Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Waste

  • What Obama Did and Did Not Say

    President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday was all about the economy. Even when he was talking about education, national security or energy, he was talking about the economy.

    There were two things that really struck me in his speech: one thing that he said, and one thing that he didn’t say.

    The president recognizes that we need to slash the bloated Pentagon budget, though whether he’ll adopt Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) plan to cut the Pentagon budget by 25% or more is unlikely. But, on Tuesday, Obama said, “We’ll…reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use.”

    This statement was sufficiently vague to keep all but the most rabid militarists from immediately criticizing his position. I think that some proof of what exactly Obama was referring to came today in the draft 2010 Department of Energy budget: ZERO dollars for new nuclear weapons (currently called the Reliable Replacement Warhead program).

    The other thing that really struck me in his speech was the very noticeable omission of nuclear power as a critical part of our energy future. Solar? Check. Wind? Check. Efficiency? Check. “Clean” coal? Um…check. Nuclear power? No thanks.

    Let’s ignore for a moment that “clean coal” is about as asinine as calling nuclear power “clean, safe and reliable.” Barack Obama comes from the state of Illinois, the state with the most nuclear power plants and arguably the strongest base of the nuclear power lobby. Obama accepted campaign money from nuclear power pushers. He campaigned on an energy platform that included nuclear power as part of the energy mix.

    What has he discovered in his first 40 days in office? Hopefully all of the following:

    • There is still no “permanent” solution to the nuclear waste problem, and there is no solution in sight;
    • The nuclear power industry cannot survive without massive government subsidies;
    • New nuclear power plants take so many years to approve and construct that they cannot help us to meet our immediate carbon reduction requirements;
    • Once you take into account the lifecycle carbon footprint of nuclear power (uranium mining, construction, operation, waste storage, decommissioning), it doesn’t look so carbon-free;
    • Investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency are more economically sensible and will eliminate CO2 emissions more effectively.

    With continued public pressure, it is possible for the evil twins of the 20th century, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, to be eliminated for good.

    This article was published on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s blog Waging Peace Today

    Rick Wayman is Director of Programs at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

  • Inside Hanford: A Trip to America’s Most Toxic Place

    This article was originally published at Counter Punch St. Clair’s book “Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes From the Dark Side of the Earth” can be purchased from www.amazon.com.

    The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm. It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The “T” stands for tanks—huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding, the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run as the nation’s H-bomb factory.

    Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years; the radioactive gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic material on earth—plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path toward the Columbia River, the world’s most productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.

    Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive sludge have already leaked out of at least sixty-seven different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak and, according to these sources, the leaks are getting much larger.

    One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s largest tanks. Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as “insignificant” a decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up into a “continuous plume” of highly radioactive Cesium-137.

    Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report the incident. Even though it was reported by their own geologists.

    A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into what geologists call the “vadose zone,” the stratum of subsurface soil just above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface, and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers that the “high levels of gamma radiation” came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”

    This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be “controlled, clean and stable.”

    No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department’s Inspector General, which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste management policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep publicity about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”

    Needless to say, the Reagan years didn’t augur a new forthrightness from the people who run Hanford. Seven years and several congressional hearings after the Inspector General’s report was released, bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were still the DOE’s operational reflex to any disturbing data bubbling up out of Hanford’s boreholes. By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an important lesson in the art of concealment: The easiest way to avoid bad press and public hostility is to simply stop monitoring sites that seemed the most likely to produce unpleasant information.

    It is now clear that the tanks began leaking as early as 1956, only a few years after the Atomic Energy Commission began pumping the poisonous sludge into the giant subterranean containers. It is also clear that the federal government covered up evidence of those leaks since the moment it learned of them.

    How many tanks are leaking? How far has the contamination spread? The DOE isn’t talking. It isn’t even looking for answers. But geologists estimated that the faster migrating contaminants, such as uranium, will move from the groundwater beneath Hanford’s central plateau to the Columbia in something like twenty-five years. That means that the first traces of radiated water could have started seeping into the Columbia in 2001.

    This reckless strategy persists. In a document called “Official Characterization Plan of Hanford”—essentially a kind of 3-D map of contamination at the site—the DOE chose not to include Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive material that is present at deep levels across the tank farm. In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention the fact that its own surveys have shown large amounts of Cesium-137 and Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools in the geological stratum, called the plio-pleistocene unit, the last barrier between Hanford’s soils and water table.

    If the DOE remains locked onto this course it will never acknowledge or even investigate the potentially lethal flow of radioactivity toward the great river of the West. That’s because the managers of Hanford say they will only research potential leaks if they detect a level of contamination several times higher than that ever recorded at Hanford—a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation or publicly admit the existence of such leaks.

    To help Hanford’s managers avoid ever discovering such embarrassing leaks, the site plan calls for them to drill the penetrometer holes, through which contamination is measured, only to a depth of forty feet—or two feet above the bottom of the tanks, guaranteeing that they will avoid picking up any radioactive traces from the region of the most dangerous contamination.

    There’s a reason the Hanford managers want the public to believe that most of the contamination at the site is limited to the surface terrain. Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and, with large government contracts, transferred to a more secure site or zapped into a glass-like substance through the big vitrification center now under construction. There’s no way to de-contaminate groundwater or the Columbia River. Their only hope for containment is to contain the issue politically by plumbing the leaks from whistleblowers.

