Ambient office  = 114 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Carrot from Central Market = 68 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 114 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Orange bell pepper from Central Market = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 76 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 109 nanosieverts per hour

       Westinghouse Electric Company LLC was created in 1998 from the nuclear power division of the original Westinghouse Electric Corporation. It provides nuclear products and services to utilities around the globe. These services and products include nuclear fuel, service and maintenance, instrumentation, control and design of nuclear power plants.
       In 1999, the owners of WEC sold the new company to British Nuclear Fuels Limited. In 2006, WEC was sold to Toshiba, a Japanese company. In 2015, Toshiba ran into financial difficulties and in 2017, Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. IN 2018, Toshiba announced that it was selling WEC to Brookfield Business Partners.
        Westinghouse opened a nuclear fuel fabrication plant in Columbia, South Carolina in 1969. Through the changes of name and ownership, Westinghouse continued to operate the plant. Today it employs about a thousand people.
        An attempt has been made to build a facility at the Westinghouse Columbia site for the manufacture of Mixed Oxide fuel, a combination of uranium and plutonium for use as reactor fuel. The plutonium would come from purified stocks of plutonium originally intended for nuclear weapons. There have be political and public opinion battles over the MOX facility which been started and halted several times and is only partially complete.
      In 2011, there was a leak in an underground contaminated water line under the concrete floor slab of the Solvent Extraction Area at the WEC fuel fabrication facility. Uranium escaped from the plant and contaminated ground water. In one area, the contamination exceeded the levels allowed for drinking water. There was little effort to notify the public and nothing was done to clean up the leaked materials. WEC does not know the amount or spread of the radioactive materials.
       There is known to be contaminated soil under one of the buildings on the site and WEC has announced that it will not be cleaned up until after the site is shut down and the building torn down. WEC has applied for a forty-year license to continue operations at the site. If the license is granted, WEC will not deal with the contaminated soil from the 2011 leak until 2058 at the soonest. It is possible that during that forty-year extension, the contamination in the soil could leak out and further contaminate drinking water in the shallow aquifer under the Columbia fabrication facility.
       Last month, there was another leak at the WEC Columbia facility. Uranium contaminated water leaked through a three-inch crack in the floor of the nuclear fuel fabrication facility. Below the facility, levels of radioactive contamination were a thousand times above the normal levels found in soil. There are concerns that the contamination could spread to drinking water supplies.
       There was a public hearing where groups and individuals attacked Westinghouse not just for the recent leak but for a history of polluting groundwater around the WEC Columbia site. The public was upset about the possibility that if WEC would get the forty year extension license, they would make no move to cleanup the contamination from the recent leak until the site was shut down in forty years. This is just another example of the corporate lack of responsibility that I have blogged about many times.

Ambient office  = 123 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 104 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 104 nanosieverts per hour

Beefsteak tomato from Central Market = 99 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 99 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 85 nanosieverts per hour

      The Yakuza is a Japanese crime syndicate that is powerful in the Japan real estate and construction businesses. They supply workers through layers of recruiting firms to Japanese nuclear power plants. There is an old saying that when a man reaches the end of his luck, he winds up working at a nuclear power plant. Years ago, I read stories of homeless people being recruited off the street to mop up spilled coolant at Japanese nuclear power plants without being warned of the dangers of what they were doing.
       The Fukushima disaster took place in Japan in March of 2011 when an underwater earthquake caused a tidal wave that flooded the Fukushima nuclear power plant and cause the meltdown of three reactors and a massive explosion. Stories were published that there were two tiers of workers. The highly paid nuclear technicians and the maintenance works that may have been recruited by the Yakuza. It was reported that the nuclear technicians had good dosimeters and radiation suits while the lower paid maintenance workers had sub standard dosimeters and radiation suits. Ironically, when the disaster struck, a lot of the nuclear technicians fled while a lot of the maintenance workers stayed and kept working.
       It has been over seven years since the disaster and radioactive water from Fukushima is still being pumped into the Pacific Ocean. There are still questions about the disposition of the fuel in reactors that melted down. Some evacuees have still not returned to their home. Radioactive fallout is still being discovered all over Japan. Now there are reports about the mistreatment of low-level workers at Fukushima.
       The U.N. says that tens of thousands of workers including migrants and homeless people are at risk for exploitation at Fukushima. They may not be being told about the dangers of working around radioactive materials. The U.N. also says that some workers may have been coerced into working in hazardous conditions on the Fukushima cleanup because they were in desperate financial circumstances. They may not have been given proper training and protection. Big contractors used hundreds of smaller contractors without experience in the nuclear industry to recruit workers.
       The U.N. experts said the situation “created favorable conditions for the abuse and violation of workers’ rights”. Workers are “often exposed to a myriad of human rights abuses, forced to make the abhorrent choice between their health and income, and their plight is invisible to most consumers and policymakers with the power to change it”.
       The Radiation Worker Central Registration Centre of Japan says that about seventy-seven thousand decontamination workers were hired at Fukushima between 2011 and 2016.The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has reported that over forty-six thousand workers were employed in 2016 alone on the Fukushima cleanup.
      The Japanese authorities are working on an education campaign about what they are calling the “revitalization” of Fukushima. The purpose of the campaign is to provide information and transparency about the cleanup process.

Ambient office  = 135 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 84 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 84 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 107 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 92 nanosieverts per hour