Japan: Radiation rumors trigger expanding Fukushima vegetable price collapse

The prices of vegetables produced in Fukushima Prefecture at Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale markets have collapsed in fiscal 2012, two years after the outbreak of the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, a Mainichi Shimbun investigation shows.

The Japanese government on April 1, 2012 introduced stringent food safety regulations, setting a radioactive cesium limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram. Despite the new regulations, Fukushima vegetables have taken the brunt of radiation rumors, prices declining even further than they did in fiscal 2011, the first year of the nuclear crisis.

The Mainichi tracked price increase and decrease rates (annual transactions divided by total quantity) of vegetables at the Tokyo wholesale markets by classifying vegetables in four categories — nationwide, eastern Japan, western Japan and Fukushima — against the base figures of fiscal 2009.

In fiscal 2011, the prices of vegetables in the first three categories jumped around 4 percent over fiscal 2009, but those of Fukushima vegetables dropped 5 percent. In fiscal 2012, the prices of vegetables in the nationwide category dipped 0.2 percent from fiscal 2009 but the prices of vegetables from Fukushima Prefecture plunged 18.7 percent.

According to 2010 Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry statistics and other sources, over 20 percent of all vegetables shipped from Fukushima Prefecture were traded at the Tokyo wholesale markets.

A vegetable dealer in Tokyo says, ’’There are no takers (for Fukushima vegetables) even now. Some supermarkets in western Japan don’t accept them at all and there are no deals.’’ The dealer criticizes the central government for setting provisional radiation limits even though the effects from radioactive materials are not understood, spreading distrust among consumers. He also says the public does not have any faith in the new regulations.

The government initially set a radioactive cesium limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram shortly after the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami triggered the Fukushima nuclear crisis, drawing fire from the public for setting the limit too high. The government later said the new and tougher regulations would bring harmful radiation rumors under control and protect both producers and consumers.

According to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, there were 1,204 cases of food products with radiation levels exceeding the original limit between the March 2011 disasters and the end of March 2012. The ministry logged 2,198 cases of food products exceeding the new limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram between April 2012 and the end of February this year, though many of the cases concerned mushrooms and wild animals.

Kiyokazu Ujiie, assistant professor of agricultural economics at the University of Tsukuba, says the price collapse involving Fukushima vegetables is occurring because consumers are reluctant to buy them and they’re diverted to the restaurant and food industries. Consumers still worry about radioactive materials in any quantity and it is not enough to make a perfunctory explanation about the safety of vegetables below the national radiation level. The central government, local governments and producers should fully explain to consumers that vegetable screening on a massive scale have not detected radiation.

Mainichi Shimbun, March 29, 2013
http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130329p2a00m0na009000c.html

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Fukushima’s Namie sees no-go zone designation lifted

NAMIE, FUKUSHIMA PREF. — The no-go zone designation was lifted Monday for the town of Namie near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

In line with the move, the Fukushima Prefecture town was realigned into three evacuation zones according to estimated annual radiation doses.

The rezoning lifted restrictions on entry into Namie’s eastern coastal area, where 80 percent of the town’s population, totaling about 20,000, lived before the March 2011 meltdown catastrophe started at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant. But no residents will be allowed to stay overnight in the area.

Several staff members were set to be stationed at the municipal office starting Monday.

The costal area was reorganized into two evacuation zones – one with an estimated annual radiation dose of 20 millisieverts or less and the other with between 20 and 50 millisieverts. For those zones, the evacuation advisory is expected to be lifted in 2016.

Restrictions on entry were kept in place for the remaining area, where homecomings will not be allowed at least until 2017 due to high radiation doses, which are estimated at over 50 millisieverts per year.

Namie was the ninth of 11 Fukushima municipalities to undergo such rezoning after they were designated for evacuation because of the nuclear fallout.

Futaba, one of the nuclear plantÅfs two host towns, is the only remaining municipality where the no-go zone designation is still in place.