    There’s no question that the subsurface leakage is serious, extensive, and dangerous. The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper than 100 feet below the surface—and sixty feet deeper than the current plan calls for probing. That report concluded that both C-137 and CO-60 had “reached groundwater in this area of the tank farm.”

    Consider this. C-137 is a slow traveling contaminant. How far have faster moving radioactive materials, such as uranium, spread? No one knows. No one is even looking.

    The DOE and Hanford’s contractors want to close down the C Quadrant of the tank farm and declare it cleaned up, even though more than 10 percent of the waste at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks. There is mounting evidence that a plume of Tritium-contaminated sludge has recently penetrated the groundwater there as well.

    John Brodeur is one of the nation’s top environmental engineers and a world-class geologist. In 1997, after a whistleblower at Hanford disclosed evidence that the groundwater beneath the central plateau had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity, Hazel O’Leary commissioned Brodeur to investigate how far the contamination had spread. It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment since the DOE and its contractors had taken extreme measures to conceal the data or avoid collecting it entirely.

    A decade later, Brodeur has once again been asked to assess the situation at one of the most contaminated sites on earth, this time for the environmental group Heart of the Northwest. His conclusions are disturbing.

    “There remains much that we don’t know about the subsurface contamination plumes at Hanford,” says John Brodeur. “The only way to solve this dilemma is to identify what we don’t know up front and get it out on the table for discussion. This is difficult to do in the chilling work environment where bad data are commonplace, lies of omission are standard practice and people lose their jobs because they disagreed with some of the long-held institutional myths at Hanford.”

    This essay is adapted from a chapter in Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth (CounterPunch/AK Press).

    Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest books, Born Under a Bad Sky and Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland (co-edited with Joshua Frank) are just out from AK Press. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

  • The Great Turning: Germany Takes the Lead for a Transformation of the Energy Paradigm

    Joanna Macy, eco-philosopher, scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. is a respected and revered voice in movements for peace and justice. She’s led numerous workshops on the nuclear dilemma, developing and promoting the Guardian Project, to brainstorm and imagine what kind of markers we will need to lay down to warn our world of the toxic lethality of plutonium, hundreds of thousands of years after we’re all gone. Macy has written that “future generations will look back on these closing years of the twentieth century and call it the time of the Great Turning. It is the epochal shift from an industrial growth society, dependent on accelerating consumption of resources, to a life-sustaining society”. Good news has come from Germany, heralding that perhaps, as we enter this new millennium, we have indeed begun the Great Turning, and not a moment to soon, ready to make the shift into a new paradigm of sustainability.
    The German government announced that 60 governments met in Berlin in mid-April to plan for a launch of an International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) this September which would empower developing countries with the ability to access the free and abundant energy of the sun, wind, marine, and geothermal sources; would train, educate, and disseminate information about implementing sustainable energy programs; organize and enable the transfer of science and know-how of renewable energy technologies; and generally be responsible for helping the world make the critical transition to a sustainable energy future. Since IRENE is the Greek word for peace, this new initiative is especially well named because we’ll never have peace with nuclear power plants metastasizing around the planet, and with old, 20th century hierarchical attempts to control and dominate the fuel cycle in yet another discriminatory regime of “haves” and “have nots”, with preemptive wars threatened against those countries which “the powers that be” don’t trust to have “peaceful” nuclear technology.
    Two other harbingers of the Great Turning, were announcements by the government of Ireland and the province of British Columbia of bans on uranium mining on their territories. Ireland’s Natural Resources Minister Eamon Ryan said, “The most likely end use of any uranium extracted in Ireland would be for nuclear electricity generation. It would be hypocritical to permit the extraction of uranium for use in nuclear reactors in other countries, while the nuclear generation of electricity is not allowed in Ireland.” More than 500 people demonstrated in sparsely settled British Columbia, to protest the opening of a uranium mine and the Minister for State Mining, Kevin Kruger, announced, “There will never be a uranium mine in B.C.” Three years ago, the Navajo tribe in Arizona banned uranium mining on their land because of the catastrophic radiation poisoning members of their tribe have suffered from the piles of mining wastes that accumulated over the years, contaminating their soil, water, and air.

    It’s noteworthy that the Berlin meeting happened quietly, with very little notice or NGO participation. It seemed like the governments were forming their own power block to make an end run around the polluting energy corporations, in the nuclear, fossil and biofuels industries, mega-transnational corporations which are touting their sickening wares to the world, corrupting our democratic processes with huge campaign gifts and sucking up government subsidies and tax breaks to the tune of $250 billion per year for their poisonous energy corporations, even burning food for fuel as more than 25 countries contend with food riots caused by scarcity, while the wealthiest of us put food in our fuel tanks at the expense of 2 billion people living in poverty. Help make the Great Turning real! Find out if your government was one of the 60 who met so quietly in Berlin this April. Make sure they’re on board to support IRENA, see http://www.irena.org/index.htm , to help humanity make the Great Turning to a more peaceful and sustainable 21st century.

    Alice Slater is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s New York City representative.

