Recently, NAPF President, Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes, spoke with Feyza Gumusluoglu on Turkish television, Ekoturk, discussing issues ranging from the dangers of a nuclear arms buildup to the existential apocalyptic aftermath of a nuclear winter. We invite everyone to listen as Dr. Hughes navigates the importance of eliminating nuclear weapons as an urgent international concern, especially from energy, security, humanitarian, and environmental standpoints that we must inevitably confront.
Category: Nuclear Energy
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Ten Lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima
George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The same may be said of those who fail to understand the past or to learn from it. If we failed to learn the lessons from the nuclear power plant accident at Chernobyl more than three decades ago or to understand its meaning for our future, perhaps the more recent accident at Fukushima will serve to underline those lessons. Here are ten lessons drawn from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
- Nuclear power is a highly complex, expensive and dangerous way to boil water. Nuclear power does nothing more than provide a high-tech and extremely dangerous way to boil water to create steam to turn turbines.
- Accidents happen and the worst-case scenario often turns out to be worse than imagined or planned for. Although the nuclear industry continues to assure the public that nuclear power plants are safe, the plants continue to have accidents, some of which exceed worst-case projections.
- The nuclear industry and its experts cannot plan for every contingency or prevent every disaster. Although it was known that Fukushima is subject to earthquakes and tsunamis, the nuclear industry and its experts did not plan for the combination of a 9.0 earthquake and the larger-than-expected tsunami that followed.
- Governments do not effectively regulate the nuclear industry to assure the safety of the public. Government regulators of nuclear industry often come from the nuclear industry and tend to be too close to the industry to regulate it effectively.
- Hubris, complacency and high-level radiation are a deadly mix. Hubris on the part of the nuclear industry and its government regulators, along with complacency on the part of the public, have led to the creation of vast amounts of high-level radiation that must be guarded from release to the environment for tens of thousands of years, far longer than civilization has existed.
- Nuclear power plants can catastrophically fail, causing vast human and environmental damage. The corporations that run the power plants, however, are protected from catastrophic economic failure by government limits on liability, which shift the economic burden to the public. If the corporations that own nuclear power plants had to bear the burden of potential financial losses in the event of a catastrophic accident, they would not build the plants because they know the risks are unacceptable. It is government liability limits, such as the Price-Anderson Act in the US, that make nuclear power plants possible, leaving the taxpayers responsible for the overwhelming monetary costs of nuclear industry failures. No other private industry is given such liability protection.
- Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in space and will not stop at national borders. The wind will carry long-lived radioactive materials around the world and affect the people and environment of many countries and regions. The radiation will also affect the oceans of the world, which are the common heritage of humankind.
- Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in time and will adversely affect countless future generations. The radioactive materials from nuclear power plant accidents, as well as from radioactive wastes, are a legacy we are bequeathing to future generations of humans and other forms of life on the planet.
- Nuclear energy, as well as nuclear weapons, and human beings cannot co-exist without the risk of future catastrophes. The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long known that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist. The Fukushima accident, like that at Chernobyl before it, makes clear that human beings and nuclear power plants also cannot co-exist without courting future disasters.
- The accidents at Fukushima and Chernobyl are a wake-up call to phase out nuclear energy and replace it with energy conservation and more human- and environmentally-friendly forms of renewable energy. For decades it has been clear that various forms of renewable energy are needed to replace both nuclear and fossil fuel energy sources. Now it is clearer than ever. The choice is not between nuclear and fossil fuels. The solution is to disavow both of these forms of energy and to move as rapidly as possible to a global energy plan based upon various forms of renewable energy: solar cells, wind, geothermal, ocean thermal, currents, tides, etc.
The nuclear power plant accident at Chernobyl was repeated, albeit with a different set of circumstances, at Fukushima. Have our societies yet learned any lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima that will prevent the people of the future from experiencing such devastation? As poet Maya Angelou points out, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage doesn’t need to be lived again.” We need the courage to phase out nuclear power globally and replace it with energy conservation and renewable energy sources. In doing so, we will not only be acting responsibly with regard to nuclear power, but will also reduce the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and strengthen the global foundations for the abolition of these weapons.
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Renewable Energy Will Bring Peace on Earth
The drums of war are beating once again as we read of preparations and rehearsals for a US or Israeli military strike against Iran to “take out” its nascent bomb making capability, as Iran asserts its legal right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium from its nuclear reactors for “peaceful” nuclear power. The planned transformation of the imperial US military into a “global strike force”, seeking “full spectrum dominance”, its targeted assassination program, now in eight countries, waged by the US Chair Force, impersonally raining down deadly drone attacks from their computers on unwary “terrorists” and innocent civilians as well, without benefit of trial, evidence, charges—even the Nazis got a trial at Nuremberg—the abhorrent willingness to wage illegal preemptive wars– we are reaping the grim whirlwind of these policies. Iran is relying on the Faustian bargain of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which enables it to develop what is ostensibly described as “peaceful” nuclear technology which gives them the capacity and materials they need to build bombs of their own as a deterrent against US threats.
