With NASA intending to launch a plutonium-fueled rover from Florida on Saturday—and admitting that a launch pad accident releasing the deadly plutonium fuel could reach as far as 62 miles away—the issue being raised by the area’s tourism officials is whether the launch will attract tourists.
“Can Curiosity Draw the Crowds?” was the recent Florida Today headline. http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20111113/NEWS02/311120041/Can-Curiosity-draw-crowds- A sub-head: “Tourism Officials Hope Mars Launch Will Lure Observers to the Space Coast.”
It quotes Rob Varley, executive director of the Space Coast Office of Tourism, as saying: “The timing of this is perfect. We don’t always fill up on Thanksgiving weekend, but I think this will help. I think people will hear there is a launch and say, ‘Let’s go there, watch the launch, eat dinner, whatever.”
The piece added that the launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station “carries a little extra significance due to the plutonium fuel aboard the spacecraft.” But, it noted, “Extensive emergency preparations were required before the mission received approval to launch, and multiple layers of protections have been built into the craft.”
Don’t worry. Be happy.
At least Florida Today mentioned plutonium in the article. The Washington Post in an extensive piece – “NASA Mars Mission To Test Planet for Ability to Sustain Life” – did not mention the words plutonium or nuclear at all. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasa-mars-mission-to-test-planet-for-ability-to-sustain-life/2011/11/12/gIQAdnapZN_story.html '
Neither did The New York Times in a front page story this week – “On Mars Rover, Tools to Plumb a Methane Mystery.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/science/space/aboard-mars-curiosity-rover-tools-to-plumb-a-methane-mystery.html?_r=1&ref=science
Better not to know about those 10.6 pounds of toxic plutonium.
Some folks in Florida have, however, gotten the word. And, mobilized by Pax Christi Tampa Bay and other groups, they were protesting over the weekend carrying placards that declared: “No Nukes In Space” and “Danger: Launching of NASA Mars Probe With 10 Lbs. Plutonium. Don’t Do Disney.” That referred to Disney theme parks in Orlando.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory says a launch accident discharging plutonium has a 1-in-420 chance of happening and could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,”
Historically, one in 100 rockets destruct at launch.
If this Atlas rocket carrying the plutonium-fueled rover, which NASA calls Curiosity, does make it up but then falls back to Earth—that would set up an even a greater disaster.
There’s a model for that up in the sky right now: Russia’s Phobos-Grunt space probe launched on November 9 to go to a moon of Mars. But it never broke out of the Earth’s gravitational field. Its rocket system failed to fire it onward from low Earth orbit. Now it’s expected to fall back to Earth in January, disintegrating in a fiery re-entry when it hits the Earth’s atmosphere.
If that is what happens to Curiosity and its 10.6 pounds of plutonium fuel is released, NASA’s EIS acknowledges that the plutonium could spread widely over the Earth.
In its EIS, NASA designates this as an accident during: “Phase 4 (Orbital/Escape): Accidents which occur after attaining parking orbit could result in orbital decay reentries from minutes to years after the accident affecting Earth surfaces between approximately 28-degrees north latitude and 28-degrees south latitude.”
Between 28 degrees north and 28-degrees south latitudes covers much of South America, Africa and Australia. NASA gives odds of 1-in-830 for the “probability of a release” of plutonium in such an accident.
An especially uncritical piece of reporting this week on the Curiosity venture was on “FLORIDA SPACErePORT” http://spacereport.blogspot.com/2011/11/november-21-2011.html
It provided an assurance that the isotope of plutonium used in space devices, Plutonium-238, “is not used in weapons and cannot explode like a bomb. It does not emit the type of penetrating radioactivity that can cause serious health problems. It emits alpha radiation, a type that is easily shielded. It cannot penetrate the skin, clothing, even a sheet of paper. It is only dangerous to humans if pulverized into a fine dust that subsequently is inhaled or ingested.”
Yes, and that is exactly what could happen in an explosion on launch and, even more likely, in a fiery re-entry of a space device with Plutonium-238 into the atmosphere.
Putting Plutonium-238 on space devices which can disintegrate over our heads and cause plutonium to rain down in fine particles—plutonium which people can breathe in—maximizes the lethality of plutonium.
A millionth of a gram of plutonium is a fatal dose. Plutonium-238, furthermore, is 270 times more radioactive than the common isotope of plutonium, Plutonium-239, used as fuel in atomic bombs.
A fall from orbit of a plutonium-fueled satellite in 1964 caused fine particles of Plutonium-238 to fall out all over the Earth. The late Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident involving a SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard the satellite to an increase in global lung cancer. With that accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered. The SNAP-9A accident is cited in the NASA EIS for the Curiosity shot as being among the three accidents that have occurred among the 26 U.S. space missions which have used plutonium.
Still, insisted Martin LaMonica this week, senior writer for CNET’s Green Tech blog, “Nuclear ‘Space Battery’ Bests Solar in Curiosity Mars Mission,” as the piece was headlined.
Sure, rovers sent to Mars up to now have used solar power for locomotion. http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57329365-76/nuclear-space-battery-bests-solar-in-curiosity-mars-mission/ But LaMonica quoted Stephen Johnson, director of the Idaho National Laboratory’s Space Nuclear Systems and Technology Division, as saying: “You can operate with solar panels on Mars. You just can’t operate everywhere.”
So to go “everywhere” we are to endanger life on Earth? To try to see about life on Mars we would threaten life on Earth?
The NASA EIS says the cost of decontamination of areas on Earth affected by plutonium discharged in an accident from Curiosity would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
The mission itself has a cost of $2.5 billion.
And the odds for disaster are low, acknowledges NASA in its EIS. The EIS says “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released is 1-in-220. How many people would get on an airplane or take a drive in a car if they knew there was a 1-in-220 chance of not making it.
Further, if Curiosity does make it up and out, it will be just one trigger pull in a game of spaceborne Russian roulette—if NASA gets its way. For not only is NASA seeking to do more space missions using plutonium but it is developing rockets powered by nuclear energy.
Demanding that this all be stopped is Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space www.space4peace.org “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet,” he says. “Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Update on Planned Launch of Plutonium-Fueled "Curiosity" Rover
NASA intends in coming days to launch a rover to be deployed on Mars fueled with 10.6pounds of plutonium. If there is an explosion on launch in Florida and plutonium is released, an area as far as 62 miles from the launch pad could be impacted, NASA acknowledges. If the rocket lofting the rover doesn’t break away from the Earth’s gravitational field to keep going into space but falls back to Earth, re-entry into the atmosphere would cause both the rocket and rover to disintegrate potentially releasing plutonium over a huge area.
An example of a space device meant to go to Mars but likely to fall back to Earth is unfolding now. A Russian space probe, named Phobos-Grunt, launched on November 9, reached low Earth orbit, but then an engine system failed to fire to power it on to Phobos, one of two moons of Mars. The Russian space agency is trying to get the craft’s onboard computer, which it believes is the source of the problem, to function properly. But prospects are dim. Reuters in an article on the situation quotes a Russian space expert, Vladimir Uvarov, as saying: “In my opinion Phobos-Grunt is lost.” Unless a fix is made, the probe will come crashing back to Earth, probably in January.
There is concern about the 12 tons of chemical fuel onboard the Phobos-Grunt impacting the Earth. A similar problem with the Mars rover, which NASA calls Curiosity, in falling back to Earth with its 10.6 pounds of plutonium would present a far, far more serious danger.
NASA intends to launch the plutonium-powered rover on what it has named its Mars Science Laboratory Mission during a window from November 25 to December 15.
In its Final Environmental Impact Statement for the mission, NASA addresses the possibility of an accident similar to what the Phobos-Grunt is facing in what NASA designates as “Phase 4” of the launch. Plutonium could be released in such an accident “affecting Earth surfaces” along a wide belt around the middle of the Earth.
NASA’s language for this: “Phase 4 (Orbital/Escape): Accidents which occur after attaining parking orbit could result in orbital decay reentries from minutes to years after the accident affecting Earth surfaces between approximately 28-degrees north latitude and 28-degrees south latitude.” NASA gives odds of 1-in-830 for the “probability of a release” of plutonium in such an accident. Between 28 degrees north and 28-degrees south covers much of South America, Africa and Australia.
The EIS says the cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.” The Curiosity mission itself has a cost of $2.5 billion.
The EIS says “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released is 1-in-220. It puts the odds at 1-in-420 of plutonium being released in a launch accident. This could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” says the EIS. The most densely populated part of that area is Orlando.
“NASA is planning a mission that could endanger not only its future but the state of Florida and beyond,” declares John Stewart of Pax Christi Tampa Bay, a leader in Florida in challenging the launch. “The absurd—and maddening—aspect of this risk is that it is unnecessary,” says Stewart, a teacher. “The locomotion for NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover, launched in 1996, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, both launched in 2003, was solar powered, with the latter two rovers performing well beyond what their engineers expected. Curiosity’s locomotion could also be solar-powered. NASA admits this in its EIS, but decided to put us all at risk because plutonium-powered batteries last longer and they want to have the ‘flexibility to select the most scientifically interesting location on the surface’ of Mars.”
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org), which has been opposing NASA’s nuclear missions for two decades, says “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining its dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel. The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
There have been accidents in the use of nuclear power in space. Of the 26 U.S. space missions listed in the EIS which have used plutonium, three underwent accidents, the EIS admits. The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth. The late Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered.
But NASA kept using plutonium as a power source on space probes maintaining that solar energy could not be utilized beyond the orbit of Mars. But this August NASA reversed itself with the launch of its solar-powered Juno space probe to Jupiter.
In its description of the Juno mission, NASA states that even when the probe gets to Jupiter, “nearly 500 million miles from the Sun,” its panels will be providing electricity.
The plutonium-fueled Curiosity mission could herald an expanded NASA space nuclear power program—not just for space probes but for nuclear propelled rockets.
During the 1950s and 60s, NASA, working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, built such rockets under a program called NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and then under Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. Billions in 1950s-1960s dollars were spent and ground-testing done, but no nuclear rocket ever got off the ground. There were concerns about a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch or crashing back to Earth.
Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, President Obama’s appointee to head NASA, is a big booster of nuclear-propulsion for rockets. He has been pushing a design developed by a fellow ex-astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, who has founded the Ad Astra Rocket Company.
With NASA turning over many space activities to private industry with the end of its shuttle program, another major private company involved is SpaceX. The website of the journal Nature reported last year that SpaceX wants the U.S. government to “return to developing nuclear-powered rockets pursued during the 1960s”—and specifically NERVA. “We have to do nuclear,” stated Tom Markusic, director of the company’s rocket development facility.
Meanwhile, there have not only been advances in solar energy as a power source in space as demonstrated by the Juno space probe mission but also in propelling spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched what it termed a “space yacht” called Ikaros which gets propulsion from the pressure on its large sails of ionizing particles emitted by the Sun. The sails also feature “thin-film solar cells to generate electricity and creating,” said Yuichi Tsuda of the agency, “a hybrid technology of electricity and pressure."
NASA has also been pushing for establishment of a production facility for plutonium for space use to be situated at Idaho National Laboratory.
Plutonium has long been described as the most lethal radioactive substance. And the plutonium isotope used in the space nuclear program, and on the Curiosity rover, is significantly more radioactive than the type of plutonium used as fuel in nuclear weapons or built up as a waste product in nuclear power plants. It is Plutonium-238 as distinct from Plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 has a far shorter half-life–87.8 years compared to Plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,500 years. An isotope’s half-life is the period in which half of its radioactivity is expended.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, explains that Plutonium-238 “is about 270 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239 per unit of weight.” Thus in radioactivity, the 10.6 pounds of Plutonium-238 that is to be used on Curiosity is the equivalent of 2,862 pounds of Plutonium-239. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki used 15 pounds of Plutonium-239.
The far shorter half-life of Plutonium-238 compared to Plutonium-239 results in it being extremely hot. This heat is translated in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator into electricity.
The pathway of greatest health concern for plutonium is breathing in a particle leding to lung cancer. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The EIS for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission speaks of particles that would be “transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
A key issue in terms of effects is whether the plutonium remains as the marble-sized pellets fabricated for space use or dispersed as fine particles that can be inhaled.
The EIS also describes “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” including: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bans on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
Pax Christi is asking people to call, email or write NASA and, says Stewart, state “that until they can launch spacecraft without nuclear materials aboard, they should not launch at all.” Also, it is calling for people to contact the White House “and tell President Obama that Curiosity should stay safely on the ground until it can be launched without threatening us and future generations.”
A petition to the White House—“Cancel the Launch of the Mars Rover Curiosity by
NASA Which is Powered by Dangerous Plutonium-238”—has also been put up on the Internet for people to sign. It is at: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/cancel-launch-mars-rover-curiosity-nasa-which-powered-dangerous-plutonium-238/8HzzWHk9
The opponents have created a Facebook page warning people not to visit Disney theme parks in Orlando during the launch window. “Don’t Do Disney brought to you by NASA,” the Facebook page is titled.
Demonstrations in Florida are also planned.
The grunt in the name of the Phobos-Grunt space probe is the word for soil in Russian. The probe was to bring soil back to Earth from Phobos. Reuters has reported that “Phobos-Grunt is also carrying bacteria, plant seeds and tiny animals known as water bears, part of a U.S. study to see if they could survive beyond the Earth’s protective bubble.”
An example of a space device meant to go to Mars but likely to fall back to Earth is unfolding now. A Russian space probe, named Phobos-Grunt, launched on November 9, reached low Earth orbit, but then an engine system failed to fire to power it on to Phobos, one of two moons of Mars. The Russian space agency is trying to get the craft’s onboard computer, which it believes is the source of the problem, to function properly. But prospects are dim. Reuters in an article on the situation quotes a Russian space expert, Vladimir Uvarov, as saying: “In my opinion Phobos-Grunt is lost.” Unless a fix is made, the probe will come crashing back to Earth, probably in January.
There is concern about the 12 tons of chemical fuel onboard the Phobos-Grunt impacting the Earth. A similar problem with the Mars rover, which NASA calls Curiosity, in falling back to Earth with its 10.6 pounds of plutonium would present a far, far more serious danger.
NASA intends to launch the plutonium-powered rover on what it has named its Mars Science Laboratory Mission during a window from November 25 to December 15.
In its Final Environmental Impact Statement for the mission, NASA addresses the possibility of an accident similar to what the Phobos-Grunt is facing in what NASA designates as “Phase 4” of the launch. Plutonium could be released in such an accident “affecting Earth surfaces” along a wide belt around the middle of the Earth.
NASA’s language for this: “Phase 4 (Orbital/Escape): Accidents which occur after attaining parking orbit could result in orbital decay reentries from minutes to years after the accident affecting Earth surfaces between approximately 28-degrees north latitude and 28-degrees south latitude.” NASA gives odds of 1-in-830 for the “probability of a release” of plutonium in such an accident. Between 28 degrees north and 28-degrees south covers much of South America, Africa and Australia.
The EIS says the cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.” The Curiosity mission itself has a cost of $2.5 billion.
The EIS says “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released is 1-in-220. It puts the odds at 1-in-420 of plutonium being released in a launch accident. This could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” says the EIS. The most densely populated part of that area is Orlando.
