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Sushi and Rev. Moon

Posted by ftrsupplemental ⋅ April 11, 2006Post a comment Email This Post Email This Post Print This Post Print This Post
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How Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing appetite for sushi is help­ing to sup­port his con­tro­ver­sial church

By Mon­ica Eng, Del­roy Alexan­der and David Jack­son
Tri­bune staff reporters
Pub­lished by The Chicago Tri­bune April 11, 2006

On a mis­sion from their leader, five young men arrived in Chicago to open a lit­tle fish shop on Elston Avenue. Back then, in 1980, peo­ple of their faith were cas­ti­gated as “Moonies” and called cult mem­bers. Yet the Japan­ese and Amer­i­can friends worked gru­el­ing hours and slept in a com­mu­nal apart­ment as they slowly built the foun­da­tion of a com­mer­cial empire.

They were led by the vision of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed mes­siah who sus­tained their spir­its as they played their part in ful­fill­ing the global busi­ness plan he had devised.

Moon founded his con­tro­ver­sial Uni­fi­ca­tion Church six decades ago with the procla­ma­tion that he was asked by Jesus to save human­ity. But he also built the empire blend­ing his con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics, savvy cap­i­tal­ism and flair for spec­ta­cles such as mass wed­dings in Madi­son Square Garden.

In a remark­able story that has gone largely untold, Moon and his fol­low­ers cre­ated an enter­prise that reaped mil­lions of dol­lars by dom­i­nat­ing one of America’s trendi­est indul­gences: sushi.

Today, one of those five Elston Avenue pio­neers, Takeshi Yashiro, serves as a top exec­u­tive of a sprawl­ing con­glom­er­ate that sup­plies much of the raw fish Amer­i­cans eat.

Adher­ing to a plan Moon spelled out more than three decades ago in a series of ser­mons, mem­bers of his move­ment man­aged to inte­grate vir­tu­ally every facet of the highly com­pet­i­tive seafood indus­try. The Moon fol­low­ers’ seafood oper­a­tion is dri­ven by a com­mer­cial pow­er­house, known as True World Group. It builds fleets of boats, runs dozens of dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters and, each day, sup­plies most of the nation’s esti­mated 9,000 sushi restaurants.

Although few seafood lovers may con­sider they’re indi­rectly sup­port­ing Moon’s reli­gious move­ment, they do just that when they eat a but­tery slice of tuna or munch on a morsel of eel in many restau­rants. True World is so ubiq­ui­tous that 14 of 17 promi­nent Chicago sushi restau­rants sur­veyed by the Tri­bune said they were sup­plied by the company.

Over the last three decades, as Moon has faced down accu­sa­tions of brain­wash­ing fol­low­ers and per­son­ally prof­it­ing from the church, he and sushi have made sim­i­lar if unlikely jour­neys from the fringes of Amer­i­can soci­ety to the mainstream.

These par­al­lel paths are not coin­ci­dence. They reflect Moon’s dream of revi­tal­iz­ing and dom­i­nat­ing the Amer­i­can fish­ing indus­try while help­ing to fund his church’s activities.

“I have the entire sys­tem worked out, start­ing with boat build­ing,” Moon said in “The Way of Tuna,” a speech given in 1980. “After we build the boats, we catch the fish and process them for the mar­ket, and then have a dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work. This is not just on the draw­ing board; I have already done it.”

In the same speech, he called him­self “king of the ocean.” It proved not to be an idle boast. The busi­nesses now employ hun­dreds, includ­ing non-church mem­bers, from the frigid waters of the Alaskan coast to the iconic Amer­i­can fish­ing town of Glouces­ter, Mass.

Records and inter­views with church insid­ers and com­peti­tors trace how Moon and mem­bers of his move­ment car­ried out his vision.

In a recent inter­view Rev. Phillip Schanker, a Uni­fi­ca­tion Church spokesman, said the seafood busi­nesses were “not orga­ni­za­tion­ally or legally con­nected” to Moon’s church, but were sim­ply “busi­nesses founded by mem­bers of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church.”

Schanker com­pared the rela­tion­ship to suc­cess­ful busi­ness owners-such as J. Willard “Bill” Mar­riott, a promi­nent Mor­mon who founded the hotel chain that bears his name-who donate money to their church.

“Mar­riott sup­ports the Mor­mon Church but no one who checks into a Mar­riott Hotel thinks they are deal­ing with Mor­monism,” he said. “In the same way I would hope that every busi­ness founded by a mem­ber based on inspi­ra­tion from Rev. Moon’s vision also would be in a posi­tion to sup­port the church.”

LEADER’S SEAFOOD STRATEGY

But links between Moon’s reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion and the fish busi­nesses are spelled out in court and gov­ern­ment records as well as in state­ments by Moon and his top church offi­cials. For one thing, Moon per­son­ally devised the seafood strat­egy, helped fund it at its out­set and served as a direc­tor of one of its ear­li­est companies.

Moon’s Uni­fi­ca­tion Church is orga­nized under a tax-exempt non-profit entity called The Holy Spirit Asso­ci­a­tion for the Uni­fi­ca­tion of World Chris­tian­ity. The busi­nesses are con­trolled by a sep­a­rate non-profit com­pany called Uni­fi­ca­tion Church Inter­na­tional Inc., or UCI.

That company’s con­nec­tions to Moon’s Uni­fi­ca­tion Church go deeper than the shared name. A 1978 con­gres­sional inves­ti­ga­tion into Moon’s busi­nesses con­cluded: “It was unclear whether the UCI had any inde­pen­dent func­tions other than serv­ing as a finan­cial clear­ing­house for var­i­ous Moon orga­ni­za­tion sub­sidiaries and projects.”

UCI as well as its sub­sidiaries and affil­i­ates such as True World are run largely by church mem­bers, Schanker said. The com­pa­nies were “founded by church mem­bers in line with Rev. Moon’s vision,” he said. “It’s not coincidence.”

Some­times the links are more direct. The boat­build­ing firm US Marine Cor­po­ra­tion shares its head­quar­ters offices with the church and lists the church as its major­ity share­holder, accord­ing to cor­po­rate records.

SERVING THROUGH BUSINESS

A por­tion of True World’s prof­its makes its way to the church through the lay­ers of par­ent cor­po­ra­tions, Yashiro said, adding: “We live to serve oth­ers, and this is how we serve by build­ing a strong business.”

Moon pre­dicted in 1974 that the fish­ing busi­ness would “lay a foun­da­tion for the future econ­omy of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church.” In fact, while Moon and busi­nesses affil­i­ated with him report­edly have poured mil­lions of dol­lars into money-losing ven­tures includ­ing The Wash­ing­ton Times news­pa­per, the seafood ven­tures have cre­ated a profit-making infra­struc­ture that could last-and help sup­port the church-long after the 86-year-old Moon is gone.

