Twelve years after the disaster there, Japan has begun releasing water that had been exposed
to radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.
In August, Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant announced its plan to discharge nuclear
wastewater into the sea.
China called the action irresponsible despite the International Atomic Energy Agency having
deemed the water safe.
The IAEA has now finished its assessment of Japan's plans to release the water stored
at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
A publicity campaign denouncing Japan was rolled out and the Chinese public was on edge.
Sales of seafood plummeted and demand for portable nuclear radiation detectors soared.
With the device in hand, Chinese started to test everything.
To their surprise, they discovered that the radiation levels at home exceeded that of
Fukushima by many times.
China's nuclear industry has grown exponentially, but the country's capacity to manage nuclear
waste is severely underdeveloped.
Where has China's massive amount of nuclear waste gone?
The answer is troubling.
Hello, welcome to Lei's Real Talk.
I'm Lei.
When the Chinese used their handheld Geiger counters to test everything and share the
data with each other, they said they found that Tibet has the highest radiation in China.
And they wondered why.
Some Chinese experts came out to say that the high radiation in Tibet is caused by the
ultraviolet rays on the Tibetan plateau.
But people didn't find that convincing.
A New York Times report from 40 years ago may have the answer.
Let's first revisit this piece of history so we can better understand what we are about
to uncover.
A February 8, 1984 New York Times report said that the Chinese government had successfully
bid for a nuclear waste management contract worth $5.5 billion with a German nuclear company.
The Germans would ship its nuclear power plant waste to remote areas of China for permanent
preservation.
At the same time, China was lobbying Switzerland and other Western countries to send their
nuclear waste to China for a fee.
The report caused a worldwide outcry.
Experts questioned, is China capable of handling nuclear waste?
Some people were skeptical about the New York Times report.
Ten days later, the Washington Post ran a similar story with more details.
It said three German companies would send 4,000 tons of nuclear waste to China over
a period of 16 years and pay the Chinese $1,500 per kilo of waste, totaling nearly $6 billion.
At the time, China's annual export was about $40 billion, so the $6 billion contract was
a substantial amount.
The report vaguely mentioned the Gobi Desert as the intended burial site but gave no exact
location.
While Western media and experts questioned China's ability to manage the nuclear waste,
Chinese representatives involved in the negotiation defiantly claimed that China had the technology
and capability to manage nuclear waste properly.
There was no further information on how the deal was implemented, nor was there any information
about China's construction of a nuclear waste storage facility.
Western diplomats shrugged their shoulders and stopped asking questions.
In 1988, a British journalist named Vania Cooley went to Tibet to investigate suspected
nuclear contamination on the Tibetan Plateau.
It was two years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the Europeans were keen on learning
about the environmental damage caused by nuclear contamination.
In a small village of just over a hundred people in Amdo, Tibet, nearly 30 people had
died from unknown causes in just a few years.
The rate of miscarriages and stillbirths was also alarmingly high.
Cooley was hosted by Tsering Zhuoma, a 30-year-old woman who had given birth to three stillborn
babies.
Cooley also found massive fish die-offs in nearby lakes that were connected to an underground
water source.
Could it be that something was wrong with the underground water source?
It all sounded a lot like nuclear contamination.
But Ms. Cooley didn't have today's portable Geiger counter to test radiation levels.
In fact, the Chinese government wouldn't have allowed her to take special equipment
into Tibet.
Ms. Cooley wasn't able to identify the source of the suspected nuclear contamination.
And her book, Tibet Behind the Ice Curtain, didn't cause a big reaction due to the lack
of data and evidence.
A few years later, in January 1992, the Dalai Lama held a press conference in India and
accused China of producing nuclear weapons in Tibet that had caused a dramatic increase
in cancer and leukemia in Tibet in the late 1980s.
He also accused China of using the Tibetan Plateau as a nuclear waste dumping ground
and that the nuclear waste was not properly buried.
The Xinhua News Agency rejected the claim that China was producing nuclear weapons in
Tibet but claimed that it had been responsible for handling nuclear waste.
The truth is, China didn't have a proper nuclear waste disposal facility until 34
years later.
In 2018, the Yumen site in northwestern Gansu was the first nuclear disposal site put into
use.
The Beilong disposal site in Guangdong was completed in 2000.
A third facility, Feifengshan disposal site in Sichuan, is still under construction and
won't be operational until 2025.
During the past three decades, China's nuclear power industry has taken off.
Since 1992, China has built 56 nuclear power plants and has the largest number of nuclear
power plants under construction.
But the CCP has not taken nuclear waste disposal seriously.
Nuclear waste is categorized into high, medium, and low emission levels.
Low level waste consists of lightly contaminated items such as tools and protective gear, which
account for 90% of total nuclear waste but only 1% of radioactivity.
