I have blogged in the past about the employment situation at Fukushima. Layers and layers of subcontractors exist between the nuclear companies and the people hired to work at nuclear plants. Organized crime in Japan is involved in contracting staffing at nuclear power reactors. There are no background checks for people working at nuclear power plants and desperate people from the margins of society wind up working a nuclear power plants. There have been reports that these desperate people form a sort of second class of workers at nuclear power plants who are poorly equipped, poorly trained and financially exploited by subcontractors. There have also been reports highly skilled workers are leaving the dangerous jobs at Fukushima for other less hazardous positions in the nuclear industry. Now there are lawsuits from workers at Fukushima saying that they are not being paid what they are entitled to.

        Four Fukushima workers are suing TEPCO because they say that they were not paid promised hazard pay above and beyond their regular salaries. This is the first such law suit against TEPCO. The workers wore masks in court because they are afraid of retaliation from their employers. Six hundred thousand dollars in unpaid wages is being sought from TEPCO and some of their partner firms. The lawyer for the four who brought the suit said that it was possible that there would be more laws suits from workers among the six thousand employed in the estimated forty year clean-up of the Fukushima disaster site. The lawyer stated that TEPCO has promised but not delivered hazard pay and that skilled workers were leaving the clean-up project which is now being handled by the less skilled.

       TEPCO announced last year that it would double daily danger pay to two hundred dollars per worker because of the danger involved in dealing with the uncontrolled flow of radioactive water and the decommissioning of the reactors that experienced core meltdowns at Fukushima. However, the promised hazard pay is being held up by some of the eight hundred subcontractors who sent workers to Fukushima. The subcontractors claim that their businesses will fail if they are not allowed to divert the hazardous pay. TEPCO is already expected to pay over forty eight billion dollars as compensation to the people around Fukushima whose lives were impacted by the Fukushima disaster. Additional billions of dollars will be required to complete the forty year decontamination and decommissioning at Fukushima. A citizens’ judicial panel recently decided that three former executives of TEPCO should face criminal charges because of their actions leading up to, during and following the Fukushima disaster.

       Considering the costs that are piling up, it is obvious that TEPCO will be under serious economic stress in the coming years. I wonder how long it will be until TEPCO declares bankruptcy. I expect that if and when they do, the burden of the continuing clean up will fall on the Japanese government and the Japanese taxpayers. And, should the government decide that it does not have the funds to continue the clean-up, the Fukushima site may become a permanent threat to human health and the environment in Japan.

Fukushima workers:

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The Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority gave the go-ahead on Wednesday for the restart of a nuclear power station, the first step to reopening an industry that was mothballed after the Fukushima disaster and which may involve the closure of a dozen old plants. japantimes.co.jp

TEPCO announced the completion of the installation of an 80 meter wide underground zeolite wall at Fukushima Daiichi. fukuleaks.org

Educating the public on the risks of radiation should be a long-term process and not just take place in the aftermath of a major nuclear accident, a panel of radiation protection experts agreed. world-nuclear-news.org

Speaking at the World Nuclear Association’s 2014 Annual Symposium on 11 September, Phumzile Tshelane, CEO of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (NECSA), outlined the country’s nuclear economy and the nuclear policies supporting it. world-nuclear-news.org

         My last blog was about tritium, the dangerous radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium is being released worldwide by operating nuclear reactors. Nuclear accidents such as Fukushima can release huge amounts of tritium. There is no existing nuclear technology for the removal of tritium from water. Japan is now seeking bids for demonstration projects for tritium removal. Three companies have been selected to construct the demonstration projects.

         The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) sent out a request for proposals in September of 2013 to remove tritium from contaminated water at Fukushima which is filling up emergency tanks and leaking into the Pacific Ocean. After the official submission period ended in late October of 2013, a review panel from the International Research Institute for Nuclear Disarmament went over all the proposals. Unfortunately, none of the many proposals that were submitted could be immediately applied to decontaminating Fukushima waste water.

