The explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is being described as caused by a “hydrogen build-up” The situation harks back to the “hydrogen bubble” that was feared would explode when the Three Mile Island plant in 1979 underwent a partial meltdown.
The hydrogen explosion problem at nuclear power plants involves a story as crazy as can be. As nuts as using nuclear fission to boil water to generate electricity is, the hydrogen problem and its cause cap the lunacy.
Eruption of hydrogen gas as a first reaction in a loss-of-coolant accident has been discussed with great worry in U.S. government and nuclear industry literature for decades.
That is because a highly volatile substance called zirconium was chosen back in the 1940’s and 50’s, when plans were first developed to build nuclear power plants, as the material to be used to make the rods into which radioactive fuel would be loaded.
There are 30,000 to 40,000 rods—composed of twenty tons of zirconium—in an average nuclear power plant. Many other substances were tried, particularly stainless steel, but only zirconium worked well. That’s because zirconium, it was found, allows neutrons from the fuel pellets in the rods to pass freely between the rods and thus a nuclear chain reaction to be sustained.
But there’s a huge problem with zirconium—it is highly volatile and when hot will explode spontaneously upon contact with air, water or steam.
The only other major commercial use of zirconium through the years has been in flashbulbs used in photography. A speck of it, on a flashbulb, ignites to provide a flash of light.
But in a nuclear plant, we’re not talking about specks—but tons and tons of zirconium, put together as a compound called “zircaloy” that clads tens of thousands of fuel rods.
Heat, a great deal of heat, builds up in a very short time with any interruption of coolant flow in a nuclear power plant—the problem at Fukushima after the earthquake that struck Japan.
Zirconium, with the explosive power, pound for pound, of nitroglycerine, will catch fire and explode at a temperature of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the 5,000 degree temperature of a meltdown.
Before then, however, zirconium reacts to the heat by drawing oxygen from water and steam and letting off hydrogen, which itself can explode—and is said to have done so at Fukushima.
As a result of such a hydrogen explosion, there is additional heat—bringing the zirconium itself closer and closer to its explosive level.
Whether in addition to being a hydrogen explosion, zirconium also exploded at Fukushima remains to be known.
But what has happened regarding hydrogen at Fukushima, like the “hydrogen bubble” when the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania underwent its near partial meltdown, is no mystery—but precisely what is expected in a loss-of-coolant accident.
It is described in U.S. government and nuclear industry accident studies as a “metal-water” reaction. It’s a reaction, the research has long stated, that can easily trigger a meltdown.
Using tons of a material otherwise used as the speck that explodes in a flashbulb in nuclear power plants —yes, absolutely crazy.
Moreover, in the spent fuel pools usually situated next to nuclear power plants, there are large numbers of additional fuel rods, used ones, disposed of as waste. There must be constant water circulation in the spent fuel pools. In what is labeled a “loss-of-water’ accident in a spent fuel pool, the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods is projected as exploding—sending into the environment the lethal nuclear poisons in a spent fuel pool.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
Japan Nuclear Emergency
What Japan is now trying to avoid is a complete loss of power to the cooling systems at its Fukushima nuclear power plant. This would lead to a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident—a disaster which could have catastrophic impacts on Japan and much of the world.
Radioactive material is used in a nuclear plant as a heat source—to boil water and produce steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. Huge amounts of radioactive material are made to go through a chain reaction, a process in which atomic particles bombard the nuclei of atoms, causing them to break up and generate heat.
But to keep the nuclear reaction in check—to prevent the material from overheating—vast amounts of coolant are required, up to a million gallons of water a minute in the most common nuclear plants that have been built (“light water” reactors). That is why nuclear plants are sited along rivers and bays, to use the water as coolant.
If the water which cools the reactor “core”—its 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of radioactive fuel load—stops flowing, the “emergency core cooling system” must send water in. If it fails, a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident can occur.
In such an accident, the core of nuclear fuel, which in less than a minute can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, burns through the cement bottom of the nuclear plant and bores into the earth. This is what U.S. nuclear scientists have dubbed the “China syndrome”—based on a nuclear plant on their side of the planet undergoing an accident seemingly sending its white-hot core in the direction of China.
In fact, the radioactive core doesn’t—in any location—go to China but it descends to the water table underlying a plant. Then, in a violent reaction, molten core and cold water combine, creating steam explosions and releasing a plume of radioactive poisons.