The NPT, signed in 1970 contained a promise by the then five nuclear weapons states—the US, Russia, UK, France and China—to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise received from all the other nations in the world not to acquire nuclear weapons. To sweeten the deal, the treaty promised all nations an “inalienable right” to so-called “peaceful” nuclear power. Only India, Pakistan and Israel refused to sign and they used the technology and materials created through the use of their “peaceful” nuclear power to acquire nuclear arsenals, together with North Korea which had signed and them left the treaty to develop its own nuclear bombs. Now Iran has begun to legally enrich its uranium which could easily enable it to produce bomb-grade material if it steps up its enrichment process.
Under the guise of “peaceful nuclear power”, other countries, such as South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Libya were also well on their way to developing nuclear bombs, which they later abandoned. Former IAEA Director, Mohammed ElBaradei remarked, “We just cannot continue business as usual that every country can build its own factories for separating plutonium or enriching uranium. Then we are really talking about 30, 40 countries sitting on the fence with a nuclear weapons capability that could be converted into a nuclear weapon in a matter of months.” (1)
Fukishima was the greatest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind. The massive tsunami crippled the cooling systems of the reactor complex, with three exposed nuclear reactors and four fuel storage pools all in desperate need of being cooled, as to this day they continue to spew their poisons into the ground, air and water, in an unprecedented meltdown of three nuclear reactors and the exposure of four storage building with irradiated nuclear fuel pools—much graver than the accident at Chernobyl which involved only one nuclear reactor. But even without a catastrophic meltdown like Fukushima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island, nuclear energy produces toxic environmental devastation at every step along the way in the nuclear fuel chain– from the lethal radioactive legacy produced by mining uranium ore, mostly on indigenous lands, to the polluted aftermath from the processing of uranium ore into fuel for what must be the most expensive method ever derived for boiling water to make electricity, to the vast tons of irradiated waste, despoiling our planet in every community where nuclear reactors are located–leaching their poisons into the air, water, and soil—and added to all this is perhaps the most terrifying consequences produced by nuclear power.
Every nuclear reactor is a bomb factory, producing the deadly material needed to make nuclear weapons. That is how all the current nuclear weapons states developed their bombs. And that is how the nuclear wannabes, like Iran and Japan keep their options open by mastering the technology to manufacture nuclear weapons material. Meanwhile, more than 30 countries, eager to join the old boys advanced technology club are trying to acquire nuclear power including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Guinea, Vietnam and Bangladesh. (2)
There are now 440 “peaceful” reactors in 31 countries (3) — all producing deadly bomb materials with 272 research reactors in 56 countries, some producing highly enriched uranium.(4) The signers of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) were well aware that by having a nuclear reactor, a nation had been given the keys to a bomb factory and would need to be included in any effort to ban nuclear tests, regardless of whether they proclaimed any intention to develop weapons. And US CIA Director, George Tenet, said, “The difference between producing low-enriched uranium and weapons-capable high-enriched uranium is only a matter of time and intent, not technology.” (5) The current flurry of negotiations and initiatives to try to control the production of the civilian nuclear fuel cycle in one central place simply will not fly. It would be just another discriminatory aspect of the NPT, creating yet another class of haves and have-nots under the treaty, as was done with those permitted to have nuclear weapons and those who are not.
There are nearly 200 million kilograms of reactor wastes in the world—with only 5 kilograms needed to make one nuclear bomb. The US has just funded Georgia with $8 billion to build two new reactors, the first new ones in the US since the Three Mile Island catastrophe, and China is planning to build 30 new reactors with 32 more under construction around the planet–to churn out more toxic poisons; on tap for bomb-making, with no known solution to safely containing the tons of nuclear waste that will be generated over the unimaginable 250,000 years it will continue to threaten life on earth. (6) New projects are underway to mine uranium on every continent (7), mostly on indigenous lands, where first peoples have suffered inordinately from radiation poisoning.(8)
Even without a tragic accident like Fukushima, numerous studies show that in communities with nuclear reactors operating “normally” there are higher incidences of cancer, leukemias and birth defects. How could this be allowed to happen? There is a huge amount of misinformation and lack of information deliberately propagated by industry and industry dominated institutions. The World Health Organization has a collusive agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which, while it performs a useful service in verifying nuclear disarmament measures, was also established through the UN in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy”.
The IAEA has been instrumental in covering up the disastrous health effects of the Chernobyl tragedy, understating the number of deaths by attributing only 50 deaths directly to the accident. This was a whitewash of health studies performed by Russia and the Ukraine. Those studies have been reported in 2011, in a NY Academy of Sciences Report estimating that nearly 1 million people died as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe.(9) This cover-up was no doubt due to the highly unethical agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization, which provides that if either of the organizations initiates any program or activity in which the other has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult with the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement. Thus our scientists and researchers at the WHO are required to have their work vetted by the industry’s champion for “peaceful” nuclear technology, the IAEA.