Much of the foun­da­tion for that suc­cess has its roots in Chicago. True World Foods, Yashiro’s whole­sale fish dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness spawned near Lawrence and Elston Avenues, now oper­ates from a 30,000-square-foot com­plex in Elk Grove Village.

The com­pany says it sup­plies hun­dreds of local sushi and fine-dining estab­lish­ments. Even many who might have reli­gious reser­va­tions about buy­ing from the com­pany do so for one sim­ple rea­son: It depend­ably deliv­ers high-quality sushi.

“We try not to think of the reli­gion part,” said Haruko Ima­mura, who with her hus­band runs Katsu on West Peter­son Avenue. “We don’t agree with their reli­gion but it’s noth­ing to do with the business.”

Like Moon him­self, who served a 13-month prison sen­tence for tax fraud in the 1980s, the seafood com­pa­nies have at times run afoul of U.S. laws.

In June 2001, True World Foods’ Kodiak, Alaska, fish pro­cess­ing com­pany pleaded guilty to a fed­eral felony for accept­ing a load of pol­lock that exceeded the boat’s 300,000-pound trip limit. The firm was fined $150,000 and put on pro­ba­tion for five years under a plea agree­ment with prosecutors.

The com­pany also has been cited for san­i­ta­tion lapses by the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion. Last year, after repeated FDA inspec­tions found “gross unsan­i­tary con­di­tions” at True World’s sub­ur­ban
Detroit plant, the facil­ity man­ager tried to bar inspec­tors from pro­duc­tion areas and refused to pro­vide records, accord­ing to an FDA report. The plant man­ager told the inspec­tors that his True World super­vi­sor was “a great man, that he was a part of a new reli­gion, and that if we took advan­tage of him, then ‘God help you!’.”

Later, accord­ing to that FDA report, an employee wear­ing a ski mask approached one female inspec­tor, put his thumb and fore­fin­ger in the shape of a gun, pointed at her and said: “You’re out of uni­form. Pow!”

Say­ing they had been “hin­dered, intim­i­dated and threat­ened,” the FDA inspec­tors took the unusual step of secur­ing a court order com­pelling True World to let them inspect the facil­ity. Yashiro, chief exec­u­tive of True World Foods, said in a writ­ten state­ment that the “iso­lated instance ..... arose from a mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” The plant is now closed; Yashiro said its oper­a­tions were con­sol­i­dated into the Elk Grove Vil­lage plant in Jan­u­ary, adding: “We main­tain the high­est stan­dards of food safety.”

THE OCEAN KING’S VISION

In the late 1970s, Moon laid out a plan to build seafood oper­a­tions in all 50 states as part of what he called “the oceanic providence.”

This dream of har­vest­ing the sea would help fund the church, feed the world and save the Amer­i­can fish­ing indus­try, Moon said.

He even sug­gested that the church’s mass wed­dings could play a role in the busi­ness plan by mak­ing Amer­i­can cit­i­zens out of Japan­ese mem­bers of the move­ment. This would help them avoid fish­ing restric­tions applied to foreigners.

“A few years ago the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment set up a 200-mile limit for off­shore fish­ing by for­eign boats,” Moon said in the 1980 “Way of Tuna” ser­mon. But by mar­ry­ing Japan­ese mem­bers to Amer­i­cans, “we are not for­eign­ers; there­fore Japan­ese broth­ers, par­tic­u­larly those matched to Amer­i­cans, are becom­ing ..... lead­ers for fish­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion” of his movement’s businesses.

Sushi’s pop­u­lar­ity had flow­ered enough by 1986 for Moon to gloat that Amer­i­cans who once thought Japan­ese were “just like ani­mals, eat­ing raw fish,” were now “pay­ing a great deal of money, eat­ing at expen­sive sushi restau­rants.” He rec­om­mended that his flock open “1,000 restau­rants” in America.

In fash­ion­ing a chain of busi­nesses that would stretch from the ocean to restau­rant tables across Amer­ica, Moon and his fol­low­ers cre­ated a struc­ture uniquely able to cap­i­tal­ize on the nation’s grow­ing appetite for sushi and fresh fish.

Some of the busi­ness start-up funds came from the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church. In a seven-month period from Octo­ber 1976 to May 1977, Moon signed some of the nearly $1 mil­lion in checks used to estab­lish the fish­ing busi­ness, accord­ing to a 1978 con­gres­sional report on alle­ga­tions of impro­pri­eties by Moon’s church.

After acquir­ing an ail­ing boat­mak­ing oper­a­tion, Mas­ter Marine, Moon and his fol­low­ers turned their atten­tion to estab­lish­ing the next link in the net­work. Church mem­bers who saw fish­ing as their call­ing took to the seas, many pow­ered by Mas­ter Marine boats. Moon’s Ocean Church would bring together mem­bers and poten­tial con­verts for 40-day tuna fish­ing trips every sum­mer in 80 boats he bought for his followers.

Many of the tour­na­ments took place off the coast of Glouces­ter, Mass., by no coin­ci­dence one of the first homes to a church-affiliated seafood pro­cess­ing plant. Moon proudly declared in his “Way of Tuna” speech that “Glouces­ter is almost a Moonie town now!” (The church has since rejected the term Moonies as derogatory.)

FROM ANGER TO ACCEPTANCE

Some­times work­ing sur­rep­ti­tiously, Moon affil­i­ates and fol­low­ers bought large chunks of the key fish­ing towns–in each case ini­tially spark­ing anger and sus­pi­cion from long­time residents.

The church and its mem­bers cre­ated an uproar when they bought a villa that had been a retire­ment home run by Roman Catholic nuns. Moon was hanged in effigy in the local harbor.

Even­tu­ally, such resis­tance with­ered away. In Bayou La Batre, Ala., Rus­sell Steiner was among com­mu­nity lead­ers who clashed with the new­com­ers. But like many in the town, Steiner has mel­lowed con­sid­er­ably since the church’s arrival. “They have been very active in the com­mu­nity and are very nice peo­ple, actu­ally,” he said.

The Alabama shrimp busi­ness is among the largest in the Gulf of Mex­ico, and the nearby boat-building plant has not only built more than 300 boats, but also done repairs on the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy ships, accord­ing to fed­eral documents.

And the fish busi­nesses have thrived. Com­pany offi­cials say the whole­sale dis­tri­b­u­tion arm, True World Foods, had rev­enue of $250 mil­lion last year.

Accord­ing to True World Foods, its fleet of 230 refrig­er­ated trucks deliv­ers raw fish to 7,000 sushi and fine-dining restau­rants nation­wide. Dozens of those trucks leave each day from the Elk Grove Vil­lage ware­house, one of 22 dis­tri­b­u­tion facil­i­ties around the country.