The problem at Fukushima Diachi nuclear facility is that one of its six reactors lost all its power as a result of the earthquake. Back-up diesel generators didn’t work, so battery power became necessary to keep coolant water flowing. If the battery power is depleted and electric power is not otherwise restored, a loss-of-coolant accident or meltdown would ensue.
“The emergency shutdown has been conducted but the process of cooling down the reaction is currently not going as planned,” explained Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, according to CNN.
Thus, Japan declared a state of “atomic power emergency” and people living within three kilometers of the Fukushima facility were advised to evacuate.
In fact, if the coolant flow is not maintained and a loss-of-coolant accident with a “breach of containment” occurs, people way beyond three kilometers around Fukushima would be impacted. The radioactive releases in the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident affected the entire northern hemisphere, as a book published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences documents. And Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, authored by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, Dr. Vassily Nesterenko and Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, finds that medical records between
1986, the year of the accident, and 2004 reflect 985,000 deaths as a result of the radioactivity released. Most of the deaths were in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but others were spread through the many other countries the radiation from Chernobyl struck.
Where the radioactivity spreads after a nuclear plant meltdown is largely a function of where winds take the radioactivity and of the rain that causes it to fall out.
There are numerous lessons to be learned from the situation now underway in Japan including why a nation situated on a string of volcanic islands would build nuclear power plants, vulnerable as they are to earthquakes. Of course, Japan is not alone on this score: in the U.S., the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was built less than three miles from the Hosgri earthquake fault.
Nuclear power plants are, in fact, life-threatening wherever they are—they represent the most dangerous way to boil water ever devised.
Wind, solar and geothermal energy and other forms of safe, clean power would not cause massive deadly damage because of an earthquake.
Radioactive material is used in a nuclear plant as a heat source—to boil water and produce steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. Huge amounts of radioactive material are made to go through a chain reaction, a process in which atomic particles bombard the nuclei of atoms, causing them to break up and generate heat.
But to keep the nuclear reaction in check—to prevent the material from overheating—vast amounts of coolant are required, up to a million gallons of water a minute in the most common nuclear plants that have been built (“light water” reactors). That is why nuclear plants are sited along rivers and bays, to use the water as coolant.
If the water which cools the reactor “core”—its 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of radioactive fuel load—stops flowing, the “emergency core cooling system” must send water in. If it fails, a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident can occur.
In such an accident, the core of nuclear fuel, which in less than a minute can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, burns through the cement bottom of the nuclear plant and bores into the earth. This is what U.S. nuclear scientists have dubbed the “China syndrome”—based on a nuclear plant on their side of the planet undergoing an accident seemingly sending its white-hot core in the direction of China.
In fact, the radioactive core doesn’t—in any location—go to China but it descends to the water table underlying a plant. Then, in a violent reaction, molten core and cold water combine, creating steam explosions and releasing a plume of radioactive poisons.
The problem at Fukushima Diachi nuclear facility is that one of its six reactors lost all its power as a result of the earthquake. Back-up diesel generators didn’t work, so battery power became necessary to keep coolant water flowing. If the battery power is depleted and electric power is not otherwise restored, a loss-of-coolant accident or meltdown would ensue.
“The emergency shutdown has been conducted but the process of cooling down the reaction is currently not going as planned,” explained Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, according to CNN.
Thus, Japan declared a state of “atomic power emergency” and people living within three kilometers of the Fukushima facility were advised to evacuate.
In fact, if the coolant flow is not maintained and a loss-of-coolant accident with a “breach of containment” occurs, people way beyond three kilometers around Fukushima would be impacted. The radioactive releases in the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident affected the entire northern hemisphere, as a book published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences documents. And Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, authored by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, Dr. Vassily Nesterenko and Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, finds that medical records between
1986, the year of the accident, and 2004 reflect 985,000 deaths as a result of the radioactivity released. Most of the deaths were in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but others were spread through the many other countries the radiation from Chernobyl struck.
Where the radioactivity spreads after a nuclear plant meltdown is largely a function of where winds take the radioactivity and of the rain that causes it to fall out.
