RELEASES INTERNAL IAEA DOCUMENT PROVING COLLUSION WITH JAPAN OVER FUKUSHIMA RADIOACTIVE WATER RELEASE A whistleblower-released document created by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on June 1, 2023, shows that “the fix is in” – IAEA is not only is planning to approve the release of 1.3 million tons of radioactive water from Fukushima but to manipulate their communication to the world in support Japan’s position despite facts showing otherwise, eliminating anything that might “be viewed negatively by the public.”
This is outrageous and dangerous for the entire world. Japan, with the IAEA’s support – NOT protection – is planning to commit its own nuclear assault on the world through this radioactive water release.
We’ve suspected and accused the IAEA and Japan of working together in the past, and now we have the proof Please, do what you can to get this word out – not just to our echo chamber, but to media.
RELEASES INTERNAL IAEA DOCUMENT PROVING COLLUSION WITH JAPAN OVER FUKUSHIMA RADIOACTIVE WATER RELEASE A whistleblower-released document created by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on June 1, 2023, shows that “the fix is in” – IAEA is not only is planning to approve the release of 1.3 million tons of radioactive water from Fukushima but to manipulate their communication to the world in support Japan’s position despite facts showing otherwise, eliminating anything that might “be viewed negatively by the public.” This is outrageous and dangerous for the entire world. Japan, with the IAEA’s support – NOT protection – is planning to commit its own nuclear assault on the world through this radioactive water release. We’ve suspected and accused the IAEA and Japan of working together in the past, and now we have the proof. Please, do what you can to get this word out – not just to our echo chamber, but to media.
Few days ago a well-intentioned whistleblower has sent me an internal document of the IAEA.
In this IAEA’s internal document the IAEA is seen coaching TEPCO about what to tell and what not tell to the public regarding the « treated » water to be soon discharged into the Pacific Ocean.
One thing that can be drawn from that document’s content is that the IAEA and TEPCO have no intention to be fully transparent about the radioactive contamination of the said « treated water », only the one to cushion insidiously the real facts to the public eyes.
« Treated water » is quite an euphemism as it is public knowledge that in 12 years the TEPCO’s ALPs filtering system has never been capable to fully remove all the 64 radionuclides present in that radioactive water. Not even to mention the radioactive mud which has accumulated at the bottom of all those water tanks. For them to mention in their press releases only the tritium as being present in that “treated” water is their habitual lying by omission.
According to the news, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of IAEA, will visit Japan on 4 July. The IAEA’s final report will be published soon and the nuclear water will be discharged into the ocean after the report.
This internal document is quite certainly making us question their future transparency, and their intention to protect truly the marine life and the health of the people. Cheap expediency, lying by omission when not just plain lying, are part of their usual modus operandi.
This whistleblower, who wishes to remain anonymous for his own protection, took a real risk leaking this document out, ascting out of his conscience as he knows from the inside the dangers of such radioactive marine pollution. Will it be enough to wake up the consciences and stop such dumping of radioactive polllution into our ocean?
Time is crucial in this matter, as for sure soon after the visit of the director general of the AIEA TEPCO will start discharging that water, and then it will be impossible to have them to stop.
I am just a blogger blogging on this little blog, I am sending this message in a bottle out to the world in the hope that someone, some journalists will take up this information and use it to influence the various governments to pressure Japan to not use our Pacific ocean as its personal trash backyard. The Asian countries neighboring Japan and the Pacific nations should protect their population from such marine radioactive pollution.
With all my prayerful wishes, asking for your help. Please share this article widely so that document will be of some use.
Many thanks to the anonymous whistleblower who did his part, now it is our turn to do ours
As worldwide stocks of plutonium increase, lightly-armed British ships are about to carry an initial 330kg of the nuclear bomb metal for ‘safekeeping’ in the US, writes Paul Brown. But it’s only the tip of a global ‘plutonium mountain’ of hundreds of tonnes nuclear power’s most hazardous waste product.
Two armed ships set off from the northwest of England this week to sail round the world to Japan on a secretive and controversial mission to collect a consignment of plutonium and transport it to the US.
The cargo of plutonium, once the most sought-after and valuable substance in the world, is one of a number of ever-growing stockpiles that are becoming an increasing financial and security embarrassment to the countries that own them.
So far, there is no commercially viable use for this toxic metal, and there is increasing fear that plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists, or that governments could be tempted to use it to join the nuclear arms race.
All the plans to use plutonium for peaceful purposes in fast breeder and commercial reactors have so far failed to keep pace with the amounts of this highly dangerous radioactive metal being produced by the countries that run uranium-fulled nuclear power stations.
The small amounts of plutonium that have been used in conventional and fast breeder reactors have produced very little electricity – at startlingly high costs.
Japan, with its 47-ton stockpile, is among the countries that once hoped to turn their plutonium into a power source, but various attempts have failed. The government, which has a firm policy of using it only for peaceful purposes, has nonetheless come under pressure to keep it out of harm’s way. Hence, the current plan to ship it to the US.
Altogether, 15 countries across the world have stockpiles. They include North Korea, which intends to turn it into nuclear weapons.
UK’s Plutonium represents a massive cost – but no balance sheet liability recorded
The UK has the largest pile, with 140 tons held at Sellafield in north-west England, whereplutonium has been produced at the site’s nuclear power plant since the 1950s, also using spent fuel from civilian nuclear plants such as Hinkley Point and Calder Hall. The government has yet to come up with a policy on what to do with it – and, meanwhile, the costs of keeping it under armed guard continue to rise.
Like most countries, the UK cannot decide whether it has an asset or a liability. The plutonium does not appear on any balance sheet, and the huge costs of storing it safely – to avoid it going critical and causing a meltdown – and guarding it against terrorists are not shown as a cost of nuclear power.
This enables the industry to claim that nuclear is an attractive and clean energy-producing option to help combat climate change.
