Fukushima: time for the IAEA to take direct responsibility for the operation.

TEPCO have just dumped 11,500 tonnes of radioactive water into the sea, in order to create space for the 60,000 tonnes of more highly radioactive water that has accumulated in the reactors.

Traces of radioactivity is showing up in samples of edible fish.

This discharge of radioactivity to the environment can and must be stopped.

First, it is time for the IAEA to take over direct responsibility for managing the Fukushima rescue operation.  By dumping to sea, TEPCO is making it an international problem. 

The present situation is that control has been lost. The fission process is starting up again in at least one of the reactors, which means ever greater heat, more leakage, and more radiation which means more difficulty in getting close enough to do remedial work.

This means that we probably have to abandon all hope of keeping the reactors cool.

The hot fuel will burn its way down to the water table, forming steam, which will leak out through the soil, possibly sometimes with explosive force.

So what can we do? I have heard unconfirmed reports that ther is a US  plan. Bomb it. Yes, you heard: Bomb Fukushima. From the side you understand, so it tips over into the sea, which will automatically cool it, and also disperse it so that the fission reaction stops.

I only mention this to show how desperate people are getting, and to show how sensible is the Emergency containment solution I am putting forward here.

The principle is that, given the reaction itself is out of control, we must apply ourselves to controlling the emissions to the environment.

These emissions occur in two main ways: air and water.


Air Pollution


I have dealt here with the solution to air emissions: cap the reactors with fabric, draw off the contaminated air, filter off the radioactivity, and store.

This atmospheric emissions solution should start tomorrow with Reactor No 2, pictured below:

Photo: REUTERS / Japan Defense Ministry



The rectangular window should be fitted with a duct through which the steam can be drawn and passed to a series of filters. The filter design choice can be a combination of particle filter, cyclone, ion-exchange washing or any other suitable modality. It is simple, bog-standard engineering. The filters can be changed, modified and added to to the heart's content of the engineers involved. Reactor 2 will be the pilot for the other, damaged reactors, which will need the more challenging fabric containment before their gases can be captured.

Water Pollution

Again, the engineering for this is simple. I am grateful to an engineer, @BottomfedBhudda (yes, I know) for this. 

We drill two holes, one deep, one shallow.

The aim of the deep one is to lower the level of the ground water. It will yield cold, clean, fresh (or brackish) water which can be used for the cooling operation. Lowering the ground water will give more time before the radionuclides come in contact with it - because once the groundwater is contaminates, radiation will diffuse through aquifers to remote sources of water.

The shallower drill will pick up contaminated water filtering down from the reactors.

This contaminated water will be passed first through a physical filter to trap particles, and then a series of ion-exchange resins and any other process that would reduce, including chemical reactions designed to precipitate out the dissolved radionuclides. 

Again, the treated water can be fed back as coolant.

So, much can be done to mitigate the Fukushima disaster. The engineering is simple. The most difficult bit is to  get the message through to the decision makers in a timely way. 

George Monbiot, Helen Caldicott and the Nuclear Consensus

There is a debate on Democracy Now! between Helen Caldicott, the anti-nuclear medic, and George Monbiot.

Basically George takes the broad consensus of the high level scientific community that discounts the effect of internal emitters, and the work of Ukrainian scientists. The latter are set aside because they were not published in the right journals.

So he believes that the deaths from Chernobyl were about 50, not 1,000,000.

He is stuck with the a false analogy between climate change science controversy and the radiobiology controversy.

This is interesting.

The fact is that the scientific community can and does get things wrong. That's how science moves: there is a consensus, new evidence comes along, there is a battle, and the consensus shifts.

With climate change, the consensus was that man-made CO2 cannot affect the climate. Over the last 30 years a huge body of evidence has built up showing that we can. This new view is resisted by politically motivated diehards, who rely on cherry-picking data to support their battered case.

With radiobiology, the old view is that external radiation should only be reckoned with, and internal emitters should be set aside. Predicted effects of a given amount of radiation on populations can be calculated from 50 year old datasets from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and new empirical data that suggest greater damage are discounted.

Nuclear scientists tend to prefer the scholastic to the scientific method.
[Update:
This means that they estimate the amount of radiation that people have received, go back to tables based on the single dose of gamma radiation received by people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from that calculate how much disease should have been caused. If there is more disease than their calculations allow for, it is put down to chance. This is scholastic, because it assumes that all truth is already known and written down.

The scientific approach on the other hand looks in detail at the radiation dose given to people affected by Chernobyl fallout, looks at the incidence of disease, compares the disease with levels existent before the disaster, and also makes comparisons with similar populations who were not affected by Chernobyl.

This requires an enormous amount of work. Much data collection was carried out in the Ukraine, but it was not published in Western, English language journals, and ended up being discounted by the UN report.]

The challenge for George Monbiot is to look at the work of Yablokov and be open to the data he has suggested that the effects of Chernobyl are far greater than the models espoused by the nuclear industry predicts.

The other question he needs to answer is whether he accepts that nuclear power should now take out fully comprehensive insurance, instead of the 1% insurance it currently enjoys.

I have tweeted both these questions to George, who has ignored them. If they questions are put to him repeatedly, he will have to address them.

[update 5th April;
A brisk debate has started over this matter. George has attacked Helen Caldicott's evidence. In an effort to get a cool overview, I have gone to the TORCH report commissioned for Green MEPs.

It seems reasonable, stressing the scientific uncertainties, in marked contrast to George, who seems very certain that only 56 or so died.

I think Monbiot's weakness is the difficulty in getting scientific data on epidemiological matters. It takes a massive amount of expensive work. Much work was published in non-English journals, which do not then reach the mainstream "peer-reviewed" journals.

This is going to be a messy and time consuming business. At present my priority is to prevent the escape of Fukushima radiation to the environment.

Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident.


Update ends]