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Buckyball
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A Radioactive Nightmare by Michael Collins
As fallout from Fukushima heads our way, the government turns a blind eye.
Millions of Southern Californians and tourists seek the region's famous
beaches to cool off in the sea breeze and frolic in the surf. Those
iconic breezes, however, may be delivering something hotter than the
white sands along the Pacific.
Buckyballs.
According to a recent U.C. Davis study, uranium-filled nanospheres are
created from the millions of tons of fresh and salt water used to try to
cool down the three molten cores of the stricken reactors. The tiny and
tough buckyballs are shaped like British Association Football soccer
balls.
Water hitting the incredibly hot and radioactive, primarily
uranium-oxide fuel turns it into peroxide. In this goo buckyballs are
formed, loaded with uranium and able to move quickly through water
without disintegrating.
High radiation readings in Santa Monica and Los Angeles air during a
42-day period from late December to late January strongly suggest that
radiation is increasing in the region including along the coast in
Ventura County.
The radiation, detected by this reporter and the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, separate from each other and using different
procedures, does not appear to be natural in origin. The EPA's radiation
station is high atop an undisclosed building in Los Angeles while this
reporter's detection location is near the West L.A. boundary.
Both stations registered over 5.3 times normal, though the methods of
sampling and detection differed. The videotaped Santa Monica sampling
and testing allowed for the detection of alpha and beta radiation while
the sensitive EPA instrument detected beta only, according to the
government website.
A windy Alaskan storm front sweeping down the coast the morning of March
31 slammed Southern California with huge breakers, a choppy sea with
30-foot waves and winds gusting to 50 mph. A low-hanging marine layer
infused with sea spray made aloft from the chop and carried on the winds
blew inland over the Los Angeles Basin for several miles bringing with
it the highest radiation this reporter has detected in hot rain since
the meltdowns began, over five times normal.
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Jetstream blowing west to east
Feb. 7, 2012.
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Scientific studies from the United Kingdom and Europe show that sea
water infused with radiation of the sort spewing out of Fukushima can
travel inland from the coast up to 300 kilometers. These mobile poisons
include cesium-137 and plutonium-239, the latter with a half-life of
24,400 years.
Even with government, University of California and this reporter's tests
showing high radiation in the air, water, food and dairy products in
this state, the state and federal governments cut off special testing
for Fukushima radionuclides more than half a year ago.
Southern California is still getting hit by Fukushima radiation at
alarmingly high levels that will inevitably increase as the main bulk of
polluted Pacific Ocean water reaches North America over the next two
years.
Luckily, the area is south of where the jet stream has brought hot rains
from across the Pacific and Fukushima, more than 5,000 miles away,
upwind and up-current of the West Coast. Those rains have brought
extraordinary amounts of radiation to places like St. Louis, with
multiple rain events detected and filmed, showing incredibly hot rains.
Unluckily, North America is directly downwind of Japan, where the government is having
560,000 tons of irradiated rubble incinerated
with the ash dumped in Tokyo Bay. The burning began last October and
continues through March 2014, enraging American activists for this
unwitting double dose.
American media coverage of Fukushima's continuing woes and of
contamination spreading across Japan and threatening Tokyo's 30 million
residents, while not robust has been adequate. Coverage of contamination
in America and Southern California has been practically non-existent.
That's one of the reasons we started Radiation Station Santa Monica four
days after the meltdowns began on March 11, 2011, transmitting live
radiation readings for the Los Angeles Basin 24/7 ever since.
With nuclear radiation monitoring equipment, this investigation has
performed more than 1,500 radiation tests in different media throughout
four states and in and in jet airplane cabins where, even accounting for
higher radiation at higher altitudes, readings were more than five
times normal according to the manufacturer of our Inspector Alert
nuclear radiation monitor.
Those readings, along with the EPA's, combined with the UC Davis study
of buckyballs and a European study of sea spray radiation spread,
strongly indicate that Southern California is being exposed to
significant amounts of radiation. The closer to the coast, like much of
populated Ventura County, the more pronounced the radiation in this
scenario.
