Today the government and TEPCO announce that they have achieved “cold shutdown,” meaning that the coolant water must remain under 100 degrees. For now, the “decay heat” has decreased enough to be considered stable. But it takes over two years for the water in a spent fuel pool to cool enough for transfer to storage.
Despite the “stable” temperatures, 11,870 gallons of highly radioactive water leaked from a crack in the desalination unit at Fukushima Daiichi through a gutter into the ocean. The water contained cesium-134 and-137, exceeding the government limits by 267 and 322 times, respectively. Asahi News reported that the water may have contained one million times as much radioactive strontium as the government limit. Dosimeters are now available at DVD rental stores.
Koyu Abe, a Zen Buddhist priest, continues to invite people to dump contaminated soil from their gardens onto the hill behind his temple near Fukushima City. The autumn rice crop may have to be abandoned. Young people are leaving family farms and moving to the city. Thirty-three football fields’ worth of contaminated dirt from the no/go zone is looking for a home.
There are only eight nuclear power plants in Japan now operating at the time of this writing. Antinuclear protestors who man the three tents outside the ministry buildings in Tokyo, where we were plied with tea and cookies on a very cold day, say they won’t leave until every nuclear power plant has been shut down.
In the United States, the debate over whether to proceed with new nuclear power plants continues. Germany is phasing out all nuclear power, but buying coal from Czechoslovakia, thereby pushing the burden of carbon and methylmercury contamination onto a poorer country.
The Japanese government has passed a law setting age limits on the remaining nuclear power plants. The Institute of Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety in France estimated that between March and mid-July, 27.1 petabecquerels of cesium-137 leaked into the Pacific Ocean, the greatest amount known to have been released from a single episode. (A petabecquerel is a million billion becquerels.)
The decontamination of towns like Iitate and Minamisoma just outside the exclusion zone gets under way. The cleanup contracts are big business: 40 billion yen is being allocated to Minamisoma alone. Such contracts are deemed a scam, part of the cozy ties between government and the nuclear industry. The workers are uneducated about radiation, questioning as they work whether to remove five or ten centimeters of contaminated soil.
“The Japanese nuclear industry is run so that the more you fail, the more money you receive,” said Kiyoshi Sakurai, a nuclear power researcher.