Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Karl Grossman

  • New Book Concludes: Chernobyl death toll 985,000, mostly from cancer

    This article was originally published by Op-Ed News.

    This past April 26th marked the 24th  anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. It came as the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear government officials in the United States and other nations were trying to “revive” nuclear power. And it followed the publication of a book, the most comprehensive study ever made, on the impacts of the Chernobyl disaster.

    Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment was published by the New York Academy of Sciences. It is authored by three noted scientists:

    Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Its editor is Dr. Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicologist long-involved in studying the health impacts of radioactivity.

    The book is solidly based–on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports–some 5,000 in all.

    It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of theChernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow.

    The book explodes the claim of the International Atomic Energy Agency–still on its website that the expected death toll from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000. The IAEA, the new book shows, is underestimating, to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.

    Alice Slater, representative in New York of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, comments: “The tragic news uncovered by the comprehensive new research that almost one million people died in the toxic aftermath of Chernobyl should be a wake-up call to people all over the world to petition their governments to put a halt to the current industry-driven “nuclear renaissance.’ Aided by a corrupt IAEA, the world has been subjected to a massive cover-up and deception about the true damages caused by Chernobyl.”

    Further worsening the situation, she said, has been “the collusive agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization in which the WHO is precluded from publishing any research on radiation effects without consultation with the IAEA.” WHO, the public health arm of the UN, has supported the IAEA’s claim that 4,000 will die as a result of the accident.

    “How fortunate,” said Ms. Slater, “that independent scientists have now revealed the horrific costs of the Chernobyl accident.”

    The book also scores the position of the IAEA, set up through the UN in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy,” and its 1959 agreement with WHO. There is a “need to change,” it says, the IAEA-WHO pact. It has muzzled the WHO, providing for the “hiding” from the “public of any information”unwanted” by the nuclear industry.

    “An important lesson from the Chernobyl experience is that experts and organizations tied to the nuclear industry have dismissed and ignored the consequences of the catastrophe,” it states.

    The book details the spread of radioactive poisons following the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26, 1986. These major releases only ended when the fire at the reactor was brought under control in mid-May. Emitted were “hundreds of millions of curies, a quantity hundreds of times larger than the fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The most extensive fall-out occurred in regions closest to the plant–in the Ukraine (the reactor was 60 miles from Kiev in Ukraine), Belarus and Russia.

    However, there was fallout all over the world as the winds kept changing direction “so the radioactive emissions”covered an enormous territory.”

    The radioactive poisons sent billowing from the plant into the air included Cesium-137, Plutonium, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90.

    There is a breakdown by country, highlighted by maps, of where the radionuclides fell out. Beyond Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the countries included Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The radiological measurements show that some 10% of Chernobyl poisons “fell on Asia”Huge areas” of eastern Turkey and central China “were highly contaminated,” reports the book. Northwestern Japan was impacted, too.

    Northern Africa was hit with “more than 5% of all Chernobyl releases.” The finding of Cesium-137 and both Plutonium-239 and Plutonium-240 “in accumulated Nile River sediment is evidence of significant Chernobyl contamination,” it states.

    “Areas of North America were contaminated from the first, most powerful explosion, which lifted a cloud of radionuclides to a height of more than 10 km. Some 1% of all Chernobyl nuclides,” says the book, “fell on North America.”

    The consequences on public health are extensively analyzed. Medical records involving children–the young, their cells more rapidly multiplying, are especially affected by radioactivity–are considered. Before the accident, more than 80% of the children in the territories of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia extensively contaminated by Chernobyl “were healthy,” the book reports, based on health data. But “today fewer than 20% are well.”

    There is an examination of genetic impacts with records reflecting an increase in “chromosomal aberrations” wherever there was fallout. This will continue through the “children of irradiated parents for as many as seven generations.” So “the genetic consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe will impact hundreds of millions of people.”

    As to deaths, the list of countries and consequences begins with Belarus. “For the period 1990-2000 cancer mortality in Belarus increased 40%,” it states, again based on medical data and illuminated by tables in the book. “The increase was a maximum in the most highly contaminated Gomel Province and lower in the less contaminated Brest and Mogilev provinces.” They include childhood cancers, thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers.

    Considering health data of people in all nations impacted by the fallout, the “overall mortality for the period from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated as 985,000 additional deaths.”

    Further, “the concentrations” of some of the poisons, because they have radioactive half-lives ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 years, “will remain practically the same virtually forever.”

    The book also examines the impact on plants and animals. “Immediately after the catastrophe, the frequency of plant mutations in the contaminated territories increased sharply.”

    There are photographs of some of these plant mutations. “Chernobyl irradiation has caused many structural anomalies and tumorlike changes in many plant species and has led to genetic disorders, sometimes continuing for many years,” it says. “Twenty-three years after the catastrophe it is still too early to know if the whole spectrum of plant radiogenic changes has been discerned. We are far from knowing all of the consequences for flora resulting from the catastrophe.”

    As to animals, the book notes “serious increases in morbidity and mortality that bear striking resemblance to changes in the public health of humans–increasing tumor rates, immunodeficiencies, and decreasing life expectancy.”

    In one study it is found that “survival rates of barn swallows in the most contaminated sites near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are close to zero. In areas of moderate contamination, annual survival is less than 25%.” Research is cited into ghastly abnormalities in barn swallows that do hatch: “two heads, two tails.”

    “In 1986,” the book states, “the level of irradiation in plants and animals in Western Europe, North America, the Arctic, and eastern Asia were sometimes hundreds and even thousands of times above acceptable norms.”