  • Sustainable Energy Will Bring Peace on Earth

    We are at a critical moment in history. Accelerating weather catastrophes—tsunamis, hurricanes, drought, the melting of the polar ice caps—underline the urgency to heed the scientific consensus that we are endangering our very survival on the planet with the continued use of carbon based fuels. Dependency on fossil fuels creates political and economic instability across the globe. Depleting resources and price volatility place growing strains on energy security concerns. Just this month, we heard disturbing reports of food riots in more than 25 poor countries around the planet, caused by food shortages, due to drastic changing weather conditions and tragic efforts to grow food crops for fuel, pitting car owners of the world against the two billion poor on our planet who struggle to get enough to eat, without even offering any benefits to the environment, since growing corn and making ethanol uses lots of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides and water, and degrades the soil. The push for biofuels is driven by massive industrial agricultural corporations, seeking ever larger profits, as they misrepresent the actual costs, in league with the fossil and nuclear fuel industries, with their huge public relations operations, grinding out false facts to undermine the possibilities for harnessing abundant free energy from the sun, wind, tides, and geothermal from deep within mother earth, because corporations are unable to control its production and make profits from its sale. Who can sell the sun, wind, tides?

    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. We can store hydrogen fuel in cells, made from safe, clean energy sources, to be used when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. When hydrogen fuel is burned, it 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.

    The failure of the world to achieve nuclear disarmament and prevent nuclear proliferation should serve as a wake up call that we cannot continue “business as usual” while increasing numbers of nations assert their right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue so-called “peaceful” nuclear technology. “Peaceful” nuclear programs in Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea enabled those countries to covertly develop nuclear weapons. Vast schemes for reprocessing nuclear fuel, like Rokkasho, and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, which Japan has joined with the US and other industrial countries, will result in a failed attempt to exercise control and domination over the nuclear fuel cycle, while further contaminating our planet, creating yet another discriminatory class of “haves” and “have nots”, and fueling future strife.

    We have seen one war start over Iraq’s supposed possession of nuclear weapons, and war fever is heating up to attack Iran now for its pursuit of so-called “peaceful” nuclear technology. If Article 9 is to have any meaning in this new century, we will have to promote it, not only as a disarmament measure for the whole world, but as a way of redistributing the world’s treasure, now wasted at the rate of over one trillion dollars per year to feed the murderous war machine, and use those funds to restore the health of the planet and end poverty on earth. Although devastating, cruel wars, motivated by fear, greed and the desire for power, have been common throughout human history, there has been nothing like the enormous speed up of destructive war, fueled by science and technology, as we saw in this last century, starting with 20 million deaths after World War I and ending with well over 100 million deaths by the end of the 20th Century, with the horrors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, the Holocaust, or the slaughter of a quarter of the population of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, as only a few awful examples of what the instruments of war have wrought.

    Yet it was only in 1969, less than 40 years ago, that humanity landed on the moon and, for the first time saw the image of our fragile, beautiful blue planet, floating in space, giving us a new perspective of a unified world, sharing this small spaceship earth, with a profound influence on our consciousness that is bound to help us shift from the paradigm of war and technological domination and control to a more balanced nurturing interdependent vision for the health of earth’s inhabitants in an expanded understanding of Article 9. The US Constitution, was imperfect at its drafting, failing to consider slaves as people or to recognize women’s right to vote. Evolving consciousness led to the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women. Similarly, a transformed earth consciousness will help us perfect the original limited vision of the “Renunciation of War” as we use this occasion to launch a global effort to stop all violence on the planet, not only for Japan, but for the whole earth—not only the violence of wars in the traditional meaning but in an expanded definition of destruction against all living things and the very ecology of our planetary home itself. . To live on a peaceful earth, we will have to phase out not only war, but nuclear power as well. Nuclear reactors generate toxic radioactive waste that threatens both human life and the environment. Japan has produced more than 45 tonnes of plutonium, almost 1/5 of the 230 tonne global civil stock and the equivalent of 5,000 Nagasaka type warheads. At this rate it would surpass the US arsenal by 2020. Opening Rokkasho would generate another 30 tonnes of weapons usable plutonium by 2012. This waste will remain lethal to human health and the environment for more than 250,000 years, and its continued production poses an unacceptable burden on present and future generations. Plutonium is being shipped across vast stretches of the ocean for reprocessing in England and France, exposing the world to unacceptable risks from accidents or terrorism.

    In every situation where nuclear technology is employed—whether military or civilian, countless studies report higher incidences of birth defects, cancer, and genetic mutations.” A US National Research Council 2005 study reported that exposure to X-rays and gamma rays, even at low-dose levels, can cause cancer. The committee defined “low-dose” as a range from near zero up to about… 10 times that from a CT scan. “There appears to be no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless,” said one NRC panelist. Tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste accumulate at civilian reactors with no solution for its storage, releasing toxic doses of radioactive waste into our air, water and soil and contaminating our planet and its inhabitants for eons. A study, this month by the German government found that children living near nuclear power stations are more likely to suffer leukemia than those living farther away.

    Despite the obvious health and security disadvantages of nuclear power, it is being promoted by industry for its potential to help avert climate catastrophes. But nuclear power is not pollution or emissions free. Every step of the nuclear fuel cycle – mining, development, production, transportation and disposal of waste – relies on fossil fuels and produces greenhouse gas emissions. A complete life-cycle analysis shows that generating electricity from nuclear power emits 20-40% of the carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of a gas-fired system when the whole system is taken into account.

