☢ Fukushima No Place for Man or Robot ☢

The robots sent into the nuclear power plants to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have all “died”. The subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished with some experts saying they have little hope in it ever being finished.

And authorities still don’t even know how to dispose of the highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site that are now starting to leak more and more. The authorities ongoing solution to the radioactive water problem to try and cool the reactors have so far been to dump it all into the Pacific Ocean.

Fukushima No Place for Man or Robot

Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-metre high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods.

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods. The radiation is so powerful that experts can only guess at what depth the melted corium fuel now is located.

So far the official reports are that the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed.

“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," Naohero Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in one interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation.”

The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.

But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said. 

Each robot has to be custom-built for each building.“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said.

Irradiated Water

Tepco, which was fiercely criticized and still is for its handling of the disaster, says conditions at the Fukushima power station have improved dramatically. Radiation levels in many places at the site are now as low as those in Tokyo. But words like those do not speak much comfort for a disaster site know as being one of the worst nuclear disasters since Chernobyl in Ukraine 30 years ago,

More than 8,000 workers are at the plant at any one time, according to officials on a recent tour. Traffic is constant as they spread across the site, removing debris, building storage tanks, laying piping and preparing to dismantle parts of the plant.

Much of the work involves pumping a steady torrent of water into the wrecked and highly radiated reactors to cool them down. Afterward, some of the radiated water is then pumped out of the plant and stored in tanks that are proliferating around the site while the rest of the radioactive water is flushed out into the Pacific Ocean.

What to do with the nearly million tonnes of radioactive water is one of the biggest challenges, said Akiro Ono, the site manager. Ono said he is “deeply worried” the storage tanks will leak even more radioactive water into the sea - as they have done several times before - prompting strong criticism for the government.

The utility has so far failed to get the backing of local fishermen to release water it has treated into the ocean.

Ono estimates that Tepco has completed around 10 percent of the work to clear the site up - the decommissioning process could take 30 to 40 years. But until the company locates the fuel, it won’t be able to assess progress and final costs, experts say.

The much touted use of X-ray like muon rays has yielded little information about the location of the melted fuel and the last robot inserted into one of the reactors sent only grainy images before breaking down.

The Great Ice Wall

Tepco is building the world’s biggest ice wall to keep groundwater from flowing into the basements of the damaged reactors and getting contaminated.

First suggested in 2013 and strongly backed by the government, the wall was completed in February, after months of delays and questions surrounding its effectiveness. Later this year, Tepco plans to pump water into the wall - which looks a bit like the piping behind a refrigerator - to start the freezing process.

Stopping the ground water intrusion into the plant is critical, said Artie Gunderson, a former nuclear engineer.

“The reactors continue to bleed radiation into the ground water and thence into the Pacific Ocean,” Gunderson said. "When Tepco finally stops the groundwater, that will be the end of the beginning.”

While he would not rule out the possibility that small amounts of radiation are reaching the ocean, Masuda, the head of decommissioning, said the leaks have ended after the company built a wall along the shoreline near the reactors whose depth goes to below the seabed.

“I am not about to say that it is absolutely zero, but because of this wall the amount of release has dramatically dropped,” he said.

Japan faces 200-year wait for Fukushima clean-up

The Times of London, Mar. 27, 2015

The chief of the Fukushima nuclear power station has admitted that the technology needed to decommission three melted-down reactors does not exist, and he has no idea how it will be developed. 

In a stark reminder of the challenge facing the Japanese authorities, Akira Ono conceded that the stated goal of decommissioning the plant by 2051 may be impossible without a giant technological leap. 

“There are so many uncertainties involved. We need to develop many, many technologies,” Mr Ono said. 

“Forremoval of the debris, we don’t have accurate information (about the state of the reactors) or any viable methodology…

Japan may be obsessed with robots

The Telegraph (UK), Mar 26, 2015

But it is a British company that has solved the “impossible” problem of visualising the radiation leaks inside the crippled reactor buildings at Fukushima.

State-of-the-art British imaging technology has been deployed at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to overcome problems that Japanese engineers declared to be insurmountable… 

The system is able to create a real-time, three-dimensional image of the area being surveyed and identify “hot-spots” of radioactivity. More than four years after… radiation levels within the structures remain too high for humans to enter. 

That has severely hampered efforts to clean up the site. Experts have already estimated that process will take three decades but progress to date has been slow. TEPCO was only able to confirm on Thursday (Mar 2015) previous suspicions that nearly all the fuel from the No. 1 reactor at the plant has melted and fallen into the containment vessel. 

[Video] Fukushima Residents Worry About Future of Affected Areas ☢

Bags full of radioactive dirt and debris are still visible 5 years after the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster.