    In its final chapter, the book declares that the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant “was the worst technogenic accident in history.” And it examines “obstacles” to the reporting of the true consequences of Chernobyl with a special focus on “organizations associated with the nuclear industry” that “protect the industry first–not the public.” Here, the IAEA and WHO are charged.

    The book ends by quoting U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s call in 1963 for an end of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.”The Chernobyl catastrophe,” it declares, “demonstrates that the nuclear industry’s willingness to risk the health of humanity and our environment with nuclear power plants will result, not only theoretically, but practically, in the same level of hazard as nuclear weapons.”

    Dr. Sherman, speaking of the IAEA’s and WHO’s dealing with the impacts of Chernobyl, commented: “It’s like Dracula guarding the blood bank.” The 1959 agreement under which WHO “is not to be independent of the IAEA” but must clear any information it obtains on issues involving radioactivity with the IAEA has put “the two in bed together.”

    Of her reflections on 14 months editing the book, she said: “Every single system that was studied–whether human or wolves or livestock or fish or trees or mushrooms or bacteria–all were changed, some of them irreversibly. The scope of the damage is stunning.”

    In his foreword, Dr. Dimitro Grodzinsky, chairman of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, writes about how “apologists of nuclear power” sought to hide the real impacts of the Chernobyl disaster from the time when the accident occurred. The book “provides the largest and most complete collection of data concerning the negative consequences of Chernobyl on the health of people and the environment…The main conclusion of the book is that it is impossible and wrong “to forget Chernobyl.’”

    In the record of Big Lies, the claim of the IAEA-WHO that “only” 4,000 people will die as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe is among the biggest. The Chernobyl accident is, as the new book documents, an ongoing global catastrophe.

    And it is a clear call for no new nuclear power plants to be built and for the closing of the dangerous atomic machines now running–and a switch to safe energy technologies, now available, led by solar and wind energy, that will not leave nearly a million people dead from one disaster.

  • The Consequences of Chernobyl

    This article was originally published on Counter Punch

    Monday is the 24th anniversary of the
    Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. It comes as the nuclear industry and
    pro-nuclear government officials in the U.S. and other nations try to
    “revive” nuclear power. It also follows the just-released publication of
    a book, the most comprehensive study ever made, on the impacts of the
    Chernobyl disaster.

    Chernobyl:
    Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment
    has just been published by the New York Academy of Sciences. It is
    authored by three noted scientists: Russian biologist Dr. Alexey
    Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr.
    Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili
    Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the
    Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of
    Belarus. Its editor is Dr. Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicologist
    long-involved in studying the health impacts of radioactivity.

    The book is solidly based—on health data,
    radiological surveys and scientific reports—some 5,000 in all.

    It concludes that based on records now available,
    some 985,000 people died of cancer caused by the Chernobyl accident.
    That’s between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004.

    More deaths, it projects, will follow.

    The book explodes the claim of the International
    Atomic Energy Agency—still on its website – that the expected death toll
    from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000. The IAEA, the new book
    shows, is under-estimating, to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.

    Comments Alice Slater, representative in New York
    of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: “The tragic news uncovered by the
    comprehensive new research that almost one million people died in the
    toxic aftermath of Chernobyl should be a wake-up call to people all over
    the world to petition their governments to put a halt to the current
    industry-driven ‘nuclear renaissance.’ Aided by a corrupt IAEA, the
    world has been subjected to a massive cover-up and deception about the
    true damages caused by Chernobyl.”

    Further worsening the situation, she said, has been
    “the collusive agreement between the IAEA and the World Health
    Organization in which the WHO is precluded from publishing any research
    on radiation effects without consultation with the IAEA.” WHO, the
    public health arm of the UN, has supported the IAEA’s claim that 4,000
    will die as a result of the accident.

    “How fortunate,” said Ms. Slater, “that independent
    scientists have now revealed the horrific costs of the Chernobyl
    accident.”

    The book also scores the position of the IAEA, set
    up through the UN in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of
    atomic energy,” and its 1959 agreement with WHO.  There is a “need to
    change,” it says, the IAEA-WHO pact. It has muzzled the WHO, providing
    for the “hiding” from the “public of any information…unwanted” by the
    nuclear industry.

    “An important lesson from the Chernobyl experience
    is that experts and organizations tied to the nuclear industry have
    dismissed and ignored the consequences of the catastrophe,” it states.

    The book details the spread of radioactive poisons
    following the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant on
    April 26, 1986. These major releases only ended when the fire at the
    reactor was brought under control in mid-May. Emitted were “hundreds of
    millions of curies, a quantity hundreds of times larger than the fallout
    from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The most
    extensive fall-out occurred in regions closest to the plant—in the
    Ukraine (the reactor was 60 miles from Kiev in Ukraine), Belarus and
    Russia.

    However, there was fallout all over the world as
    the winds kept changing direction “so the radioactive emissions…covered
    an enormous territory.”

    The radioactive poisons sent billowing from the
    plant into the air included Cesium-137, Plutonium, Iodine-131 and
    Strontium-90.

    There is a breakdown by country, highlighted by
    maps, of where the radionuclides fell out.  Beyond Ukraine, Belarus and
    Russia, the countries included Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany,
    Greece, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The radiological
    measurements show that some 10% of Chernobyl poisons “fell on Asia…Huge
    areas” of eastern Turkey and central China “were highly contaminated,”
    reports the book. Northwestern Japan was impacted, too.

    Northern Africa was hit with “more than 5% of all
    Chernobyl releases.” The finding of  Cesium-137 and both Plutonium-239
    and Plutonium-240 “in accumulated Nile River sediment is evidence of
    significant Chernobyl contamination,” it says. “Areas of North America
    were contaminated from the first, most powerful explosion, which lifted a
    cloud of radionuclides to a height of more than 10 km. Some 1% of all
    Chernobyl nuclides,” says the book, “fell on North America.”