Jiji Press, April 1, 2013
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/04/01/national/fukushimas-namie-sees-no-go-zone-designation-lifted/#.UWNsn_JUpWE

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 Record cesium level detected in fish caught near Fukushima plant

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Friday it detected a record 740,000 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium in a fish caught in waters near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, equivalent to 7,400 times the state-set limit deemed safe for human consumption.

The greenling measuring 38 centimeters in length and weighing 564 grams was caught near a water intake of the four reactor units in the power station’s port on Feb. 21 during the utility’s operation to remove fish from the port.

TEPCO has installed a net on the sea floor of the port exit in Fukushima Prefecture to make it hard for fish living near the sediments of contaminated soil to go elsewhere.

According to TEPCO, the previous record of cesium concentration in fish was 510,000 Bq/kg detected in another greenling captured in the same area. Currently, fishermen are voluntarily withholding operations off the coast of the prefecture except for some experimental catches of some fishes.

Mainichi Shimbun, March 16, 2013
http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130316p2g00m0dm004000c.html

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 Water is both the savior and the bane at Fukushima No. 1

Those who were at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant two years ago probably remember their fears after towering tsunami knocked out the reactor cooling systems, triggering three core meltdowns that threatened to harm the entire nation.

Today the crippled reactors require close monitoring but are in a controllable state – at least compared with the chaos of 2011.

Looking at the bigger picture, however, Tokyo Electric Power Co. isn’t making much progress decommissioning reactors 1, 2, 3 and 4 – a task expected to take at least three decades. This is because the very thing that saved the plant is now blocking the way: water.

Water is perpetually needed to keep the melted fuel cool, but the meltdowns burned holes in three of the six reactors, allowing water to leak into the basements of the containment buildings after being tainted with deadly amounts of radioactivity. This was exacerbated by hydrogen explosions, which possibly cracked the containment vessels and ripped the buildings housing the reactors apart.

While pumps are being used to drain and detoxify the water as much as possible, finding safe places to store it remains Tepco’s most pressing task.

“The work to decommission the plant is still in the beginning stage. We have to overcome many hurdles, such as taking care of the massive amounts of contaminated water, finding the source of leaks in the containment vessels and recovering the melted fuel rods,” said plant manager Takeshi Takahashi, 55, at a Feb. 28 news conference in Fukushima.

“It’s going to take a very long time to complete the work, and itÅfs going to be tough, but weÅfre committed to completing it,” Takahashi said.

As if the damage above ground isn’t enough to worry about, the 9 -magnitude earthquake apparently cracked the walls of the plant, allowing about 400 tons of groundwater to seep into the buildings and mix with the tainted coolant water. Tepco has controlled the coolant volume to ensure the inflow of groundwater is stronger, which will help keep it in the buildings.

About 260,000 tons of tainted water are stored in tanks; Tepco thinks it could probably store up to 700,000 tons if it had time to build more tanks. But as it stands today, there are only enough tanks to store about 60,000 more tons, which means they only have months before the entire site begins to flood.

“The contaminated water is a pressing issue,” said Takahashi.

Since the water could very well leave the plant and end up in the water supply and the ocean, Tepco is planning two measures.

One is to make bypasses for the groundwater by digging wells to curb the seepage into the reactor buildings. The diverted groundwater would flow to the sea.

The second measure is a new water processing system called ALPS that can remove 62 kinds of radioactive substances, including strontium, which can cause bone cancer. The existing system mainly removes cesium before recirculating some of the water into the reactors. The rest is stored.

Tepco also will have to find a way to dispose of water processed by ALPS. Since Tepco is trying to limit the amount of coolant to reduce the leak rate, any water purified by ALPS won’t be reused as coolant.

And even ALPS cannot remove tritium.

According to Tepco, the level of tritium in the contaminated water is between 1 million and 5 million becquerels per liter, and the legal limit is 60,000. Tritium has a half life of about 12 to 13 years and is about one-thousandth as radioactive as the isotopes cesium-134 and -137.