“NASA is planning a mission that could endanger not only its future but the state of Florida and beyond,” declares John Stewart of Pax Christi Tampa Bay, a leader in Florida in challenging the launch. “The absurd—and maddening—aspect of this risk is that it is unnecessary,” says Stewart, a teacher. “The locomotion for NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover, launched in 1996, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, both launched in 2003, was solar powered, with the latter two rovers performing well beyond what their engineers expected. Curiosity’s locomotion could also be solar-powered. NASA admits this in its EIS, but decided to put us all at risk because plutonium-powered batteries last longer and they want to have the ‘flexibility to select the most scientifically interesting location on the surface’ of Mars.”
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org), which has been opposing NASA’s nuclear missions for two decades, says “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining its dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel. The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
There have been accidents in the use of nuclear power in space. Of the 26 U.S. space missions listed in the EIS which have used plutonium, three underwent accidents, the EIS admits. The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth. The late Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered.
But NASA kept using plutonium as a power source on space probes maintaining that solar energy could not be utilized beyond the orbit of Mars. But this August NASA reversed itself with the launch of its solar-powered Juno space probe to Jupiter.
In its description of the Juno mission, NASA states that even when the probe gets to Jupiter, “nearly 500 million miles from the Sun,” its panels will be providing electricity.
The plutonium-fueled Curiosity mission could herald an expanded NASA space nuclear power program—not just for space probes but for nuclear propelled rockets.
During the 1950s and 60s, NASA, working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, built such rockets under a program called NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and then under Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. Billions in 1950s-1960s dollars were spent and ground-testing done, but no nuclear rocket ever got off the ground. There were concerns about a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch or crashing back to Earth.
Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, President Obama’s appointee to head NASA, is a big booster of nuclear-propulsion for rockets. He has been pushing a design developed by a fellow ex-astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, who has founded the Ad Astra Rocket Company.
With NASA turning over many space activities to private industry with the end of its shuttle program, another major private company involved is SpaceX. The website of the journal Nature reported last year that SpaceX wants the U.S. government to “return to developing nuclear-powered rockets pursued during the 1960s”—and specifically NERVA. “We have to do nuclear,” stated Tom Markusic, director of the company’s rocket development facility.
Meanwhile, there have not only been advances in solar energy as a power source in space as demonstrated by the Juno space probe mission but also in propelling spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched what it termed a “space yacht” called Ikaros which gets propulsion from the pressure on its large sails of ionizing particles emitted by the Sun. The sails also feature “thin-film solar cells to generate electricity and creating,” said Yuichi Tsuda of the agency, “a hybrid technology of electricity and pressure."
NASA has also been pushing for establishment of a production facility for plutonium for space use to be situated at Idaho National Laboratory.
Plutonium has long been described as the most lethal radioactive substance. And the plutonium isotope used in the space nuclear program, and on the Curiosity rover, is significantly more radioactive than the type of plutonium used as fuel in nuclear weapons or built up as a waste product in nuclear power plants. It is Plutonium-238 as distinct from Plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 has a far shorter half-life–87.8 years compared to Plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,500 years. An isotope’s half-life is the period in which half of its radioactivity is expended.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, explains that Plutonium-238 “is about 270 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239 per unit of weight.” Thus in radioactivity, the 10.6 pounds of Plutonium-238 that is to be used on Curiosity is the equivalent of 2,862 pounds of Plutonium-239. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki used 15 pounds of Plutonium-239.
The far shorter half-life of Plutonium-238 compared to Plutonium-239 results in it being extremely hot. This heat is translated in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator into electricity.
The pathway of greatest health concern for plutonium is breathing in a particle leding to lung cancer. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The EIS for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission speaks of particles that would be “transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
A key issue in terms of effects is whether the plutonium remains as the marble-sized pellets fabricated for space use or dispersed as fine particles that can be inhaled.
The EIS also describes “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” including: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bans on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
Pax Christi is asking people to call, email or write NASA and, says Stewart, state “that until they can launch spacecraft without nuclear materials aboard, they should not launch at all.” Also, it is calling for people to contact the White House “and tell President Obama that Curiosity should stay safely on the ground until it can be launched without threatening us and future generations.”
A petition to the White House—“Cancel the Launch of the Mars Rover Curiosity by
NASA Which is Powered by Dangerous Plutonium-238”—has also been put up on the Internet for people to sign. It is at: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/cancel-launch-mars-rover-curiosity-nasa-which-powered-dangerous-plutonium-238/8HzzWHk9
The opponents have created a Facebook page warning people not to visit Disney theme parks in Orlando during the launch window. “Don’t Do Disney brought to you by NASA,” the Facebook page is titled.
Demonstrations in Florida are also planned.
The grunt in the name of the Phobos-Grunt space probe is the word for soil in Russian. The probe was to bring soil back to Earth from Phobos. Reuters has reported that “Phobos-Grunt is also carrying bacteria, plant seeds and tiny animals known as water bears, part of a U.S. study to see if they could survive beyond the Earth’s protective bubble.”
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
"Don't Do Disney..."
NASA intends in coming weeks to launch a rover to be deployed on Mars fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium. Opponents of the launch in Florida, concerned about an accident releasing deadly plutonium, such as the explosion of the rocket that’s to loft the rover, have created a Facebook page warning people not to visit Disney theme parks in Orlando during the November 25-to-December 15 launch window. “Don’t Do Disney brought to you by NASA,” the Facebook page is titled. Other actions are planned.
Indeed, NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission says a launch accident discharging plutonium has a 1-in-420 chance of happening and could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” That’s an area including Orlando.
The EIS says “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released is just 1-in-220. This could affect a major portion of Earth in an accident which vaporizes and disperses plutonium from the rover, called Curiosity, as the Atlas 5 rocket carrying it up gains altitude.
The EIS says an accident releasing plutonium in the troposphere, the atmosphere five to nine miles high, is “assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Middle East, then parts of India and China, Hawaii and other Pacific islands, Mexico, and south Texas.
If there’s an accident resulting in plutonium fallout which occurs above that and before the rocket breaks through Earth’s gravitational field, people could be affected “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the EIS. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth which includes much of South America, Africa and Australia.
The EIS says the cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
The mission itself has a cost of $2.5 billion.
“NASA is planning a mission that could endanger not only its future but the state of Florida and beyond,” declares John Stewart of Pax Christi Tampa Bay, a leader in Florida in challenging the launch. “The absurd—and maddening—aspect of this risk is that it is unnecessary,” says Stewart, a teacher. “The locomotion for NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover, launched in 1996, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, both launched in 2003, was solar powered, with the latter two rovers performing well beyond what their engineers expected. Curiosity’s locomotion could also be solar-powered. NASA admits this in its EIS, but decided to put us all at risk because plutonium-powered batteries last longer and they want to have the ‘flexibility to select the most scientifically interesting location on the surface’ of Mars.”
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, which has been opposing NASA’s nuclear missions for two decades, says “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining its dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel. The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
Since the 1950s, NASA has used nuclear power in space—and there have been accidents. Of the 26 U.S. space missions listed in the EIS that have used plutonium, three underwent accidents, the EIS admits. The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth.
The late Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered.
But NASA insisted on using plutonium as a power source on space probes—claiming that solar energy cannot be utilized beyond the orbit of Mars. But this August it reversed itself with the launch of the solar-powered Juno space probe to Jupiter.
In its description of the Juno mission, NASA states that even when the probe gets to Jupiter, “nearly 500 million miles from the Sun,” its panels will be providing electricity.
The choice of solar power by NASA on Juno was less than voluntary, however. The Associated Press has described Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the Juno mission for the Southwest Research Institute, a NASA contractor, as maintaining “the choice of solar was a practical one…No plutonium-powered generators were available to him and his San Antonio-based team nearly a decade ago so they opted for solar panels rather than develop a new nuclear source.”
The plutonium-fueled Curiosity mission could herald an expanded NASA space nuclear power program—not just for space probes but involving nuclear-propelled rockets.
During the 1950s and 60s, NASA, working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, built such rockets under a program called NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and then Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. Billions in 1950s-1960s dollars were spent and ground-testing done, but no nuclear rocket ever got off the ground. There were concerns about a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch and crashing back to Earth.
Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, President Obama’s appointee to head NASA, is a big booster of nuclear-propulsion for rockets. He has been pushing a design developed by a fellow ex-astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, who has founded the Ad Astra Rocket Company.
With NASA turning over many space activities to private industry with the end of its shuttle program, another major private company involved is SpaceX. The website of the journal Nature reported last year that SpaceX wants the U.S. government to “return to developing nuclear-powered rockets pursued during the 1960s”—and specifically NERVA. “We have to do nuclear,” stated Tom Markusic, director of the company’s rocket development facility.
Meanwhile, not only have great advances been made in using solar energy as a power source in space—as demonstrated by the Juno space probe mission—but also in propelling spacecraft and quickly in the vacuum of space. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched what it termed a “space yacht” called Ikaros which gets propulsion from the pressure on its large sails of ionizing particles emitted by the Sun. The sails also feature “thin-film solar cells to generate electricity and creating,” said Yuichi Tsuda of the agency, “a hybrid technology of electricity and pressure."
The Curiosity rover and the Atlas V rocket on which it is to ride were positioned for launch last week at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A Florida Today website account—as has been typical in coverage by the mainstream media of NASA’s nuclear program—in reporting this omitted the words plutonium and nuclear and made no reference to the danger s acknowledged in the EIS of the nuclear aspect of the mission.
Plutonium has long been described as the most lethal radioactive substance. And the plutonium isotope used in the space nuclear program, and on the Curiosity rover, is far more radioactive than the type of plutonium used as fuel in nuclear weapons or built up as a waste product in nuclear power plants.
It is Plutonium-238 as distinct from Plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 has a far shorter half-life–87.8 years compared to Plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,500 years. An isotope’s half-life is the period in which half of its radioactivity is expended.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, explains that Plutonium-238 “is about 270 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239 per unit of weight.” Thus in radioactivity, the 10.6 pounds of Plutonium-238 that is to be used on Curiosity is the equivalent of 2,862 pounds of Plutonium-239. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki used 15 pounds of Plutonium-239.
The far shorter half-life of Plutonium-238 compared to Plutonium-239 results in it being extremely hot. This heat is translated in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator into electricity.
The pathway of greatest health concern for plutonium is breathing in a particle. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The EIS for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission speaks of particles that would be “transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
It also describes “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” including: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bans on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
Pax Christi is asking people to call, email or write NASA and, says Stewart, state “that until they can launch spacecraft without nuclear materials aboard, they should not launch at all.” Also, it is calling for people to contact the White House “and tell President Obama that Curiosity should stay safely on the ground until it can be launched without threatening us and future generations.”
A petition to the White House—“Cancel the Launch of the Mars Rover Curiosity by NASA Which is Powered by Dangerous Plutonium-238”—has also been put up on the Internet for people to sign. It is at: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/cancel-launch-mars-rover-curiosity-nasa-which-powered-dangerous-plutonium-238/8HzzWHk9
Indeed, NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission says a launch accident discharging plutonium has a 1-in-420 chance of happening and could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” That’s an area including Orlando.
The EIS says “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released is just 1-in-220. This could affect a major portion of Earth in an accident which vaporizes and disperses plutonium from the rover, called Curiosity, as the Atlas 5 rocket carrying it up gains altitude.
The EIS says an accident releasing plutonium in the troposphere, the atmosphere five to nine miles high, is “assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Middle East, then parts of India and China, Hawaii and other Pacific islands, Mexico, and south Texas.
If there’s an accident resulting in plutonium fallout which occurs above that and before the rocket breaks through Earth’s gravitational field, people could be affected “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the EIS. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth which includes much of South America, Africa and Australia.
The EIS says the cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
The mission itself has a cost of $2.5 billion.
“NASA is planning a mission that could endanger not only its future but the state of Florida and beyond,” declares John Stewart of Pax Christi Tampa Bay, a leader in Florida in challenging the launch. “The absurd—and maddening—aspect of this risk is that it is unnecessary,” says Stewart, a teacher. “The locomotion for NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover, launched in 1996, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, both launched in 2003, was solar powered, with the latter two rovers performing well beyond what their engineers expected. Curiosity’s locomotion could also be solar-powered. NASA admits this in its EIS, but decided to put us all at risk because plutonium-powered batteries last longer and they want to have the ‘flexibility to select the most scientifically interesting location on the surface’ of Mars.”
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, which has been opposing NASA’s nuclear missions for two decades, says “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining its dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel. The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
Since the 1950s, NASA has used nuclear power in space—and there have been accidents. Of the 26 U.S. space missions listed in the EIS that have used plutonium, three underwent accidents, the EIS admits. The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth.
The late Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered.
But NASA insisted on using plutonium as a power source on space probes—claiming that solar energy cannot be utilized beyond the orbit of Mars. But this August it reversed itself with the launch of the solar-powered Juno space probe to Jupiter.
In its description of the Juno mission, NASA states that even when the probe gets to Jupiter, “nearly 500 million miles from the Sun,” its panels will be providing electricity.
The choice of solar power by NASA on Juno was less than voluntary, however. The Associated Press has described Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the Juno mission for the Southwest Research Institute, a NASA contractor, as maintaining “the choice of solar was a practical one…No plutonium-powered generators were available to him and his San Antonio-based team nearly a decade ago so they opted for solar panels rather than develop a new nuclear source.”
The plutonium-fueled Curiosity mission could herald an expanded NASA space nuclear power program—not just for space probes but involving nuclear-propelled rockets.
During the 1950s and 60s, NASA, working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, built such rockets under a program called NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and then Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. Billions in 1950s-1960s dollars were spent and ground-testing done, but no nuclear rocket ever got off the ground. There were concerns about a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch and crashing back to Earth.
Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, President Obama’s appointee to head NASA, is a big booster of nuclear-propulsion for rockets. He has been pushing a design developed by a fellow ex-astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, who has founded the Ad Astra Rocket Company.
With NASA turning over many space activities to private industry with the end of its shuttle program, another major private company involved is SpaceX. The website of the journal Nature reported last year that SpaceX wants the U.S. government to “return to developing nuclear-powered rockets pursued during the 1960s”—and specifically NERVA. “We have to do nuclear,” stated Tom Markusic, director of the company’s rocket development facility.
Meanwhile, not only have great advances been made in using solar energy as a power source in space—as demonstrated by the Juno space probe mission—but also in propelling spacecraft and quickly in the vacuum of space. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched what it termed a “space yacht” called Ikaros which gets propulsion from the pressure on its large sails of ionizing particles emitted by the Sun. The sails also feature “thin-film solar cells to generate electricity and creating,” said Yuichi Tsuda of the agency, “a hybrid technology of electricity and pressure."
The Curiosity rover and the Atlas V rocket on which it is to ride were positioned for launch last week at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A Florida Today website account—as has been typical in coverage by the mainstream media of NASA’s nuclear program—in reporting this omitted the words plutonium and nuclear and made no reference to the danger s acknowledged in the EIS of the nuclear aspect of the mission.
Plutonium has long been described as the most lethal radioactive substance. And the plutonium isotope used in the space nuclear program, and on the Curiosity rover, is far more radioactive than the type of plutonium used as fuel in nuclear weapons or built up as a waste product in nuclear power plants.
It is Plutonium-238 as distinct from Plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 has a far shorter half-life–87.8 years compared to Plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,500 years. An isotope’s half-life is the period in which half of its radioactivity is expended.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, explains that Plutonium-238 “is about 270 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239 per unit of weight.” Thus in radioactivity, the 10.6 pounds of Plutonium-238 that is to be used on Curiosity is the equivalent of 2,862 pounds of Plutonium-239. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki used 15 pounds of Plutonium-239.
