A report from our friend Gordon Edwards.
The industry is petitioning the government for permission to dump a vast amount of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.
“Water, Water, Everywhere
And Not a Drop to Drink!”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Marine
Here is a link to a TV News interview I gave this morning on CTV. It’ s about 1000 huge tanks of radioactively contaminated water at Fukushima Japan, and the fact that the industry wants to dump it all into the Pacific Ocean!!
Note: to hear the interview, you may have to “unmute” the sound.
South Korea has insisted that its Olympic athletes in attendance at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics must have their own kitchen and food preparation because the Korean gov’t does not want its athletes eating contaminated food or drinking contaminated beverages.
Background:
The focus of the interview has to do with the ever-growing legacy of radioactive water left over from the triple nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi more than 8 years ago. The plant’s owner is seeking permission from the government to dump this contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean, much to the dismay of local Japanese fishermen and the government of South Korea, both of them fearing the viability of their fishing industries.
The three crippled reactor cores still have to be constantly cooled to prevent over-heating — and the water used for this purpose becomes heavily contaminated with dozens of radioactive pollutants created during the nuclear fission process. These dangerous radioactive poisons are inevitably “flushed” out of the melted cores when coming into contact with the cooling water.
Already there are 1.1 million tonnes of contaminated water stored on-site in about 1000 huge tanks, some of them 10 metres high, each holding 1000-1200 tonnes of radioactive liquid. In the next 4-5 years, another three-quarters of a million tonnes will be added to the inventory.
Although dozens of radioactive materials have been removed from the contaminated water, there is no technology readily available to remove the radioactive tritium. The water is very heavily contaminated with tritium. Moreover, since no removal technology is ever 100 percent Perfect, there are residual amounts of many other radioactive poisons still to be found in the treated water — radioactive cesium, radioactive strontium, radioactive iodine, and many many more. In many cases the residual levels exceed the maximum legally permissible concentration levels for drinking water.
Tritium is radioactive hydrogen. Since a water molecule is H2O — two hydrogen atoms combined with one oxygen atom — the water molecules themselves become radioactive when the ordinary hydrogen (H) is replaced with radioactive hydrogen (T = tritium). But radioactive water molecules are identical with non-radioactive water molecules, except that radioactive water molecules will suddenly explode (“disintegrate”) giving off damaging radiation that can cause cancer, damage reproductive cells (sperm or eggs), depress the immune system, and cause other kinds of biological damage. Tritium cannot be removed from water because it IS water. You cannot filter water from water.
Because water is essential for life, radioactive water freely enters into all living things. Because hydrogen is one of the basic building blocks of all organic molecules, including DNA molecules, some of the radioactive hydrogen (tritium) becomes “trapped” in organic molecules of all kinds. In this way tritium can internally irradiate fish, animals and humans from inside their bodies.
Coincidentally, at Chalk River on the Ottawa River, the consortium of multinational companies that operates Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is planning to release a significant amount of tritium into Perch Lake, a body of water that drains into the Ottawa River. The levels of tritium involved (up to 360,000 becquerels per litre) are as much as 51 times greater than the maximum permissible concentrations of tritium for drinking water in Canada (7,000 becquerels per litre) — a standard that is in itself 350 times greater than the more stringent standard that was recommended by two independent panels of toxicological experts commissioned by the Ontario government (20 becquerels per litre). Overall, the CNL tritium effluent concentrations are as much as 18,000 times the maximum recommended by the Ontario Drinking Water Advisory Council ( www.ccnr.org/GE_ODWAC_2009_e.pdf )
Gordon