Host Margaret Harrington talks with Arnie Gundersen about the ongoing nuclear man made crisis when there is no sound methodology in place for decommissioning Fukushima Daiitchi or Vermont Yankee or any of the nuclear power plants being decommissioned in the US. A nuclear power plant carcass can sit for 60 or 70 years with ratepayers and tax payers paying for them after the plant owners have been subsidized at the public expense
Transcript
English
MH: This is Burlington, and here we are in the Channel 17 newsroom at the Center for Media and Democracy. And this is our ongoing series: Nuclear Free Future conversation. I’m your host, Margaret Harrington. And viewers, let’s welcome our guest, Arnie Gundersen, from Fairewinds Energy Education here in Burlington, Vermont, the Chief Engineer for Fairewinds Energy Education, and the newly appointed Community Research Fellow for the University of Vermont.
AG: Hi, Margaret. It’s nice to be back from Japan and sitting here with you today.
MH: Yes. And you were just telling me about what you saw in Japan in your last speaking tour. So our title is Fukushima at 5 and the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning – What do they Mean? So we’re drawing the two subjects together. But to start it off, please tell us your impressions.
AG: There’s a couple of impressions. The first is the people in Japan and in Fukushima Prefecture are wonderful, like people all over the world. But the inhumanity of the Japanese government and the nuclear industry toward the people is just overwhelming. I was so surprised. They’re forcing these people back into radiation areas. It used to be that the old limit for an acceptable radiation dose was one millisievert. And to get people to go back, they actually raised the limit 20 times higher, to 20 millisieverts. And they’re saying it’s safe. Well, right before the accident, 1 was safe, and now to get people back, they’ve raised the bar. So they’re exposed to 20 times more radiation than they would have been. It’s really, really awful.
MH: And are people being forced to go back to the Fukushima area?
AG: Well, what they’re doing, the people that were forced to leave are living in resettlement areas. And they’re saying that – and they’re on a stipend – they’re saying if you want to continue your stipend, you’ve got to go home. If you want to stay here, you can, but we’re not going to pay you any more. So they have no job and they have – they’ve lost their source of income. So they’re being forced home into high radiation areas because they’re taking their ability to eat away. They’re not being paid. It’s sad.
MH: And you had the opportunity to speak to several people there.
AG: I met in one of the resettlement areas and I met with 22 women who were there that day. There’s 66 of these small buildings. Think of almost about the size of a trailer, if not even smaller. And so one third of this little village came out to talk to us for 3 or 4 hours. The unofficial mayor of this group – a real dynamo of a woman – she experienced hair loss, bloody nose, speckles on her skin and the doctors told her it was stress and not to worry about it. That’s not stress. It was radiation damage. But again, that’s this inhumanity that I was experiencing. The government and the people associated with the government are singing one song, and it’s not what the data suggests. I climbed all over the hills and valleys of Fukushima. We followed radioactive monkeys and we caught their droppings and put them into radiation meters and they’re highly radioactive. We had hunters kill a wild boar and they’re highly radioactive. So the entire mountain range – think of from Middlebury to the border with Canada, from Lake Champlain all the way up to Mount Mansfield and over the other side – is highly contaminated. And every time they clean one little area, it gets dirty again because it comes down – gets radioactively dirty again because it all comes out of the mountain and settles back into all these places.
MH: (4:46) Arnie, what you’re describing is a terrain very much like Vermont.
AG: It reminded me a lot of Vermont. It was a lot of rural areas, a couple of cities. There’s 70,000 people that still can’t go home. So that’s essentially 2 Burlingtons. And so you’re driving through these roads and you come up on these ghost towns. Think of Burlington as a ghost town, and there would be essentially two of them. It was really an eye-opener for me.
MH: And when you spoke to this woman in particular and to the others, were they used to being listened to?
