Fukushima: The First Five Years

Fukushima: The First Five Years

Rob Godfrey

Fukushima: The First Five Years

Version SW 3.01

Copyright © Rob Godfrey 2011 – 2016

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Contents

2011

1) The Japanese earthquake and memories of Chernobyl 2) Disaster in Japan: even Hollywood could not come up with something worse than this 3) Japan: all we need now is for Godzilla to come up out of the sea 4) Japan – the devil and the deep blue sea: Godzilla has risen 5) Japan: where the wind blows and spent fuel 6) More about Godzilla. And, oh no, it’s Yoko Ono 7) Japan: it looks like they’re going to have to go for the Chernobyl solution 8) Libya and Japan: good news and bad news 9) Plutonium and Politics 10) Thorium: it’s power, Jim, but not as we know it 11) Fecking Fukushima 12) Radiation is good for your health 13) The world concentrates on other news as Japan begins to glow in the dark 14) The neighbours from hell 15) Fukushima: the possibility of a massive explosion 16) How global warming has completely changed the nuclear power debate 17) The Russians and Fukushima 18) Japan March 2011 tsunami videos 19) Stuff about Fukushima you might want to know 20) This is really, really not like Chernobyl 21) Gawd, I haven’t said anything about Fukushima for almost a month! 22) Surprise, surprise, Fukushima is much worse than they first admitted

2012

23) Fukushima – the nightmare continues 24) Plutonium is good for you: or, happy astroturfing 25) The WHO, Japan and alpha emitters 26) Fukushima – sorry about the doom and gloom, but… 27) Fukushima spent fuel pool No.4 28) What drugs are they on?! 29) Censored Stories of 2012 – or: Merry Christmas Mr Murdoch

2013

30) Fukushima, an irradiated mayor speaks out 31) Dr Caldicott’s final podcast and atomic guinea pigs 32) The Fukushima 50, who are all dead 33) Fukushima – WHO is lying 34) Fukushima Symposium 35) Fukushima – on a wing and a prayer 36) Planet Earth RIP 37) Fukushima and Fascism 38) The Tokyo Olympics 39) Two brilliant speeches 40) Let’s talk about plutonium 41) Radioactive bananas

2014

42) 20,000 Isotopes Under the Sea 43) The NRC and hot tin roofs 44) Alchemy and Mass Murder 45) Reagan gets Irradiated 46) Nuke Wars and Nuns 47) Godzilla surfaces in New Mexico 48) Corium and Corruption 49) Their noses grow ever longer 50) Lies and Rebellion 51) These people are insane 52) Mr Idogawa speaks out 53) The Mainstream Mafia 54) Nuclear Kitty Litter 55) The World Hate Organisation 56) Nuclear Vermin 57) USS Reagan update and an interview with a dying sailor 58) The End Of The World Show 59) Intrepid II Goes Forth 60) Assassins and Asylums

2015

61) The Pacific Ocean and Geoff Palko RIP 62) The Caldicott Symposium 2015 63) Fukushima 4th Anniversary 64) Mermaids and Muons 65) Morality the Media and Megan Rice 66) A Brave Man 67) An Ocean Dies 68) Flora and Fauna and Fission 69) Port Simpson to Prince Rupert 70) Down the Rabbit Hole 71) Buesseler and Blanch 72) Bombs and Cherry Blossoms 73) The Expedition for Life 74) The Gift That Keeps On Giving 75) The Chain Of Life 76) Mr Durnford Gets Arrested 77) A Few Good Men 78) A Jolly in Paris 79) Merry Mass Murder

2016

80) A Mystery Disease 81) Pissing In the Wind 82) Smoking is bad for your health 83) Let’s Talk About Neutron Bombardment 84) Fukushima: The First Five Years

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Introduction

I started my Burgundy Blog in January 2011. Prior to that I never felt any great desire to go in for blogging, even though I'd been online for many years. It was the Arab uprisings, that were kicking off in early 2011, that prompted me to start a blog. Then in March 2011 the Tohoku earthquake occurred, one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded, which along with the resulting tsunami killed almost 16,000 people in north eastern Japan. It also caused triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This book is a compilation of my blog posts about Fukushima, starting on March 11th 2011, the day of the earthquake, and covers the first five years of something quite unique in human history: there's never before been three nuclear reactors in complete and ongoing meltdown.

