Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: tsunami

  • Japan’s Nuclear Catastrophe Leaves Little to be Celebrated on Children’s Day

    May 5 is Children’s Day, a Japanese national holiday that celebrates the happiness of childhood. This year, it will fall under a dark, radioactive shadow.


    Japanese children in the path of radioactive plumes from the crippled nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station are likely to suffer health problems that a recent government action will only exacerbate.


    On April 19, the Japanese government sharply ramped up its radiation exposure limit to 2,000 millirem per year (20 mSv/y) for schools and playgrounds in Fukushima prefecture. Japanese children are now permitted to be exposed to an hourly dose rate 165 times above normal background radiation and 133 times more than levels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows for the American public. Japanese school children will be allowed to be exposed to same level recommended by the International Commission on Radiation Protection for nuclear workers. Unlike workers, however, children won’t have a choice as to whether they can be so exposed.


    This decision callously puts thousands of children in harm’s way.


    Experts consider children to be 10 to 20 times more vulnerable to contracting cancer from exposure to ionizing radiation than adults. This is because as they grow, their dividing cells are more easily damaged — allowing cancer cells to form. Routine fetal X-rays have ceased worldwide for this reason. Cancer remains a leading cause of death by disease for children in the United States.


    On April 12, the Japanese government announced that the nuclear crisis in Fukushima was as severe as the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Within weeks of the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, the four ruined reactors at the Dai-Ichi power station released enormous quantities of radiation into the atmosphere.


    According to the Daily Youmiri, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) announced that between 10 and 17 million curies (270,000- 360,000 TBq) of radioactive materials were released to the atmosphere before early April, a great deal more than previous official estimates.


    Even though atmospheric releases blew mostly out to sea and appear to have declined dramatically, NISA reports that Fukushima’s nuclear ruins are discharging about 4,200 curies of iodine-131 and cesium-137 per day into the air (154 TBq). This is nearly 320,000 times more than d radiation the now de-commissioned Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant released over a year. NISA’s estimate is likely to be the low end, given the numerous sources of unmeasured and unfiltered leaks into the environment amidst the four wrecked reactors. On April 27, Bloomberg News reported that radiation readings at the Dai-Ichi nuclear power station have risen to the highest levels since the earthquake.


    With a half-life of 8.5 days, iodine-131 is rapidly absorbed in dairy products and in the human thyroid, particularly those of children. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years and gives off potentially dangerous external radiation. It concentrates in various foods and is absorbed throughout the human body. Unlike iodine-131, which decays to a level considered safe after about three months, cesium-137 can pose risks for several hundred years.


    Measurements taken at 1,600 nursery schools, kindergartens, and middle school playgrounds in early April indicate that children are regularly getting high radiation doses. Radiation levels one meter above the ground indicate that children at hundreds of schools received exposures 43- 200 times above background. And this is outside of the “exclusionary zone” around the Dai-Ichi reactors, where locals have been evacuated. Japan’s Ministry of Education and Science has limited outdoor activities at 13 schools in the cities of Fukushima, Date, and Koriyama Cities.


    Although the extent of long-term contamination is not yet fully known, disturbing evidence is emerging. Data collected 40 kilometers from the Fukushima’s nuclear accident  show cumulative levels as high as 9.5 rems (95 mSv) — nearly five times the international annual occupational dose. Soil beyond the 30-kilometer evacuation zone shows cesium-137 levels at 2,200 kBq per square meter — 67 percent greater than that requiring evacuation near Chernobyl.


    Three-fourths of the monitored schools in Fukushima had radioactivity levels so high that human entry shouldn’t be allowed, even though students began a new semester on April 5.

  • Nuclear Energy and Weapons: Uncontrollable in Time and Space

    This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.


    Alyn WareThe earthquake and tsunami in Japan devastated a whole region. Radioactive emissions from the damaged nuclear reactors are very serious, and have already contaminated food and water, prompting a ban on food exports from four prefectures and a government warning not to give Tokyo tap water to babies. The crisis could impact human health and the environment on an even wider scale — across Japan and around the globe.


    Whether or not the brave technicians in Fukushima are successful in containing the bulk of the radiation in the six reactors, the message is clear: natural disasters and accidents will happen. If it can go wrong sooner or later it will go wrong, and Murphy’s law and nuclear energy do not mix.


