Radioactive Isotopes Measured at Olympic and Paralympic Venues in Fukushima Prefecture and Tokyo, Japan
/Peer-reviewed journal article published by Journal of Environmental Engineering Science
Marco Paul Johann Kaltofen
Department of Physics, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA.
Arnie Gundersen and Maggie Gundersen
Fairewinds Energy Education, Charleston, South Carolina, USA.
Today, as highlighted in a quick post-two-weeks ago, Fairewinds Energy Education releases the data and links to the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science peer-reviewed article authored by Dr. Marco Kaltofen of WPI, Fairewinds’ chief engineer Arnie Gundersen, and Fairewinds founder Maggie Gundersen. Known for “exploring innovative solutions to problems in air, water, and land contamination and waste disposal, with coverage of climate change, environmental risk assessment and management, green technologies, sustainability, and environmental policy”, Environmental Engineering Science is published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Entitled Radioactive Isotopes Measured at Olympic and Paralympic Venues in Fukushima Prefecture and Tokyo, Japan is a study that “detected modest radioactive contamination at Olympic venues in Japan, and found significant alpha-, beta-, and gamma-emitter contamination at Japan’s National Training Center. A total of 146 independent soil and dust samples were collected from sites in Fukushima Prefecture, Greater Tokyo, and the heavily traveled corridors between these northern Japan locations to assess radiological contamination related to the Fukushima meltdowns. Thirty-six samples were collected from 2020 Olympic/Paralympic venues, including Yoyogi National Stadium, Shiokaze Park, Olympic Village, Imperial Palace Gardens (all in Tokyo), Azuma Stadium in Fukushima, and the J-Village Olympic and Paralympic National Training Center,” according to the Abstract in Environmental Engineering Science. [Emphasis Added]
Here is the current link to the Abstract in Environmental Engineering Science. We’ll share the authors’ temporary link to a full-text pdf once the publisher makes this available.
This newly reviewed study of Radioactive Dusts and Dirt at Japanese Olympic sites and throughout Northern Japan by Fairewinds and Marco Kaltofen has four significant conclusions:
Different types of alpha and beta radioactive micro-particles were released at other times and landed in various locations throughout Japan. “The exclusive use of cesium-137 beta activity levels as a proxy for total internal and external exposure, therefore, introduces dose assessment errors.”
“Rooftops previously decontaminated in Minamisoma are recontaminated by airborne atmospheric dust containing radionuclides … from the Fukushima meltdowns. The data show a need for continuing reassessment and potentially, additional remedial work on many sites in Fukushima Prefecture.”
The greater Tokyo Olympic venues had activities similar to sample sites in the US. In contrast, Olympic sites in Northern Japan near Fukushima contained an average of about twice as much radioactivity as Tokyo, with Plutonium identified at the J-Village National Training Center.
Non-Olympic sites throughout Japan averaged 7.0 times greater beta activity than the Tokyo Olympic venues. These data show that remediation emphasized the Olympic venues over cleaning other contaminated parts of Japan.
Fairewinds first met Dr. Marco Kaltofen after an introduction by a mutual colleague shortly after the triple meltdowns at TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant site north of Tokyo, Japan. These meltdowns were the third, fourth, and fifth meltdowns at a commercial utility reactor site. The first such calamity happened in 1979 at the TMI reactor Unit 2 near Harrisburg, PA, in the United States. The second such catastrophe occurred in 1986 at the Chernobyl reactor located in Pripyat, Ukraine. The three meltdowns in Japan in March 2011 showed the extreme danger of aging nukes operating on a budget to make money for the energy company while eschewing safety regulations like tsunami walls in cost-cutting efforts. Nuclear power cost cutting resulted in 5-meltdowns in at commercial reactor sites in only 40-years. These five meltdowns do not include the many other meltdowns or significant radioactive releases that Fairewinds has also studied and even sampled worldwide that have occurred at nuclear test sites like the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) in California and Sellafield/Windscale in the UK.
Good Science takes time and money. We would not have been able to conduct the scientific work Fairewinds has done in Japan without the individual donors and foundations who have consistently donated to support Fairewinds’ travel expenses to Japan and any associated project costs. We are grateful that you believe in us and in science.
To Fairewinds’ individual donors, who have asked us to continue the work we began immediately after the Fukushima meltdowns, and continue donating to Fairewinds Energy Education year after year as they waited for Dr. Marco Kaltofen and Arnie Gundersen to conduct this investigative science work: Thank you!
Special thanks to Fairewinds Japan Project donors including The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, Wallace Research Foundation, Samuel Lawrence Foundation, The Tides Foundation, Morning Sun Foundation, Boyle Foundation, Linda Lewison, and several other individual donors who have donated the time and money to make this work possible for Fairewinds and Dr. Kaltofen.
We would also like to use this opportunity to thank our board members who regularly donate time and money as they also sustain us emotionally in this challenging work.