True World Foods’ Alaska plant processes more than 20 mil­lion pounds of salmon, cod and pol­lock each year, the com­pany says. Its Inter­na­tional Lob­ster oper­a­tion in Glouces­ter ships monk­fish and lob­ster around the world from a 25,000-square-foot cold stor­age facil­ity that is among the largest on the East Coast.

And it is again in an expan­sion­ist mood. True World recently opened up shop in Eng­land and estab­lished offices in Japan and Korea, set­ting its sights on the world’s biggest mar­ket for sushi.

AN EMPIRE’S CHICAGO ROOTS

When Takeshi Yashiro arrived in Chicago in 1980 to help set up one of the ear­li­est out­posts of the fish­ing empire, the area had just a hand­ful of sushi joints. That num­ber has bal­looned to more than 200 restau­rants statewide, and Yashiro’s fish house has flourished.

The son of an Epis­co­palian Japan­ese min­is­ter, he immi­grated to the U.S. and joined the church as a stu­dent in San Fran­cisco. On July 1, 1982, Moon blessed Yashiro and his bride along with more than 2,000 other cou­ples in one of his mass wed­ding cer­e­monies, in New York City’s Madi­son Square Garden.

The Rain­bow Fish House that Yashiro and fel­low church mem­bers founded on Chicago’s North­west Side has become not only the city’s dom­i­nant sushi sup­plier but also the nation’s. The fish house became True World Foods, which buys so much tuna from around the world that it has seven peo­ple in Chicago solely ded­i­cated to sourc­ing and pric­ing the best grades.

One of True World’s advan­tages is that its sales force speaks Chi­nese, Korean and Japan­ese, mak­ing it easy for first-generation eth­nic restau­rant own­ers to do busi­ness with them.

“It’s kind of tough to com­pete in this indus­try with a com­pany that is so global, has a major pres­ence in almost every mar­ket and that is dri­ven by reli­gious fer­vor,” said Bill Dugan, who has been in the fish busi­ness for almost 30 years and owns the Fish Guy Mar­ket on Elston Avenue, near the orig­i­nal Rain­bow shop. “We should all be so blessed.”

But not all of True World’s employ­ees are church mem­bers. Tuna buyer Eddie Lin recently left True World for For­tune Fish Co., a local rival. Lin said his for­mer work­place was not overtly reli­gious, but he added that as a non-church mem­ber he felt his abil­ity to advance was lim­ited. “You can feel the dif­fer­ence between the way they see mem­bers and non-members,” Lin said.

FAITH-BASED BUSINESS CULTURE

While dis­put­ing such asser­tions, Yashiro noted that new employ­ees “have to know that the founder is the founder of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church. It’s a very clear dis­tinc­tion between join­ing the church or not join­ing the church. There’s no dis­crim­i­na­tion, but I think our cul­ture is def­i­nitely based on our faith.”

It’s that faith that makes some uneasy. Wang Kim, a Chicago-area youth min­istry direc­tor and M
oon critic, was cer­tain he could find local Korean Chris­t­ian sushi restau­ra­teurs who didn’t use True World because they might con­sider his views hereti­cal. As Kim said, Moon “says that he is the Mes­siah, and we hate that.”

But Kim called back empty-handed. “I checked with sev­eral of my friends,” he said, “and they know it is from Moon but they have to use [them because] they have to give qual­ity to their customers.”

The sheer suc­cess of the ven­ture has left lin­ger­ing ques­tions even in the minds of Moon’s ded­i­cated fol­low­ers. Yashiro, the Chicago pio­neer who now heads True World Foods, remem­bers ded­i­cat­ing his career and life 26 years ago to achiev­ing Moon’s dream, which included solv­ing world hunger.

But that part of Moon’s grand vision has yet to mate­ri­al­ize. “I was won­der­ing if we are really here to solve the world’s hunger,” Yashiro said. “Every day I ..... pray on it.”

He still hopes True World Foods even­tu­ally will help end hunger. But until then, he said, his role will be to grow the busi­ness and make money.

Discussion

10 comments for “Sushi and Rev. Moon”

  1. With radi­a­tion show­ing up in Tokyo’s super­mar­kets, it’s worth not­ing that True World is still up to its old tricks.

    From sea to sushi bar, a sys­tem open to abuse
    Boston Globe
    By Beth Daley and Jenn Abel­son, Globe Staff
    ...
    Over­all, the test­ing revealed that nearly half of 183 fish sam­ples col­lected at restau­rants and super­mar­kets were not the species ordered.

    Mass­a­chu­setts has long played a major role in the nation’s seafood indus­try, with both fresh catches and frozen fish being sent here to get processed. Last year, about $673 mil­lion worth of seafood was processed in Mass­a­chu­setts, accord­ing to the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion Fish­eries Ser­vice, enough to rank the state fourth in the nation. (Alaska tops the list.)

    The Globe inves­ti­ga­tion found that the major­ity of the restau­rants sell­ing mis­la­beled fish get their prod­ucts from a hand­ful of dis­trib­u­tors, includ­ing True World Foods and Gold­well Trad­ing, which oper­ate Boston ware­houses. Some sup­pli­ers implic­itly or overtly encour­age seafood mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, accord­ing to restau­ra­teurs and their employees.

    Restau­rant invoices and prod­uct cat­a­logs that were pro­vided to the Globe show that sup­pli­ers often use two names for one species of fish. For exam­ple, Gold­well Trad­ing, which deliv­ers sushi to about 150 restau­rants in Mass­a­chu­setts, describes the same fish as white tuna and esco­lar on its invoices. The cat­a­log of True World, a large sup­plier that says it deliv­ers to high-profile clients such as the Red Sox club­house at Fen­way Park, lists it the same way.
    ...

    Posted by terrafractyl | October 25, 2011, 7:07 am

  2. Con­sid­er­ing the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church’s dom­i­nant role in the Gulf of Mex­ico shrimp­ing busi­ness, the recent NY Times report on the dec­i­mated shrimp pop­u­la­tions in the Gulf is extra wor­ry­ing. You also have to won­der how much of that $20 bil­lion BP-spill com­pen­sa­tion fund is head­ing into the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church’s cof­fers (since it doesn’t sound like the local res­i­dents have had much luck get­ting their hands on it). Oh well, at least it sounds like it’s safe to eat! *eye roll*

    Gulf Shrimp Are Scarce This Sea­son; Answers, Too
    By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
    Pub­lished: Octo­ber 10, 2011

    LAFITTE, La. — The dock at Bundy’s Seafood is quiet, the trucks are empty and a crew a frac­tion of the nor­mal size sits around a table wait­ing for some­thing to do. But the most telling indi­ca­tor that some­thing is wrong is the smell. It smells per­fectly fine.

