BRATTLEBORO — Anniversaries are times to celebrate or commemorate, to take stock and look ahead.
March 11 is the second anniversary of the first day of nuclear meltdowns that continue to this day at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in Japan. It is also the anniversary of the first day 130,000 people began new lives as nuclear refugees, leaving whole communities to become graveyards for radioactive waste, water, and debris.
What have we learned? What could we, living in our own evacuation zone around a reactor just like theirs, be faced with?
The nuclear disaster was initiated when an earthquake and tsunami hit the eastern coast of Japan, the site of a complex of six nuclear reactors, despite the seismic instability of the area.
The reactors lost external power to cool their cores, and three have melted down, most likely beneath their containment vessels, although no one knows for sure, even two years later.
One of these containment vessels was the same design and vintage as Vermont Yankee.
There is still radioactivity going into the ocean and the air. Two years later, the cooling pool of a fourth reactor is collapsing. This unit was refueling at the time of the earthquake - just as Vermont Yankee is about to do - and so the spent fuel in the pool was extremely “hot.” If it “goes,” it could unleash high levels of radioactive isotopes worldwide.
As the disaster in 2011 unfolded, the plume of radiation spread out around the power station and then traveled mostly northwest. Some towns in the 10-mile perimeter of the planned evacuation zone had very little radiation to contend with.
But other towns well outside that perimeter received high doses of contamination. Even the northern part of Japan is now so contaminated that people cannot eat food that grows there. The neat 10-mile radius evacuation zones we have in Vermont clearly mean little to the routes where wind would take any radioactive releases from Vermont Yankee.
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Many people in Fukushima were told to “shelter in place” - a phrase familiar to any local resident who has read Vermont Yankee's annual emergency public information calendar - as massive releases of radiation from the Daiichi complex continued for 10 days.
Communities where people were confined ran out of food as well as the fuel needed for eventual evacuation. Essential specialists - doctors, social workers, bus drivers - were not always willing to stay in an area receiving large amounts of radiation.
Entire towns were evacuated, but not in an orderly fashion.
The citizens of Namie, about five miles northwest of Fukushima Daiichi, for instance, decided on their own after three days to evacuate themselves, and they went to a town that was also right under the plume - twice. No one helped them. No one warned them. They are now dispersed throughout Japan.
Namie, Futaba, Okuma, Tomioka, Kawauchi, Minamisoma, Iitate - are all virtual ghost towns inhabited by feral pets and farm animals. Needless to say, billions and billions of dollars of business assets were effectively destroyed.
As you read “Namie,” think “Brattleboro.” When you hear “Iitate,” think “Putney.” When you hear “Kawamata,” think “Wilmington.”
Think about persimmon orchards with every piece of bark stripped off the trees in an attempt to decontaminate them, and picture our lovely Green Mountain Orchards. Think about rice fields abandoned and overgrown, and picture the orderly rows of Vermont corn we are so used to seeing.
In the towns near the reactors, the government has set up monitoring stations with readouts of radiation exposure. Since Chernobyl, many Japanese citizens have their own Geiger counters, and their readings are often twice as high as the government monitors.
Many have developed a deep distrust of the government and its reaction to the disaster. Never did emergency preparedness plans even hint that evacuations could last years, if not decades, which now seems likely.
Government compensation schemes have set neighbor against neighbor. The government has arranged for the same large corporations that built the nation's nuclear power facilities to clean up contaminated buildings and soil without bringing in national and international experts. Workers are poorly trained and monitored, and they are dumping radioactive materials into rivers and streams.
In reality, though, attempting to completely decontaminate the exclusion zones is futile.
Melting snow and rainwater run off the contaminated hills and recontaminate. TEPCO, the company that owns the damaged reactors, has begun incinerating radioactive rubble from the earthquake and tsunami, releasing more radioactivity into the air.
Children are the most vulnerable to radiation. Two-thirds of the ones who have been tested have cesium in their urine. Cesium has a half-life of 30 years. Many, many children have already developed nodules or cysts on their thyroid glands and abnormalities in lung and bone-marrow function. The full-blown cancers won't show up for another four to nine years and beyond.
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How could such a disaster have happened, especially after one already happened in Chernobyl? Especially when the International Atomic Energy Agency praised Japan for its robust regulation and emergency preparedness?
In Russia and Japan, there are very close ties between promotion of and regulation of nuclear power. Arnie Gunderson of Fairewinds Associates cites an “attitude of allowed deception” between TEPCO and the Japanese institutions which were supposed to ensure citizen safety.
Industry has led the development of regulations and not the other way around. Regulators did not enforce sufficiently strong measures to stop the same problems from happening again and again. When they did request safety modifications, they allowed many years to go by before these measures were implemented.
It is clear already that the government will be stepping in to bail out TEPCO and that most of the costs of the damages will be shouldered by taxpayers.
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Make no mistake about it. The same conflicts of interest between regulators and the nuclear industry in Japan are happening right here in the U.S. When you hear about the collusion of Japan's Nuclear Regulatory Authority with the nuclear industry, simply insert “U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” and you will have a pretty accurate picture.
For many of us who live near Vermont Yankee, taking in this information is just too horrifying, and we shut it out. But what do we accomplish by doing so?
We could well be allowing our own future Fukushima to unfold right here. Thirty-one of the 104 reactors in the U.S. are the same GE Mark I design as Fukushima Unit 1, the one whose dramatic explosions released so much radiation into the atmosphere.
It doesn't take a tsunami to cause problems.
The same thing that happened in Fukushima - a loss of external power to cool spent nuclear fuel - just happened at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Mass., in February when the Nor'easter blew in. That plant is also a GE Mark I, and it is also owned by Louisiana-based Entergy Nuclear.
We think we are masters of our world. This is a particularly American flaw; our nation's collective psyche was built on this premise.
But we are not. There are forces much bigger than us. There are things we cannot control. Nuclear fission, nuclear “accidents,” and nuclear waste are among them.
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Here in Vermont, this brave little state that thinks for itself, we have the opportunity to stop the Fukushima in our own backyard.
Entergy is trying to tie our hands with its lies and legal wrangling, spending money on lawyers, money that would be better spent on safety, or better yet, building up the decommissioning fund.
But we persist in standing up and saying “you can't bully us.” There is every possibility we can win the appeal of the Entergy's lawsuit against Vermont, despite what the company wants us to believe.
We have alternatives to nuclear power. A little conservation and the use of the robust and affordable renewable energy technologies that are already available can easily replace this outdated, poorly maintained, inherently dangerous power generator.
Join your voice with many others in defending our beautiful home and our future in a commemoration of the Fukushima disaster anniversary from March 9 to 11 as we honor the thousands upon thousands of Japanese nuclear refugees by sending them messages of solidarity and pledge in their name: “Never again.”