The far shorter half-life of Plutonium-238 compared to Plutonium-239 results in it being extremely hot. This heat is translated in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator into electricity.
The pathway of greatest health concern for plutonium is breathing in a particle. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The EIS for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission speaks of particles that would be “transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
It also describes “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” including: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bans on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
Pax Christi is asking people to call, email or write NASA and, says Stewart, state “that until they can launch spacecraft without nuclear materials aboard, they should not launch at all.” Also, it is calling for people to contact the White House “and tell President Obama that Curiosity should stay safely on the ground until it can be launched without threatening us and future generations.”
A petition to the White House—“Cancel the Launch of the Mars Rover Curiosity by NASA Which is Powered by Dangerous Plutonium-238”—has also been put up on the Internet for people to sign. It is at: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/cancel-launch-mars-rover-curiosity-nasa-which-powered-dangerous-plutonium-238/8HzzWHk9
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Government-By-Anonymous-Officials
The U.S. press has become increasingly accepting of officials speaking anonymously.
Having officials identified only as a “a senior department official” or “veteran diplomat” or “high official” and the like is a way for top and lesser officials to say things without having to take any responsibility for what they say.
Not identified by name, they can exaggerate and make claims they’d be reticent to make if they were personally identified. Unnamed, they can also use media to float trial balloons.
And now U.S. officialdom apparently thinks the public can readily accept this, too.
I was surprised to see in recent days this system of having officials speak anonymously displayed for all to see in dispatches out of the U.S. State Department.
They were in the form of transcripts posted online of various “background” briefings including one last week about of all things considering this system of official anonymity—“open government.”
Online at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/09/172743.htm, it is titled “Background Briefing on a Preview of the Open Government Partnership.”
It involves a press conference on September 19 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York which opens with the “moderator”—not even the government PR person who ran the event is identified—stating: “Alright everybody. We are here to talk about tomorrow’s Open Government Partnership high-level meeting, which the President will participate in.
We have two senior Administration officials …The first is”—his or her name is omitted and, instead, in brackets in the transcript, is—“Senior Administration Official One.”
The “moderator” continues: “And the second is”—again the person’s name is omitted and the transcript says—“Senior Administration Official Two.”
“Okay, with that, Senior Official Number One, take it away,” says the “moderator.”
This isn’t an unusual occurrence. The system of official anonymity has taken deep hold. And with the U.S. government clearly not ashamed of it whatsoever, the government has loaded the Internet with examples of this opposite of responsibility and transparency.
Consider another State Department press conference last week, a “Special Briefing Via Teleconference” from Washington D.C. on September 21titled “Background Briefing of High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Safety”—http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/09/172930.htm
It starts with the unnamed “moderator” thanking “you callers for joining us today…We are delighted to have as our briefer today”—and then the identity of the official is omitted but in brackets are the words “Senior State Department Official.” And the “moderator” goes on, “Hereafter known as Senior State Department Official.”
It’s not as if the anonymous U.S. official is saying unimportant things. The “Senior State Department Official” speaks of the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex in Japan and how it shows that “nuclear accidents can transcend national borders and have international consequences. A nuclear accident anywhere affects all of us.” And then he or she goes on to declare that despite Fukushima, “the United States remains committed to nuclear power.”
Is it not important to know, by name, the official who made this declaration?
Years ago, in doing research for a book on U.S.activities in Central America—at a time when the U.S. was arming the “contras” to stage attacks in Nicaragua—I got a taste of this government-by-anonymous-officials. In the book (Nicaragua: America’s New Vietnam?) I wrote about going to a press conference at the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras at which a panel was being presented that included the embassy’s military, public affairs and political officers. Honduras was then being set up as a jumping off point for direct U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.
The press conference began with the embassy’s press attaché discussing with the assembled journalists the “ground rules” for the event—whether what the officers will say will be “attributed to U.S. officials, diplomatic sources, or U.S. official sources.” I and some other journalists there that day, not posted to Honduras, insisted that all comments be on the record.
As I explained in the book: “I am particularly insistent on this point having long felt that ‘off the record’ briefings by officials shield them from accountability and responsibility and compromise the principles of journalism. One senses that such an ‘on the record’ press conference is somewhat unusual here. Reporters stationed in Honduras are not pressing for it. Such reporters are often dependent on embassies or government officials for tips and news—or think they are.”
In the book, and in the account from reporters who were at the press conference that day, the comments of the officials were attributed—by name—to the officials making them.
This, I believe, is the way it should be—rather than public officials hiding behind the cloak of anonymity. The trend to official anonymity seems to, if anything, have grown. The press has increasingly been letting officialdom get away with this cowardly game, indeed developed a co-dependency with government in allowing it. And now, with the Internet, U.S. government agencies have no shame in sharing with the public a system that seriously compromises open and accountable government.
Having officials identified only as a “a senior department official” or “veteran diplomat” or “high official” and the like is a way for top and lesser officials to say things without having to take any responsibility for what they say.
Not identified by name, they can exaggerate and make claims they’d be reticent to make if they were personally identified. Unnamed, they can also use media to float trial balloons.
And now U.S. officialdom apparently thinks the public can readily accept this, too.
I was surprised to see in recent days this system of having officials speak anonymously displayed for all to see in dispatches out of the U.S. State Department.
They were in the form of transcripts posted online of various “background” briefings including one last week about of all things considering this system of official anonymity—“open government.”
Online at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/09/172743.htm, it is titled “Background Briefing on a Preview of the Open Government Partnership.”
It involves a press conference on September 19 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York which opens with the “moderator”—not even the government PR person who ran the event is identified—stating: “Alright everybody. We are here to talk about tomorrow’s Open Government Partnership high-level meeting, which the President will participate in.
We have two senior Administration officials …The first is”—his or her name is omitted and, instead, in brackets in the transcript, is—“Senior Administration Official One.”
The “moderator” continues: “And the second is”—again the person’s name is omitted and the transcript says—“Senior Administration Official Two.”
“Okay, with that, Senior Official Number One, take it away,” says the “moderator.”
This isn’t an unusual occurrence. The system of official anonymity has taken deep hold. And with the U.S. government clearly not ashamed of it whatsoever, the government has loaded the Internet with examples of this opposite of responsibility and transparency.
Consider another State Department press conference last week, a “Special Briefing Via Teleconference” from Washington D.C. on September 21titled “Background Briefing of High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Safety”—http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/09/172930.htm
It starts with the unnamed “moderator” thanking “you callers for joining us today…We are delighted to have as our briefer today”—and then the identity of the official is omitted but in brackets are the words “Senior State Department Official.” And the “moderator” goes on, “Hereafter known as Senior State Department Official.”
It’s not as if the anonymous U.S. official is saying unimportant things. The “Senior State Department Official” speaks of the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex in Japan and how it shows that “nuclear accidents can transcend national borders and have international consequences. A nuclear accident anywhere affects all of us.” And then he or she goes on to declare that despite Fukushima, “the United States remains committed to nuclear power.”
Is it not important to know, by name, the official who made this declaration?
Years ago, in doing research for a book on U.S.activities in Central America—at a time when the U.S. was arming the “contras” to stage attacks in Nicaragua—I got a taste of this government-by-anonymous-officials. In the book (Nicaragua: America’s New Vietnam?) I wrote about going to a press conference at the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras at which a panel was being presented that included the embassy’s military, public affairs and political officers. Honduras was then being set up as a jumping off point for direct U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.
The press conference began with the embassy’s press attaché discussing with the assembled journalists the “ground rules” for the event—whether what the officers will say will be “attributed to U.S. officials, diplomatic sources, or U.S. official sources.” I and some other journalists there that day, not posted to Honduras, insisted that all comments be on the record.
As I explained in the book: “I am particularly insistent on this point having long felt that ‘off the record’ briefings by officials shield them from accountability and responsibility and compromise the principles of journalism. One senses that such an ‘on the record’ press conference is somewhat unusual here. Reporters stationed in Honduras are not pressing for it. Such reporters are often dependent on embassies or government officials for tips and news—or think they are.”
In the book, and in the account from reporters who were at the press conference that day, the comments of the officials were attributed—by name—to the officials making them.
This, I believe, is the way it should be—rather than public officials hiding behind the cloak of anonymity. The trend to official anonymity seems to, if anything, have grown. The press has increasingly been letting officialdom get away with this cowardly game, indeed developed a co-dependency with government in allowing it. And now, with the Internet, U.S. government agencies have no shame in sharing with the public a system that seriously compromises open and accountable government.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Siemens' Significant Decision -- Abandoning Nuclear Power
The just-announced decision by Siemens, a major player in the nuclear industry, to withdraw entirely from nuclear power is a significant declaration by a corporation about nuclear power and the world’s potential energy future.
“The chapter is closed for us,” Peter Loescher, chief executive of the Germany-based engineering group, said Sunday. “We are no longer going to participate in taking responsibility for building nuclear power stations or financing them.”
The Siemens decision follows that of the German government to, with the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant complex, abandon nuclear power—to close the nation’s 17 nuclear plants, all of which were built by Siemens—and pursue instead safe, clean, renewable energy led by solar, wind and geothermal.
It comes after Loescher saying, when a deal was struck in 2009 for a joint venture with Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear company, that Siemens would become a “market leader in nuclear energy” challenging General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva.
It follows Wall Street’s now long-standing reluctance to finance the construction of new nuclear power plants. Thus, the financial basis for President Barack Obama’s push for new nuclear power plants in the U.S. is billions of dollars in taxpayer-supported loan guarantees.
The U.S. government is also using the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally-owned entity created during the New Deal, to be a leader in building new nuclear plants.
Although many people blame industry for the development of nuclear power, ever since it began in the 1950s, much of industry hasn’t wanted to get involved. Governments, then and now, have been in the forefront of nuclear power.
Now, with Germany moving in the other direction, Siemens has followed.
The national nuclear laboratories set up in the U.S. during the Manhattan Project of World War II to embark on a crash program to build atomic bombs were key to nuclear power development in the U.S. With the war over, the laboratories constructed more nuclear weapons—thousands of them—and looked for other things nuclear to do. A huge vested interest employing thousands of people was created during the Manhattan Project and was seeking to perpetuate itself.
The Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) after the war, and its first chairman, David Lilienthal, later would complain in a book, Change, Hope, and the Bomb, about the "elaborate and even luxurious [national] laboratories that have grown up at Oak Ridge, Argonne, Brookhaven" and the push at them for nuclear devices for "blowing out harbors, making explosions underground to produce steam” and other uses of atomic energy.
Lilienthal, who left the AEC in 1950,in his 1963 book criticized "how far scientists and administrators will go to try to establish a nonmilitary use" for nuclear technology. He was very wary about nuclear power for safety reasons and the nuclear waste dilemma.
In 1957, the first nuclear power plant in the U.S. opened—built by the federal government. The AEC and the Navy’s Division of Naval Reactors partnered in the construction of the Shippingport nuclear plant near Pittsburgh.
As it opened, Lewis Strauss, then AEC chairman, warned the utility industry that if it didn’t built nuclear plants, the government would. That was the stick. The carrot was the passage in 1957 of the Price-Anderson Act. It was supposed to be something temporary to limit liability in the event of a nuclear plant disaster—a limit of $560million in liability with the government paying the first $500 million. Price-Anderson remains law in the U.S. 54 years later with the liability limit now at $12 billion. Beyond that, people cannot collect for death, injury and property damage caused by a nuclear plant accident. The Chernobyl and now Fukushima catastrophes have demonstrated the losses could be in the hundreds of billions.
Having the Price-Anderson Act stay in place has been critical for government to get industry to stick with nuclear power.
GE and Westinghouse got involved with nuclear technology as contractors for the Manhattan Project. They became the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power worldwide with 80 percent of nuclear power plants globally of GE or Westinghouse design or manufacture.
In 2006, GE partnered in its nuclear division with the Japanese corporation Hitachi and Westinghouse sold its nuclear division to Toshiba. Both companies have since been closely tied to the Japanese government—an additional reason why it has sought to underplay the impacts of the Fukushima accident, which involved six GE plants.
As to the other main actors in the nuclear field, Areva is largely financed by the French government. Siemens has been a partner in an Areva subsidiary seeking to build an “advanced generation” nuclear plant, a collaboration that will now seemingly be over.
Then there is Rosatom which grew out of the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Nuclear Engineering and Industry. In the Soviet Union, and now Russia, government has totally dominated atomic energy development.
What did it take for Germany to abandon nuclear power—and followed now by Siemens?
Democracy.
Germany’s decision was announced by Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a physicist, after historic post-Fukushima election losses for her party and large wins by the anti-nuclear Greens.
Nuclear power—a product of Big Government followed by Big Business.
What can end it and lead to safe, clean, renewable energy? The will of the people—democracy—in action.
“The chapter is closed for us,” Peter Loescher, chief executive of the Germany-based engineering group, said Sunday. “We are no longer going to participate in taking responsibility for building nuclear power stations or financing them.”
The Siemens decision follows that of the German government to, with the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant complex, abandon nuclear power—to close the nation’s 17 nuclear plants, all of which were built by Siemens—and pursue instead safe, clean, renewable energy led by solar, wind and geothermal.
It comes after Loescher saying, when a deal was struck in 2009 for a joint venture with Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear company, that Siemens would become a “market leader in nuclear energy” challenging General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva.
It follows Wall Street’s now long-standing reluctance to finance the construction of new nuclear power plants. Thus, the financial basis for President Barack Obama’s push for new nuclear power plants in the U.S. is billions of dollars in taxpayer-supported loan guarantees.
The U.S. government is also using the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally-owned entity created during the New Deal, to be a leader in building new nuclear plants.
Although many people blame industry for the development of nuclear power, ever since it began in the 1950s, much of industry hasn’t wanted to get involved. Governments, then and now, have been in the forefront of nuclear power.
Now, with Germany moving in the other direction, Siemens has followed.
The national nuclear laboratories set up in the U.S. during the Manhattan Project of World War II to embark on a crash program to build atomic bombs were key to nuclear power development in the U.S. With the war over, the laboratories constructed more nuclear weapons—thousands of them—and looked for other things nuclear to do. A huge vested interest employing thousands of people was created during the Manhattan Project and was seeking to perpetuate itself.
The Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) after the war, and its first chairman, David Lilienthal, later would complain in a book, Change, Hope, and the Bomb, about the "elaborate and even luxurious [national] laboratories that have grown up at Oak Ridge, Argonne, Brookhaven" and the push at them for nuclear devices for "blowing out harbors, making explosions underground to produce steam” and other uses of atomic energy.
Lilienthal, who left the AEC in 1950,in his 1963 book criticized "how far scientists and administrators will go to try to establish a nonmilitary use" for nuclear technology. He was very wary about nuclear power for safety reasons and the nuclear waste dilemma.
In 1957, the first nuclear power plant in the U.S. opened—built by the federal government. The AEC and the Navy’s Division of Naval Reactors partnered in the construction of the Shippingport nuclear plant near Pittsburgh.
As it opened, Lewis Strauss, then AEC chairman, warned the utility industry that if it didn’t built nuclear plants, the government would. That was the stick. The carrot was the passage in 1957 of the Price-Anderson Act. It was supposed to be something temporary to limit liability in the event of a nuclear plant disaster—a limit of $560million in liability with the government paying the first $500 million. Price-Anderson remains law in the U.S. 54 years later with the liability limit now at $12 billion. Beyond that, people cannot collect for death, injury and property damage caused by a nuclear plant accident. The Chernobyl and now Fukushima catastrophes have demonstrated the losses could be in the hundreds of billions.
