When it comes to the truth about radiation and health effects,
there are no experts who are honest - not in government, not in science, not anywhere. Yet, people would rather
listen to liars than challenge their assumptions about the sources of the so-called truth and disregard the purveyors
of actual truth on this topic: the non-creditialed self-taught. - Andrew Kishner, May 18, 2013
'Deception, Cover-up and Murder in the Nuclear Age' is our six-year effort and free web-based book. Click to read the book here
What you can learn in the book: Every cancer and leukemia
since 1945 can be fractionally blamed on one thing: nuclear testing fallout. 'Chernobyl fallout' was 90-95% from Chernobyl and the rest from a covered-up U.S. nuclear release. There are dozens of nuclear reactors orbiting us - many have crashed on Earth. The U.S. may have replicated a 'Hiroshima' inferno on actual humans (in cages in Nevada). Your cremated remains mixed into water would be undrinkable per the EPA because of its strontium-90 levels.
MORE
April 30, 2013 - While LaScram
LaSalle Falls Apart, Operator Asks NRC If They Can Put a Hemi
In It- Exelon is proceeding with a formal request to the NRC for a mega-power boost (aka
'uprate') at the LaSalle plant to increase thermal output by a whopping 12.5%. Also, it has
been learned that the culprit of the technical shutdown of LaSalle Unit 1 reactor on
April 27th was the same exact valve that failed
following a scram in February 2011 due to a welding defect. The recommended fix (buy a new one, duh!) was apparently not heeded;
Status: LaSalle 1 is being restarted (at 22%). LaSalle 2 is at 1% power.
April 29, 2013 - Map of eastern U.S. nuclear plants that
have no containment vent filters (which is a 'Fukushima lessons learned'
that 'wasn't implemented')- enlarge image
April 25-27, 2013 - April 25: LaSalle Unit 2 restart attempt results in a
scram - reason: condenser leak. April 26: NRC
announces 'Special Investigation'
into April 17th events; April 27: during Unit 1 startup process, operators
were forced to shut reactor down after leak was detected in the primary containment
April 17, 2013 - LaSalle County
Nuclear Generating Station is hit by lightning - both reactors scram - pressure
builds in containment - radioactive gases vented from containment - monitoring fails -
vents from Unit 2 not filtered - leaks and other problems not reported until days later - our initial report
and our analysis of the types of radioactive gases released
in unfiltered vent
You are reading from a free online e-book titled 'Deception, Cover-up and Murder in the Nuclear Age.'
The book discusses the Trinity test, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hydrogen bomb testing fallout,
U.S. experiments done on Marshall Islanders (Project 4.1), the Irene Allen trial, Cosmos 954, the Fukushima meltdowns,
Three Mile Island updates, and so much
more. Visit the Table of Contents to find this free content.
Footnotes are located at the end of each chapter - press the (right facing) 'PAGE' button icon until you reach
the footnotes page, or locate it via the table of contents
Chapter 12 -Fukushima Daiichi
12-1
1 of 6
Our Daily Posts (and thus a chronology) Early-on About Fukushima -
The highest readings following the
first major release at Unit 1 on March 12 spiked above 1,000
microSieverts/hr. That radiation formed an air mass over northeast Japan
at least 80 miles in diameter. The plume reached Onogawa Nuclear Power
Plant, which is 120 kilometers (more than 75 miles) north of Fukushima -
radiation monitors picked up a spike of radiation at about midnight on
March 12. The levels were 500 times normal background levels for a few
hours. By March 13, radiation dropped to 20 times normal levels.
Based on Pentagon statements, the plume was detected 60 (plus) miles out to sea.a
At 9:37 pm local time on March 14,
another release of radiation at Fukushima was detected around the complex.
