JAPAN ANNOUNCES PLAN TO DUMP RADIOACTIVE WASTEWATER INTO THE OCEAN

                From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185       246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14       4142    15512         1151        189       712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

Mar     2        1989      9490       1726       110      194

April   6         906     11787         4211        631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786      59 

June    1         287     10637        2346      3205      95

July     7         251      8440         1595        817      411

Aug    4         656    10120         1118         532      423

Sept    1       1480   10470           703        505      235 

           7          815     8469           342        358      282

Summary:

• Well, finally, some obvious improvement, except for Africa.  But let's see about tomorrow.
• The U.S, had again by far the most number of new cases, 107,060 to #2 UK with 37,326.
• Russia was #2 in new deaths to the U.S. with 795.
• However, in terms of new cases/million people:
• U.S.   321
• U.K.   547
• World   68
• Russia  119
• New deaths/million population:
• U.S.   2.4
• Wyoming   36.0
• California   0.9
• Texas   5.4
• UK   3.1
• World   1.1
• Japan   0.3 (and the country remains on high alert)
• South Korea   0.06
• Russia   5.4
• Bulgaria   17.9
• Malaysia  9.7
• Sri Lanka   8.8
• Reunion   13.3
• Martinique   179.1

As the U.S. South and Trump states in the West have lagged in vaccinations, so too have the European Central and East:

• While 80 percent of the adult populations in countries like Belgium, Denmark and Portugal have been fully vaccinated, in Bulgaria that figure plunges to only about 20 percent, while in Romania it lags at around 32 percent, according to the European authorities.
• Those countries, along with the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, also have some of the highest excess mortality rates across the European Union during the pandemic — one measure of how many deaths the coronavirus has caused.
• Countries like France and Germany are about to vaccinate millions with booster shots. Spain is aiming to inoculate 90 percent of its total population soon. And Italy is considering making vaccinations mandatory. But large swaths of the populations of Eastern European nations have yet to receive a single dose.
• The scarcity of doses that dogged early vaccination campaigns across the bloc is no longer an issue. Instead, misinformation, distrust of the authorities, and ignorance about the benefits of inoculation seem to be behind the low uptake in Central and Eastern Europe.
• Many in villages and small towns have shunned the shots, with some wrongly believing myths including that vaccines are more dangerous than the virus.
• Bulgaria, which has the lowest vaccination rate in the European Union, also has the bloc’s highest death rate, adjusted per population. 

In October of 2020 Japan outraged the world by announcing it would be discharging radioactive water from their crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean within two years.  Sure, they said this dangerous fluid would be filtered (huh??) and diluted to safe levels first.  Can you imagine the internal discussion that led to this pronouncement?   Sort of, okay, we're screwed, these wastes are piling up in tanks and we will need to hold them for hundreds of years, so let's see what happens when we fly a trial balloon of the only possible solution.

From that fatal day a decade ago, from Wikipedia:

Radioactive waste water has been discharged into the Pacific Ocean since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, triggered by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011 in Japan. Most of the radioactive materials came from immediate leaks into the atmosphere, 80% of which eventually deposited over the Pacific (and over some rivers).^[3] Leakage to groundwater has persisted since the disaster and was only first admitted by the nuclear plant in 2013.^[4] Water treatment began that year as the "Advanced Liquid Processing System" become operable,^[5] which is capable of removing most radionuclides except notably tritium.^[6] In 2021, the Japanese cabinet approved the dumping of radioactive water into the Pacific over a course of 30 years.

So was that the spread of radioactive wastes into the Pacific Ocean as many thought?  Well, no, that is a chart created by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing the possible wave height of the tsunami following the Great Tohuku Earthquake on 1 March 2011.  Snopes had a nice article on this disaster.  They quoted:

• Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

  This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, [said].

  Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) are only a temporary solution, he said.

  Tepco’s “sense of crisis is weak,” Kinjo said. “This is why you can’t just leave it up to Tepco alone” to grapple with the ongoing disaster.

  “Right now, we have an emergency,” he said.