    Equally important, nuclear power is the slowest and costliest way to reduce CO2 emissions, as financing nuclear power diverts scarce resources from investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The enormous costs of nuclear power per unit of carbon emissions reduced would actually worsen our ability to abate climate change as we would be buying less carbon-free energy per dollar spent on nuclear power compared to the emissions we would save by investing those dollars in solar, wind or energy efficiency. In addition, nuclear power is limited only to the production of electricity. Despite the tens of billions of dollars that the nuclear industry has received since its inception in 1948, it is still unable to operate without massive subsidies, tax breaks and incentives The U.S. nuclear industry is estimated to have received more than $115 billion in direct subsidies from 1947 through 1999. Government subsidies for wind and solar energy for the same period totaled only $5.49 billion.

    Nuclear storage facilities and power plants themselves are vulnerable to accidents or attacks, and there are similar hazards in transporting nuclear waste by truck, train or ship. Reports estimate that the Chernobyl disaster may ultimately cause 270,000 cases of cancer, of which 93,000 could be fatal. A terrorist or military attack resulting in a core meltdown would carry a disastrous human toll, with estimates of upwards of 15,000 acute radiation deaths and up to one million deaths from cancer. And in a much less hypothetical example, the Indian Point nuclear reactors, located some 30 miles from New York City were listed as suggested targets in documents found from Al-Quaeda after the World Trade Center attacks.

    When compounded with its limited ability to reduce greenhouse gasses compared to the reductions that could be achieved by using the same dollars for sustainable energy, the enormous proliferation and waste-related issues make nuclear energy an untenable and irrational energy choice. Renewable energy and energy efficiency are the only paths to true energy security assuring stable and reliable energy supplies and expanding energy access across the planet. The technology to harness the enormous potential of the sun, wind, tides and geothermal energy exists today. We can build a self-sustaining, earth-friendly energy infrastructure to harvest the earth’s benign and abundant free resources. Abolition 2000, a network of over 2000 organizations in 95 countries, working for the elimination of nuclear weapons, has recognized the “inextricable link” between nuclear weapons and nuclear power and proposed the adoption of its Model Statute for an International Sustainable Energy Agency, asking that the effort be funded by reallocating the $250 billion dollars in annual subsidies to fossil and nuclear fuels to clean energy resources.

    Only this month, the government of Germany took up a similar proposal, calling a meeting of 60 nations to launch an International Renewal Energy Agency, IRENA, this September which would empower developing countries with the ability to access the free energy of the sun, wind, marine, and geothermal sources, would train, educate, and disseminate information about implementing sustainable energy programs, organize and enable the transfer of science and know-how of renewable energy technologies, and generally be responsible for helping the world make the critical transition to a sustainable energy future. Since IRENE is the Greek word for peace, this new initiative is especially well named, and a commitment from this Article 9 conference to ask our governments to support IRENA (see www.irena.org) would be a positive, transforming step for giving new meaning to Article 9 in a more peaceful 21st century.

    Alice Slater is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s New York City representative.

  • 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.

  • Nuclear Materials Poison Navajo Land

    From ABC News,original URL
    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id=3764417

    When Ray Manygoats describes his childhood — playing with marbles, messing around with his brother, visiting his father at work and grilling his family’s livestock — one might mistake his stories for fond memories of growing up in the Navajo Nation.

    But today, these memories are nothing more than evidence of the damage done to him and his family by uranium mining on Navajo lands during the Cold War, all part of an effort to provide the federal government with the uranium yellowcake it needed for nuclear weapons.

    “We cooked on grills my father brought back from the mill. These grills had been used to sift the yellowcake uranium,” Manygoats told Congress at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Tuesday.

    “My brother Tommy and I would often bring lunch to my father at the mill. Yellow stuff was always everywhere. We would play in the yellowcake sand at the mill, jumping and rolling around in it. We also found small metal balls at the mill. The balls were used to crush and process the uranium. We played marbles with them and had contests to see how far we could throw them.”

    Living on Poisoned Land

    It wasn’t until years later that the damage done became horrifyingly clear.

    In his testimony to the committee, Manygoats blames the illnesses on uranium.

    “Our land today is poisoned. Today I am a man who has lost his health, his family and his ancestral way of life because of uranium,” he told the committee.
    Manygoats described the devastating details of living on poisoned land.

    “My father began to have trouble breathing,” he recounted. “His breathing troubles never went away, even after the mill was closed. I have always had problems with my ears and eyes. I have had surgery three times to remove growths from my eyes and often have sores on my ears.”

    Although no comprehensive study has ever been done on the health problems resulting from uranium mining in the Navajo nation, researchers believe that exposure to mining almost certainly triggered a dramatic rise in cancer among the Navajo.

    Manygoats blamed the widespread illnesses among his family and his community on the uranium.

    “Our land today is poisoned,” he told Congress. “Today I am a man who has lost his health, his family, and his ancestral way of life because of uranium.”

    Echoes of the Cold War

    According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, between 1944 and 1986 nearly 4 million tons of uranium ore were mined from the Navajo Nation, an area larger than the state of West Virginia, which occupies parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

    These mines have since been shut down.

    At present, the EPA says there are 520 abandoned uranium mines in the Navajo Nation, while the Southwest Research and Information Center estimates there may actually be as many as 1,200 abandoned mines and related sites on Navajo land.

    Although the mines are no longer operational, Manygoats and other Navajos are upset that the surface and groundwater contamination from the mines continues to plague the Navajo population.

