On The Road Again...Japan Speaking Tour Series No.
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Fairewinds’ Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen is hitting the road yet again for his third speaking tour of Japan! It will be five years in March since the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi began and the Japanese public continues to search for the truth about nuclear risk and honest answers to their energy future as they face their current government’s push to restart Japan’s atomic reactors. By invitation from various organizations and public interest groups, Arnie will be presenting to communities throughout Japan including those who live in the shadow of atomic reactors, plutonium reprocessing plants, and proposed atomic waste dumps. Join the Fairewinds Crew as we explore some of the key issues that will be discussed during the tour.
Transcript
English
MG: Welcome to the Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast. Today it’s being hosted by the Fairewinds crew. I am Maggie Gundersen and I’d like to welcome you to the show, along with Caroline Phillips, Program Administrator for Fairewinds, Toby Aronson, our Media Producer and Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer. We have a lot to tell you about today. Fairewinds Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen is traveling to Japan this week, and he will be presenting in Iwate Prefecture next weekend. Today, the Fairewinds crew will discuss what’s going on in Japan regarding the meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi, it’s continuing impact on the Japanese people and the rest of the world, as well as Japan’s current push to restart its atomic reactors under the Abe regime. Arnie, what are you looking at for your first prospect in Japan? What’s really going on over there?
AG: Yeah, you know, the country’s seriously contaminated even now. This isn’t going to go away if we ignore it. I’m sure everybody’s seen those pictures of millions of plastic bags loaded with radioactive material in huge dumps. And you’ve got to remember, the only thing the Japanese are cleaning is within about 50 feet of the side of the roads. So the entire mountain range that’s Fukushima Prefecture is not clean. So every time the weather changes and that stuff gets blown back in, they re-contaminate what they already cleaned. So people that live in the Prefecture are living in what we would all an RCA – and that stands for a radiologically contaminated area. If that were in the states, if that were in a nuclear power plant, those kinds of levels of radiation would require that you couldn’t walk into those areas without health physic support.
MG: So currently, there are a lot of people who are dislocated, but are people also returning to these contaminated areas as well right now?
AG: Yeah, I think they’re being forced to go back in. You’ve got to remember, there’s 160,000 people that were evacuated originally, and now the number is just a hair under 100,000, so 60,000 have gone back into areas that we would consider by United States standards highly contaminated. But what the Japanese did was they raised the standard and they took away the money from these people when they were in housing, not in the Prefecture. So they said if you want to continue with the stipend we have you on, you’ve got to go home. So it’s basically they’re forcing them back into an area that’s much more radioactive than it was when they left.
CP: So if you’re living in Japan, who would you consider – or what would you consider the most reliable source of information regarding Fukushima Daiichi, the cleanup process, radioactive cleanup, etc.
AG: Well, the Japanese consider the Fairewinds crew to be an honest source of information, and I think we’re all proud that we really work hard not to sensationalize, but to tell it like it is and not sugarcoat it like the International Atomic Energy Agency does or the Japanese government. So we certainly are a source and I’ll pat us all on the back for that. But in addition, the work of Dr. Marco Kaltofen at Worcester Poly, Dr. Tim Mousseau down in South Carolina and Green Action in Japan – there’s a group called Green Action – are also several others that are really trying to get honest, unbiased information out there to make decisions by.
TA: So Arnie, not only are people moving back into contaminated areas, but we also have some nuclear power plants in Japan starting up again. Can you talk about some concerns regarding that issue?
AG: Yeah, Toby, that’s a great question. There were 54 nuclear power plants in Japan operating right before the great east earthquake and the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. There were four units at Daiichi wiped out, plus there were two others that will never start again. Plus there were four others just down the road at Fukushima Daini. So 10 nuclear reactors will essentially never operate again because they’re in Fukushima Prefecture. In addition, at least another 10 or 15 are too old to operate and should have been shut down even before the earthquake. So that 54 units has tumbled down to about 26. Of those 26, the Japanese are frantically trying to get them back up and running. And the real reason behind it all is – you’ve heard it before – money. The banks have put a lot of money into maintaining those 26 power plants and paying for the staffs to sit there essentially idle for the last five years. They want their money back, and the only way to get their money back is to turn those nukes back on. What’s happened in the last five years is that the Japanese haven’t really made these plants any stronger. What they’ve done is they’ve reanalyzed all of their calculations and taken away all the margins of safety and said that, well, a stronger earthquake these plants can withstand. But in fact, there’s been no major changes to the structure. It’s frightening. These plants were built by people my age when we got out of college in the 70’s. We used slide rules and they’re old. And the Japanese refuse to acknowledge that it was a bad bet then, and they’re going to double down on a bad bet now.