AG: They told us – the 22 women on that particular day – told us that we were the first people in 5 years to talk to them about radiation. I mean Tokyo Electric didn’t talk to them, the government didn’t talk to them. We were the first. And we said, well, where do you get your information from. And they said they get it from Tokyo Electric and the government, since those are the only sources that they have available. So it was just an eye-opener. Every time I turned around, I saw people that definitely experienced radiation damage. We had one woman who ran from her house to evacuate carrying her dog. About a day after the accident, they realized that she needed to be evacuated. And so she runs barefoot to her car, gets in her car, drives to the resettlement community. She’s highly radioactive. They make her – especially her feet – they make her take her socks off and take showers, wash her down before they let her in. And her feet were black for 3 years from radiation damage. And that’s not being spoken about in any of the medical journals. We had a doctor – Doctor Meti (?6:47) – who said that he had a thriving clinic, and whenever he treated somebody, he would put what the cause was. And if it was radiation, he put radiation on the treatment slip. And the Japanese government refused to pay him for any of the radiation illnesses that he was diagnosing. And he went out of business. He lost his clinic.
MH: What is the purpose of the government not doing that? Is it that they don’t want to acknowledge that there is radiation damage to the people?
AG: (7:20) Yeah. It’s funny. They want to get these other nuclear plants up and running. And if the population is getting ill from radiation effects, it’s a lot harder. So they have – they’ve really banded together with the medical community. We had numerous doctors say that they were going to lose hospital privileges and things like that. And the people that are keeping track of deaths in Fukushima Prefecture aren’t publishing the data. So the entire government infrastructure, from the people in Tokyo to the underlings in the Prefecture, are all singing the same song: that this is stress, there’s no radiation. And it sure isn’t what I found, I’ll tell you.
MH: And in a sense, they are winning, right? By obliterating the real story.
AG: Were it not for the internet, they would have won. (MH: Aha!) And I think the difference between the disaster at Fukushima and the disaster at Chernobyl and TMI is that now we have the internet. It still is an unlevel playing field. There’s still so much money on the other side of it that people are being brainwashed. Oh, that bloody nose you’ve had for the last 3 weeks is stress. So they are being brainwashed, but they do have – a lot of them who have access to the internet do have an alternative to counter whatever it is the Japanese government is throwing out there. Follow the money. We’ve said that before in Vermont Yankee. We’ve said it – there’s a lot of money at stake here, and the people’s lives be damned.
MH: And the money is being put toward the development of new nuclear power reactors in Japan?
AG: Well, they had 54 nuclear plants before the disaster. And they immediately lost 4 – Fukushima 1, 2, 3, 4. Another 10 or 15 will likely never start up because they shouldn’t have been running in the first place, they were so old and so dangerous. But there’s about 30 plants that the government desperately wants to get back up. And the banks want it, too. Because what’s happened is while these plants have been shut down for the last 5 years, the staffs are continued to be paid. So that – when I borrow money from the bank, I’ve got to have collateral. If I buy a car, they’ve got to have the title. Well, the banks are not just giving this money to these utilities. There’s got to be a tacit agreement that we know you’re going to start that plant back up. So there’s a lot of pressure from the banks and the utilities on the government to turn these plants back on.
MH: And there’s a global pressure, too, right?
AG: I think so. I definitely think that General Electric here in the states is applying pressure to our State Department to encourage the Japanese to get these nukes up and running again.
MH: And how is the NRC playing into this? Because in Vermont, we have Vermont Yankee has been closed. And so for a lot of us, it’s out of our minds. I mean it’s not in our mind any more because the press isn’t covering it; it’s setting there. And all I saw recently is that there might be a fracked gas pipeline somewhere near the carcass of Vermont Yankee to supply energy down there.
AG: (11:21) That’s going to be difficult to do because there’s a radioactive power plant on that site. And it’s not as if you can open a plant unless you’ve dismantled the one that’s there. So I think what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is doing right now is frantically trying to change the regulations to make it easier for Entergy to strip money out of the fund. There used to be a decommissioning trust fund. And now it’s turning into a slush fund. And anything Entergy wants to take out of it, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, sure, no problem. So I’m afraid that we’re draining the fund and the money isn’t being well spent. We’ve been talking with Doug Hoffer, the State Auditor, and he’s really interested in how as a State Auditor, he can watch this fund to make sure the money’s being properly spent. And I’d like to get the state auditors all around the country to do this, too, because Vermont Yankee is just the first to go through this, but there’s going to be 100 more. And we can be the test case that establishes rules that protect you and I and not the owners of these power plants. Left to their own desires, I think the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would just give the money to the owners of the power plants. And 60 years out, when there’s still a carcass of a plant sitting there, it’s you and I that are going to get stuck – and our grandkids – that are going to get stuck paying the bill.
