東京電力福島第一原発（福島県大熊町、双葉町）で原子炉6基のうち3基でメルトダウン（炉心溶融）が起きた世界最悪レベルの事故から、まもなく11年となる。ウクライナでは原発がロシア軍に攻撃され、核リスクの懸念が浮上したが、福島第一では今も高い放射線量が収束作業の行く手を阻む。東京新聞原発取材班は3月2日、建屋外では最も線量が高い場所に近づいた。（小野沢健太、写真は山川剛史）
「ここは素早く通り過ぎます」。1、2号機の間にある排気筒の根元を通る際、東電の広報担当者が大声で言った。排気筒は事故当初、原子炉格納容器の破裂を防ぐため、極めて高い濃度の放射性物質を含む蒸気を排出（ベント）した。根元に近い接続部の線量は毎時約4.3シーベルト（2020年2月調査、1シーベルトは1マイクロシーベルトの100万倍）。その場に数時間いると、人は確実に死ぬ。
[…]
風がほとんどなく快晴の午前、1号機脇で白い防護服と顔を覆う全面マスク姿の作業員十数人が、巨大なてんびんのような機械の周りにいた。屋外で最も線量が高い場所にある1、2号機間の汚染配管の撤去に使う切断装置だ。不具合が続き、配管を切れずにいた。身ぶり手ぶりを交えて議論している様子から、トラブルの深刻さがうかがえた。
4号機南西側では昨秋以降、汚染水の発生源である原子炉建屋に地下水が入り込むのを抑える「凍土遮水壁」の一部が解けた。そこを補強するため、地中に鉄板（幅40センチ、長さ9.5メートル）を打ち込む工事の真っ最中だった。クレーンでつり上げた鉄板を作業員がロープでたぐり寄せ、打ち込む位置を定める。大きな鉄板に体重をかけて押さえ込む姿に、身がすくんだ。
凍土壁は国費345億円を投じて2016年に凍結を始めたが、効果がはっきりしない。冷却液漏れなどのトラブルが続発するなど設備の劣化が進んでおり、対処する作業員らは危険と隣り合わせでもある。
午後3時、1、2号機西側にある高台に立つと、地上近くの汚染配管の上にクレーンでつられた切断装置が見えた。切断時に聞こえるはずの金属音はなく、ぴくりとも動かない。東電によると、この約40分前に切断器具が壊れた。計画通りには進まない事故収束作業を象徴するようだった。
5時間半の原発構内の取材で、記者の被ばく線量は43.94マイクロシーベルトだった。取材班は1分ごとに被ばく線量を測定できる機器を持参し、測定した。グラフから、1、2号機排気筒周辺にいたときに最も被ばくしていることが分かる。
[…]
March 4, 2022 · 3:45 PM EST
Atomic safety experts said a war fought amid nuclear reactors represents an unprecedented and highly dangerous situation.
To get a better understanding of the risks at nuclear power plants in war zones, The World’s host Carol Hills spoke to Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.
Carol Hills: We know there was a fire at the plant. What are the risks?Henry Sokolski: The risks would be, instead of shooting at an auxiliary building, some young buck might aim the artillery or the missile out of a spent-fuel pond [pool] storage building, or the containment building for the reactor core, or the electrical lines coming in that supply the electricity to keep both of those facilities cool so that they don’t melt down or produce spent-fuel fires. If any of that might have occurred, the hyperbole of many Chernobyl’s isn’t really far from the mark.
Ukraine has said the power plant is now occupied by the Russian military, and we know that employees are still operating the plant. But how do we know the situation is under control?Well, I mean, the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] wants to get there. I don’t know that that’s a complete thought. You want to probably have some way to know without having physical visits that things are operating properly, particularly at facilities that might be subject to war operations. And we just don’t have that. I mean, we have to go on the reports of the people operating that are in control of it. And I don’t know that this is a big issue, because only one of the six plants is operating now. The others were all shut down for fear that the containment buildings would have been penetrated and that the big radiological release that I talked about might occur. What you do is you shut the thing down so that the pressures and heat aren’t as great. And so, the emissions from penetration wouldn’t be quite as dramatic. But you know, that means that most of these facilities are not operating right now.
What are these plants built to withstand?Not as much as being advertised. What they’re built primarily to withstand is pressures from the inside of the plant getting out. And so, some of the containment systems are as low as 15 or 20 pounds per square inch. They were not meant to prevent ballistic objects from penetrating from outside. The spent-fuel pond [pool] building is incredibly soft in comparison to the containment building.
