Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Chernobyl

A Time for Boldness

This is the transcript of a talk given at a side event hosted on April 26, 2013, by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Soka Gakkai International entitled “Nuclear Abolition: A Time for Boldness and Hope” at the 2013 Non-Proliferation Treaty PrepCom in Geneva, Switzerland.

First, I thank you for being here today, in this 27th anniversary of the beginning of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Together we honour the memory of its victims, as well as of the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima.

I thank David Krieger and Rick Wayman for inviting me to this panel and for prompting us to think about an unusual and stimulating subject. The subject of boldness is a surprising subject to choose.

When David offered me the chance to address you on it, I thought he was alluding to the words of Kissinger, Nunn, Shultz and Perry in the “Wall Street Journal” of January 2007. They requested (quote) “a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage”, that is an initiative to go by practical measures to a world free of nuclear weapons. However, I was very surprised. I asked him: “Really? Why me?” He replied: “Because your hunger-strike was a bold action”. That answer only increased my perplexity.

So now, let me put to you the thoughts that resulted from that surprise, and, as David requested, let me use my hunger-strike as a way of raising one or two questions that I’ll try to answer without claiming to solve them. I’ll refer to my own experience in an attempt to draw conclusions that others can use – because, as Hannah Arendt said, it is in specific things that universal things can be readable.

First question: was my hunger-strike really a bold act? What defines the boldness of an action or a person?

Note first that the word “bold” is often used in the military, in games like chess, and generally in context of competition, for example when a yacht in a sailing race chooses a surprising course to sail.

Boldness is often a synonym of courage. But it’s a particular form of courage. It consists, certainly, of confronting a situation that is difficult, painful, scary, even desperate, but not simply by doing one’s duty. Boldness consists in taking the initiative of doing something unusual, unpredictable or unforeseen. Bold people are not content like “ordinary” brave people to resist the course of history, they try to reverse it. They take risks, they strive to overcome adversity by surprising the adversary. And often they win, although success is never guaranteed (otherwise there would be no risk). However, although the risks that the bold take can be considerable, they are still reasoned, calculated risks. Boldness is never madness or foolhardiness. Sometimes bold people make very quick decisions, but they remain nevertheless cool-headed. Their actions are in proportion with their objectives, and that is what gives them a serious chance of success.

Now, if we apply these criteria to my hunger-strike, was it, as David thinks, a bold action? Upon reflection I think it could be.

I needed, in truth, a certain courage: enough to “take the plunge” into unknown waters, for I had never fasted before. I didn’t know I would even get beyond day three, which some fasters had told me is a frightening one. And I still remember the precise minute when I took the plunge by sending off a media release.

It was also an action I took out of desperation. ACDN since it was founded in 1996, and I myself since 1986, had done all we could to involve France in the abolition of nuclear weapons. I shan’t give the details of our activism, just a few “bold” actions: like my candidacy for the Presidential Elections in 2002 or my applications to the Constitutional Council in 2002 and 2012 asking for the main candidates (Chirac and Jospin, then Sarkozy and Hollande) to be excluded because they were preparing crimes against humanity, violating Article VI of the NPT, and not honouring the French Constitution. Moreover, during the 2012 campaign, we wrote to François Hollande seven or eight times without ever getting a reply. Actually, he replied indirectly, in December 2011: he said in an article in the “Nouvel Observateur” that he would continue the nuclear deterrence policy, a presidential prerogative that he intended to assume. In other words this humanist, this socialist declared himself capable of pressing the nuclear button. That was unacceptable. On 15 May, the day he became President, I began my hunger-strike.

Let me add that my objective was reasonable and accessible: I did not fast to demand the abolition of all nuclear weapons, or for France to renounce her own weapons, but only to obtain an audience with the new president to expound our arguments and to ask him to organize – for democratic reasons – the referendum that would at last enable the French people to express their opinion … and would enable him to change policy without losing face or breaking his commitments.

On 25 June, day 42 of my hunger-strike, I was in Paris with Luc Dazy – a friend who had joined me in fasting since 1 June – and we were barred by the police from entering the Elysee Palace where we were to have had an audience. We never could find out why. Even the socialist MP of my city – who had herself handed candidate Hollande a letter from me, and who has later signed the Open Letter to the President, even she was not able to find out why.

Must we conclude that this “bold” action was doomed to failure? Frankly I don’t think so. Our hunger-strike was not useless.

