Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 13, 2013

Ambient office = .104 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .083 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain = .088 microsieverts per hour

Romaine lettuce from local grocery store = .087 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .089 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .056 microsieverts per hour

           I have written about problems with ground water and surface water before with respect to radioactive contamination from things like nuclear accidents and nuclear explosions. However, today I’m going to focus on naturally occurring radioactivity in a regional water supply.

            In the country of Jordan, in the Middle East, the climate is very dry and water is a big problem. Thousands of years ago, the area was not as dry and ancient water from those times can be found in deep aquifers beneath the Jordanian dessert. In order to sustain the current population of the area, it has been necessary to drill deep wells and pump thirty thousand year old water out of the ancient aquifers. Millions of cubic feet of water are being pumped out of aquifers all over the Middle East and North Africa.

           Currently, Jordan is carrying out a major new hydraulic engineering project to supply water to Amman, the capitol of the country. The Disi aquifer in the southern part of the country already supplies sixty million cubic feet of water a year to Jordan. When the new project is complete, another hundred million cubic feet a year will be pumped out of the Disi aquifer and sent through pipelines to Amman.

           The World Health Organization has been analyzing the water from the Disi aquifer and has found that the level of naturally occurring radioactivity in the water is up to thirty times higher than the level considered safe by WHO standards. The radioactivity comes from the natural uranium and thorium in the sedimentary rock that contains the aquifer. Not only Jordan, but the entire Middle East and Northern Africa are confronted with the same problem from the ancient aquifers.

            The German Federal Office for Radiation Protection has run calculations on the probable number of extra deaths which may be caused by the radiation from the water based on consumption of two liters of water per day from the aquifer. In Amman alone, from a population of two million people, that comes to an additional eight thousand deaths from health problems related to radiation poisoning. This calculation is only based on direct consumption of the water and does not take other sources of radioactivity into account such as concentration of radiation in vegetables that are raised on land irrigated by the aquifer water. Beyond Jordan, the problem applies to hundreds of millions of people across the Middle East and North Africa. Using the same calculations, we can estimate that more than a million people may be killed by the natural radioactivity in the water they are drinking.

          The Disi aquifer is mostly under neighboring Saudi Arabia where it is called the Saq aquifer. Tests over a wide area have confirmed that the levels of natural radioactivity are above WHO standards. For unknown reasons, it has been found that the radioactivity is highest in the parts of the aquifer that are being depleted the most rapidly. This is a pressing problem because if the radioactivity keeps rising as the aquifer levels in a particular area fall, then the areas making the most use of aquifer water will be the first exposed to the highest levels of natural radioactivity before other regions where the aquifer is not being so heavily utilized.

           Saudi Arabia is treating the water from the Saq aquifer to remove radioactive particles but other governments inf the Middle East and North Africa are not being as conscientious. Libya is engaged in a huge project to pump water out of the aquifer in the interior and send it to cities on the coast. Jordan claims that its own testing shows much lower levels and is not so worried about radioactivity. That may be a problem because the European bank that is helping to finance the Jordan project has been very clear that continuation of the loan is tied to stringent testing of the water for radioactive contamination.

Jordan:

900-mile-long “front” of most contaminated water from Fukushima Daiichi moving across Pacific toward Pacific Northwest. enenews.com

TEPCO’s discovery of leaks in water storage pits at the wrecked Fukushima atomic station raises the risk the utility will be forced to dump radioactive water in the Pacific Ocean. bloomberg.com

The United States will talk to North Korea, but only if the country gets serious about negotiating the end of its nuclear weapons program, Secretary of State John Kerry said after arriving Friday in Seoul for talks with U.S. ally South Korea. cnn.com

Some 99% of residents of Fukushima prefecture and neighboring Ibaraki have barely detectable levels of internal exposure to caesium-137, a group of Japanese researchers has found. Of the remaining 1%, all showed levels well below the government-set limit. world-nuclear-news.org

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 12, 2013

Ambient office = .085 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .074 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain = .078 microsieverts per hour

Hass avacado from local grocery store = .062 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .061 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .044 microsieverts per hour

           The Constitution says that the Federal Government is charged with the task of taking care of the public welfare. Top on the list of definitions for welfare is health. The EPA is the division of the U.S. Government that is supposed to be watching out  the environment for possible threats to human health. As such, the issue of radioactive contamination from a nuclear accident or deliberate incident is definitely within their purview.

           Toward the end of the Bush administration, the EPA was talking about new guidelines about the release of radioactivity into the environment with respect to what levels of radiation should trigger what levels of response on the part of authorities. When the Obama Administration took over, they held up the release of the new guidelines. Part of the reason for the delay was that nuclear activists had raised serious concerns that the new guidelines would raise thresholds for acceptable amounts of radiation in the environment.

           After several more years of controversy, the EPA recently released draft proposals of new turned out to be valid. The new guidelines do not explicitly spell out radiation levels but instead refer to numbers from other agencies and institutions which say that much high levels of radiation should not merit a strong response.

            One of the main problems is that the EPA had previously recommended that water that contained a certain level of radioactivity should not be consumed without being decontaminated. The new guidelines make reference to recommendations that if decontamination is not practical it would be alright to consume water with thousands of times the radioactive contamination of the previous EPA limits.