But are they routinely built to, say, withstand an earthquake?They are supposed to be sited to not have to experience the earthquakes. In Japan, they have not done well in earthquakes. I don’t know whether the seismic issue is a big one in Ukraine. But I think we have oversold to ourselves how resistant these plants are to the kinds of military operation threats that are going on here in Ukraine and that could occur in the Middle East. We did a big study on what would happen if missiles hit various portions of reactors in the Middle East, and the radiological models and patterns were very disturbing. We didn’t have the presence of mind to do it for Ukraine, but obviously, this should be a wake-up call. I don’t know that these kinds of studies have been properly done within our own government. I say that as somebody who worked at the Defense Department, at a pretty senior level.
[…]
Read more.
TOKYO, March 4 (Reuters) – Japan’s Supreme Court upheld an order for utility Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) (9501.T) to pay damages of 1.4 billion yen ($12 million) to about 3,700 people whose lives were devastated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the first decision of its kind.
Public broadcaster NHK said the average payout of about 380,000 yen ($3,290) for each plaintiff covered three class-action lawsuits, among more than 30 against the utility, which are the first to be finalised.
[…]
Friday’s decision came as the court rejected an appeal by Tepco and ruled it negligent in taking preventive measures against a tsunami of that size, the broadcaster said.
The court withheld a verdict on the role of the government, which is also a defendant in the lawsuits, and will hold a hearing next month to rule on its culpability, NHK added.
Lower courts have split over the extent of the government’s responsibility in foreseeing the disaster and ordering steps by Tepco to prevent it.
Read more.
By Timothy A. Mousseau
[…]
On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl’s reactor number four melted down as a result of human error, releasing vast quantities of radioactive particles and gases into the surrounding landscape – 400 times more radioactivity to the environment than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Put in place to contain the radioactive contaminants, the exclusion zone also protects the region from human disturbance.
[…]
I’ve spent more than 20 years working in Ukraine, as well as in Belarus and Fukushima, Japan, largely focused on the effects of radiation. I have been asked many times over the past days why Russian forces entered northern Ukraine via this atomic wasteland, and what the environmental consequences of military activity in the zone might be.
In hindsight, the strategic benefits of basing military operations in the Chernobyl exclusion zone seem obvious. It is a large, unpopulated area connected by a paved highway straight to the Ukrainian capital, with few obstacles or human developments along the way. The Chernobyl zone abuts Belarus and is thus immune from attack from Ukrainian forces from the north. The reactor site’s industrial area is, in effect, a large parking lot suitable for staging an invading army’s thousands of vehicles.
The power plant site also houses the main electrical grid switching network for the entire region. It’s possible to turn the lights off in Kyiv from here, even though the power plant itself has not generated any electricity since 2000, when the last of Chernobyl’s four reactors was shut down. Such control over the power supply likely has strategic importance, although Kyiv’s electrical needs could probably also be supplied via other nodes on the Ukrainian national power grid.
The reactor site likely offers considerable protection from aerial attack, given the improbability that Ukrainian or other forces would risk combat on a site containing more than 5.3 million pounds (2.4 million kilograms) of radioactive spent nuclear fuel. This is the highly radioactive material produced by a nuclear reactor during normal operations. A direct hit on the power plant’s spent fuel pools or dry cask storage facilities could release substantially more radioactive material into the environment than the original meltdown and explosions in 1986 and thus cause an environmental disaster of global proportions.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is among the most radioactively contaminated regions on the planet. Thousands of acres surrounding the reactor site have ambient radiation dose rates exceeding typical background levels by thousands of times. In parts of the so-called Red Forest near the power plant it’s possible to receive a dangerous radiation dose in just a few days of exposure.
Radiation monitoring stations across the Chernobyl zone recorded the first obvious environmental impact of the invasion. Sensors put in place by the Ukrainian Chernobyl EcoCenter in case of accidents or forest fires showed dramatic jumps in radiation levels along major roads and next to the reactor facilities starting after 9 p.m on Feb. 24, 2022. That’s when Russian invaders reached the area from neighboring Belarus.
Because the rise in radiation levels was most obvious in the immediate vicinity of the reactor buildings, there was concern that the containment structures had been damaged, although Russian authorities have denied this possibility. The sensor network abruptly stopped reporting early on Feb. 25 and did not restart until March 1, 2022, so the full magnitude of disturbance to the region from the troop movements is unclear.
If, in fact, it was dust stirred up by vehicles and not damage to any containment facilities that caused the rise in radiation readings, and assuming the increase lasted for just a few hours, it’s not likely to be of long-term concern, as the dust will settle again once troops move through.
But the Russian soldiers, as well as the Ukrainian power plant workers who have been held hostage, undoubtedly inhaled some of the blowing dust. Researchers know the dirt in the Chernobyl exclusion zone can contain radionuclides including cesium-137, strontium-90, several isotopes of plutonium and uranium, and americium-241. Even at very low levels, they’re all toxic, carcinogenic or both if inhaled.