For example, WHO abandoned its original 1961 agenda for research on the basic human health implications of food irradiation. It ceded to the IAEA, the ultimate power of researching the safety of irradiated foods. The IAEA is leading a global campaign to further the legalization, commercialization and consumer acceptance of irradiated foods. “We must confer with experts in the various fields of advertising and psychology to put the public at ease,” one IAEA report states, also recommending that the process “should not be required on the label.” (10)
Now there is a Fukushima cover-up. We read numerous stories in the press about the lack of information or the actual misinformation that is being fed to the Japanese people. Further, there is a global radiation monitoring network, established by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) to detect any radiation from nations that might be doing nuclear tests clandestinely. The CTBTO has released that data to governments, scientists, and various UN agencies such as the UNDP, UNODA, and to the countries who are members of the treaty. We know the Fukushima radiation is traveling around the planet, and has even entered the southern hemisphere now, but there are no public reports available to the public as to where the radiation is falling. In the US, we read from time to time of radiation affecting food in various hot spots all over the continent, but astonishingly, our Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it will stop reporting on the radiation emitting from the Fukushima catastrophe. (11) The LCNP is bringing a FOIA action to pry the data out from our government and make it public.
The Good News
In light of the tragedy of Fukushima, the world has taken a time-out on going full speed ahead with nuclear power. Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Japan have announced their intention to phase out nuclear power. Japan, laboring under the catastrophic consequences shut down all but one of its 56 nuclear reactors has yet to experience a black out as the people have been fiercely conserving energy and developing substitutes to avoid power outages.
• Kuwait pulled out of a contract to build 4 reactors.
• Venezuelan -froze all nuclear development projects .
• Mexico-dropped plans to build 10 reactors. (12)Every 30 minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year. Wind can satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over, and meet all global energy demands five times over. The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Tidal, wave and small hydropower, can also provide vast stores of energy everywhere on earth, abundant and free for every person on our planet, rich and poor alike. From water, broken down by solar or wind-powered electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen, we can make and store hydrogen fuel in cells to be used when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. When hydrogen fuel is burned, it recombines with oxygen and produces water vapor, pure enough to drink, with no contamination added to the planet. Iceland plans to be completely sustainable by 2050, using hydrogen in its vehicles, trains, busses and ships, made from geothermal and marine energy.(13)
New research and reports are affirming the possibilities for shifting the global energy paradigm. Scientific American reported a plan in 2009 to power 100% of the planet by 2030 with only solar, wind and water renewables, calling for millions of wind turbines, water machines and solar installations to accomplish that task. The authors assert that “the scale is not an insurmountable hurdle; society has achieved massive transformations before”, reminding us that “[d]uring World War II, the U.S retooled automobile factories to produce 300,000 aircraft and other countries produced 486,000 more”. Their scenario for 2030 contemplates, in part, building 3.8 million windmills to provide 51% of the world’s energy demand which would take up less than 50 square kilometers (smaller than Manhattan). They reassure us that even though the number seems enormous, the world manufactures 73 million cars and lights trucks every year.
The authors review the policies that would need to be in place to make the energy transition, such as taxes on fossil fuels, or at least the elimination of existing subsidies for fossil and nuclear energy to level the playing field, and an intelligently expanded grid to ensure rapid deployment of clean energy sources.(14)
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also issued a Report in 2010, 100% Renewable Energy, which outlined a scenario for relying on sustainable energy that, unlike the Scientific American plan, included biofuels as renewable energy. The WWF Director for Global Energy Policy, Stephan Singer, took issue with another report issued this year from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which predicted that the world could meet 80% of its energy needs from renewables by 2050. Singer cited the WWF study that looked at a scenario for going to 100% renewables by 2050.(15)
The Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century(REN), released their Renewables Global Status Report in July, 2011.(16) Despite countervailing factors like the continuing economic recession, incentive cuts for implementing sustainable energy measures, and low natural-gas prices, there was much encouraging news to report for 2010:
• Existing solar water and space heating capacity increased by 16%
• Global solar photovoltaic (PV) production and markets doubled from 2009.
• Germany installed more PV than the entire world in 2009; PV markets in Japan and the US doubled
• At least 119 countries had enacted renewable national policies, compared to 55 countries in 2005
• Investment was $211 billion in renewables, compared to $160 billion in 2009, five times that in 2005
• Investments in developing countries surpassed developed nations for the first timeIn 2009 the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) was launched and now has 187 member states.(17) Previously, the world had only the International Atomic Energy Agency to address issues of nuclear power, and the 28 member International Energy Agency, established during the 1973 oil crisis to address the disruptions of the global oil supply. IRENA’s mission is to empower developing countries with the ability to access the free energy of the sun, wind, marine, and geothermal source. Since Irene is the Greek word for peace, this new institution is especially well named.
