Japan Plans Major Boost of Radiation Monitoring - Global Security Newswire

Japan is planning a threefold increase in the count of areas it examines for radioactive contaminants floating above the ground after being released by a crippled nuclear power plant, Bloomberg reoported on Wednesday (see GSN, Aug. 22).

Authorities have battled to prevent radioactive contaminants from escaping the six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi facility following a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 20,000 people dead or missing in Japan. Radiation releases on a level not seen since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster forced the evacuation of about 80,000 residents from the 12-mile ring exclusion zone.

An increasing number of radiation-tainted "hot spots" have been located at greater distances from the site, according to Bloomberg.

Helicopters will be used to check for radiation in 22 prefectures, up from assessments of the six prefectures nearest to the facility. The move follows the identification this week of contaminated detritus 125 miles from the site, a distance that is more than twice what is allowed by law.

"The government should have expanded the monitoring area by helicopters much earlier to ease concerns among the public," according to Tetsuo Ito, who leads the Atomic Energy Research Insitute at Kinki University in Osaka.

The Japanese Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry is also preparing to examine food from roughly 100 communities in 14 prefectures, an agency official said.

The government since June has not issued any specific data on how much radiation has been emitted by the plant (Inajima/Okada, Bloomberg, Aug. 24).

One specialist told lawmakers in July that the amount of radioactive material released from the Fukushima plant is about 30 times greater than the quanity produced by the U.S. atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima during World War II, the Japan Times reported.

"It means a signficantly large amount of radioactive material was released compared with the atomic bomb," according to University of Tokyo systems biological and medicine professor Tatsuhiko Kodama (Jun Hongo, Japan Times, Aug. 24).

The New York Times reported on Sunday that Japan might declare parts of the 12-mile exclusion zone around the nuclear plant uninhabitable for decades.

One specialist said the government's cap on maximum yearly contact with radioactive contaminants should be increased from the anticipated 1 millisievert to as high as 5 millisieverts, Kyodo News reported. That would be more reasonable in allowing citizens to return to their homes, according to Shunichi Tanaka, one-time head of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission.

"Past experience of decontamination has shown it would be very difficult to reduce annual radiation exposure to 1 millisievert," Tanaka said during a commission session.

A recent government assessment indicated that annual exposure levels at 15 of 50 specific locations within the exclusion ring would be presently in excess of 100 millisieverts (Kyodo News/Mainichi Daily News, Aug. 24).

Meanwhile, a tentative plan calls for the International Atomic Energy Agency over three years to conduct one or more safety checks in all countries that have atomic energy facilities, Reuters reported. The proposal is intended to head off disasters similar to the situation in Japan.

"The robust implementation of this action plan with full transparency will be of utmost importance and will represent a significant step forward in strengthening nuclear safety," according to the plan, which has not been finalized.

Some states have pushed for tougher regulations, while others have said the safety issue should remain under the purview of nations' governments, according to Reuters.

"This is middle ground," one European envoy said. "It is still not the most ambitious of documents."

The IAEA Board of Governors could consider the safety proposal when it meets next month (Fredrik Dahl, Reuters, Aug. 23).

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Children Near Japan Nuclear Plant Suffered Internal Radiation Exposure - Global Security Newswire

Radiation turned up inside nearly half of more than 1,000 young people tested in the vicinity of Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi atomic energy facility, the Asahi Shimbun reported on Thursday (see GSN, Aug. 18).

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power has battled to prevent radioactive material from escaping the six-reactor facility following a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 20,000 people dead or missing in Japan. Forty-five percent of the tested individuals, who ranged from infants younger than 12 months old to subjects up to 15 years in age, tested positive for bodily radiation absorption in the aftermath of the disaster.

The thyroids in the majority of those affected had only received radiation in fairly small quantities, government representatives said on Thursday (Asahi Shimbun, Aug. 19).

"The possibility of these children developing thyroid cancer is extremely low" if the findings are reliable, Yoshio Hosoi, a specialist with Hiroshima University's Research Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine, told the Wall Street Journal.

Still, the study took place too late to assess the potential absorption of contaminants that break down rapidly, such as iodine 132 and tellurium, he said (Yuka Hayashi, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 19).

Meanwhile, an official inquiry determined that Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency did not consider alerting foreign governments to plans for discharging low-level radioactive water from the plant into the Pacific Ocean, Kyodo News reported on Thursday. Japan's Foreign Ministry received notice of the effort from an official working with a Tokyo Electric Power crisis response panel (Kyodo News I/Mainichi Daily News, Aug. 18).