Other reports exist of what likely-Fukushima fallout in the Southland exist.
Researchers from Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University and the
School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University,
released a study May 28 that showed that all 15 samples of Pacific
Bluefin tuna caught off of San Diego in August 2011 showed indisputable
signs of radiation contamination emanating from Fukushima.
This suggests that the popular and expensive animal carved up usually
for sushi is even more contaminated now nearly a year after it was first
harvested and tested as at least 1,000 tons of highly radioactive water
used to cool the melted cores and spent fuel ponds are being dumped
daily into the ocean, according to recent revelations of the nuclear
plants owners, Tokyo Electric Power Company.
The study also suggests that other highly migratory species, like
turtles, sharks and marine birds, may also be contaminated with the
radiation found in the tuna: cesium-134 and cesium-137.
The U.S. Geological Service (USGS) reported Feb. 21 that Los Angeles had
more cesium-137 fallout than any other place in the nation during the
opening days of the disaster from March 15 to April 5, 2011.
The amount of Cs-137 detected in precipitation at a monitoring station
20 miles east of downtown was 13 times the limit for the toxin in
drinking water according to a report obtained by the
VCReporter.
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© VCReporter
Writer Michael Collins measuring the
unfriendly skies in December 2011.
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USGS released another astonishing study Feb. 22, from measurements taken
at its Bennington National Atmospheric Deposition Program in Vermont,
confirming a grim cesium-137 scenario for Southern California.
"Deposition actually decreased as the air mass traveled east to west,"
Greg Wetherbee, a chemist with USGS, told the Brattleboro Reformer
newspaper before imparting an additional bombshell.
"In the United States, cesium-134 and cesium-137 wet dispersion values were
higher than for Chernobyl fallout,
in part due to the U.S. being further downwind," Wetherbee told the
paper. "With Chernobyl, there was more opportunity for plume
dispersion."
This double whammy of cesium-137, with a half-life of 30 years isn't
even in a uranium-60 buckyball. But they are in the unfathomable spread
of goo throughout the Pacific on the second strongest current in the
world headed right for us.
The three meltdowns have spewed trillions of becquerels of highly
radioactive iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 into
the atmosphere and Pacific since March 11, 2011. The initial explosions
and fires sent untold amounts of radiation high into the atmosphere.
A Feb. 28 report by the Meteorological Research Institute, just released
at a scientific symposium in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, says
that 40,000 trillion becquerels, double the amount previously thought,
have escaped Unit 1 reactor alone.
This has resulted in fallout around the globe and especially impacting
the Pacific and parts of America and Canada, two countries downwind of
Japan on the jet stream. British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest,
Midwest and Ontario have been hit especially hard by rain, sleet and
snow, in some cases with dizzying amounts of high radiation.
A March 6 study Department of Biological Sciences study conducted at
California State University, Long Beach, found that kelp along the coast
of California was heavily impacted by radioactive Iodine-131 a month
after the meltdowns began. The virulent and deadly isotope was detected
at 250 times levels the researchers said were normal in the kelp before
the disaster.
Radioactive fallout in St. Louis, Mo., rainfall, which has been
monitored at Potrblog.com since the crisis began, has been repeatedly so
hot that levels have been reached that make it unsafe for children and
pregnant women. An Oct.17, 2011, St. Louis rainstorm was measured on
video at 2.76 millirems per hour or more than 270 times background.
The U.S. EPA considers anything 3 times background to be significantly
above background. The California Highway Patrol deems any material more
than three times background as a potential hazardous materials
situation. The St. Louis rain was
90 times CHP's hazmat trigger.
The main wave of water-borne radiation from the meltdowns, including
highly mobile uranium-60 buckyballs, is surging across the Pacific along
the Kuroshio Current, second only to the Gulf Stream for power on the
planet.