We already have the technology to harness the bounty of the earth. It is clearly not beyond our financial means, as argued by the corporate supporters of toxic fuel industries working against the momentum to move to a green energy economy. Industry has been able to influence government policy to continue to subsidize polluting fossil, nuclear, and industrial biomass industries at much higher levels than funds made available to clean safe, sun, wind, geothermal and hydropower. The International Energy Agency estimates indicate that fossil-fuel consumption subsidies worldwide amounted to $409 billion in 2010, up from $300 billion in 2009 which was six times more than the annual subsidies for biofuels, wind power and solar energy. And the IEA figure doesn’t include the $50 billion a year dollar estimated costs for military infrastructure and naval operations operating during peacetime, on guard duty for the oil tankers plying the seas with their noxious cargo.(18) A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, The Gift That Keeps on Taking, estimates that the US nuclear industry has received hundreds of billions of dollars over the past 50 years from taxpayers for every aspect of the nuclear chain, including liability insurance to cover catastrophic losses without which industry would never have even built a single nuclear power plant.(19)
Yet despite these encouraging reports and facts on the ground, the corporate dominated media is still beating the drums for continued reliance on fossil, nuclear and industrial biomass fuels. It is obvious that they will do all they can to block the development of green energy because they will lose their cash cows. Once the infrastructure is in, they can’t sell the sun, or the wind or the tides the way they can peddle coal, gas, oil, uranium, and biomass. We mustn’t buy into the propaganda that clean safe energy is decades away or too costly. We need to be vigilant in providing the ample evidence in its favor to counter the corporate forces arguing that it’s not ready, it’s years away, its’ too expensive—arguments made by companies in the business of producing dirty fuel. Here’s what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say about similar forces in 1936:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.(20)While it is inspiring to know of the many initiatives, both private and public, that have the capacity to reorder our energy economy in a safer new millennium, there are enormous forces we must overcome. We are at a time which the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, describes as”the great turning”. In shifting the energy paradigm we would essentially be turning away from “the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization”, foregoing a failed economic model which “ measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits–in other words by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste.”(21) Relying on the inexhaustible abundance of the sun, wind, tides, and heat of the earth for our energy needs, freely available to all, will diminish the competitive, industrial, consumer society that is threatening our planetary survival. By ending our dependence on the old structures, beginning with the compelling urgency to transform the way we meet our energy needs, we may finally be able to put an end to war as well.
Endnotes
1. Agence France Press, Feb. 23, 2005
2. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf102.html
3. http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htmm
4. http://www.rertr.anl.gov/RERTR25/PDF/Ritchie.pdf
5. http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2004/tenet_testimony_03092004.html
6. http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm
7. http://www.wise-uranium.org/indexu.html
8. http://www.sric.org/uraniumsummit/
9. http://www.nyas.org/publications/annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
10. http://www.citizen.org/documents/Bad%20Taste%20-%202-pager%20-%20PDF.pdf
11. http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/05/09-0
12. http://progressive.org/fukushima_nuclear_industry.html
13. See generally, A Sustainable Energy Future is Possible Now, www.abolition2000.org
14. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030
15. http://www.worldwildlife.org/climate/energy-report.html
16. http://www.ren21.net/REN21Activities/Publications/GlobalStatusReport/GSR2011/tabid/56142/Default.aspx
17. http://www.irena.org/Menu/Index.aspx?mnu=Cat&PriMenuID=46&CatID=67
18. Winning the Oil Endgame Fact Sheet, Rocky Mountain Institute.
19. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html
20. http://millercenter.virginia.edu/scripps/digitalarchive/speeches/spe_1936_1031_roosevelt
21. http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/great-turning -
Nuclear Insanity
This article was originally published by the Deccan Chronicle.
Fukushima has raised, once again, the perennial questions about human fallibility and human frailty, about human hubris and man’s arrogance in thinking he can control nature. The earthquakes, the tsunami, the meltdown at Japan’s nuclear power plant are nature’s reminders of her power.
The scientific and industrial revolution was based on the idea that nature is dead, and the earth inert matter. The tragedy in Japan is a wakeup call from Mother Nature — an alarm to tell us she is alive and powerful, and that humans are powerless in her path. The ruined harbours, villages and towns, the ships, aeroplanes and cars tossed away by the angry waves as if they were tiny toys are reminders that should correct the assumption that man can dominate over nature — with technology, tools and industrial infrastructure.
The Fukushima disaster invites us to revisit the human-nature relationship. It also raises questions about the so-called “nuclear renaissance” as an answer to the climate and energy crisis. President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Arjun Makhijani, speaking at Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, said that “nuclear renaissance” would need 300 reactors every week and two-three uranium enrichment plants every year. The spent fuel would contain 90,000 bombs of plutonium per year if separated. Water required would be 10-20 million litres per day.