On 24 June, the Federal Council of the EELV Party (Europe Ecologie- Les Verts), of which I was a former Councillor, gave me an enthusiastic and impressive welcome (including a standing ovation of one hundred fifty or more people, a minute of applause). On a motion of its president and committee, the Federal Council paid tribute to our action, said they endorsed our struggle, and committed to support it. They wished Luc Dazy and me to stop our hunger-strike, they expressed solidarity with us, and they wished that President Hollande would listen to our requests.

After a solemn debate, the Federal Council decided unanimously with one abstention (quote) “to ask all its representatives in parliament and in government to do all they can to ensure that a bill or a governmental proposal is drawn up without delay with a view to establishing a wide debate and a referendum on the following question:

Do you agree that France should participate with the other states concerned in the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, under mutual and international control that is strict and effective?”

Previously, in October 2011, ACDN and 6 other national organisations working in other fields from ours, such as ATTAC, the Confédération Paysanne or Human Rights League, had organised a big gathering in Saintes. Three hundred people did attend this event and about 150 wrote and discussed a “Charter for a Livable World” which they definitely adopted by consensus. A few later, during the presidential campaign, we proposed this charter to every candidate. François Hollande never answered, but six other candidates answered and three of them explicitly approved, amongst 103 articles, the article 1.2.F. By this approval, Eva Joly (EELV), Philippe Poutou (New Anticapitalist Party) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Parti de Gauche, Left Party) – had undertaken to consult the French people by referendum on the aforesaid question. Together these candidates won around 15% of the votes.

Currently, the Greens have around 45 MPs, Senators and MEPs, they have 2 ministers in the French government. If each of them follows up the aforesaid commitment of their own party, it seems that the French people should not be far from deciding by themselves whether they must stop or pursue the archaic and criminal nuclear policies decided in their name by a handful of schizophrenic deciders. According to two polls, one ordered in 2008 by Global Zero, the second ordered in 2012 by the Mouvement de la Paix, more than 80 % of French wish for a world without any nuclear weapons, not even French ones.

So, even if a referendum is never won before being voted, even if our opponents are very strong in the art of manipulating opinion and the media, I think we have to go to a referendum on such an important, decisive and vital issue. If we lose the referendum, we will lose nothing, since for more than 60 years the French nuclear policy has been conducted without any democratic debate and without voting. A defeat of the abolitionist camp would result simply in the continuation of a policy which is already planned. On the other hand, a success would be the beginning of a complete change, a reversal of situation. Let us remember the sentence of Lenin: “When an idea takes over masses, it becomes a historic force”. We have to attempt it, or else admit that we are mere sheep destined to become mutton.

Personally, I’m convinced that the French people are not more intelligent than any other people, but very likely have more good sense than their political leaders, and are perfectly able to decide by themselves on the most important issues. Is that democratic idea a too bold idea? In that case, I accept being called a bold guy.

Friends from abroad, I thank you for supporting in great numbers the Open Letter to the French President. If you have not done it already, please support and sign it now.

Before concluding, I would like to ask and quickly answer a second question: If that hunger-strike was truly “bold”, how did it happen that an eminent figure in the international abolitionist movement, a US citizen, considered it important, whereas in France the national media, with very few exceptions, didn’t even mention it? That paradox deserves explanation.

When an event escapes the attention of most people, including professional observers like journalists who ought to notice, those who do notice need to have been on the lookout for a subject they are already sensitive to. Thus, David has struggled for ages for the abolition of nuclear weapons and like us keeps meeting a sort of wall. He is therefore on the lookout for anything that could open a breach in it. Similarly, it’s because I was interested in international relations and Russian history that I heard, at the very moment in January 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev’s call for “No nuclear weapons by 2000!”. That call, certainly unexpected and bold, was to overturn my life.

Prior sensitization creates a vicious circle for whistle-blowers and activists for causes like ours: by what we say and write and do, we wish to draw public attention to a problem that we deem particularly serious, but the public cannot pay serious attention unless they are already sensitized… In our media-dominated world, journalists play an essential role in informing and sensitizing the public. So we first need to gain their attention, and since the media love anything sensational, that’s where boldness can play a role.

But that’s not enough. For instance, our hunger-strike was well covered by the press, radio and TV in our region, where ACDN and I are already known. That didn’t happen elsewhere, and when TV France 3 of our region asked the national France 3 to film us outside the Elysee Palace, the footage was broadcast in our region but not nationally. Why so? It would be too long to explain, but it could be also an interesting topic by comparing the various situations we are faced with in our different countries.

In conclusion, permit me to ask you two questions without answering them:

First: What enables us now to say that “The Time for Boldness has come”?