There are numerous lessons to be learned from the situation now underway in Japan including why a nation situated on a string of volcanic islands would build nuclear power plants, vulnerable as they are to earthquakes. Of course, Japan is not alone on this score: in the U.S., the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was built less than three miles from the Hosgri earthquake fault.
Nuclear power plants are, in fact, life-threatening wherever they are—they represent the most dangerous way to boil water ever devised.
Wind, solar and geothermal energy and other forms of safe, clean power would not cause massive deadly damage because of an earthquake.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
World Wetlands Day Today
Today marks the 14th annual celebration of World Wetlands Day. It is telling that the event is only in its 14th year—an acknowledgement of how long it has taken for the critical importance of wetlands to be recognized globally.
Where I live, on Long Island, New York, much of it once fringed with wetlands—many of them now filled in—I’ve witnessed this slow recognition. When I began as a journalist here in the 1960s, there was general ignorance about the important role of wetland. Money was being made in filling in what were considered useless marshes, and there were those in government joining in the profit-making.
As an investigative reporter for the Long Island Press, I exposed how the Suffolk County Department of Public Works utilized a huge dredge to suck up bay bottom and deposit it as fill on wetlands in Southampton Town so they could be used for housing developments. Rudolph Kammerer, then Suffolk public works commissioner, moonlighted as a private engineer on these developments, working with C. Marvin Raynor, president of the Southampton Town Trustees. The trustees have been empowered since colonial times with supervision of the town’s wetlands. Raynor laid out plans for bulkheading that would front the wetlands, making filling possible. And as a trustee, he voted for the dredging, bulkheading and fill depositing.
The articles forced the sale of the county dredge—but the struggle to save Long Island wetlands continued and goes on to this day.
Extensive damage to the wetlands has been done on Long Island by ditches dug by Suffolk County in the name of mosquito control. Further, it has regularly doused the wetlands with toxic pesticides—including DDT—to kill mosquitoes, although marine and bird life die as well.
Just out is a comprehensive book on the variety of life in the wetlands, their importance and the destruction that has been going on: “Tidal Marshes of Long Island, New York. Published by the Torrey Botanical Society, the oldest botanical organization in the western hemisphere, it is full of fascinating essays, vivid color photos, maps and charts.
The book is edited by Dr. John Potente who as a member of the Suffolk County Council on Environmental Quality fought against the county’s damaging undertakings in the wetlands. He resigned from the council in 2007 in protest to these activities, joined by environmental attorney Lauren Stiles and members representing Riverhead and Southold Towns.
Dr. Potente contributes a chapter in the new book along with 17 others including Philip Weinberg who as head of the New York State Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Bureau in the 1970s pioneered legal protection for Long Island wetlands; Larry Penny, East Hampton Town’s director of natural resources; Professor Christopher Gobler of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University; and Matthew Atkinson, former general counsel for Peconic Baykeeper.
“Long Island’s salt marshes,” writes Dr. Potente, “play an important ecological role as nursery grounds for finfish, shellfish and marine plankton, as well as providing a buffer against ocean storms.” But he points out that “half of the marshes that originally existed in the northeastern United States have been lost, and the remaining marshes have been significantly altered.”
He speaks of the “filling of marshlands with trash and concrete [and] the development of waterfront property” as major causes of wetlands destruction. And then there are the impacts of pollution: “ And he elaborates on how “linear ditches were dug out of pristine marshlands” and Long Island wetlands were “saturated with DDT” and other poisonous pesticides.
“Today, reducing human impacts on our salt marshes is imperative because so much marshland already has been irretrievably lost,” declares Dr. Potente. “Only after acquiring a general respect for the inherent complexity of the salt marsh can humans begin to withdraw their need to interfere.”
Penny in his chapter—titled “Healing Salt Marshes from the Scars of Mosquito Ditches”—writes: “Despite the laments of Rachel Carson and a handful of conservationists, before the mid-1960s salt marshes had a reputation rivaling that of weed patches…Across Long Island, in a span of less than 15 postwar years, a quarter of the salt marshes, especially those along the South Shore bays, were filled over.”
The chapter by Weinberg, who went on to be a professor at St. John’s University School of Law, centers on the 1973 passage of the Long Island Wetlands Law—over the intense opposition of Long Island development interests. He writes: “Long Island’s and the state’s wetlands remain vital and irreplaceable resources” and “their continued survival depends on sufficient resources, and penalties, being deployed to protect them.”