    The consequences on public health are extensively
    analyzed. Medical records involving children—the young, their cells more
    rapidly multiplying, are especially affected by radioactivity—are
    considered. Before the accident, more than 80% of the children in the
    territories of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia extensively contaminated by
    Chernobyl “were healthy,” the book reports, based on health data.  But
    “today fewer than 20% are well.”

    There is an examination of genetic impacts with
    records reflecting an increase in “chromosomal aberrations” wherever
    there was fallout. This will continue through the “children of
    irradiated parents for as many as seven generations.” So “the genetic
    consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe will impact hundreds of
    millions of people.”

    As to fatal cancer, the list of countries and
    consequences begins with Belarus. “For the period 1900-2000 cancer
    mortality in Belarus increased 40%,” it states, again based on medical
    data and illuminated by tables in the book. “The increase was a maximum
    in the most highly contaminated Gomel Province and lower in the less
    contaminated Brest and Mogilev provinces.” They include childhood
    cancers, thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers.

    Considering health data of people in all nations
    impacted by the fallout, the “overall [cancer] mortality for the period
    from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was
    estimated as 985,000 additional deaths.”

    Further, “the concentrations” of some of the
    poisons, because they have radioactive half-lives ranging from 20,000 to
    200,000 years, “will remain practically the same virtually forever.”

    The book also examines the impact on plants and
    animals. ”Immediately after the catastrophe, the frequency of plant
    mutations in the contaminated territories increased sharply.”

    There are photographs of some of these plant
    mutations. “Chernobyl irradiation has caused many structural anomalies
    and tumorlike changes in many plant species and has led to genetic
    disorders, sometimes continuing for many years,” it says. “Twenty-three
    years after the catastrophe it is still too early to know if the whole
    spectrum of plant radiogenic changes has been discerned. We are far from
    knowing all of the consequences for flora resulting from the
    catastrophe.”

    As to animals, the book notes “serious increases in
    morbidity and mortality that bear striking resemblance to changes in
    the public health of humans—increasing tumor rates, immunodeficiencies,
    decreasing life expectancy…”

    In one study it is found that “survival rates of
    barn swallows in the most contaminated sites near the Chernobyl nuclear
    power plant are close to zero. In areas of moderate contamination,
    annual survival is less than 25%.” Research is cited into ghastly
    abnormalities in barn swallows that do hatch: “two heads, two tails.”

    “In 1986,” the book states, “the level of
    irradiation in plants and animals in Western Europe, North America, the
    Arctic, and eastern Asia were sometimes hundreds and even thousands of
    times above acceptable norms.”

    In its final chapter, the book declares that the
    explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant “was the worst technogenic
    accident in history.” And it examines “obstacles” to the reporting of
    the true consequences of Chernobyl with a special focus on
    “organizations associated with the nuclear industry” that “protect the
    industry first—not the public.” Here, the IAEA and WHO are charged.

    The book ends by quoting U.S. President John F.
    Kennedy’s call in 1963 for an end of atmospheric testing of nuclear
    weapons.“The Chernobyl catastrophe,” it declares, “demonstrates that the
    nuclear industry’s willingness to risk the health of humanity and our
    environment with nuclear power plants will result, not only
    theoretically, but practically, in the same level of hazard as nuclear
    weapons.”

    Dr. Sherman, speaking of the IAEA’s and WHO’s
    dealing with the impacts of Chernobyl, commented: “It’s like Dracula
    guarding the blood bank.” The 1959 agreement under which WHO “is not to
    be independent of the IAEA” but must clear any information it obtains on
    issues involving radioactivity with the IAEA has put “the two in bed
    together.”

    Of her reflections on 14 months editing the book,
    she said: “Every single system that was studied—whether human or wolves
    or livestock or fish or trees or mushrooms or bacteria—all were changed,
    some of them irreversibly. The scope of the damage is stunning.”

    In his foreword, Dr. Dimitro Grodzinsky, chairman
    of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, writes
    about how “apologists of nuclear power” sought to hide the real impacts
    of the Chernobyl disaster from the time when the accident occurred. The
    book “provides the largest and most complete collection of data
    concerning the negative consequences of Chernobyl on the health of
    people and the environment…The main conclusion of the book is that it
    is impossible and wrong ‘to forget Chernobyl.’”

    In the record of Big Lies, the claim of the
    IAEA-WHO that “only” 4,000 people will die as a result of the Chernobyl
    catastrophe is among the biggest.

    The Chernobyl accident is, as the new book
    documents, an ongoing global catastrophe.

    And it is a clear call for no new nuclear power
    plants to be built and for the closing of the dangerous atomic machines
    now running—and a switch to safe energy technologies, now available, led
    by solar and wind energy, that will not leave nearly a million people
    dead from one disaster.

  • Obama Goes Nuclear

    This article was originally published on Counterpunch.

    Is there any chance that President Barack Obama can return to his long-held stand critical of nuclear power? Is he open to hearing from scientists and energy experts, such as Amory Lovins, who can refute the pro-nuclear arguments that have apparently influenced him?

    Obama’s declaration in his State of the Union speech on January 27 about “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country” marked a significant change for him. His announcement Tuesday on moving ahead on $8.3 billion in federal government loan guarantees to build new nuclear plants and increasing the loan guarantee fund to $54.5 billion was a further major step. Wall Street is reluctant to invest money in the dangerous and extremely expensive technology.

    Before taking office, including as a candidate for president, Obama not only was negative about atomic energy but—unusual for a politician—indicated a detailed knowledge of its threat to life.