    In Japan, the fear of radiation spreading is connected to the memory of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki over 65 years ago. Over 100,000 people died from radiation exposure — nearly as many as from the blast. The genetic effects continue down through the generations.


    Japan’s nuclear crisis has brought back to public consciousness the basic truth that the effects of nuclear disasters — whether from nuclear energy or nuclear weapons — are uncontrollable in time and space.


    Current events at Fukushima remind us of the negligence of nuclear power companies in building nuclear power plants on earthquake fault lines or vulnerable coastlines. But they should also remind us of the even greater negligence of the nuclear weapon states in maintaining their arsenals of 20,000 nuclear weapons — most with yields over 100 times greater than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and many on hair trigger alert, ready to launch within minutes. Any accidental, unauthorized, inadvertent or intentional use today (or tomorrow) would have a catastrophic, widespread, unprecedented and unimaginable impact on humanity and the environment.


    A recent statement released by international law experts from around the world, including former judges from the International Court of Justice, affirms that maintaining nuclear weapons and a readiness to use them is not only negligent, but given the dire consequences of any use, also against the law. The Vancouver Declaration on “Law’s Imperative for the Urgent Achievement of a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World,” notes that the use of nuclear weapons would be “contrary to the fundamental rules of international humanitarian law (laws governing use of force in wartime) forbidding the infliction of indiscriminate harm and unnecessary suffering.”


    In other words, during war one can attack military targets and personnel, but not civilians. One can inflict harm on military personnel, but not such harm that would last long after the conflict is over. In addition, it is illegal even in wartime to inflict long-term and severe damage on the environment. Nuclear weapons, with their uncontrollable blast, heat and radiation effects, could not be used without violating these laws. And if such an act is illegal, the threat to commit such an act is also illegal.


    Thus, in 1996 the International Court of Justice (a. k. a. the World Court) determined that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally illegal, and that there is an unconditional obligation to achieve the complete prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons through good-faith negotiations.


    Since then, failure of the nuclear weapon states to comply has had predictably disastrous results for global proliferation and nuclear danger, convincing India, Pakistan and North Korea that if they can’t cajole the nuclear weapon states to give up nuclear weapons, then they might as well join their nuclear club. Others are bound to follow suit.


    Until recently, states that wanted to hang onto their nuclear arsenals and their policies to use them argued that such policies were legal by misrepresenting a clause in the Court’s opinion. That clause stated that the ICJ could not reach a conclusion on the legality of threat or use in the extreme circumstance of self-defense when the very survival of a state is at stake. So by stating that they would only use nuclear weapons in “extreme circumstances,” the nuclear weapon states avoided applying the general ruling of illegality to their nuclear weapons policies.


    But they can no longer avoid this. In May 2010, the parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which includes the major nuclear weapon states, affirmed that any use of nuclear weapons would cause catastrophic humanitarian consequences, and that states must comply with international humanitarian law “at all times.” They also agreed that all states must make special efforts to build the framework for a nuclear weapons-free world, citing the United Nations Secretary-General’s proposal for negotiations on a global nuclear abolition treaty.


    Now governments have to choose: hang onto their nuclear arsenals, or uphold the rule of law to which they have agreed. They can’t do both. We all know which will make us safer. Nuclear possession is a recipe for proliferation and corrosive to international humanitarian law, which, as the Vancouver Declaration says, “is essential to limiting the effects of armed conflicts, large and small, around the world.”


    The nuclear crisis in Japan has debunked the claims of authorities that their nuclear power stations, built with inferior containment on fault-lines, are safe and fully under control. Before something goes horribly wrong on the weapons front, we must also debunk the claims of the nuclear weapon states that nuclear weapons are safe as long as they are in the ‘right hands.’


    States including the US take the position that we should just trust them to take small steps towards nuclear disarmament sometime in an indefinite future. That’s like trusting the nuclear power industry to police itself and voluntarily phase itself out in deference to public safety. It simply won’t happen without a global prohibition enforced by the rest of the world, like the one outlined in the draft treaty circulated by the UN Secretary-General.


    In 1996, the President of the International Court of Justice called nuclear weapons an “absolute evil.” We have already applied international humanitarian law to other inhumane and indiscriminate (read “evil”) weapons such as landmines and cluster munitions in order to achieve global treaties for banning them. Now it’s time for absolute prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.

