今なお終りが見えない福島原発事故が人災であることは、すでに語られて時が経つ。チェック・アンド・バランスを骨子とした現行の日本国憲法の精神が浸透し、もっと尊重されていれば、民官（学）の癒着に反対する精神的拠り所になり、それを担った個人の育成・成長と民主主義の確かな足場を作り、日本社会が国民の幸せの向上と富の享受のために、後退ではなくて前進するとは言えないだろうか。
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Japan leaders, utility slammed for 'man-made' nuclear disaster
July 5, 2012 | 11:45 am
An independent parliamentary commission accused the Japanese government and the nation's leading utility of "collusion" in avoiding vital nuclear safety improvements that would have prevented the reactor meltdowns last year at the tsunami-damaged Fukushima complex.
In its report based on 900 hours of testimony, the Japanese Diet's 10-member investigative panel accused government and industry leaders of having “betrayed the nation's right to be safe from nuclear accidents.”
The report, seven months in the making and at odds with government and industry accounts of culpability, coincided with the first nuclear power plant going back on line since all 50 of Japan's working reactors were shut down for inspection and safety upgrades. The first electrical energy from the No. 3 reactor at Ohi, in central Fukui prefecture, flowed into the national power grid Thursday, the Kansai Electric Power Co. reported Thursday.
Politicians called it "outrageous" that the government decided to restart two reactors at Ohi before the commission's report was issued and without completing all recommended safety improvements, including building a seawall around the reactor complex to protect it from the kind of tsunami that devastated the Fukushima plant.
The earthquake-triggered inundation of March 11, 2011, that led to meltdowns at three of Fukushima's four reactors "cannot be regarded as a natural disaster," Tokyo University professor Kiyoshi Kurokawa wrote in the commission's 600-page report. "It is an obviously man-made disaster ... that could and should have been foreseen and prevented."
Japanese nuclear regulators with the Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency colluded with Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. in willfully ignoring necessary safety upgrades, the report stated.
“Across the board, the commission found ignorance and arrogance unforgivable for anyone or any organization that deals with nuclear power,” the report said.
The commission recommended that the Diet establish a permanent oversight panel to ensure that the government and utilities carry out the necessary measures to prevent any recurrence of the Fukushima disaster, the world's worst nuclear crisis since the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine.
The Diet commission report was likely to fuel already strong anti-nuclear sentiments in Japan, where 20,000 besieged the offices of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda last week to protest the planned resumption of nuclear power generation. All 50 operable nuclear reactors in the country had been shut down in a phased inspection program after the Fukushima disaster that saw the final plant go off-line in May, leaving Japan without nuclear energy-generating capacity for the first time in 42 years.
Recent opinion polls in Japan have shown at least 70% of the population want nuclear energy reduced or eliminated. Japan relied on nuclear power for about a third of its energy needs before last year's disasters.
In announcing the first flow of nuclear energy on Thursday, Kansai Electric said it expected the power from the two Ohi plants to avert as much as a 15% power shortfall in the populous Osaka and Kyodo areas this summer.
福島原発事故はまだ収拾していない。それどころか今だ大きな危険を孕んでいる。見守っている世界の原子力エキスパートたちと日本政府・東京電力の対処対策との隔たりと、その苛立ちがわかる記事。
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Global help urged to avert reactor 4 pool fire
U.S. expert appalled by Tepco's attitude over 'sleeping dragon' risk
By ERIC JOHNSTON Japan Times Staff writer
Saturday, Sep. 8, 2012
KYOTO — The risk of a fire starting in reactor 4's spent-fuel pool at the Fukushima No. 1 plant continues to alarm scientists and government officials around the world, prompting a leading U.S. nuclear expert to urge Japan to tap global expertise to avert a catastrophe.
Go global: U.S. nuclear expert and opponent Arnie Gundersen addresses an audience Monday in Kyoto, after traveling to Japan to meet with Diet members and citizens' groups over conditions at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant. MICAH GAMPEL
Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer and former executive in the nuclear power industry who is now one of its foremost critics in the United States, has been monitoring the No. 1 plant since the March 2011 triple meltdowns through his Vermont-based Fairewinds Energy Education nonprofit organization.