    “I start off with the premise that nuclear energy is not optimal and so I am not a nuclear energy proponent,” Obama said at a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa on December 30, 2007. “My general view is that until we can make certain that nuclear power plants are safe, that they have solved the storage problem—because I’m opposed to Yucca Mountain and just dumping…in one state, in Nevada particularly, since there’s potentially an earthquake line there—until we solve those problems and the whole nuclear industry can show that they can produce clean, safe energy without enormous subsidies from the U.S. government, I don’t think that’s the best option. I am much more interested in solar and wind and bio-diesel and strategies [for] alternative fuels.”

    As he told the editorial board of the Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire on November 25, 2007: “I don’t think there’s anything that we inevitably dislike about nuclear power. We just dislike the fact that it might blow up…and irradiate us…and kill us. That’s the problem.”

    Yes, that’s the big problem with splitting the atom—one that has existed since the start  of nuclear power and will always be inherent in the technology. Using the perilous process of fission to generate electricity with its capacity for catastrophic accidents and its production of highly toxic radioactive poisons called nuclear waste will always be unsafe. And it is unnecessary considering the safe energy technologies now available, from solar, wind and other clean sources.

    Just how dangerous it is has been underlined in a book just published by the New York Academy of Sciences, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. Written by a team of scientists led by noted Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, using health data that have become available since the 1986 accident, it concludes that the fatality total “from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated at 985,000 additional [cancer] deaths.” This is in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other countries where Chernobyl’s poisons fell. The toll, they relate, continues to rise.

    Chernobyl was a different design from the nuclear plants which the U.S., France and Japan seek now to build but disasters can also happen involving these plants and they, too, produce the highly toxic nuclear waste poisons. The problem is fission itself. It’s no way to produce electricity.

    Obama has been aware of this. As he stated at a Londonderry, New Hampshire town meeting on October 7, 2007: “Nuclear power has a host of problems that have not been solved. We haven’t solved the storage situation effectively. We have not dealt with all of the security aspects of our nuclear plants and nuclear power is very expensive.”

    He still left the door open to it. His Energy Plan as a candidate stated: “It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table. However, there is no future for expanded nuclear without first addressing four key issues: public right-to-know, security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and [nuclear weapons] proliferation.”

    In his first year as president, nuclear power proponents worked to influence him. Among nuclear opponents, there has been anxiety regarding Obama’s two top aides, both of whom have been involved with what is now the utility operating more nuclear power plants than any other in the United States, Exelon.

    Rahm Emanuel, now Obama’s chief of staff, as an investment banker was in the middle of the $8.2 billion merger in 1999 of Unicom, the parent company of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, and Peco Energy to put together Exelon. David Axelrod, now a senior Obama advisor and formerly chief campaign strategist, was an Exelon consultant. Candidate Obama received sizeable contributions from Exelon executives including from John Rowe, its president and chief executive officer who in 2007 also became chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the U.S. nuclear industry’s main trade group.

    It’s not only been nuclear opponents who have seen a link between Exelon and the Obama administration. Forbes magazine, in its January 18th issue, in an article on John Rowe and how he has “focused the company on nuclear,” displayed a sidebar headlined, “The President’s Utility.”  It read: “Ties are tight between Exelon and the Obama administration,” noting Exelon political contributions and featuring Emanuel and Axelrod with photos and descriptions of their Exelon connections.

    The Forbes article spoke of how last year “Emanuel e-mailed Rowe on the eve of the House vote on global warming legislation and asked that he reach out to some uncommitted Democrats. ‘We are proud to be the President’s utility,’ says Elizabeth Moler, Exelon’s chief lobbyist,” the article went on. “It’s nice for John to be able to go to the White House and they know his name.’”

    Chicago-based Exelon’s website boasts of its operating “the largest nuclear fleet in the nation and the third largest in the world.” It owns 17 nuclear power plants which “represent approximately 20 percent of the U.S. nuclear industry’s power capacity.”

    The climate change or global warming issue is another factor in Obama’s change on nuclear power. An Associated Press article of January 31 on Obama’s having “singled out nuclear power in his State of the Union address and his spending plan for the next budget,” began: “President Barack Obama is endorsing nuclear energy like never before, trying to win over Republicans and moderate Democrats on climate and energy legislation.”

    MSNBC’s Mike Stuckey on February 9 reported about “Obama’s new support for nuclear power, which some feel may be a down payment for Republican backing on a climate change bill.”

    After the “safe, clean nuclear power” claim, Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, declared: “Politically, Obama likely was simply parroting the effort being led by Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham to gain support for a climate bill by adding massive subsidies for nuclear power, offshore oil and ‘clean’ coal. But recycling George W. Bush energy talking points is no way to solve the climate crisis or develop a sustainable energy policy…Indeed, Obama knows better. Candidate Obama understood that nuclear power is neither safe nor clean.”

    Climate change has been used by those promoting a “revival” of nuclear power—there hasn’t been a new nuclear plant ordered and built in the U.S. in 37 years—as a new argument. In fact, nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming considering the overall “nuclear cycle”—uranium mining and milling, conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication and the disposition of radioactive waste, and so on.

    Climate change is also one argument for pushing atomic energy of  another major influence on Obama on nuclear power, Steven Chu, his Department of Energy secretary. Chu typifies the religious-like zeal for nuclear power emanating for decades from scientists in the U.S. government’s string of national nuclear laboratories. Chu was director of one of these, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, before becoming head of DOE.