MH: Now you mentioned – what is the name of the Regulatory Commission in Japan that just gave the go-ahead to up the radiation dose that people can get?
AG: They call it the NRA – but it’s not National Rifle Association – it’s Nuclear Regulatory Association or Agency, maybe.
MH: But it’s comparable to the NRC here –
AG: I’d like to believe that, but what’s happening now is that the very conservative Abe administration – Abe is the Prime Minister – is replacing all of the neutral people on that commission – on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Japan – with people that want to start nuclear power back up. So over the 5 years that it was running so far, it was reasonably objective and a pretty good watchdog. But in the last 6, 7 months, any of the people on that commission who really felt that nuclear plants should be properly regulated are being thrown off the commission and being replaced with people – actually, these guys have actually been paid by Tokyo Electric and now they’re on the board overseeing Tokyo Electric. Not objective at all.
MH: This is called a revolving door, right?
AG: Yes. We have it here, too. When I was in Japan, I kept telling people that – don’t think that the Japanese system caused Fukushima and it couldn’t happen anywhere else. America got lucky. It didn’t have – we have 23 plants just like Fukushima, including Vermont Yankee, including Pilgrim over in Massachusetts. And that one of those didn’t fail catastrophically isn’t because we’re better; it’s just because we’re lucky.
MH: (15:03) Arnie, you have called the Fukushima triple meltdown the greatest industrial accident ever. How does it compare to Vermont Yankee and the going forward with the carcass of Vermont Yankee and the other decommissioned nuclear power plants?
AG: Well, to turn Vermont Yankee back into a green field, to make it so it could be farmed or there could be a gas plant there or there could be condos with riverfront, whatever – to turn it back into a green field at Vermont Yankee would cost about a billion dollars. Fukushima is going to cost 500 billion dollars to clean up. So the disaster has – imagine contaminating the Green Mountains and then trying to send people in with shovels to clean it out. That’s what they’re trying to do. I have never seen more dump trucks and construction vehicles in my life. They put the nuclear waste into bags, and the bags are a cubic meter. And they weigh a ton. And there’s 30 million of these bags. Everywhere you go, there’s these piles and piles of bags full of radioactive material. And maybe they’ve cleaned 5 or 10 percent of the Prefecture, but they can’t get into the mountains. So what happens is, every time you have a storm or every time – now we’ve got the seeds – the roots are bringing up the radiation into the seeds and this time of year in Japan, the seeds are blowing in the wind. So these towns are becoming re-contaminated with the stuff that’s in the mountains. And 90 percent of the radiation is up there in the mountains.
MH: What are they going to do with the plastic bags?
AG: They are asking that question. They’re talking about incineration. But my problem with that is all of this radiation now is going to be re-volatilized. It’s going to go right back up into the atmosphere. So essentially we’ll have a second Fukushima because we’ll be blowing this stuff up into the sky again. They claim that they’ll trap it all inside the incinerator, but the measurements I took show that that’s not happening.
MH: Arnie, we’re going to show the video that you made in Japan at the end of our program here. And so I would like you to segue us into that. And I was very moved in seeing it, and I’m sure that people will be enlightened about the truth of what’s going on when they see this.
AG: Well, we were asked by several groups that wanted to have a retrospect of what’s gone on at Fukushima Daiichi in the last 5 years. We were asked back in January to put together a video. So in January before I left, we went back and found all the old newspaper clips and stories about what our government was saying. For instance, the Department of Energy was saying that don’t worry, it’s not anywhere near as bad as Chernobyl and in fact, it’s probably like Three Mile Island – not a big deal. And I was on television 5 years ago saying baloney, this is the worst industrial accident in the history of mankind. So what we were able to do is to weave back in all of the things that Fairewinds has said over the last 5 years, basically refuting what the government claimed. And I think it’s been – it was an eye-opener for me because I came to the conclusion that the American government has been trying to cover up Fukushima and the costs of Vermont Yankee and all this stuff. We are no better than the Japanese as far as the callous disregard we have for people compared to the worshipping, essentially, of profit.
