'No Safe Levels' of Radiation in Japan 

Experts warn that any detectable level of radiation is "too
much".

By Dahr Jamail
Al-Jazeera-English 
April 5, 2011

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/20114219250664111.html

In a nuclear crisis that is becoming increasingly serious,
Japan's Nuclear Safety Agency confirmed that radioactive
iodine-131 in seawater samples taken near the crippled
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex that was seriously
damaged by the recent tsunami off the coast of Japan is 4,385
times the level permitted by law.

Airborne radiation near the plant has been measured at 4-
times government limits.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, the company that operates the
crippled plant, has begun releasing more than 11,000 tons of
radioactive water that was used to cool the fuel rods into
the ocean while it attempts to find the source of radioactive
leaks. The water being released is about 100 times more
radioactive than legal limits.

Meanwhile, water that is vastly more radioactive continues to
gush into the ocean through a large crack in a six-foot deep
pit at the nuclear plant. Over the weekend, workers at the
plant used sawdust, shredded newspaper and diaper chemicals
in a desperate attempt to plug the area, which failed. Water
leaking from the pit is about 10,000 times more radioactive
than water normally found at a nuclear plant

Thus, radiation from a meltdown in the reactor core of
reactor No. 2 is leaking out into the water and soil, with
other reactors continuing to experience problems.

Yet scientists and activists question these government and
nuclear industry 'safe' limits of radiation exposure.

'The U.S. Department of Energy has testified that there is no
level of radiation that is so low that it is without health
risks,' Jacqueline Cabasso, the Executive Director of the
Western States Legal Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

Her foundation monitors and analyzes U.S. nuclear weapons
programs and policies and related high technology energy,
with a focus on the national nuclear weapons laboratories.

Cabasso explained that natural background radiation exists,
'But more than 2,000 nuclear tests have enhanced this
background radiation level, so we are already living in an
artificially radiated environment due to all the nuclear
tests.'

'Karl Morgan, who worked on the Manhattan project, later came
out against the nuclear industry when he understood the
danger of low levels of ionizing radiation-and he said there
is no safe dose of radiation exposure,' Cabasso continued,
'That means all this talk about what a worker or the public
can withstand on a yearly basis is bogus. There is no safe
level of radiation exposure. These so-called safe levels are
coming from within the nuclear establishment.'

Risk at low doses

Karl Morgan was an American physicist who was a founder of
the field of radiation health physics. After a long career in
the Manhattan Project and at the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, he became a critic of nuclear power and weapons.
Morgan, who died in 1999, began to offer court testimony for
people who said they had been harmed by the nuclear power
industry.

'Nobody is talking about the fact that there is no safe dose
of radiation,' Cabasso added, 'One of the reasons Morgan said
this is because doses are cumulative in the body.'

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a report in
2006 titled Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR)
report, VII Phase 2. NAS BEIR VII was an expert panel who
reviewed available peer reviewed literature and wrote, 'the
committee concludes that the preponderance of information
indicates that there will be some risk, even at low doses.'

The concluding statement of the report reads, 'The committee
concludes that the current scientific evidence is consistent
with the hypothesis that there is a linear, no-threshold
dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing
radiation and the development of cancer in humans.'

This means that the sum of several very small exposures to
radiation has the same effect as one large exposure, since
the effects of radiation are cumulative.

For weeks engineers from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) have
been working to restore power to the plant and have resorted
to having seawater sprayed on radioactive fuel rods that have
been at risk of meltdown.

Despite this, Japanese officials conceded to the public on
March 31 that the battle to save four crippled nuclear
reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been
lost. On March 29 a US engineer who helped install the
reactors at the plant said he believed the radioactive core
in unit No. 2 may have melted through the bottom of its
containment vessel and on to a concrete floor.

Tepco's chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, said they had 'no
choice' but to scrap the No's 1-4 reactors, but held out hope
that the remaining two could continue to operate, despite the
fact that he admitted the nuclear disaster could last several
months. It is the first time the company has admitted that at
least part of the plant will have to be decommissioned.

But the government's chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, repeated
an earlier call for all six reactors at the 40-year-old plant
to be decommissioned. 'It is very clear looking at the social
circumstances,' he said.

Even after a cold shutdown, scrapping the plant will likely
take decades, and the site will become a no-man's land.

Tonnes of nuclear waste sit at the site of the nuclear
reactors, and enclosing the reactors by injecting lead and
encasing them in concrete would make it safe to work and live
a few kilometres away from the site, but is not a long-term
solution for the disposal of spent fuel, which will decay and
emit fission fragments over tens of thousands of years.

