Last hours of humanity: nuclear radiation feeding superstorms

@ara_to1 before hagabis landfall
Very strange weather — weather pattern disruptions and anomalies— has intensified over the past decade. Although it is taboo to explore the subject (research into the devastating effects of nuclear radiation tend to be either grotesquely conducted, or underfunded and top-secret), there is a nagging suspicion that the four nuclear reactor meltdowns at Fukushima from March 11, 2011 is amplifying the effects of global warming. Many Japanese and visitors to Japan noted that prior to super-Typhoon Hagibis, the skies above had a distinctly purple haze, a kind of preternatural look that might be attributable to the number of hot energy particles lodged in the troposphere.

Fukushima update from Nuclear Proctologist

As Dana Durnford, the Nuclear Proctologist, describes during his weekly newscasts, vast amounts of nuclear radiated water are flushing through the defunct plant and out into the bay. This is because subsurface water which was designed to recirculate and cool the plant can no longer be pragmatically contained. The tank farm itself is already at capacity therefore irradiated water is likely flushed out on a routine top-secret basis. And there are at least 60 other nuclear power plants in Japan, most of which are located near the coast because this is the direction water takes to flow out into the ocean.

WISE International estimates that for a 1 GW nuclear reactor, water consumption ranges from 36.3 million liters (10 million gallons) to 65 million liters (17 million gallons). However at the inoperable plant, the flowthrough is far greater since it has been too unsafe to conduct many needed repairs. Doing the math where 1 gallon= 8.34 pound water, between 83 – 542 million pounds of water or 41,700 – 271,000 tons of radiated water may be flowing out into the bay. These numbers dwarf the earlier information on leakages from cleanup and containment operations by Dr. Paolo Scampa who provided a low estimate of 300 cubic meters (300 metric tonnes). If the cooling water flowthrough is on the order of hundred-thousand tons of water per day for just 1 GW nuclear reactor, this needs to be multiplied by over 4 as Fukushima Daiichi collectively generated about 4.7 GW, meaning that an estimated four hundred thousand tons of water per day flows out into the ocean. These kinds of volumes don’t compare with the waste-water treatment sized leakage tanks AGN previously calculated; instead the cooling water release volumes compare with four football stadiums (1.33 acre apiece) filled with water approximately 100 – 200 feet deep.

(Wikipedia‘s description of the “Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster” has obviously received much attention as that particular page has grown and expanded since AGN accessed it. Note that in lieu of the upcoming Olympics 2020, there is a press version of “Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant” on Wikipedia which may serve as a decoy. But the subject cannot be compared with Chernobyl in either scope or ongoing scale).

Cosmetic Preparations

TEPCO and the government of Japan have undertaken to normalize life by scraping off the top three inches of detritus from the land and trees around Fukushima prefecture. Although it is only 3% complete, in early October, there were 30 million 1-ton sized plastic bags parked in acres of holding areas, including along beaches, streams, agricultural farm lands, and even in parks and near where people work, play, or attend school. The extent to which Japanese media is complicit in the cover-up cannot be understated. For one thing, Prime Minister Abe and his cabinet helped enact laws which make truthful reporting on the extent of radiation poisoning punishable for journalists. It is punishable due to nuclear power being part of the security state apparatus (although nuclear power is paid for by public monies and provided to the public as an energy utility).

30 million bags stored at 150,000 storage sites

Ongoing project to store harvested radioactive surface debris in massive storage sites (Screenshot Dana Durnford, Oct 30, 2019 youtu.be/wTzHd73ONb4)

The preferred logic favored by the government has and continues to be: “This is a disaster but we are monitoring it and everything is therefore under control.” However it would not be cosmetic if there were not blatant attempts to hide data and avoid full scale international investigations. Past reporting at ENENews and by HealFukushima indicates doctors are encouraged to ascribe the rise in thyroid cancer, leukemia, heart troubles, respiratory ailments, diabetes, and a host of diseases in children as not related to radiation poisoning. Deaths which occurred at Fukushima NPP are in the single digits because no one apparently worked at the plant during the disaster, or if they did, they disappeared and could not be accounted for. They fled quickly and remain missing, or they may have died from stress, not from toxic levels of radiation absorption.

During the years in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, many crippled children with gross malformations were born. To this day they remain in orphanages living in deplorable conditions, yet as the Nuclear Proctologist and Green Peace point out, Chernobyl officials now presume the plant has recovered to the point of turning it into a park. As a tour destination, how many rubles will flow into the orphanages, and will there be a tour stop there?

But in Japan, the young women of Fukushima are forbidden to have children. The implication is that by law if they have babies, they are entitled to abort, or even encouraged to abort. And those who give birth to abnormal looking babies will not be seen. There are NO photos of abnormal looking babies in the aftermath of Fukushima, such are the levels of censorship and lockdown. It is a different kind of horrifying if journalists ever discover where those missing abnormal babies went, if they are indeed allowed to live at all. But this is why all we see, eight years later, are cute Japanese toddlers being trotted before the cameras as they receive their routine skin surface radiation measurements. We are not allowed to see many sick, diseased, malformed infants, and this is the “good data set” TEPCO uses for evidence to show Fukushima’s four ongoing nuclear meltdowns are not as severe as at Chernobyl.