Following the Fukushima disaster, China, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines are reviewing their nuclear power programmes. As Alexander Glaser, assistant professor in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, observes, “It will take time to grasp the full impact of the unimaginable human tragedy unfolding after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, but it is already clear that the proposition of a global nuclear renaissance ended on that day”.
Across India, movements are growing against old and new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants are proposed at Haripur (West Bengal), Mithi Virdi (Gujarat), Madban (Maharashtra), Pitti Sonapur (Orissa), Chutka (Madhya Pradesh) and Kavada (Andhra Pradesh).
The 9,900 MW Jaitapur nuclear power plant, consisting of six nuclear reactors in Madban village, Ratnagiri district, Maharashtra, will be the world’s largest nuclear power plant if built. French state-owned nuclear engineering firm Areva and Indian state-owned operator Nuclear Power Corporation of India signed a $22-billion agreement in December 2010, to build six nuclear reactors in the presence of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, and Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister.
In the light of expected surge in orders following the France-India agreement, Areva started to hire 1,000 people a month.
Jaitapur is a seismically sensitive area and is prone to earthquakes. Yet, there is no plan for the disposal of 300 tonnes of nuclear waste that the plant will generate each year. The plant will require about 968 hectares of fertile agricultural land spread over five villages that the government claims is “barren”.
Jaitapur is one of many nuclear power plants proposed on a thin strip of fertile coast land of Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts — the estimated combined power generation will be 33,000 MW. This is the region that the Government of India wanted to be declared a world heritage site under the Man and Biosphere programme of Unesco. Villagers of the Konkan region have been protesting against the nuclear plant. They have formed Konkan Bachao Samiti and Janahit Seva Samiti and have refused to accept cheques for the forced land acquisition. Ten gram panchayats have resigned to protest the violation of the 73rd Amendment.
Jaitapur has been put under prohibitory orders and more than five people cannot gather. On April 18, 2011, policemen fired at protesters who were demonstrating against the proposed Nuclear Power Park at Jaitapur. One died and eight others were seriously injured. The 2,800 MW nuclear plant planned at Fatehbad, Haryana, involves the acquisition of 1,503 acre of fertile farmland. Eighty villages are protesting; two farmers have died during protests.
A nuclear power plant is planned in Chutkah, Madhya Pradesh, where 162 villages were earlier displaced by the Bargi dam. Forty-four villages are resisting the nuclear power plant. Dr Surender Gadakar, a physicist and anti-nuclear activist, describes nuclear power as a technology for boiling water that produces large quantities of poisons that need to be isolated from the environment for long durations of time. Plutonium, produced as nuclear waste, has a half life of 240,000 years, while the average life of nuclear reactors is 21 years. There is so far no proven safe system for nuclear waste disposal. Spent nuclear fuel has to be constantly cooled, and when cooling systems fail, we have a nuclear disaster. This is what happened at nuclear reactor 4 at Fukushima.
The focus on fossil fuels, CO2 emissions and climate change suddenly allowed nuclear energy to be offered as “clean” and “safe”. But as a technology, nuclear power consumes more energy than it generates if the energy for cooling spent fuel for thousands of years is taken into account. In India, the costs of nuclear energy become even higher because nuclear power plants must grab land and displace people. The Narora nuclear plant in Uttar Pradesh, which is a mere 125 km from Delhi, displaced five villages. In 1993, there was a major fire and near meltdown in Narora.
The highest cost of nuclear energy in India is the destruction of democracy and constitutional rights. Nuclear power must undermine democracy. We witnessed this during the process of signing the US-India Nuclear Agreement. We witnessed it in the “cash for votes” scandal during the no-confidence motion in Parliament. And we witness it wherever a new nuclear power plant is planned. Physicist Sowmya Dutta reminds us that the world has potential for 17 terra watt nuclear energy, 700 terra watt wind energy and 86,000 terra watt of solar energy. Alternatives to nuclear energy are thousand times more abundant and million times less risky. To push nuclear plants after Fukushima is pure insanity.
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A Bomb in Every Reactor
Twenty-five years after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the ongoing catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan has ― it must be hoped ― made clear once and for all that the purported blessings of the nuclear age are mere illusions: nuclear power is neither clean nor safe nor cheap.
Indeed, the opposite is true. Nuclear power is saddled with three major unresolved risks: plant safety, nuclear waste, and, most menacing of all, the risk of military proliferation. Moreover, the alternatives to nuclear energy ― and to fossil fuels ― are well known and technically much more advanced and sustainable. Taking on nuclear risk is not a necessity; it is a deliberate political choice.
Fossil-fuel and nuclear energy belong to the technological utopias of the 19th and 20th centuries, which were based on a belief in the innocence of the technologically feasible and on the fact that, at the time, only a minority of people worldwide, largely in the West, benefited from technological progress.
By contrast, the 21st century will be informed by the realization that the global ecosystem and its resources, which are indispensable for human survival, are finite, and that this implies an enduring responsibility to preserve what we have. Meeting this imperative entails both an enormous technological challenge and an opportunity to redefine the meaning of modernity.