The two ships that set off from the English port of Barrow-in-Furness this week are the Pacific Egret and Pacific Heron, nuclear fuel carriers fitted with naval cannon on deck. They are operated by Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd, which ultimately is owned by the British government.
The presence on both ships of a heavily-armed security squad – provided by the Civil Nuclear Constabulary’s Strategic Escort Group – and the earlier loading of stores and the craning on board of live ammunition point to a long, security-conscious voyage ahead.
Sent to the US for safekeeping
The shipment of plutonium from Japan to the US falls under the US-led Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), or Material Management & Minimisation (M3) programme, whereby weapons-useable material such as plutonium and highly-enriched uranium (HEU) is removed from facilities worldwide for safekeeping in the US.
The cargo to be loaded onto the two UK ships in Japan consists of some 331kg of plutonium from Japan’s Tokai Research Establishment.
This plutonium – a substantial fraction of which was supplied to Japan by the UK decades ago for ‘experimental purposes’ in Tokai’s Fast Critical Assembly (FCA) facility – is described by the US Department of Energy (DOE) as “posing a potential threat to national security, being susceptible to use in an improvised nuclear device, and presenting a high risk of theft or diversion”. Or, as another US expert put it, “sufficient to make up to 40 nuclear bombs”.
Under the US-led programme, the plutonium will be transported from Japan to the US port of Charleston and onwards to the Savannah River site in South Carolina.
Tom Clements, director of the public interest group Savannah River Site Watch, has condemned this import of plutonium as a material that will simply be stranded at the site, with no clear disposition path out of South Carolina. He sees it as further evidence that Savannah River is being used as a dumping ground for an extensive range of international nuclear waste.
Their spokesman, Martin Forwood, said: “The practice of shipping this plutonium to the US as a safeguard is completely undermined by deliberately exposing this prime terrorist material to a lengthy sea transport, during which it will face everyday maritime risks and targeting by those with hostile intentions.
“We see this as wholly unnecessary and a significant security threat in today’s volatile and unpredictable world.” The best option, CORE believes, would have been to leave it where it was, under guard.
From DOE documents, this shipment will be the first of a number of planned shipments for what is referred to as ‘Gap Material Plutonium‘ – weapons-useable materials that are not covered under other US or Russian programmes.
In total, the DOE plans to import up to 900kg of ‘at risk’ plutonium – currently held in seven countries – via 12 shipments over seven years. Other materials include stocks of HEU – the most highly enriched plutonium (to 93%), also being supplied to Japan by the UK.
The voyage from Barrow to Japan takes about six weeks, and a further seven weeks from Japan to Savannah River – use of the Panama Canal having been ruled out by the DOE in its documents on the shipment. Previously, the countries near the canal have objected to nuclear transport in their territorial waters.
SaskPower held a webinar on its proposal for a Hitachi Boiling Water Reactor (BWRX300), a small modular nuclear reactor in Southern Saskatchewan. Its otherwise informative webinar was marred by a statement that the BWRX300 would have no emissions.
No emissions! People may not know everything about nuclear power plants, but most of us know that tritium or “hydrogen” is created and released in planned or unplanned episodes. It could build up and cause an explosion.
Tritium is more dangerous than the nuclear industry admits. Tritium is radioactive hydrogen. When combined with oxygen, it forms radioactive water. Tritium has been described as a “weak beta emitter.” Its beta particle can be stopped by paper or skin.
Our bodies incorporate hydrogen into every cell and cellular structure in our bodies. Our bodies are unable to distinguish between a normal hydrogen atom and tritium. This means that every tritium atom that we ingest into our bodies could spontaneously decay into helium, a gas.
As the tritium decays, it emits energy that can oxidize cellular contents including RNA and DNA, genetic material. Many believe that tritium is the culprit for the increase in children developing leukemia close to nuclear power plants.
With a half-life of 12 years, the tritium that is released today will not be “gone” for 120 years.
But let’s not forget the small amounts of other radioactive elements emitted: krypton-85, carbon-14, strontium-90, iodine-131, and caesium-137, to name a few. Nuclear power plants also emit all the types of pollutants any other steam- or gas-powered electrical plant emits.
most of the exposure people received came in the form of internal exposures from ingesting radioactivity, not from external, ambient gamma rays in the environment.
Medical examinations of people in contaminated regions showed a significant increase in the general number of chromosomal mutations in newborns, and the frequency of birth defects in southern Belarus was found to be significantly higher than the control. In terms of general health, Konoplia reported, adults showed an increase in diseases of the circulatory system, hypertension, coronary illness, heart attacks, and myocardial problems, plus a rise in respiratory diseases.
Researchers on the UN team who had security clearances had access to classified studies that showed that 79 percent of children in the Marshall Islands exposed to American bomb blasts under the age of ten had developed thyroid cancer. Seventy-nine percent of several hundred children had thyroid cancer when the background rate was one in a million.
Health physicists fear lawsuits more than nuclear accidents
In 1987, a year after the Chernobyl accident, the US Health Physics Society met in Columbia, Maryland. Health physicists are scientists who are responsible for radiological protection at nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons plants, and hospitals. They are called on in cases of nuclear accidents. The conference’s keynote speaker came from the Department of Energy (DOE); the title of his talk drew on a sports analogy: “Radiation: The Offense and the Defense.” Switching metaphors to geopolitics, the speaker announced to the hall of nuclear professionals that his talk amounted to “the party line.” The biggest threat to nuclear industries, he told the gathered professionals, was not more disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island but lawsuits.
After the address, lawyers from the Department of Justice (DOJ) met in break-out groups with the health physicists to prepare them to serve as “expert witnesses” against claimants suing the US government for alleged health problems due to exposure from radioactivity issued in the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. That’s right: the DOE and the DOJ were preparing private citizens to defend the US government and its corporate contractors as they ostensibly served as “objective” scientific experts in US courts.