Those levels rose to a peak of 3,130 microSieverts/hr, which is equal to
313 milliRems per hour. This level is 6 times 'permissible levels' set by
Japanese authorities (although it has been known since the 1940s that no amount
of radiation is truly safe).
a A document released
by the NRC ('March 13th, 2011 - 2200 EDT - USNRC Emergency Operations Center Status Update' -
'NRC Evaluation of Radiation Measurements from
USS Ronald Reagan') stated that dose
rates measured by an entity called 'Naval Reactors' on the morning of 3/13/11 on the carrier flight deck
of the USS Ronald Reagan from
the 'overhead "plume"' were 'approximately 0.6 mrem per hour
gamma with no measurable activity on the ship surfaces.'
The nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan was '~130 nautical miles
off the Japanese coast...' Air samples were sent to a lab, which
detected radioactive isotopes of 'iodine, cesium
and technetium;' the memo states these isotopes are 'consistent with a release from
a nuclear reactor' and although the carrier does release nuclear
poisons itself - including traces of iodine, and cesium-137 into the air via xenon-137 - the NRC stated the
measureable radioactivity was 'consistent with
the venting of the Fukushima Daiishi [sic] Unit 1 reactor.'
Although the Navy didn't indicate the isotope number of any of the radiochemicals found,
it is very interesting that technetium was discovered. Technetium has a volatilization/boiling
point of 4,877 degrees Celsius. It was either volatilized
from the core of Unit 1 at an extremely high temperature or was ejected from the fuel pools
or a core via a hydrogen explosion.
The lab analysis that the Navy ordered was
a gamma profile of the sample(s) collected on the flight deck. Common isotopes of iodine and cesium
in fallout are gamma emitters. Thus, we must
conclude the air sample contained Technetium-99m, which
was also detected by the CTBTO (Takasaki) monitoring station in Gunma, Japan,
on most 24 hour sample-runs through
the second week of April 2011; CTBTO stations only provide gamma isotopic
analysis. Technetium-99m is also widely used in nuclear medicine because
of its short half life (6.01 hrs) and it's also a weak gamma emitter (140 keV).
Technetium-99m is a product
of fission (of uranium-235), meaning it is created in reactors; the
'mass 99 chain' - comprised of beta-emitters - begins with very short-lived zirconium (99) -> (which decays into)
very short-lived Niobium (99) -> molybdenum (99) -> technetium-99m -> technetium-99 -> rubidium-99 (stable).
Molybdenum-99 and technetium-99m are also gamma-emitters. The mass 99 chain
accounts for 6.1 percent of the (fission) yield from common forms of fission. (The total
fission yield from uranium-235 is a composite of 200%. Why? Because each fissioning U-235 atom
spews two neutrons.)
The Navy didn't order - or did, but
isn't telling the public - an isotopic analysis for alphas and betas. If technetium-99m
was found, as we are concluding, then surely plutonium and uranium would have
been in the air over the Pacific (and over Japan, and everywhere else) because those elements have
lower volatilization/boiling
points than tc-99m. And if tc-99m was ejected into air via an explosion, then so
would have plutonium and uranium anyway!
Tc-99m probably reached the U.S. West Coast in trace amounts. But
that doesn't matter much because it will be a constant menace in the West soon. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it
is considering conducting several explosive
tests in the Nevada desert each year that
would release directly into the open-air (or
from underground areas into the open-air via pumped air or buoyancy) up to 10 peta (10 to the power of 15)
becquerels each of tc-99m, molybdenum-99,
rubidium-86, zirconium-95,
technetium-99m, molybdenum-99, rubidium-103, cesium-136, barium-140, cerium-141,
neodymium-147, samarium-153, and the radioactive gasses xenon-127, xenon-131m, xenon-133, krypton 85,
and argon-37. (more; p. 5-157, draft SWEIS).
What's in that smoke?
The lost physics lesson of Fukushima
In March 2011,
emanations from the embattled reactors at TEPCO's
Fukushima Daiichi complex were described by the global scientific community, the Japanese government and international media
as 'black smoke,' 'grayish smoke,' 'white smoke,' 'steam,' and 'vapor.'