The energy future of nine billion people, which is what the world population will be in the middle of the century, lies neither in fossil fuels nor in nuclear energy, but in renewable energy sources and dramatic improvements in energy efficiency. We already know this.
Why, then, do the most advanced countries, in particular, take on the risk of a mega-catastrophe by seeking to create energy from radioactive fission?
The answer, ultimately, doesn’t lie with any civilian use of nuclear energy, but first and foremost with its military applications.
The energy derived from splitting uranium and plutonium atoms was originally used for the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb. Being a nuclear power provides sovereign states with protection and prestige. Even today, the bomb divides the world into two classes: the few states have it, and the many that do not.
The old Cold War world order was based on the nuclear arms race between the two superpowers, the United States and Soviet Union. To stop others from trying to become nuclear powers, which would have multiplied and spread the risk of nuclear confrontation, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was framed in the 1960s. To this day, it governs the relationships between the nuclear powers and the rest of the world, imposing renunciation on the have-nots and nuclear-disarmament obligations on the haves.
Of course, the NPT has repeatedly been violated or circumvented by states that never subscribed to it. To this day, therefore, the risk remains that the number of nuclear powers will increase, particularly given small and medium powers’ hope to enhance their prestige and position in regional conflicts. Iran is the most current example of this.
The nuclearization of these not-always-stable states threatens to make the regional conflicts of the 21st century much more dangerous, and will also substantially increase the risk that nuclear weapons eventually end up in the hands of terrorists.
Despite the NPT, a clear separation between civilian and military use of nuclear energy hasn’t always worked, or worked completely, because the NPT’s rules permit all signatory states to develop and use ― under international supervision ― all of the components of the nuclear fuel cycle for civilian purposes. From here, then, all that is required to become a nuclear power are a few small technical steps and political leaders’ decision to take them.
This political power, not the requirements of energy policy, is what makes giving up nuclear energy so difficult. As a rule, the path to nuclear-power status always begins with so-called “civilian” nuclear programs. The supposed “civilian” nuclear ambitions of Iran have thus, for instance, led to a large number of such “civilian” programs in neighboring states.
And, of course, the reactions of the nuclear powers to the disaster at Fukushima will be watched and analyzed closely by the so-called “clandestine threshold countries.”
So how will the world ― first and foremost, the main nuclear powers ― react to the Fukushima disaster? Will the tide truly turn, propelling the world toward nuclear disarmament and a future free of nuclear weapons? Or will we witness attempts to downplay the calamity and return to business as usual as soon as possible?
Fukushima has presented the world with a far-reaching, fundamental choice.
It was Japan, the high-tech country par excellence (not the latter-day Soviet Union) that proved unable to take adequate precautions to avert disaster in four reactor blocks. What, then, will a future risk assessment look like if significantly less organized and developed countries begin ― with the active assistance of the nuclear powers ― to acquire civilian nuclear-energy capabilities?
Any decision to continue as before would send an unambiguous message to the clandestine threshold countries that are secretly pursuing nuclear weapons: despite lofty rhetoric and wordy documents, the nuclear powers lack the political will to change course. Were they to abandon nuclear energy, however, their epochal change of heart would constitute a seminal contribution to global nuclear security ― and thus to the fight against nuclear proliferation.
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Chernobyl’s Dirty Secrets
This article was originally published by The Moscow Times.
My archive consists of piles of secret documents on Chernobyl from the Communist Party Central Committee. They reveal why millions suffered and still suffer from the Chernobyl accident in April 1986.
I first gained access to the most classified of those documents in 1991 when I was elected as a deputy to the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies from the city of Zhitomir, just 135 kilometers from Chernobyl. The Communist Party initially banned access to those files, but the secret Central Committee protocols regarding the accident were finally made available to deputies.
These documents reveal that the Politburo first met to discuss the Chernobyl accident on April 29, 1986, three days after the explosion. Then a flood of messages beginning May 4 document the hospitalization of area residents. Judging from the minutes, the number of patients was growing daily and had already reached several thousand.
For example: “Classified. Minutes No. 12. May 12, 1986. A total of 10,198 people have been hospitalized for examination and treatment, of which 345 show symptoms of radiation sickness.”
But most of them were released and sent home. It seems that the more the radiation spread, the healthier the Soviet people became. And here is the reason for this unexpected “miracle cure:”
“Classified. Minutes No. 9. May 8, 1986. The Health Ministry of the Soviet Union has approved new acceptable levels of radiation to which the public can be exposed and that are 10 times higher than former levels. In special cases, levels up to 50 times higher than former levels are acceptable.”
The Kremlin was willing to do anything to conceal the extent of the radiation exposure. Only two months had passed since residents had been evacuated from homes within an 30-kilometer radius of the plant when the authorities hurriedly began the opposite process: resettlement.