    “My family’s land is poisoned,” says Manygoats. “But no one helps us to remove the poison. I am here on behalf of my community to ask for your help.”
    George Arthur represented the Navajo Nation government at the hearing.

    “Uranium mining and milling on and near the reservation has been a disaster for the Navajo people,” Arthur said.

    “We are still undergoing what appea to be a never-ending federal experiment to see how much devastation can be endured by a people and a society from exposure to radiation in the air, in the water, in the mines, and on the surface of the land. We are unwilling to be the subjects of that ongoing experiment any longer.”

    Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were outraged. Committee chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., called the government’s behavior “absolutely unacceptable” and a “modern American tragedy”.

    Federal Government Defends Cleanup Efforts

    Officials from various federal agencies also testified, highlighting their respective efforts to solve the problem.

    Wayne Nastri of the Environmental Protection Agency cited an investigation of uranium mining areas on Navajo lands from 1994 to 2007 that built an inventory of the 520 abandoned sites, an inventory now being used by the Navajo Nation government to prioritize the mine sites.

    Nastri said the EPA is taking action at sites that “present an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health or the environment” and providing a total of $3.9 million annually through 11 grant programs.

    Nastri also added that over the last 16 years the EPA has provided $7.8 million for the Navajo Nation Superfund program, legislation that makes polluters pay for the remediation of toxic sites.

    David Geiser of the Department of Energy noted that DOE has remediated four inactive uranium milling sites on Navajo land, including the Tuba City, Arizona mill at which Ray Manygoats’ father worked.

    But many lawmakers were far from satisfied with the responses from the various officials.

    Accusing the agency officials of having “a conspiracy of silence and do-nothingness”, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Mary., demanded that they do better in the future.
    “These are human beings they share this land with us,” Cummings said, “And it’s just not right. And if there’s not more empathy for our fellow human beings, then maybe somebody’s got to replace you guys.”

    The outrage of the lawmakers was matched by the sadness of the Navajo representatives.

    Nuclear Waste’s Effects Linger

    Edith Hood still sees the remains of the uranium mining every morning.

    “As I pray in the early morning dawn, there is a man-made mesa of radioactive and hazardous waste about a quarter of a mile northeast of my residence. In the other direction, to the south about 1,000 feet away, is another mound of uranium mining waste,” Hood said.

    Hood and her family have also experienced serious health problems.

    “I was diagnosed with lymphoma in the summer of 2006. My father has a pulmonary fibrosis. My mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. My grandmother and grandfather died of lung cancer. Many of my family members and neighbors are sick,” she says.

    Hood describes a community ravaged by uranium.

    “Mining has already contaminated the water, the plants and the air. People are sick and dying all around us,” she says.

    Hood, Manygoats and other Navajo such as Phil Harrison, whose father died of lung cancer and whose brothers and sisters all have thyroid problems and disorders, want the government to take action.

    “Assist my people and my land in recovering from the devastation caused by short-sighted and in some cases mean-spirited people who put their own private interests first and ignored the fact that their choices and decisions would result in an inhumane experiment being conducted on an indigenous people,” Harrison will tell the committee.

    Harrison suffered kidney failure in 1999, only to receive a kidney transplant from his sister.

    “You have the power to change things,” Harrison told Congress. “You have the power to end this tragic experiment.”

    “It’s been about 25 years since the last mines closed,” Harrison concluded. “My people shouldn’t have to wait another 25 years for the federal government to accept a responsibility it should have accepted many years ago.”

    ABC News’ Tom Shine contributed to this report.

  • Japanese Earthquake Triggers Faults at Nuclear Power Plant

    Report by Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) (Original document is at www.nirs.org/international/asia/reportonearthquakedamage71907.pdf)

    In the early hours following the July 16 earthquake in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, when Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) was reporting only a transformer fire and spill of 1.5 liters of radioactive water, NIRS criticized TEPCO for being slow to report information and told the Associated Press that we were waiting “for the other shoe to drop.”

    That sound you hear is the rumble of an entire shoe factory tumbling to the ground.

    It is now clear that the damage to the world’s largest nuclear power facility was far greater than initially reported and that radiation releases were also far greater than reported. Indeed, it appears that radiation releases are continuing today (July 19, 2007). According to a report from Bloomberg News (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aCWh.1vTk3_Y&refer=home), 402 million Becquerels of radioactivity already have been released, although this government-supplied figure likely understates the reality, as radiation apparently continues to be released into the environment.

    According to the Associated Press (www.pr-inside.com/a-look-at-problems-found-at-r174712.htm) on July 17, damage to the reactors was extensive. The AP found the following problems listed at that time:

    A list of malfunctions at the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariya nuclear power plant in northwestern Japan following a powerful earthquake this week:

    • Fire at an electrical transformer facility.
    • 1,200 liters of water containing radioactive material leaked into sea.
    • About 100 barrels of radioactive waste knocked over in storage facility.
    • Duct knocked out of place in major vent; possible leak of radioactive cobalt-60 and chromium-51 from five of the plant’s reactors.
    • Water leak inside buildings housing all seven reactors.
    • Malfunctioning of water intake screening pump at two reactors.
    • Blowout panel knocked down at turbine buildings at two reactors.
    • Oil leak from low-activation transformer waste oil pipes at two reactors.
    • Loss in water-tight seal at reactor core cooling system.
    • Water leaks from diesel generator facility, burst extinguisher pipe, burst condenser valve and filtration tank.
    • Broken connections and broken bolt at electric transformer.
    • Loss of power at control center for liquid waste disposal facility.
    • Oil leaks from damaged transformer and magnetic transformer facility.
    • Oil leak at reactor water supply pump facility.
    • Disrupted electrical connection at magnetic transformer facility.
    • Cracks in embankment of water intake facility.
    • Air and oil leaks at switching stations.
    • Land under parts of plant turned to mud in quake-caused process known as liquefaction.