Yet, collectively, these entities negligently failed to educate people that these smokey plumes
were a form of radioactive pollution rarely seen on Earth and a form
that was incredibly dangerous.
It all started on the day of the first explosion at the
Fukushima Daiichi reactor
complex, which occurred on March 12th, the day after the great earthquake. On the 12th, the host
of CNN
'Saturday Morning' asked a guest expert about the smoke rising from Unit 1 following a hydrogen blast1 earlier that day:
KAYE: ...there were a couple of explosions being reported this morning. We were just looking at
pictures of this white smoke coming that was coming from one of these plants. That does concern you?
HIBBS: Right, well, the plume would propel the nuclides high into the atmosphere.'
But what exactly did Hibbs mean? Exactly *how* were 'nuclides' rising up
from the reactors via the scary-looking smoke?
The general public wasn't given much assistance
with this question by CNN's guest, who was Mark Hibbs, a senior associate in the Nuclear Policy
Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Either it was the CNN approach of "it just rises, that's all" or it
was a very technical explanation, much like what appeared in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on March 18th.2
In the WSJ article, reporter Gautam Naik interviewed Lars-Erik De Geer, a research director of the Swedish Defense
Research Institute, who gave an overview of what happens to an overheating reactor:
"First, a range of less-dangerous gasses are liberated, including tritium, krypton and xenon.
...Overheating fuel rods then discharge
gaseous forms of certain volatile radioactive elements, including cesium, iodine, strontium and tellurium.
As these rise, they latch on to dust in the air and become particulates, a quarter the size of a grain of sand....
The radiation emitted...[that] still poses a big danger to workers or cleanup crews ...[includes]
released volatile elements such as cesium and iodine."
So, there were so-called 'less dangerous' radioactive gasses being
immediately released from Fukushima's overheating reactors that were followed by gaseous forms
of things that - it sounds like - aren't ordinary gasses. Does this mean these
things were liquids and then boiled off? Or were solids and somehow turned to vapor? If
you believe this is the answer, you are right. As long as a reactor overheats enough, and has holes or cracks in its various 'containments,'
it would
leak out gaseous forms of things like radioactive strontium and cesium that are ordinarily solids. What
CNN's host was referring to as 'white smoke' was part water vapor, part smoke from fires but, most
importantly, part vaporized radioactive solids. If you put
your vitamin pills, which are comprised of minerals like selenium
and iron (not really different than minerals like strontium and cesium), into a furnace, you would
have an odd-colored plume, which is vitamin minerals in their vapor form!
If we are to understand and speak the language
of physics when it comes to vapor coming out of Fukushima's reactors, the 'key' word is 'volatile,' or 'volatilization.' We sometimes hear that the stock
market is 'volatile.' In physics, volatilization
is what happens when a solid or a liquid is turned to vapor.
And that is what has happened since March 11, 2011,
at Fukushima. The contents of the fuel rods in the reactors (and the spent
fuel pools) have volatilized, or turned to vapor. It is still vaporizing, volatilizing.
So, how hot of a furnace do we need to have to vaporize things like cesium and
strontium? Well, cesium volatilizes at 670 degrees Celsius and strontium-90
volatilizes at 1400 degrees Celsius (note that both chemicals are solid at room temperature). Were the reactors, or the melted cores, at Fukushima 'that hot?' Michio Ishikawa of the Japan Nuclear Technology Institute
said on Asahi TV on April 29, 2011 that he believed the molten fuel at Fukushima
had heated to temperatures at or above 2,000 degrees Celsius. Others speculated a peak temperature of the
overheating reactor cores at twice that,
or 4,000 degrees Celsius.3
A vapor pressure for a given chemical isn't
a straight-forward constant or coefficient, but rather a deluxe equation that a physics
calculator or Microsoft Excel can render. The reason is that vapor pressure
increases exponentially with temperature. Therefore, vapor pressure formulas usually are denoted
with logarithms, which make exponential trends more easily understandable. The best way to understand
vapor pressures is to visualize them on a graph - and there are plenty out there on the internet.