         A Japanese government committee charged with finding treatments for the contaminated waste water said that “Since technologies that have a quick effect in separating tritium have not been found after collecting technical proposals from both inside and outside of Japan, it will be necessary in the future to assess measures proposed in response to our requests for information.” The committee called for proposals in mid-May that could demonstrate a method for tritium removal. The deadline for the new proposals was July 17, 2014. In late August, METI stated that Kurion from the U.S., GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy of Canada (GENEC) and FSUE Radioactive Waste Management Enterprise (RosRAO) from Russia will build demonstration projects to show how their technology can remove tritium from water.

        The demonstration projects have to show that the propose tritium removal technologies actually work as promised. Additionally, the demonstration projects will provide a basis for estimating the cost of constructing and operating tritium removal at the Fukushima nuclear plant where the disaster occurred. The demos will have to show that they can remove tritium from water where the tritium concentration is between six tenths of a million Becquerels and four million Becquerels per quart. The processes demonstrated have to be expandable to treating more than four hundred cubic yards of water a day. The Mitsubishi Research Institute will be handling the funding on behalf of METI’s Agency for Natural Resource and Energy. Funding of up to nine million four hundred thousand dollars will be made available to each of the companies for the construction and operation of the demonstration projects.

       Tritium is a threat to human health and it is a growing problem around Fukushima. Development of a technology that can remove tritium from water is an important step toward mitigating the environmental pollution from the Fukushima disaster. Hopefully, at least one of the demonstration projects will be successful and there will be a new technology to assist in decontamination of water released from nuclear power plants.

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Models show “greater potential impact” to US West Coast from rainfall containing Fukushima radioactive material.  enenews.com

Firefighters quickly doused a fire reported in an auxiliary building at North Carolina’s Harris nuclear plant Wednesday. nuclearstreet.com

Meeting the energy needs of a growing global population while tackling climate change is the “biggest diplomatic challenge of the era,” according to leading climate change expert Professor Sir David King. world-nuclear-news.org

Transparency is key to the United Arab Emirates’ program to build its first nuclear power plant, Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation chief Mohamed Al Hammadi told the World Nuclear Association’s 2014 Annual Symposium. world-nuclear-news.org

         Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that has two neutrons in the nucleus in addition to the single proton. Radioactive beta particles are emitted by tritium. (Beta particles are high energy electrons or positrons.) Since water is contained in living cells, heavy water with tritium instead of normal hydrogen is easily absorbed by living tissue when it is consumed. It can also enter a living body by being inhaled as water vapor. If the tritium is incorporated into organic compounds instead of being excreted or exhaled, it is referred to as organically bound tritium (OBT) and it can remain in a human body for up ten years, emitting beta particles. 

        If a beta particle from tritium hits the DNA in the nucleus of a living cell, it can cause mutations. If the DNA mutated is part of an important gene, the mutation can cause serious diseases. Laboratory animals exposed to tritium have developed cancer and birth defects. Research has shown that tritium can deliver what is called relative biological effectiveness in terms of radiation damage to living tissue at a rate of up to five times that of cosmic rays or x-rays.

      Tritium is created naturally when cosmic rays collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. It is also created by human activity such as the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons. It can also be released as a gas or water vapor by the normal operation of a nuclear power plant. In nuclear accidents at power plants, much greater releases of tritium are possible. It is estimated that nuclear power plants release tens of thousands of curies into the atmosphere and tens of millions of picocuries per liter into bodies of water near operating reactors.

       The NRC allows a licensed nuclear power plant to release a planned quantity of tritium into the environment that could result in a member of the public receiving a maximum of one milliseievert per year. Tritium has a half-life of about twelve years. Although increasing amounts of tritium are being released by normal nuclear reactor operations and nuclear accidents at nuclear power plants, the NRC does not require water or steam containing tritium to be filtered because there is no existing commercial technology that can remove tritium for water or water vapor.