Ahead of the anniversary on March 11th reporters visited a town 20 kilometers away. The first in the area to fully re-open.

Bags full of Radioactive Dirt and Debris - Fukushima 2016

But for some of the few residence who have returned to Nahara there's little hope for the future of the town. This Buddhist priest says after coming back I knew I would see the end of this region, this town. It became an environment where people could not live safely and comfortably ever again he says.

Buddhist priest Tokuo Hayakawa living in Nahara, Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan

It's reported less than six percent of residents have returned. Locals say the future will depend on young people returning and so far there is only a handful amid lingering fares about radioactivity. However authorities maintain the presence of radiation has now dropped to levels below what's considered safe.

Watch the video on Youtube

Watch video on Liveleak https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d70_1456932602

8 Year Old Keiko Survived Nuclear War - 70 Years Since

Keiko Ogura felt the explosion of the world's first atomic bomb in her own body. She tells her story so that no one else ever should have to go through the same thing.

Keiko didn't go to school on August 6 with the other students because her father felt that something bad was about to happen that day. I was unhappy as all my classmates had gone, she recalls. She had celebrated her 8th birthday two days before.

Keiko Ogura the year after Hiroshima

I remember everything clearly as if it had happened yesterday. I stood on the street near our house when a blinding flash suddenly appeared in the sky. I was thrown to the ground and lost consciousness, says Keiko Ogura on the phone from Hiroshima where she has lived all her life. Keiko was a second grade elementary school student, the bomb exploded at 8.15 a.m.

She does not know how long she was unconscious, but when she woke up the whole world was black and from the sky came a black rain. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand, there was debris falling on me and all over and I couldn’t hear anything.

“When I went home, it was smashed and some of it had blown up, I could see the ceiling and tiles gone and hundreds of pieces of window glass on the wall. My father was lucky. He was between the open glass doors and the pantry and he was alright. My sister and brother were bleeding from the head, but it wasn’t serious. When I stepped out, I saw black rain, what’s this I thought - it was charcoal colour and it was very sticky and I touched it,” she narrates.

National Georgraphic Channel Reenactment

There was a complete calm around. The house was 2.4 kilometers from the place where the atomic bomb was dropped. I strongly remember all the terrible smells that hovered in the air during the following days. At first there was the smell of burnt hair which was then mixed with the smell of burned bodies.

Near our home was a Shinto shrine that was made to a first aid station. Therefore it came injured people to our area and I saw hundreds of sick and dying people. They were walking like ghosts. I only saw dark figures who stretched out their arms and legs. Many people's skin was severely burned.

The family miraculously survived

Keiko saw how skin hung from human body parts and especially from the fingers. They were swollen due to radiation damage.

Some people were completely soaked in black rain and developed health complications and diseases. Some foreigners died. 25,000 including Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Americans, foreign students and around 10 American prisoners. It was one of the reasons Hiroshima was chosen - it had few prisoners at that time in the city, she says.

It was horrible

“In Ushita where I lived, each home was an air raid shelter. Usually in the mornings there is an air raid warning but on that day August 6, 1945, there was a warning but no air raid.” Strangely, the night before, Keiko says people couldn’t sleep as they kept going in and out of air raid shelters after the sirens kept blaring. B-29s appeared above Hiroshima accompanied by air raid sirens. “We went home and tried to sleep. All the time we kept wondering why no air raid despite the siren. On August 6 there was one air raid warning. We thought Hiroshima would be skipped. We had heard that Tokyo and Kobe were destroyed, maybe God decided to spare our city. That morning people didn’t worry why there was a warning and no raid,” she says.

Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. Photo: EPA / Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

It was a miracle her own family got saved. No family member died that day 70 years ago when an unprecedented terror spread out over the world.

Keiko's father began working at the crematoria in which the bodies were burned. He burned hundreds of bodies the days after the atomic bomb fell.

“After the bombing, everyday someone died, they didn’t have any scars but they died, we were wondering if it was poison gas, we didn’t know then that it was radiation,” she says. Now the survivors “the hibakusha” as they are called, fall into four categories. Keiko says those who helped in cremating bodies also became sick. “Everyday I saw lines at the cemetery, of people to be buried and we wondered who would be next. One of my friend’s who was living out of the city, was exposed to radiation when she came here and fell sick and her younger brother died after a six-hour exposure in Hiroshima."

People told me that all of Hiroshima had been destroyed. Our own house was full of broken glass but the walls were still standing.

A few days after Keiko began to do short trips to the horrific battlefield.