Millions of tons of seawater and fresh water have been used to cool the
melted cores and spent fuel rods, generating millions of tons of
irradiated water. The Kuroshio Current is transporting a significant
amount of this escaping radiation from Fukushima Daiichi across the
Pacific toward the West Coast.
The 70-mile-wide current joins the North Pacific Current, moving
eastward until it splits and flows southward along the California
Current, which flows along the coast to Ventura County and beyond.The
American government has done nothing to monitor the Pacific Ocean for
over half a year, even though a Texas-sized sea of Japanese earthquake
debris is already washing up on outlying Alaskan islands and is
suspected to have already hit the West Coast, including California.
"In terms of the radiation, EPA is in charge of the radiation network
for airborne radiation; it's called RadNet," EPA Region 9 Administrator
Jared Blumenfeld told the
VCReporter on Feb. 9 during a news
conference about new ship sewage regulations. "And we have a very
significant and comprehensive array of RadNet monitors along the,
actually along the coast, but on land. We don't have jurisdiction for
looking at marine radiation. Perhaps NOAA would be able to answer that
question but we don't have data or monitor it," he said.
NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
suspended testing the Pacific for Fukushima radiation last summer after concluding that there wasn't any radiation to be detected.
"As far as questions about radiation, we are working with radiation
experts within the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of
Energy," NOAA media liaison Keeley Belva wrote in a Feb. 10 e-mail.
"Here are some contacts information for those agencies at the
headquarters level."
In other words,
no federal agency, department or administration is doing anything to sample and analyze water from the Pacific. Fish aren't being tested for contamination, either.
"NOAA is not currently doing further research on seafood," Belva said
adding "NOAA is doing a study related to radiation that is focused on
radiation plume modeling."
The lack of testing disappoints Dan Hirsch, U.C. Santa Cruz nuclear
policy lecturer and president of Committee to Bridge the Gap which
exposed the Rocketdyne partial meltdowns above the western San Fernando
Valley in 1979 and continues to lead the fight to clean up Rocketdyne
today.
"EPA did some special monitoring for a few weeks after the accident
began, then shut down the special monitoring" Hirsch told the
VCReporter.
"What monitoring was done was very troubled. Half of the stationary air
monitors were broken at the time of the accident. Deployable monitors
were ordered not deployed."
Even when the government testing did work, increasingly high levels of radiation seem to have been ignored.
The VCReporter has learned that the California Department of Public
Health halted monitoring of Fukushima fallout when its Radiologic Health
Branch issued its last report on Oct. 10, 2011.
That report shows an alarming rise in cesium-137 in CalPoly San Luis
Obispo dairy farm milk beginning June 14, 2011, when it tested 2.95
picocuries per liter (pCi/l) and steadily rising in four subsequent
tests until it was 5.91 pCi/l. The hot milk was at twice the allowable
amount of this radionuclide in drinking water, according to the EPA's
3.0 pCi/l limit.
Then the testing stopped, for no other reason than the government
concluded that nothing from Fukushima had sufficiently contaminated
anything to be of concern. Even detections of radioactive sulphur-35 in
San Diego and plutonium-239 in Riverside did nothing to pique the
interest of regulators.
"The lesson to be learned is that both the U.S. and Japan suffer from
very lax regulation, a too-cozy relationship between nuclear regulators
and the industry they are to regulate," Hirsch said. "This can lead to
dangerous outcomes. This was not unanticipated. Yet the need for
immediate information was undeniable.
Live-streaming radiation readings from Santa Monica began four days
after the meltdowns. Since then, this reporter has conducted more than
1,500 tests in four states and miles above the Earth, where jet
radiation registered more than five times normal, even accounting for
altitude.
Special tests revealed elevated radiation in Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon rain. Southwest Michigan rain samples were hot.
Santa Monica and Los Angeles rain and mist were also high. Readings
taken in Agoura, Oxnard and Ventura mostly mirrored these measurements.
The Radiation Station Ventura California provides near-daily radiation
readings that include local food measurements.