Usually, a chemical that has a high vapor pressure requires a very little temperature
increase (from normal temperatures) to experience a pressure change compared to chemicals with low
vapor pressures.
If we look at a list of elements (remember the periodic table?)
and their boiling
points here,
we see that 2,000 degrees (to pick a conservative value) is hot enough to volatilize radioactive versions
of the following:
A fuel rod that has been put to some use in an operating reactor
is made
up of hundreds of 'fission products,' which include radioactive versions of many of the elements listed above.4 A
radioactive version of an elemental chemical (meaning one that occurs naturally, like those on the periodic table)
is one that has extra (or is missing) protons and neutrons. These extra protons and neutrons don't significantly
affect the boiling point. So, we can expect that dozens of radioactive elements were volatilized
from the overheating cores at Fukushima into gas.5 When that happens, these vaporized radioactive
chemicals have the potential, as De Geer had stated, to rise and attach
to dust particles to float about. Since there are gaps and holes in the containments at Fukushima's
stricken reactors, these 'hot' dust particles will
get carried with the winds - for miles or across the entire globe.
But the above list of chemicals doesn't include plutonium and
plutonium was detected by TEPCO miles away from the reactors - and tens of kilometers away by Japan's Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. How did plutonium get 'propelled' from Fukushima
if (we are to believe) the reactors temperatures didn't reach plutonium's boiling point? Did it travel from the hydrogen
explosions or did plutonium somehow become a gas through some other means?
Plutonium has a boiling point of 3,232 degrees Celsius. So,
if the reactor cores never reached 3,232oC, then plutonium didn't
volatilize, right?6
Wrong. Vaporization of a chemical or molecule happens
both at and before the boiling point.
This is a phenomenon we see everyday. You must have noticed that a glass (or vase) full of water, if
left alone for a day or more, will lose a little bit of its contents. Why does it do that? On one forum
on the web (one of many that discussed with varying levels of intelligence Fukushima in early to mid 2011)
one commenter explained how plutonium can escape at Fukushima by using this 'glass full of water' example:
a "liquid does not have to boil to evaporate, for example
water is evaporating all the time as long as its in a liquid form. The boiling point is simply the point the whole lot
turns to vapour. So you could get plutonium evaporation into the atmosphere even at far lower temperatures, as far as [I] know."
(source).
In order to understand this, consider a
glass of water brought to boiling. When we're boiling water, we are actually
increasing the 'vapor pressure' of the water so that it is higher than
the pressure
of the atmosphere that's above and around the glass. At boiling, the water's
H20 molecules have inherent pressures - atmospherically - that are greater than the surrounding air
and so all of the water gets released as vapor.
Warm (not boiling) water in a glass doesn't turn to steam readily because
most of the H20 molecules aren't pressurized enough to overwhelm
the pressure of the air around it. But, even at room temperature, some H20 molecules are vaporizing. How? Because
molecules or atoms in
any heated substance 'shake' at a range of energies - and some molecules or atoms (in solid- or liquid-state) in the
upper ranges have a 'vapor pressure' equivalent to the 'boiling point' - thus vapor escapes.
Think of vaporization like a rocket blasting off from
the surface of the Earth. In order for that rocket to rise from the Earth's surface, it
needs a tremendous 'push' of its own that is greater than the
pull of gravity.
Based on what we have learned, we now know that plutonium, a solid metal with a boiling point of
3,232 degrees Celsius, can escape as a vapor before its boiling point. And if the
reactors at Fukushima heated up to around 2,000 degrees Celsius, then it likely that
plutonium vapor was escaping and floating over Japan and beyond in March 2011 (and beyond)! We
can extend this thinking to all the radioactive nuclides in the reactors at Fukushima.
Strontiums and other 'low volatile' elements volatilized as well.
To go further with this concept of vapor pressure, have you ever wondered why some cooking instructions
are tailored for 'high altitudes?' This is because high elevations have
lower atmospheric pressures than at sea level, for example. Lower atmospheric pressure
means that water requires a lower vapor pressure to volatilize, and thus has a lower boiling point.