When someone died, we said that they died of "the light"

A special memory from the day after

“There was a bad smell, their hair and flesh were burnt and they were lying down, squatting and suddenly someone grabbed my ankle, and asked for water. Till then everyone was silent but suddenly there was a cry for mizu or water. Some thanked me after I got water for them but to my horror some died. It is said that people shouldn’t be given water when in shock, but I didn’t know that as a little girl. I ran home and got it from the well. I was shocked and I thought there was some poison. My father said you shouldn’t give people water and I kept silent. Keiko thought she killed people by giving them water. She was so scared that she did not tell anyone about the water until decades later, when her father had passed away. That became my trauma. I had nightmares and I cried. It took me a long time to recover,” she explains.

Typical symptoms of radiation injuries include high fever, loss of appetite, bleeding and hair loss. Keiko had almost no symptoms at all except that she got nosebleeds.

I could not connect the bleeding with the atomic bomb until decades later, when I heard that it was common among the children who lived near the area affected by the nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

She also suffered from anemia, but otherwise her health has been good.

But the most fearful thing for her was that babies were born with deformities, with microcephaly or small heads. Keiko later met a girl in her forties who was like a three-year-old. She wouldn’t say anything and watched TV all day, and could recognise only the faces of movie stars. People were worried about having handicapped children.

Many children died, many were orphaned or maimed. By the end of 1945, the number of dead had risen to 140,000,” she adds.

Her brother was behind Hiroshima station working to break down houses and clear fire lanes among the debris. He and others had heard the sound of the airplane - there were three planes - but from one he saw a tiny black thing (the Americans called it Little Boy) that was released. As the planes turned, the black dot exploded and they were all thrown to the ground unconscious. “There were people lying on the ground all over and my brother’s classmate was so severely burnt that he took off his shirt and all of them had severe burns as they tried to go home. There were so many dead bodies on the road. He decided to climb up the hill and go another way to avoid the bodies. My brother said the cloud was like ice cream, and he saw the whole city destroyed. It was my brother who came and told us the whole city was burnt,” Keiko says.

We did not understand what had happened. No one spoke to us about the atomic bomb. We thought that tens or hundreds of bombs were detonated. Only much later did we realize that our city had been destroyed by the force of a single bomb.

Right after the bombing, the question was how to overcome it and not think of revenge, she says. There was nothing to eat, everyday was so hard, everyday people died. “Right after the bomb our thoughts were - how could we overcome it? What can we eat? Nothing was there. Some vegetables and rice. We caught grasshoppers or insects and ate them after cooking. Everyday was so hard and we were so afraid of dying.”

Shame joins Hiroshima and Fukushima

Many so-called "hibakushas", those who survived the atomic bomb, has for decades kept secret where they were when the bomb detonated.

We were afraid of discrimination. For example, no one wanted to marry someone who had been near the site where the bomb struck. Maybe one feared that there would be something wrong with the descendants, the now 78-year-old Keiko wonders.

Survivors are seemingly okay but get easily tired, didn’t have 100 per cent energy. We used to think survivors are lazy, they catch a cold easily, develop stomach ache, she says. “People are worried about getting married or getting jobs. The first thing I was asked by a young man from Tokyo whether I was from Hiroshima and exposed to radiation. There was denial too. Most people didn’t want to admit to being survivors, “she points out.

Keiko says she was also stunned by the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011.

The people in Fukushima have the same fate as us. People are afraid of them and they are discriminated against in Japanese society. People begin to distort the truth, telling lies about the past and keeping secrets about disabled children who are born.

Keiko Ogura - Photo: Keiko Ogura

Because the atomic bomb have so much association with secrecy and shame, Keiko Ogura have decided to tell her own story to the world. She has devoted her life to preserving the historical memory and are grateful to all who would listen to her story.

“Survivors at first hated America, especially the President of the USA for ordering the bombing, but there was guilt too that we couldn’t save our children. There was always regret. Why did I survive many people wondered but later we felt hope when elementary school children visited us and wanted to hear our stories. For the first time, people felt hope that they had survived. There was a feeling that before we all died our stories would be told to the world,” she adds.

She tells of the shock when she heard that the United States continued it's nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean even in the 1950s. There, began her work for peace.

Among other things, Keiko founded a small group of hibakushas, the Hiroshima Interpreters for Peace, who tries to explain to the world what happened in Hiroshima 70 years ago.

So that no one should have to experience the same thing.

Keiko confessed that the people she loved most in the world were teachers and the media. “They conveyed our stories. One time I was on TV and my son’s friend said he didn’t know I was a survivor. The only time I didn’t like the media was when I went to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. in 2003. I was supposed to work as an interpreter. I started to cry. I didn’t want to see the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the bomb. They took pictures of me crying and everyone in Japan saw it,” she says regretfully.

That’s the dilemma of the survivors. Without staying on the story, the world wouldn’t be better but then they will be identified as survivors. Keiko, like other survivors, was afraid of the stigma but she was clear on one thing - “If we think of revenge, the world will be unhappy. This is my message.”

