Since the terrible accident of 11 March 2011 (an earthquake of magnitude 9 and a 15 m-high tsunami), the devastated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power plant has not seemed to pose any health concerns outside Japan. And even in Japan, no radiation levels above the dose limit were found in the shops or in the food.
Yet from some Japanese data, some of which have not been translated yet, the situation in Fukushima is no longer under control.
First 400 tonnes of water are entering daily in the Fukushima Nuclear plant, from the sea, they are contaminated there, which is in addition to the 280,000 tonnes of contaminated water already stored at the site. Moreover, there are several hundred tonnes of very contaminated materials in the power plant. According to some reports (from workers on the site, that need to be confirmed, or denied I hope), radiation levels within three of the reactor buildings (in Unit 1 through Unit 3) at the Fukushima Nuclear plant (the three cores have melted down) would be 800 millisieverts (the amount of radiation the `dose’ received by people is measured in millisieverts) in Unit 1; 880 millisieverts in Unit 2; and 1,510 millisieverts in Unit 3. Yet, a man dies after a radiation exposure of 1,000 millisieverts. And in Unit 4, the situation remains extremely unstable, there are 14,225 spent fuel rods.
While in Chernobyl, the Nuclear Power Plant sarcophagus or Object Shelter was built in 7 months, by mobilizing 300,000 people, including 30,000 soldiers, in Fukushima, radiation levels are so high that even a suicide squad could not work there for more than a couple of seconds; and robots cannot be used everywhere because the Fukushima plant is too damaged.
Within a radius of 15 km, cities are empty; a bit further, a significant increase in leukemias and breast cancer have been noted. At sea, in front of the nuclear power station, 1 km off the coast, a level of more than 2000 Bq/kg (The International System unit of radioactivity, equal to one nuclear decay or other nuclear transformation per second) was detected in fish, that is to say 4 times the prescribed safe limit, with even other fish, in lesser numbers, with up to 7,400 times more caesium than the safety tolerance limits. And since contamination is spread through plankton and small fishes as they eat sludge containing radioactive substances, thus 120 km from Fukushima, fish with levels of radiation at 380 Bq/kg can be found, and this is spreading all the way to Tokyo Bay. At the current rate, according to the IAEA, decontamination would take at least four decades.
Meanwhile, many things can happen; there is in particular a real concern that the plant could start to break apart before decontamination is complete.
On the one hand, the structures of containment start breaking down, on the other, according to several experts, signs of a next offshore earthquake are multiplying, off Nagoya-Osaka or the region of
Fukushima, with a magnitude greater than 6.0, producing tsunami waves of more than 10 metres.
In this case, the cooling system would fail; the containment buildings would break down; the 280,000 tonnes of contaminated water would empty into the ground and the sea; unit 4 would be destroyed. The consequences would be immense; for Japan as a whole; and beyond. In particular, we would need to evacuate 30 million people of the Tokyo Metropolitan Region.
Last problem: at sea, there are tsunami debris equivalent it is said to the volume of « two Mount Fuji ». And since Japanese technology makes it possible to recover only debris and this at less than 30 meters deep, only the coastal area has been cleared, leaving the majority of debris to corrode at sea.
Since the Japanese seem to minimize all these problems, that are out of the grasp of Japanese technologies, a general mobilization of the planet is necessary; if we do not want the consequences to be terrifying for humanity. The next G8 summit in London, in June, has to decide that Fukushima is no longer a Japanese problem, but a global problem.
j@attali.com