Near the plant, the radiation levels dangerously escalated to
400 milliseiverts/hour. Considering background radiation is
on the order of 1 milliseivert per year, this means a yearly
background dose every 9 seconds, based on industry and
governmental 'allowable' radiation exposure limits.

That compares with a national 'safety standard' in the U.S.
of 250 millisieverts over a year. The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency says a single dose of 1,000 millisieverts
is enough to cause internal hemorrhaging.

Meanwhile, more than 168 citizens organizations in Japan
submitted a petition to their government on March 28 calling
for an expanded evacuation zone near the Fukushima nuclear
disaster site. The groups are also calling for other urgent
measures to protect the public health and safety.

Residents of evacuated areas near the stricken Fukushima
nuclear plant have been warned that they may not be able to
return to their homes for months as Japan's nuclear crisis
stretched into a third week.

The neighbourhoods near the plant will remain empty 'for the
long term', Yukio Edano, the country's chief cabinet
secretary, said on April 1.

Though he did not set a timetable, he said residents would
not be able to return permanently 'in a matter of days or
weeks. It will be longer than that'.

The official evacuation zone remains only 20 kilometres,
while the government has encouraged people within 30
kilometres to evacuate.

Yet levels of cesium-137 in the village of Iitate, for
example, have been measured at more than twice the levels
that prompted the Soviet Union to evacuate people near
Chernobyl. Iitate is 40 kilometres northwest of Fukushima.

Radioactive Iodine has already been found in the tap water in
all of Tokyo's 23 wards.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had already
recommended an 80-kilometre evacuation zone for U.S. citizens
in Japan.

Fukushima as Chernobyl

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster.

'There are still no-go areas there, and the workers town has
long since been abandoned, and we are seeing radioactive
refugees from there, like we are now seeing generated in
Japan,' Dr Kathleen Sullivan, a disarmament educator and
activist who has been engaged in the nuclear issue for over
20 years told Al Jazeera, 'Tepco is trying to cover their
rear-end, and the Japanese government is being cagey about
it, and I believe people don't understand that radiation is a
major problem and issue.'

Dr Sullivan, cited Albert Einstein, who said, 'The splitting
of the atom changed everything, save man's mode of thinking;
thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.'

'So we don't understand this mistake because of the timeless
invisible nature of the problem that radiation is,' Sullivan,
who has been an education consultant to the UN Office for
Disarmament Affairs, added.

Some experts have warned of a nightmare scenario where clouds
of radioactive material could spread lethal toxins across the
planet for months on end if the spent fuel rods catch fire
due to lack of coolant.

The Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics of
Vienna told New Scientist on March 24: 'Japan's damaged
nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive
iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the
aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian
researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation
detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests –
to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73
per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily
amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is
around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.'

The same group of scientists stated, 'The Fukushima plant has
around 1760 tonnes of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site,'
while, 'the Chernobyl reactor had only 180 tonnes.'

According to a report from the New York Academy of Sciences,
due to the Chernobyl disaster, 985,000 people have died,
mainly from cancer, between 1986-2004.

Monitors have detected tiny radioactive particles which have
spread from the reactor site across the Pacific to North
America, the Atlantic and even Europe.

Andrea Stahl, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute
for Air Research, told Reuters, 'It's only a matter of days
before it disperses in the entire northern hemisphere.'

Tens of thousands of people living near the plant have been
evacuated or ordered to stay indoors, while radioactive
materials have leaked into the sea, soil and air.

Last week also marked the 32nd anniversary of the Three Mile
Island nuclear disaster in Middletown, Pennsylvania, in the
United States.

250,000 years of radiation

Sullivan explained that when dealing with long-lived
radioactive materials, in addition to carcinogens there are
inter-generational effects that include the mutation of the
genetic structure of life.

'This is permanent and irreversible,' she added.

Sullivan uses Fukushima reactor No. 3 as an example, because
it is fueled with Mox fuel uranium and plutonium. Plutonium
has a half-life of 24,000 years, which means it is
carcinogenic and mutagenic for up to 250,000 years, or 12,000
human generations.

A radioactive half-life means that in this case, in 24,000
years, half of the ionizing radiation will have decayed, then
in another 24,000 years half of that radiation will decay,
etc.

'That's not really understandable or explainable in a
conventional sense of knowing,' Sullivan said, 'We have to
apply our moral imagination to 12,000 generations to even
begin to understand what we are doing in this moment.' 

(c) 2011 Al-Jazeera-English

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