Nuclear Consultant: Fukushima reactors released about 3 times more radioactivity than Chernobyl — Japan crisis is unprecedented in size, complexity, and consequences — Yet disaster is not over and can become much worse — Very far from being stabilized
http://enenews.com/nuclear-consultant-fukushima-reactors-released-about-3-times-more-radioactivity-than-chernobyl-japan-crisis-is-unprecedented-in-size-complexity-and-consequences-yet-disaster-is-not-over-and-cPublished: June 20th, 2014 at 2:43 pm ET
|
Q & A with Mycle Schneider, nuclear energy consultant, IPS, June 21, 2014:
What did Fukushima represent regarding the safety of nuclear plants?
- Mycle Schneider, nuclear energy consultant: People think Fukushima was the worst case, but it was not. It can become much worse, it is not over. This accident is ongoing, it has been for three years. There are continuous leaks of radioactivity in the environment because the radioactive inventory is not stabilised. It’s an unprecedented event in complexity, in size and in consequences. The biggest problem is that the methodology chosen by Tepco and the Japanese government appears inappropriate. We see that after three years the situation is very far from being stabilised.
- Schneider: The amount of radioactivity that has gone into water that was leaked into the basements is estimated to be roughly three times the amount of radioactivity released during the Chernobyl accident. This issue is vastly underestimated.
See also:
- Study: Daily release from Fukushima of 100+ Quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 early on in crisis “seems reasonable” — Chernobyl total release was ~70 Quadrillion Bq of cs-137
- Canadian officials estimated Fukushima cesium-137 release almost double Chernobyl — Based on the “most conservative and credible” projections
- EU-funded Research: Fukushima atmospheric release of 210 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 used as upper bound in simulation — Chernobyl estimated at 70 to 85 quadrillion
- Marine Chemist: Latest numbers I have are Fukushima released 80 Quadrillion Bq of cesium-137 (Chernobyl estimated at 70 Quadrillion) — “The radioactive plume itself has actually arrived… it’s already here” on west coast (AUDIO)
- Gov’t Report: Fukushima released up to 181 Quadrillion Bq of cesium, Chernobyl was 105 Quadrillion — Radioactive material to flow from Japan “for years to come” — Fukushima radionuclides have now spread “throughout N. Pacific”
Published: June 20th, 2014 at 2:43 pm ET
|
Related Posts
- “Ultimate, worst-case scenario” underway at Fukushima? New York Times: Experts suspect intense contamination is seeping out from under melted-down reactors and into Pacific — Will surpass even the leaks from disaster’s early days August 24, 2013
- Senior Scientist at MIT Event: Japanese scientists censored — Not allowed to publish research that compared Fukushima to Chernobyl — Fukushima ‘arguably’ bigger January 24, 2014
- Former Official in Fukushima: “This is a disaster of all humanity… the entire world” — “It’s on an international level, huge consequences” — “Now bigger than anything we can cope with” (VIDEO) January 17, 2014
- Study: Up to 47 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 released into Pacific from Fukushima — Nearly 50 times original Tepco estimate March 12, 2013
- *Experts on Fukushima Unit 4* CNBC: “Far from under control, could get a lot worse” – Japan Times: “Could very quickly get much worse” – CNN: “Could still get a lot worse” — “Tokyo, Yokohama, even neighboring countries at serious risk” (VIDEO) August 30, 2013
~~~ Build a Bigger Breakwater NOW Please ~~~
http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk209/DistantThunderbolt/Japan%20Reconstruction/Fshima7000circle1a_zpsf6b66b14.jpg
Report comment
Timeline of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster Evacuations; 10+ Million People Should Have Been Evacuated On 3/11
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2014/06/timeline-of-fukushima-evacuations-10.html
Report comment
Hi Doc Goodheart , just wondered if you have any info concerning the corium which was visible from reactor 4 equipment pool which flowed out and was clearly visible. Did TEPCO just cover it up with one go their tents? I’m hoping they have placed lead shielding or the like over that area but it would be difficult as it flowed along the side of the building Thanks in advance
Report comment
Yeah I’ve wondered about that too. But there is sooo much mis/dis-information around reactor 4. I question weather or not there was ever any fuel rod removal in that building…how? They never acknowledged the melt-out. No one ever mentions the meltdown in unit 4..and that one is all but caught on camera.
