In 2011, Japan’s nuclear regulator raised the danger level of an ongoing radioactive leak at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant to 7 on a 7-point scale. Authorities said on Tuesday (August 2013) that a storage tank has leaked 300 tons of radioactive water into the ground.
Here are five things about the Fukushima radiation leak and related investments:
1. Uranium investors are hurt:
The price per ton of uranium has plunged since the March 2011 nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, which caused losses for anyone investing in uranium mining stocks. Germany’s shutdown of most of its nuclear reactors pushed uranium demand to even lower levels.
How much radioactive material from Fukushima leaked into the ocean?
Scientists measured 5,000 to 15,000 terabecquerels of radioactive material reaching the ocean in 2011. The greatest threat came from the radionuclide cesium. Strontium and tritium radionuclides pose a greater threat to leaks entering the soil, since the soil absorbs cesium while the other two do not.
A terabecquerel is 1 trillion becquerels, defined as the radioactive decay of a nucleus per second; One sievert is a unit of biological radiation dose that is equivalent to about 50,000 frontal view chest X-rays.
2) Nuclear utility investors are hurt:
Investors in nuclear facilities over the past five decades have enjoyed a decent return on their investment, generally in the range of 10 to 12 percent per year. The Fukushima incident has hurt those investments a lot and many of them have fallen by 30 to 50%. It can take years to recover, if ever. Some investors sold their shares at a loss, to move on to other investments and try to start over.
The Tokyo Electric Power Plant (TEPCO) estimated that between 30 trillion and 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium leaked into the ocean so far contaminating it for years, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported.
The damaged plant continues to leak around 300 tons of water containing these radioactive radionuclides into the ocean every day in 2013, Japanese officials have claimed. This enormous amount of radiation is poisoning the entire Pacific Ocean on which more than two million fishermen depend to make a living and feed their families.
3) The livelihoods of fishermen have been destroyed:
Millions of fishermen from all over the west coast of America, the west coast of Mexico, all of Japan, Korea, the east coast of China, the west coast of Canada and the coasts of Alaska have seen their fishing livelihoods severely damaged by the enormous radiation poisoning of the Pacific Ocean by Japan. Most of these fishermen who had invested their lives in fishing and thousands of dollars invested in their boats are now suffering huge loss of income and loss of funds to make bank payments on their fishing boats. Many declare bankruptcy and work part-time on the land to make ends meet for their families. Fishing in the Pacific Ocean, once a billion dollar a year industry, has collapsed taking a million fishing families with it, a truly horrendous development. Japanese fishermen who followed their fathers into the fishing trade have been decimated by massive ocean poisoning across Japan.
How will radioactive material affect marine life?
US scientists say groundwater leaks could get worse. Nicholas Fisher, a marine biologist at Stony Brook University in New York, told Live Science in a previous article. “But in the region, yes, there may be enough contamination from the local shellfish, so it would be unwise to eat that shellfish,Fisher said.
3) Force Fishermen and Women to Stop Investments:
The fishing families now do not have additional funds to make other investments such as gold, silver or stocks. Some are losing the very house they called home for the last 5-10 years because they fell behind on their mortgage payments, a situation that causes large displacement of families, depression and leads to divorce. Holiday celebrations are bleak as families struggle just to put enough food on the table each week. In some families, parents are forced to withdraw amounts from their retirement accounts just to help feed the family.
4) Play the Lottery:
As desperation continues to eat away at them, some fishermen allocate a few dollars each week to place bets on their state lottery, praying and hoping that the big win will pull their family out of the financial hole they’ve gotten themselves into. This is a long shot, but someone wins every week, so more people continue to play the lottery chasing that one-in-a-million chance, even though it takes dollars out of their meager budgets.
5) Millions of farmers lose money on contaminated crops:
Farmers in Japan have suffered greatly with most of their crops radioactive and unfit for market. Farmers in the largest growing region in the United States, the famed San Joaquin Valley in central California, have had to spend thousands of dollars more per farm to implement shielding strategies to protect and clean their produce from any particulate matter. residual radiation. Dairy farms in Hawaii, the western United States and Canada found radiation particles in their milk and were forced to dump thousands of wasted gallons. These farmers struggle every month trying to grow their crops free of contamination. Therefore, the investments of time and money in their farms are now questionable if the profits from the harvest will pay more than the annual expenses. Some have switched to growing in indoor greenhouses to provide a measure of protection. Even so, tiny particles of radiation reach the water source and are absorbed by plants even in greenhouses, so the problem continues. Many of these farmers are now struggling to make the mortgage payments on their farms and ranches, as well as paying their contract workers. Only time will tell how severe the radiation contamination is affecting the millions of people who live near the Pacific Ocean.