    However, as of July 19, we now know that some 400, not 100, barrels of radioactive waste were knocked over, and about 40 lost their lids. At least some of the waste was liquid, and leaked into the building, according to Citizens Nuclear Information Center (CNIC) in Japan (for more information on nuclear power in Japan, visit their website at http://cnic.jp/english/). It is not known whether radiation from these spills has leaked outside the building.

    The 1200 liters (about 317 gallons) of radioactive water spilled into the Sea of Japan apparently came from the irradiated fuel pool at Unit 6 at the site. This is one of the two newer units: it is a 1315 MW General Electric/Toshiba Boiling Water Reactor that came online in November 1996.

    According to Japanese officials, the newest reactor at the site, a 1315 MW GE/Hitachi Boiling Water Reactor that came online in July 1997, has been venting radioactive steam into the air since the earthquake began, and continues to do so today (July 19). We have been unable to determine radiation levels of these releases.

    The earthquake exceeded the design basis for the reactors, and the facility does not meet new Japanese earthquake standards put in place in September 2006. Moreover, the fault that caused the quake is apparently directly underneath the facility site, and was not discovered prior to construction. It is not yet known whether this fault is capable of an even larger earthquake than the 6.8 measured on July 16.

    In a July 17 statement, CNIC said, “In just two years three earthquakes (off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture on 16 August 2005, off the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture on 25 March 2007, and now this one) have exceeded the “extreme design earthquake” assumed at the time the plants were built. In September 2006, for the first time in 28 years, the Nuclear Safety Commission revised Japan’s earthquake guidelines. Japan’s nuclear power companies are now carrying out earthquake safety checks on the basis of the new guidelines. By rights, all nuclear power plants should be shut down until these checks have been completed.”

    All of the reactors at Kashiwasaki Kariwa currently are shutdown and likely will be so for a long time to come as additional damage comes to light and its ability to withstand future earthquakes comes further into question. Initial projections are that the reactors will be closed for at least a year, and it is highly possible they will never reopen. Already, the earthquake has caused TEPCO to lose $4.3 Billion of its market value, according to Bloomberg. A lengthy shutdown of the world’s largest nuclear facility will undoubtedly cause far greater cost to the utility.

    Ironically, TEPCO’s website touts its nuclear program, and states as its number one priority in restoring public confidence in that program, “Promoting disclosure of information and ensuring transparency of nuclear operations.” Clearly, TEPCO’s commitment to transparency is no more than a slogan and it is unlikely public confidence will ever be regained.

    For the United States, the lesson is unmistakable: the earthquake reminds us of the fragility and danger of nuclear power and its ability to withstand the acts of Mother Nature. Nuclear reactors and earthquake faults simply don’t mix. An immediate need is to permanently end any further discussion of installation of dry cask radioactive waste storage units at the Diablo Canyon site on California’s earthquake-prone Pacific coast.

    NIRS will attempt to update this report as events warrant.

    The Kashiwasaki Kariwa facility consists of seven Boiling Water Reactors. Three are of Toshiba design and are 1067 MW each. Unit 1 came online in September 1985, Unit 2 in September 1990 and Unit 3 in August 1993. Two are Hitachi reactors of 1067 MW each: Unit 4 came online in August 1994 and Unit 5 in April 1990. Unit 6, a GE/Toshiba BWR of 1315 MW, came online in November 1996 and Unit 7, a 1315 MW GE/Hitachi BWR came online in July 1997. Taken together, until July 16, 2007, these represented the world’s largest nuclear power facility.

     

    Michael Mariotte, July 19, 2007 Nuclear Information and Resource Service 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 340 Takoma Park, MD 20912 301-270-6477 nirsnet@nirs.org, www.nirs.org

  • EPA Revised Standards Are Inadequate for Protecting Public Health

    Established in 1982, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan, education and advocacy organization that initiates and supports efforts to eliminate nuclear threats to humanity. With headquarters in California, the Foundation has a membership of thousands individuals across the United States, including in Nevada.

    On behalf of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and our members, I am here today to express our deep concern over the Environmental Protection Agency’s revised radiation protection standard for the Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste dump in Nevada. We believe this revised radiation protection standard will fall far short of protecting public health and that it even disregards the agency’s own previous recommendations. If approved, this standard will ignore the scientific consensus on the health impact of radiation, as well as the many unresolved problems surrounding radioactive waste. It will set a terrible precedent; lowering the bar for radiation protection across the country.

    The Yucca Mountain project is a distinct danger to defenseless citizens – not just to this generation, but to thousands of generations to come who will be affected by this decision. In July 2004, a DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision found EPA’s previous standard – a 15 millirem per year radiation exposure limit for 10,000 years – to be illegal. According to the ruling, the standard EPA sets for Yucca Mountain must be consistent with a National Academy of Science (NAS) study on the subject, which recommended that the standard extend through the time of highest risk to the public, known as the “peak dose.” The Department of Energy estimates peak dose at several hundred thousand years.

