Glowing in the Dark
Courtesy of Acting Man
Fukushima Aftermath
Shortly after the March 2011 tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan turned into an MCA (“maximum credible accident”), an event that was largely due to the fact that the emergency electricity generators (which were flooded) had been erected in the wrong place. At the time many rumors made the rounds indicating that Japan's government as well as plant operator TEPCO were deliberately downplaying the severity of the situation. It seems now that they have indeed not been as forthright about the dangers than they should have been. The problem with nuclear material is that it just keeps radiating and depending on what material exactly is involved, its so-called half-life (the point in time when half of its radiation is spent) can be quite long.
Recently it has turned out that the Fukushima accident is in fact still ongoing. Initially the plant was flooded with water in order to cool the reactors down and thereby slow down the chain reaction process so as to avert an even bigger disaster. Unfortunately that meant that the water used for the purpose became radio-active as well. Now the contaminated water is becoming a huge problem.
“Japan's nuclear watchdog will play a more direct role in the cleanup at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant after doubts were raised about the ability of the plant's operator to cope with continuing problems. The Nuclear Regulation Authority, created in September to give teeth to the country's nuclear oversight, said Monday it would for the first time be involved in measuring radiation levels at the site of the world's second-worst nuclear-plant disaster. This comes after a number of revelations in recent weeks of sudden leaps in radiation levels, as well as signs that some contaminated water may be reaching the ocean waters that border the plant.
[…]
NRA officials said highly contaminated water may be leaking into the soil from a number of trenches, allowing the water to seep into the site's groundwater and eventually into the ocean. The site has numerous trenches that hold electrical cables and pipes.
In the latest revelation, Tepco said Saturday it found extremely high concentrations of radiation in water samples from a trench near the No. 2 reactor. It said that the sample had 750 million becquerels of cesium-134 and 1.6 billion becquerels of cesium-137 per liter.
Both radioactive substances are considered harmful to health. An NRA official said Monday that the very high levels were likely to be even higher than those within the reactor units themselves.
The levels are millions of times higher than the government's limit of 60 becquerels per liter of water for cesium-134, and 90 becquerels for cesium-137. The elevated concentrations would pose a serious threat if large amounts of water were to leak from the trenches.
It was by far the highest concentration of radioactivity detected since soon after Japan's March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, after which the cores of three reactors melted down, producing dangerous levels of radioactivity.
While the trenches have long been known to hold water with dangerously high levels of contamination, Tepco said last week that radioactivity was also rising in groundwater at the site. It said test wells it dug to monitor radiation showed contamination at about 9,000 to 18,000 becquerels a liter. It added that some of this water was believed to be leaking into the ocean, an admission that came only after the nuclear authority said the water was "strongly suspected" to be seeping into the ground of the plant site and then into the ocean.
The NRA's action comes just five days after the authority's chairman, Shunichi Tanaka, questioned Tepco's ability to manage the decommissioning of the plant. "It is simply too big for one company to handle," Mr. Tanaka said Wednesday, and suggested the government's intervention. Mr. Tanaka had previously questioned the accuracy of Tepco's data on contamination at the site and said at the time that having independent testing would be one possibility.
In the early days of frantic efforts to bring the dangerously overheating reactors under control, Tepco flooded the cores of the three active units with large amounts of water to prevent a larger-scale nuclear disaster. At the time, it placed shields at various spots in the trenches to prevent the water from flowing into the sea.”
Japan's nuclear watchdog after spending some time near the Fukushima plant.
(Artwork by Ho Baron)
It is Possible that Nothing Can be Done
Without a doubt containing a nuclear power plant after a good chunk of it has been blown to smithereens and the rest has been flooded and is highly radioactive is an enormous technical challenge. Whether the government will prove better at the task than TEPCO is however very much open to doubt.
The government may be able to marshal more resources, but the complexity of the task will remain exactly the same. It is beginning to look possible that the situation cannot be brought under control at all, regardless of which agency takes control of the clean-up process. It may well be that it is simply beyond current technical capabilities. More than two years have passed since the original accident, and here is what Japan's authorities are saying today:
“An official at Japan's nuclear watchdog told Reuters on Monday radioactive water seeping from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant into the sea constitutes an "emergency," an assessment far more extreme than previously stated.
"Right now, we have an emergency," head of Japan's Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, Shinji Kinjo, told the news service.”
As this video by the BBC points out, the problem actually goes well beyond the water that was pumped into the plant originally. The plant is sitting atop a huge aquifer and 400 tons of additional water are pouring into its basement every day and become radioactive there. A barrier that was erected to keep the water from flowing into the ocean has resulted in a constant rise in the water level – and now the barrier is no longer sufficient to keep the water in check. After noting that the situation is clearly “beyond TEPCO's ability to control” and repeating the widely held notion that therefore, “Japan's government must step in”, the Beeb's presenter wistfully notes that it is actually not quite clear what the government can do about the situation either.
As one Japanese engineer points out: it is not that TEPCO isn't trying. It is doing what it can, but if a viable solution were available, it would surely have been implemented by now. Already more than 2000 water tanks that have been used to store contaminated water are standing around the plant. They are not only brimfull, they are also disintegrating, as they were erected in haste under less than ideal circumstances after the tsunami. In short, the problem could be aggravated even further once these tanks are giving way. In any case, with the contaminated groundwater overflowing the barrier and 400 tons of it being added daily, divine intervention may be required to avert an escalation of the crisis.
Conclusion:
It is not quite clear to us just how dangerous it is actually going to be when more and more of the radio-active water is released into the wild, but the fact that the radiation levels measured in samples are said to be 'millions of times' above the maximum still considered safe, it seems that this could become quite a grave threat – and not only for Japan. This situation is an example for a 'black swan' event. After all, almost no-one expected to hear much about Fukushima again after more than two years have passed during which very little attention was paid to it. Suddenly it pops up again, like the proverbial jack-in-the-box, as big a threat as ever.
Addendum: Japanese Financial Markets
The Nikkei (which as a friend remarked to us 'trades like a dotcom stock') has recently declined sharply, while the yen and the JGB both have been rising lately. Whether there is a connection between the deteriorating situation at the Fukushima plant and these market moves is of course not knowable, but we wouldn't rule it out.
The stock market of the third largest economy in the world “trades like a dotcom stock”. It appears to have entered a wave C down – click to enlarge.
JGBs continue to recover, a sign that the market is not very worried that 'reflation' will actually work in Japan – at least not yet. Concerns over government's solvency are obviously also postponed for now – click to enlarge.
Yen, September contract. This looks like a potential inverse head and shoulders bottom. Keep in mind that the world's fund managers are unanimous in hating the yen, and yet Japan's money supply growth continues to be by far the lowest of all major currency areas – click to enlarge.
Fukushima shrooms.
(Photo via amazon.com – unknown author)
Charts by BarCharts, BigCharts, Investing.com