Thank you to the citizens of Japan who hosted Fairewinds for the 2017 trip including Leon and Rosa Cloder, our host in Tokyo Dr. H. M. Homma, and Steve Leeper (the Founding Partner & Vice President of the Peace, Education, Art, Communication (PEAC) Institute Nonprofit).
Other friends in Japan also donated time and skills that made the 2017 study featured in this Journal even possible. Their translation skills and sampling help enabled us to provide analyses.
Most of all I would like to thank Shueisha Publishing in Tokyo Japan for publishing our book: Fukushima Dai-ichi: The Truth and The Way Forward in 2012 in Japanese. Whenever Arnie Gundersen has traveled to Japan, people have known him and worked to support Fairewinds’ investigative science. Thank you Shueisha Publishing and our co-author Reiko Okazaki: Fairewinds’ goal has always been to give the citizens of Japan the technical and scientific information they need.
Personal Essay
By Maggie Gundersen
Fairewinds thanks to the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Catherine A. Peters, PhD, Princeton University, for accepting this journal article and working with us to write a journal article that could reach many more people who are searching for information about the migration of radioactivity from sites all over the world. When you read this article in the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science, please recognize that there are so many more sites in the US and worldwide that need oversight and clear documentation showing the migration of the toxic materials, as we have shown here.
When I founded Fairewinds Energy Education in 2008, I never imagined where it would go. I first founded Fairewinds Associates for my environmental paralegal work and incorporated it in 2005. I am incredibly thankful to three women from Vermont: Crea S. Lintilhac, Mary Ellen Copeland, and Judy Davidson [Psychologist, Brattleboro, VT] for encouraging me to found the Fairewinds Energy Education Nonprofit. While I had some nonprofit experience, it was with private schools for kids with learning issues and several small community organizations, including two hospice organizations. I had never thought of or created a nonprofit organization, especially one that has touched so many lives all over the world.
For me, the release of the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science article with coauthors Dr. Marco Kaltofen and my husband and colleague Arnie Gundersen, I see the culmination and continuation of the work I began in 2008 and expanded in 2011 when TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi atomic power reactor site had three nuclear meltdowns in one day. My professional background includes time as a print media journalist and as a teacher, including in ESL with students from Japan and Korea, followed by my years as a paralegal and mediator, having earned my certificate in mediation.
Developing and expanding Fairewinds Energy Education was not something I had ever envisioned, but the pieces fit together well. I modeled Fairewinds Energy Education on a scientific, legal, and investigative journalism model that I visualized. Both Arnie Gundersen and I are former nuclear industry employees and nuclear whistleblowers. In the nuclear industry, I worked for an atomic reactor vendor [Combustion Engineering – now absorbed in various mergers] and for a utility in upstate New York as a public information representative at a proposed atomic power reactor site near Oswego. As a writer in the nuke industry, I also trained in grassroots advocacy and community building. Those are the skills I relied upon to build the community volunteer citizen science model that Fairewinds Energy Education uses for its sampling programs. Special thanks to Dr. Marco Kaltofen for working with me to determine and write protocols for collecting and submitting samples and data. I also want to commend him for his tireless pro-bono efforts to make our Japan Project available to everyone.
Publication of Radioactive Isotopes Measured at Olympic and Paralympic Venues in Fukushima Prefecture and Tokyo, Japan by the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science makes me feel that my whole career had come full circle to what I had first visualized when I created Fairewinds. In its publication, the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science includes cutting-edge research on climate change, complex and adaptive systems, contaminant fate and transport, environmental risk assessment and management, environmental sensors, green technologies, industrial ecology, sustainability, environmental policy, and energy and the environment. All of these issues are ones that we cover on Fairewinds educational website www.fairewinds.org. With Arnie’s and my joint backgrounds in education and legal testimony, Fairewinds also focuses on environmental justice and injustice matters.
In the US, almost every state has some type of nuclear facility, whether that is an operating atomic power reactor site generating electricity, nuclear bomb waste dumped and not cleaned up since the beginning of the atomic age, leaking uranium mines, atomic labs studying new methods to new products that are just as lethal as what is out there and under-regulated nuclear fuel manufacturing sites, or hospitals using radioactive materials that are not well monitored, improperly implanted, or loosely regulated. World War II and the A-Bomb let the nuclear genie out of the box. The alleged Atoms for Peace program then shared that technology with the world beginning the arms race. There is no solution for all the waste and a worldwide arsenal of nuke weapons that will bring on nuclear winter for the entire planet in a cataclysm if these weapons are unleashed. It is time to clean up this nuclear mess and move on to energy sources that will protect people and our planet while also creating real jobs in each country.
Science really matters! How we treat our planet really does impact our health, whether it is the movement of radioactivity, the plastics clogging our oceans, the smog clouding our skies, or COVID-19 wreaking havoc around the world.
At Fairewinds, we will keep you informed!