            Another problem with the new guidelines proposal has to do with environmental remediation to restore the natural environment after contamination with radioactive materials. The new guidelines suggest that it is not necessary to restore a contaminated landscape to the point where it would not violate the previous guidelines for declaring a site to be contaminated. In other words, some remaining contamination could be ignored. Homeland Security suggests that a possible future cancer rate of one person in twenty would be acceptable. The old EPA guidelines set the limit of a possible future cancer rate of one in ten thousand people.

           The new guidelines proposal also says that it might be OK to dump nuclear waste into ordinary landfills if there are not other repositories available. This could result in widespread contamination of ground and surface water. The other option would be to burn it in incinerators which would contaminate the air that we breath. A great fear of nuclear activists is that the guidelines are too broad. There might be a nuclear explosion which would disperse so much radioactive material that no thorough cleanup would be possible. On the other hand, the activists are afraid that adoption of the guidelines might make the relaxed standards acceptable for dealing with more ordinary and manageable levels of radioactive contamination and waste.

          The EPA claims that they are not relaxing their current standards for dealing with environmental radioactive contamination. They say that the new guideline proposal is an attempt to develop a broader range of option to help deal with major radioactive catastrophes. I agree with the activists that the new guidelines are too broad and vague in drawing important distinctions in how to deal with different levels of radioactive contamination.

TEPCO says that major leakage at Fukushima can’t be fixed until early June. fukushima-diary.com

TEPCO is concealing all the radiation data about water reservoir leakage at Fukushima. fukushima-diary.com

TEPCO plans for storing radioactive water at Fukushima have been dealt a heavy blow. ajw.asahi.com

Mishaps underscore weaknesses of Japanese nuclear plant and concerns about the competence of TEPCO. nytimes.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 11, 2013

Ambient office = .070 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .059 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain = .068 microsieverts per hour

Bartlett pear from local grocery store = .083 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .134 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .117 microsieverts per hour

           Back around 1980, I volunteered to review a U.S. Government plan from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to evacuate Seattle to east of the Cascades in case of the threat of nuclear war. I had been attending meetings with the Physicians for Social Responsibility and they needed someone with a technical background to evaluate the plan.

            The plan contained instructions for moving the majority of the population of Seattle over the mountains to eastern Washington to be housed in schools and other public buildings. One of the problems with evacuating Seattle is the fact that the city is surrounded by mountains and bodies of water with only a few major highways.

            I wasn’t sure exactly how to approach an evaluation until I came upon an analysis of a plan to evacuate Denver, Colorado. Denver has some of the same issues that Seattle has with respect to landscapes and limited highways. The evaluation was very thorough and took into account the fact that state transportation departments have very reliable calculation  for estimating the number of lane blocking incidents in a given period of time based on the number of vehicles on the road in that period. A nuclear evacuation would yield much worse numbers than usual because of panicked drivers, people fleeing with low gas, etc. The Denver study concluded that within twelve hours of a call for evacuation EVERY major freeway out of Denver would be blocked and impassable. The original Denver plan called for a three day evacuation. The evaluation said that authorities would be lucky to evacuate the city in three weeks given what would certainly happen on the roads.

           Comparing the Seattle evacuation plan with the Denver plan, it was clear that the same sort of traffic jams would occur and that the Seattle plan to evacuate in three days was just plain unrealistic. I reported this back to the group that asked me to make the evaluation. In July 1982, Seattle Mayor Charles Royer withdrew Seattle from planning for nuclear war evacuation. He called the FEMA plans to evacuate the population of Seattle to east of the Cascades in the event of a nuclear attack “virtually useless” and stated that Seattle should not “lend credence to the dangerous idea that a nuclear war is a manageable emergency.” FEMA threatened to withdraw some Federal funding that was supposed to be provided to Seattle if Seattle withdrew, but Seattle pulled out anyway.

           The Federal Government has been engaged in a controversial debate over a revision of the “Protective Action Guide,” an EPA document that was written to provide guidelines on what levels of radiation should trigger protective measures such as evacuations. Activists are claiming that the proposed manual references other agencies numbers which are thousands of time higher than previous EPA guidelines. I will be writing a post about the new EPA manual in the near future but, for the time being, I just want to point out that I hope that if a nuclear evacuation anywhere in the U.S. is ever triggered, the plan is much better than the plan that FEMA came up with for Seattle in 1980.

 

The company that runs a Japanese nuclear power plant destroyed by a tsunami two years ago said on Tuesday it was losing faith in temporary storage pits for radioactive water – but it doesn’t have anywhere else to put it. newsdaily.com

The operator of Japan’s crippled nuclear plant halted an emergency operation Tuesday to pump thousands of gallons of radioactive water from a leaking underground storage pool after workers discovered that a similar pool, to which the water was being transferred, was also leaking. nytimes.com

A day after an earthquake rattled the area containing Iran’s only nuclear power plant, the country announced that it plans to build more plants in the same place.  foxnews.com

“Dark lightning” that is almost invisible within clouds may regularly blast airline passengers with large numbers of gamma rays, scientists find. news.yahoo.com

Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 10, 2013

Ambient office = .116 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .109 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain = .107 microsieverts per hour

Bartlett pear from local grocery store = .117 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .088 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .070 microsieverts per hour