    First established during World War II’s Manhattan Project to build atomic weapons, the laboratories after the war began promoting civilian nuclear technology—and have been pushing it unceasingly ever since. It has been a way to perpetuate the vested interest created during World War II.  The number of nuclear weapons that could be built was limited because atomic bombs don’t lend themselves to commercial distribution, but in pushing food irradiation, nuclear-powered airplanes and rockets, atomic devices for excavation and, of course, nuclear power, the budgets and staffs of the national nuclear laboratories could be maintained, indeed increase.

    That was the analysis of David Lilienthal, first chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which preceded the Department of Energy. Lilienthal in his 1963 book Change, Hope, and the Bomb wrote: “The classic picture of the scientist as a creative individual, a man obsessed, working alone through the night, a man in a laboratory pushing an idea—this has changed. Now scientists are ranked in platoons. They are organization men. In many cases the independent and humble search for new truths about nature has been confused with the bureaucratic impulse to justify expenditure and see that next year’s budget is bigger than last’s.”

    Lilienthal wrote about the “elaborate and even luxurious [national nuclear] laboratories that have grown up at Oak Ridge, Argonne, Brookhaven” and the push to use nuclear devices for “blowing out harbors, making explosions underground to produce steam, and so on” which show “how far scientists and administrators will go to try to establish a nonmilitary use” for nuclear technology.

    Chu, like so many of the national nuclear laboratory scientists and administrators, minimizes the dangers of radioactivity. If they didn’t, if they acknowledged how life-threatening the radiation produced by nuclear technology is, their favorite technology would crumble.

    A major theme of Chu, too, is a return to the notion promoted by the national nuclear laboratories in the 1950s and 60s of “recycling” and “reusing” nuclear waste. This way, they have hoped, it might not be seen as waste at all. The concept was to use radioactive Cesium-137 (the main poison discharged in the Chernobyl disaster) to irradiate food, to use depleted uranium to harden bullets and shells, and so on. In recent weeks, with Obama carrying out his pledge not  to allow Yucca Mountain to become a nuclear waste dump, Chu set up a “blue-ribbon” panel on radioactive  waste—stacked with nuclear power advocates including Exelon’s John Rowe—that is expected to stress the “recycling” theory.  

    “We are aggressively pursuing nuclear energy,” declared Chu in January as he announced DOE’s budget plan—which included an increase in the 2011 federal budget in monies for nuclear loan guarantees to build new nuclear plants cited by Obama Tuesday. “We are, as we have repeatedly said, working hard to restart the American nuclear power industry.”

    The $8.3 billion in loan guarantees Obama announced Tuesday is to come from $18.5 billion in guarantees proposed by the George W. Bush administration and authorized by Congress in 2005. “My budget proposes tripling the loan guarantees we provide to help finance safe, clean nuclear facilities,” said Obama Tuesday, referring to the DOE plan which would add $36 billion and bring the loan guarantee fund to $54.5. And this despite candidate Obama warning about “enormous subsidies from the U.S. government” to the nuclear industry.

    The $8.3 billion in loan guarantees is to go toward the Southern Company of Atlanta constructing two nuclear power reactors in Burke, Georgia. These are to be AP1000 nuclear power plants designed by the Westinghouse nuclear division (now owned by Toshiba) although in October the designs were rejected by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as likely being unable to withstand events like tornadoes and earthquakes.

    Obama’s change of stance on nuclear power has led to an earthquake of its own politically. MoveOn, the nonprofit advocacy group that has raised millions of dollars for Democratic candidates including Obama, gauged sentiment of his State of the Union speech by having10,000 MoveOn members record their views. Every few seconds they pressed a button signaling their reactions—ranging from “great” to “awful.” When Obama got his line on energy, the overwhelming judgment was awful. “The most definitive drop in enthusiasm is when President Obama talked about nuclear power and offshore drilling,” said Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn’s director of political advocacy. “They’re looking for clean energy sources that prioritize wind and solar.”

    “Safe, clean nuclear power—it’s an oxymoron,” said Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace USA. “The president knows better. Just because radiation is invisible doesn’t mean it’s clean.”

    “From a health perspective, the proposal of the Obama administration to increase federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors poses a serious risk to Americans,” said Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. “Adding new reactors will raise the chance for a catastrophic meltdown. It will also increase the amount of radioactive chemicals routinely emitted from reactors into the environment—and human bodies. New reactors will raise rates of cancer—which are already unacceptably high—especially to infants and children. Public policies affecting America’s energy future should reduce, rather than raise, hazards to our citizens.”

    As to government loan guarantees, “The last thing Americans want is another government bailout for a failing industry, but that’s exactly what they’re getting from the Obama administration,” said Ben Schreiber, the climate and energy tax analyst of Friends of the Earth.

    “It would be not only good policy but good politics for Obama to abandon the nuclear loan guarantee program,” said Mariotte of NIRS.

    After Obama’s Tuesday declaration on loan guarantees, Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project of the organization Beyond Nuclear, said: “Unfortunately, the president’s decision is fuel for opposition to costly and dangerous nuclear power. It signals a widening of a divide as the administration steps back from its promise for a change in energy policy and those of us who are committed to a change.”

    “We are deeply disturbed by President Obama’s decision,” said Peter Wilk, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “Not only does this put taxpayers on the hook for billions, it prioritizes a dirty, dangerous, and expensive technology over public health.  From the beginning to the end of the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear reactors remain a serious threat to public health and safety.  From uranium mining waste to operating reactors leaking radioactivity to the lack of radioactive waste solutions, nuclear power continues to pose serious public health threats.”

    Nuclear opponents have been disappointed in a lack of access to the Obama White House of those with a critical view on nuclear power—who could counteract the pro-nuclear arguments that Obama has been fed. Will President Obama open himself to hearing from those who question nuclear power?

