Ashes from Sewer Sludge with 16,670 Bq/kg Cesium Dumped

[kristopher]

More on living with the consequences of a meltdown. Note the cherry blossoms in the background - a sure sign that this is a heavily used public area; in fact it turns out to be the grounds of a high school.

Ashes from Sewer Sludge with 16,670 Bq/kg Cesium Dumped in the Final Disposal Site in Kiryu City, Gunma Prefecture


Kiryu City's assemblyman Hidenori Nishimaki and Assemblywoman Yuki Niwayama visited the final disposal site for sewer sludge and took some pictures. The site is maintained by the city's water department.

First, this is how the ashes from burning the sewer sludge from May and June last year is stored safely. The ashes from May were found with 16,670 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium, and the ashes from June with 9,623 becquerels/kg, says Assemblyman Nishimaki. If you think they are not supposed to dump the ashes with more than 8,000 becquerels/kg in the final disposal site, you are right, but they do it anyway in Kiryu City. (Probably Kiryu is not alone.)

And these ashes have 2,000 to 3,000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium. No protection, not even the blue tarp and sandbags.

From Assemblywoman Niwayama's blog, surreal dialog between the official at the site and Niwayama:


庭山:空間線量、高いですね。 Niwayama: Air radiation is high here, isn't it?

職員:ここは出ますよ 当然のように Official: Yes it is (saying as a matter of fact).

庭山:近隣の人、聞いてみたけど、ここに放射性廃棄物捨ててるの知らないですよ。 N: I've asked the neighbors. They don't know that radioactive waste is being dumped here.

職員:回覧板で回しましたけどね。 O: We've notified them using the neighborhood circular notice.

庭山:怒っていますよ。 N: They are angry.

職員:佐藤光好議員に相談したら、近隣だけで十分ということで4丁目にだけ回覧版を回しました。 O: When we asked the assemblyman of the district, he said only the residents in the vicinity needed to be notified. So we notified only the 4-chome** residents....

Much more at http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2012/04/ashes-from-sewer-sludge-with-16670-bqkg.html


** chome (pronounced with a short e) designates a city subdivision of a postal zone. It is probably no more than a few blocks of the surrounding area at most.

[Nihil]

1. Truly appalling on so many levels.

> a sure sign that this is a heavily used public area;
> in fact it turns out to be the grounds of a high school.

> The site is maintained by the city's water department.

So we're not even seeing the effects of illegal fly-tipping by contractors:
This is the official disposal by the city itself!




> When we asked the assemblyman of the district, he said only the residents in the
> vicinity needed to be notified. So we notified only the (nearest) residents....

... with just a simple wooden fence to keep people (= kids) out ... and nothing to
keep the "ash" in when it dries out again and the wind picks up ...


This would be a terrible situation to unearth in Somalia, one of the -stans or some
other exploited third-world nation but in Japan?!

[kristopher]

2. That's the reality when dealing with the quanities of contamination from such a disaster.

There simply isn't enough money in a system to actually do a proper clean-up. We see the same economic process at work with oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon.

[kristopher]

3. a major lesson of Fukushima is that...

Before this no one in Japan imagined the nuclear plants would put everyone in a situation where it can't be cleaned up or contained and taken care of promptly.

We still suffer from that same ignorance of arrogance.