MH: (19:41) Can you tell us what the profit gain is? Like who are the nuclear bigwigs?
AG: Wall Street is really not interested in funding any new nuclear. So it is a dying industry. But there’s still 100 nuclear plants out there and most of them are licensed to run 60 years, and now they’re all applying to run for 80 years. So they were designed for 40 and their licenses were extended by 20. And now they’re all going back in to get another 20. So there’s 100 plants out there. The big guys are Entergy, which is actively funding Hillary Clinton’s campaign, because they’re a southern utility and of course, she’s from the south. And Exelon. And Exelon actively funded Barak Obama’s campaign. And then there’s a bunch of smaller actors. But between Entergy and Exelon, they own 35 of the 100 – those two are the big guys. And they want to keep that asset churning out electricity for as long as they can. They paid next to nothing. Vermont Yankee was less than $200 million. And to build a new nuclear plant is probably $20 billion. So they got a real, real bargain on it and other plants around the country. So they want to keep these bargain basement plants running for as long as they can to make as much as they can from them. Wall Street is putting pressure on them not to do it again; don’t build another one. You’ve got to have a death wish to build a new nuclear plant. But if there’s a way to keep a nuclear plant operating, they’re going to find it. And it’s frightening because think about an 80-year-old car. Even with the best of maintenance, is that something you’d drive down the highway full speed? The answer is no. But yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows it to happen for power plants.
MH: And meanwhile, as you mentioned, we the taxpayers are funding this. The government money that goes into these power plants is the taxpayer money.
AG: The General Accounting Office’s study over the last 70 years, nuclear power has gotten half of all of the energy subsidies that the Department of Energy has given out. And then oil and gas have gotten a quarter, and then electric grid and solar and renewable – everything else has gotten another quarter. So half of this pie over 70 years has been to nuclear in direct subsidies. But now what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is doing is granting exemptions. And an exemption is like, if you want to go 100 miles an hour down route 89, you call the NRC and say hey, I want to go 100 and they’ll say, sure. So they basically are ignoring the regulations and allowing utilities to do whatever they want. And the net effect of that is that nuclear appears to be cheaper than it really is. If it had to compete on price, more nuclear power plants would shut down. And the Nuclear Regulatory commission is propping them up by making their costs lower than they really should be.
MH: (23:33) Arnie, let’s go into the video now, and we’ll say goodbye for now in our live program here. Please come back again to continue your wonderful research findings with us, continue enlightening us. Thank you so much. And could you just segue us into the video. We thank the viewers for watching, and please watch this video. You will learn a lot from it and you will get active when you see this.
AG: Yeah. You know, the Abe administration said back 4 or 5 years ago that Fukushima was not a problem. And in the process, it got the Olympics brought there. They basically made the problem disappear. But the problem didn’t disappear. We were looking at newspaper coverage from the last couple of weeks and it’s clear that the plant continues to hemorrhage. So what we were able to do is put together a 5-year retrospective that shows that all of the lies that the Abe administration made in order to get the Olympics were wrong, and that it should have – the Olympics never should have been chosen for Japan. Because the entire country, and especially the north, is quite highly contaminated.
MH: Thank you, Arnie. And thank you, Free Speech TV, because you’re not getting this in mainstream media. Thank you.
AG: Thanks, Margaret.
Hi, I’m Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer and Board Member for Fairewinds Energy Education. It’s March, 2016, and five years ago this month, the triple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi began. Maggie and I and the Fairewinds crew have received many questions about how this disaster began, its current status and what the future after such a major catastrophe may look like for the Daiichi site, for Fukushima Prefecture and for the people of Japan. All of us at Fairewinds created this video to answer your questions and share the truth about the ongoing tragedy at Fukushima Daiichi.