    “There’s no shrimp,” explained Grant Bundy, 38. The dock should smell like a place where 10,000 pounds of shrimp a day are bought off the boats. Not this year. In all of Sep­tem­ber, Bundy’s Seafood bought around 41,000 pounds.

    White shrimp sea­son began in late August, and two months in, the shrimpers here say it is a bad one, if not the worst in mem­ory. It is bad not just in spots but all over south­east­ern Louisiana, said Jules Nunez, 78, call­ing it the worst sea­son he had seen since he began shrimp­ing in 1950. Some fish­er­men said their catches were off by 80 per­cent or more.

    “A lot of peo­ple say it’s this, it’s that, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s BP,” Mr. Nunez said. “We just don’t know.”

    ...

    Those who work in the gulf seafood indus­try, as well as their lawyers, have watched closely for signs of a species col­lapse sim­i­lar to the one that dec­i­mated the her­ring fish­ery four years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. The causes of even that col­lapse remain a mat­ter of dis­pute, but it is often cited as an exam­ple of the delayed dis­as­ter that shrimpers and oth­ers fear.

    This con­cern was stoked fur­ther by a recent study by L.S.U. researchers that reported that a species of fish abun­dant in Gulf marshes was show­ing signs of cel­lu­lar dam­age, prob­lems typ­i­cally due to expo­sure to oil. The func­tions of the fish, a min­now called the kil­li­fish, have been affected in ways that could harm repro­duc­tion, the study found.

    Seafood indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives say there is enough uncer­tainty to raise doubts that the shrimp har­vest will recover by 2012, a sup­po­si­tion in a report that Ken­neth R. Fein­berg, the admin­is­tra­tor of the $20 bil­lion com­pen­sa­tion fund for vic­tims of the spill, used in his for­mula for deter­min­ing final settlements.

    ...

    Con­cerns about the lack of shrimp are dif­fer­ent from con­cerns about the state of shrimp that are found. Repeated stud­ies have shown gulf seafood is safe to eat, a fact trum­peted by indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives and gov­ern­ment officials, who launched a gulf seafood safety Web site last week to reas­sure consumers.

    Posted by terrafractyl | October 26, 2011, 10:16 am

  3. Another chill­ing round of updates just released sug­gests 20 times more cesium was leaked into the ocean dur­ing the ini­tial radi­a­tion release then pre­vi­ously esti­mated, putting the total esti­mate for the ocean release at 27,000 bec­querels (the ‘Lit­tle Boy’ bomb released 89 bec­querels, for ref­er­ence). Note that this is just the ini­tial release in the to ocean and atmos­phere and doesn’t appear to include all of the radi­a­tion that has been leak­ing from the plants since then as a result of rain and spraying.

    There’s also a new esti­mate of the clean up time: 3 years before radioac­tive waste dis­posal facil­i­ties will be online and 30 years for a com­plete cleanup.

    Fukushima Plant Released Record Amount of Radi­a­tion Into Sea
    Bloomberg
    Octo­ber 31, 2011, 5:10 AM EDT

    Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) — The destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan was respon­si­ble for the biggest dis­charge of radioac­tive mate­r­ial into the ocean in his­tory, a study from a French nuclear safety insti­tute said.

    The radioac­tive cesium that flowed into the sea from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant was 20 times the amount esti­mated by its owner, Tokyo Elec­tric Power Co., accord­ing to the study by the Insti­tute for Radi­o­log­i­cal Pro­tec­tion and Nuclear Safety, which is funded by the French government.

    It’s the sec­ond report released in a week call­ing into ques­tion esti­mates from Japan’s gov­ern­ment and the oper­a­tor of the plant that was dam­aged in the March earth­quake and tsunami. The Fukushima sta­tion may have emit­ted more than dou­ble the company’s esti­mate of atmos­pheric release at the height of the worst civil atomic cri­sis since Cher­nobyl in 1986, accord­ing to a study in the Atmos­pheric Chem­istry and Physics journal.

    he oceanic study esti­mates 27,000 ter­abec­querels of radioac­tive cesium 137 leaked into the sea from the Fukushima plant, north of Tokyo.

    Tepco is aware of the esti­mate from the insti­tute through media reports and has no com­ment, spokesman Hajime Moto­juku said today by phone.
    ....

    Fukushima nuclear plant could take 30 years to clean up
    Removal of fuel rods and decom­mis­sion­ing of reac­tors could take decades, warns Japan’s atomic com­mis­sion
    Justin McCurry in Tokyo and agen­cies
    guardian.co.uk, Mon­day 31 Octo­ber 2011 04.14 EDT

    Experts in Japan have warned it could take more than 30 years to clean up the Fukushima Dai­ichi power plant.

    A panel set up by the country’s nuclear energy com­mis­sion said the sever­ity of the acci­dent meant it would take decades to remove melted fuel rods and decom­mis­sion the plant, located 150 miles north of Tokyo.

    The com­mis­sion called on the facility’s oper­a­tor, Tokyo Elec­tric Power (Tepco), to begin remov­ing the fuel rods within 10 years. The dam­age to Fukushima is more dif­fi­cult to repair than that sus­tained at Three Mile Island, where fuel removal began six years after an acci­dent in 1979.

    Work to decom­mis­sion four of Fukushima’s six reac­tors could start this year if Tepco brings the plant to a safe state known as cold shutdown.

    The util­ity will begin by remov­ing spent fuel from stor­age pools within three years of mak­ing the reac­tors safe, before begin­ning the more dif­fi­cult task of remov­ing melted fuel from the three reac­tors that suf­fered meltdown.

    While radi­a­tion emis­sions have dropped sig­nif­i­cantly since the 11 March earth­quake and tsunami, work­ers con­tinue to oper­ate in highly dan­ger­ous conditions.

    Towns near Fukushima have responded cau­tiously to plans to build tem­po­rary stor­age sites for mas­sive quan­ti­ties of radioac­tive debris gen­er­ated by the accident.

    Almost eight months after the start of the cri­sis the gov­ern­ment says the facil­i­ties will not be ready for at least another three years. In the mean­time, towns will have to store the con­t­a­m­i­nated waste locally, despite health con­cerns.
    ...
    Much of the early decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion work has been per­formed by local author­i­ties and vol­un­teers, although nei­ther has found a sat­is­fac­tory means of stor­ing the waste. The cen­tral gov­ern­ment is not expected to take con­trol of the cleanup oper­a­tion until a decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion law is passed in Jan­u­ary.
    ...