Having the Price-Anderson Act stay in place has been critical for government to get industry to stick with nuclear power.
GE and Westinghouse got involved with nuclear technology as contractors for the Manhattan Project. They became the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power worldwide with 80 percent of nuclear power plants globally of GE or Westinghouse design or manufacture.
In 2006, GE partnered in its nuclear division with the Japanese corporation Hitachi and Westinghouse sold its nuclear division to Toshiba. Both companies have since been closely tied to the Japanese government—an additional reason why it has sought to underplay the impacts of the Fukushima accident, which involved six GE plants.
As to the other main actors in the nuclear field, Areva is largely financed by the French government. Siemens has been a partner in an Areva subsidiary seeking to build an “advanced generation” nuclear plant, a collaboration that will now seemingly be over.
Then there is Rosatom which grew out of the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Nuclear Engineering and Industry. In the Soviet Union, and now Russia, government has totally dominated atomic energy development.
What did it take for Germany to abandon nuclear power—and followed now by Siemens?
Democracy.
Germany’s decision was announced by Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a physicist, after historic post-Fukushima election losses for her party and large wins by the anti-nuclear Greens.
Nuclear power—a product of Big Government followed by Big Business.
What can end it and lead to safe, clean, renewable energy? The will of the people—democracy—in action.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
And Now..."Radiation is Good for You." But DOE Cancels Pitch.
Among the nuttiest theories about radiation is that it is good for you. Yes, radiation is good for you—it exercises the immune system.
That’s what some nuclear scientists claim. They call it the “hormesis radiation” theory. These scientists don’t just want to minimize or even flatly deny the deadly impacts of radioactivity—they want people to think it’s healthy.
An advocate of the “hormesis radiation” theory was scheduled to peddle the theory today before the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.
The DOE’s Savannah River Site is a radioactive mess—310 square miles in South Carolina—that includes the Savannah River National Laboratory and five now closed nuclear reactors. It’s been used through the years to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons, plutonium to power NASA space probes, and now seeks to make plutonium-based MOX fuel for nuclear power plants, and do other things nuclear. It is in an area of South Carolina which has a large minority population. It’s been designated a high-pollution Superfund site.
But Dr. Clinton R. Wolfe, executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, wasn’t planning to simply comfort the 25-person advisory board with the “hormesis radiation” theory as regarding the radioactive muddle where they reside.
The topic of his talk was; “A Perspective on Radiation Exposure and the Fukushima Disaster.” People in South Carolina—indeed around the world—have become more aware of and concerned about radioactivity because of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex disaster.
Wolfe, like many in his group, is a product of the system of DOE national nuclear laboratories. He was at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed, specializing in work with plutonium, then worked for Westinghouse, a nuclear industry giant where he led research on nuclear power plant corrosion issues, according to his biography on his group's website, and ended up at the Savannah River National Laboratory. After being deeply involved in nuclear technology—both its military and civilian sides—he took his position at Citizens for Nuclear Technology which, its website says, is committed “to being a credible, consistent voice on behalf of beneficial nuclear technologies and the Savannah River Site.” He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry.
Wolfe telegraphed what he intended to talk about today in an op-ed piece in The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper.
Wolfe began by explaining, “’Hormesis,’ a Greek word meaning ‘impel, urge on,’ refers to the phenomenon by which gradually adding a toxic substance to an organism produces an initial beneficial effect….The concept of small doses of radiation having beneficial effects on living organisms fits this model.” He said there “are considerable data on laboratory animals and selected populations of humans from epidemiological studies that show beneficial effects of low levels of radiation. “
He continued that “even if you don’t believe that some low levels of radiation are good for you, perhaps we can stop the hysteria about low levels causing harm. Based on what we know to date, there’s no reason to think that even the most highly irradiated workers at Fukushima will suffer harmful health effects.”
A grouping of safe-energy and environmental organizations took issue with Wolfe’s plan to pitch “hormesis radiation” to the Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.
They wrote a letter to the Department of Energy complaining that there would be “no accurate, science-based counterbalancing presentation that radiation at all doses can be harmful,” the agency’s “allowance for the presentation of a pseudo-scientific presentation to be irresponsible and believe that such a presentation may well give the false impression that hormesis is being endorsed by DOE. “
The letter discussed international and U.S. scientific bodies and reports that have concluded that there is “no threshold” for radiation exposure—that any amount can harm a person—and noted that the DOE itself “also affirms challenges to the hormesis theory.”
“Given that the hormesis theory does not comport with DOE policy and that a presentation about it is scheduled without equal time being given to an explanation of the linear no-threshold radiation dose model accepted by the scientific community, we request that you take steps to make sure that a presentation on the rejected hormesis theory does not remain on the Citizen Advisory Board’s agenda at its upcoming meeting.”
The letter also noted that Wolfe “does not appear to have requisite credentials in the medical or health physics fields.”
It was signed by: Tom Clements of Friends of the Earth, Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Susan Corbett of the South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, Glenn Carroll of Nuclear Watch South, Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Bobbie Paul of Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions, David Kyle of the Center for a Sustainable Coast, Brett Bursey of the South Carolina Progressive Network and Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.
The DOE then cancelled Wolfe’s talk.
"The public interest groups interested in the truth stopped the talk from going forward," comments Clements of Friends of the Earth.
Wolfe is not the only nuclear scientist pushing the hormesis radiation-is-good-for-you-theory. A leader in promoting it has been Dr. T. D.. Luckey, the author of Hormesis and Ionizing Radiation and Radiation Hormesis. He contends: “We need more, not less, exposure to ionizing radiation. The evidence that ionizing radiation is an essential agent has been reviewed…There is proven benefit.”
Luckey, whose Ph.D. is in biochemistry/nutrition, also states: “The trillions of dollars estimated for worldwide nuclear waste management can be reduced to billions to provide safe, low-dose irradiation to improve our health. The direction is obvious; the first step remains to be taken.”
Luckey did some of his research as a visiting scientist at another national nuclear laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory.
A medical expert on the impacts of radiation, Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, where he is a professor of epidemiology, comments that “Luckey and the others advocating hormesis are without foundation.”
Wing’s Ph.D. is in epidemiology, defined as the branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution and control of diseases in populations.
He declares that the push for “radiation hormesis” is “related to the conflicts of interest” involving these individuals connected to “universities, government agencies, industry and government laboratories that profit from nuclear weapons and the nuclear power industry.”
That’s what some nuclear scientists claim. They call it the “hormesis radiation” theory. These scientists don’t just want to minimize or even flatly deny the deadly impacts of radioactivity—they want people to think it’s healthy.
An advocate of the “hormesis radiation” theory was scheduled to peddle the theory today before the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.
The DOE’s Savannah River Site is a radioactive mess—310 square miles in South Carolina—that includes the Savannah River National Laboratory and five now closed nuclear reactors. It’s been used through the years to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons, plutonium to power NASA space probes, and now seeks to make plutonium-based MOX fuel for nuclear power plants, and do other things nuclear. It is in an area of South Carolina which has a large minority population. It’s been designated a high-pollution Superfund site.
But Dr. Clinton R. Wolfe, executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, wasn’t planning to simply comfort the 25-person advisory board with the “hormesis radiation” theory as regarding the radioactive muddle where they reside.
The topic of his talk was; “A Perspective on Radiation Exposure and the Fukushima Disaster.” People in South Carolina—indeed around the world—have become more aware of and concerned about radioactivity because of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex disaster.
Wolfe, like many in his group, is a product of the system of DOE national nuclear laboratories. He was at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed, specializing in work with plutonium, then worked for Westinghouse, a nuclear industry giant where he led research on nuclear power plant corrosion issues, according to his biography on his group's website, and ended up at the Savannah River National Laboratory. After being deeply involved in nuclear technology—both its military and civilian sides—he took his position at Citizens for Nuclear Technology which, its website says, is committed “to being a credible, consistent voice on behalf of beneficial nuclear technologies and the Savannah River Site.” He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry.
Wolfe telegraphed what he intended to talk about today in an op-ed piece in The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper.
Wolfe began by explaining, “’Hormesis,’ a Greek word meaning ‘impel, urge on,’ refers to the phenomenon by which gradually adding a toxic substance to an organism produces an initial beneficial effect….The concept of small doses of radiation having beneficial effects on living organisms fits this model.” He said there “are considerable data on laboratory animals and selected populations of humans from epidemiological studies that show beneficial effects of low levels of radiation. “
He continued that “even if you don’t believe that some low levels of radiation are good for you, perhaps we can stop the hysteria about low levels causing harm. Based on what we know to date, there’s no reason to think that even the most highly irradiated workers at Fukushima will suffer harmful health effects.”
A grouping of safe-energy and environmental organizations took issue with Wolfe’s plan to pitch “hormesis radiation” to the Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.
They wrote a letter to the Department of Energy complaining that there would be “no accurate, science-based counterbalancing presentation that radiation at all doses can be harmful,” the agency’s “allowance for the presentation of a pseudo-scientific presentation to be irresponsible and believe that such a presentation may well give the false impression that hormesis is being endorsed by DOE. “
The letter discussed international and U.S. scientific bodies and reports that have concluded that there is “no threshold” for radiation exposure—that any amount can harm a person—and noted that the DOE itself “also affirms challenges to the hormesis theory.”
“Given that the hormesis theory does not comport with DOE policy and that a presentation about it is scheduled without equal time being given to an explanation of the linear no-threshold radiation dose model accepted by the scientific community, we request that you take steps to make sure that a presentation on the rejected hormesis theory does not remain on the Citizen Advisory Board’s agenda at its upcoming meeting.”
The letter also noted that Wolfe “does not appear to have requisite credentials in the medical or health physics fields.”
It was signed by: Tom Clements of Friends of the Earth, Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Susan Corbett of the South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, Glenn Carroll of Nuclear Watch South, Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Bobbie Paul of Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions, David Kyle of the Center for a Sustainable Coast, Brett Bursey of the South Carolina Progressive Network and Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.
The DOE then cancelled Wolfe’s talk.
"The public interest groups interested in the truth stopped the talk from going forward," comments Clements of Friends of the Earth.
Wolfe is not the only nuclear scientist pushing the hormesis radiation-is-good-for-you-theory. A leader in promoting it has been Dr. T. D.. Luckey, the author of Hormesis and Ionizing Radiation and Radiation Hormesis. He contends: “We need more, not less, exposure to ionizing radiation. The evidence that ionizing radiation is an essential agent has been reviewed…There is proven benefit.”
Luckey, whose Ph.D. is in biochemistry/nutrition, also states: “The trillions of dollars estimated for worldwide nuclear waste management can be reduced to billions to provide safe, low-dose irradiation to improve our health. The direction is obvious; the first step remains to be taken.”
Luckey did some of his research as a visiting scientist at another national nuclear laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory.
A medical expert on the impacts of radiation, Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, where he is a professor of epidemiology, comments that “Luckey and the others advocating hormesis are without foundation.”
Wing’s Ph.D. is in epidemiology, defined as the branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution and control of diseases in populations.
He declares that the push for “radiation hormesis” is “related to the conflicts of interest” involving these individuals connected to “universities, government agencies, industry and government laboratories that profit from nuclear weapons and the nuclear power industry.”
Friday, July 22, 2011
NASA and Nukes: A Recipe for Disaster
What is NASA’s future now that Atlantis has landed and the shuttle program is over? If NASA persists in using nuclear power in space, the agency’s future is threatened.
Between November 25 and December 15 NASA plans to launch for use on Mars a rover fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium, more plutonium than ever used on a rover.
The mission has a huge cost: $2.5 billion.
But if there is an accident before the rover is well on its way to Mars, and plutonium is released on Earth, its cost stands to be yet more gargantuan.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for what it calls its Mars Science Laboratory Mission says that if plutonium is released on Earth, the cost could be as high as $1.5 billion to decontaminate each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas” impacted.
What‘s the probability of an accident releasing plutonium? The NASA document says “the probability of an accident with a release of plutonium” is 1-in-220“overall.”
If you knew your chance of not surviving an airplane flight—or just a drive in a car—was 1 in 220, would you take that trip?
And is this enormous risk necessary?
In two weeks, there’ll be a NASA mission demonstrating a clear alternative to atomic energy in space: solar power.
On August 5, NASA plans to launch a solar-powered space probe it’s named Juno to Jupiter. There’s no atomic energy involved, although NASA for decades has insisted that nuclear power is necessary for space devices beyond the orbit of Mars. With Juno, NASA will be showing it had that wrong.
“Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system,” says NASA on its website. “In 2016, the spinning, solar-powered Juno spacecraft will reach Jupiter.” It will be equipped with “instruments that can sense the hidden world beneath Jupiter’s colorful clouds” and make 33 passes of Jupiter.
As notes Aviation Week and Space Technology: “The unique spacecraft will set a record by running on solar power rather than nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generators previously used to operate spacecraft that far from the Sun.”
The Mars rover to be launched, named Curiosity by NASA, will be equipped with these radioisotope thermoelectric generators using plutonium, the deadliest radioactive substance.
Juno, a large craft—66-feet wide—will be powered by solar panels built by a Boeing subsidiary, Spectrolab. The panels can convert 28 percent of the sunlight that them to electricity. They’ll also produce heat to keep Juno’s instruments warm. This mission’s cost is $1.1 billion.
In fact, Juno is not a wholly unique spacecraft. In 2004, the European Space Agency launched a space probe called Rosetta that is also solar-powered. Its mission is to orbit and land on a comet—beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
Moreover, there have been major developments in “solar sails” to propel spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched its Ikaros spacecraft with solar sails taking it to Venus. In January, NASA itself launched its NanoSail-D spacecraft. The Planetary Society has been developing several spacecraft that will take advantage of photons emitted by the Sun to travel through the vacuum of space.
At no point will Juno (or the other solar spacecrafts) be a threat to life on Earth. This includes Juno posing no danger when in 2013 it makes a flyby of Earth. Such flybys making use of Earth’s gravity to increase a spacecraft’s velocity have constituted dangerous maneuvers when in recent years they’ve involved plutonium-powered space probes such as NASA’s Galileo and Cassini probes.
Curiosity is a return to nuclear danger.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement admits that a large swath of Earth could be impacted by plutonium in an accident involving it. The document’s section on “Impacts of Radiological Releases” says “the affected environment” could include “the regional area near the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the global area.”
“Launch area accidents would initially release material into the regional area, defined…to be within …62 miles of the launch pad,” says the document. This is an area from Cape Canaveral west to Orlando.
But “since some of the accidents result in the release of very fine particles less than a micron in diameter, a portion of such releases could be transported beyond…62 miles,” it goes on. These particles could become “well-mixed in the troposphere”—the atmosphere five to nine miles high—“and have been assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Mideast, then India and China Hawaii and other Pacific islands, and Mexico and southern Texas.
Then, as the rocket carrying Curiosity up gains altitude, the impacts of an accident in which plutonium is released would be even broader. The plutonium could affect people “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the NASA document. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth including much of South America, Africa and Australia.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has long emphasized that a pound of plutonium if uniformly distributed could hypothetically give a fatal dose of lung cancer to every person on Earth. A pound, even 10.6 pounds, could never be that uniformly distributed, of course. But an accident in which plutonium is released by a space device as tiny particles falling to Earth maximizes its lethality. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The pathway of greatest concern is the breathing in plutonium particle.