Health physics is an extremely important field for our everyday lives. Health physicists set standards for radiation protection and evaluate damage after nuclear emergencies. They determine where radiologists set the dial for CT scans and X-rays. They calculate how radioactive our food can be (and our food is often radioactive) and determine acceptable levels of radiation in our workplaces, environments, bodies of water, and air. Despite its importance, as it is practiced inside university labs and government organizations, health physics is far from an independent field engaged in the objective, open-ended pursuit of knowledge.
Compromised Science
The field of health physics emerged inside the Manhattan Project along with the development of the world’s first nuclear bombs. From the United States, it migrated abroad. For the past seventy-five years, the vast majority of health physicists have been employed in national nuclear agencies or in universities with research underwritten by national nuclear agencies. As much as we in the academy like to make distinctions between apolitical, academic research and politicized paid research outside the academy, during the Cold War those distinctions hardly made sense. From the end of World War II until the 1970s, federal grants paid for 70 percent of university research. The largest federal donors were the Department of Defense, the US Atomic Energy Agency, and a dozen federal security agencies.
Historian Peter Galison estimated in 2004 that the volume of classified research surpassed open literature in American libraries by five to ten times. Put another way, for every article published by American academics in open journals, five to ten articles were filed in sealed repositories available only to the 4 million Americans with security clearances. Often, the same researchers penned both open and classified work. Health physics benefited from the largesse of the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission, which produced nuclear weapons for US arsenals. Correspondingly, the field suffered from a closed circle of knowledge that has had a major impact on our abilities to assess and respond to both nuclear emergencies and quotidian radioactive contamination.
Tracking the production of knowledge in the field of health physics shows how the effective renunciation of facts has played a major role in this branch of science. More generally, it demonstrates how the boundary between open and classified research is critical yet rarely acknowledged. The response of international health physicists to the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in Soviet Ukraine in April 1986, shows heavily politicized science in action. History reveals that the official, federally sponsored cultivation of “alternative facts” is not new but has deep roots in the twentieth century.
Chernobyl came at an unfortunate time for nuclear professionals. As the Cold War creaked to an end, lawsuits abounded. In the 1980s, Marshall Islanders—their homes blasted in nuclear tests, their bodies subjected to classified medical study by scientists contracted by the Atomic Energy Agency—went to court. In Utah and Nevada, those who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site were lining up for lawsuits. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Edison Company in Pennsylvania faced lawsuits from plaintiffs living near the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979.
In the late 1980s, reporters and congressional investigators began to inquire into US government agencies’ wide-scale engagement in human radiation experiments, which included exposing tens of thousands of soldiers to nuclear blasts. These legal actions and investigations constituted an existential threat for nuclear industries, civilian and military. Chernobyl cast into doubt industry statements that nuclear energy is safer than coal, than flying, than living in high-altitude Denver. If another nuclear accident were to occur, UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Hans Blix told the IAEA board of governors a few weeks after the Chernobyl explosions, “I fear the general public will no longer believe any contention that the risk of a severe accident was so small as to be almost negligible.”
Because radioactivity is insensible, society relies on scientists and their technologies to count ionizing radiation and analyze its effect on biological organisms. In 1986, the three-decades-old Life Span Study of Japanese bomb survivors served in the West as the “gold standard” for radiation exposure. It became the chief referent in lawsuits over health damage from radioactive contaminants. The Life Span Study started in 1950. In subsequent decades, American and Japanese scientists followed bomb survivors and their offspring, looking for possible health effects from exposure to the bomb blasts. By 1986, the group had detected a significant increase in a handful of cancers and, surprisingly, no birth defects, though geneticists had expected them.
The Life Span Study told scientists a great deal about the effects of a single exposure of a terrifically large blast of radiation lasting less than a second but little about the impact of chronic, low doses of radioactivity—the kind of exposures served up by the Chernobyl accident and related to the ongoing lawsuits in the United States. At the time, like now, scientists confessed they knew very little about the effects of low doses of radioactivity on human health. For that reason, after Chernobyl, leading scientific administrators in UN agencies and national health agencies called for using the Chernobyl accident to carry out a long-term, large-scale epidemiological study to determine the effects of low doses of radiation on human health. Unfortunately, those requests went nowhere at first because Soviet officials asserted that health damage was limited to the two dozen firefighters who died from acute radiation poisoning. They insisted that they were monitoring the health of neighboring residents and found no change in their health. Soviet spokespeople told the international community that they did not need help, thank you very much.
Silos of Knowledge
Health physics, a moribund field in the West and a secretive field in the Soviet Union, suddenly appeared in the spotlight after the Chernobyl accident. Archival records show that two silos of knowledge about the effects of low doses of radiation on human health emerged in the wake of the Chernobyl accident. Western health physicists oriented around the Life Span Study, while Soviet health physicists worked from specialized, closed clinics producing literature that mostly was filed in classified libraries. A few months after the accident, Western health physicists— extrapolating from Hiroshima—announced that, given the reported levels of radioactivity released in the accident, they expected to see no detectable health problems as a result. From the Soviet side, spokespeople gave vague assurances, but scientists were silent. For security reasons, Soviet health physicists did not take the podium. Anyway, they were busy.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet scientists near the accident quietly got to work figuring out the extent of the damage. A few days after the accident, Anatolii Romanenko, minister of health in Ukraine, called up medical brigades to examine evacuees and villagers in contaminated areas. Several thousand doctors and nurses fanned out across the Soviet countryside. The effort would have been unimaginable outside of a socialist state highly skilled in the art of mass mobilization. In Ukraine alone, doctors examined seventy thousand children and over one hundred thousand adults in the summer following the accident. People judged to have received high doses were sent to hospitals in Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow. By late May, the number of hospitalized citizens rose to the tens of thousands.