“Classified. Minutes No. 29. June 23, 1986. Report on the possibility of returning children and pregnant women to areas with radiation levels within the range of 2 millirems per hour to 5 millirems per hour.”
To put this in perspective, the U.S. government sets the maximum allowable exposure of an adult working with radioactive material at fewer than 6,000 millirems per year and recommends that human fetuses be exposed to no more than 50 millirems per month.
Another highlight from the Kremlin’s criminal acts is its “secret recipe” for making radioactive meat and milk edible. It reads:
“Top secret. Resolution of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee on May 8, 1986. Minutes recorded by Comrade V.S. Murakhovsky. … When slaughtering livestock and pigs, it has been found that their meat can be made fit for consumption by washing the stomachs with water and removing the lymph nodes.”
Apparently, the Politburo was thinking of new ways to make fillings for pirozhki:
“Classified. Addendum to Item 10 of Minutes No. 32. … Distribute meat contaminated by radiation as widely as possibly throughout the country and use it in a ratio of 1:10 with normal meat to make sausage, canned and processed meat.”
Five years after the Chernobyl disaster, Deputy Prosecutor General V.I. Andreyev gave this written answer to my inquiries as a deputy: “From the period of 1986 to 1989 the indicated areas produced 47.5 tons of meat and 2 million tons of milk with higher than acceptable levels of contamination. … These circumstances placed approximately 75 million people in dangerous living conditions … and created conditions for increased mortality, a higher incidence of malignancies, a greater number of deformities. … For 1.5 million people alone — including 160,000 children under the age of seven — the thyroid glands in 87 percent of the adults and 48 percent of the children were exposed to radiation doses of 30,000 millirems, 11 percent and 35 percent respectively were exposed to doses from 30,000 to 100,000 millirems, and 2 percent of adults and 17 percent of children were exposed to doses exceeding 100,000 millirems.”
Despite these horrific figures, no top official was ever prosecuted for the multiple acts of criminal negligence for both the Chernobyl accident itself or the rescue mission afterward.
The top priority for the Communist Party bureaucrats was to “strengthen propaganda measures aimed at exposing the deceitful fabrications of bourgeois information and intelligence agencies regarding events at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.”
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Japan’s Nuclear Catastrophe Leaves Little to be Celebrated on Children’s Day
May 5 is Children’s Day, a Japanese national holiday that celebrates the happiness of childhood. This year, it will fall under a dark, radioactive shadow.
Japanese children in the path of radioactive plumes from the crippled nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station are likely to suffer health problems that a recent government action will only exacerbate.
On April 19, the Japanese government sharply ramped up its radiation exposure limit to 2,000 millirem per year (20 mSv/y) for schools and playgrounds in Fukushima prefecture. Japanese children are now permitted to be exposed to an hourly dose rate 165 times above normal background radiation and 133 times more than levels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows for the American public. Japanese school children will be allowed to be exposed to same level recommended by the International Commission on Radiation Protection for nuclear workers. Unlike workers, however, children won’t have a choice as to whether they can be so exposed.
This decision callously puts thousands of children in harm’s way.
Experts consider children to be 10 to 20 times more vulnerable to contracting cancer from exposure to ionizing radiation than adults. This is because as they grow, their dividing cells are more easily damaged — allowing cancer cells to form. Routine fetal X-rays have ceased worldwide for this reason. Cancer remains a leading cause of death by disease for children in the United States.
On April 12, the Japanese government announced that the nuclear crisis in Fukushima was as severe as the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Within weeks of the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, the four ruined reactors at the Dai-Ichi power station released enormous quantities of radiation into the atmosphere.
According to the Daily Youmiri, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) announced that between 10 and 17 million curies (270,000- 360,000 TBq) of radioactive materials were released to the atmosphere before early April, a great deal more than previous official estimates.
Even though atmospheric releases blew mostly out to sea and appear to have declined dramatically, NISA reports that Fukushima’s nuclear ruins are discharging about 4,200 curies of iodine-131 and cesium-137 per day into the air (154 TBq). This is nearly 320,000 times more than d radiation the now de-commissioned Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant released over a year. NISA’s estimate is likely to be the low end, given the numerous sources of unmeasured and unfiltered leaks into the environment amidst the four wrecked reactors. On April 27, Bloomberg News reported that radiation readings at the Dai-Ichi nuclear power station have risen to the highest levels since the earthquake.
With a half-life of 8.5 days, iodine-131 is rapidly absorbed in dairy products and in the human thyroid, particularly those of children. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years and gives off potentially dangerous external radiation. It concentrates in various foods and is absorbed throughout the human body. Unlike iodine-131, which decays to a level considered safe after about three months, cesium-137 can pose risks for several hundred years.
Measurements taken at 1,600 nursery schools, kindergartens, and middle school playgrounds in early April indicate that children are regularly getting high radiation doses. Radiation levels one meter above the ground indicate that children at hundreds of schools received exposures 43- 200 times above background. And this is outside of the “exclusionary zone” around the Dai-Ichi reactors, where locals have been evacuated. Japan’s Ministry of Education and Science has limited outdoor activities at 13 schools in the cities of Fukushima, Date, and Koriyama Cities.