The medium level category includes engineering parts and accounts for about 7% of total waste
and 5% radioactivity.
Waste items in these two categories take hundreds of years to become inactive.
The third category is called spent nuclear fuel or simply spent fuel, which is a high
order nuclear waste generated from nuclear reaction.
Spent fuel accounts for only 3% of total nuclear waste but 95% of the radioactivity and requires
5,000 years to become inactive.
Humans and animals exposed to it have a high chance of developing cancers and other fatal
diseases.
Worst of all, radiation affects cell DNA, causing genetic diseases and even deformities
that can be passed down to future generations in humans, animals, and plants.
As local CCP officials competed to build more nuclear power plants to meet their GDP target,
they ignored building nuclear waste disposal facilities.
A Chinese media report called this,
Building houses without a toilet.
Officials want to build large and fancy nuclear power plants, but don't want to deal with
the waste.
The lack of proper nuclear waste processing capabilities has alarmed Chinese experts and
even the media.
Gu Zhongmao, a deputy director at the China Academy of Atomic Energy Sciences, addressed
the national leadership in 2004, saying,
Our nuclear waste reprocessing technology is 20 years behind India.
And on the eve of the 52nd anniversary of the successful test of China's first atomic
bomb on Oct. 15, 2016, Zhu Yonggong, a Chinese nuclear scientist, told other Chinese nuclear
experts,
We have to admit that we are backward in nuclear waste reprocessing.
Chinese media Phoenix.com asked in an April 27, 2016 article,
Millions of years of radiation.
Where has China's nuclear waste gone?
The article opened with this statement,
With an annual output of 600 tons, China's nuclear waste has nowhere to go.
The 600 tons output refers to China's annual output of spent fuel, which is high-level
nuclear waste.
The report further stated that China's medium and low-level solid waste nuclear storage
reservoirs had exceeded their service life and were reaching full capacity.
The spent fuel storage pools at a number of Chinese nuclear power plants were maxed out,
and high-level waste disposal sites were far from being in existence.
The problem described in the news article has worsened in recent years.
According to an April 2023 report by Henan.net, which is China's nuclear energy website, China's
spent fuel output has grown to be over 1,000 tons annually.
However, the country's recycling capacity is only 50 tons.
By comparison, India has an annual capacity of 350 tons.
In their in-depth study, the website said that China's spent fuel generation is expected
to reach 1,470 tons in 2025 and 2,394 tons by 2035, and China's cumulative output will
respectively reach 15,200 tons and 34,600 tons.
However, Beijing's effort in building spent fuel recycling plants lags far behind.
China is building two large spent fuel reprocessing plants, each with only a capacity of 200 tons
per year.
The first plant is expected to be operational in 2025, while the second reprocessing plant
began construction in late 2020, and we don't even know the completion date.
Here's the question.
If China has accumulated nearly 15,000 tons of spent fuel, with an annual recycle capacity
of only 50 tons and waste storage capacity maxed out 6 years ago, how has China stored
the spent fuel, and where did the nuclear waste go?
And why hasn't Beijing hurried up building more nuclear waste recycling facilities?
Last October, when the United States warned Russia against using dirty bombs in Ukraine,
Lu De, a Chinese social media personality, discussed the CCP's making dirty bombs using
nuclear waste.
He said in his YouTube program on October 25, 2022, that the POE's equipment development
department had been given the okay to manufacture dirty bombs, and a facility in Sichuan had
been making them day and night.
A dirty bomb is a radiological weapon that utilizes a radioactive substance in combination
with conventional explosives.
When a dirty bomb explodes, its radiological impact will be spread over a territory, causing
a long-term harm to the environment.
The main source of material for a dirty bomb is spent nuclear fuel, which China has accumulated
a lot of.
Lu De also said that the CCP would deploy dirty bombs in its military actions against
Taiwan, and would blame the radiation in the area, on the Fukushima nuclear waste water,
to confuse the matter.
Lu De said this in October last year, and as he predicted, 10 months later, the CCP's
propaganda machine lambasted Japan over the Fukushima water discharge.
On September 6, 2023, after people in Inner Mongolia suffered from thunder asthma that
was suspected to be caused by radioactive dust from a local coal mine, Lu De again talked
about Xi Jinping's plan of manufacturing dirty bombs.
He said China doesn't have the ability to recycle nuclear waste, but is using it to
make dirty bombs.
I cannot verify Lu De's claims, but his insight has offered a good explanation why Beijing
doesn't worry about not having enough recycling facilities to handle the large amounts of
nuclear power waste, and where China's large amount of spent fuel has gone.
Otherwise, one can comprehend how Beijing has resolved its 2016 nuclear waste disposal
crisis without building more facilities.
Let me know what you think and leave me a comment.
Thank you all for watching, that's all for today, and please subscribe for more.