For the subsequent five years, the last years of the Soviet Union, doctors and medical researchers in Ukraine and Belarus tracked health statistics in contaminated regions. They reported the results in classified documents each year. Their reports show that after the accident, frequencies of health problems in five major disease categories grew annually. Soviet doctors did not have access to ambient measurements of radioactivity in the environment and the food chain because that information was classified, so doctors did what they had long done in the Soviet Union. They used their patients’ bodies as biological barometers to determine doses of radioactivity. Medical practitioners counted white and red blood cells, held radiation detection counters to the thyroids of their patients, measured blood pressure, and scanned urine. They looked for chromosomal damage in blood cells and counts of radioactivity in tooth enamel. Using these biomarkers, Soviet doctors determined the doses of radioactivity their patients had encountered externally and ingested internally. Doctors calculated the range of radioactive isotopes lodged in their patients’ bodies. A KGB general who ran his own KGB clinic in Kiev for KGB agents and their families counted twelve different radioactive isotopes in organs and tissue of his patients.
In 1986, in neighboring Belarus, which received the majority of Chernobyl fallout, scientists at the Belarusian Academy of Science set up case-control studies to track the impact in real time on the health of children and pregnant women, two populations judged to be especially vulnerable. The academy also commissioned dozens of studies of radioactive contamination in the atmosphere, soils, plants, agricultural products, and livestock. They drew on a body of knowledge that Soviet scientists had clandestinely developed over four decades in clinics stationed near secret nuclear installations that had suffered a large number of accidents and spills of radioactive effluents during the Cold War rush to produce weapons. In April 1989, the respected president of the Belarusian Academy of Science sent to Moscow a twenty-five-page report that reflected the renaissance of science in the fields of radioecology and radiobiology that had flourished in the contaminated regions as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. Evgenii Konoplia laid out what his Institute of Radiobiology had found.
Almost the entire territory of Belarus had been contaminated, Konoplia wrote, except for a few northern regions.
The BMJ article which was published on Aug 16, 2023 (accessible free of charge) is the result of a lengthy occupational study by US Professor David Richardson and a team of 11 academics and public health researchers in the US, UK, France and Spain. https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj-2022-074520
Its conclusion states
“This major update to INWORKS provides a direct estimate of the association between protracted low dose exposure to ionising radiation and solid cancer mortality based on some of the world’s most informative cohorts of radiation workers. The summary estimate of excess relative rate solid cancer mortality per Gy is larger than estimates currently informing radiation protection, and some evidence suggests a steeper slope for the dose-response association in the low dose range than over the full dose range. These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially for low dose exposures that are of primary interest in contemporary medical, occupational, and environmental settings.”
In a nutshell, the article’s findings
substantially increase our perception of radiogenic risks
confirm that the linear no threshold model for radiation risks is acceptable
give new hard evidence of increased risks at low levels of exposure
act to question the continued use of the LSS studies of Japanese bomb survivors in deriving absolute radiation risks for the public
act to question the ICRP’s continued use of DDREFs which at present halve radiation risks, and
act to put pressure on ICRP, WHO, IAEA, etc to revise upwards the current low risks of radiation.
DISCUSSION
Numerical Risk of Radiation…………………………………………………………………………………………………..So it can be shown that the INWORKS study increases the currently perceived absolute risk of fatal cancer in the UK from ~ 5% to 13% per Sv. This is a substantial increase and will need to be addressed by the ICRP and national authorities.
2. Strengthens and Increases the risks found older studies. Second, the new study strengthens an earlier 2018 study (Richardson et al, 2018) by the same team by adding another 10 years’ data to the epidemiology datasets used in the metastudy. It not only strengthens the findings but actually increases the observed ERR risk by ~10% ie from 0.47 to 0.52 per Gy.
Prolonged exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation is associated with a higher risk of death from cancer than previously thought, suggests research tracking the deaths of workers in the nuclear industry, published in The BMJ.
The findings should inform current rules on workplace protection from low-dose radiation, say the researchers.
To date, estimates of the effects of radiation on the risk of dying from cancer have been based primarily on studies of survivors of atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War.
These estimates are used to set the level of protection required for workers regularly exposed to much lower doses of radiation in the nuclear industry and other sectors such as health care.
But the latest data from the International Nuclear Workers Study (INWORKS) suggest that risk estimates, based on the acute exposures among atomic bomb survivors to an extremely high dose of radiation, may underestimate the cancer risks from exposure to much lower doses of ionizing radiation delivered over a prolonged period in the workplace.
The researchers therefore tracked and analyzed deaths among 309,932 workers in the nuclear industry in the UK, France, and the US (INWORKS) for whom individual monitoring data for external exposure to ionizing radiation were available.
During a monitoring period spanning 1944 to 2016, 103,553 workers died: 28,089 of these deaths were due to solid cancers, which include most cancers other than leukemia.
The researchers then used this information to estimate the risk of death from solid cancers based on workers’ exposure to radiation 10 years previously.
They estimated that this risk increased by 52% for every unit of radiation (Gray; Gy) workers had absorbed. A dose of one Gray is equivalent to a unit of one Joule of energy deposited in a kilogram of a substance.
But when the analysis was restricted to workers who had been exposed to the lowest cumulative doses of radiation (0-100 mGy), this approximately doubled the risk of death from solid cancers per unit Gy absorbed.
Similarly, restricting the analysis only to workers hired in more recent years when estimates of occupational external penetrating radiation dose were more accurate also increased the risk of death from solid cancer per unit Gy absorbed.
Excluding deaths from cancers of the lung and lung cavity, which might be linked to smoking or occupational exposure to asbestos, had little effect on the strength of the association.
The researchers acknowledge some limitations to their findings, including that exposures for workers employed in the early years of the nuclear industry may have been poorly estimated, despite their efforts to account for subsequent improvements in dosimeter technology—a device for measuring exposure to radiation.
They also point out that the separate analysis of deaths restricted to workers hired in more recent years found an even higher risk of death from solid cancer per unit Gy absorbed, meaning that the increased risk observed in the full cohort wasn’t driven by workers employed in the earliest years of the industry. There were also no individual level data on several potentially influential factors, including smoking.