First, let’s look at why this disaster happened at all. Many of you know that in addition to the public information work we do as the nonprofit, Fairewinds Energy Education, we work together as a paralegal services and an expert witness firm that Maggie founded in 2003 named Fairewinds Associates. During the first quarter of 2011, we were working on several cases and uncovering a number of significant safety issues at very different plants here in the U.S. One night, after a dinner walk only three weeks prior to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Maggie said, you know, we look at a lot of aging nukes and we’re uncovering so many safety risks, Arnie, where do you think the next radioactive disaster will be. I said I’m not sure where it will be, but I’m sure it will be in a General Electric Mark 1 boiling water reactor. Unfortunately, I was right. The Fukushima Daiichi atomic reactor is a GE Mark 1 boiling water reactor design. If you listen to the mainstream media, you might believe that these three atomic reactor meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi are strictly a problem produced in Japan. That is absolutely wrong. All of the major design decisions at Fukushima Daiichi were made in the USA, including placing the diesels in the basement and ignoring a 2,000-year history of huge tsunamis. The atomic reactor itself was designed by General Electric in San Jose, California, while the entire Unit 1 power plant was designed and constructed by Evasco, located in downtown Manhattan. Today in the United States, there’s 23 atomic reactors identical to those still in meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. The atomic power industry would have you believe that the Japanese nuclear program is somehow inferior to the U.S. counterpart. Moreover, it wants you to believe that such a catastrophe could not happen in the U.S. And once again, the nuclear industry is absolutely wrong. All of the mechanical problems that caused the equipment malfunctions at Fukushima Daiichi are also present in each of the 23 GE Mark 1 boiling water reactors here in the United States. But more importantly, the same engineers that designed 100 atomic reactors here in the U.S., used the same skills to design the six reactors at the Daiichi site. And finally, the people we’re supposed to trust to regulate the United States plants – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or the NRC – have been compromised by the atomic power industry just like the Japanese regulators were.
Japanese technology is not inferior to U.S. atomic technology and the regulation of Japan’s nuclear power and materials industries are not less regulated than those we have here in the U.S. For that matter, several U.S. plants are in such decrepit condition and also located in earthquake faults or downstream from leaking dams that it is only dumb luck that none of America’s atomic power plants have suffered meltdowns since the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
For more than 40 years, both American and Japanese engineers have been absolutely aware of the many design flaws that caused the meltdown and accompanying explosions at Fukushima Daiichi. Senior managers at the Atomic Energy Commission, the regulatory precursor to the NRC, expressed grave concerns about the GE Mark 1 containment design as early as 1972. Subsequently, in 1985, a report issued by the NRC identified that if a meltdown occurred, there was a 90 percent probability that the Mark 1 containment would explode. Afterward, another NRC report from the 80’s showed that General Electric’s entire reactor design was more prone to a meltdown than other atomic reactors, because it was designed with many holes in the bottom of each reactor to facilitate the movement of the control rods required to slow down and stop the atomic chain reaction. These control rods significantly weakened the floor of each GE boiling water reactor. And finally, again in the 80’s, NRC reports indicate that GE and NRC knew that the high pressures, the high temperatures, the high radiation levels after a nuclear meltdown would cause the plumbing and the electrical conduits in each of the containments to fail totally, thereby allowing groundwater to leak into the molten core.
The ongoing disaster at Fukushima Daiichi simply proves these early engineering analyses from the 70’s and the 80’s were absolutely correct. Not one safety system operated as it was designed, and consequently, massive amounts of radiation continue to enter Japan’s water and air and bleed into the Pacific Ocean daily. No one in the atomic power industry wants to discuss why these reactors were operated for 40 years knowing that they were ticking time bombs, and why dozens of similar reactors are even allowed to operate today. You’ve heard me say it before here at Fairewinds: Follow the money.
Quite simply, the atomic power industry and its regulators put the interests of investment bankers, atomic power and weapons brokers and the government eager to retain atomic capability ahead of our public health and safety. It was obvious back in 2011 that these poorly designed and aged reactors that are sitting in an earthquake zone would continue to bleed radiation into the Pacific. Clearly, leaking radioactivity will be an ongoing phenomenon for decades at least.