And, last question: What kinds of boldness must we manifest in order to respond to the challenges of the present time?

I would have several suggestions to make on that last item; some of them could perhaps interest you. But my time of speaking is over. Generally, I would say: we need to demand with determination our right to have truth, freedom and life.

I heartily thank David and Rick who have permitted me to speak for the first and perhaps for the last time at a side event in this arena. Thank you for your attention.

Jean-Marie Matagne is President of l’Action des Citoyens pour le Désarmement Nucléaire (ACDN) in France.

April 26, 2013
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.”

May 17, 2011
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?

March 15, 2011
New Book Concludes: Chernobyl death toll 985,000, mostly from cancer

This article was originally published by Op-Ed News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 15, 2010
Apocalypse in the Gulf Now (Oil) & Next (Nukes)

As BP’s ghastly gusher assaults the Gulf of Mexico and so much more, a tornado has forced shut the Fermi2 atomic reactor at the site of a 1966 melt-down that nearly irradiated the entire Great Lakes region.

If the White House has a reliable plan for deploying and funding a credible response to a disaster at a reactor that’s superior to the one we’ve seen at the Deepwater Horizon, we’d sure like to see it.

Meanwhile it wants us to fund two more reactors on the Gulf and another one 40 miles from Washington DC. And that’s just for starters.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned that at least one new design proposed for federal funding cannot withstand tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes.

But the administration has slipped $9 billion for nuclear loan guarantees into an emergency military funding bill, in addition to the $8.33 it’s already approved for two new nukes in Georgia.

Unless we do something about it, the House Appropriations Committee may begin the process next week.

Like Deepwater Horizon and Fermi, these new nukes could ignite disasters beyond our technological control—and our worst nightmares.

Like BP, their builders would enjoy financial liability limits dwarfed by damage they could do.

Two of the new reactors are proposed for South Texas, where two others have already been leaking radiation into the Gulf. Ironically, oil pouring into the Gulf could make the waters unusable for cooling existing and future nukes and coal burners.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently admitted to Rachel Maddow he has no firm plans for the radioactive wastes created by the proposed new reactors, or by the 104 currently licensed.

That would include Vermont Yankee, where strontium, cesium, tritium and more are leaking into the Connecticut River. VY’s rotted underground pipes may have leaking counterparts at every other US reactor.

After 50 years, this industry can’t get private financing, can’t get private liability insurance and has no solution for its wastes.

The Gulf gusher bears the simple lesson that technologies that require liability limits will rapidly exceed them, and must not be deployed.

No US nuclear utility has sufficient capital resources to cover the damages from a reactor disaster, which is one reason taxpayers are targeted as the ultimate underwriters.

On May 27, the House Appropriations Committee was scheduled to vote on new nuke loan guarantees, which had been attached to an emergency military spending bill. Amidst a flood of grassroots opposition, the vote was postponed.

But it could return as early as June 15. We can and must stop these new guarantees, which would feed the gusher of nuke power hand-outs being dumped into new climate/energy legislation.

By all accounts, despite the horrors of the Gulf, the administration still wants legislation that will expand deepwater drilling and atomic technologies that are simply beyond our control…but that fund apparently unstoppable dividends for corporations like BP.

It’s our vital responsibility to transform this crisis into a definitive shift to a totally green-powered earth, based solely on renewables and efficiency. We have a full array of Solartopian technologies that are proven, profitable, insurable and manageable. They are the core of our necessary transition to a prosperous, sustainable future.

As our planet dies around us, truly green climate/energy legislation must come…NOW! The next key vote may come when the Appropriations Committee reconvenes.

Make your voice is heard. It’s all we have.

June 8, 2010
The Consequences of Chernobyl

This article was originally published on Counter Punch

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

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

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

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

More deaths, it projects, will follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 26, 2010
Obama Goes Nuclear

This article was originally published on Counterpunch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 22, 2010
Nuclear Power

It is my belief, based on a professional lifetime of study, that further development of nuclear power presents an unacceptable radioactive curse on all future generations. Aside from the risks of accidents worse than we have so far seen, there is no suitable place in our environment to dispose of either present or future nuclear waste. Now massive public-relations efforts are being launched to retrain the public to trust the “experts.” Damaged gene pools and cancers, and a ruined environment, will be our legacy to future generations if we continue to build nuclear reactors and nuclear armaments. How many of our grandchildren are we willing to sacrifice for the continuation of nuclear electric power and nuclear war?