    Posted by terrafractyl | October 31, 2011, 6:53 am

  4. two steps for­ward: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204479504576636503693856820.html
    “
    ...
    Tepco said that emis­sions from the plant are now esti­mated at 100 mil­lion bec­querels per hour, or one eight-millionth of their peak on March 15, though Tepco offi­cials noted cur­rent lev­els are still higher than normal.

    The assess­ment came after tem­per­a­tures in the three dam­aged reac­tor cores all recently fell below 100 degrees Cel­sius, stop­ping radioac­tive steam from being emit­ted into the atmos­phere.

    “Stop­ping the steam leak­age is a major step for­ward in terms of radi­a­tion con­trol,” said Tadashi Narabayashi, pro­fes­sor of reac­tor engi­neer­ing at Hokkaido Uni­ver­sity.
    ...
    ”

    one step back:
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011–11-01/tepco-says-nuclear-fission-possible-at-fukushima-plant-2-.html

    “
    ...
    Tokyo Elec­tric Power Co. detected signs of nuclear fis­sion at its crip­pled Fukushima atomic power plant, rais­ing the risk of increased radi­a­tion emis­sions. No increase in radi­a­tion was found at the site and the sit­u­a­tion is under con­trol, offi­cials said.

    The com­pany, known as Tepco, began spray­ing boric acid on the No. 2 reac­tor at 2:48 a.m. Japan time to pre­vent acci­den­tal chain reac­tions. Tepco said it may have found xenon, which is asso­ci­ated with nuclear fis­sion, while exam­in­ing gases taken from the reac­tor, accord­ing to an e-mailed state­ment today.
    ...
    ”

    and one very ill advised drink of water: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/japanese-official-drinks-water-from-fukushima-reactor-buildings/

    “
    ...

    As Asahi Shim­bun explained, that skep­ti­cal mood was obvi­ous last month when a jour­nal­ist dared Mr. Son­oda to drink some of the water.

    At an Oct. 10 news con­fer­ence hosted by Tepco, a free­lance writer said: “Because we are pro­hib­ited from enter­ing the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant grounds, we have to trust the infor­ma­tion pro­vided by Tepco. If the water is really safe enough to drink, can you pro­vide the water in glasses and have every­one drink it?”

    Three days later, a muck­rak­ing jour­nal­ist named Yu Tera­sawa pointed out to Mr. Son­oda that, in 1996, when the pub­lic was con­cerned that radish sprouts might be con­t­a­m­i­nated with E. coli bac­te­ria, the Japan­ese health min­is­ter at the time ate some to demon­strate his faith in the food’s safety. “Since Tepco offi­cials said the water is safe enough to drink,” the jour­nal­ist asked, “why don’t you drink a cup? Will you drink it?”

    On Mon­day, after gulp­ing down half a glass of the water, Mr. Son­oda said: “Just because I drank the water does not mean that its safety has been con­firmed, so there is no sig­nif­i­cance to the act. I drank it because a request had been made.”
    ...
    ”

    Posted by terrafractyl | November 2, 2011, 10:12 am

  5. The phrase “avoid­ing own­er­ship of the prob­lem” comes to mind. Some less pleas­ant phrases too:

    TEPCO: Radioac­tive sub­stances belong to landown­ers, not us
    Novem­ber 24, 2011

    By TOMOHIRO IWATA / Asahi Shim­bun Weekly AERA

    Dur­ing court pro­ceed­ings con­cern­ing a radioac­tive golf course, Tokyo Elec­tric Power Co. stunned lawyers by say­ing the util­ity was not respon­si­ble for decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion because it no longer “owned” the radioac­tive substances.

    “Radioac­tive mate­ri­als (such as cesium) that scat­tered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to indi­vid­ual landown­ers there, not TEPCO,” the util­ity said.

    That argu­ment did not sit well with the com­pa­nies that own and oper­ate the Sun­field Nihon­matsu Golf Club, just 45 kilo­me­ters west of the stricken TEPCO plant in Fukushima Prefecture.

    The Tokyo Dis­trict Court also rejected that idea.

    But in a rul­ing described as incon­sis­tent by lawyers, the court essen­tially freed TEPCO from respon­si­bil­ity for decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion work, say­ing the cleanup efforts should be done by the cen­tral and local governments.

    Although the legal bat­tle has moved to a higher court, observers said that if the dis­trict court’s deci­sion stands and becomes a prece­dent, local gov­ern­ments’ cof­fers could be drained.

    The two golf com­pa­nies in August filed for a pro­vi­sional dis­po­si­tion with the Tokyo Dis­trict Court, demand­ing TEPCO decon­t­a­m­i­nate the golf course and pay about 87 mil­lion yen ($1.13 mil­lion) for the upkeep costs over six months.

    ...

    The golf course com­pany com­mis­sioned a radi­a­tion test­ing agency to check the course on Nov. 13. It detected 235,000 bec­querels of cesium per kilo­gram of grass, a level that would put the area into a no-entry zone under safety stan­dards enforced after the 1986 Cher­nobyl disaster.

    On Nov. 17, radioac­tive stron­tium at 98 bec­querels per kilo­gram was detected in the grass and ground.

    Asked about TEPCO’s doubts con­cern­ing the city’s radi­a­tion mea­sure­ments, Nihon­matsu Mayor Kei­ichi Miho said, “We made the utmost efforts when we con­ducted the checks.”

    A TEPCO offi­cial told The Asahi Shim­bun that com­pany will refrain from com­ment­ing on the legal battle.

    Posted by terrafractyl | November 30, 2011, 1:55 pm

  6. Some good news from Dec 1:

    Japan may announce Fukushima cold shut­down on Dec. 16: Yomiuri

    TOKYO | Thu Dec 1, 2011 8:26pm EST

    (Reuters) — Japan may announce on Decem­ber 16 that tsunami-damaged nuclear reac­tors in Fukushima are in a cold shut­down, the Yomi­uri news­pa­per reported on Fri­day, an impor­tant mile­stone in its plan to bring under con­trol the worst nuclear acci­dent in 25 years.

    The Fukushima Dai­ichi plant, 240 km (150 miles) north­east of Tokyo, was wrecked by the March 11 earth­quake and tsunami, which knocked out reac­tor cool­ing sys­tems, caus­ing melt­downs of nuclear fuel rods.

    A cold shut­down is when water used to cool nuclear fuel rods remains below its boil­ing point, pre­vent­ing the fuel from reheating.

    Prime Min­is­ter Yoshi­hiko Noda may declare a cold shut­down because a Novem­ber 30 analy­sis by plant oper­a­tor Tokyo Elec­tric Power Co showed that tem­per­a­tures for the nuclear fuel lying at the bot­tom of the con­tain­ment ves­sel have sta­bi­lized, the paper said.

    Radi­a­tion lev­els at the reac­tors have also fallen sig­nif­i­cantly, it said.