As the NASA Environmental Impact Statement puts it: “Particles smaller than about 5 microns would be transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The plutonium particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
“A small fraction would be transported over time directly to the blood or to lymph nodes and then to the blood,” it continues. Once plutonium “has entered the blood via ingestion or inhalation, it would circulate and be deposited primarily in the liver and skeletal system.” Also, says the document, some of the plutonium would migrate to the testes or ovaries.
The cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium could be, according to the NASA statement, $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
The NASA document lists “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” as: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bands on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
As to why the use of a plutonium-powered rover on Mars—considering that NASA has successfully used solar-powered rovers on Mars—the NASA Environmental Impact Statement says that a “solar-powered rover…would not be capable of operating over the full range of scientifically desirable landing site latitudes” on this mission.
There’s more to it. For many decades there has been a marriage of nuclear power and space at NASA. The use of nuclear power on space missions has been heavily promoted by the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the many DOE (previously AEC) national laboratories including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. This provides work for these government entities. Also, the manufacturers of nuclear-powered space devices—General Electric was a pioneer in this—have pushed their products. Further, NAS has sought to coordinate its activities with the U.S. military. The military for decades has planned for the deployment of nuclear-powered weapons in space.
Personifying the NASA-military connection now is NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former NASA astronaut and Marine Corps major general. Appointed by President Barack Obama, he is a booster of radioisotope thermoelectric generators as well as rockets using nuclear power for propulsion. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars through the years on such rockets but none have ever taken off and the programs have all ended up cancelled largely out of concern about a nuclear-powered rocket blowing up on launch or falling back to Earth.
Accidents have happened in the U.S. space nuclear program. Of the 26 space missions that have used plutonium which are listed in the NASA Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, three underwent accident, admits the document.
The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth and Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites—and the International Space Station—are solar-powered.
There was a near-miss involving a nuclear disaster and a space shuttle. The ill-fated Challenger’s next mission in 1986 was to loft a plutonium-powered space probe.
The NASA Environmental Impact Statement includes comments from people and organizations some highly critical of a plutonium-powered Mars Science Laboratory Mission.
Leah Karpen of Asheville, North Carolina says: “Every expansion of plutonium research, development and transportation of this deadly material increases the risk of nuclear accident or theft. In addition, plutonium production is expensive and diverts resources from the more important social needs of our society today, and in the future.” She urges NASA “to reconsider the use of nuclear” and go with solar instead.
Jeremy Maxand, executive director of the Idaho-based Snake River Alliance, calls on NASA and the Department of Energy to “take this opportunity to move space exploration in a sustainable direction with regard to power. Using solar rather than nuclear to power the Mars Science Laboratory Mission would keep the U.S. safe, advance energy technologies that are cleaner and more secure, be more fiscally responsible, and set a responsible example to other countries as they make decisions about their energy future.”
Russell Ace Hoffman of Carlsbad, California speaks of “today’s nuclear NASA” and a “closed society of dangerous, closed-minded ‘scientists’ who are hoodwinking the American public and who are guilty of premeditated random murder.” He adds: “The media has a duty to learn the truth rather than parrot NASA’s blanketly-false assertions.”
NASA, in response to the criticisms, repeatedly states in the document: “NASA and the DOE take very seriously the possibility that an action they take could potentially result in harm to humans or the environment. Therefore, both agencies maintain vigorous processes to reduce the potential for such events.”
Involved in challenging the mission is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org). Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Maine-based organization, says that “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining their dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel.”
Says Gagnon: “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the life of all the people on the planet…Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
With the return of Atlantis and end of the shuttle program, there are concerns about this being the “end” of the U.S. space program.
An accident if NASA continues to insist on mixing atomic energy and space—a nuclear disaster overhead—that, indeed, could end the space program..
Between November 25 and December 15 NASA plans to launch for use on Mars a rover fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium, more plutonium than ever used on a rover.
The mission has a huge cost: $2.5 billion.
But if there is an accident before the rover is well on its way to Mars, and plutonium is released on Earth, its cost stands to be yet more gargantuan.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for what it calls its Mars Science Laboratory Mission says that if plutonium is released on Earth, the cost could be as high as $1.5 billion to decontaminate each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas” impacted.
What‘s the probability of an accident releasing plutonium? The NASA document says “the probability of an accident with a release of plutonium” is 1-in-220“overall.”
If you knew your chance of not surviving an airplane flight—or just a drive in a car—was 1 in 220, would you take that trip?
And is this enormous risk necessary?
In two weeks, there’ll be a NASA mission demonstrating a clear alternative to atomic energy in space: solar power.
On August 5, NASA plans to launch a solar-powered space probe it’s named Juno to Jupiter. There’s no atomic energy involved, although NASA for decades has insisted that nuclear power is necessary for space devices beyond the orbit of Mars. With Juno, NASA will be showing it had that wrong.
“Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system,” says NASA on its website. “In 2016, the spinning, solar-powered Juno spacecraft will reach Jupiter.” It will be equipped with “instruments that can sense the hidden world beneath Jupiter’s colorful clouds” and make 33 passes of Jupiter.
As notes Aviation Week and Space Technology: “The unique spacecraft will set a record by running on solar power rather than nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generators previously used to operate spacecraft that far from the Sun.”
The Mars rover to be launched, named Curiosity by NASA, will be equipped with these radioisotope thermoelectric generators using plutonium, the deadliest radioactive substance.
Juno, a large craft—66-feet wide—will be powered by solar panels built by a Boeing subsidiary, Spectrolab. The panels can convert 28 percent of the sunlight that them to electricity. They’ll also produce heat to keep Juno’s instruments warm. This mission’s cost is $1.1 billion.
In fact, Juno is not a wholly unique spacecraft. In 2004, the European Space Agency launched a space probe called Rosetta that is also solar-powered. Its mission is to orbit and land on a comet—beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
Moreover, there have been major developments in “solar sails” to propel spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched its Ikaros spacecraft with solar sails taking it to Venus. In January, NASA itself launched its NanoSail-D spacecraft. The Planetary Society has been developing several spacecraft that will take advantage of photons emitted by the Sun to travel through the vacuum of space.
At no point will Juno (or the other solar spacecrafts) be a threat to life on Earth. This includes Juno posing no danger when in 2013 it makes a flyby of Earth. Such flybys making use of Earth’s gravity to increase a spacecraft’s velocity have constituted dangerous maneuvers when in recent years they’ve involved plutonium-powered space probes such as NASA’s Galileo and Cassini probes.
Curiosity is a return to nuclear danger.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement admits that a large swath of Earth could be impacted by plutonium in an accident involving it. The document’s section on “Impacts of Radiological Releases” says “the affected environment” could include “the regional area near the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the global area.”
“Launch area accidents would initially release material into the regional area, defined…to be within …62 miles of the launch pad,” says the document. This is an area from Cape Canaveral west to Orlando.
But “since some of the accidents result in the release of very fine particles less than a micron in diameter, a portion of such releases could be transported beyond…62 miles,” it goes on. These particles could become “well-mixed in the troposphere”—the atmosphere five to nine miles high—“and have been assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Mideast, then India and China Hawaii and other Pacific islands, and Mexico and southern Texas.
Then, as the rocket carrying Curiosity up gains altitude, the impacts of an accident in which plutonium is released would be even broader. The plutonium could affect people “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the NASA document. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth including much of South America, Africa and Australia.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has long emphasized that a pound of plutonium if uniformly distributed could hypothetically give a fatal dose of lung cancer to every person on Earth. A pound, even 10.6 pounds, could never be that uniformly distributed, of course. But an accident in which plutonium is released by a space device as tiny particles falling to Earth maximizes its lethality. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The pathway of greatest concern is the breathing in plutonium particle.
As the NASA Environmental Impact Statement puts it: “Particles smaller than about 5 microns would be transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The plutonium particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
“A small fraction would be transported over time directly to the blood or to lymph nodes and then to the blood,” it continues. Once plutonium “has entered the blood via ingestion or inhalation, it would circulate and be deposited primarily in the liver and skeletal system.” Also, says the document, some of the plutonium would migrate to the testes or ovaries.
The cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium could be, according to the NASA statement, $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
The NASA document lists “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” as: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bands on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
As to why the use of a plutonium-powered rover on Mars—considering that NASA has successfully used solar-powered rovers on Mars—the NASA Environmental Impact Statement says that a “solar-powered rover…would not be capable of operating over the full range of scientifically desirable landing site latitudes” on this mission.
There’s more to it. For many decades there has been a marriage of nuclear power and space at NASA. The use of nuclear power on space missions has been heavily promoted by the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the many DOE (previously AEC) national laboratories including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. This provides work for these government entities. Also, the manufacturers of nuclear-powered space devices—General Electric was a pioneer in this—have pushed their products. Further, NAS has sought to coordinate its activities with the U.S. military. The military for decades has planned for the deployment of nuclear-powered weapons in space.
Personifying the NASA-military connection now is NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former NASA astronaut and Marine Corps major general. Appointed by President Barack Obama, he is a booster of radioisotope thermoelectric generators as well as rockets using nuclear power for propulsion. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars through the years on such rockets but none have ever taken off and the programs have all ended up cancelled largely out of concern about a nuclear-powered rocket blowing up on launch or falling back to Earth.
Accidents have happened in the U.S. space nuclear program. Of the 26 space missions that have used plutonium which are listed in the NASA Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, three underwent accident, admits the document.
The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth and Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites—and the International Space Station—are solar-powered.
There was a near-miss involving a nuclear disaster and a space shuttle. The ill-fated Challenger’s next mission in 1986 was to loft a plutonium-powered space probe.
The NASA Environmental Impact Statement includes comments from people and organizations some highly critical of a plutonium-powered Mars Science Laboratory Mission.
Leah Karpen of Asheville, North Carolina says: “Every expansion of plutonium research, development and transportation of this deadly material increases the risk of nuclear accident or theft. In addition, plutonium production is expensive and diverts resources from the more important social needs of our society today, and in the future.” She urges NASA “to reconsider the use of nuclear” and go with solar instead.
Jeremy Maxand, executive director of the Idaho-based Snake River Alliance, calls on NASA and the Department of Energy to “take this opportunity to move space exploration in a sustainable direction with regard to power. Using solar rather than nuclear to power the Mars Science Laboratory Mission would keep the U.S. safe, advance energy technologies that are cleaner and more secure, be more fiscally responsible, and set a responsible example to other countries as they make decisions about their energy future.”
Russell Ace Hoffman of Carlsbad, California speaks of “today’s nuclear NASA” and a “closed society of dangerous, closed-minded ‘scientists’ who are hoodwinking the American public and who are guilty of premeditated random murder.” He adds: “The media has a duty to learn the truth rather than parrot NASA’s blanketly-false assertions.”
NASA, in response to the criticisms, repeatedly states in the document: “NASA and the DOE take very seriously the possibility that an action they take could potentially result in harm to humans or the environment. Therefore, both agencies maintain vigorous processes to reduce the potential for such events.”
Involved in challenging the mission is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org). Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Maine-based organization, says that “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining their dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel.”
Says Gagnon: “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the life of all the people on the planet…Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
With the return of Atlantis and end of the shuttle program, there are concerns about this being the “end” of the U.S. space program.
An accident if NASA continues to insist on mixing atomic energy and space—a nuclear disaster overhead—that, indeed, could end the space program..
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Atomic Energy: Unsafe in the Real World
Nuclear power requires “perfection” and “no acts of God,” we were warned years ago. This has been brought home by the ongoing disaster caused by the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Fukushimi Daiichi nuclear plant complex, the flooding along the Missouri River in Nebraska now threatening two nuclear plants, and the wildfire laying siege to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of atomic energy.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire—these and other disasters will inevitably occur. Add nuclear power with its potential to release massive amounts of deadly radioactive poisons when impacted by such a disaster, and it is clear that atomic energy is incompatible with the real world.
There’s no perfection in human beings or in technology. Accidents will happen. And there will always be natural disasters—we can’t eliminate them. But we can—and must—eliminate atomic energy.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Hannes Alfven explained in 1972 in declaring his strong opposition to nuclear power: “Fission energy is safe only if a number of critical devices work as they should, if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions, if there is no sabotage, no hijacking of the transports, if no reactor processing plant or reprocessing plant or repository anywhere in the world is situated in a region of riots or guerilla activity, and no revolution or war—even a ‘conventional one’—takes place in those regions. The enormous quantities of extremely dangerous material must not get into the hands of ignorant people or desperados. No acts of God can be permitted.” Dr. Alfven was writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
“Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology. It allows no room for error,” wrote Carl J. Hocevar of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1975. Hocevar had earlier been an engineer working on reactor safety at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. “Perfection must be achieved if accidents that affect the general public are to be prevented,” he wrote in his foreword to the book We Almost Lost Detroit. The book is about the partial meltdown at the Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in 1966 that threatened nearby Detroit, one of numerous near-misses and many other accidents involving nuclear power in addition to the disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and now Fukushima.
In We Almost Lost Detroit, Hocevar described the blind faith of scientists in atomic energy and their wrong assumptions. “The scientists involved were most confident that they had covered all possible problem areas. They had built safeguards on top of safeguards. Yet in spite of the precautions in the design and construction of the Fermi reactor, and in spite of the reassurances by the scientists that a serious accident could not happen, one did occur. The results far exceeded the expectations of anyone involved with the project. Fortunately, at the time of the accident, the reactor was operating at a very low power level or the consequences could have been much worse.”
“The Fermi accident and others described in this book demonstrate the fact that no matter how much diligence is exercised in the design, construction, and operation of a nuclear reactor, things can and do go wrong,” Hocevar related. “Design errors occur, the unexpected happens, human error is a very real possibility.”
Still, “for many years, the [nuclear] industry vigorously defended the nuclear power
program as being essentially risk-free. Nuclear power was claimed to be perfectly safe. It was said that no serious accidents would ever happen,” he noted. “Such a position was of course necessary to promote the acceptance of nuclear power by the general public. It has not been until just recently that the proponents of nuclear energy have admitted that accidents can and will happen, and the public should prepare itself for such eventualities.”
Wei Zhaofeng, an energy official in China, which is now reconsidering its plans for nuclear power because of the Fukushima catastrophe, said recently: “We have to ensure 100 percent safety of these nuclear power plants.”
That cannot be. Nuclear power can never be 100 percent safe. And it must be. That is why it should not be. And, instead, we must get rid of it and fully implement the clean, renewable technologies such as solar, wind and others now available which can provide, as major studies in the last several years have shown, all the energy we need—and are safe.
As physicist Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, recently wrote: “Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving.” It’s “the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away.”
That’s been made evident by the Fukushima disaster, the crisis along the Missouri River in Nebraska and the wildfire at the gates of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
To err is human, it’s realized. Technology fails, it’s comprehended. And we must also understand that atomic energy is unsafe in the real world. It can never be safe. It must be eliminated in favor of energy we can live with.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire—these and other disasters will inevitably occur. Add nuclear power with its potential to release massive amounts of deadly radioactive poisons when impacted by such a disaster, and it is clear that atomic energy is incompatible with the real world.