Drinking 2 liters of water containing 60,000 becquerels of tritium per liter each day for a year will give you a dose of about 0.79 millisievert, the utility said. The legal exposure limit is 1 millisievert per year.

To prevent the tanks from occupying all of the available space on site, Tepco is thinking of dumping the water processed by ALPS into the ocean, despite fierce opposition from fishermen.

Tepco said it will not do it without receiving the consent of related ministries.

Kyoto University professor Akio Koyama, an expert on radioactive waste, said Tepco seems to have no choice but to dump the water because tritium is so hard to remove. If Tepco can dilute the tritium-tainted water to legal levels, it should not be a big problem, Koyama said.

“The water will be further diluted as soon as it is dumped into the ocean. There are various estimates, but I don’t think this will be dangerous,” he said.

Still, it will be hard to convince people in the fishing industry, which was decimated by a similar release in the early stages of the crisis in April 2011.

JF Zengyoren, a national advocacy group for fishermen, visited Tepco on Jan. 25 to protest.

“Fishermen have been suffering from the impacts of the Fukushima crisis and trying to regain consumers’ trust. Dumping tainted water will destroy these efforts,” the organization said.

To end the vicious circle, Tepco must locate the leaks and plug them. But little progress has been made because the radiation levels are still lethal in the reactor buildings and a thorough examination of the machinery will be extremely hard to carry out.

The utility is planning to send robots to find the leaks and other plant makers are developing technologies to plug them.

The only progress Tepco seems to be making is on reactor 4, which was defueled prior to the crisis but had become a storage site for both fresh and spent-fuel rods – including some containing plutonium.

Experts believe the fuel rods in the spent-fuel pool of unit 4 present a critical risk and Tepco is working to remove them as quickly as possible before another major quake topples the remains of the building, which was heavily damaged by the hydrogen explosion.

Tepco claims reactor 4’s building can still withstand a quake rated at upper 6 on the Japanese intensity scale to 7 – the same as the quake that hit two years ago – but experts say it is better to move the fuel to a safer place as soon as possible.

The pool, which sits above the reactor, contains 1,533 spent-fuel rods. Tepco plans to start removing them in November and hopes to be finished by the end of 2014.

Kazuaki Nagata, Japan Times Staff Writer, March 9, 2013
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/03/09/national/water-is-both-the-savior-and-the-bane-at-fukushima-no-1/#.UT_nlTfA55s

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 Radiation halves within 80-km radius of Fukushima plant

TOKYO (Kyodo) — The radiation level in areas within a 80-kilometer radius of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant nearly halved in a 20-month period between April 2011 and November last year, a government-affiliated body said Sunday.

The level is declining steadily at a pace faster than originally forecast apparently because radioactive substances spewed after the March 2011 accident were washed away by rain, according to the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.

Radiation depleted particularly rapidly in areas with lots of buildings and asphalt roads, the agency added.

The agency analyzed radiation 1 meter above the ground, using data collected by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

The radiation level is estimated to have fallen 30 percent from the April 2011 reading by November the same year and halved by November last year, according to the agency.

As of November last year, the dosages were still high in the town of Namie and other localities northwest of the nuclear plant, but locations registering a radiation dose of more than 19 microsieverts per hour have decreased, adds the agency.

At 20 microcieverts, consuming local food will be restricted and people will be asked to temporarily relocate within a week.

The agency believes that the reduction in the radiation dosage owes much to the effects of the elements rather than man-made decontamination efforts.

The pace of radiation depletion as of November last year compared with April 2011 slowed, however, because cesium 137 with a half-life of 30 years remained after cesium 134 with a half-life of two years first depleted, the agency says.

“There have been no data on radiation depletion in countries with much rainfall such as Japan,” an agency official said, adding it will further study unfolding developments.

Kyodo News, March 11, 2013
http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130311p2g00m0dm031000c.html

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