During a trip to Japan in late August and early September, Gundersen met with Diet members, lawyers and citizens' groups to discuss conditions at the wrecked power station and told an audience in Kyoto on Monday that fears over the spent-fuel pool in reactor 4 remain high.
"The spent-nuclear-fuel pool at Fukushima No. 1's unit 4 remains a sleeping dragon. The situation and possibility of a fuel pool fire in reactor 4 in the days (immediately) after the (March 2011) quake was the reason the U.S. government recommended that the evacuation zone be (set at) 80 km," said Gundersen, who served as an expert witness during the federal investigation into the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania.
This evacuation recommendation was based on studies the U.S. conducted more than a decade earlier at New York's Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and researches atomic energy.
"In 1997, the laboratory did a study showing that if a nuclear-fuel pool were to boil dry, it would release enough radiation to cause the permanent evacuation of those living within an 80 km radius (of the complex).
"The Fukushima plant's reactor 4 (pool) has 1,500 fuel bundles. That's more cesium than was released into the atmosphere from all of the nuclear bombs ever exploded, (which total) more than 700 over a period of 30 years. That's also why the U.S. recommended an evacuation with an 80 km radius," Gundersen explained.
But even today, concerns persist among experts worldwide that reactor 4's pool is still at risk of boiling dry. If this were to occur, it would necessitate a massive and immediate evacuation of the surrounding area.
Nuclear fuel rods are extremely thin and clad with zircaloy, a zirconium alloy that contains a tiny amount of tin and other metals. But zircaloy burns if it is exposed to air, as shown in a test conducted at the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico just two weeks before the Great East Japan Earthquake devastated the Tohoku region.
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The facility is wholly owned by Sandia Corp., a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corp., and undertakes research for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
"Last week, I showed slides of the Sandia lab experiments to some Diet members. Afterward, Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials presented their plan to empty the nuclear fuel from the reactor pool," Gundersen said.
"I told Tepco that while I realized they hoped and believed that there will always be water in the nuclear fuel pool, I had to ask whether or not they had (already prepared and stationed) any chemicals to put out a nuclear fuel pool fire in the event they were wrong.
"Tepco's response was that there was nothing in the fuel pool that could burn, a statement I find appalling."
In July, Tepco announced it had removed two unused nuclear fuel assemblies from reactor 4's pool, the first of more than 1,500 that will have to be retrieved. If everything goes according to plan, the utility will begin extracting the remaining assemblies, used to store spent fuel rods, from December 2013 and complete the task within three years.
But the state of the fuel pool and the lack of preparations to deal with a possible fire has drawn intense criticism not just from experts like Gundersen but also from some senior officials in the U.S.
Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources who visited Fukushima Prefecture in April, sent a letter to Japan's ambassador in Washington upon his return urging Tokyo to tap the expertise and knowhow of the United States and other countries to complete the cleanup work more quickly.
"Tepco's Dec. 21 remediation road map proposes to take up to 10 years to complete spent-fuel removal from all of the pools on the (Fukushima No. 1) site," Wyden wrote.
"Given the compromised nature of these structures due to the events of March 11, this schedule carries extraordinary and continuing risk if further severe seismic events were to occur.
"Many nations possess expertise in nuclear energy technology and its full breadth should be made available to Japan in dealing with" the Fukushima disaster, the letter said.
Later that month, 72 domestic antinuclear groups, along with former Ambassador to Switzerland Mitsuhei Murata and ex-U.N. diplomat Akio Matsumura, called on the United Nations to establish a nuclear security summit to specifically focus on the spent-fuel pool at reactor 4 and to also establish an independent assessment team to investigate the matter.
However, Gundersen said he is still awaiting signs from the Japanese government or Tepco officials indicating they're ready to canvass a broad range of experts around the world over how best to deal with not only the unit 4 situation, but the larger question of what to do with the Fukushima No. 1 plant.
"Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and Tepco claim they are getting outside expertise from the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Article II of the IAEA's charter states its mission is to promote nuclear power. There is a real need for experts who think outside the box," Gundersen said.