Says Dale Humburg, chief biologist of Ducks Unlimited, the main sponsor of World Wetlands Day: “Wetlands are some of nature’s most productive and biologically diverse ecosystems, providing natural flood control, water quality and prime habitat for fish and wildlife….But we’re losing these precious natural resources at an alarming rate. World Wetlands Day is a good opportunity to highlight this imperiled ecosystem, but the focus really needs to be continual.”
A special focus of the day this year is the wetlands along the Gulf of Mexico coast, hit hard by the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill, on top of a continual loss. “This region continues to lose wetland habitat the size of a football field every 30 minutes,” notes Ducks Unlimited.
Where I live, on Long Island, New York, much of it once fringed with wetlands—many of them now filled in—I’ve witnessed this slow recognition. When I began as a journalist here in the 1960s, there was general ignorance about the important role of wetland. Money was being made in filling in what were considered useless marshes, and there were those in government joining in the profit-making.
As an investigative reporter for the Long Island Press, I exposed how the Suffolk County Department of Public Works utilized a huge dredge to suck up bay bottom and deposit it as fill on wetlands in Southampton Town so they could be used for housing developments. Rudolph Kammerer, then Suffolk public works commissioner, moonlighted as a private engineer on these developments, working with C. Marvin Raynor, president of the Southampton Town Trustees. The trustees have been empowered since colonial times with supervision of the town’s wetlands. Raynor laid out plans for bulkheading that would front the wetlands, making filling possible. And as a trustee, he voted for the dredging, bulkheading and fill depositing.
The articles forced the sale of the county dredge—but the struggle to save Long Island wetlands continued and goes on to this day.
Extensive damage to the wetlands has been done on Long Island by ditches dug by Suffolk County in the name of mosquito control. Further, it has regularly doused the wetlands with toxic pesticides—including DDT—to kill mosquitoes, although marine and bird life die as well.
Just out is a comprehensive book on the variety of life in the wetlands, their importance and the destruction that has been going on: “Tidal Marshes of Long Island, New York. Published by the Torrey Botanical Society, the oldest botanical organization in the western hemisphere, it is full of fascinating essays, vivid color photos, maps and charts.
The book is edited by Dr. John Potente who as a member of the Suffolk County Council on Environmental Quality fought against the county’s damaging undertakings in the wetlands. He resigned from the council in 2007 in protest to these activities, joined by environmental attorney Lauren Stiles and members representing Riverhead and Southold Towns.
Dr. Potente contributes a chapter in the new book along with 17 others including Philip Weinberg who as head of the New York State Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Bureau in the 1970s pioneered legal protection for Long Island wetlands; Larry Penny, East Hampton Town’s director of natural resources; Professor Christopher Gobler of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University; and Matthew Atkinson, former general counsel for Peconic Baykeeper.
“Long Island’s salt marshes,” writes Dr. Potente, “play an important ecological role as nursery grounds for finfish, shellfish and marine plankton, as well as providing a buffer against ocean storms.” But he points out that “half of the marshes that originally existed in the northeastern United States have been lost, and the remaining marshes have been significantly altered.”
He speaks of the “filling of marshlands with trash and concrete [and] the development of waterfront property” as major causes of wetlands destruction. And then there are the impacts of pollution: “ And he elaborates on how “linear ditches were dug out of pristine marshlands” and Long Island wetlands were “saturated with DDT” and other poisonous pesticides.
“Today, reducing human impacts on our salt marshes is imperative because so much marshland already has been irretrievably lost,” declares Dr. Potente. “Only after acquiring a general respect for the inherent complexity of the salt marsh can humans begin to withdraw their need to interfere.”
Penny in his chapter—titled “Healing Salt Marshes from the Scars of Mosquito Ditches”—writes: “Despite the laments of Rachel Carson and a handful of conservationists, before the mid-1960s salt marshes had a reputation rivaling that of weed patches…Across Long Island, in a span of less than 15 postwar years, a quarter of the salt marshes, especially those along the South Shore bays, were filled over.”
The chapter by Weinberg, who went on to be a professor at St. John’s University School of Law, centers on the 1973 passage of the Long Island Wetlands Law—over the intense opposition of Long Island development interests. He writes: “Long Island’s and the state’s wetlands remain vital and irreplaceable resources” and “their continued survival depends on sufficient resources, and penalties, being deployed to protect them.”