  • From Hiroshima to Fukushima

    This article was originally published by The New York Times.


    Jonathan SchellThe horrible and heartbreaking events in Japan present a strange concatenation of disasters.


    First, the planet unleashed one of its primordial shocks, an earthquake, of a magnitude greater than any previously recorded in Japan. The earthquake, in turn, created the colossal tsunami, which, when it struck the country’s northeastern shores, pulverized everything in its path, forming a filthy wave made of mud, cars, buildings, houses, airplanes and other debris.


    In part because the earthquake had just lowered the level of the land by two feet, the wave rolled as far as six miles inland, killing thousands of people. In a stupefying demonstration of its power, as The New York Times has reported, the earthquake moved parts of Japan 13 feet eastward, slightly shifted the earth’s axis and actually shortened each day that passes on earth, if only infinitesimally (by 1.8 milliseconds).


    But this was not all. Another shock soon followed. Succumbing to the one-two punch of the earthquake and the tsunami, eleven of Japan’s 54 nuclear power reactors were shut down. At this writing, three of them have lost coolant to their cores and have experienced partial meltdowns. The same three have also suffered large explosions.


    The spent fuel in a fourth caught fire. Now a second filthy wave is beginning to roll — this one composed of radioactive elements in the atmosphere. They include unknown amounts of cesium-137 and iodine-131, which can only have originated in the melting cores or in nearby spent fuel rod pools. Both are dangerous to human health.


    The Japanese government has evacuated some 200,000 people in the vicinity of the plants and issued potassium iodide pills, which prevent the uptake of radioactive iodine. The U.S. aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan had to change course when it sailed into a radioactive cloud.


    The second shock was, of course, different from the first in at least one fundamental respect. The first was dealt by Mother Nature, who has thus reminded us of her sovereign power to nourish or punish our delicate planet, its axis now tipping ever so slightly in a new direction. No finger of blame can be pointed at any perpetrator.


    The second shock, on the other hand, is the product of humankind, and involves human responsibility. Until the human species stepped in, there was no appreciable release of atomic energy from nuclear fission or fusion on earth. It took human hands to introduce it into the midst of terrestrial affairs.


    That happened 66 years ago, also in Japan, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, President Harry Truman used language that is worth pondering today.


    “It is an atomic bomb,” he said. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”


    Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, referred to the atomic bombings by implication when he stated that the current crisis was the worst for Japan “since the Second World War.”


    For some years afterward, atomic energy was understood mainly to be an inconceivably malign force — as the potential source of a sort of man-made equivalent of earthquakes, and worse.


    In the 1950s, however, when nuclear power plants were first built, an attempt began to find a bright side to the atom. (In 1956 Walt Disney even made a cartoon called “Our Friend the Atom.”)


    A key turning point was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953, which required nuclear-armed nations to sell nuclear power technology to other nations in exchange for following certain nonproliferation rules. This bargain is now enshrined in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which promotes nuclear power even as it discourages nuclear weapons.


    As Ira Chernus has chronicled in his book “Atoms for Peace,” the proposal paradoxically grew out of Eisenhower’s distaste for arms control. He had launched a nuclear buildup that would increase the U.S. arsenal from 1,436 warheads at the beginning of his two terms to 20,464 by the end. His strategic nuclear policy was one of “massive retaliation,” which relied more heavily on nuclear threats than Truman’s policy had. Arms control would have obstructed these policies.


    Yet Eisenhower needed some proposal to temper his growing reputation as a reckless nuclear hawk. Atoms for Peace met this need. The solution to nuclear danger, he said, was “to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers” and put it “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace” — chiefly, those who would use it to build nuclear power plants.


    Of course, the weapon never was taken out of the hands of soldiers, but the basic power of the universe was indeed handed over to nuclear power engineers — including Japanese engineers.


    The long, checkered career of nuclear power began. The promise at first seemed great, but the problems cropped up immediately. The distinction between Disney’s smiling, friendly atom and the frowning, hostile one kept breaking down.


    In the first place, the technology of nuclear power proved to be an open spigot for the spread of technology that also served the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the second place, the requirement of burying nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it takes for its radioactive materials to decline to levels deemed safe mocked the meager ingenuity and constancy of a species whose entire recorded history amounts only to some 6,000 years.