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福島原発事故は人災。原子力規制委員会の委員たちと東電との金をめぐる癒着により、厳しいはずの安全規制が弛められた結果発生。予防できたはずの災害であった。
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Japan nuclear safety team took utility money
Nov 3, 5:50 AM EDT
By YURI KAGEYAMA AP Business Writer
TOKYO (AP) -- Members of a Japanese government team assigned to set reactor safety measures received funding from utility companies or atomic industry manufacturers, raising questions about the experts' neutrality in the wake of last year's tsunami-triggered nuclear disaster.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority said Friday that Nagoya University Professor Akio Yamamoto received 27.14 million yen ($339,000) over the past three years for research on reactors. That includes 6.28 million yen ($79,000) from a subsidiary of Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant sent into meltdowns last year.
The authority said Friday that three others on the six-member standards team received industry funding. Getting such money is not illegal, but it could call the neutrality of the team into question, since the industry would benefit from laxer standards.
The commission had asked the team members to voluntarily disclose such funding, including grants and donations, in an effort to boost transparency.
Akira Yamaguchi, a professor at Osaka University, got 10 million yen ($125,000) in such money, including 3 million yen from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which makes nuclear plants.
Before, regulators were in the same ministry that promotes the industry. The Nuclear Regulation Authority was set up this year after calls for a more independent watchdog, and large and frequent public protests against nuclear power.
The Tokyo Shimbun newspaper reported Friday that such funding highlights the "danger the measures may turn spineless to reflect the utilities' wishes."
Even the Nuclear Regulation Authority's chief, Shunichi Tanaka, has been under fire as possibly being too pro-nuclear. He was a key member of a government panel promoting nuclear energy and headed government research on the technology before being tapped for the job.
Separately, another team of experts working under the commission has been examining earthquake faults at Ohi nuclear power plant, which houses the only two reactors running in Japan.
A decision is expected Sunday on whether Ohi will be shut down.
Japan's 50 nuclear reactors, besides the four ruined at Fukushima Dai-ichi, have not been turned back on after getting turned off for routine inspections.
The two at Ohi went back on in July, barely two months after this nation went without nuclear power. Before the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power had furnished about 30 percent of Japan's electricity.
Ruling party legislator Goshi Hosono, the former minister overseeing the disaster, said Saturday more tests may be needed to check on the faults, but even "a gray zone" of uncertainty would likely mean Ohi reactors would go offline.
Cancer risk from Fukushima disaster small, report says
People living near the site of Japan's 2011 nuclear disaster face only a slightly greater risk of cancer in their lifetimes as a result, a World Health Organization report concludes.
By Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times
March 1, 2013
Three-year-old Wakana Nemoto is screened for radiation exposure in Fukushima, Japan, in April 2011, a month after the nuclear plant disaster. Infants who lived in the vicinity at the time face the greatest additional cancer risk during their lifetimes, a World Health Organization report said. (Hiro Komae / Associated Press / April 16, 2011)
The 9.0-magnitude Tohoku-Oki earthquake and resulting tsunami that triggered a meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station has resulted in only a small increase in lifetime cancer risks for people living nearby, and an even smaller risk for populations outside of Japan, according to a new report from the World Health Organization.
The uptick in disease resulting from radiation released by the crippled plant is "likely to remain below detectable levels," the study authors concluded in their 166-page report released Thursday. That added risk will probably be drowned out by the choices people make throughout their lives, such as whether to smoke and how much to exercise, they said.
Based on the estimated levels of radiation released into the environment during the Fukushima crisis two years ago, scientists determined that the greatest threat people would probably face would be an increased risk of cancer. The most vulnerable people were infants who lived in close proximity to the plant on Japan's eastern coast.
For instance, baby boys who lived in the area at the time now have a 7% increased risk of developing leukemia during their lifetimes compared with what they would have faced if the meltdown hadn't happened. Baby girls who lived near the plant and were exposed to radiation now have a 6% increased risk of developing breast cancer and a 4% increased risk of developing any type of cancer that forms solid tumors.
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The study authors also calculated that these girls are now 70% more likely to develop thyroid cancer, but they emphasized that the absolute risk was still very small, rising from 0.75% to 1.25%.
Although emergency workers had some of the highest levels of radiation exposure, they had yet to demonstrate acute radiation effects, the scientists found. The only effects that are expected in this group are "possible thyroid disorders in those few workers who inhaled significant quantities of radioactive iodine," the authors wrote.