Report comment
“Three times the amount of Chernobyl”? Didn’t he leave off two or three zeroes? Or was it just three times “at first”? This is ongoing devastation to the ocean alone that land-bound Chernobyl had no capacity to do.
It’s good he is speaking out, but (as usual, it seems,) it is way downplayed.
Report comment
Fukushima Decommissioning Worker Conditions Deteriorating; via A Green Road http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/11/fukushima-decommissioning-working.html
Report comment
Event Peak Radiation Reading In Bq/m³
2,400 Nuclear weapons testing peak – 100 Bq/m³
Chernobyl caused a peak reading of – 1,000 Bq/m³
Fukushima caused a peak reading of – 180,000,000 Bq/m³
Chernobyl was around ten times worse than 2,400 nuclear bombs going off.
Fukushima was around 180,000 times worse than 2,400 nuclear bombs going off.
2014 – Fukushima Ocean Radiation Compared To Chernobyl and 2,400 Open Air Nuclear Bomb Tests; via @AGreenRoad
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2013/05/fukushima-radiation-measured-in-pacific.html
Report comment
unbelievable, Goodheart. Please tell me these numbers are wrong. Seems they’re now going beyond our wildest projections…
Report comment
Those figures are frightening, Dr Goodheart! And I try not to use such words as I think they can engender paralyzing emotions. But to give comparative figures like this makes it almost certain that we will become extinct along with most other contemporary life forms on the planet.
These ‘experts’ opinion that we have 3x the release from Chernobyl does strike me as a rather simplistic form of radionuclide accounting. You know, there was one reactor that melted down at Chernobyl and three (that the authorities are admitting to) at Fukushima…So 1×3=3. That really fills me with confidence that these ‘experts’ are really paying close attention to this crisis/catastrophe (not!).
No matter how much Kool-Aid I drink, from time to time, I cannot escape the inexorable march of logic that dictates to me that we are in deep trouble on this planet. We are loosing our food and fresh/clean water supplies. We require more and more and more energy to try to make our personal environment livable. But the production of that energy makes our planet even more uninhabitable. IMO this is the biggest underlying conundrum that faces our planet and until we can implement technologies that give us relatively cheap to free clean energy which, for really all non-destructive purposes (and most of them to) is electricity, we are poised on the edge of oblivion.
But instead I’m confronted with Big Brother telling everybody that everything is fine, just move along with your own(ed) lives.
Crazy.
Report comment
Yeah, and that will work nicely for the nuclear cabal, their shills and apologists. Well, let’s see three times Chernobyl, that translates into 12,000 people dead, since the WHO’s official position on Chernobyl was 4000.
No truth, no data…no problem SSDD
Report comment
I think the general calculation, WNTF, is always add 10 zeros. That puts it into a ‘conservative’ range.
Anything larger than that is obviously wrong, according to .gov experts.
Report comment
Sorry I short-changed the zeroes. Mea culpa. New calc sounds about right.
Report comment
WNTF, did you see this link? Spells it out fairly straight forward
http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/6913
But there is a huge range of theorized radioactive release in Chernobyl. When I mention Chernobyl, people quickly tell me its an animal paradise! So the problem is more than accurate numbers…the problem is the brains/psychology of the masses…
Report comment
The idea that the Chernobyl exclusion zone is an animal paradise is a myth. The area has reverted to a more natural state in the (relative) absence of humans, and wild animals have returned. However there is extensive evidence of environmental abnormalities including deformities, low populations of some species, and suppressed growth and decomposition rates. See for example
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/?no-ist
Report comment
correct, NoFixedID…
Report comment
Full disclosure I was one of those people who googled Chernobyl immediately after 3/11 and got all the ‘Chernobyl = nature paradise’ pages pull up and naively stopped searching. Combined with my parents’ telling me ‘it’s in cold shutdown now’ – I lost the first 1.5 years to oblivion and avoidable radiation exposure.
The ‘Chernobyl returnee grandma’ story is also effective too.