There’s no perfection in human beings or in technology. Accidents will happen. And there will always be natural disasters—we can’t eliminate them. But we can—and must—eliminate atomic energy.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Hannes Alfven explained in 1972 in declaring his strong opposition to nuclear power: “Fission energy is safe only if a number of critical devices work as they should, if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions, if there is no sabotage, no hijacking of the transports, if no reactor processing plant or reprocessing plant or repository anywhere in the world is situated in a region of riots or guerilla activity, and no revolution or war—even a ‘conventional one’—takes place in those regions. The enormous quantities of extremely dangerous material must not get into the hands of ignorant people or desperados. No acts of God can be permitted.” Dr. Alfven was writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
“Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology. It allows no room for error,” wrote Carl J. Hocevar of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1975. Hocevar had earlier been an engineer working on reactor safety at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. “Perfection must be achieved if accidents that affect the general public are to be prevented,” he wrote in his foreword to the book We Almost Lost Detroit. The book is about the partial meltdown at the Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in 1966 that threatened nearby Detroit, one of numerous near-misses and many other accidents involving nuclear power in addition to the disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and now Fukushima.
In We Almost Lost Detroit, Hocevar described the blind faith of scientists in atomic energy and their wrong assumptions. “The scientists involved were most confident that they had covered all possible problem areas. They had built safeguards on top of safeguards. Yet in spite of the precautions in the design and construction of the Fermi reactor, and in spite of the reassurances by the scientists that a serious accident could not happen, one did occur. The results far exceeded the expectations of anyone involved with the project. Fortunately, at the time of the accident, the reactor was operating at a very low power level or the consequences could have been much worse.”
“The Fermi accident and others described in this book demonstrate the fact that no matter how much diligence is exercised in the design, construction, and operation of a nuclear reactor, things can and do go wrong,” Hocevar related. “Design errors occur, the unexpected happens, human error is a very real possibility.”
Still, “for many years, the [nuclear] industry vigorously defended the nuclear power
program as being essentially risk-free. Nuclear power was claimed to be perfectly safe. It was said that no serious accidents would ever happen,” he noted. “Such a position was of course necessary to promote the acceptance of nuclear power by the general public. It has not been until just recently that the proponents of nuclear energy have admitted that accidents can and will happen, and the public should prepare itself for such eventualities.”
Wei Zhaofeng, an energy official in China, which is now reconsidering its plans for nuclear power because of the Fukushima catastrophe, said recently: “We have to ensure 100 percent safety of these nuclear power plants.”
That cannot be. Nuclear power can never be 100 percent safe. And it must be. That is why it should not be. And, instead, we must get rid of it and fully implement the clean, renewable technologies such as solar, wind and others now available which can provide, as major studies in the last several years have shown, all the energy we need—and are safe.
As physicist Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, recently wrote: “Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving.” It’s “the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away.”
That’s been made evident by the Fukushima disaster, the crisis along the Missouri River in Nebraska and the wildfire at the gates of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
To err is human, it’s realized. Technology fails, it’s comprehended. And we must also understand that atomic energy is unsafe in the real world. It can never be safe. It must be eliminated in favor of energy we can live with.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The Big Fukushima Lie Flies High
The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “The big lie flies high,” comments Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear.
Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened—going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it—but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants—including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants—and U.S. government officials.
Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.
Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time—that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?
Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?
Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.
“No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington last week.
“They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.
“We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11.
There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses—as well as genetic effects—as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”
The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are “professionals” in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial camp. “Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident,” it declares on its website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: “There is no health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United States.”
Acknowledging that “radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the United States,” the American Nuclear Society asserts that’s because we are able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking water due to the Fukushima incident…The radiation from Fukushima, though detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern.”
Says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, “The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”
The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. “For anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant,” Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has insisted. “We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30 countries [and] these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of background radiation…and they do not constitute a public health risk.”
WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.
As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, says: “We do live with background radiation—but it does cause cancer.” That’s why there is concern, he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium in some soils. “That’s background [radiation] but it’s not safe. There are absolutely no safe levels of radiation” and adding more radiation “adds to the health impacts.”
“There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology,” says Dr. Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, “large populations of people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t agree to.”
Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: “The generally accepted thinking about the safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of the cancer or genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there’s a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears.”
Of the claims of “no threat to health” from the radioactivity emitted from Fukushima, that “just flies in the face of all the standard models and all the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and cancer.”
“As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other continents and around the world, the doses are spread out,” notes Dr. Wing. “But it’s important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person’s individual risk, it doesn’t reduce the number of cancers that result from that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a few thousand people exposed to that same dose.”
He believes “we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that minimizes harm,” is a “sane energy policy.” Those who have “led us into this situation” have caused “big problems.”
And they are still at it—even with radioactivity still coming out at Fukushima and expected to for months. On Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, the “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.
Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi.
Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979; Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to expand into the U.S. and worldwide.
Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor technologies; William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future set up by the Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch nuclear power supporters.
Other participants, according to the program for the event, will be “senior executives and thought leaders from the who’s who of the U.S. new nuclear community.” Bruce Llewelyn, who hosts “White House Chronicle” on PBS television, is listed as the summit’s “moderator.”
There will be programs on the “State of the Renaissance,” “China, India & Emerging Global Nuclear Markets,” “Advancing Nuclear Technology” and “Lessons from Fukushima.”
As the nuclear Pinocchios lie, the nuclear promoters push ahead.
Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened—going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it—but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants—including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants—and U.S. government officials.
Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.
Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time—that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?
Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?
Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.
“No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington last week.
“They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.
“We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11.
There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses—as well as genetic effects—as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”
The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are “professionals” in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial camp. “Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident,” it declares on its website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: “There is no health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United States.”
Acknowledging that “radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the United States,” the American Nuclear Society asserts that’s because we are able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking water due to the Fukushima incident…The radiation from Fukushima, though detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern.”
Says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, “The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”
The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. “For anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant,” Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has insisted. “We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30 countries [and] these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of background radiation…and they do not constitute a public health risk.”
WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.
As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, says: “We do live with background radiation—but it does cause cancer.” That’s why there is concern, he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium in some soils. “That’s background [radiation] but it’s not safe. There are absolutely no safe levels of radiation” and adding more radiation “adds to the health impacts.”
“There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology,” says Dr. Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, “large populations of people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t agree to.”
Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: “The generally accepted thinking about the safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of the cancer or genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there’s a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears.”
Of the claims of “no threat to health” from the radioactivity emitted from Fukushima, that “just flies in the face of all the standard models and all the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and cancer.”
“As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other continents and around the world, the doses are spread out,” notes Dr. Wing. “But it’s important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person’s individual risk, it doesn’t reduce the number of cancers that result from that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a few thousand people exposed to that same dose.”
He believes “we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that minimizes harm,” is a “sane energy policy.” Those who have “led us into this situation” have caused “big problems.”
And they are still at it—even with radioactivity still coming out at Fukushima and expected to for months. On Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, the “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.
Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi.
Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979; Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to expand into the U.S. and worldwide.
Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor technologies; William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future set up by the Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch nuclear power supporters.
Other participants, according to the program for the event, will be “senior executives and thought leaders from the who’s who of the U.S. new nuclear community.” Bruce Llewelyn, who hosts “White House Chronicle” on PBS television, is listed as the summit’s “moderator.”
There will be programs on the “State of the Renaissance,” “China, India & Emerging Global Nuclear Markets,” “Advancing Nuclear Technology” and “Lessons from Fukushima.”
As the nuclear Pinocchios lie, the nuclear promoters push ahead.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Nuclear Pinocchios
Published in Long Island newspapers this week.
“Remember, we can change the world. Or at least Long Island,” Nora Bredes, former executive director of the Shoreham Opponents Coalition, just wrote on her Facebook page. With her message was a New York Times article about a massive demonstration 25 years ago this month protesting the Shoreham nuclear plant.
“More than 600 protesters were arrested here today after 15,000 demonstrators gathered,” the piece began. The headline noted it was “One of the Largest Held Worldwide” against nuclear power.
Because of demonstrations, legal challenges, political initiatives and other actions by organizations and individuals, and work by Suffolk County, state and local officials, the Shoreham plant was stopped.
Two months before that June 1986 demonstration, the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe occurred in the former Soviet Union clearly showing the deadliness of nuclear power, despite the claims of nuclear promoters—including on Long Island—that it was safe.
Now, the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan has again proven the lethality of nuclear power. A baseline for how many people will likely die from Fukushima radiation is provided by a 2009 book published by the New York Academy of Sciences, “Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, a team of eminent European scientists concludes that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from Chernobyl. And the Fukushima disaster involved not one but a cluster of nuclear power plants and is ongoing with radioactivity still streaming out and spreading worldwide.
But the nuclear Pinocchios are still at it.
Last week, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, held a press conference in Washington at which it issued a statement asserting: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima.” And as for the rest of us: don’t worry.
“This is as believable as the Marlboro man offering you the same assurance,” said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight at the organization Beyond Nuclear (www.beyondnuclear.org). “The global nuclear industry should focus on bringing this catastrophic nuclear accident to an end rather than damage control for its increasingly radioactive public image.”
Reaction to Fukushima has varied. Germany, Switzerland, Italy and other nations have declared they will now abandon nuclear power and instead pursue safe, clean, renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind. A difference between today and 25 years ago is that such technologies are more highly developed and if fully utilized can provide all the energy the world needs, as recent studies have shown. They render nuclear power unnecessary.
In Washington this week, a Congressional Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Expo and Forum involving safe energy advocates and members of Congress was held. But the Obama administration, heavily influenced by Steven Chu, the nuclear scientist who heads the Department of Energy, is still pushing atomic power. It wants, despite the Fukushima disaster, more nuclear plants built in the U.S. and is seeking $34 billion in taxpayer monies to build them. Next week, a New Nuclear Energy Summit to “advance” nuclear power will be held in Washington involving Obama administration and nuclear industry officials.
Shoreham was stopped, along with Long Island Lighting Company plans to build other nuclear plants here as well. Long Island is nuclear-free. But across the Sound in Connecticut, the two Millstone nuclear plants continue to operate, dangerously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just issued a report finding “pervasive performance lapses” by plant operators during a serious “unexpected power spike” at Millstone 2 on February 12, a month before the Fukushima meltdowns. Taking on Millstone is the Standing for Truth About Radiation Coalition, restarted by Priscilla Star of Montauk (priscillaastar@hotmail.com) since Fukushima.
The threat of nuclear power continues, as does the struggle to end the deadly technology and shift to safe, clean, renewable energy.
“Remember, we can change the world. Or at least Long Island,” Nora Bredes, former executive director of the Shoreham Opponents Coalition, just wrote on her Facebook page. With her message was a New York Times article about a massive demonstration 25 years ago this month protesting the Shoreham nuclear plant.
“More than 600 protesters were arrested here today after 15,000 demonstrators gathered,” the piece began. The headline noted it was “One of the Largest Held Worldwide” against nuclear power.
Because of demonstrations, legal challenges, political initiatives and other actions by organizations and individuals, and work by Suffolk County, state and local officials, the Shoreham plant was stopped.
Two months before that June 1986 demonstration, the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe occurred in the former Soviet Union clearly showing the deadliness of nuclear power, despite the claims of nuclear promoters—including on Long Island—that it was safe.
Now, the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan has again proven the lethality of nuclear power. A baseline for how many people will likely die from Fukushima radiation is provided by a 2009 book published by the New York Academy of Sciences, “Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, a team of eminent European scientists concludes that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from Chernobyl. And the Fukushima disaster involved not one but a cluster of nuclear power plants and is ongoing with radioactivity still streaming out and spreading worldwide.
But the nuclear Pinocchios are still at it.
Last week, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, held a press conference in Washington at which it issued a statement asserting: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima.” And as for the rest of us: don’t worry.
“This is as believable as the Marlboro man offering you the same assurance,” said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight at the organization Beyond Nuclear (www.beyondnuclear.org). “The global nuclear industry should focus on bringing this catastrophic nuclear accident to an end rather than damage control for its increasingly radioactive public image.”
Reaction to Fukushima has varied. Germany, Switzerland, Italy and other nations have declared they will now abandon nuclear power and instead pursue safe, clean, renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind. A difference between today and 25 years ago is that such technologies are more highly developed and if fully utilized can provide all the energy the world needs, as recent studies have shown. They render nuclear power unnecessary.
In Washington this week, a Congressional Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Expo and Forum involving safe energy advocates and members of Congress was held. But the Obama administration, heavily influenced by Steven Chu, the nuclear scientist who heads the Department of Energy, is still pushing atomic power. It wants, despite the Fukushima disaster, more nuclear plants built in the U.S. and is seeking $34 billion in taxpayer monies to build them. Next week, a New Nuclear Energy Summit to “advance” nuclear power will be held in Washington involving Obama administration and nuclear industry officials.
Shoreham was stopped, along with Long Island Lighting Company plans to build other nuclear plants here as well. Long Island is nuclear-free. But across the Sound in Connecticut, the two Millstone nuclear plants continue to operate, dangerously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just issued a report finding “pervasive performance lapses” by plant operators during a serious “unexpected power spike” at Millstone 2 on February 12, a month before the Fukushima meltdowns. Taking on Millstone is the Standing for Truth About Radiation Coalition, restarted by Priscilla Star of Montauk (priscillaastar@hotmail.com) since Fukushima.
The threat of nuclear power continues, as does the struggle to end the deadly technology and shift to safe, clean, renewable energy.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Downplaying Deadly Dangers in Japan and at Home, After Fukushima, Media Still Buying Media Spin
Published in Extra! The Magazine of FAIR—The Media Watch Group
May 2011 Cover Story
Ever since the start of nuclear technology, those behind it have made heavy use of deception, obfuscation and denial--with the complicity of most of the media. New York Times reporter William Laurence, working at the same time with the Manhattan Project, wrote a widely-published press release covering up the first nuclear test in New Mexico in 1945, claiming it was nothing more than an ammunition dump explosion. The Times and Laurence went on to boost nuclear power for years to come (Beverly Deepe Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb).
A central concern of nuclear promoters, as Rosalie Bertell writes in her book No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, has been: "Should the public discover the true health cost of nuclear pollution, a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people would refuse to cooperate passively with their own death." In the U.S., nuclear industry and government nuclear agencies lied after the accident at Three Mile Island. In the Soviet Union, government lies flowed after the catastrophe at Chernobyl. There have been cover-up after cover-up of the smaller accidents in between (Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own, The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation; Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, Deadly Deceit; Low-level Radiation, High-level Cover-up).
The nuclear enterprise, with its army of PR people, has had little trouble through the years manipulating a largely compliant media, a major component of which it has owned: Westinghouse owning CBS for many years, and General Electric, NBC. And this continues in the still-unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan.
Media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power facility disaster has ranged from dreadful to barely passable. Much of the reporting about the threats of nuclear power and the impacts of radioactivity has been outrageously poor, as journalists and their talking-head experts have parroted the assurances of Japanese and other officials that the amounts of radioactivity being released were low and thus posed "no health threat" to people (e.g., AP, 3/21/11).
Decades ago, there was the notion of a "threshold dose" of radiation, below which there was no harm. That’s because when nuclear technology began and people were exposed to radioactivity, they didn’t promptly fall down dead. But as the years went by, it was realized that lower levels of radioactivity take time to result in cancer and other illnesses--that there is a five-to-40-year "incubation" period.
Now most scientists acknowledge that any amount of radioactivity can lead to illness and death, especially in fetuses and children whose cells are dividing more rapidly than in adults. As the National Council on Radiation Protection (No. 136, 2001) has said: "Every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer." Or the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ("Fact Sheet: Biological Effects of Radiation"): "Any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer.”