Six Fukushima plant workers died during or soon after the March 2011 disaster. A United Nations report last year determined that none of them perished due to the effects of radiation and attributed their deaths and injuries to physical trauma, cardiovascular stress and heat stress. One reported leukemia death could not be attributed to the meltdown because of the short time between radiation exposure and death, the U.N. said.
The report said exposure levels were insufficient to cause an increase in miscarriages, stillbirths or birth defects. The report did not assess potential psychosocial or mental health impacts from the disaster.
No discernible increase in health risks was expected outside of Japan, the scientists concluded.
Much of the data that were used to develop the risk forecast model were taken from survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts and from the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster.
The study authors said they took pains not to underestimate potential health risks from the Fukushima disaster. As such, they assumed that people living nearby the power plant took longer to evacuate than they actually did, and that they ate only food produced in the area.
Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group, said the WHO report's focus on the increased risk to each person "tends to dilute the impact" of the disaster.
Lyman pointed to another study done last year by Stanford University scientists who estimated that the meltdown would cause about 310 cases of cancer, including about 130 deaths. That study was published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Times staff writer Emily Alpert contributed to this report.
Robots have failed Fukushima Daiichi and Japan
March 20, 2013: 8:29 AM ET
By Michael Fitzpatrick, contributor
One of the most highly innovative countries in the world did not have the technology it should have had.
FORTUNE -- Two years since a shudder in the Earth's crust devastated Japan, the country's scientists and engineers are still attempting to develop technologies to make Fukushima safe from radiation. But progress has been slow and—because of institutional failings—more advanced technologies have not been available to workers at the sire.
A country known as a technological superpower ultimately had to rely on low-tech methods during the disaster, including dumping water from the air to cool the raging reactors. High radiation levels prevented engineers from approaching critically damaged areas at the plant two years ago—and still does so today. Robots that some expected to be on call were conspicuously absent. The country faces a bill of between $1 billion and $2.5 billion dollars to dismantle the Fukushima plant, and 40 years until it is safely decommissioned.
Only now are robots being developed that might be able to access the most contaminated areas within the shattered reactors' cores. So how did Japan, with the worlds' most "advanced" robots (not to mention the biggest population of them), fail to deploy the machines that might have spared dangerous human toil?
"For a start," says Dr. Masashi Goto who worked on designing containment vessels of Mark-1 reactors like those at Fukushima Daiichi, "neither Japan's nuclear power industry nor the government concede that an accident like this could ever happen. They have long held that all of Japan reactors are 'absolutely safe.'" In other words, why prepare emergency backups or robots for the event of a quake-induced meltdown when the authorities denied such a thing could ever happen? Doing so would acknowledge a danger perpetually denied.
"They said that �accidents owing to earthquakes would be minimal," adds Goto. "As a consequence the companies involved in designed these reactors were told only to make '�voluntary� efforts to make the reactors' containment vessel quake proof."
Although TEPCO the firm that built and ran the reactors, and the authorities knew disaster response technology on hand was old, little was done to provide backups, such as robots, in the event of a meltdown. Cheap nuclear power was—and still is—too important to Japan's economic competitiveness.
Luckily, so far radiation released from Fukushima is only one tenth of Chernobyl's. The Ukrainian plant blew its top, literally, and spewed, chimney like, nuclear fallout far and wide. Daiichi shutdown, Chernobyl did not. Enough safety protocols functioned to avert an even larger disaster, but the reactors remain unstable. Still, the fact is that no machine exists that can safely obtain proper readings from near the radioactive cores. "It will be difficult to explain where the fuel is. We can't get close enough for proper measurements," admits Yoshinori Moriyama, of Japan's nuclear watchdog NISA.
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At the centre of all this are the Daiichi workers—those unlucky enough to have the task, limited to a few moments at a time, of labouring inside the debris-strewn reactor buildings. With radiation high enough to sabotage electronics, American robots donated to the Daiichi plant have been missing in action, along with a Japanese robot dubbed Quince. Human labor for some of the most dangerous tasks has had to substitute.
"Untrained casual laborers used dustpans to scoop up highly radioactive water into buckets; dashing in and out of doors to reduce their exposure times," says local Fukushima councillor Hiroyuki Watanabe who is studying Daiichi workers and acts as an unofficial spokesman for them. Says one anonymous worker "for all of Japan's high-tech prowess, none of those lauded humanoid helpers were any good at all," referring to Japan's robot programs.