    Obama has credibility trouble already. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote on January 26:

        “Who is Barack Obama? Americans are still looking for the answer…Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map…Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.”

  • Money is the Real Green Power: The Hoax of Eco-Friendly Nuclear Energy

    Originally appeared in Extra!

    Nuclear advocates in government and the nuclear industry are engaged in a massive, heavily financed drive to revive atomic power in the United States-with most of the mainstream media either not questioning or actually assisting in the promotion.

    “With a very few notable exceptions, such as the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. media have turned the same sort of blind, uncritical eye on the nuclear industry’s claims that led an earlier generation of Americans to believe atomic energy would be too cheap to meter,”comments Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The nuclear industry’s public relations effort has improved over the past 50 years, while the natural skepticism of reporters toward corporate claims seems to have disappeared.”

    The New York Times continues to be, as it was a half-century ago when nuclear technology was first advanced, a media leader in pushing the technology, which collapsed in the U.S. with the 1979 Three Mile Island and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accidents. The Times has showered readers with a variety of pieces advocating a nuclear revival, all marbled with omissions and untruths. A lead editorial headlined “The Greening of Nuclear Power” (5/13/06) opened:

    Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. . . . But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better.

    Nukes add to greenhouse

    Parroting a central atomic industry theme these days, the Times editors declared, “Nuclear energy can replace fossil-fuel power plants for generating electricity, reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute heavily to global warming.” As a TV commercial frequently aired by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nuclear industry trade group, states: “Nuclear power plants don’t emit greenhouses gases, so they protect our environment.”

    What is left unmentioned by the NEI, the Times and other mainstream media making this claim is that the overall “nuclear cycle”-which includes uranium mining and milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication and disposal of radioactive waste-has significant greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

    As Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, wrote in an (unpublished) letter to the Times, the

    dirty secret is that nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming. Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes. These include uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel; construction and deconstruction of the massive nuclear facility structures; and the disposition of high-level nuclear waste.

    She included information on “independent studies that document in detail the extent to which the entire nuclear cycle generates greenhouse emissions.”

    Separately, Lee wrote to a Times journalist stating that the “fiction” that nuclear power does not contribute to global warming “has been a prime feature of the nuclear industry’s and Bush administration’s PR campaign” that “unfortunately . . . has been swallowed by a number of New York Times reporters, op-ed columnists and editors.”

    Greens for hire

    In “The Greening of Nuclear Power,” the Times, like other mainstream media touting a nuclear restart, also spoke of environmentalists changing their stance on nuclear power. “Two new leaders” have emerged “to encourage the building of new nuclear reactors,” according to the editorial. They happen to be Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and Patrick Moore, “a co-founder of Greenpeace.” The Times heralded this as “the latest sign that nuclear power is getting a more welcome reception from some environmentalists.”

    However, “both Whitman and Moore . . . are being paid to do so by the Nuclear Energy Institute,” noted the Center for Media and Democracy’s Diane Farsetta (PRWatch.org, 3/14/07). In her piece “Moore Spin: Or, How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups,” Farsetta also reported:

    A Nexis news database search on March 1, 2007 identified 302 news items about nuclear power that cite Moore since April 2006. Only 37 of those pieces-12 percent of the total-mention his financial relationship with NEI.

    Whitman and Moore were hired as part of NEI’s “Clean and Safe Energy Coalition” in 2006, which is “fully funded” by the institute, Farsetta noted. As for Moore and Greenpeace, his “association . . . ended in 1986,” and he “has now spent more time working as a PR consultant to the logging, mining, biotech, nuclear and other industries . . . than he did as an environmental activist.”

    According to Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Radiation (Brattleboro Reformer, 2/24/07), “Moore sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign, but he did not actually found the organization.” Wasserman went on to cite an actual founder of the organization, Bob Hunter, describing Moore as “the Judas of the ecology movement.”

    Scarce high-grade fuel

    Insisting that “there is good reason to give nuclear power a fresh look,” “The Greening of Nuclear Power” further claimed, “It can diversify our sources of energy with a fuel-uranium-that is both abundant and inexpensive.”

    This, too, was bogus. The uranium from which fuel used in nuclear power plants is made-so-called “high-grade” ore containing substantial amounts of fissionable uranium-235-is, in fact, not “abundant.” As Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation told BBC News (11/29/05), another “dirty little secret” of nuclear power is that “startlingly, there’s only a few decades left of the proven high-grade uranium ore it needs for fuel.” This has been the projection for years.

    Indeed, this limit on “high-grade” uranium ore is why the industry projects that, in the long-term, nuclear power will need to be based on breeder reactors running on manmade plutonium. But use of plutonium-fueled reactors has been stymied because they can explode like atomic bombs-they contain tons of plutonium fuel, while the first bomb using plutonium, dropped on Nagasaki, contained 15 pounds. Because it takes only a few pounds of plutonium to make an atomic bomb, they also constitute an enormous proliferation risk.

    Blaming Jane Fonda

    “The Jane Fonda Effect” (9/16/07), a Times Magazine column by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, blamed nuclear power’s stall on the 1979 film The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, which opened days before the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. “Stoked by The China Syndrome,” it caused “widespread panic,” wrote Dubner and Levitt, even though, they maintained, the accident did not “produce any deaths, injuries or significant damage.”

    In fact, the utility that owned Three Mile Island has for years been quietly paying people whose family members died, contracted cancer or were otherwise impacted by the accident. While settlements range up to $1 million, the utility company continues to insist this does not acknowledge fault. The toll of Three Mile Island is chronicled in my television documentary Three Mile Island Revisited (EnviroVideo, 1993) and Wasserman’s book Killing Our Own (which includes a devastating chapter, “People Died at Three Mile Island”), among other works.

