Friday, March 04, 2016
Five
Years After Fukushima, 'No End in Sight' to Ecological Fallout
And U.S. nuclear regulatory agency comes
under fire for 'half-baked' reforms that fail to improve public safety
An employee uses a a radiation dosage monitor
as workers continue the decontamination and reconstruction process. (Photo:
Christopher Furlong/Getty)
The environmental impacts of the 2011
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are already becoming apparent, according
to a new analysis from Greenpeace Japan, and
for humans and other living things in the region, there is "no end in
sight" to the ecological fallout.
The report warns that these impacts—which
include mutations in trees, DNA-damaged worms, and radiation-contaminated
mountain watersheds—will last "decades to centuries." The conclusion
is culled from a large body of independent scientific research on impacted
areas in the Fukushima region, as well as investigations by Greenpeace
radiation specialists over the past five years.
"The government's massive
decontamination program will have almost no impact on reducing the ecological
threat from the enormous amount of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear
disaster," said Kendra Ulrich, senior nuclear campaigner at Greenpeace
Japan. "Already, over 9 million cubic meters of nuclear waste are
scattered over at least 113,000 locations across Fukushima prefecture."
According to Radiation
Reloaded: Ecological Impacts of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident 5 Years
Later, studies have shown:
·
High radiation concentrations in new leaves, and at least in the
case of cedar, in pollen;
·
apparent increases in growth mutations of fir trees with rising
radiation levels;
·
heritable mutations in pale blue grass butterfly populations and
DNA-damaged worms in highly contaminated areas, as well as apparent reduced
fertility in barn swallows;
·
decreases in the abundance of 57 bird species with higher
radiation levels over a four year study; and
·
high levels of caesium contamination in commercially important
freshwater fish; and radiological contamination of one of the most important
ecosystems – coastal estuaries.
The report comes amid a push by the
government of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe to resettle contaminated areas and
also restart nuclear reactors in Japan that
were shut down in the aftermath of the crisis.
However, Ulrich said, "the Abe
government is perpetuating a myth that five years after the start of the nuclear
accident the situation is returning to normal. The evidence exposes this as
political rhetoric, not scientific fact. And unfortunately for the victims,
this means they are being told it is safe to return to environments where
radiation levels are often still too high and are surrounded by heavy
contamination."
According to Greenpeace, it's not only the
Abe government that holds "deeply flawed assumptions" about both
decontamination and ecosystem risks, but the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), too. Indeed, the failures in the methods used by the IAEA to come to
the "baseless conclusion" that there would be no expected ecological
impacts from the Fukushima disaster are "readily apparent," the
report claims.
In September, Greenpeace Japan blasted the IAEA for
"downplaying" the continuing environmental and health effects of the nuclear
meltdown in order to support the Japanese government's agenda
of normalizing the ongoing disaster.
Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists
(UCS) charged on Thursday that the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC) has also failed to learn lessons from the Fukushima
meltdown. In its report,Preventing an American Fukushima, the
group states that five years after the nuclear accident, the NRC "has made
insufficient progress in improving U.S. nuclear power safety" while
implementing "half-baked" reforms.
"[A]ll too often," UCS said,
"the agency abdicated its responsibility as the nation's nuclear watchdog
by allowing the industry to rely on voluntary guidelines, which are, by their
very nature, unenforceable."
"The NRC and the nuclear
industry have taken steps to address some of the safety vulnerabilities
revealed by the Fukushima disaster," acknowledged report author Edwin
Lyman, a UCS senior scientist and co-author of the 2014 book, Fukushima:
The Story of a Nuclear Disaster. "But so far, the agency has failed to
fully learn the lessons of Fukushima. It needs to go back to the drawing board
and reconsider critical safety recommendations that it dismissed without good
justification. The health and safety of the more than 100 million Americans
living within 50 miles of a nuclear plant hang in the balance."
On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake off
the coast of Japan triggered a tsunami, which in turn produced equipment
failures and the release of radioactive material at the Fukushima
Nuclear Power Plant. The disaster is the single largest release of
radioactivity into the ocean and one of only two Level 7 nuclear disasters in
world history—the other being Chernobyl.
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