         Much has been written about massive tritium releases caused by the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in March of 2013. The fuel cores of three of the Fukushima reactors melted down and may have escaped from the reactors. In any case, the integrity of the reactors’ containment vessels has been destroyed. Ground water is flowing through the area containing the cores where it picks up tritium. In May of 2014 it was reported that the level of tritium in the water beneath the crippled power plant is exceeding the level which is allowed for dumping water directly into the Pacific Ocean.

       The contaminated water has been pumped into storage tanks but the tanks are rapidly being filled and some are leaking. TEPCO attempted to freeze the soil around the reactors that melted down in an attempt to create an “ice wall” to contain the contaminated water but that plan has failed. Water from the area around the destroyed reactors is now flowing directly into the Pacific Ocean. At this point, it is estimated that water containing tritium will continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima for the foreseeable future. This poses a danger to all life on Earth.

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A nuclear plant in southwestern Japan will obtain a safety clearance from regulators this week to become the first such facility in the country to meet new, tighter regulations introduced following the 2011 Fukushima crisis, official sources said Monday. english.kyodonews.jp

Senior scientist says that no one knows how far melted nuclear fuel from Fukushima reactors has spread. enenews.com

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory recently announced further cooperation with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute to develop a new Generation IV sodium-cooled fast reactor. nuclearstreet.com

The head of Hitachi has said his company is considering a move to the UK for its nuclear power business. nuclearstreet.com

         Dounreay is a facility on the north coast of Scotland that was used to develop prototypes of fast breeder reactors and to test submarine reactors. There are five nuclear reactors at Dounreay, three of which are operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority which is a government agency responsible for the development of nuclear fusion. The other two nuclear reactors are operated by the Ministry of Defense. The Dounreay site is being decommission. A low level nuclear waste storage facility is being dug underground to store wastes from the demolition of the Dounreay reactors. The nuclear fuel from the Dounreay reactors is going to be shipped to the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria on the northeast coast of England.

        There have been shipments of fuel from Dounreay to Sellafield via rail and anti-nuclear activists have protested the shipments. Now there is talk of shipping nuclear fuel from Dounreay to Sellafield by sea. There have already been controversial sea shipments of nuclear fuel to Belgium from Dounreay. Sea trials are scheduled later this year to test the concept of shipping to Sellafield. The details of the tests and shipment plans are being kept secret on the grounds of national security.

       Critics point out that the sea is rough around Cape Wrath and the west coast of Scotland. People living on the coast along the proposed shipping route have not been consulted about the plan and they have been complaining. The weather in that part of Scotland can be severe and would pose a threat to shipments. An emergency tug boat has been lost in that area so currently there would not be a tug that could go out to rescue a radioactive shipment in trouble.

        Dounreay’s record of handling nuclear fuel is poor. There have been calls to close public beaches in the area because there are particles of nuclear fuel on the beaches in the area. Authorities say that there is no danger to the public but the public is not convinced. There is a whole bank of nuclear fuel fragments on the seabed off Dounreay.

        The question of Scottish independence is also a concern for the shipment plans. There will be a vote held soon by the Scots to see if they want to secede from the United Kingdom. If they do secede, this will complicate the planned shipments. U.K. law says that once fuel is reprocessed, it must be returned to the country of origin. An independent Scotland would have to go through a process of negotiation to arrange for shipments of nuclear fuel to Sellafield in England for reprocessing.

        There is a U.K. naval base for nuclear submarines in Faslane, Scotland. If Scotland becomes independent, the status of that base would come into question. Moving the base would be very expensive. There have been calls for the U.K. to declare the naval base to be sovereign U.K. territory in an independent Scotland.

        If Scotland achieves independence, it will further complicate an already complicated situation with respect to U.K. nuclear installations in Scotland and the movement of nuclear fuel and nuclear waste from Scotland to England.

Dounreay nuclear research facility:

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