Disappearing plastic bags phenomena

Grassroots citizens both in Japan and abroad have taken extensive footage and photos of the huge staging areas of plastic bags. Acres of one-ton bags stacked five high are distributed all around the affected Prefectures including around Tokyo. Civil engineer ‘Cleveland Marko’ put together a video expose on how extensive the landings are. 150,000 staging areas are required to store the thirty million plus one-ton bags. Sites include parks, beaches, playing fields, farms, just about anywhere determined suitable.
1-ton bags piled 5 high

Mammoth storage sites requires cranes to lift 1-ton bags with up to 100,000 becquerels in hot particles

However inherent danger lies in the vicinity of any of these sites. Each bag contains surface debris from the explosions and open venting since 3-11 of extremely toxic radio-isotopes many of which have half-lives of at least 30 years, such as Cesium-137 (major news outlet misquoted the half-life as 2 years which is wrong), americium, uranium, plutonium, curium, radioactive iodine, and radioactive actinides were liberated into the air and into the surroundings. Although invisible to the human eye, the isotopes are attached to dust, moisture, animals, and continue to fall on trees, bushes, the soil, buildings, roads, arable land, streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, etc.

Even Superman, Spiderman, or other superheroes cannot sustain the effort to reduce the abnormally high Becquerels. A single one-ton bag probably contains over 100,000 Becquerels in hot measurable atomic decays. The sites contain rows of bags stacked five-high, amounting to tens of thousands of bags, so the significance is billions of Becquerels pulsating from these bags, which sturdy as they might be, are friable also because they are exposed to the elements of nature. To make matters worse, this situation has become normalized because the citizenry are encouraged to ignore, downplay, or overlook the significance of a hot-site near their school or home or farm.

The extent of desensitization to the presence of radioactive waste bags is apparent not just from photos of farm produce growing nearby but the reaction of officials from news when an unknown number of bags are swept into rivers due to heavy flooding caused by typhoons and accompanying tide surges. Typically the officials assert that the bags will have little impact on the environment even if they are released into rivers or ocean. For instance, in 2015, when Tropical Stork Etau swept away over 700 bags in Tochigi Prefecture (just south of Fukushima), an official asserted that “the radiation level is so low that I believe there will not be a huge impact.”

Impact of Superstorm Hagibis

Storm waves can drag many objects out to sea

Massive storm waves surge over the seawalls with crushing force 

Of course the priority in possibly the worst storm in Japan’s history is to save people first. According to various reports Typhoon Hagibis (also known as Typhoon No. 19 in Japan) took two days to pass through Japan and had a diameter of 200 miles. With winds averaging 140 mph and wind gusts up to 175 miles per hour, the duration only guarantees lasting impact. Photos shows upended cars (which weigh more than a ton) and houses ripped apart. Many news reports referred to the winds as from a cyclone or tornado. Workers are shown sifting helplessly among debris from homes and buildings blown apart meaning there is little hope of finding missing people within the survivability time-frame.
More than twenty rivers in Central and NE Japan overflowed their embankments

Flooding along Chikumagawa River in Nagano causing much damage

 Insofar as flooding, the damage is extensive in the wet, lush country. There were numerous washouts of levees or road embankments, at least 50 known breaks. The torrential rains (up to 35 inches in 24 hours) meant that dams had to release flood waters supposed to be retained, flooding the lands down river. According to The Irish Sun: “Rescue efforts were hindered after more than twenty rivers in central and northeastern Japan burst their banks and dozens more overflowed.” Some of the worst flooding occurred along the Chikumagawa River in Nagano prefecture where huge swathes of land were left underwater when the river broke its banks. However according to the article, areas in Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures were also badly flooded, with photos indicating flooding at least waist high.

Of significance is how much more new damage the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant sustained, especially to its already unstable top structures which once held uranium fuel rods and the damaged vent stacks where radiation measured has exceeded 25 Sv. It also did not help matters that a 5.7 magnitude earthquake was recorded at Chiba on the same weekend, or that the Abukuma River in Fukushima prefecture burst its banks in at least 14 places, or that floodwaters will inevitably spread the radiation pollutants around.
It’s true that about 70% of Japan’s territory is polluted” by Fukushima radioactive material. Biology Professor Kim Ik-Joong of Dongguk University believes that radiation at Fukushima nuclear power plant was at least seven times as much as that at Chernobyl.
As Japan continues its censorship, this much is certain: a great number of plastic bags were likely damaged, washed out to rivers or the ocean, tossed about and mangled as badly as cars or power poles, or even just blown about into shreds. The only attention to the matter was a report in Taiwan News with information provided by The Asahi Shimbun that an estimated 2,667 radioactive bags from Fukushima nuclear disaster were unleashed by Typhoon Hagibis (Typhoon No. 19). International grassroots observers comment that most likely in keeping with the policy of minimization, the count of bags lost is low—possibly by a factor of 100. Bag sites washed out along the coast would easily be lifted and hauled out by heavy rip tides. Furthermore, along beaches, it’s commonly known that because sand dunes are unstable and have a tendency to shift, many holding platforms could develop sinkholes.

Bags sit uncomfortably near the ocean

Aerial view of beachfront bag park, one out of 150,000 radioactive bag sites in Japan

For those worried about the unsightliness and burdensome recordkeeping, the typhoons may be a blessing in disguise. The last thing on anyone’s mind is recovering the one-ton radioactive plastic bags or repacking their flooded contents. Nevertheless liberating a lot of radioactive contaminants into the environment, whether in Japan’s beautiful rural environs, its urban water supply, or out into the Pacific Ocean, is an unending disaster on its own. With at least 60 other nuclear plants once operable in Japan alone, nations around the world must act to stop this constant venting of nuclear radioisotopes, their disposal of hot-cooling plant water,  and the need to store unremediable nuclear waste for thousands of years.