomic-radiation-anti-radiation-drink-and-therapeutic-baths/
I think that antioxidants are the most important thing you can do, in addition to some sources of iodine. I suggest Co Q 10 or ubiquinol, or other high-potency ones. A big issue with radiation are the free radicals. I suggest keeping up with your reading and being mindful of the source.
Here is what I posted to facebook this week
Hey Eric,
Thanks for covering this oober scary situation so thoroughly. Here on the west coast people desperate cling to any news that indicates we’ll be ok. But that’s not the reality.
For Eric and all the awesome Planet Waves staff and readers:
So here’s the big question, for those of us on the West coast who are starting to get hit with radiation, what do we do?
This isn’t just about being aware of something going on on the other side of the world, this is something that has come to us which will effect, and in many ways have a deadly effect, our health. And health is a precious thing, which can so easily get shattered. It’s a good ol’ Aries Point moment. What is going on in Japan has literally come into our livingrooms here on the West Coast in the form of radiation.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And with a question this big that is directly impacting your life in a very physical, real, and scary way, it’s so easy to think you’ll figure it out tomorrow because today it’s too overwhelming. I don’t want to live my life sick from radiation. But when you actually contemplate moving East you realize how not-simple this is. How rooted and entangled your life is. How it’s easy to say move, but much harder to do.
So I’m going to throw this question out to your excellent wisdom, Eric, and all you amazing readers of Plant Waves – What do those of us on the West Coast do? What can we do?
I know all of us on the West Coast would really appreciate wisdom and suggestions.
Progress Report, by Elaine Equi
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15053