Perhaps the greater environmental threat to the region stems from the potential release to the atmosphere of radionuclides stored in soil and plants should a forest fire ignite.
Such fires have recently increased in frequency, size and intensity, likely because of climate change, and these fires have released radioactive materials back into the air and and dispersed them far and wide. Radioactive fallout from forest fires may well represent the greatest threat from the Chernobyl site to human populations downwind of the region as well as the wildlife within the exclusion zone.
Currently the zone is home to massive amounts of dead trees and debris that could act as fuel for a fire. Even in the absence of combat, military activity – like thousands of troops transiting, eating, smoking and building campfires to stay warm – increases the risk of forest fires.
It’s hard to predict the effects of radioactive fallout on people, but the consequences to flora and fauna have been well documented. Chronic exposure to even relatively low levels of radionuclides has been linked to a wide variety of health consequences in wildlife, including genetic mutations, tumors, eye cataracts, sterility and neurological impairment, along with reductions in population sizes and biodiversity in areas of high contamination.
There is no “safe” level when it comes to ionizing radiation. The hazards to life are in direct proportion to the level of exposure. Should the ongoing conflict escalate and damage the radiation confinement facilities at Chernobyl, or at any of the 15 nuclear reactors at four other sites across Ukraine, the magnitude of harm to the environment would be catastrophic.
Read more.
2 March 2022 Briefing -Greenpeace International by Jan Vande Putte (radiation protection advisor & nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace East Asia & Greenpeace Belgium) and Shaun Burnie (senior nuclear specialist, Greenpeace East Asia)
[…]
Nuclear power plants are some of the most complex and sensitive industrial installations, which require a very complex set of resources in ready state at all times to keep them operational. This cannot be guaranteed in a war. An operational nuclear power plant requires at all times electricity supply to power pumps and water supply to cool its nuclear fuel, both in the reactor and in the adjacent spent nuclear fuel pool. Even when the reactor is shut down, there is an enormous amount of residual heat in the fuel core which requires continuous cooling. Without cooling, the water in the reactor core (and spent fuel pool) begins to heat. In the case of an operational reactor the heating is rapid. The water reaches boiling point and begins to evaporate, and the hot nuclear reactor fuel assemblies are at risk of being exposed to air which then would lead to a thermal reaction of the nuclear fuel assembly cladding and reactor core fuel melt. In the case of nuclear fuel in the spent fuel pool, the highly exothermic chemical reaction is called a runaway zirconium oxidation reaction or autocatalytic ignition, with resultant release of a very large volume of radioactivity. In March 2011, the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in Japan led to the loss of site power at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant – the site was no longer connected to the grid. The tsunami that then struck the plant flooded it, including Emergency Diesel Generators (EDGs) and their fuel supply, all needed to power the cooling pumps. Even with some level of redundancy in case the EDGs would not be available such as batteries and turbine driven pumps , all three reactor cores that were in operation at the time of the earthquake and floodingSo, even without physical damage to the power plant, such as through an intentional or accidental hit by artillery or missiles, a nuclear power plant is very vulnerable to a disruption of the support systems. A nuclear power plant that is in operation requires active systems to remain functioning at all times. This includes many aspects, not only electricity but also cooling water and the continuous presence of qualified personnel to operate the plant. Even under normal functioning, hundreds of workers need to be able to reach the plant from their homes, which is evidently not feasible under war circumstances.
In a scenario where there would be a technical disruption, which could be for instance the electricity grid failing, or some of the diesel generators not starting up properly, you would need the ability to quickly mobilise vast amounts of equipment and additional personnel, such as fire brigades or crane operators. The example of Fukushima again demonstrated the need to be able to bring in heavy equipment such as massive cranes and specialised crane operators, fire brigades, heavy pumps etc . Every technical disruption, for whatever reason, could require a major logistical operation at a nation-wide level which could be severely compromised through the war activities around the power plant. In the context of an armed conflict, it cannot be excluded that a power plant would be isolated from the grid for a longer period of time, which would require emergency diesel generators to remain reliable and have sufficient fuel supply till the grid connection is re-established.
Nuclear power plants present unique hazards in terms of the potential consequences resulting from a severe accident, even without physical damage to the power plant, such as through an intentional or accidental hit by artillery or missiles, a nuclear power plant is very vulnerable to a disruption of the support systems. A nuclear power plant that is in operation requires active systems to remain functioning at all times. This includes many aspects, not only electricity but also cooling water and the continuous presence of qualified personnel to operate the plant. Even under normal functioning, hundreds of workers need to be able to reach the plant from their homes, which is evidently not feasible under war circumstances.