TEPCO and the Japanese government are scrambling now to get some stronger mechanical help into the stricken reactors, calling on the expertise of disaster robot specialists at Technology's Future Robotics Technology Center (fuRo) at the University of Chiba.
But it seems too little, too late. For years much of Japan's robot research and development—billions of dollars worth—was aimed at developing humanoid helpers for the home derided by some as toys, not practical robots like those from fuRO. With authorities prioritising factory and helper humanoids to do the work immigrants do elsewhere in the world, more useful robotics were marginalised.
"The Japanese like to put a face on things, to make them look like a humans or animals. It's more done for entertainment value than real practicality," says Joseph Engelberger the "father of the robotics industry" on Japan's robots. "They should be able to do more."
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The $6.8 Billion Great Wall of Japan: Fukushima Cleanup Takes on Epic Proportion
NIck Cunningham / Oilprice.com @oilandenergy 5:18 PM ET Time
写真=Tanks of radiation-contaminated water are seen at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)'s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan on March 11, 2015.
'The Great Wall of Japan' may be able to prevent future disasters, but the cleanup could take another forty years before it's complete
More than four years after the catastrophic tsunami that crippled several nuclear reactors in Fukushima, the Japanese utility that owns the site is struggling to deal with a continuous flood of radioactive water.
The tsunami knocked off power at the nuclear plant, which led to the meltdown of three of the six reactors, with a fourth severely damaged. The ongoing release of radioactive material has prevented anyone from entering parts of the complex.
But getting a handle on the mess, let alone permanently cleaning up the site, has been extraordinarily difficult. The problem is the daily flood of rainwater that flows downhill towards the sea, rushing into the mangled radioactive site. An estimated 300 tons of water reaches the building each day, and then becomes contaminated. TEPCO, the utility that owns the site, has been furiously building above ground storage tanks for radioactive water. Storing the water prevents it from being discharged into the sea, but this Sisyphean task does nothing to ultimately solve the problem as the torrent of water never ends. TEPCO has already put more than 500,000 tons of radioactive water in storage tanks.
To reduce the 300 tons of newly created radioactive water each day, TEPCO must cut off the flow of groundwater into the nuclear complex. To do that, it plans on building an ice wall that will surround the four reactors. TEPCO plans on building an intricate array of coolant pipes underneath the reactors, freezing the soil into a hardened ice wall that will block the flow of water. The ice wall will stretch one and a half kilometers around the reactors.
Great plan, except that it has never been done before. TEPCO may be able to freeze the soil, but there is no telling if it can build an ice wall without any holes that could allow water to seep into the reactor building. Questions surrounding the viability of the ice wall, and with it the prospects for halting the flow of radioactive water, heightened after TEPCO announced in mid-March that it was postponing the project.
In fact, much of what TEPCO has to do to clean up the disaster area is daunting. TEPCO actually has to dig up radioactive soil and remove it, putting it in an interim storage facility. The idea is to make Fukushima inhabitable again, rather than indefinitely leave it as a radioactive and toxic no-go zone like the immediate surroundings of Chernobyl. When or if that can happen is anybody’s guess. The removal of radioactive soil began recently.
Another unnerving challenge is TEPCO’s plan to remove radioactive elements from contaminated water and then discharge the water into the Pacific Ocean, a plan that is facing enormous pushback. That’s because TEPCO has lost the trust of the public. Not only has the utility responded poorly to the cleanup, but it also recently admitted to not having publicly disclosed that a leak was resulting in radioactive water flowing into the ocean. TEPCO knew about the leak for more than ten months, one of a long line of acts of obfuscation that has enraged the Japanese public. The Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Authority gave its stamp of approval for dumping cleansed water into the ocean, but the fishing industry is hoping to block the plan, as many fishermen do not trust that the water TEPCO plans on dumping is in fact clean of radioactivity.
The Japanese government hopes to prevent future nuclear meltdowns by constructing “The Great Wall of Japan,” a controversial $6.8 billion campaign to build around 440 sea walls along the coast to fend off tsunamis.
That may be able to prevent future disasters, but in the meantime the cleanup and decommissioning of the Fukushima nuclear power plant continues. It could take another forty years before the work is complete.
This article originally appeared on Oilprice.com.
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