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Fukushima Redux

March 8, 2021 By Bob Kinsey

TEPCO plans massive ocean dumping of radioactive water at Fukushima
March 11 is the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima accident; it’s really not over yet, since the site continues to produce vast amounts of contaminated water. There is also no real answer for what will be done with the molten cores of the reactors when they are eventually extracted. The cost of decommissioning will run into hundreds of billions of dollars; it will take decades.

The most immediate threat is the official plan to discharge about 1.3 million metric tons of radioactively contaminated water – about 340 million gallons – containing tritium, strontium-90, carbon-14 and other radionuclides. This is the quickest and cheapest method of dealing with it; it is also dirtiest option by far, in my view. Listen to the interview I did with Living On Earth, Public Radio International’s environment show. It is this week’s opening segment, Radioactive Water Dilemma at Fukushima.

The proposed plan seems to be in violation of the 1972 London Anti-Dumping Convention, which unequivocally bans the dumping of radioactive waste in the seas. (Item 6 in Annex I, where the banned items are listed, states “Radioactive wastes or other radioactive matter.”) The Biden administration should join China, South Korea, Chile, and the Fukushima region’s fishing community in protesting the plan. All of them should demand that TEPCO, the power plant’s owner, do a global environmental impact statement comparing the ecological and health consequences of all alternatives, including the option of extracting the tritium and storing it for several decades till it is almost all decayed away. That is the least that TEPCO and the Japanese government can do before taking irreversible action to dump on their neighbors and a part of their own food supply.

My warm wishes to you

Arjun

Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D.
President
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
Phone: 301-509-6843
www.ieer.org

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Filed Under: News, Perspective

About Bob Kinsey

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Disarmament Quotes

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford"The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

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