New Earthquake Spikes Fukushima Radiation worries

Posted by Mike Tirone - Thursday, January 26th, 2012

We are nearing the one year mark of the Tohoku earthquake which resulted in a tsunami off the coast of Japan, killing over 15,000 people in one of the most expensive natural disasters in world history, with an estimated $235 worth of economic damage.

In response to the epic disaster, the Fukushima nuclear plant experienced a meltdown. Since then, researchers continue to find alarmingly high levels of severe radiation from the plant and its surrounding area.

Although disaster recovery has been in full swing, the last thing that the Japanese nation needed was another earthquake...

Late Monday night, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck just 93 miles away from the Fukushima plant. As the far right edge of the chart below shows, the quake this week caused the greates spike in the dose-rate radiation since April, following the Tohoku quake.

Following Monday night's quake, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. reported an increase in radioactive materials leaking from damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima.

From JiJi Press,

The total amount of radioactive cesium that leaked from the containment vessels of the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors reached 70 million becquerels per hour, up 12 million becquerels from the December level, the power firm said.

It seems that radioactive dusts were stirred up because plant workers went inside reactor buildings and removed rubble.

Countering the report from Tepco, some feel that the magnitude 5 quake that struck the town of Tsukuba, just under 100 miles away from the reactor plant, caused the the dust particles to sitr up.

Meanwhile, one Fukushima whistle-blower is saying that radioactive fuel is coming out from beneath the containment building. He explained that while Tepco has been drilling below the reactor's location they have found highly radioactive and lethal grains of dust.

Looking closer in this man's photographs you can see yellow concrete slags coming from under the building. He says, this “means that the container vessel is melting like honeycomb...otherwise why would metal uranium come [out of it]?”

After measuring the radioactive levels of these slags (which he describes as looking like yellow cake) the whistle-blower reported an off-the-the-chart reading, surpassing the 500 mSv/h limit – the Geiger counter equipment is incapable of recording any higher radioactive levels.

(Photos courtesy of Fukushima Diary)

As time passes, more and more reports are surfacing regarding radiation as it spreads across the globe, in part, because of the Fukushima reactor meltdown.

Just last month, eight months after the meltdown, Wealth Wire reported that an estimated 14,000 (now upped to 20,000) U.S. infants had died from radiation levels 100 times above normal across the United States. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that these lethal levels of radiation were found in air, water, and milk. The Center for Disease Control investigated and found this:

...eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age: 4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week) 10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week.)This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant. Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

Other reports reveal that radiation levels are dramatically higher in certain areas such as California, Canada, Finland, and Australia. Catalysts are everywhere, ranging from lichens, fungi, elk and reindeer meat in Finland, radiation clouds over Australia, to debris hailing from Japan seeping into Canada.

Consequently, thyroid cancer cases are "mysteriously" increasing in the United States.

The evidence does not directly link all of these issues with Fukushima, but many believe it is a result of lax handling of radioactive materials.

If it's true that the reactors' vessels are melting so severely into the soil below Japan --perhaps, without Tepco's realization-- than it is not far fetched to correlate the radiation levels across the globe with Fukushima specifically.