Much coverage reassured the public that, even if there was some risk, potassium iodide pills being distributed in Japan "block radioactivity" (CNN, 3/18/11). In fact, potassium iodide pills work only on the thyroid, filling it with "good" iodine so radioactive iodine-131, which causes thyroid cancer, cannot be absorbed. But there are hundreds of other fission products--including cesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which were discharged when the Fukushima nuclear plants erupted--and there are no magic pills for any of them.
Fox News took its coverage to another level, with Geraldo Rivera declaring (3/18/11): "I love nuclear power." And right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter on the O'Reilly Factor (Fox News, 3/17/11) asserted that "radiation [amounts] in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer." Even fellow right-wing firebrand Bill O’Reilly was taken aback. "You have to be responsible," he told her.
Coulter's comment stems from a wild theory of some nuclear scientists called "hormesis," which holds that radioactivity is good because it exercises the immune system. Coulter challenged media for not pursuing the radiation-is-good hypothesis. They should--they'll find that it's been dismissed by national and international agencies involved with radiation protection, including the U.S. National Research Council, the National Council on Radiation Protection and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
There have been huge scientific errors, even by people who acknowledged the seriousness of the disaster—such as the explanation for cesium-137 by "expert" Bill Nye, aka "The Science Guy," on CNN (3/12/11). "We hear about this substance called cesium, which is being released," anchor John Vause said to Nye. "What's the significance of that?" The "Science Guy" responded: "Cesium is used to slow and control the nuclear reaction, the fission of these very large atoms of uranium. And so when cesium can’t get in there to slow things down, it gets hotter and hotter."
In fact, cesium-137 has absolutely nothing to do with slowing or controlling fission (that's boron); it is one of the deadliest radioactive products created by fission, and one of the main reasons there's still a 1,660-square-mile Exclusion Zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. "The Science Guy" flubs a high-school physics exam question, and one that is crucial to understanding the health effects of nuclear accidents.
Media have betrayed a lack of understanding about the hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off the Fukushima plants as well. It was reported that this had to do with fuel rods, and sometimes zirconium was mentioned. (e.g. LA Times, 3/16/11). But missed was a huge issue: Zirconium, which is used to make nuclear fuel rods because it allows neutrons to pass freely, is extremely volatile. It explodes at 2,000[o] F with the explosive power, pound for pound, of nitroglycerin. (A tiny speck of zirconium produces the flash in a flashbulb; a typical nuclear plant contains 20 tons.) With lesser heat, it emits hydrogen, which itself can explode, and this is what occurred at Fukushima. Using zirconium in a nuclear plant is like building a bridge out of firecrackers. It’s not hard to explain, but that didn’t happen.
Then there were the reports about three GE nuclear engineers who resigned because of defects in the GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor used at Fukushima (ABC News, 3/16/11). This was in line with the spin that the problem is not nuclear power in general, but merely one flawed plant design.
While the Mark 1 design was, indeed, a factor in why the three GE nuclear engineering supervisors, Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor, left the nuclear industry, their broader point went missing in media coverage: As they declared in a statement to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress in 1976,
"We did so because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the
continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power--a system we
believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on
this planet."
Meanwhile, disinformation about the impacts of previous nuclear plant disasters has served to downplay the potential impacts of the Fukushima disaster.
U.S. media regularly reported that only a few thousand people died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe--commonly used as a baseline of comparison (e.g. New York Times, 3/27/11). These numbers ignore the most comprehensive study done on the effects of Chernobyl, a book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences titled Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of scientists from Russia and Belarus studied health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports--some 5,000 in all--from 1986 to 2004, and estimated that the accident caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide. More deaths, they wrote, will follow. That’s the real baseline for a major disaster at one nuclear power plant.
Indeed, the senior scientist in that study, Dr. Alexey Yablokov, at a March 25 press conference in Washington, D.C., pointed out that because of the multiple nuclear power plants and spent fuel pools involved in the Fukushima disaster, and "because the area is far more densely populated than around Chernobyl, the human toll could eventually be far worse." The New York Times did not cover or run a story on that press conference at the National Press Club--or the New York Academy of Science's book.
There were also declarations that "no one died" as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 (e.g., O'Reilly Factor, 3/16/11). NPR (3/28/11) went so far as to claim that "relatively small amounts of radiation had escaped from the plant. No one was even injured."
That myth was long ago long exploded by the book Killing Our Own, which includes a chapter called "People Died at Three Mile Island," detailing infant and adult deaths. I wrote and narrated a TV documentary on the impacts of the TMI partial meltdown, Three Mile Island Revisited, that focused on the cancers and death in the area around the plant, and how its owner has quietly given pay-outs, many for $1 million apiece, to settle with people who suffered health impacts or lost family members because of the accident.
Meanwhile, media didn't mention that Japan in recent years has become a global giant in the sale of nuclear power plants. GE and Westinghouse have long been the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power plants worldwide, historically manufacturing or designing 80 percent of all nuclear plants. In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse's nuclear division and Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE to run its nuclear division. How might this huge Japanese stake in selling nuclear plants worldwide affect what Japanese officials were saying about Fukushima? This area was ignored by U.S. media--many of which have links to the nuclear industry themselves. (See FAIR Blog, 4/12/11).
A pioneer journalist on nuclear technology, Anna Mayo, had one word to describe U.S. media coverage of the Japanese disaster: "grotesque." From 1969 to 1989, Mayo worked for the Village Voice, writing a column titled "Geiger Counter." She once said (Karl Grossman, Cover Up), "I built a full-time career on covering nuclear horror stories that the New York Times neglected." Mayo was forced out after changes of ownership at the Village Voice, with "nuclear industry pressure" having much to do with her ouster: "The nuclear industry went after me. It was very obvious."
The nuclear industry on the disaster in Japan, said Mayo, "is trying desperately to conceal the extent of radiation exposure, and they’ve wheeled out the same old lies." And media, as usual, have bought the deadly nuclear deception.
May 2011 Cover Story
Ever since the start of nuclear technology, those behind it have made heavy use of deception, obfuscation and denial--with the complicity of most of the media. New York Times reporter William Laurence, working at the same time with the Manhattan Project, wrote a widely-published press release covering up the first nuclear test in New Mexico in 1945, claiming it was nothing more than an ammunition dump explosion. The Times and Laurence went on to boost nuclear power for years to come (Beverly Deepe Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb).
A central concern of nuclear promoters, as Rosalie Bertell writes in her book No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, has been: "Should the public discover the true health cost of nuclear pollution, a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people would refuse to cooperate passively with their own death." In the U.S., nuclear industry and government nuclear agencies lied after the accident at Three Mile Island. In the Soviet Union, government lies flowed after the catastrophe at Chernobyl. There have been cover-up after cover-up of the smaller accidents in between (Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own, The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation; Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, Deadly Deceit; Low-level Radiation, High-level Cover-up).
The nuclear enterprise, with its army of PR people, has had little trouble through the years manipulating a largely compliant media, a major component of which it has owned: Westinghouse owning CBS for many years, and General Electric, NBC. And this continues in the still-unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan.
Media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power facility disaster has ranged from dreadful to barely passable. Much of the reporting about the threats of nuclear power and the impacts of radioactivity has been outrageously poor, as journalists and their talking-head experts have parroted the assurances of Japanese and other officials that the amounts of radioactivity being released were low and thus posed "no health threat" to people (e.g., AP, 3/21/11).
Decades ago, there was the notion of a "threshold dose" of radiation, below which there was no harm. That’s because when nuclear technology began and people were exposed to radioactivity, they didn’t promptly fall down dead. But as the years went by, it was realized that lower levels of radioactivity take time to result in cancer and other illnesses--that there is a five-to-40-year "incubation" period.
Now most scientists acknowledge that any amount of radioactivity can lead to illness and death, especially in fetuses and children whose cells are dividing more rapidly than in adults. As the National Council on Radiation Protection (No. 136, 2001) has said: "Every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer." Or the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ("Fact Sheet: Biological Effects of Radiation"): "Any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer.”
Much coverage reassured the public that, even if there was some risk, potassium iodide pills being distributed in Japan "block radioactivity" (CNN, 3/18/11). In fact, potassium iodide pills work only on the thyroid, filling it with "good" iodine so radioactive iodine-131, which causes thyroid cancer, cannot be absorbed. But there are hundreds of other fission products--including cesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which were discharged when the Fukushima nuclear plants erupted--and there are no magic pills for any of them.
Fox News took its coverage to another level, with Geraldo Rivera declaring (3/18/11): "I love nuclear power." And right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter on the O'Reilly Factor (Fox News, 3/17/11) asserted that "radiation [amounts] in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer." Even fellow right-wing firebrand Bill O’Reilly was taken aback. "You have to be responsible," he told her.
Coulter's comment stems from a wild theory of some nuclear scientists called "hormesis," which holds that radioactivity is good because it exercises the immune system. Coulter challenged media for not pursuing the radiation-is-good hypothesis. They should--they'll find that it's been dismissed by national and international agencies involved with radiation protection, including the U.S. National Research Council, the National Council on Radiation Protection and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
There have been huge scientific errors, even by people who acknowledged the seriousness of the disaster—such as the explanation for cesium-137 by "expert" Bill Nye, aka "The Science Guy," on CNN (3/12/11). "We hear about this substance called cesium, which is being released," anchor John Vause said to Nye. "What's the significance of that?" The "Science Guy" responded: "Cesium is used to slow and control the nuclear reaction, the fission of these very large atoms of uranium. And so when cesium can’t get in there to slow things down, it gets hotter and hotter."
In fact, cesium-137 has absolutely nothing to do with slowing or controlling fission (that's boron); it is one of the deadliest radioactive products created by fission, and one of the main reasons there's still a 1,660-square-mile Exclusion Zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. "The Science Guy" flubs a high-school physics exam question, and one that is crucial to understanding the health effects of nuclear accidents.
Media have betrayed a lack of understanding about the hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off the Fukushima plants as well. It was reported that this had to do with fuel rods, and sometimes zirconium was mentioned. (e.g. LA Times, 3/16/11). But missed was a huge issue: Zirconium, which is used to make nuclear fuel rods because it allows neutrons to pass freely, is extremely volatile. It explodes at 2,000[o] F with the explosive power, pound for pound, of nitroglycerin. (A tiny speck of zirconium produces the flash in a flashbulb; a typical nuclear plant contains 20 tons.) With lesser heat, it emits hydrogen, which itself can explode, and this is what occurred at Fukushima. Using zirconium in a nuclear plant is like building a bridge out of firecrackers. It’s not hard to explain, but that didn’t happen.
Then there were the reports about three GE nuclear engineers who resigned because of defects in the GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor used at Fukushima (ABC News, 3/16/11). This was in line with the spin that the problem is not nuclear power in general, but merely one flawed plant design.
While the Mark 1 design was, indeed, a factor in why the three GE nuclear engineering supervisors, Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor, left the nuclear industry, their broader point went missing in media coverage: As they declared in a statement to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress in 1976,
"We did so because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the
continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power--a system we
believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on
this planet."
Meanwhile, disinformation about the impacts of previous nuclear plant disasters has served to downplay the potential impacts of the Fukushima disaster.
U.S. media regularly reported that only a few thousand people died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe--commonly used as a baseline of comparison (e.g. New York Times, 3/27/11). These numbers ignore the most comprehensive study done on the effects of Chernobyl, a book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences titled Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of scientists from Russia and Belarus studied health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports--some 5,000 in all--from 1986 to 2004, and estimated that the accident caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide. More deaths, they wrote, will follow. That’s the real baseline for a major disaster at one nuclear power plant.
Indeed, the senior scientist in that study, Dr. Alexey Yablokov, at a March 25 press conference in Washington, D.C., pointed out that because of the multiple nuclear power plants and spent fuel pools involved in the Fukushima disaster, and "because the area is far more densely populated than around Chernobyl, the human toll could eventually be far worse." The New York Times did not cover or run a story on that press conference at the National Press Club--or the New York Academy of Science's book.
There were also declarations that "no one died" as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 (e.g., O'Reilly Factor, 3/16/11). NPR (3/28/11) went so far as to claim that "relatively small amounts of radiation had escaped from the plant. No one was even injured."
That myth was long ago long exploded by the book Killing Our Own, which includes a chapter called "People Died at Three Mile Island," detailing infant and adult deaths. I wrote and narrated a TV documentary on the impacts of the TMI partial meltdown, Three Mile Island Revisited, that focused on the cancers and death in the area around the plant, and how its owner has quietly given pay-outs, many for $1 million apiece, to settle with people who suffered health impacts or lost family members because of the accident.
Meanwhile, media didn't mention that Japan in recent years has become a global giant in the sale of nuclear power plants. GE and Westinghouse have long been the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power plants worldwide, historically manufacturing or designing 80 percent of all nuclear plants. In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse's nuclear division and Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE to run its nuclear division. How might this huge Japanese stake in selling nuclear plants worldwide affect what Japanese officials were saying about Fukushima? This area was ignored by U.S. media--many of which have links to the nuclear industry themselves. (See FAIR Blog, 4/12/11).
A pioneer journalist on nuclear technology, Anna Mayo, had one word to describe U.S. media coverage of the Japanese disaster: "grotesque." From 1969 to 1989, Mayo worked for the Village Voice, writing a column titled "Geiger Counter." She once said (Karl Grossman, Cover Up), "I built a full-time career on covering nuclear horror stories that the New York Times neglected." Mayo was forced out after changes of ownership at the Village Voice, with "nuclear industry pressure" having much to do with her ouster: "The nuclear industry went after me. It was very obvious."
The nuclear industry on the disaster in Japan, said Mayo, "is trying desperately to conceal the extent of radiation exposure, and they’ve wheeled out the same old lies." And media, as usual, have bought the deadly nuclear deception.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe
With the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe having arrived, and with the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex still unfolding—and radioactivity continuing to spew from those plants—some people are asking: can nuclear power be made safe?
The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.
This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power—and urged that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”
The basic problem: radioactivity.
“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”
“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated.
This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.
The problem is radioactivity—unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the “new, improved” nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology.
All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been—and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.
Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they’re produced in a nuclear plant to when they’re taken out as hotly radioactive “nuclear waste,” they must be isolated from life—for thousands for some millions of years.
In the nuclear process, mildly radioactive uranium is taken from the ground and bombarded by neutrons—and that part of the uranium which can split, is “fissile,” Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: There are hundreds of these “fission products.” The human body doesn’t know the difference between these lethal twins and safe and stable elements. Also produced are alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, all radioactive.
In addition, much of the larger part of uranium, Uranium-238, which cannot split, grabs on to neutrons and turns into Plutonium-239, the most radioactive substance known.
In this atom-splitting, too, heat is produced—which is used to boil water. Nuclear power plants are simply the most dangerous way to boil water ever conceived.
Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity? It has far less to do with science than with politics and economics—from the aftermath of the Manhattan Project to today During the World War II Manhattan Project, scientists working at laboratories secretly set up across the U.S. built atomic weapons. By 1945
it employed 600,000 people and billions of dollars were spent. Two bombs were dropped on Japan. And, with the war’s end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and more nuclear weapons were built. But what else could be done with nuclear technology to perpetuate the nuclear undertaking?
Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see their jobs end; corporations which were Manhattan Project contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, didn’t want to see their contracts ended. As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the war over there were problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy.”
Nuclear weapons don’t lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to keep the nuclear establishment going? Schemes advanced included using nuclear devices as substitutes for dynamite to blast huge holes in the ground—including stringing 125 atomic devices across the isthmus of Panama and setting them off to create the “Panatomic Canal,” utilizing radioactivity to zap food so it could seemingly be stored for years; building nuclear-powered airplanes (this didn’t go far because of the weight of the lead shielding needed to protect the pilots)—and using the heat built up by the nuclear reaction to boil water to produce electricity.