Although the extent of long-term contamination is not yet fully known, disturbing evidence is emerging. Data collected 40 kilometers from the Fukushima’s nuclear accident show cumulative levels as high as 9.5 rems (95 mSv) — nearly five times the international annual occupational dose. Soil beyond the 30-kilometer evacuation zone shows cesium-137 levels at 2,200 kBq per square meter — 67 percent greater than that requiring evacuation near Chernobyl.
Three-fourths of the monitored schools in Fukushima had radioactivity levels so high that human entry shouldn’t be allowed, even though students began a new semester on April 5.
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A Final Wakeup Call?
Our hearts go out to the people of Japan who are suffering the devastating effects of one of the most powerful earthquakes in the past one hundred years, followed by a devastating tsunami. Thousands are dead, injured and missing, and hundreds of thousands have been left homeless, many with limited food and water.
The greatest danger to the people of Japan, however, may lie ahead in the unfolding disaster of the damaged nuclear power plants at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station located 130 miles north of Tokyo. Already, substantial radiation has been released from the fires, explosions and partial meltdowns of the radioactive fuel rods in these plants, brought about by loss of coolant in the reactor cores and the spent fuel pools. The containment shells surrounding several of the reactors have been breached, allowing for the release of radiation into the environment.
High radiation levels at the plants have resulted in reducing the work force trying to contain the radiation releases to skeleton crews, volunteers who are putting their own lives in jeopardy for the common good. Keijiro Matsushima, an 82-year-old survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, commented, “It’s like the third atomic bomb attack on Japan. But this time, we made it ourselves.”
The amount of radioactive material in the crippled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi dwarfs the amount in the Chernobyl plant, which 25 years ago had the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. Residents have been told to evacuate from a 12-mile radius of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants, and told to stay indoors in a further 7-mile radius. The United States has warned its citizens in Japan to stay beyond a 50-mile radius of the damaged power plants. Many countries are helping their citizens to leave Japan altogether.
The major lessons to be drawn from the tragedy in Japan are: first, nature’s power is far beyond our ability to control; second, the nuclear industry, in Japan and elsewhere, has arrogantly pushed ahead with their dangerous technology, wrongly assuring the public there is no reason for concern; third, the reassurances of self-interested nuclear “experts” are not to be trusted; and fourth, the nuclear power plant failures in Japan are a final wake-up call to replace nuclear power with safe, sustainable and renewable forms of energy.
There are 440 commercial nuclear reactors in the world. Of these, the US has 104, nearly twice as many as Japan’s 55 nuclear power reactors. Of the US reactors, 23 are of the same or similar design as those that are failing in Japan. President Obama’s 2012 budget calls for $36 billion in loan guarantees to subsidize new nuclear power plants.
California, known for its propensity for earthquakes, has two nuclear power plants: one at Avila Beach, north of Santa Barbara; and one at San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego. Both plants are located near major fault lines. The Diablo Canyon power plant at Avila Beach is situated near the San Andreas and Hosgri fault lines. The San Onofre plant is located less than a mile from the Cristianitos fault line. Diablo Canyon is designed to withstand a 7.5 magnitude earthquake and San Onofre to withstand a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. Japan’s 9.0 magnitude earthquake has demonstrated, however, that the force of earthquakes can dramatically exceed expectations.
Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors 1 and 2 made the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s list of top ten nuclear power sites with the highest risk of suffering core damage from an earthquake. Living in Santa Barbara, downwind from those reactors, we should be worried. The millions of people who live and work in New York City, within the evacuation range of the Indian Point 3 nuclear power plant, should also be worried because that plant is listed as number one on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s highest risk sites.
We know that we humans cannot control earthquakes. Nor can we control tsunamis or other natural disasters. What we can control are our decisions about the use of technology. We can say “No” to technologies that are catastrophically dangerous. From my perspective, this would include any technologies that require an unattainable level of human perfection to prevent massive annihilation. As we have seen in Japan, natural disasters and nuclear power plants are a potentially deadly mix. The dangers grow even deadlier when human error is added to the equation.
In addition to their potential for catastrophic accidents, nuclear power plants are subject to deliberate attacks by terrorists or during warfare. After more than half a century, there also remains no long-term solution for the storage of highly radioactive nuclear wastes, which will threaten future generations for many times longer than human civilization has existed. Of critical concern as well, nuclear power plants use and create the fissile materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
Mother Nature has given us a deadly warning that it is past time to end our reliance on nuclear power and invest instead in solar power, the only safe nuclear reactor that exists – 93 million miles from Earth. The question is: Will the disaster in Japan open our eyes to the need for change, or will we be content to continue to tempt fate and simply hope that we do not become the next place on the planet where nuclear power fails catastrophically?