Says Dale Humburg, chief biologist of Ducks Unlimited, the main sponsor of World Wetlands Day: “Wetlands are some of nature’s most productive and biologically diverse ecosystems, providing natural flood control, water quality and prime habitat for fish and wildlife….But we’re losing these precious natural resources at an alarming rate. World Wetlands Day is a good opportunity to highlight this imperiled ecosystem, but the focus really needs to be continual.”
A special focus of the day this year is the wetlands along the Gulf of Mexico coast, hit hard by the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill, on top of a continual loss. “This region continues to lose wetland habitat the size of a football field every 30 minutes,” notes Ducks Unlimited.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Avoiding Nuclear Destruction: By The Skin Of Our Teeth
As Thanksgiving 2010 arrives, thanks should be given for something that never happened decades ago: the use as planned of bases built all over the United States armed with BOMARC and Nike Hercules nuclear-tipped missiles.
It was the 1950s and 60s and the U.S. feared Soviet bombers might strike major American cities and various strategic targets. So a scheme was hatched to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles. These were early antiaircraft missiles and seen as unable to score direct hits. Thus the plan was to have the nuclear warheads on the BOMARC and Nike Hercules missiles detonate when the missiles reached a formation of Soviet bombers, blowing the formation apart—although also raining radioactivity down below.
The nuclear warheads on the BOMARC and Nike Hercules missiles had massive power. The tips on the BOMARCs had the equivalent of 10 kilotons of TNT. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the power of 13 kilotons. The Nike Hercules warheads ranged up to 30 kilotons.
How much radioactive fall-out would have descended on coastal areas where BOMARC and Nike Hercules bases were located depended on the winds and where the detonations of the nuclear warheads occurred. For bases sited inland, and BOMARC and Nike Hercules bases ringed several inland cities including Chicago, the nuclear warheads would definitely have exploded over populated regions of America. The BOMARC had a range of 250 miles, the Nike Hercules 100 miles.
I had the eerie experience recently of walking around two former nuclear-tipped missile sites—a BOMARC base in Westhampton and a Nike Hercules base in Rocky Point, both on Long Island, New York. (The BOMARC program was run by the Air Force and named for its developers—BO for Boeing and MARC for Michigan Aerospace Research Center. The Nike program was run by the Army and named for the Greek goddess of victory, although in this scheme it would have been a potentially suicidal victory.)
I was making a TV documentary on the BOMARC and Nike bases set up on Long Island and elsewhere in the New York Metropolitan Area with Soviet bombers headed for New York City as the major concern.
The documentary, which I did as chief investigative reporter for WVVH-TV in New York, has been broadcast in recent weeks, and WVVH has also put it up on YouTube. You can view it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLb_8FuH-8M Or just input my name at www.youtube.com along with the words: Avoiding Nuclear Destruction: By The Skin Of Our Teeth.
Each of the 56 BOMARC missiles in Westhampton had its own building. The missiles were positioned on the floors of the buildings and their roofs would open when they were to be fired. The buildings remain, and they and the machinery in them to open the roofs are very solid. Large amounts of money were spent on this scheme.
With the shift by the Soviets (and the U.S.) to ICBMs, the BOMARC and Nike bases were closed in the 70s. The nuclear-tipped missiles are now all gone, but many of the bases remain, frightening reminders of a dangerous period.
The Westhampton BOMARC base was given to Suffolk County which utilizes some of the buildings for storage. The site is also used as a police shooting range. Fittingly, gunfire was in the background as we filmed.
The three-mile Nike Hercules base in Rocky Point is now the site of an Army Reserve Center. The Nike missiles were positioned underground in silos. I stood on one of the welded-shut tops of a silo to explain what had been below.
The words that came to me in visiting the nuclear-tipped missile sites were: by the skin of our teeth. Only by the skin of our teeth, I thought, had we avoided nuclear destruction. Thus the title of the program.
A book has just been published, Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War by Christopher J. Bright. He writes about the “effort to facilitate popular acceptance of these weapons…The arms were touted in news releases, featured in films and television episodes…The need for atomic antiaircraft weapons was readily accepted by most Americans, and few objected to their existence or ubiquity.”