Since heated water at high altitudes becomes steam earlier than usual, recipes advise lower temperatures and/or longer
cooking times in order to ensure that moisture is retained in the cooked items (such as breads and roasts);
using ordinary recipes at high altitudes will cause excess evaporation and therefore
foods will get burnt, scorched or dried out. Even if you're cooking while the eye of a
hurricane is above you, you too may be affected by 'vapor pressure effects.' A glass of water
under a low pressure weather system will experience evaporation quicker than that same glass at the same
temperature under a high pressure system. If we decrease the air pressure around and above the glass,
the boiling point decreases!
In nuclear reactors, water is actually kept in a pressurized environment so
that it can remain at a high temperature without turning to steam; high pressure
increases its boiling point. This is important
because as a liquid, it can be piped around the plant easily.
You may asking at this point: what makes
one chemical have a specific boiling point? Why don't all elements have the same vapor pressures?
That's above my paygrade to answer; but it has to do with their endowed physical qualities.
What we need to understand as downwinders of nuclear reactors is that cesium
has a low boiling point; its vapor pressure exceeds standard air pressure
when heated up just a few hundred degrees Celsius from room temperature. We also must know that strontium
and plutonium (which have low vapor pressures, high boiling points) can be turned to vapor if they are heated
up as little as a thousand degrees Celsius.
Knowing all of this, we should be worried. Why? Because the very mechanism that propelled dangerous
amounts of nuclides
at Fukushima during the first hours
of the meltdowns is still happening! Fukushima's lava-corium is still hot enough to continue propelling these nuclides into
the air through the present.7 Also, owing to the fragile state of Fukushima's
reactors and cooling systems, any loss of power onsite in the future could cause
the unmelted fuel rods at three reactors to similarly overheat and melt. This could
be caused by a smaller earthquake and tsunami than experienced on March 11, 2011.
It wasn't until July 2011 that this author, after stumbling upon an
article in a science journal, was finally convinced that solid, radioactive isotopes indeed volatilize
below, at and beyond their boiling points. Although it appeared in the pro-nuclear 'Journal of
Nuclear Medicine,' the article did convey the truth.8 In a section of
the science paper that gave a chronology of the accident at Fukushima, the authors wrote that :
"...the analysis of turbine water samples appears to identify a
predominantly fuel-overheat event, with clear indications of some fuel melting
as well...
...A mix of the radionuclides similar to those listed in Table 3 (and
others not yet identified) [table 3 lists iodine-131, cesium isotopes and
barium-140] was therefore likely released to the atmosphere in gaseous (and
possibly some particulate) form and to the sea in liquid (and possibly some
particulate) form."
The authors also presented two tables to help
readers determine under which
scenario (either fuel-melt or fuel-overheat) (a) what would get released under (b) what
temperatures and (c) at what relative quantities. (We took the liberty of putting
table 1 & 2 into the accompanying graphic with some of our own edits.)
Here's what the authors wrote to describe these tables.
"Table 1 presents estimates of the available total radioactive releases for these respective scenarios based on a
2,400-MWt reactor (14) and identifies the fuel temperatures
needed for each such condition. The specific percentage
of each fission product released from the core is estimated
to be higher in fuel-melt than in fuel-overheat conditions
(Table 2) (14). Although both conditions likely result in a
significant release of noble gases, iodine, and cesium, there
are differences among these conditions for the other fission
products."
Unlocking the mysteries of Fukushima in Springtime 2011
Understanding volatilization is the key to understanding
the nuclear crisis and the unfolding of a science scandal with regards to Fukushima. In the article
'NUCLEAR CRISIS: HOW IT HAPPENED / Government radiation data disclosure--too little, too late'
published
in the June 11, 2011 edition of the Japanese paper 'The Yomiuri Shimbun,' the journalists reveal
that Japan's NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) had withheld (until June '11) vital information
that it knew about [next page]