    Finally, the technology of nuclear power itself kept breaking down and bringing or threatening disaster, as is now occurring in Japan.


    The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control.


    Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind. The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong — and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt.


    You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch.


    These predictable and unpredictable failings affect every stage of the operation. For instance, in Japan, the nuclear power industry has a record of garden-variety cover-ups, ducking safety regulations, hiding safety violations and other problems. But which large bureaucratic organization does not?


    And if these happen in Japan, as orderly and efficient a country as exists on earth, in which country will they not? When the bureaucracy is the parking violations bureau or the sanitation department, ordinary mistakes lead to ordinary mishaps. But when the basic power of the universe is involved, they court catastrophe.


    The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren’t tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax.


    It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom.


    When nature strikes, why should humankind compound the trouble? The earth is provided with enough primordial forces of destruction without our help in introducing more. We should leave those to Mother Nature.


    Some have suggested that in light of the new developments we should abandon nuclear power. I have a different proposal, perhaps more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the peril. Let us pause and study the matter. For how long?


    Plutonium, a component of nuclear waste, has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that half of it is transformed into other elements through radioactive decay. This suggests a time-scale. We will not be precipitous if we study the matter for only half of that half-life, 12,000 years.


    In the interval, we can make a search for safe new energy sources, among other useful endeavors. Then perhaps we’ll be wise enough to make good use of the split atom.

  • Nuclear Reactor Catastrophe in Japan

    2011_03_16_weeramantry.pdf

  • The Japanese Disaster – Nuclear Tragedy – Lessons for India

    2011_03_16_ramdas_india.pdf

  • A Final Wakeup Call?

    David KriegerOur 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?

  • Cancel the Inauguration Parties and Increase Aid to Tsunami Victims

    There has been a tragedy in the family, the human family. Watching and reading about the victims of the tsunami in South Asia, one feels enormous shock at the magnitude of the human loss. The number of victims continues to rise and there is fear that widespread disease will follow in the wake of the disaster taking many more lives. Confronted by the worst natural disaster in memory, people throughout the world are rallying to aid the victims.

    After being shamed by its earlier offering of $35 million, the United States has pledged $350 million in aid. President Bush has ordered US flags lowered to half-mast for the victims of the tragedy and has asked American citizens to join in contributing to a broad humanitarian relief effort. He has enlisted two former presidents, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to head up efforts to solicit private funds towards this goal. “I ask every American,” he said, “to contribute as they are able to do so.” This is certainly a laudable call, but falls short of the contribution we could be making as a country.

    There is a very big party, or series of parties, scheduled for January 20th for the second inauguration of George W. Bush as president of the United States. Some $40 million in private funds is being raised for this gala inauguration. The upper price for tickets is $250,000 each and includes lunch with the President and Vice President. Security for the events will also cost millions.

    While still in the midst of the devastating tragedy in South Asia, not to mention the 150,000 American troops in combat in Iraq, it seems terribly wrong to move forward with such a gala public celebration. Americans should refrain from national partying while the verdict is still out on what more can be done to aid the millions of victims of the tsunami disaster. There is precedent for this in the fourth inaugural of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose January 1945 inauguration during World War II was described as “simple and austere with no fanfare or formal celebration following the event.” There was also no parade due to gas rationing.

    Tragedies such as the one that has been unfolding in South Asia remind us that we are all part of the human family. When one part of the family suffers, we all share in the pain. Reports tell us that more than 150,000 people, including 50,000 children, have already died as a result of this disaster. These are our fellow humans. These are our children. Can we not imagine, even feel the grief of their loved ones?

    We are reminded that we are one world and one human family. The tragedy is not over there. It is everywhere. It is not their tragedy. It is our shared tragedy.

    It would be an impressive sign to the world that America cares and is capable of compassion and empathy if the President were to cancel the planned inauguration ceremony, the parades and parties, the pomp and circumstance, and add the tens of millions saved to the relief fund for the victims of the disaster. Even with this, we Americans would still be officially contributing less to relief efforts than the Japanese. Let’s show that individually and collectively we are serious about providing assistance to the tsunami victims. It would be good for them and also good for our spirits, for defining who and what we are capable of being.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).