“People often assume that low dose rate exposures pose less carcinogenic hazard than the high dose rate exposures experienced by the Japanese atomic bomb survivors,” write the researchers. “Our study does not find evidence of reduced risk per unit dose for solid cancer among workers typically exposed to radiation at low dose rates.”
They hope that organizations such as the International Commission on Radiological Protection will use their results to inform their assessment of the risks of low dose, and low dose rate, radiation and ultimately in an update of the system of radiological protection.
More information: Cancer mortality after low dose exposure to ionising radiation in workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (INWORKS): cohort study, The BMJ (2023). DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2022-074520
Many citizens do not realize that SMNRs (Small Modular Nuclear Reactors) produce all of the same kinds of radioactive wastes that traditional larger reactors do – high-level waste (irradiated nuclear fuel), medium-level waste (e.g. decommissioning waste resulting from the dismantling of reactor structures), and low-level waste. This particular post is about tritium.
by Gordon Edwards, 9 Aug 23
By far the most radioactive objects produced by any nuclear reactor, large or small, are the intensely radioactive used nuclear fuel elements. A used nuclear fuel bundle is one of the most dangerous objects on Earth. It can give a lethal gamma radiation dose to any unshielded human being in a short time, even after “cooling off” for several decades.
But even after all the irradiated nuclear fuel (high-level radioactive waste) has been removed from the reactor there is still a large volume of dangerous radioactive waste left behind – including the activation products that are created in the core area of the reactor. Two of the most biologically and environmentally mobile radioactive activation products are tritium (radioactive hydrogen) and carbon-14 (radioactive carbon).
(1) Tritium is radioactive hydrogen. A tritium atom is three times heavier than a normal hydrogen atom, but the two are otherwise chemically identical. Any chemical compounds formed with ordinary hydrogen can equally well use tritium instead. The only fundamental difference is that tritium atoms disintegrate (explode), while other hydrogen atoms do not disintegrate. When a tritium atom explodes it gives off a beta particle, but there are no gamma rays. It is a “pure” beta emitter.
(2) For example, a normal water molecule H2O is not radioactive. Tritiated water is radioactive because one or both of the hydrogen atoms in H2O has been replaced by a tritium atom. So when you drink or inhale or otherwise absorb tritiated water, the tritium atoms are disintegrating inside your body. Your cells are being bombarded with beta particles from disintegrating tritium atoms.
(3) Chemically, radioactive water molecules are no different than ordinary water molecules. It is not possible to separate out the tritiated water molecules by filtration or any normal chemical processes. Tritiated water is chemically identical to ordinary water. Municipal water treatment plants cannot remove tritium from drinking water. You can’t filter water from water.
(4) Evaporation of tritiated water will produce radioactive water vapour. Tritiated water vapour will condense to form radioactive dew drops, and can precipitate as radioactive raindrops or radioactive snowflakes. To contain tritiated water therefore it is important to prevent evaporation. Sealed drums or water tanks are suitable for the task.
At Fukushima Daiichi there are about 1.3 million tonnes of tritiated water stored in over 1000 large steel tanks. This inventory is constantly growing because of the continual cooling of the molten cores with ordinary water which becomes heavily contaminated with two dozen radioactive waste materials on contact with the molten core material, including tritium. The main reason that TEPCO has given for dumping this huge amount of stored tritiated water into the Pacific Ocean is simply because the site is running out of space to accommodate more tanks. This is a lame excuse – more space can be found if needed. The tritiated water at Fukushima is also contaminated with other radioactive materials, even though much of these other varieties has been greatly reduced by decontamination equipment called ALPS — which in no way reduces the tritium content. Since no removal process is 100%, other radionuclides remain in the tritiated water, in some cases to a very significant degree.
This problem of a growing inventory of tritiated water will not occur at Indian Point or any other shut down nuclear reactor. In such a situation, the volume of tritiated water is a constant and can be stored for many decades in drums. These drums would have to be inspected and repaired or replaced when necessary.
(5) All organic molecules (including DNA) incorporate carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms. Tritium atoms can and do replace some of the non-radioactive hydrogen atoms in the organic molecules in your body. This is called “organically bound tritium” or OBT. Whereas tritiated water, like ordinary water, passes through the body easily, OBT stays around for a lot longer. The “biological half-life” is how long it takes the body to get rid of half of the tritium; evidently it depends a lot on whether it is OBT or not. Tritium and carbon-14 are unique in their ability to become a part of our very own DNA molecules; most radionuclides do not have this possibility.
(6) It has been shown in animal experiments that tritium causes genetic damage of almost all kinds, both chromosomal and non-chromosomal. Tritium ingested by a pregnant female passes through the umbilical cord to the embryo and the developing fetus in fact gets a larger radiation dose than the mother. Tritium has been shown to cause physical deformities and more subtle developmental abnormalities in embryos of experimental animals – for example, loss of the “righting reflex” in mammalian juveniles.
(7) Tritium gives off a non-penetrating form of beta radiation and so it is relatively harmless outside the body – unless it is in contact with bare skin. It can be absorbed directly through the skin. However once inside the body it goes everywhere (all organs) and is known to be at least 2-3 times more biologically damaging (per unit of absorbed energy) than gamma radiation. IMPORTANT: Although this “discrepancy” has been known for decades, and is not disputed, NONE of the regulatory bodies take it into account! After careful study, the UK Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters (CERRIE) published a report showing that the biological damage of tritium (per unit of absorbed energy) may be as much as 15 times greater than the damage from gamma radiation. See www.ccnr.org/tritium_paper_CERRIE.pdf .
(1) Resources on tritium can be found at “Troubles with Tritium” www.ccnr.org/#tr For general background on tritium, this article is easy to read: http://www.ccnr.org/GE_ODWAC_2009_e.pdf(2) Other resources can be found at Tritium Awareness Project (TAP Canada) http://tapcanada.orgHere is a brief reference to OBT (organically-bound tritium) from TAP Canada.
