Huge 8.9 quake plus tsunami - Japan

Time for a Global Takeover
The Crisis at Fukushima 4
by HARVEY WASSERMAN

We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focussed on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.

Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.

The one thing certain about this crisis is that Tepco does not have the scientific, engineering or financial resources to handle it. Nor does the Japanese government. The situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientists and engineers our species can muster.

Why is this so serious?

We already know that thousands of tons of heavily contaminated water are pouring through the Fukushima site, carrying a devil’s brew of long-lived poisonous isotopes into the Pacific. Tuna irradiated with fallout traceable to Fukushima have already been caught off the coast of California. We can expect far worse.

Tepco continues to pour more water onto the proximate site of three melted reactor cores it must somehow keep cool.Steam plumes indicate fission may still be going on somewhere underground. But nobody knows exactly where those cores actually are.

Much of that irradiated water now sits in roughly a thousand huge but fragile tanks that have been quickly assembled and strewn around the site. Many are already leaking. All could shatter in the next earthquake, releasing thousands of tons of permanent poisons into the Pacific. Fresh reports show that Tepco has just dumped another thousand tons of contaminated liquids into the sea ( http://www.alternet.org/environment/ ).

The water flowing through the site is also undermining the remnant structures at Fukushima, including the one supporting the fuel pool at Unit Four.

More than 6,000 fuel assemblies now sit in a common pool just 50 meters from Unit Four. Some contain plutonium. The pool has no containment over it. It’s vulnerable to loss of coolant, the collapse of a nearby building, another earthquake, another tsunami and more.

Overall, more than 11,000 fuel assemblies are scattered around the Fukushima site. According to long-time expert and former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, there is more than 85 times as much lethal cesium on site as was released at Chernobyl.

Radioactive hot spots continue to be found around Japan. There are indications of heightened rates of thyroid damage among local children.

The immediate bottom line is that those fuel rods must somehow come safely out of the Unit Four fuel pool as soon as possible.

Just prior to the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami that shattered the Fukushima site, the core of Unit Four was removed for routine maintenance and refueling. Like some two dozen reactors in the US and too many more around the world, the General Electric-designed pool into which that core now sits is 100 feet in the air.

Spent fuel must somehow be kept under water. It’s clad in zirconium alloy which will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Long used in flash bulbs for cameras, zirconium burns with an extremely bright hot flame.

Each uncovered rod emits enough radiation to kill someone standing nearby in a matter of minutes. A conflagration could force all personnel to flee the site and render electronic machinery unworkable.

According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with forty years in an industry for which he once manufactured fuel rods, the ones in the Unit 4 core are bent, damaged and embrittled to the point of crumbling. Cameras have shown troubling quantities of debris in the fuel pool, which itself is damaged.

The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.

Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all us.

Chernobyl’s first 1986 fallout reached California within ten days. Fukushima’s in 2011 arrived in less than a week. A new fuel fire at Unit 4 would pour out a continuous stream of lethal radioactive poisons for centuries.

Former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata says full-scale releases from Fukushima “would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.”

Neither Tokyo Electric nor the government of Japan can go this alone. There is no excuse for deploying anything less than a coordinated team of the planet’s best scientists and engineers.

We have two months or less to act.

For now, we are petitioning the United Nations and President Obama to mobilize the global scientific and engineering community to take charge at Fukushima and the job of moving these fuel rods to safety.

You can sign the petition at: http://www.nukefree.org/crisis-fukushima-4-petition-un-us-global-response

If you have a better idea, please follow it. But do something and do it now.

The clock is ticking. The hand of global nuclear disaster is painfully close to midnight.

Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org and is author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth. His SOLARTOPIA GREEN POWER & WELLNESS SHOW is at www.prn.fm

Hundreds of huge, flimsy tanks are also leaking untold tons of highly radioactive fluids.

Chernobyl’s first 1986 fallout reached California within ten days. Fukushima’s in 2011 arrived in less than a week.

Would you please do that Hawkeye? Find the TEPCO piece that is ? Or find what you would consider "balanced" journalism?

Energy & Sustainability
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Climatewire
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March 11, 2013
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Coal-Fired Power in India May Cause More Than 100,000 Premature Deaths Annually

A new study puts the cost of coal-fired electricity in India at $4.6 billion

By Lisa Friedman and ClimateWire





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Indian workers unloading a coal train. Image: Flickr/Nick Sarebi

As many as 115,000 people die in India each year from coal-fired power plant pollution, costing the country about $4.6 billion, according to a groundbreaking new study released today.

The report by the Mumbai-based Conservation Action Trust is the first comprehensive examination of the link between fine particle pollution and health problems in India, where coal is the fuel of choice and energy demands are skyrocketing.

