Japan's radiation monitoring unreliable: Greenpeace

TOKYO —

Government radiation monitoring in areas near Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is unreliable, Greenpeace charged on Tuesday, with heavily populated areas exposed to 13 times the legal limit.

The environmental group said authorities were wasting time cleaning up evacuated areas and should prioritize decontamination efforts in places where people live, work and play.

Greenpeace found that in some parks and school facilities in Fukushima city, home to 285,000 people, radiation levels were above three microsieverts per hour. Japan’s recommended radiation limit is 0.23 microsieverts per hour.

Greenpeace International Energy Campaigner and radiation expert Rianne TeuleAFP

“We also found that official monitoring posts placed by the government systematically underestimate the radiation levels,” said Rianne Teule, Greenpeace’s radiation expert, adding that some machines are shielded from radiation by surrounding metal and concrete structures.

“Official monitoring stations are placed in areas the authorities have decontaminated. However, our monitoring shows that just a few steps away the radiation levels rise significantly,” she said.

“Decontamination efforts are seriously delayed and many hot spots that were repeatedly identified by Greenpeace are still there,” Teule said.

“It is especially disturbing to see that there are many hot spots around playground equipment, exposing children who are most vulnerable to radiation risks,” she said.

In tests carried out over four days last week, Greenpeace also found that radiation levels in Iitate village, where the government is hoping to soon return evacuated residents, are still many times over the limit, with decontamination efforts patchy.

Greenpeace’s Japan nuclear campaigner Kazue Suzuki said attempts to clean up were “misguided”.

“One home or office may be cleaned up, but it is very unlikely that the whole area will be freed of radiation risks within the next few years,” given the mountainous and heavily forested nature of the region, she said.

“The government continues to downplay radiation risks and give false hope (of returning home) to victims of this nuclear disaster,” said Suzuki.

A huge tsunami, sparked by a massive undersea quake, swamped the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March last year.

Reactors went into meltdown, spewing radiation over a large swathe of Japan’s agriculture-heavy northeast, in the planet’s worst atomic disaster for a generation.

The natural disaster left around 19,000 people dead or missing.

However, no one is officially recorded as having died as a direct result of the nuclear catastrophe, but thousands of people have been displaced and many livelihoods wrecked.

Scientists caution it could be decades before the plant is fully decommissioned and the areas around it are safe to live in again.

© 2012 AFP

ALERT: Emergency Declared At Oyster Creek Nuke Plant

This could get ugly in a hurry.  Oyster Creek is the same design, but even older than Fukushima, and acccording to Reuters, just 6 more inches of water will completely submerge the cooling pump.

Nation's oldest nuclear plant on alert

(Reuters) - Exelon Corp declared an "alert" at its New Jersey Oyster Creek nuclear power plant due to a record storm surge, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said, warning that a further water rise could force the country's oldest working plant to use emergency water supplies to cool spent uranium fuel rods.

The alert came after water levels at the plant rose by more than 6.5 feet, potentially affecting the pumps that circulate water through the plant, an NRC spokesman said late on Monday.  A further rise to 7 feet could submerge the service water pump motor that is used to cool the water in the spent fuel pool.

From National Geographic:

In the wake of Fukushima, the U.S. nuclear industry has pledged to bring additional backup equipment such as generators, pumps, hoses, and batteries to keep plants operating in case of loss of power or water, but that deployment is still under way.  Some critics have raised concerns about the safety of spent fuel at Oyster Creek and other nuclear plants, noting that the cooling pools where it is stored are not required to have backup power.  Spent fuel rods are still radioactive and continue to generate significant heat for decades.  Without cooling, the pools would boil away, leaving the fuel vulnerable to damage and to causing a radioactive release.  Exelon says it has "numerous, redundant backup cooling systems."

However, as discussed below by nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen, there is NO backup diesel generator for the spent fuel pool at Oyster Creek.

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Don't skip this.  Arne Gunderson discusses Oyster Creek:

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/29/nuclear_plants_from_virginia_to_vermont

Interview runs 5 minutes.  Gunderson on Democracy Now yesterday:

"There is NO backup generator for the spent fuel pool at Oyster Creek."

"The biggest problem, as I see it right now, is the Oyster Creek plant.  Oyster Creek is the same design, but even older than Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.  It’s in a refueling outage.  That means that all the nuclear fuel is not in the nuclear reactor, but it’s over in the spent fuel pool.  And in that condition, there’s no backup power for the spent fuel pools.  So, if Oyster Creek were to lose its offsite power — and, frankly, that’s really likely — there would be no way cool that nuclear fuel that’s in the fuel pool until they get the power reestablished.  The most important lesson we can take out of the Fukushima Daiichi incident, especially with Hurricane Sandy, is that we can’t expect to cool these fueling pools."