    Declar­ing a cold shut­down will have reper­cus­sions well beyond the plant as it is one of the cri­te­ria the gov­ern­ment has said must be met before it begins allow­ing 80,000 res­i­dents evac­u­ated from within a 20 km (12 mile) radius of the plant to return home.

    ...

    You have to won­der how soon res­i­dents are going to return to the quar­an­tined region now that it’s tech­ni­cally allowable.

    Another huge advan­tage of get­ting to the “cold-shutdown” sta­tus is that Tepco no longer has to keep pump­ing water into build­ings. This issue was high­lighted last week with another announce­ment. It was good news, in a bad sort of way:

    Fukushima nuclear plant scraps plan to dump water into sea
    The deci­sion comes after the util­ity released more than 10,000 tons of water tainted with low lev­els of radi­a­tion in April.
    By Reuter­sThu, Dec 08 2011 at 10:20 PM EST

    TOKYO — Japan’s crip­pled Fukushima nuclear power plant said Fri­day it has scrapped a plan to dump water it treated for radi­a­tion con­t­a­m­i­na­tion into the sea fol­low­ing fierce protests from fish­ing groups.

    That caused an uproar among Japan­ese fish­ing cooperatives.

    ...

    Tepco esti­mates that the amount of treated water requir­ing stor­age is increas­ing by 200 to 500 tons every day. It says the plant is likely to reach its stor­age capac­ity of about 155,000 tons around March.

    The util­ity released more than 10,000 tons of water tainted with low lev­els of radi­a­tion in April to free up space for water with much higher lev­els of radioac­tiv­ity, draw­ing sharp crit­i­cism from neigh­bors such as South Korea and China.

    Yes, achiev­ing cold shut­down is indeed a hugely impor­tant achieve­ment:

    IAEA wel­comes Japan’s announce­ment of cold shut­down at Fukushima plant
    (Mainichi Japan) Decem­ber 17, 2011

    VIENNA (Kyodo) — The Inter­na­tional Atomic Energy Agency on Fri­day wel­comed the Japan­ese government’s announce­ment that the crip­pled Fukushima Dai­ichi nuclear power plant has achieved a sta­ble state of cold shutdown.

    Tokyo Elec­tric Power Co., the plant’s oper­a­tor, and the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment have “made sig­nif­i­cant progress,” IAEA Direc­tor Gen­eral Yukiya Amano said in a statement.

    Amano also said the IAEA will con­tinue mon­i­tor­ing the sta­tus of the plant and radi­a­tion data in the wake of the nuclear disaster.

    “The agency con­tin­ues to stand ready to pro­vide nec­es­sary assis­tance to Japan as requested,” he said.

    (Mainichi Japan) Decem­ber 17, 2011

    Well that has to have the IAEA breath­ing a sigh of relief.

    In other tan­gen­tially related news...

    ’Absolutely no progress being made’ at Fukushima nuke plant, under­cover reporter says

    Posted by terrafractyl | December 16, 2011, 9:51 pm

  7. Health offi­cials want you to know that there’s still noth­ing to be wor­ried about...:

    After Fukushima, fish tales

    Mon­treal Gazette
    By Alex Roslin, The Gazette Jan­u­ary 14, 2012

    After the world’s WORST nuclear acci­dent in 25 years, author­i­ties in Canada said peo­ple liv­ing here were safe and faced no health risks from the fall­out from Fukushima.

    They said most of the radi­a­tion from the crip­pled Japan­ese nuclear power plant would fall into the ocean, where it would be diluted and not pose any danger.

    ...

    Dewar, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Physi­cians for Global Sur­vival, a Cana­dian anti-nuclear group, says the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment has down­played the radi­a­tion risks from Fukushima and is doing lit­tle to mon­i­tor them.

    “We sus­pect we’re going to see more can­cers, decreased fetal via­bil­ity, decreased fer­til­ity, increased meta­bolic defects — and we expect them to be gen­er­a­tional,” she said.

    And evi­dence has emerged that the impacts of the dis­as­ter on the Pacific Ocean are worse than expected.

    Since a tsunami and earth­quake destroyed the Fukushima Dai­ichi Nuclear Power Plant last March, radioac­tive cesium has con­sis­tently been found in 60 to 80 per cent of Japan­ese fish­ing catches each month tested by Japan’s Fish­eries Agency.

    In Novem­ber, 65 per cent of the catches tested pos­i­tive for cesium (a radioac­tive mate­r­ial cre­ated by nuclear reac­tors), accord­ing to a Gazette analy­sis of data on the fish­eries agency’s web­site. Cesium is a long-lived radionu­clide that per­sists in the envi­ron­ment and increases the risk of can­cer, accord­ing to the United States Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, which says the most com­mon form of radioac­tive cesium has a half-life of 30 years.

    The Cana­dian Food Inspec­tion Agency, which mon­i­tors food safety, says it is aware of the num­bers but says the amounts of cesium detected are small.

    “Approx­i­mately 60 per cent of fish have shown to have detectable lev­els of radionu­clides,” it said in an emailed statement.

    “The major­ity of exported fish to Canada are caught much far­ther from the coast of Japan, and the Japan­ese test­ing has shown that these fish have not been con­t­a­m­i­nated with high lev­els of radionuclides.”

    But the Japan­ese data shows ele­vated lev­els of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in sev­eral seafood species that Japan has exported to Canada in recent years.

    In Novem­ber, 18 per cent of cod exceeded a new radi­a­tion ceil­ing for food to be imple­mented in Japan in April — along with 21 per cent of eel, 22 per cent of sole and 33 per cent of seaweed.

    Over­all, one in five of the 1,100 catches tested in Novem­ber exceeded the new ceil­ing of 100 bec­querels per kilo­gram. (Canada’s ceil­ing for radi­a­tion in food is much higher: 1,000 bec­querels per kilo.)

    ...

    Fisher is research­ing how radi­a­tion from Fukushima is affect­ing the Pacific fish­ery. “There has been vir­tu­ally zero mon­i­tor­ing and research on this,” he said, call­ing on other gov­ern­ments to do more radi­a­tion tests on the ocean’s marine life.

    “Is it some­thing we need to be ter­ri­fied of ? No. Is it some­thing we need to mon­i­tor? Yes, par­tic­u­larly in coastal waters where con­cen­tra­tions are high.”

    ...

    In Octo­ber, a U.S. study — coau­thored by oceanog­ra­pher Ken Bues­seler, a senior sci­en­tist at the non-profit Woods Hole Oceano­graphic Insti­tu­tion in Woods Hole, Mass., — reported Fukushima caused history’s biggest-ever release of radi­a­tion into the ocean — 10 to 100 times more than the 1986 Cher­nobyl nuclear catastrophe.