Here’s what I said when I was one of the first to identify this leakage back in 2011: “The building, that box, is called the reactor building. And inside that is the containment. And as pressure started to build up in units 1 and unit 3, they vented the hydrogen gases into the reactor building and that’s what blew up. And the dramatic pictures of the explosion or of the reactor building. Underneath that rubble is the containment. But in the building that’s intact, they didn’t vent it in time and they had a hydrogen detonation inside the containment. And that’s kind of like sneezing with your mouth closed and your nose pinched. It’s going to pop your eardrums. Well, what happened on unit 2 is, as a result of that explosion, the containment itself broke. And so no radioactive liquids are leaking out of the containment into that trench.” (Anchor: I’m going to shrink this down for a second. I want to come back to the pictures in a minute. But for now, I want to just talk about how much water. Because the company says 11,500 tons of radioactive water. We’re not minimizing this at all – going into the Pacific Ocean. That’s enough water to fill five large swimming pools. The Pacific Ocean, as you can see – in terms of the volume of the Pacific Ocean, Mr. Gundersen, this is literally a drop in the bucket. However you think the company is understating the concern here about the radioactivity?
“Well, they pumped – they needed to empty tanks on site because the tanks had concentrations of liquid that were 500 times what was permissible. But the stuff they needed to put in them was much more radioactive than that. So the 11,000 tons that they pumped overboard today was to clear tanks so that more radioactive liquid could come behind it. The leak that they just fixed, though, for the last couple of weeks has been leaking something on the order of 7 tons a day – not of the 500 time concentration, but of the much more concentrated radioactivity into the ocean. So there’s a lot of radiation in the ocean.”
People around the world write to Fairewinds asking why the clean-up is taking so long and how soon will the disaster be over. Less than one week after the triple meltdown started, I was interviewed on CNN, and I said then and I’ll say it again. Cleaning up Fukushima will be a long slog. While we at Fairewinds Education were speaking truth to power during the first week of the meltdowns, government officials here, in Europe and in Japan were trying to convince people around the world that nothing bad had happened at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi site. “Don’t worry, be happy” seemed to be the theme song around the world, so that each country that owned atomic power plants could continue operating its reactors without its citizens being concerned for their own health and safety.
Many FOIA – that’s the Freedom of Information Act document request – given to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, have produced a series of emails from inside the NRC that show that U.S. engineers and the commission itself knew exactly what the world was watching via the internet and social media, was a real tragedy of enormous proportions. In spite of this knowledge, throughout the world in atomic reactor countries, government officials didn’t tell anyone just how severe this calamity was. I’ve spent almost 45 years in the atomic power industry and I have a bachelors and a masters degree in nuclear engineering. I was also a licensed reactor operator. I taught reactor physics at Rensselaer, and I had an Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship. And I also have a patent on a nuclear safety device.
When I was interviewed on John King on CNN on March 18, 2011, I was the first person in America and Japan to publicly say what many nuclear engineers, regulators and government officials all over the world already knew.
(Anchor: It has been described already. Secretary Chu today called it, Arnie, worse than Three Mile Island. Based on everything you know tonight, is there a chance that it will be worse than Chernobyl?)
“I actually think it’s at Chernobyl level right now. You have 4 different reactors. A year ago, the worst case imaginable was 1 percent fuel failure with a containment that leaked a tenth of a percent per day. That’s what we thought was the worst that could happen. And now we’re finding 70 percent fuel in a containment with a hole in the side of it. This is 100 times worse than the worst case we imagined a year ago.”
(Anchor: A sobering, sobering, sobering perspective. Arnie Gundersen, ??38:14, we appreciate both of you so much.)
Two months after I said that on the John King show, while nuclear engineers and regulators maintained silence, and after the nuclear power industry called me a liar, Japan’s government officials belatedly told the world the truth about the failure of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi atomic power plant. The world was finally told that the system failures and meltdowns in Japan were as bad as Chernobyl. What took them so long? As I’ve said all along, follow the money.