To augment Gordon Edward;s ‘s excellent overview about tritium here are some other basic facts.
As for tritium being “mildly radioactive,” as Gordon points out, this is not the case when taken in the body- as tritiated water-the most common form of exposure. The Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board overseeing DOE nuclear sites informed the Secretary of Energy in June 2019 that “tritiated water vapor represents a significant risk to those exposed to it, as its dose consequence to an exposed individual is 15,000 to 20,000 times higher than that for an equivalent amount of tritium gas.”
With a specific activity of 9,619 curies per gram, tritium emits, as it decays, nearly 400 trillion energetic disintegrations per second. William H. McBride, Professor of radiation oncology at the UCLA Medical School, describes ionizing radiation disintegrations as “explosive packages of energy” that are “highly efficient at forming complex, potentially lethal DNA double strand breaks.”
Source: William MacBride, UCLA School of Medicine Vice Chair for Research in Radiation, Principal Investigator of UCLA’s Center for Medical Countermeasures Against Radiation — National Institutes of Health, Jan 27, 2014.
“No matter how it is taken into the body,” states a fact sheet, from the Energy Departments’ Argonne National Laboratory, “tritium is uniformly distributed through all biological fluids within one to two hours.” During that brief time, the DNFSB points out that “the combination of a rapid intake and a short biological half-life means a large fraction of the radiological dose is acutely delivered within hours to days…” McBride underscored this concern, stating that, “damage to DNA can occur within minutes to hours.”
Over the past 40 years, Arjun Makhijani has provided clear, concise, and important scientific insights that have enriched our understanding of the nuclear age. In doing so, Makhijani—now president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research—has built a solid reputation as a scientist working in the public interest. His most recent contribution to public discourse, Exploring Tritium’s Dangers, adds to this fine tradition.
A radioactive isotope of hydrogen, tritium is one the most expensive, rare, and potentially harmful elements in the world. Its rarity is underscored by its price—$30,000 per gram—which is projected to rise from $100,000 to $200,000 per gram by mid-century.
Although its rarity and usefulness in some applications gives it a high monetary value, tritium is also a radioactive contaminant that has been released widely to the air and water from nuclear power and spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plants. Makhijani points out that “one teaspoon of tritiated water (as HTO) would contaminate about 100 billion gallons of water to the US drinking water limit; that is enough to supply about 1 million homes with water for a year.”
Where tritium comes from. Since Earth began to form, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen known as tritium (H-3) has been created by interactions between cosmic rays and Earth’s atmosphere; through this natural process, the isotope continues to blanket the planet in tiny amounts. With a radioactive half-life of 12.3 years, tritium falls from the sky and decays, creating a steady-state global equilibrium that comes to about three to seven kilograms of tritium.
Tritium initially became a widespread man-made contaminant when it was spread across the globe by open-air nuclear weapons explosions conducted between 1945 and 1963. Rainfall in 1963 was found in the Northern Hemisphere to contain 1,000 times more tritium than background levels. Open-air nuclear weapons explosions released about 600 kilograms (6 billion curies) into the atmosphere. In the decades since above-ground nuclear testing ended, nuclear power plants have added even more to the planet’s inventory of tritium. For several years, US power reactors have been contaminating ground water via large, unexpected tritium leaks from degraded subsurface piping and spent nuclear fuel storage pool infrastructures.
Since the 1990s, about 70 percent of the nuclear power sites in the United States (43 out of 61 sites) have had significant tritium leaks that contaminated groundwater in excess of federal drinking water limits.
The most recent leak occurred in November 2022, involving 400,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated water from the Monticello nuclear station in Minnesota. The leak was kept from the public for several months. In late March of this year, after the operator could not stop the leak, it was forced to shut down the reactor to fix and replace piping. By this time, tritium reached the groundwater that enters the Mississippi River. A good place to start limiting the negative effects of tritium contamination, Makhijani recommends, is to significantly tighten drinking water standards.
Routine releases of airborne tritium are also not trivial. As part of his well-researched monograph, Makhijani underscores this point by including a detailed atmospheric dispersion study that he commissioned, indicating that tritium (HTO) from the Braidwood Nuclear Power Plant in Illinois has been literally raining down from gaseous releases – as it incorporates with precipitation to form tritium oxide (HTO)—something that occurs at water cooled reactors. Spent fuel storage pools are considered the largest source of gaseous tritium releases.
The largely unacknowledged health effects. Makhijani makes it clear that the impacts of tritium on human health, especially when it is taken inside the body, warrant much more attention and control than they have received until now. This is not an easy problem to contend with, given the scattered and fragmented efforts that are in place to address this hazard. Thirty-nine states, and nine federal agencies (the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Agriculture are all responsible for regulating tritium.
This highly scattered regulatory regime has been ineffective at limiting tritium contamination, much less reducing it. For example, state and federal regulators haven’t a clue as to how many of some two million exit signs purchased in the United States—and made luminous without electric power by tritium—have been illegally dumped. For decades, tritium signs, each initially containing about 25 curies (or 25,000,000,000,000 pCi) of radioactivity, have found their way into landfills that often contaminate drinking water. One broken sign is enough to contaminate an entire community landfill. There are no standards for tritium in the liquid that leaches from landfills, despite measurements taken in 2009 indicating levels at Pennsylvania landfills thousands of times above background.
Adding to this regulatory mess, is the fact that federal standards limiting tritium in drinking water only apply to public supplies, and not to private wells.
In past decades, regulators have papered over the tritium-contamination problem by asserting, when tritium leakage becomes a matter of public concern, that the tritium doses humans might receive are too small to be of concern. Despite growing evidence that tritium is harmful in ways that fall outside the basic framework for radiation protection, agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission remain frozen in time when it comes to tritium regulation.