    The EPA’s recently revised standard, however, fails to comply with the court ruling and the intent of the NAS recommendations. Instead of extending the 15 millirem per year limit through the time of peak risk, the EPA has proposed a two part standard – 15 millirem per year for 10,000 years, and then a 350 millirem per year standard thereafter (up to a million years).

    Such a standard is not scientifically justified, and would perhaps be the least protective radiation standard in the world. No other US or international radiation protection standard permits a dose of 350 millirems per year to individuals. In fact, EPA’s proposed standard is not even consistent with the agency’s own previous recommendations.

    Yucca Mountain is located on Native American land, belonging to the Western Shoshone by the treaty of Ruby Valley. The Western Shoshone National Council has declared this land a nuclear free zone and demanded an end to nuclear testing and the dumping of nuclear wastes on their land. We support the claims of the Western Shoshone to the sovereignty of their land, which they hold as sacred, and we believe that the revised radiation standard is a form of environmental racism that will disproportionately harm the lands and health of the Western Shoshone people.

    We are also concerned that Yucca Mountain sits above the only source of drinking water for the residents of Amargosa Valley. The aquifer below Yucca Mountain provides water to Nevada’s largest dairy farm, which supplies milk to some 30 million people on the west coast. Another casualty of EPA’s proposed rule is the Safe Drinking Water Act standard limiting radiation in drinking water to 4 millirem per year, which EPA would only enforce for the first10,000 years, but would then replace with the 350 millirem year all pathway exposure limit. Water is a precious resource, which will require more, not less, protection as time goes on. Yucca’s radioactive wastes will leak into the underlying drinking water aquifer, which will become the primary pathway for harmful doses to people downstream. The Safe Drinking Water Act standard should be applied to protect Yucca’s aquifer and the people downstream for as long as the high-level radioactive wastes remain hazardous, hundreds of thousands of years into the future.

    Yucca Mountain is also directly above an active magma pocket and is the third most seismically active area in the United States. In the past 25 years alone, over 600 earthquakes of 2.5 or greater on the Richter Scale have struck within 50 miles of Yucca Mountain. In 1992, a 5.6 quake cracked walls, shattered windows, and caused some one million dollars in damage to the Department of Energy (DoE) field office studying the site. On July 14, 2002, an earthquake registered a magnitude of 4.4 on the Richter Scale. It defies reason to expect that radioactive wastes will sit for tens of thousands of years undisturbed by unpredictable nature, or by human or technological errors in the design of the containment structure itself.

    The problem of what to do with high-level radioactive wastes warrants additional consideration and resources, including investigation of alternatives to Yucca Mountain. Instead of setting a new and very dangerous precedent for the storage of radioactive waste throughout the country in order to simply satisfy political pressures to license Yucca Mountain, the Environmental Protection Agency should fulfill its mission to protect human health and the environment. We ask you to withdraw this standard immediately, and propose a standard that is truly protective of public health and the environment for this generation and generations to come.

  • Nuclear Power: No Solution for Global Warming

    There is simply no way global warming can be stopped without significant reductions in the current energy consumption levels of developed countries. Whatever else one could say about nuclear power in the old days, it was certainly not considered environment-friendly. Over the past few years, however, a number of so-called environmentalists, generally Western, have come out in support of nuclear power as an essential component of any practical solution to global warming. Predictably, flailing nuclear establishments everywhere have grabbed this second opportunity to make a claim for massive state investments and resurrect an industry that has collapsed in country after country due to its inability to provide clean, safe, or cheap electricity. But just as the old mantra”too cheap to meter” proved ridiculously wrong, the claims that nuclear energy can contribute significantly to mitigating climate change do not bear scrutiny.

    Most prominent of these so-called environmentalists turned pro-nuclear advocates is James Lovelock, who propounded the Gaia hypothesis of the Earth as a self-regulating organism. Last year he entreated his”friends in the [Green] movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.” Lovelock’s article had several factual errors. For example,”nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources” One wonders which of the many renewable energy sources promoted by the Green movement – photovoltaics, wind energy, and so on – has had an accident that even remotely compares with Chernobyl.

    Even more inexplicable is the assertion: “We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen.” Despite such nonsense, Lovelock’s article was circulated widely, both by the nuclear lobby and by other environmentalists who were either confused or felt that this sort of argument had to be refuted strongly.

    Lovelock’s bloomers aside, the fact that some environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power as a solution to global warming deserves serious consideration and response. The enormity of the potential impact of climate change adds to this imperative.

    Two implicit but flawed assumptions underlie most claims about the significance of nuclear energy for the climate-change issue. The first is that climate change can be tackled without confronting and changing Western, especially American, patterns of energy consumption – the primary causes and continuing drivers for unsustainable increases in carbon emissions and global warming. This is plain impossible; there is simply no way global warming can be stopped without significant reductions in the current energy consumption levels of Western/developed countries. Efforts by various developing countries to match these consumption levels only intensify the problem.

    The second flawed assumption is that the adoption of nuclear power will lower aggregate carbon emissions. In a strictly technical sense, each unit of electricity produced by a nuclear plant would cause the emission of fewer grams of carbon than a unit of electricity generated by thermal plants. (A false myth often propagated by the nuclear lobby is that nuclear energy is carbon free. In reality, several steps in the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to enrichment to reprocessing, emit copious amounts of greenhouse gases.) And so, the assumption goes, installing a large number of nuclear power stations will lower carbon emission rates.