All along, the nuclear scientists—such as Chu now—attempted to minimize, indeed deny, the lethal danger of radioactivity and, like Nuclear Pinocchios, they pushed their technology.
Nuclear power plants—all 443 on the earth today—should be closed and no new ones built. As Rickover declared, nuclear reactors must be outlawed.
During the Bill Clinton campaign years ago, the slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” With nuclear power plants, “It’s the radioactivity”—inherent in the process and deadly.
Instead we must fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies like solar, wind (now the fastest growing energy source and cheaper than nuclear) and geothermal and all the rest which, major studies have concluded, can provide all the energy the world needs—energy without lethal radioactivity, energy we can live with.
The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.
This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power—and urged that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”
The basic problem: radioactivity.
“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”
“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated.
This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.
The problem is radioactivity—unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the “new, improved” nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology.
All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been—and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.
Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they’re produced in a nuclear plant to when they’re taken out as hotly radioactive “nuclear waste,” they must be isolated from life—for thousands for some millions of years.
In the nuclear process, mildly radioactive uranium is taken from the ground and bombarded by neutrons—and that part of the uranium which can split, is “fissile,” Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: There are hundreds of these “fission products.” The human body doesn’t know the difference between these lethal twins and safe and stable elements. Also produced are alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, all radioactive.
In addition, much of the larger part of uranium, Uranium-238, which cannot split, grabs on to neutrons and turns into Plutonium-239, the most radioactive substance known.
In this atom-splitting, too, heat is produced—which is used to boil water. Nuclear power plants are simply the most dangerous way to boil water ever conceived.
Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity? It has far less to do with science than with politics and economics—from the aftermath of the Manhattan Project to today During the World War II Manhattan Project, scientists working at laboratories secretly set up across the U.S. built atomic weapons. By 1945
it employed 600,000 people and billions of dollars were spent. Two bombs were dropped on Japan. And, with the war’s end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and more nuclear weapons were built. But what else could be done with nuclear technology to perpetuate the nuclear undertaking?
Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see their jobs end; corporations which were Manhattan Project contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, didn’t want to see their contracts ended. As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the war over there were problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy.”
Nuclear weapons don’t lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to keep the nuclear establishment going? Schemes advanced included using nuclear devices as substitutes for dynamite to blast huge holes in the ground—including stringing 125 atomic devices across the isthmus of Panama and setting them off to create the “Panatomic Canal,” utilizing radioactivity to zap food so it could seemingly be stored for years; building nuclear-powered airplanes (this didn’t go far because of the weight of the lead shielding needed to protect the pilots)—and using the heat built up by the nuclear reaction to boil water to produce electricity.
All along, the nuclear scientists—such as Chu now—attempted to minimize, indeed deny, the lethal danger of radioactivity and, like Nuclear Pinocchios, they pushed their technology.
Nuclear power plants—all 443 on the earth today—should be closed and no new ones built. As Rickover declared, nuclear reactors must be outlawed.
During the Bill Clinton campaign years ago, the slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” With nuclear power plants, “It’s the radioactivity”—inherent in the process and deadly.
Instead we must fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies like solar, wind (now the fastest growing energy source and cheaper than nuclear) and geothermal and all the rest which, major studies have concluded, can provide all the energy the world needs—energy without lethal radioactivity, energy we can live with.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Fukushima: A Month of Media Disinformation
Today marks exactly a month since the nuclear power disaster in Japan began. Along with the ongoing discharges of radioactivity from the Fukushima nuclear plant complex, there has been a largely outrageous flow of media coverage.
Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News on April 6th asked a good question: “And what about all that water, the many million gallons of it, highly radioactive, dumped in the Pacific Ocean for days on end—and we’ve all been told it will dissipate. But how can this not be harmful?” he queried correspondent Miguel Almaguer.
The question might have been good but the response to it, Almaguer’s report, was far from that. He presented a talking head expert, Luca Centurioni of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who said: “No, there is no immediate danger.” (Centurioni’s background, according to his resume posted on the Internet, reflects no background in radioactivity.)
“The bottom line,” said Almaguer, “experts are in agreement there’s no threat to our water or our food.” He added: “And as you can see Brian, California’s coastline is as beautiful as ever.” Radioactivity, of course, is invisible.
Or consider Charles Osgood on “The Osgood File” on CBS radio on April 1—stressing that there was nothing to fear but fear. Indeed, he played President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That might have been a reasonable reassurance amid the Depression. But here were the first indications of radioactivity having come to the U.S. from Japan.with radioactive iodine being “found in milk in the states of California and Washington,” noted Osgood.
But, he quickly added, “the contamination is described as miniscule, posing no threat to the public.” To bolster that assertion he presented Blair Thompson, “spokesman for the Washington Dairy Products Commission.”
“Radiation can be a scary word, but I think it’s important to remember that actually we live surrounded by radiation every day,” said milk industry PR man Thompson.
Indeed, chirped Osgood: “Some of our most common foods—potatoes, carrots, bananas and Brazil nuts—contain radioactive potassium.”
Yes, there is naturally occurring “background radiation” of various sorts—and that causes a level of cancer. As the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (www.nirs.org) states: “Even exposure to background radiation causes some cancers. Additional exposures cause additional risks.” Cited is a 700-page 2005 National Academy of Sciences report, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation,” that concluded that: “There is no safe level or threshold of ionizing radiation exposure.” There have been numerous similar reports.
And not only were reporter after reporter over the past month unaware of the facts about radioactivity, the experts they presented were quite a crew, too.
Consider David Brenner. He was on PBS Nightly News on March 18, two days after being featured in the New York Times story about him headlined: “Countering Radiation Fears With Just the Facts.” In the article, he was quoted as saying “I think there is a role for safe nuclear power.” Just a fact? Clearly, he was ready for TV, too.
Asked by Jeffrey Brown about “the plutonium found in the ground” around the Fukushima nuclear plants, Dr. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University, responded: “Well, there are various sources that the plutonium could have come from. But I think we’re relieved that the levels of plutonium are actually very low, and actually, typical of plutonium—natural plutonium contamination in this country.”
Plutonium is the most lethal of all radioactive substances. There is no level “actually very low.” A millionth of a gram inhaled, a microscopic particle, is all that’s needed to produce lung cancer. Furthermore, there is no “natural plutonium contamination in this country.”
Plutonium is a manmade substance. It was discovered by Glenn Seaborg in 1941 and used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki and almost all atomic weapons since. Plutonium-239 is what Uranium-238 can become when in the proximity of fission.
Nuclear power plants build up 500 to 1,000 pounds of plutonium every year. Indeed, the concept for nuclear power plants came from the plutonium production reactors built at the Hanford reservation in the state of Washington during the Manhattan Project crash program of World War II to build atomic bombs. Also produced in those reactors were large amounts of heat. With the war over, seeking to do more with nuclear technology than just build more nuclear weapons, the scientists, engineers and corporate contractors of the Manhattan Project—which became the Atomic Energy Commission—pushed a scheme to use that heat to boil water to turn a turbine and generate electricity.
Among their schemes, too, has been using plutonium as fuel in nuclear plants for the same reason plutonium was turned to by the Manhattan Project: limits of high-grade uranium. Manmade plutonium has been seen as the fuel for what’s called “breeder” reactors.
Meanwhile, amid all the disinformation about radioactivity there has been the effort by most of media to frame a debate between nuclear and coal—chpose your poison. In fact, the energy debate is between nuclear, coal and oil, on one side, and safe, clean, renewable energy technologies, led by solar and wind, on the other.
But you wouldn’t know that from media reports over the past month. The New York Times, for example, devoted part of a long “Science Times” article on March 29 to what the subhead stated: “Alternatives Carry Risks Too.” It said: “Radiation is a real threat, nuclear physicists say, but not as great as many people believe it is, and not as great as other threats. Indeed, every energy source comes with dangers, from mine or wellhead or the smokestack or tailpipe.” The piece went on to discuss coal-mining accidents and gas pipeline explosions. There was not a mention of the safe, clean energy technologies such as solar and wind.
Editorial cartoonist Walt Handelsmann in Newsday on April 4 went even further, drawing a picture of two pieces of wood with the caption: “Looking for cheap, risk free, all-natural, abundant energy…Start rubbing.” That’s not the choice.
As Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, concludes in his new book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse—as have many studies and reports—solar, wind and geothermal energy can provide all the energy the world’s needs. He dismisses nuclear power as too expensive and dangerous.
It not only can happen, it is happening, emphasizes Brown. “The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with an economy powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. Despite the global economic crisis, this energy transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even two years ago.”
But the real energy choices were largely not being discussed by media through the past month of Fukushima disinformation.
The classic book on disinformation on nuclear technology is Nukespeak, published in 1982. It is dedicated to George Orwell, author of 1984, and written by Stephen Hilgarten, Richard C. Bell and Rory O’Connor.
It opens by declaring that “the history of nuclear development has been profoundly shaped by the manipulation through official secrecy and extensive public-relations campaigns. Nukespeak and the use of information-management techniques have consistently distorted the debate over nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Time and time again, nuclear developers have confused their hopes with reality, publicly presented their expectations and assumptions as facts, covered up damaging information, harassed and fired scientists who disagreed with established policy, refused to recognize the existence of problems…claimed that there was no choice but to follow their policies.”
In the first month of the Fukushima disaster, there’s been an explosion of Nukespeak by the nuclear power establishment aided and abetted by a compliant media.
Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News on April 6th asked a good question: “And what about all that water, the many million gallons of it, highly radioactive, dumped in the Pacific Ocean for days on end—and we’ve all been told it will dissipate. But how can this not be harmful?” he queried correspondent Miguel Almaguer.
The question might have been good but the response to it, Almaguer’s report, was far from that. He presented a talking head expert, Luca Centurioni of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who said: “No, there is no immediate danger.” (Centurioni’s background, according to his resume posted on the Internet, reflects no background in radioactivity.)
“The bottom line,” said Almaguer, “experts are in agreement there’s no threat to our water or our food.” He added: “And as you can see Brian, California’s coastline is as beautiful as ever.” Radioactivity, of course, is invisible.
Or consider Charles Osgood on “The Osgood File” on CBS radio on April 1—stressing that there was nothing to fear but fear. Indeed, he played President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That might have been a reasonable reassurance amid the Depression. But here were the first indications of radioactivity having come to the U.S. from Japan.with radioactive iodine being “found in milk in the states of California and Washington,” noted Osgood.
But, he quickly added, “the contamination is described as miniscule, posing no threat to the public.” To bolster that assertion he presented Blair Thompson, “spokesman for the Washington Dairy Products Commission.”
“Radiation can be a scary word, but I think it’s important to remember that actually we live surrounded by radiation every day,” said milk industry PR man Thompson.
Indeed, chirped Osgood: “Some of our most common foods—potatoes, carrots, bananas and Brazil nuts—contain radioactive potassium.”
Yes, there is naturally occurring “background radiation” of various sorts—and that causes a level of cancer. As the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (www.nirs.org) states: “Even exposure to background radiation causes some cancers. Additional exposures cause additional risks.” Cited is a 700-page 2005 National Academy of Sciences report, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation,” that concluded that: “There is no safe level or threshold of ionizing radiation exposure.” There have been numerous similar reports.
And not only were reporter after reporter over the past month unaware of the facts about radioactivity, the experts they presented were quite a crew, too.
Consider David Brenner. He was on PBS Nightly News on March 18, two days after being featured in the New York Times story about him headlined: “Countering Radiation Fears With Just the Facts.” In the article, he was quoted as saying “I think there is a role for safe nuclear power.” Just a fact? Clearly, he was ready for TV, too.
Asked by Jeffrey Brown about “the plutonium found in the ground” around the Fukushima nuclear plants, Dr. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University, responded: “Well, there are various sources that the plutonium could have come from. But I think we’re relieved that the levels of plutonium are actually very low, and actually, typical of plutonium—natural plutonium contamination in this country.”
Plutonium is the most lethal of all radioactive substances. There is no level “actually very low.” A millionth of a gram inhaled, a microscopic particle, is all that’s needed to produce lung cancer. Furthermore, there is no “natural plutonium contamination in this country.”
Plutonium is a manmade substance. It was discovered by Glenn Seaborg in 1941 and used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki and almost all atomic weapons since. Plutonium-239 is what Uranium-238 can become when in the proximity of fission.
Nuclear power plants build up 500 to 1,000 pounds of plutonium every year. Indeed, the concept for nuclear power plants came from the plutonium production reactors built at the Hanford reservation in the state of Washington during the Manhattan Project crash program of World War II to build atomic bombs. Also produced in those reactors were large amounts of heat. With the war over, seeking to do more with nuclear technology than just build more nuclear weapons, the scientists, engineers and corporate contractors of the Manhattan Project—which became the Atomic Energy Commission—pushed a scheme to use that heat to boil water to turn a turbine and generate electricity.
Among their schemes, too, has been using plutonium as fuel in nuclear plants for the same reason plutonium was turned to by the Manhattan Project: limits of high-grade uranium. Manmade plutonium has been seen as the fuel for what’s called “breeder” reactors.
Meanwhile, amid all the disinformation about radioactivity there has been the effort by most of media to frame a debate between nuclear and coal—chpose your poison. In fact, the energy debate is between nuclear, coal and oil, on one side, and safe, clean, renewable energy technologies, led by solar and wind, on the other.
But you wouldn’t know that from media reports over the past month. The New York Times, for example, devoted part of a long “Science Times” article on March 29 to what the subhead stated: “Alternatives Carry Risks Too.” It said: “Radiation is a real threat, nuclear physicists say, but not as great as many people believe it is, and not as great as other threats. Indeed, every energy source comes with dangers, from mine or wellhead or the smokestack or tailpipe.” The piece went on to discuss coal-mining accidents and gas pipeline explosions. There was not a mention of the safe, clean energy technologies such as solar and wind.
Editorial cartoonist Walt Handelsmann in Newsday on April 4 went even further, drawing a picture of two pieces of wood with the caption: “Looking for cheap, risk free, all-natural, abundant energy…Start rubbing.” That’s not the choice.
As Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, concludes in his new book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse—as have many studies and reports—solar, wind and geothermal energy can provide all the energy the world’s needs. He dismisses nuclear power as too expensive and dangerous.
It not only can happen, it is happening, emphasizes Brown. “The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with an economy powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. Despite the global economic crisis, this energy transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even two years ago.”
But the real energy choices were largely not being discussed by media through the past month of Fukushima disinformation.
The classic book on disinformation on nuclear technology is Nukespeak, published in 1982. It is dedicated to George Orwell, author of 1984, and written by Stephen Hilgarten, Richard C. Bell and Rory O’Connor.
It opens by declaring that “the history of nuclear development has been profoundly shaped by the manipulation through official secrecy and extensive public-relations campaigns. Nukespeak and the use of information-management techniques have consistently distorted the debate over nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Time and time again, nuclear developers have confused their hopes with reality, publicly presented their expectations and assumptions as facts, covered up damaging information, harassed and fired scientists who disagreed with established policy, refused to recognize the existence of problems…claimed that there was no choice but to follow their policies.”
In the first month of the Fukushima disaster, there’s been an explosion of Nukespeak by the nuclear power establishment aided and abetted by a compliant media.
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