Some of the blog posts are brief, some are quite lengthy. Some are light-hearted, some are quite grave. The posts contain a wealth of links - to news items, scientific reports, seminars, etc - and tell the real story of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the position we're now in five years down the line. This book is published against the backdrop of an ongoing news media blackout of all things Fukushima. Many of my posts touch upon this censorship, and in particular the politics and corruption behind it. The book also contains links to lots of interviews, everything from high profile people such as Naoto Kan, who was Prime Minister of Japan when the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck (and who is now a fervent anti-nuclear campaigner), to anti-nuke activists like Kevin Blanch and Dana Durnford, who are unknown to most people (both Blanch and Durnford have amazing stories behind them).

On a technical note, I would have liked to embed the video and audio in this book. This is now possible with e-books; however, only the very latest e-book readers can show embedded stuff, so instead I've used links for video and audio. Depending on the kind of device you're using, these links should open in either your browser or media player.

I suppose you can read Fukushima: The First Five Years from start to finish, as a chronology of the disaster; or you can dip into it using the table of contents; or you can search it for key words. Whatever way you approach this book, if you're not overly familiar with the Fukushima disaster you will probably discover things that will make you both very surprised and very angry. Fukushima is a game-changing moment in the human story, and this book is a historic record of it.

Rob Godfrey

Charente, France

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The Japanese earthquake and memories of Chernobyl

Posted on Friday 11 March 2011

The disaster caused by the earthquake today off the coast of north east Japan is quite breathtaking. To give some idea of the scale of things, news agencies are now saying that two trains have been ‘reported missing’. That’s two entire trains, full of people, swept away by the tsunami.

Even more worrying is what’s going on at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power station, which is in one of the regions worst effected by the earthquake. The 8.9-magnitude quake caused the cooling system of reactor No.1 to fail, and the reactor started overheating. A secondary cooling system was brought into play, and earlier today the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, said that things were under control. As I type this, though, they’re now saying that the reactor is overheating again and they are going to release radioactive steam in a bid to ease a build-up of pressure. Let’s hope they manage to keep the reactor under control.

By happenstance, it’s almost 25 years since reactor No.4 blew-up at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. At the time a friend and I were hiking in the far north of Scotland, the stretch of coast that runs from Wick in the east to Cape Wrath in the west. One night we camped beside a small loch near the Kyle of Tongue (this was about 6 days after reactor No.4 blew its lid in the Ukraine). I remember waking up the next morning to find the landscape littered with dead birds. There were thousands of them, mostly seagulls.

Twenty five years later there are still places in the UK (and many other parts of Europe) that are off bounds because of Chernobyl radiation, and there are UK farmers who can’t take their sheep to market because the sheep are contaminated (see here).

In 2005 The Chernobyl Forum (consisting of various UN agencies and the governments of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine) released a report about the disaster (see here). The report says that 47 people died as a direct result of radiation from the disaster and an estimated 4000 will die from cancer in the long term.

Thing is, The Chernobyl Forum only looked at figures from the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, and the original estimate was 40,000 deaths, which was reduced to that 4,000 after some hokey pokey by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who have a vested interest in making nuclear power appear to be safe.

Further, the Chernobyl Forum did not take into account any of the 50,000 residents of the city of Prypiat, which was just 3 miles or so from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Prypiat was not evacuated until 30 hours after reactor No.4 blew-up, by which time everyone in Prypiat had received huge doses of radiation. There are no records as to what happened to those 50,000 people, and how many of them are still alive.

Likewise, there are no records of what happened to the people in the rest of the 30 kilometre evacuation zone around Chernobyl (probably about another 50,000 people) who also received huge doses of radiation.