    “It’s com­pletely untrue to say this level of radi­a­tion is safe or harm­less,” said Gor­don Edwards, pres­i­dent of the Cana­dian Coali­tion for Nuclear Respon­si­bil­ity.
    ...

    “The reas­sur­ances have been com­pletely irre­spon­si­ble. To say there are no health con­cerns flies in the face of all sci­en­tific evi­dence,” said Edwards, who has advised the fed­eral auditor-general’s office and Ontario gov­ern­ment on nuclear-power issues.

    Other Fukushima impacts have been unex­pected, too. The first debris swept into the sea by the tsunami report­edly started to wash ashore on the west coast in mid-December, a year ear­lier than sci­en­tists and author­i­ties predicted.

    ...

    The Gazette ana­lyzed the Japan­ese fish­eries data for 22 seafood species that Japan has exported to Canada in recent years.

    Some cesium was found in 16 of these 22 species in Novem­ber, the last full month for which data was available.

    Cesium was espe­cially preva­lent in cer­tain of the species:

    - 73 per cent of mack­erel tested

    - 91 per cent of the halibut

    - 92 per cent of the sardines

    - 93 per cent of the tuna and eel

    - 94 per cent of the cod and anchovies

    - 100 per cent of the carp, sea-weed, shark and monkfish

    Some of the fish were caught in Japan­ese coastal waters. Other catches were made hun­dreds of kilo­me­tres away in the open ocean.

    There, the fish can also be caught by fish­ers from dozens of other nations that ply the waters of the Pacific.

    Yet, Japan is the only coun­try that appears to be sys­tem­at­i­cally test­ing fish for radi­a­tion and pub­licly report­ing the results.

    CFIA is no longer doing any test­ing of its own. It did some radi­a­tion tests on food imports from areas of Japan around the stricken nuclear plant in the weeks after the Fukushima accident.

    Only one of the 169 tested prod­ucts showed any radi­a­tion. CFIA stopped doing the tests last June, say­ing they weren’t needed.

    ...

    CFIA now relies on Japan­ese author­i­ties to screen Japan­ese food exported to Canada.

    But Japan’s mon­i­tor­ing of food has come under a storm of crit­i­cism from the Japan­ese pub­lic after food con­t­a­m­i­nated with radi­a­tion was sold to consumers.

    ...

    But despite this belief and the impor­tance of the Pacific fish­ery, few stud­ies exist on how Fukushima affected marine life.

    One of those stud­ies found that fish and crus­taceans caught in the vicin­ity of Fukushima in late March had 10,000 times more than socalled safe lev­els of radi­a­tion. The study, pub­lished last May in the jour­nal Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence & Tech­nol­ogy, also said macroal­gae had 19,000 times the safe level.

    Those lev­els were mea­sured before the Japan­ese util­ity that runs the crip­pled nuclear plant dumped 11,000 tonnes of radioac­tive water into the Pacific in April and addi­tional leaks that have released hun­dreds of tonnes more.

    But since that early study, lit­tle research has been pub­lished on the topic.

    ...

    He co-authored the study in Octo­ber that said cesium lev­els in the Pacific had gone up an aston­ish­ing 45 mil­lion times above pre-accident lev­els. The lev­els then declined rapidly for a while, but after that, they unex­pect­edly lev­elled off.

    In July, cesium lev­els stopped declin­ing and remained stuck at 10,000 times above pre-accident levels.

    It meant the ocean wasn’t dilut­ing the radi­a­tion as expected. If it had been, cesium lev­els would have kept falling. The find­ing sug­gested radi­a­tion was still being released into the ocean long after the acci­dent in March, Bues­seler said in an interview.

    “It implies the ground­wa­ter is con­t­a­m­i­nated or the facil­ity is still leak­ing radi­a­tion.”

    The Japan­ese fish­eries data seems to sup­port this con­clu­sion. Far from declin­ing, con­t­a­m­i­na­tion lev­els in some species were flat or even rose last fall, includ­ing species that Japan exports to Canada like skip­jack tuna, cod, sole and eel.

    ...

    Con­tin­u­ing radi­a­tion leaks from Fukushima could be to blame, he said. Another cul­prit, he said, may be a phe­nom­e­non called bio-magnification — the ten­dency for radi­a­tion con­cen­tra­tions to increase in species that are far­ther up the food chain.

    ...

    See no evil, hear no evil, radi­ate no evil.

    Posted by terrafractyl | January 18, 2012, 2:36 pm

  8. Of the many scary ques­tions raised by this arti­cle, per­haps the scari­est ques­tion is this: just how hell­ish did it need to get before the sit­u­a­tions was “out of con­trol”?

    The Irish Times — Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 27, 2012
    Report urg­ing mass evac­u­a­tion of Tokyo res­i­dents kept secret

    DAVID McNEILL in Tokyo

    JAPAN’S GOVERNMENT feared mil­lions of Tokyo res­i­dents might have to be evac­u­ated dur­ing the worst of last year’s nuclear cri­sis, but kept the sce­nario secret to avoid panic in some of the world’s most crowded urban areas, accord­ing to an inter­nal report.

    The 15-page report, by the Japan Atomic Energy Com­mis­sion, was deliv­ered to then prime min­is­ter Naoto Kan two weeks after the March 11th earth­quake and tsunami trig­gered the cri­sis as the Fukushima Dai­ichi nuclear plant.

    It warned that if the sit­u­a­tion at the plant spi­ralled out of con­trol, com­pul­sory or vol­un­tary evac­u­a­tion orders would have to be issued to res­i­dents liv­ing within 250km (155 miles), a radius that would have included the met­ro­pol­i­tan Tokyo area, home to about 30 mil­lion people.

    The direc­tive would have also cov­ered sev­eral large cities north and west of the plant, includ­ing Sendai, which has roughly the same pop­u­la­tion as Dublin. Some of the areas would be con­t­a­m­i­nated for “sev­eral decades” warned the report, which has been seen by AP news agency.

    Last May, oper­a­tor Tokyo Elec­tric Power Co (Tepco) admit­ted that ura­nium fuel inside three of the plant’s reac­tors had melted down in the first few days after March 11th. A series of hydro­gen explo­sions had show­ered thou­sands of square kilo­me­tres of land and sea with radioac­tive sub­stances, but gov­ern­ment and Tepco offi­cials repeat­edly denied the melt­down scenario.

    Over 80,000 peo­ple were sub­se­quently told to leave the most heav­ily irra­di­ated areas around the nuclear plant and have yet to return. Tens of thou­sands more have since left Fukushima pre­fec­ture voluntarily.

    Mr Kan and his gov­ern­ment insisted through­out March and April that the nuclear cri­sis was being con­tained and ignored calls to widen the evac­u­a­tion area, say­ing there was no need.