As we look back on these devastating atomic power induced tragedies, it’s easy to determine the moment that both the debacle at Chernobyl began and the moments in time that TEPCO’s Fukushima atomic reactors began to melt down. But now, five years later, no one knows when any of those ongoing man-made radioactive cataclysms will end. As Yogi Berra, the famous American baseball player and coach would say, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” Sadly, Fukushima is far from being over. For me, as a nuclear engineer, it was obvious immediately after the disaster began, as it was to many others with a similar technical background to mine, that it would take an extraordinary amount of time and a phenomenal sum of money to clean up the worst industrial calamity in human history.
In February, 2012, I was an invited speaker to the foreign correspondence press club in Tokyo, where I told the world-wide media:
“I believe that over the next 25 years, the total cleanup, especially in Fukushima Prefecture, will add another $190 billion U.S. to that. So 60 billion for the plant and 190 – I believe there will be about a quarter of a trillion U.S. to completely – over the next 20 or 30 years – to completely clean up after this accident.”
As an experienced nuclear engineer and a former nuke industry corporate senior VP, I did not want to see the cover-ups and risks to families around the world that I saw after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Fairewinds and I spoke truth to power immediately, in the Washington Post, New York Times, Global Post. The two-hour interview I did with the Wall Street Journal was never published. We are Fairewinds worked unceasingly to make sure that accurate information reached the media all over the world. The saddest thing that happened to me during the last 5 years was to witness how the governments in Japan and the U.S. and the world-wide atomic energy industry continue to claim that little or no radiation is impacting the people living in Japan. The truth is already beginning to make itself known. And during the next 5 years, the world will see a rapid increase in thyroid cancers followed by organ cancers, hard tissue cancers and leukemia in those exposed to the massive amounts of radiation that were released in Japan.
Many of Japan’s government officials continue to apply enormous pressure to doctors, to scientists, to teachers and to journalists in order to prevent them from analyzing, discussing and informing people about the health ramifications from such extensive and invasive radiation. Because they are so much more radiosensitive, children, especially young girls and their mothers, will be the real casualties of this disaster for decades to come.
We at Fairewinds estimate that at least 100,000 and very possibly as many as a million cancers will result from this ongoing and unmitigatable atomic disaster. Tissue damage to people in Japan due to radioactive hot particles has been and continues to be completely ignored by the world’s nuclear community. I was the first scientist to discuss the release of Fukushima hot particles.
The ongoing radioactive legacy of hot particles will linger throughout Japan literally fro centuries. Maggie and I and the Fairewinds crew have repeatedly been the first organization to talk about and publish information informing you about the dozens of other significant issues that other scientists and government officials in the nuclear power field have not. Some of these scientists and officials have told us that they were either afraid to discuss or they were forbidden by their corporate employer from speaking about the information we’ve made public with you.
While we’re proud to share our knowledge with you, we’re also dismayed that mainstream media has failed to tell the truth about the worst industrial disaster in human history. So what did we learn from the triple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi? First, we learned there will be more atomic reactor catastrophes in the future. Second, during the next nuclear disaster, emergency evacuation plans will fail again, because government officials place atomic power profits before the health and safety of its people. Third, nuclear containment systems are absolutely incapable of enclosing and isolating radiation released as the catastrophes begin and as they continue unmitigated. Fourth, these prolific radiation releases will cause upwards of a million deaths even though officials will claim that none have occurred, as they did at Chernobyl and at TMI. Fifth, the irreversible cost of atomic power to us – to you and I, the people of the world – greatly exceed any profits or any benefits that the corporate owners of nuclear power receive. Sixth, due to its triple meltdowns and the unmitigatable radioactive releases, Fukushima Daiichi will continue to bleed radiation into the Pacific Ocean for more than a century. And finally, there is no roadmap to follow with directions to stop the ongoing debacle that is Fukushima Daiichi. It will be a long slog.
Renewable energy is so much safer and economically viable. With the legacy of TMI, Chernobyl and now the ongoing calamity at Fukushima Daiichi, why is the world even considering building more atomic power plants? And with aging, degraded atomic reactors, climate change induced flooding, tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, along with moving tectonic plates creating earthquakes world-wide, why indeed are any atomic reactors operating anywhere in the world?
I’m Arnie Gundersen for Fairewinds, and we’ll keep you informed.