Nuclear Electric Utilites
The “peacetime” nuclear business in the United States is in bad shape. The hard fact is that nuclear power is the most subsidized of all industries, kept alive by taxpayer, rate-payer, and bondholder financed welfare, and by world wide military support. Abandoned reactors include Rancho Seco in California, Trojan in Oregon, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Shoreham on Long Island. All new reactors ordered since 1973 have been can-celed. Estimates of the cost of disposal rise fantastically above $500 million per reactor, and no one knows what to do with the radioactive stuff stored within and around them. The United States Department of Energy has expressed a desire for tritium to replenish the dwindling supply in its thermonuclear bomb stockpile. In order to survive, some electric utilities have expressed willingness to produce wartime tritium as a government-subsidized by-product of their nuclear electrical power.

Nuclear Construction Companies
Nuclear construction companies would like to build nuclear power plants, but it is unlikely that any unsubsidized nuclear power plant will be ordered by a US utility. The United States has proposed to provide reactors to North Korea to replace their “unsafe” nuclear plants. American, French, and Canadian nuclear companies are considering joint ventures to build power reactors in Indonesia and elsewhere, I presume with financial aid from US taxpayers. Now it is proposed that US nuclear corporations sell $60 billion of nuclear products to China, trusting that they will not use their ability to produce plutonium for bombs.

Nuclear War with Depleted Uranium
The US Atomic Energy Commission used its enormous diffusion plants to separate uranium-235 from natural uranium for the purpose of making nuclear bombs, like the one dropped on Hiroshima. The tons of depleted uranium (mostly uranium-238) left over from the diffusion process were to be a valuable material for conversion to plutonium fuel for breeder reactors. Because our breeder program has lost its support, depleted uranium is now a “waste” material in need of “recycling.” Its value for “peace” has been replaced by its value for waging nuclear war. In the Persian Gulf the US military recycled hundreds of tons of depleted uranium into armor piercing shells and protective armor for tanks. After piercing a tank wall the depleted uranium burned, forming a radioactive and chemically lethal aerosol, incinerating everyone inside the tank, then spreading unseen over Iraq. Sickness and death for all future time were spread indiscriminately among Iraqi soldiers and civilians (including children). American soldiers and their children became victims as part of the Gulf War Syndrome. Now US military suppliers plan to sell this “free” government bonanza on the profitable world military market.

Radioactive Pollution on a Worldwide Scale
The public has been conditioned by both corporate and government proponents of nuclear power to believe in the necessity for their inherently “safe” nuclear reactors to avert a coming energy crisis. The nuclear establishment advertises itself as the producer of “green” energy, completely ignoring the non-green effects of the manufacture and eventual disposal of reactors, their fuels, and their radioactive products. They claim that they are now ready to produce “safe” reactors. Extension of the analyses by which the experts support their claim of safety shows, I believe, that there is no possibility of a guaranteed safe reactor. There is certainly no way safely to dispose of nuclear waste into the environment. Reactors are bound occasionally to fail. They are complicated mechanical devices designed, built, and operated by fallible human beings, some of whom may be vindictive. Our reactors may be “weapons in the hands of our enemies,” susceptible to sabotage. Despite attempts at secrecy, the list of reactor accidents fills whole books. In 1986 the Chernobyl reactor exploded, blowing off its two-thousand-ton lid, polluting the northern hemisphere with radioactivity, casting radiation sickness and death into the far future, leaving a million acres of land ruined “forever” by radioactive contamination. Radioactive reindeer meat was discarded in Lapland, and milk in Italy. It is reported that half of the 10 million people in Belorussia live in contaminated areas. Some estimates of adults and children doomed to be killed and maimed by cancer and mutations run in the millions. If nuclear power continues, there will be other “Chernobyls” scattered around the world, perhaps more devastating. The Chernobyl accident demonstrates the devastation which could happen with a nuclear accident near a large city. The nuclear business, here and abroad, has a record of willful and careless radiation exposure and killing of unaware people since the beginning: its miners from radon gas, its Hanford “down-winders”, victims of Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the SL-1 reactor in Idaho. Even “successful” reactors are intolerable. Reactors produce radioactive pollution. They use uranium and make plutonium. Both are radioactive, chemically poisonous heavy metals. Plutonium, a nuclear bomb material, is also the world’s most radioactively lethal material. A power reactor at the end of its life has manufactured lethal radioactive products equivalent to those from several thousand nuclear bombs. We as a society cannot afford, even if we knew how, the cleanup of these radioactive messes. Nuclear power, with its lethal radioactive poisons, pollutes “forever”, in new, more insidious, more intransigent ways than any other form of energy.

May 1, 1998