The NRC and other regulating agencies are sticking to an outdated premise that tritium is a “mild” radioactive contaminant that emits “weak” beta particles that cannot penetrate the outer layers of skin. When tritium is taken inside the body (by, for example, drinking tritiated water), half is quickly excreted within 10 days, the agencies point out, and the radiation doses are tiny. Overall, the NRC implies its risk of tritium ingestion causing cancer is small.
But evidence of harm to workers handling tritium is also growing. Epidemiologists from the University of North Carolina reported in 2013, that the risk of dying from leukemia among workers at the Savannah River Plant following exposure to tritium is more than eight times greater (RBE-8.6) than from exposure to gamma radiation (RBE-1). Over the past several years, studies of workers exposed to tritium consistently show significant excess levels of chromosome damage.[1]
The contention that tritium is “mildly radioactive” does not hold when it is taken in the body as tritiated water—the dominant means for exposure. The Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—which advises the US Energy Department about safety at the nation’s defense nuclear sites—informed the secretary of energy in June 2019 that “[t]ritiated water vapor represents a significant risk to those exposed to it, as its dose consequence to an exposed individual is 15,000 to 20,000 times higher than that for an equivalent amount of tritium gas.”
As it decays, tritium emits nearly 400 trillion energetic disintegrations per second. William H. McBride, a professor of radiation oncology at the UCLA Medical School, describes these disintegrations as “explosive packages of energy” that are “highly efficient at forming complex, potentially lethal DNA double strand breaks.” McBride, underscored this concern at an event sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, where he stated that “damage to DNA can occur within minutes to hours.” [2]
“No matter how it is taken into the body,” a fact sheet from the Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory says, “tritium is uniformly distributed through all biological fluids within one to two hours.” During that short time, the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board points out that “the combination of a rapid intake and a short biological half-life means a large fraction of the radiological dose is acutely delivered within hours to days…”
A new approach to tritium regulation. Makhijani pulls together impressive evidence clearly pointing to the need for an innovative approach that addresses, in addition to cancer, a range of outcomes that can follow tritium exposure, including prenatal and various forms of genomic damage. In particular, he raises a key point about how physics has dominated radiation protection regulation at the expense of the biological sciences.
It all boils down to estimation of a dose as measured in human urine based on mathematical models. For tritium, dose estimation can be extraordinarily complex (at best) when it is taken inside the body as water or as organically bound, tritide forms. So the mathematical models that can simplify this challenge depend on “constant values” that provide the basis for radiation protection.
In this regard, the principal “constant value” holding dose reconstruction and regulatory compliance together is the reliance on the “reference man.” He is a healthy Caucasian male between the age of 20 to 30 years, who exists only in the abstract world.
Use of the reference man standard gives rise to obvious (and major) questions: What radiation dose limit is necessary to protect the “reference man” from serious genomic damage? And what about protection of more vulnerable forms of human life?
According to the 2006 study by the National Research Council, healthy Caucasian men between the age of 20 and 30 are about one-tenth as likely to contract a radiation-induced cancer as a child exposed to the same external dose of gamma radiation while in the womb.
In his monograph, Makhijani underscores the need to protect the fetus and embryo from internal exposures to tritium—a need largely being side-stepped by radiation protection authorities. “Tritium replaces non-radioactive hydrogen in water, the principal source of tritium exposure,” Makhijani writes, pointing to unassailable evidence that tritium “easily can cross the placenta and irradiate developing fetuses in utero, thereby raising the risk of birth defects, miscarriages, and other problems.”
He is not alone in such an assessment. According a 2022 medical expert consensus report on radiation protection for health care professionals in Europe, “The greatest risk of pregnancy loss from radiation exposure is during the first 2 weeks of pregnancy, while between 2-8 weeks after conception, the embryo is most susceptible to the development of congenital malformations because this is the period of organogenesis.”
In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s efforts to reduce exposure limits and protect pregnant women and their fetuses is best described as foot-dragging. By comparison, the required limit for a pregnant worker in Europe to be reassigned from further exposure is one-fifth the US standard—and was adopted nearly 20 years ago.
Long-term environmental retention. A 2019 study put forward the first ever empirical evidence of very long-term environmental retention of organically bound tritium (OBT) in an entire river system, deposited by fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions.
When released into the environment, tritium atoms can replace hydrogen atoms in organic molecules to form organically bound tritium, which is found soil, and river sediments, vegetation, and a wide variety of foods. It’s been more than a half century since the ratification of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and tritium released through nuclear weapons testing has undergone significant decay. Yet because of the long retention of organically bound tritium, in greater than expected concentrations, it still remains a contaminant of concern.
For instance, despite its 12.3-year half-life, a much larger amount of organically bound tritium from nuclear tests than previously assumed is locked in Arctic permafrost, raising concerns about widespread contamination as global warming melts the Arctic. Organically bound tritium can reside in the body far longer than tritiated water, to consequently greater negative effect.[3]
Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and tritium. The tritium problem has several dimensions that relate directly to the world’s current and future efforts vis a vis nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
Now that nuclear power reactors are closing down, especially in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident, the disposal of large volumes of tritium-contaminated water into lakes, rivers, and oceans is becoming a source of growing concern around the world. The Japanese government has approved the dumping of about 230 million gallons of radioactive water, stored in some 1,300 large tanks sitting near the Fukushima nuclear ruins, into the Pacific Ocean. Once it incorporates into water, tritium is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible to remove.
Protests in Japan by a wide segment of the public and in several other nations—including Russia, the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, China, South Korea and North Korea—object to the disposal of this large volume of contaminated water into near-shore waters.