    But Dubner and Levitt continue undeterred, declaring, “The big news is that nuclear power may be making a comeback in the United States.” They acknowledge the Chernobyl accident, stating that it “killed at least a few dozen people directly.” They admit that it “exposed millions more to radiation,” but keep silent about the consequences of this in terms of illness and death. This atomic version of Holocaust denial flies in the face of voluminous research on the disaster that puts the number of dead in the hundreds of thousands.

    “At least 500,000 people-perhaps more-have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine,” said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine (Guardian, 3/25/06). Dr. Alexey Yablokov, president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, calculates a death toll of 300,000. In the book Chernobyl: 20 Years On, which he co-edited, Yablokov writes, “In 20 years it has become clear that not tens, hundreds of thousands, but millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere have suffered and will suffer from the Chernobyl catastrophe.”

    The New York Times Magazine also published “Atomic Balm?” (7/16/06), by Jon Gertner; the subhead read, “For the first time in decades, increasing the role of nuclear power in the United States may be starting to make political, environmental and even economic sense.” Gertner used the term nuclear “renaissance,” and again forwarded the claim that “the supply [of uranium] is abundant.”

    Gertner told of how the “lifespan” for nuclear plants was set at 40 years because this was considered “how long a large nuclear plant could safely operate.” This has “proved a conservative estimate,” he states-without providing a factual basis. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been “granting 20-year extensions” to the 103 U.S. nuclear plants so they “can run for a total of 60 years.” (Consider the safety and reliability of 60-year-old cars speeding down highways.)

    “Even with such licensing renewals, though, it’s doubtful the current fleet of plants will run for, say, 80 years,” he continued, and “that means the industry, in a way, is in a race against time.” It needs to build new plants because the “absence” of nuclear power “would probably pose tremendous challenges for the United States.”

    The New York Times also allows its nuclear advocacy to slip into its news stories. In an article (11/27/07) about the French nuclear power company Areva signing a deal with a Chinese atomic corporation, Times reporter John Tagliabue wrote of Areva chief executive Anne Lauvergeon’s “long path from dirty hands to clean energy.” The “dirty hands” referred to a youthful interest in archaeology; that nuclear power is “clean energy” appears to require no explanation.

    Another story, datelined Fort Collins, Colorado (11/19/07), reported on two energy projects proposed for what the paper calls “a deeply green city.” Describing the plans as “exposing the hard place that communities like this across the country are likely to confront,” Times reporter Kirk Johnson wrote:

    Both projects would do exactly what the city proclaims it wants, helping to produce zero-carbon energy. But one involves crowd-pleasing, feel-good solar power, and the other is a uranium mine, which has a base of support here about as big as a pinkie. Environmentalism and local politics have collided with a broader ethical and moral debate about the good of the planet, and whether some places could or should be called upon to sacrifice for their high-minded goals.

    Other revivalists

    Other media promoting a nuclear revival-their words prominently featured on NEI’s website-include USA Today (3/5/06): “The facts are straightforward: Nuclear power . . . creates virtually none of the pollution that causes climate change and delivers electricity cheaper than other forms of generation do.” And the Augusta Chronicle (8/21/06): “Nuclear power-for decades perceived as an environmental scourge-is emerging as the cleanest and most cost-efficient source of energy available, a fact conceded even by environmentalists.” And Investor’s Business Daily (12/1/06): “We can worry about imaginary threats of nuclear energy or the real dangers of fossil fuel pollution.”

    Glenn Beck of CNN Headline News also joined the chorus of support (5/2/07): “Look, America should embrace nuclear power, even if it’s [just] to get off the foreign oil bandwagon.” This is also common nuclear disinformation, that nuclear power is needed to displace foreign oil. The only energy produced by nuclear power is electricity-and only 3 percent of electricity in the U.S. is generated with oil.

    There are a few exceptions in the mainstream media, notably the other Times, the Los Angeles Times. “The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986,” the paper stated (7/23/07) in an editorial headlined: “No to Nukes: It’s Tempting to Turn to Nuclear Plants to Combat Climate Change, but Alternatives Are Safer and Cheaper.” Those who claim nuclear power “must be part of any solution” to global warming or climate change “make a weak case,” said the L.A. Times, citing

    the enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste. . . . What’s more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks.

    Staggering numbers

    As to the risks, the mainstream media’s handling-or non-handling-of the U.S. government’s most comprehensive study on the consequences of a nuclear plant accident is instructive. Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences 2 (known as CRAC-2) was done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1980s. Bill Smirnow, an anti-nuclear activist, has tried for years to interest media in reporting on it-sending out information about it continually.

    The study estimates the impacts from a meltdown at each nuclear plant in the U.S. in categories of “peak early fatalities,” “peak early injuries,” “peak cancer deaths” and “costs [in] billions.” (”Peak” refers to the highest calculated value-not a “worst case scenario,” as worse assumptions could have been chosen.) For the Indian Point 3 plant north of New York City, for example, the projection is that a meltdown would cause 50,000 “peak early fatalities,” 141,000 “peak early injuries,” 13,000 “peak cancer deaths,” and $314 billion in property damage-and that’s based on the dollar’s value in 1980, so the cost today would be nearly $1 trillion. For the Salem 2 nuclear plant in New Jersey, the study projects 100,000 “peak early fatalities,” 70,000 “peak early injuries,” 40,000 “peak cancer deaths,” and $155 billion in property damage. The study provides similarly staggering numbers across the country.

