Remember Fukushima

Remember Fukushima

La cractéristique remarquable de ces temps métahistoriques, c’est bien sûr la multiplicité des crises catastrophiques, et la poursuite de toutes, sans aucune résolution, parallèlement mais avec des fortunes de communication variables. La crise du nucléaire de Fuskushima, qui nous plongea dans la catastrophe tout au long du mois de mars, est aujourd’hui reléguée à une place secondaire dans le système de la communication, – c’est-à-dire qu’elle est oubliée médiatiquement et du point de vue de la démarche d'appréciation virtualiste des événements. Bien entendu, elle perdure, se poursuit, s'aggrave, etc.

…Elle est même, selon certaines évaluations qui sont en abondance, “bien plus grave” qu’on ne le croit, ou qu’on le dit, ou qu’on se contraint à le dire. Il faut alors signaler un long article de Aljazeera.net, du 16 juin 2011, extrêmement pessimiste sur l’état de cette crise. Divers experts sont consultés et tous rendent un diagnostic effectivement très pessimiste.

«“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera. […] Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

»“Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,” he said, “You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.” […]

»Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive “hot spots” around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.

»"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,” said Gundersen. “The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.” […]

«Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns. TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

»Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station – an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan – is now likely uninhabitable.

»In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant. The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.» […]

Quel terme envisager pour résoudre la crise ? Gundersen est plus que pessimiste, il est indéfiniment pessimiste.

«“Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years,” he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor.” […]

»Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan. “So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water,” Gundersen said. “We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come.” […] “With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started,” he said, “But they never end.”»

Un passage de ce long article concerne la technologie des réacteurs nucléaires US et les risques qui s’y rattachent. Le Japon, par ailleurs lié par des accords de sécurité contraignants aux USA, a opté pour cette technologie… Ainsi y a-t-il un lien étrange, pervers et catastrophique entre Hiroshima et Fukushima.

«Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US? Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

»Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in Japan. He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the fact that most of them are of US design. “Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes,” Dr Sawada told Al Jazeera. “I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan.”

»Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US, something Dr Sawada feels is also a large component of the problem. “Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use,” he explained. "The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese government not use this technology yet, but the government accepted to use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear”.»

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