Report comment
Lots of catching up to do since then, obviously. Thanks enenews and thanks everyone.
Report comment
…..
Zero risk? no plants.
Take that “danger potential”
Set sun, wind, tides free
Report comment
hey, there is some hope….check out this new process to convert nuclides into stable elements, developed by a japanese scientist at Mitsubishi Heavy industries. Palladium nano-film is used to convert cesium into praseodymium; he says a similar process should work for strontium 90 and others.
http://www.kitco.com/ind/Albrecht/2014-06-18-Palladium-Used-To-Transform-Radioactive-Waste-Into-Rare-Earth-Element.html
Report comment
maybe technology can help … we should be looking for any help anywhere …
smarter option? to pillory the criminal nuclear cabal and shut their bodacious Ponzi scheme down right now … while there is still some hope!!!
peace ‘newsers! Take the fight to ’em … every day … every moment … every platform …
Nuclear is soooooo unnecessary … Take that Bechtel and your little dog, GE, too!!!
Report comment
I say we start searching for the mythical Swan that can separate milk from water. Maybe she will know how to separate the sea from the hundred or so radionucleides that have been pouring in the Pacific for 169 is it, weeks now. Not to mention the criminal and industrial pollution of a couple centuries. Maybe there’s a mythical creature that can unweave a hundred years of lies, that would be nice, too. Or we can rely on the oh so wonderful technology invented by clueless and compartmentalized scientists, who, if you haven’t noticed got us into this mess and seem to have no problem lying to the public about it for a stipend. I’m sorry if I sound bitter, but, vitrifie this, what has been done cannot be undone. They cannot decontaminate the hydrologic cycle. It is in the ocean, the mist, the air, the rain, the fog, the rivers, it’s in the ionosphere, it’s everywhere and it’s invisible. Make your peace with God. They gambled and we all lost.
Report comment
NFV “maybe technology can help”? So far to date, these geniuses haven’t been able to come up with anything better than caveman…bury your sh#t in the ground. Hell, these technological wizards with boat loads of PhD’s in nuclear physics and engineering, can’t even engineer/dig a hole that works.
The whole scenario of nuclear power is beyond insanity. For me, beyond insanity is death. That’s where all this is going, and in short order sorry to say.
Report comment
wxman:
There are fundamental problems with the Palladium nano film concept.
The shear volume and quantity of radioactive material at Fuku (et al) is beyond the scope of scaling up his process.
It does have promise for contained material, yet not for the chaotic situation at Fuku, let alone what Fuku (et al) has dispersed in to the ocean and atmosphere already.
As a design engineer, I have spent decades reading of stories like this one. Few of them ever become a practical reality. Most have inherent flaws in terms of reproduceability, economics, and actual implementation.
Note that he is projecting practical application 10 years out.
So multiply that by at least 2 or 3.
Even if what he has could be made to work within a year or two, that would still be 4 to 5 years late…i.e. the genie is out of the bottle. His discovery can not put the genie back in to the bottle.
It can, at best, sterilize the genie before it ever gets out of the bottle.
Recall:
Nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter.
Traffic jams will be a thing of the past because we will all be flying helicopters.
Cold fusion
Every house will have a nuclear reactor to replace the furnace.
Antibiotics will wipe out disease.
Antibiotics will get rid of all STDs.
TV will replace the classroom for education.
Computers will create the paperless office.
A hydrogen based energy source to replace petroleum fuels.
(Source being horribly confused with storage).
Here endeth the rant of the day.
Report comment
albeit, an awesome one, fireguyjeff…
Report comment
they told the german people the same things towards the end of ww2
kept offering them hope that great new super weapons would soon be reeking havoc on the allies – same old bs; hope & change
Report comment
Mitshubishi Heavy Industries. The same people that helped destroy SONGS at San Onofre.
Here’s how it works. Discover some new ‘life-saving’ technology. Brag about it in the news. Government comes in and throws billions at it, not caring if it works or not, but the contractors all skim off hundreds of millions. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat . . .
Just like the vitrification plant at Hanford. I think they’re up over a half-trillion dollars, and NOTHING. Lots of bonuses, though, and raises for all the upper offices. And something about increased contributions . . .