    After he left office, the prime min­is­ter admit­ted in an inter­view with a Tokyo news­pa­per last autumn that he feared the Fukushima dis­as­ter would leave the cap­i­tal unin­hab­it­able, and that evac­u­at­ing it would have been “impos­si­ble”. He said that the “spine-chilling thought” of a deserted cap­i­tal con­vinced him to scrap nuclear power.

    The lat­est rev­e­la­tions will revive crit­i­cism that the author­i­ties have been less than forth­com­ing since the cri­sis erupted, and add to sus­pi­cions that they are still down­play­ing the impact of radi­a­tion. Gov­ern­ment offi­cials recently admit­ted that data on where the radi­a­tion went was with­held from the Japan­ese pub­lic for 10 days, but given to the US mil­i­tary in Japan.

    The report will also add to con­cerns that Japan is unpre­pared for a sim­i­lar dis­as­ter. Last week researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Tokyo warned that there was a 75 per cent prob­a­bil­ity that the cap­i­tal would be hit by a major earth­quake in the next four years.
    ...

    Posted by terrafractyl | January 31, 2012, 7:27 pm

  9. So no one has died yet from the Fukushima radi­a­tion? Well that’s a relief:

    No big Fukushima health impact seen: U.N. body chairman

    VIENNA | Tue Jan 31, 2012 2:15pm EST

    (Reuters) — The health impact of last year’s Fukushima nuclear dis­as­ter in Japan appears rel­a­tively small thanks partly to prompt evac­u­a­tions, the chair­man of a U.N. sci­en­tific body inves­ti­gat­ing the effects of radi­a­tion said on Tuesday.

    The fact that some radioac­tive releases spread over the ocean instead of pop­u­lated areas also con­tributed to lim­it­ing the con­se­quences, said Wolf­gang Weiss of the U.N. Sci­en­tific Com­mit­tee on the effects of Atomic Radi­a­tion (UNSCEAR).

    “As far as the doses we have seen from the screen­ing of the pop­u­la­tion ... they are very low,” Weiss told Reuters. This was partly “due to the rapid evac­u­a­tion and this worked very well.”

    Weiss was speak­ing on the side­lines of a week-long meet­ing of 60 inter­na­tional experts in Vienna to assess for the United Nations the radi­a­tion expo­sures and health effects of the world’s worst nuclear acci­dent in 25 years.

    The March 11 dis­as­ter caused by a 9.0 mag­ni­tude earth­quake and tsunami wrecked the Fukushima plant on the coast north of Tokyo, trig­ger­ing a radi­a­tion cri­sis and wide­spread con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. About 80,000 res­i­dents fled a 20-km (12-mile) exclu­sion zone.

    Weiss said Japan­ese experts attend­ing the meet­ing had told him that they were not aware of any acute health effects, in con­trast to the 1986 Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter in Ukraine.

    “What we have seen in Cher­nobyl — peo­ple were dying from huge, high expo­sures, some of the work­ers were dying very soon — noth­ing along these lines has been reported so far (in Japan),” he said. “Up to now there were no acute imme­di­ate effects observed.”

    Sev­eral thou­sand chil­dren devel­oped thy­roid can­cer due to radi­a­tion expo­sure after the Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter in the then Soviet Union, when a reac­tor exploded and caught fire and radi­a­tion was sent bil­low­ing across Europe.

    Weiss said a few work­ers at Fukushima had received high radioac­tive doses, but “so far the ini­tial med­ical follow-up of these work­ers who had high doses, as far as the Japan­ese col­leagues told us, was OK.”

    ...

    Asked whether he was opti­mistic that the over­all health effects would be quite small, Weiss said: “If we find out that what we know now is rep­re­sent­ing the sit­u­a­tion, then the answer would be yes ... the health impact would be low.”

    What hap­pens if we find out that we “we know” is NOT “rep­re­sent­ing the sit­u­a­tion”?

    Posted by terrafractyl | February 2, 2012, 1:17 pm

  10. Well this is con­fi­dence inspir­ing:

    Fukushima farm­ers furi­ous over lack of con­sid­er­a­tion in decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion subsidies

    Feb­ru­ary 2, 2012
    ...

    The Fukushima Munic­i­pal Gov­ern­ment has worked out a spe­cific plan to decon­t­a­m­i­nate all local farm­land between this month and March next year in order to ensure the safety of agri­cul­tural prod­ucts and pre­vent res­i­dents’ exter­nal expo­sure to radi­a­tion. Ship­ments of rice grown in some areas of the city have been pro­hib­ited because radioac­tive cesium in excess of the pro­vi­sional limit set by the national gov­ern­ment has been detected.

    How­ever, the munic­i­pal gov­ern­ment has deemed it dif­fi­cult to replace thick lay­ers of sur­face soil with sub­soil or to plow large por­tions of farm­land accord­ing to the guide­lines, because most local farm­land is divided into small plots and large machin­ery can­not enter such land. For the time being, the munic­i­pal gov­ern­ment has decided to plow a layer of sur­face soil about 12 cen­time­ters deep, using agri­cul­tural machin­ery that local farm­ers possess.

    The national gov­ern­ment has offered to extend sub­si­dies to cover the costs of buy­ing zeo­lite used to absorb radioac­tive sub­stances only if the sur­face soil is replaced and plowed in accor­dance with the Envi­ron­ment Min­istry guide­lines.

    The Fukushima Munic­i­pal Gov­ern­ment is poised to demand that the cen­tral gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies cover the pur­chase of zeo­lite even if the require­ments are not met, on the grounds that spray­ing zeo­lite over farm­land can help reduce the con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of agri­cul­tural prod­ucts through radioac­tive cesium.

    How­ever, bureau­cratic red tape has posed a stum­bling block to such subsidies.

    The Envi­ron­ment Min­istry, which is aim­ing pri­mar­ily to reduce air­borne radi­a­tion, insists that reduc­ing agri­cul­tural prod­ucts’ radi­a­tion lev­els is beyond its jurisdiction.

    “Decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion is aimed at pre­vent­ing ordi­nary people’s exter­nal expo­sure to radi­a­tion. We’re aware of the need to pre­vent agri­cul­tural prod­ucts from being con­t­a­m­i­nated with radi­a­tion, but it’s out­side our juris­dic­tion,” a min­istry offi­cial said.

    The Agri­cul­ture, Forestry and Fish­eries Min­istry says it is exper­i­ment­ing with var­i­ous decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion meth­ods, includ­ing those to be employed in small areas of farm­land where large machin­ery can­not be used. If some of these meth­ods prove effec­tive, the min­istry will urge the Envi­ron­ment Min­istry to incor­po­rate them in its guidelines.

    ...

    Posted by terrafractyl | February 2, 2012, 10:40 pm

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