Then there’s the matter of boosting the efficiency and destructive power of nuclear weapons with tritium gas—a use that has dominated demand for this isotope. Because five percent of the tritium in thermonuclear warheads decays each year, it has to be periodically replenished. Over the past 70 years, an estimated 225 kilograms of tritium were produced in US government reactors, principally at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina. Those reactors were shuttered in 1988. Since 2003, tritium supplies for US nuclear warheads are provided by two Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power reactors. The irradiation of lithium target elements in the reactors has fallen short of meeting demand because of excess tritium leakage into the reactor coolant.
The hazards of tritium production for weapons are far from trivial.
For instance, since June of 2019, the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board has taken the Energy Department to task for its failure to address the risk of a severe fire involving tritium processing and storage facilities at the Savannah River Site. According to the Board, such a fire may have a 40 percent chance of occurring during 50 years of operation and could result in potentially lethal worker doses greater than 6,000 rems—1,200 times the annual occupational exposure limit. Doses to the public would not be inconsequential. Meanwhile, the Energy Department is under pressure from the nuclear weapons establishment to step up demand for tritium. Unless there is “a marked increase in the planned production of tritium in the next few years,” the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review concluded “our nuclear capabilities will inevitably atrophy and degrade below requirements.”
The Energy Department estimates it will take 15-20 years to achieve a major multibillion overhaul of its tritium production infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the quest for fusion energy highlights a startling fact: The amount of tritium required to fuel a single fusion reactor (should an economic, fusion-based power plant ever be created) will likely be far greater than the amount produced by all fission reactors and open-air bomb tests since the 1940s. A full-scale (3,000 megawatt-electric) fusion reactor is estimated to “burn” about 150 kilograms of tritium a year.[4]
The cost for a one-year batch of tritium fuel for a fusion reactor, based on the current market price, would be $4.5 billion. An annual loss to the environment from a single fusion reactor could dwarf the release of tritium from all nuclear facilities that currently dot the global landscape.
The tritium overview. Evidence is mounting not just in regard to increased health risks from tritium-contaminated water and from organically bound tritium, but also as relates to the harm tritium can visit on the unborn. At the same time, it has become clear that regulation of tritium in the United States is grossly insufficient to the current risk from tritium contamination, not to mention future risks that could arise if tritium production, use, and associated leakage rise. Arjun Makhijani provides a useful roadmap for sparing workers and the public from the dangers this pernicious contaminant will pose in the future, absent more effective regulation that includes lower limits for human tritium exposure.
[2] William MacBride, UCLA School of Medicine Vice Chair for Research in Radiation, Principal Investigator of UCLA’s Center for Medical Countermeasures Against Radiation — National Institutes of Health, Jan 27, 2014. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEH72v-yN9A
[4] Advocates assume that only the initial loading of 150 kg will be needed, as the reactor will “breed” the remaining amount of tritium to run the plant after a year of operation.
Tritium, which the Japanese government planned to dump from its crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, will harm human beings’ inside bodies as internal exposure can be more dangerous than external one, a renowned scientist said Thursday.
“When tritium gets inside the body, it’s at least as dangerous as any of the other radionuclides. And in some cases, it’s more than double as dangerous in terms of the effects of the radiation on the genetic material, on the proteins,” Timothy Mousseau, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, told a press conference in Seoul.
The Japanese government and institutions, including the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), have claimed that tritium is not dangerous because it emits a very “weak” beta particle, but the professor called it “fiction.”
“Ingestion is really the most dangerous. People have said that tritium is not dangerous based on the concerns for external exposure, but using the same argument, you would say that uranium 235 is not dangerous,” he noted.
Tritium is known as an emitter of low-energy beta particles incapable of penetrating a human body as they are stopped by a layer of clothing, in contrast to gamma rays that can pass through a human body and only be stopped by several feet of concrete.
If the tritiated water or the organically bound tritium discharged from the collapsed Fukushima power plant is consistently ingested, the ionizing radiation would directly damage DNA or indirectly affect other metabolic activities through oxidative stress or an imbalance inside the body that can lead to cell and tissue damage.
“The way it works is that the tritium molecule comes inside the cell and ejects an electron…It’s a little bullet. It’s like a bullet coming from a gun. It comes out from the nucleus of the tritium atom. That bullet hits something like the DNA,” Mousseau said.
“What makes tritium more dangerous than high-energy emission is that the bullet is moving kind of slow, so it hits something and bounces. And it hits something else and then it hits something else. It doesn’t go anywhere, so you end up with a clustered damage from that beta particle,” the professor noted.
“High-energy beta particles are higher energy. They will hit something, yes, but then they continue and go through the cell, maybe out of the body, and do much less damage as a result. So, this is why we need to pay attention to tritium in particular,” he added.
Mousseau, who published over 130 scientific papers related to radiation effects, presented a new paper on the biological consequences of exposure to tritium earlier this month based on 250 studies after scanning over 700,000 references to tritium.
According to the paper, the scientific literature indicated that tritium could be genotoxic and carcinogenic and can affect reproductive systems such as sperm and eggs.
Japan planned to release over 1.2 million tonnes of the tritium-laced water into the ocean for 30 years from 2023, but the discharge would last much longer than planned, Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace East Asia, told the press conference.
“Those discharges could begin as early as July, possibly later, and continue for many decades, not just the 30 years but maybe 50, 60, 70, 80 years. Next century is really possible,” said Burnie.
“This is water that’s radioactive in tanks, so it’s the deliberate decision to pollute and contaminate the environment, which doesn’t need to take place because actually there is sufficient storage space in the two districts next to the Fukushima nuclear power plant,” he noted.
Burnie was also skeptical of Japan’s claim that the contaminated water could be diluted through an advanced liquid processing system (ALPS).
“This is water that has come in direct contact with a reactor, a nuclear fuel that suffered a severe melt, which means fission products within the nuclear fuel became in direct contact with water,” the specialist said.
“It’s unclear how successfully the ALPS system processes the water. Around 70 percent of the water in the tanks still needs to undergo further processing. So, we still don’t know how effective it’s going to be. It can’t be discharged as it is at the moment,” he added.
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