You may also like to read:

Newspaper 1945 - Atom Bomb Hits Japs

☢ 66 Years Since Hiroshima Atom Bomb Hit 1945 Newspaper The Brainerd Daily Dispatch ☢

24 Hours After Hiroshima Documentary

☢ Watch 24 Hours After Hiroshima Documentary - National Geographic Channel - Interview Living Survivors 2010 ☢

Atomic Bomb Survivor Aug 6 1945 Akira Yamada

Hiroshima Anniversary Aug. 6 Now 66 years since the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima

Hiroshima Anniversary Aug. 6 Now 66 Years Since Bombing

Fukushima Clouds Hiroshima Anniversary
By Suvendrini Kakuchi


TOKYO, Aug 4, 2011 (IPS) - Matashichi Oishi, 78, a radiation victim from Bikini Atoll, the site of a U.S. hydrogen bomb test in 1954, will make his annual lone visit this week to commemorate the Aug. 6 anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima 66 years ago.

This year, says the former sailor, battling lung cancer from exposure to high levels of radiation at Bikini Atoll, his message at Hiroshima will go beyond a routine call to end nuclear weapons.

"Against the backdrop of the disastrous Fukushima nuclear plant accident, I will speak of the absolute need for Japan to not only work to ban nuclear weapons but also to completely eradicate dependence on nuclear energy," he told IPS. 

Oishi’s planned speech echoes the emergence of nuclear energy as an equal threat to peace. It gains credence from the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Fukushima and the northeast coasts of Japan on Mar. 11, severely damaging the nuclear plant located there.

Hiroshima became the world’s first atom-bombed city when the United Stated dropped a uranium bomb that exploded and killed almost its entire population instantly in 1945.

The atomic bombing anniversary has long made Hiroshima and Nagasaki city, that was similarly devastated within three days, potent symbols of world peace. The cities are unrivalled leaders in the nuclear disarmament movement.

Like Oishi, the thousands of peace activists, officials and politicians who will rally at Hiroshima to declare their commitment towards a world without nuclear weapons, will also call for a ban on nuclear energy.

A press release by the Mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui and his Nagasaki counterpart, Tomihisa Taue, makes the agenda clear.

Drafts of their speeches, released to the media, refer to the catastrophe faced by the people in Fukushima, and appeal to the government to promote renewable energy sources.

Matsui is quoted in the Japanese press as saying: "The central government should take responsibility to deal with the nuclear power generation issue."

Indeed, Oishi points out that a ban on nuclear power has been his lonely cry for the last six decades. He was 19 years old and sailing on a tuna boat when the U.S. carried out the bomb test that radiated his crew and forced the massive evacuation of residents from the surrounding islands.

The incident created an uproar in Japan, but given the political sensitivity at that time - the Cold War and a race to develop nuclear weapons development between the former Soviet Union and the U.S. - Oishi and his colleagues were forced to abandon the pursuit of justice.

Fourteen of the 23 Japanese crew on board the ‘Lucky Dragon’ contracted cancer, and ten died of it.

For Ayako Ooga, who lives in a temporary shelter in Aizu, 150 km from the damaged reactors in Fukushima, her former home, the upcoming Hiroshima anniversary is a time for solidarity.

"We must join hands with other victims like Oishi because we ourselves have become radiation victims," she said.

Prof. Michiji Konuma, who heads the Japan-based World Peace Appeal group, explained that the Fukushima disaster has reinforced the importance of raising public awareness about the dark side of nuclear energy.

Konuma, a physicist, has long campaigned to highlight the risks to human health posed by radiation. To him, the sobering lesson of Fukushima is that it is the fourth nuclear disaster to hit the Japanese people, counting Bikini Island, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"The human tragedy of the past disaster that included fatalities, cancer and other radiation induced diseases, as well as the widespread discrimination faced by the survivors, illustrate the hidden and lingering problems of nuclear power," he said.

"We must sustain the awareness raised by Fukushima and speak out about the dangers we face if we continue to pursue nuclear energy," he added.

Konuma represents a panel of intellectuals in Japan that issued a notice to the government in July, calling for a shift away from dependence on nuclear energy.

The group is also spearheading a public movement to bring in a long-needed debate on the safety aspects of nuclear power in Japan with the aim of creating deeper understanding at the citizen level.

"The difficult aspect of sustaining an anti-nuclear energy public mood can only be met if more stakeholders - from intellectuals to radiation victims - get together. We must not repeat the mistake of forgetting again," he said.

Oishi agrees. "My own story shows how lonely the struggle is in Japan to get the authorities to listen to victims who stay silent for fear of being discriminated against," he said. (END) 


This is from https://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56740