The findings are stunning. In addition to more than 100,000 premature deaths, it links millions of cases of asthma and respiratory ailments to coal exposure. It counts 10,000 children under the age of 5 as fatal victims last year alone.

"I didn't expect the mortality figures per year to be so high," said Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the Conservation Action Trust.

Goenka described health impacts as "one of the most neglected aspects" of local environmental impact assessments, saying, "We're so used to reading the EIA reports year after year saying, 'There are no impacts on health and human development.'"

The report, produced with Greenpeace India, uses power plant data compiled by former World Bank air pollution analyst Sarath Guttikunda, founding director of a Delhi-based organization focused on sharing scientific information called Urban Emissions. The data is based on plant and fuel characteristics, since India, researchers said, does not make continuous and open-source monitoring information available at the plant level.

Researchers then used models to estimate changes in ambient pollutant concentrations due to the presence of coal-fired plants in the region and estimated health impacts using peer-reviewed methodologies used in similar studies around the world. The report also has been submitted to the journal Atmospheric Environment.

'Entirely avoidable'?
Calling the findings "shocking," the authors said the sickness and death related to coal emissions underscores the need to enact more stringent emissions standards, deploy advanced pollution control technologies and increase the use of cleaner energy options.

"The data represents a clarion call to action to avoid the deadly, and entirely avoidable, impact this pollution is having on India's population," the authors wrote. Without changes, they warned, "hundreds of thousands of lives will continue to be lost due to emissions from coal power plants. Any attempts to weaken even the current environmental regulations will add to this unfolding human tragedy."

Offline Papyrifera
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Re: My hair is starting to fall out......
« Reply #17 on: Yesterday at 12:09:37 AM »
Quote
Gomphidius glutinosus, the "Hideous Gomphidius" is a species known to bioaccumulate radioactive cessium to hundreds of times the background level. Not only did this mushroom fruit heavily around Fukishima, I observed it fruiting abundantly on Vancouver Island (west coast of North America) last fall.


Potential for mycoremediation? Yes.

We're all exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Fukishima is the latest and worst in a series of nuclear blasts and disasters releasing this sh#t into our environment. What are you going to do about it?

I'm guessing you already know about potassium iodide, and magnescent iodine for thyroid protection. Maybe you already have your stash, although it is getting harder as the material is snapped up by governments and concerned citizens.

Here's a two part strategy to dealing with exposure to radiation. We're not used to doing this now, but it could potentially be a life saving necessity in the kind of world we are creating:

1) Getting that sh#t out of your body - bentonite clay and zeolite can help bind radioactive isotopes and take them out of the body. Bentonite clay does it by adsorption, zeolite by cation exchange (look them up, basically radioactive isotopes are positively charged molecules, clay has a large negatively charged surface that attracts and binds positively charged molecules, while zeolites contain positively charged molecules within a negatively charged matrix, and will exchange a positively charged molecule eg. Mg++ for some other positively charged molecule like strontium or cessium). Chlorella (an algae) is also very effective at pulling positively charged toxins (heavy metals, radioactive isotopes) from the body. Sweating (sauna, sweat lodge, etc) can help as well. To get clay into my diet on a daily basis, I switched to making my own clay based toothpaste. Just blend bentonite clay with some water and a few esssential oils (clove, cinnamon, myrrh, peppermint or wintergreen), and swallow it instead of spitting it out. All traditional cultures incorporated clay into their diets in some form, and if they needed it to help detoxify then how much more do we need it today??

(and by the way, "Pica" as the "disease" is called by doctors, when pregnant women start craving weird sh#t like paint chips or ice cubes, is really the craving to eat clay).

2) Protecting the body against the harmful effects of radiation - certain herbs are useful here. Rhodiola rosea is one of the best, a herb so powerful that the Russians researched it extensively as a herb that could be given to soldiers entering a nuclear war zone. You probably want to pound medicinal mushrooms too - chaga, for its antioxidant and antitumor activities, reishi, turkey tail, shiitake, maitake, enoki, other polypores... whatever you can get your hands on.

Good luck! We're going to need it.
« Last Edit: Yesterday at 12:19:24 AM by Papyrifera

The ocean is broken
By Greg Ray, Newcastle Herald 13 hours ago

Ivan Macfadyen aboard the Funnel Web
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The following article was reprinted with permission from The Newcastle Herald. You can read the original here.

IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.

Not the absence of sound, exactly.

The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.

Read what's happened since this article went global

And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.

But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.

"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."

But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.

North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.

"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.

And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.

"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."

But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.

"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.

"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.

If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.

"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.

"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."

Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.

Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.

"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.

Not this time.

"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.

"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.

"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.

"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.

"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.

"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw."

Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.

And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.

BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.

"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.

Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.

He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.

More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.

Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.

"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.

"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."

This article ran in the Newcastle Herald, which published a follow up after it gained traction worldwide.The original story is here.