Report comment
Radha Roy (now deceased) already did this. Could never check out his patents, but maybe they were stolen and hidden.
The Roy process worked with small quantitative amounts, really small. He said he could convert plutonium to non-radioactive lead. Don’t know what this other scientist is doing. Now if we could just have an “everywhere” machine, or just do an un-do on the food chain. I’m all for hope, and such avenues should be pursued, even if it would de-contaminate small amounts of food. But the mix of radionuclides is so complex, and contamination getting so ubiquitous, that unclear where this could go.
Report comment
While I can’t comment on the efficiency of the system (and can they, really, I might ask?), palladium right now is over $800/oz., which I don’t consider prohibitive or an impediment considering the need. Not as bad as gold, or platinum. The films are nm in thickness, though I wonder how this would transalte scaled up.
“Iwamura expects the process can be scaled up within ten years, provided that a large enough budget will be available for the entire time period.”
Abundance of Palladium:
◦Earth’s Crust/p.p.m.: 0.0006
◦Seawater/p.p.m.:
■Atlantic Suface: N/A
■Atlantic Deep: N/A
■Pacific Surface: 1.9E-08
■Pacific Deep: 6.8E-08
Personally, I’d like to see it work and scaled up quickly. Should I ask for a show of hands here who would feel that a pace of 10 years just for the research to single scale-up might be much too long? It’s going to hell pretty quickly and though it may be compared to the beginning, scaled back, now it’s still much too much at a steady state. And I’m sure the cam watchers would have an issue about my expression ‘steady state’, that it’s not that at all.
Report comment
Shaker:
The amount of palladium needed for a scaled up system would simply multiply by the scale up factor.
The nm thickness aspect wold stay the same.
The scaled up version would be a combination of larger surface area films
and paralleling a lot of systems.
Think of it like how much of a challenge it was to get small LCD displays and then the goal of trying to make TV screen sizes.
The price of palladium is likely to be a small/liveable percent of the development and manufacturing cost due to how thin the monolayer is.
Not to be a buzzkill, but my analogy is sort of like making the big screen TV while your audience is going blind.
Like I said, the genie is out of the bottle with no way to get it back in. And it does not grant any wishes. Yet many will wish they had not encountered the genie.
Report comment
I want to know why has this kind of tech is being ignored,brushed aside?im no rocket surgeon,but something real must be done !The world is dying an inch at a time .Good link wxman2001.
Report comment
Well at least this lie is a start. This again fails to mention the TONS of spent fuel that Chernobyl did NOT have on site however.
Report comment
Also omits the MOX fuel.
Report comment
Oct/2013 Cancer at Malibu: 3 teachers have been recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer, another 3 with thyroid problems. Also reported are hair loss, rashes, and bladder cancer. Migraines are epidemic. Several parents stated their kids are sick with cancer and other ailments. Malibu high school is one block from the Pacific ocean. People living 20 kilometers from the ocean are subject to breathing in seaspray. Americum, Plutonium, and Cesium migrate 20 kilometers inland. If you are interested, this info came from a site called Bobby1’sBlog. A friend emailed it to me so I don’t have a direct address.
Report comment
My wife grew up in Malibu, born Feb. 14, 1960 … first years in Bakersfield, Whittier, then Eureka … then after four years old all Carbon Beach … takes thyroid supplements regularly …
Her brother just sold his house one mile from Malibu High … “Juan de something” … apparently the school was built on some nasty fill … Rocketdyne and Hughes are nearby … as is Pepperdine etc. etc.
Not saying they didn’t get dosed from Fuku-puppy … but there may be more to this Malibu High story … … we need more information, which the EPA, DOE, US Gov’t et al are withholding …
Report comment
I just posted also about my friend from Santa Barbara being ill, daughter[16] with throat/abdominal cancer, dog died of it. This is the perfect site to tell the stories of these emerging illnesses. Since the ‘real’ world is in denial, at least the people here and the ones that are curious and new here, will have the opportunity to tie radiation with sickness. Many may think it’s lame, but people just don’t get the whole ‘invisible death’ thing.
Report comment