• Further:  In the United States, across the Pacific, there was no sense of alarm.

  “With the amount of dilution that would occur, any kind of release in Japan would be non-detectable here,” said David Yogi, spokesman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

  Eric Norman, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the latest leak was not a concern.

  “The Pacific Ocean is an enormous place,” said Norman, who found radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power in California rainwater, milk and plants soon after the earthquake and tsunami. “There’s a lot of material between us and Japan. No matter what happens in Fukushima, it’s not going to be a problem over here.”

• From Hawaii:

The Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH) continues to monitor the results of
water quality surveys [from Japan] and does not anticipate any public
health effect on beachgoers or seafood safety around the Hawaiian Islands, due to
the following factors:

• Water acts as a diluent. While there may be significant quantities of
radioactive material released into the sea near the Fukushima reactor site,
the massive amount of water in the Pacific Ocean would rapidly dilute and
disperse the materials to negligible levels.

• Some radioactive isotopes rapidly decay. For example, the half life of
Iodine-131 (I-131) is about eight days. This means that the activity level of
the I-131 isotope drops by half every eight days. Given the length of time
since the event, the short-lived radionuclides would have decayed to near
background levels and therefore pose no health hazard. Although Cesium
isotopes have longer half-lives (Cs-134 has a half-life of about two years,
Cs-137 a longer half-life of about 30 years), the radionuclides also undergo
biological excretion and do not continue to build up in fish forever.

In short, Japan was too concerned about the cataclysm and what to do about it, while the rest of the world commiserated and appeared to have condoned the actions of Tokyo Electric Power Company.  After all, there was nothing else they could do.  Armed with that history, I guess the Japanese government in October of 2020 thought, hmm...if that was the response almost a decade ago, why not take the easy way out by just announcing they would cleanse these radioactive waters and carefully share it with the Pacific Ocean.

Well, China, the USA and rest of the world went berserk, including  Japanese fishermen.  So the Japanese government returned late in August with a new plan.  They would build an undersea tunnel to release these "safe" fluids a mile away from the coastline to preserve local fishing, and only do this for 30 years.  A mile out to make fishing safe?  30 years?  Are they nuts or what?

And why can't they just build more tanks to store wastes?  Well, Tokyo Electric Power Company indicated that the space taken up by the 1000 or so tanks at the plant need to be removed to make room for facilities necessary for the plant's decommissioning.  The government would also compensate local fisheries and businesses to mute their fear.

I've long felt that this event ruined Japan into the foreseeable future.  Chernobyl at least was landlocked.  Fukushima, and all 54 nuclear reactors in the country, are at the coastline.  Only nine of them have thus far been approved for operation.  Frankly, I don't know how the country has remained solvent.  

Five years ago I predicted that the contaminated region near Fukushima would become Japan's third nuclear peace park.  This area is about as large as the state of Connecticut.  In the meantime, they are faced with a need to decommission for another half a century for around $500 billion.  What about this radioactive wastewater?  That would be a significant additional cost if the Pacific Ocean is unavailable.

Here is another side of Japan I never noticed.  And I've been there at least a hundred times:

The green/yellow arrow symbol must be placed on both the front and back side of your vehicle for a whole  year to indicate that you just got your driver's license.  If you ride a scooter, same, showing that you are a beginner.

If you are at least 70 it is recommended that you place these, and it is required over the age of 75.  This combo is a bit confusing, as the teardrop was instituted in 1997 and the colored figure-8 in 2011 to replace the original.  Now, why would they make this kind of change?

The butterfly indicates you are hearing-impaired and the four-leaf clover is you are otherwise handicapped in some way.  They also drive on the left side of the road, so watch it when you cross the street.

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Hurricane Larry is weakening as he moves north in the Atlantic Ocean, heading nowhere important.  In the west Pacific, Super Typhoon Chanthu at 160 MPH suddenly formed east of the Philippines, and will skirt the country to the north, ease past southern Taiwan, and make landfall over China on Sunday.  I'll provide more details tomorrow, for any deviation can be catastrophic.

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