MG: Arnie, just to follow up on that for a minute, isn’t it more about the Japanese banks and government putting pressure on there? You said the Japanese are doing this and I think there’s figures that between 70 and 80 percent of the people are against these restarts. There have been all these demonstrations there that mainstream media hasn’t covered. So really, isn’t this more about the banks wanting their investment back and the government wanted to control still nuclear materials?
AG: Yeah, it absolutely is. The Abe regime is very pro-business. And the banks have deep inroads into the Abe regime. And on top of that, the 10 utilities that run all of the power grid in Japan are little fiefdoms that have incredible pressure in their parliament. So politically, the pressure from the banks, the pressure from these 10 power companies – Tokyo Electric is only one of 10 – and the Abe regime, are totally ignoring what the public wants. And you’re right, it’s at least 70 percent of the Japanese, including almost every woman and just about half the men, don’t want nuclear power to operate again. But it’s being ram-rodded through by financial interests that just don’t care about public health and safety anywhere near as much as they do about their own bottom line.
CP: Well, I think right now – correct me if I’m wrong – there may be three reactors that have maybe restarted since the Fukushima meltdown began and they shut down all reactors. And when there were no nuclear reactors in Japan going, I never read about any blackouts or power outages. My question is, how is Japan meeting its energy needs without all of the nuclear reactors that haven’t been restored or will not be restarted? And in regards to the restart, there was one at Sendai and there have been a couple others – are they necessary for Japan’s energy power needs?
AG: Yeah, there’s a couple answers to that, Caroline. That’s a great question. The first is that the Japanese power grid is really nowhere near a first world power power grid. They have 10 little fiefdoms and they don’t share power across the grid. So you’ve got TEPCO to the north and Chubu to the south of Tokyo and each has an enormous over-capacity in case one unit goes down. In the United States, we have a shared grid; we pool our power. In Japan, they don’t. Matter of fact, in western Japan, they’re at 50 cycles per second and in eastern Japan, they’re at 60 cycles per second, so they can’t even agree on how many cycles per second the electricity should flow at. So when all these units shut down, there was a lot of excess capacity sitting around anyway. And it was largely gas and largely coal. So what happened is two things. First – and the Japanese really deserve an enormous amount of credit – they conserved like crazy. They really went on an efficiency kick. I was in office buildings where the temperature inside was 78 in the summer, and it wasn’t bad. They realized that they were over cooling in the summer and overheating in the winter. So the Japanese really went into an energy efficiency and a conservation mode. They did import more coal and gas and then they also brought in the equivalent of about six nuclear power plants worth of solar power. So they’re beginning already to displace with solar power these old nukes. That whole combination – they got through. And you’re right, there were no blackouts, Tokyo remained well over-illuminated, trust me, and life went on.
MG: Arnie, I have a follow-up question to that. You touched on solar. What is the actual progress with renewables? What are they doing? We had originally talked about and done a video on the tipping point. So they were at a tipping point after all the nukes were closed where they could clearly just move ahead with solar, wind, wave action – they have right out in the ocean so much going on, and there’s so many new technologies – are they doing this? What progress are they making?
AG: Well, there’s enormous pressure by these 10 utilities that we talked about – the 10 governing electric boards, essentially, are putting enormous pressure on the DIET so that renewables are being stifled. But even despite that, people are doing it; and corporations are doing it. The interesting thing is that even before the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, Japan had the highest electrical rates in the industrial world. And that’s an incredible burden. And now they’re going to be higher because they just paid for 5 years of nuclear plants that didn’t run, and they want that money back, too. So electric costs in Japan are arbitrarily high because these 10 powerhouse utilities control the DIET, control the parliament, and the people are getting stuck with high rates. So now we’ve got high rates that they pay for out of their wall socket, and they’re realizing heck, I can go off the grid and put a solar collector on and get it cheaper. So they’ve priced themselves to a point where new solar is much, much cheaper than what they can get from the grid. And the big industries are realizing it, too. The big industries are building their own power plants or building their own solar collectors so that they don’t have to pay these exorbitant rates that the Japanese are being charged.