    “I’ve sent the CRAC-2 material out for years to media and have never heard a thing,” Smirnow told Extra!:

    Not anyone in the media ever even asked me a question. There’s no excuse for this media inattention to such an important subject, and it shows how they’re falling flat on their faces in not performing their purported mission of educating and informing the public. Whatever their reason or reasons for not informing their readers and listeners, the effect is one of helping the nuclear power industry and hurting the public. If the public was informed, this new big pro-nuke push would never happen.

    Also in the way of sins of omission is the media silence on “routine emissions”-the amount of radioactivity the U.S. government allows to be routinely released by nuclear plants. “It doesn’t take an accident for a nuclear power plant to release radioactivity into our air, water and soil,” says Kay Drey of Beyond Nuclear at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. “All it takes is the plant’s everyday routine operation, and federal regulations permit these radioactive releases. Rarely, if ever, is this reported by media.” The radioactive substances regularly emitted include tritium, krypton and xenon. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets a “permissible” level for these “routine emissions,” but, as Drey states, “permissible does not mean safe.”

    Hidden subsidies

    Another lonely voice amid the media nuclear cheerleaders is the Las Vegas Sun, which recently has been especially outraged by $50 billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to build new nuclear plants included in the 2007 Energy Bill. The Sun demanded (8/1/07): “Pull the Plug Already.”

    In reporting on the economics of nuclear power, mainstream media virtually never mention the many government subsidies for it, while continuing to claim that it’s “cost-effective” (Augusta Chronicle, 8/21/06). One such giveaway is the Price-Anderson Act, which shields the nuclear industry from liability for catastrophic accidents. Price-Anderson, supposed to be temporary when first enacted in 1957, has been extended repeatedly and now limits liability in the event of an accident to $10 billion, despite CRAC-2’s projections of consequences far worse than that.

    Writing on CommonDreams.org (9/11/07), Ralph Nader explored the economic issue. “Taxpayers alert!” he declared:

    The atomic power corporations are beating on the doors in Washington to make you guarantee their financing for more giant nuclear plants. They are pouring money and applying political muscle to Congress for up to $50 billion in loan guarantees to persuade an uninterested Wall Street that Uncle Sam will pay for any defaults on industry construction loans. . . . The atomic power industry does not give up. Not as long as Uncle Sam can be dragooned to be its subsidizing, immunizing partner. Ever since the first of 100 plants opened in 1957, corporate socialism has fed this insatiable atomic goliath with many types of subsidies.

    Ignored alternatives

    Yet another claim by mainstream media in pushing for a nuclear revival is the “success” of the French nuclear program. 60 Minutes (4/8/07) did it in a segment called “Vive Les Nukes.” (See FAIR Action Alert, 4/18/07.) Correspondent Steve Kroft started with the nuclear-power-doesn’t-contribute-to-global-warming myth:

    With power demands rising and concerns over global warming increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing carbon-free energy. And one of the few available options is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go, and may now be coming again. . . . With zero greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power, and one of the first places they’re looking to is France, where it’s been a resounding success.

    Though she was totally ignored, Linda Gunter of Beyond Nuclear told 60 Minutes of radioactive contamination in the marine life off Normandy where the French reprocessing center sits, leukemia clusters in people living along that coast, and massive demonstrations in French cities earlier in the year protesting construction of new nuclear power plants.

    The Union of Concerned Scientists was upset by 60 Minutes’ downplaying of alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar. UCS’s Alden Meyer wrote to 60 Minutes:

    In fact, wind power could supply more energy to the U.S. grid than nuclear does today, and when combined with a mix of energy efficiency and other renewable energy sources, could provide a continuous energy supply that would help us make dramatic reductions in global warming.

    Dismissal of renewable energy forms is another major facet of mainstream media’s drive for a nuclear power revival. As the St. Petersburg Times put it (12/08/06), “While renewable sources of energy such as solar power are still in the developmental stage, nuclear is the new green.” Renewables Are Ready was the title of a 1999 book written by two UCS staffers. Today, they are more than ready. “Wind is the cheapest form of new generation now being built,” wrote Greenpeace advisor Wasserman (Free Press, 4/10/07). He pointed to an “array of wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal, ocean thermal and increased conservation and efficiency.”

    Wasserman has also written about another element ignored by most mainstream media (Free Press, 7/9/07): “The switch to renewables defunds global terrorism. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Shutting them down ends the fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error.” He stressed, again, that safe, clean energy is here and “we could replace everything with available technology that could easily supply all our needs while allowing a sustainable planet to survive and thrive.”

    The one green thing

    What are the causes of the media nuclear dysfunction? The obvious problem is media ownership. General Electric, for one, is both a leading nuclear plant manufacturer and a media mogul, owning NBC and other outlets. (For years, CBS was owned by Westinghouse; Westinghouse and GE are the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power.) There have been board and financial interlocks between the media and nuclear industries. There is the long-held pro-nuclear faith at media such as the New York Times. (See sidebar.)

    There is also the giant public relations operation-both corporate, led by the NEI, and government, involving the Department of Energy and its national nuclear laboratories. “You have the NEI and the nuclear industry propagandizing on nuclear power, and journalists taking down what the industry is saying and not looking at the veracity of their claims,” Greenpeace USA nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio told Extra!.

    And then there’s lots of money. FAIR recently exposed (Action Alert, 8/22/07) how National Public Radio, which broadcasts many pro-nuclear pieces, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from “nuclear operator Sempra Energy” and Constellation Energy, “which belongs to Nustart Energy, a 10-company consortium pushing for new nuclear power plant construction.”

    The only thing green about nuclear power is the nuclear establishment’s dollars.

    Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Books he has written about nuclear technology include Cover Up: What You ARE NOT Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He has hosted many television programs on nuclear technology on EnviroVideo.com.