But it doesn’t stop there: more than 600,000 people (the vast majority of them military personel) took part in the clean-up/containment operation in the immediate aftermath of the disaster – they are known as ‘the Liquidators’. Once again, most of these people were exposed to huge amounts of radiation and there are no records as to what happened to them afterwards. The Chernobyl Forum only took into account people from the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The Liquidators came from all over the Soviet Union.

Who do you believe, the generally accepted Chernobyl Forum estimates (as can be found on Wiki, etc), or the much higher estimates? (which sell books and newspapers) My own way of thinking is that the higher estimates are more consistent with the amount of radiation that was released into the environment (as far as I’m aware there’s not much arguement about how much radiation came out of reactor No4).

I’m a cheery soul, aren’t I.

UN accused of ignoring 500,000 Chernobyl deaths

Chernobyl Radiation Killed Nearly One Million People

Disaster in Japan: even Hollywood could not come up with something worse than this

Posted on Saturday 12 March 2011

Earlier today there was a massive explosion at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant (officially known as Fukushima I), which completely destroyed the already heavily damaged hall of reactor No.1. One of the unusual things about this was that it was the first time that such an event has been captured on camera (by a Japanese tv news team). The footage was probably taken from 5 kilometers away (about 3 miles), which at the time was the extent of the exclusion zone around the plant. Due to the distance it’s not easy to judge the scale of things. It should be noted that the white buildings shown in this news footage are the other reactor halls, and each are about ten storeys high…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3_ZRO5oATk

This plant has 6 working reactors. Seven miles south of Fukushima Dai-ichi is the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant (officially known as Fukushima II) which has 4 working reactors. In the confusion of events, things are still not entirely clear, yet Japanese officials have stated that other reactors in the Fukushima complex are in a state of emergency. One hour after today’s explosion at the Fukushima plant the exclusion zone was extended to 10 kilometers (about 6 miles), and later in the day to 20 kilometers (about 13 miles). Five hours after the explosion, Japanese authorities were distributing iodine to residents in the area (iodine helps counteract some types of radiation) and were advising people to stay indoors and not drink tap water. At the same time, another large earthquake/aftershock hit the Fukushima region and the Japanese Government were saying that everything was under control at the Fukushima nuclear plants.

At the time of writing about 140,000 people have been evacuated from the immediate vicinity of the Fukushima nuclear plants (there are two hospitals within 5 miles of Fukushima I). The nearest big population centre is Minamisoma, about 20 miles to the north, with a population of 75,000. It’s still not known how many of that 75,000 population died in the earthquake and ensuing tsunami. Minamisoma is almost right on the coast, so the death toll is likely to be high. As if this natural horror is not enough, they may now have to face an equal or greater man-made horror.

The Japanese authorities are notorious for being secretive about nuclear accidents. The earthquake that struck on Friday is probably the worst in history, with regard to its power and close vicinity to millions of people. Amidst all the terror/panic, perhaps the Japanese government can not be blamed for trying to cover up not one, but possibly multiple Chernobyls.

If I wrote a script about all this, and took it to Hollywood, the producers would say: nah, too outlandish; it could never happen.

Japan: all we need now is for Godzilla to come up out of the sea

Posted on Sunday 13 March 2011

Today, Sunday, there’s been much conflicting and confusing information about the Fukushima nuclear reactors, from both the plant operators, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and the Japanese Government. What does seem certain is that the three reactors that were in operation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant when the earthquake struck are now in serious trouble. At the adjacent Fukushima Daini plant one reactor is also in serious trouble. The problem with all four of these reactors has been caused by the failure of the primary coolant systems, because the earthquake knocked out power supplies. The secondary (emergency) coolant systems, powered by diesel generators, kicked-in ok but were then knocked out by the tsunami. No power, no coolant systems: the reactors overheat and there’s a real risk of meltdown (in the sense of a reactor’s containment structure being breached, and a hellish radioactive brew being released into the environment).

All four reactors shut down automatically when the