TA: Arnie, moving on to issues regarding the outpour of radiation into the Pacific Ocean, there’s been a lot of debate on exactly how contaminated is the Pacific Ocean. Is it affecting our food? Is it affecting our water quality? Can you in a nutshell describe to us your thoughts about how contaminated the Pacific Ocean is because of Fukushima?
AG: Yeah, Toby. The Japanese are focusing on leaks from the Fukushima power plants. That’s probably a mile of coastline, and it is severely contaminated and it continues to bleed into the Pacific every day. But what no one is paying any attention to is that the entire mountain range that runs 100 miles up and down this coast is also contaminated. And as much radiation is pouring out into the rivers and streams into the Pacific from the mountain range because it’s so contaminated, as from the Fukushima site. So Tokyo Electric would have you just look at the site and say, well, we’re doing things to collect the radiation. But in fact, they’ve got an entire state pouring radiation into the Pacific. So what’s in the Pacific? Off of California, they’re finding radiation at what I would consider significant levels. A cubic meter is about 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet, and in a cubic meter of ocean water, they’re finding 10 radioactive decays every second. That’s called the disintegration. So that’s called 10 Becquerel per cubic meter. So a cubic meter of water, if you’re in a dark room, would have 10 flashes of light every second, and that’s going to go on for 300 years. So we have contaminated the biggest source of water on the planet, and there’s no way to stop it.
MG: So are you saying that the contaminated water problem is hopeless? Is there nothing we can do to slow it down?
AG: It used to be that scientists believed dilution is the solution to pollution. But I think we’re finding with the biggest body of water on the planet, that you can’t dilute this stuff. And we’re going to begin to see this bio-accumulation, which is all the fish that are in the ocean are going to uptake the cesium and the strontium and become more and more and more radioactive.
CP: (15:23) So you said – Arnie, you used the term bio-accumulation. If you could explain to our audience what exactly that means and sort of what that implies as far as food quality goes. Or water quality.
AG: Well, if you think of it as – there’s radiation on the bottom of the Pacific and that gets picked up by the – whatever’s on the bottom – the seaweed – and then little fish eat the seaweed and little fish get eaten by bigger fish and those fish get eaten by still bigger fish –
CP: The circle of life.
AG: Right. In that process, every time they do that, the cesium in the little fish gets concentrated in the bigger fish. It’s not just radioactivity. We know that about the mercury that’s in tuna. That coal plants have thrown mercury out into oceans and it works its way up the food chain, too. So this concept of bio-accumulation doesn’t just apply to radiation, but it is applying to fish in the food chain now.
CP: I know that I haven’t heard anything announced by the FDA and I’m not a believer that the FDA would automatically say anything, but I know we don’t have any substantiated radio levels in our seafood coming to the United States, but what is your stance? Do you eat out and take Maggie out to sushi regularly for bits of Yellow Fin tuna?
AG: The FDA limit is so high that – it’s 12 times higher for Americans than it is for Japanese. So basically, if the Japanese find a fish that they can’t eat, they an ship it to America and feed it to us, and the FDA doesn’t care. So we’ve got a really high threshold and on top of that, the FDA is hardly sampling fish at all; less than a tenth of a percent of the fish that come into the United States are tested – really, really small number. So my decision is I’m not eating fish from the Pacific. That’s a personal decision. I never did eat Yellow fin tuna, by the way, because they’re such a beautiful fish, I just really couldn’t stand killing one.
MG: Arnie, while you’re in Japan, I know that a number of presentations are set for you and you’ll be traveling all over. You’ll be in Fukushima, you’ll be in Iwate, you’ll be in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo. So it’s a long trip. And we have all of that information up on our site where your presentations are and what you’ll be doing. In your presentations, what are you specifically talking about to these groups? I know all the different groups have asked specific questions. What will you be answering for them? Can you give us just a couple of sentences about that? What are the key points?