In a scenario where there would be a technical disruption, which could be for instance the electricity grid failing, or some of the diesel generators not starting up properly, you would need the ability to quickly mobilise vast amounts of equipment and additional personnel, such as fire brigades or crane operators. The example of Fukushima again demonstrated the need to be able to bring in heavy equipment such as massive cranes and specialised crane operators, fire brigades, heavy pumps etc . Every technical disruption, for whatever reason, could require a 5 major logistical operation at a nation-wide level which could be severely compromised through the war activities around the power plant. In the context of an armed conflict, it cannot be excluded that a power plant would be isolated from the grid for a longer period of time, which would require emergency diesel generators to remain reliable and have sufficient fuel supply till the grid connection is re-established.
Nuclear power plants present unique hazards in terms of the potential consequences resulting from a severe accident. Nuclear reactors and their associated high level spent fuel stores are vulnerable to natural disasters, as Fukushima Daiichi showed, but they are also vulnerable in times of conflict. This brief seeks to explain some of the hazards and potential consequences that exist today in Ukraine.evere accident. Nuclear reactors and their associated high level spent fuel stores are vulnerable to natural disasters, as Fukushima Daiichi showed, but they are also vulnerable in times of conflict. This brief seeks to explain some of the hazards and potential consequences that exist today in Ukraine.
Read more.
Audio Player00:0000:00Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
Podcast: Download
Nuclear Ukraine in a Russian War Zone – There are more ways to trigger a nuclear catastrophe i Ukraine than mainstream media is currently reporting. For this Nuclear Hotseat SPECIAL, we have three interviews with genuine experts. Each knows the nuances of nuclear issues and covers the nightmare variants of possible Armageddon that we currently face. They also provide some positive steps we can take at this dangerous moment towards ridding the planet of all nukes.
Read more.
[…]
原子力規制委員会・更田豊志委員長：「（廃炉について）現実的に、例えばさまざまな方面に対して約束できるような年数を確定させるのは私は技術的に不可能だというふうに思っています」
会見で更田委員長は、福島第一原発の1号機から3号機にある燃料デブリ一つとっても、いつまでに片付けられるか年限を区切るのは事実上不可能だと思っていると述べました。
そのうえで、福島県などの人達に廃炉まで何年という約束を確定させるのは技術的に不可能だとの認識を示しました。
デブリ取り出しなどが難航するなか、政府と東京電力は廃炉まで最大であと29年という目標を依然として掲げたままです。
３月２日夜８時、「３１１子ども甲状腺がん裁判」原告・弁護団が初のオンラインイベント「原告がいま、話したいこと。伝えたい思い。」を配信しました。 東京電力を訴える裁判に挑む若い小児甲状腺がん患者たち。１０年もの時を経てようやく声をあげるに至った原告がそれぞれの思いを語りました。一人でも多くの方に、原告の思いを聞いていだければと思います。
オンラインイベント「〜原告がいま、話したいこと。伝えたい思い。」 日時：２０２２年３月２日（水）20:00〜21:00
出演：原告・家族 弁護団（井戸謙一弁護団長、河合弘之副団長、大河陽子事務局長、北村賢二郎弁護士、田辺保雄弁護士、斎藤悠貴弁護士、中野宏典弁護士）
クラウドファンディングではたくさんの応援メッセージありがとうございます、引き続き応援をお願いいたします。
クラウドファンディングのサイト https://readyfor.jp/projects/311suppo…＃311子ども甲状腺がん裁判＃甲状腺がん
東京電力福島第一原発事故後に福島県内の除染で出た汚染土を県内外の道路工事などで再利用する。そんな国の計画への理解が全国で広がっていないことが、朝日新聞の知事アンケートで浮き彫りになった。7知事が反対し、他の知事も「安全性がまだわからない」「判断できない」「回答を差し控える」などと答え、賛成の回答はなかった。
アンケートは1～2月に実施。福島を除く46都道府県の知事に賛否を尋ねた。福岡は知事が入院中として副知事が答えた。「県民の理解が得られると思えない」などとして道路や農地造成に使うことに反対した知事が5人、道路だけ、農地だけ反対した知事がそれぞれ1人ずついた。
汚染土は2045年までに県外に搬出して最終処分すると法律で定められている。中間貯蔵施設への搬入量は来春に約1400万立方メートル（東京ドーム11個分）に達する見込み。国は、膨大な量をすべて最終処分するのは現実的でないとして全体の8割を再利用したい考え。放射能濃度が比較的低い汚染土を普通の土で覆うなどの手法を想定し、24年度までに用途や管理方法などをまとめる方針だ。
[…]
アンケートでは最終処分の受け入れ意向も聞いた。8知事は「受け入れることはできない」と拒否。ほかの知事は、国が工程を示していないなどとして「回答できない」「どちらとも言えない」と答えた。（福地慶太郎、戸田政考）
もっと読む
A nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois. Taken by photographer Joseph Pobereskin (http://pobereskin.com).