In a bid to lure former inhabitants back to the Fukushima prefecture city of Minamisoma, local leaders in the last week hired workers to rinse away potential contaminants in public areas, the Associated Press reported. More than one-third out of more than 30,000 people who have fled the area vacated properties still considered by the government to be safe for habitation.

City government members, who referred to August as "Decontamination Month," suggested failure to prove the area's safety could prevent the return of former residents. The city previously had a population of 70,000.

"We decided that we could not sit by and wait until Tokyo figured out what to do," local official Yoshiaki Yokota said. "It's an enormous task, but we have to start somewhere" (Eric Talmadge, Associated Press/Google News, Aug. 19).

Elsewhere, 52 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium turned up in rice cultivated in the Ibaraki prefecture city of Hokota, prefecture officials said on Friday. The government allows nearly 10 times that concentration of contaminants, Kyodo reported (Kyodo News II/Mainichi Daily News, Aug. 18).

Tokyo loosened restrictions on beef shipments from Miyagi prefecture on Friday, but it maintained a prohibition on deliveries from Fukushima prefecture over concerns of radiation-tainted meat, Reuters reported (Ishiguro/Kubota, Reuters, Aug. 19).

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Japan Delayed Village's Evacuation Over Radiation Threshold - Global Security Newswire

Japan's government took more than one month to evacuate the village of Iitate after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant sustained damage in March, due in part to an uneven dispersal of radioactive contaminants across the area and a lack of consensus over the threat posed by the material, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday (see GSN, Aug. 15).

Authorities have battled to prevent radioactive contaminants from escaping the six-reactor facility following a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 20,000 people dead or missing in Japan. Four days into the crisis, an air current that had been pushing radioactive material seaward turned northwest and prompted warnings from nation's radioactive plume modeling system, dubbed the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, that contaminants would move toward Iitate.

Japan's Fukushima prefecture provided warning by March 15 of elevated atmospheric contaminant concentrations in Iitate, where roughly 6,000 people lived. The nation's Education Ministry, followed by other entities, began measuring radiation levels around the village on March 16, and regular air samples were eventually being collected at 36 locations in the area. Tokyo put the data online without comment.

Radiation levels in Iitate appeared significant to Toshimitsu Honma, a senior official with Japan's Nuclear Safety Research Center who also sits on the emergency committee of the Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission. Still, the village's cumulative radiation level had not yet reached the government's evacuation threshold of 50 millisieverts; Tokyo advised residents to remain inside in areas where cumulative radiation levels fell between 10 and 50 millisieverts.

"We spent a lot of time debating because we knew we were making a very profound decision," Honma said, referring to a potential evacuation order. "The real problem was the 50 millisievert rule," he said, adding he supported removing Iitate's residents as of early April.

Radioactivity in Iitate began to decline after plateauing on March 17 and 18, but contamination persisted and cumulative exposure continued to increase. One isolated area received 28 millisieverts of radiation in the first 17 days of the crisis, and the Nuclear Safety Commission projected it would receive 35 millisieverts over time.

The government, which had acted within days to remove residents from a 12-mile ring around the plant, did not call for Iitate's evacuation as disagreement persisted among Nuclear Safety Commission members over the extent of danger to the village. "We are aware that there are some areas outside (the evacuation zones) that are contaminated, but it is our judgment that there won't be health consequences as a result," said Haruki Madarame, the commission's chairman.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, though, on March 30 said an analysis of ground material turned up contaminants exceeding its evacuation standard. Japan on April 22 called for residents to leave Iitate and four other locations where radioactive materials from the plant had collected unevenly (Yuka Hayashi, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 16).

Meanwhile, local officials for the Fukushima prefecture towns of Futaba and Okuma on Monday said former residents would be permitted between August 26 and September 1 to temporarily return to properties within 1.9 miles of the damaged nuclear plant, Kyodo News reported (Kyodo News/Mainichi Daily News, Aug. 16).

Elsewhere, China indicated it would bolster radiation monitoring efforts in ocean water east of the nuclear plant and in the East China Sea, China Daily reported. The initiative would seek to gauge the effect of radioactive contaminants from the facility on the ocean habitat and on seafood from the region, according to the Chinese State Oceanic Administration's environmental protection department.

Ocean water collected previously by the agency contained 300 times the naturally occurring concentration of radioactive cesium and 100 times the natural concentration of radioactive strontium, according to data made public on July 29 (Wang Qian, China Daily, Aug. 16).

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