AG: Yeah. The first thing I’ll be talking about in Japan is the use of plutonium in their nuclear reactors for fuel. They call that MOX – mixed oxide fuel – but it’s uranium and plutonium together inside a nuclear reactor. Running a reactor on plutonium is (1) really technically complicated; and (2) expensive. There’s not a reactor in America that uses MOX fuel. And there’s none in the pipeline, either. Why? Because our utilities are trying to minimize the cost and it’s actually cheaper to use uranium than it is for mixed oxide fuel. In Japan, they don’t care. As we talked about at the beginning, the utilities that own these power plants have control over the rates. So they’re paying more for this plutonium fuel. In America, not a power plant in the country uses plutonium for fuel. Mixed oxide fuel is going nowhere. No one wants to buy the used plutonium because it’s more expensive and because it’s more complicated to license. And after a nuclear accident, it also complicates the accident analysis. So it’s a real mess using plutonium. The Japanese use it anyway. And I really want to talk about how I think it’s a bad decision that plutonium will be used in Japanese reactors.
CP: (19:52) What do you think is the terrorist risk with MOX reactors?
AG: There’s some brilliant people, and Frank von Hippel is probably at the top of the list, at Princeton, who have been saying for 20 and 30 years that having plutonium driving down the highways to fuel a power plant is a real terrorist risk. And the reason is that if you capture a truck that’s got plutonium and uranium in it, you can chemically separate out the plutonium and make a bomb. You don’t need a real fancy gaseous diffusion plant and billions of dollars. You can chemically pull out the plutonium and make a bomb. Raw uranium is at 3 percent enriched and in order to make bomb-grade uranium, you need billions of dollars of enrichment. But if there’s plutonium in the mix, you can make a bomb.
CP: And another difference in my understanding of uranium – raw uranium – versus plutonium, is raw uranium is actually cheaper. Is that right, Arnie?
AG: Yeah, it’s cheaper to mine uranium out of the ground than it is to reprocess the old – what the industry calls spent fuel – the highly radioactive spent fuel, to pull out the plutonium to reuse. It’s on the order of millions of dollars more expensive to extract the plutonium than it is to just dispose of the plutonium. This is one of these unintended consequences of nuclear power that dates back 70 years. We’ve got the plutonium now and rather than put it in a hole and walk away for a quarter of a million years, then nuclear industry comes up with yet another scheme to get rid of it. And by “reusing” it. But by the end of the day, it’s even more expensive than the first scheme, which was just uranium.
MG: Arnie, one of the things that people have asked me again and again is what about France’s reprocessing system and it’s supposed to be so amazing and working so well. Is it?
AG: I refer the readers to a great podcast we did about a year ago with Mycle Schneider. So they can go up on our site and search for Mycle Schneider. And Mycle is spelled M-y-c-l-e. And he is French and he totally destroys the myth that the French are doing it right. In fact, plutonium in France has negative value. They have to pay people to take it because it’s such a different type of fuel to use in a nuclear reactor.
CP: (22:36) I remember that. I think we called it the nuclear fuel chain is broken because they often call it a fuel cycle. But it’s not a cycle. You always end up with nuclear garbage that has to be abandoned somewhere for thousands of years. And yeah, I remember that one, it has that great picture of all the cyclists falling because chains are broken. So along with these MOX plants that you will also be discussing in Japan, are you going to touch on the restart of other reactors and issues that come up with those, and aging reactors and design issues that kind of have been left unregulated, as far as I know, in Japan.
AG: Japan’s got three operating nuclear reactors now, with another perhaps five more scheduled to start up this year. And again, the only reason is because the banks want their money back. But what the Japanese have done to get these old plants – they’re all 30 years old already – to get them qualified to start back up – they just changed the calculations on the paper. They didn’t physically change the power plant. They just changed the calculations on the paper and essentially took away safety margins. These plants are no better now than they were five years ago, but they’re all five years older. And I’ll be talking about concrete wearing out. You put concrete in the ground; it wears out. Plastic insulation on the wires, over time they get brittle. Fire risks at these old power plants and neutron embrittlement which is – we also spoke out it on the Fairewinds site. All of those issues are there in Japan because all the plants are so old. And I don’t think the right choice is to invest billions and billions of dollars into these old plants. Put that billions and billions into a renewable grid. And you’d see real progress that’s sustainable.
MG: Well, Arnie, we really wish you a good trip and we look forward to receiving your mini podcasts to us from Japan. And we want to hear more. So we look forward to hearing about how your trip goes and we really will hope that it makes a difference and that the Japanese people know that we hear them and we definitely want to see the government respect their wishes and shut down these nukes and invest in renewables. Thank you, and we’ll keep you informed.