Japanese sake, beer, vegetable juice, seaweed, pastries and tea all
registered significant ionization above background. Powdered milk,
turkey hot dogs, and jet travel breathing masks were all part of the
specific media tested, many of which were recorded in these videotaped
radiation detections.
HEPA filters may also be effective in capturing buckyballs, which are
geodesic dome-shaped structures that are spherical with multiple flat
sides. Strong evidence suggests that these hardy radioactive Uranium-60
nanoparticles have crossed the Pacific quickly, with their
concentrations rising.
That evidence includes our and the EPA's high beta readings in Los
Angeles. Our radiation station is a little more than a mile from the
Pacific shoreline. Downtown Los Angeles is more than 13 miles away from
the sea.
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Alexandra Navrotsky, Ph.D., director of
nanomaterials research at U.C. Davis
(center) with colleagues.
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The Jan. 27, 2012, U.C. Davis report "Uranyl peroxide enhanced nuclear
fuel corrosion in seawater," is the first account to analyze what is
happening to the gargantuan amount of seawater, as well as fresh water,
that has been hosing down the melted reactor cores and flushing into the
Pacific.
The study spells out a horrific scenario in which compromised irradiated
fuel turned huge amounts of ocean water into a series of
uranium-related peroxide compounds containing as many as 60 "uranyl
ions" in hardy nanoscale cage clusters that can "potentially transport
uranium over long distances" and persist for "at least 294 days without
detectable change."
How hot these nano-cage clusters of cancer-causing radiation are depends
on what kind and ratio of uranium isotopes make up the 60 in each one.
"A given isotope has the same radioactivity (half-life) regardless of
what chemical state it is in," Alexandra Navrotsky, Ph.D., director of
nanomaterials research at U.C. Davis, told the
VCReporter. "So the radioactivity for a constant number of U atoms depends on the proportion of different isotopes in the sample."
There is a strong possibility that these uranium peroxide buckyballs are
already sloshing around in the waters off Southern California as this
reporter and the EPA's radiation readings appear to indicate. But if it
was the source of our high detections what was the mechanism that was
transporting radiation inland.
Sea spray, perhaps. Radioactive sea spray has been shown to blow
hundreds of kilometers inland in tests conducted in the United Kingdom
by British and European researchers. As any one who has ever smelled the
salty ocean air miles from the ocean might expect, salt in sea spray
can travel a significant distance. The same holds true for radioactive
particles floating in the sea, even if in addition to U60 buckyballs.
In the 2008 report "Sea to land transfer of radionuclides in Cumbria and
North Wales," the greatest average concentration of cesium-137 and
plutonium-239 in soil at a depth of 0 to 15 centimeters was found 10
kilometers from the coast. The highest average amounts found at 15 to 30
centimeters deep were 5 kilometers away from the sea illustrating the
unpredictability of radiation fallout.
A 62-page UK study released in December 2011 found that sea spray and
marine aerosols created from bubbles forming and popping when the sea is
choppy or waves break have increased concentrations of radioactive
"actinides."
Actinides are chemically alike radioactive metallic elements and include
uranium and plutonium. One actinide infused the spray with an 812 times
greater concentration of americium-241 than normal amounts of Am-241 in
ambient seawater.
The report cited information that sea-spray-blown cesium 137 was found
200 kilometers from the discharge source in the New Hebrides islands in
northern Scotland.
Another UK study found that the Irish Sea has a micro layer on top of
it, perhaps only thousandths of a millimeter in thickness, that can
become imbued with fine particulate material and its absorbed radiation.
These concentrations of plutonium and americium are four to five times
their concentrations in ambient seawater. Plutonium concentrates by
26,000 times in floating algal blooms at sea, says the report.
These radionuclides and buckyballs make up the goo inexorably crossing
the Pacific, which may just have begun to impact our shores. Yet
not a nickel of state or federal money is spent monitoring it. We are on our own in this Fukushima nightmare.
This report was originally published at EnviroReporter.com.