    The problem is that the assumption holds true only if all else remains constant, in particular consumption levels. But that is never the case. In fact, there is no empirical evidence that increased use of nuclear power has contributed to actually reducing a country’s carbon dioxide emissions. The best case study is Japan, a strongly pro-nuclear energy country. As Japanese nuclear chemist and winner of the 1997 Right Livelihood Award, Jinzaburo Takagi pointed out, from 1965 to 1995 Japan’s nuclear plant capacity went from zero to over 40,000 MW. During the same period, carbon dioxide emissions went up from about 400 million tonnes to about 1200 million tonnes.

    There are two reasons why increased use of nuclear power does not necessarily lower carbon emissions. First, nuclear energy is best suited only to produce baseload electricity. That only constitutes a fraction of all sources of carbon emissions. Other sectors of the economy where carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are emitted, such as transportation, cannot be operated using electricity from nuclear reactors. This situation is unlikely to change anytime in the near future.

    A second and more fundamental reason is provided by John Byrnes of the University of Delaware’s Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy, who observed that nuclear technology is an expensive source of energy service and can only be economically viable in a society that relies on increasing levels of energy use. Nuclear power tends to require and promote a supply-oriented energy policy and an energy-intensive pattern of development.

    The high cost of nuclear power also means that any potential decreases in carbon emissions due to its adoption are expensive, certainly higher than energy efficiency improvements as well as other means to lower emissions from thermal power plants.

    One other argument advanced by some of these so-called environmentalists is that nuclear power is just an interim solution while better solutions are worked out. The idea is wholly at odds with the history of nuclear establishments around the world and completely underestimates the remarkable capabilities of powerful institutions to find resources for continuing existence and growth. Once such institutions are established, they will find ways to ensure that they are not disempowered.

    For nuclear power to make a significant dent in global warming, nuclear capacity must grow manifold (ten-plus). The notion that nuclear power can increase manifold from current levels and then be phased out is wishful thinking, to say the least. Such a projection also completely ignores existing realities – uncompetitive costs, safety concerns, the unresolved problem of radioactive waste, and the link to the bomb – that come in the way of any significant expansion of nuclear power.

    Global warming is a serious issue. Providing ill-thought out answers is no way to address such a grave problem.

    Originally published by The Friday Times.

  • An Orwellian View of Nuclear Energy: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Nuclear Energy is Green

    In George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984, the government uses the slogans war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Now, Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, April 9, 2005) would have us believe that nuclear energy is green.

    Kristof’s argument that “nukes are green” is out of touch with reality. Kristof would have us believe that the truly green energy sources – solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal – are no match compared to the benefits of nuclear power. He argues that nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases. Presumably, in Kristof’s logic, the gigantic steam towers, reactor buildings and nuclear fuel spring from the earth as naturally as the sun shines and the wind blows.

    Kristof offers an extremely narrow examination of the issue. He fails to consider that the construction of a nuclear plant, as well as fueling, decommissioning and storage of spent fuel, relies heavily upon fossil fuels, which generate vast quantities of greenhouse gases. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Energy Information Administration says the global strategy to mitigate carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions, besides conservation programs, should include retiring coal-fired plants in favor of natural gas and renewables and not to construct new nuclear plants.

    Kristof also fails to accurately analyze the economics of the nuclear industry. Monstrous government subsidies have kept the industry afloat. Without massive subsidization, the nuclear industry’s insurance liabilities would have driven the industry into the ground years ago. The IAEA Energy Information Administration reports that “new nuclear power plants presently cost more to build than do fossil fuel plants. This includes fossil fuel plants such as those fired by natural gas, a fuel that carries lower environmental costs…”

    Combined costs of new nuclear plants with the unknown yet enormous costs to store the more than 45,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste produced to date, promises to handicap future generations with a gargantuan debt. If nuclear energy is accepted as green and reactors multiply across the world, future generations can expect not only an economic nightmare, but also the potential for accidents such as Chernobyl, calamitous terrorist attacks and an environment strewn with radioactivity.

    Kristof is dead wrong in suggesting that burdening future generations with nuclear wastes buried underground is more reasonable than burdening them with a warmer world in which Manhattan is submerged under 20 feet of water. Endorsing nuclear energy as green and calling for an expanded national presence for nuclear energy will not solve the global warming crisis, it will only exacerbate it. Accepting nuclear energy as green will increase the number of targets terrorists might strike; increase the amount of viciously radioactive waste in need of heavily protected long-term storage; and increase the amount of ozone depleting gases emitted into the atmosphere.

    Replacing fossil fuels with truly renewable energy sources could be accomplished with government subsidization for a fraction of what the US is currently spending to subsidize the nuclear power industry and to secure our access to Middle East oil through military intervention and foreign aid.

    Unless war is peace and freedom is slavery, then nuclear energy is not green. Policy makers must realize they need not choose between two poisons: burdening future generations with nuclear wastes buried underground or burdening the future with a warmer world submerged under water. Kristof glosses over the true viability of clean, renewable energy sources. With sufficient funding, research, and legislative support, future generations won’t have to face the bleak Orwellian future that Kristof implies is inevitable.

    Luke Brothers is the Communications and Outreach Associate at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).