Nuclear technology is still being heavily promoted. The U.S. as well as the French and Russian governments are pushing for the building of many more nuclear plants—and inevitably there will be more accidents as bad as or worse than the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Though ostensibly for civilian use, the reactors would also provide the fuel and give their technicians the expertise for making nuclear weapons—this is how India got the atomic bomb. The Pentagon, meanwhile, still holds nuclear war to be quite feasible. And U.S. Senator John Kyl, an Arizona Republican, is right now seeking to block ratification of a new nuclear arms pact between the U.S. and Russia, a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The treaty has done a good job in limiting the nuclear weapons stockpiles of both countries and providing transparency. Will Kyl and his followers kill that?
This, too, is a highly dangerous period.
In front of a BOMARC building, I ended the documentary asking: how long will we be able to survive by the skin of our teeth? We should give thanks this week that somehow we got through the Cold War atomic nightmare. Now we must roll back the new crazy atomic push.
It was the 1950s and 60s and the U.S. feared Soviet bombers might strike major American cities and various strategic targets. So a scheme was hatched to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles. These were early antiaircraft missiles and seen as unable to score direct hits. Thus the plan was to have the nuclear warheads on the BOMARC and Nike Hercules missiles detonate when the missiles reached a formation of Soviet bombers, blowing the formation apart—although also raining radioactivity down below.
The nuclear warheads on the BOMARC and Nike Hercules missiles had massive power. The tips on the BOMARCs had the equivalent of 10 kilotons of TNT. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the power of 13 kilotons. The Nike Hercules warheads ranged up to 30 kilotons.
How much radioactive fall-out would have descended on coastal areas where BOMARC and Nike Hercules bases were located depended on the winds and where the detonations of the nuclear warheads occurred. For bases sited inland, and BOMARC and Nike Hercules bases ringed several inland cities including Chicago, the nuclear warheads would definitely have exploded over populated regions of America. The BOMARC had a range of 250 miles, the Nike Hercules 100 miles.
I had the eerie experience recently of walking around two former nuclear-tipped missile sites—a BOMARC base in Westhampton and a Nike Hercules base in Rocky Point, both on Long Island, New York. (The BOMARC program was run by the Air Force and named for its developers—BO for Boeing and MARC for Michigan Aerospace Research Center. The Nike program was run by the Army and named for the Greek goddess of victory, although in this scheme it would have been a potentially suicidal victory.)
I was making a TV documentary on the BOMARC and Nike bases set up on Long Island and elsewhere in the New York Metropolitan Area with Soviet bombers headed for New York City as the major concern.
The documentary, which I did as chief investigative reporter for WVVH-TV in New York, has been broadcast in recent weeks, and WVVH has also put it up on YouTube. You can view it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLb_8FuH-8M Or just input my name at www.youtube.com along with the words: Avoiding Nuclear Destruction: By The Skin Of Our Teeth.
Each of the 56 BOMARC missiles in Westhampton had its own building. The missiles were positioned on the floors of the buildings and their roofs would open when they were to be fired. The buildings remain, and they and the machinery in them to open the roofs are very solid. Large amounts of money were spent on this scheme.
With the shift by the Soviets (and the U.S.) to ICBMs, the BOMARC and Nike bases were closed in the 70s. The nuclear-tipped missiles are now all gone, but many of the bases remain, frightening reminders of a dangerous period.
The Westhampton BOMARC base was given to Suffolk County which utilizes some of the buildings for storage. The site is also used as a police shooting range. Fittingly, gunfire was in the background as we filmed.
The three-mile Nike Hercules base in Rocky Point is now the site of an Army Reserve Center. The Nike missiles were positioned underground in silos. I stood on one of the welded-shut tops of a silo to explain what had been below.
The words that came to me in visiting the nuclear-tipped missile sites were: by the skin of our teeth. Only by the skin of our teeth, I thought, had we avoided nuclear destruction. Thus the title of the program.
A book has just been published, Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War by Christopher J. Bright. He writes about the “effort to facilitate popular acceptance of these weapons…The arms were touted in news releases, featured in films and television episodes…The need for atomic antiaircraft weapons was readily accepted by most Americans, and few objected to their existence or ubiquity.”
Nuclear technology is still being heavily promoted. The U.S. as well as the French and Russian governments are pushing for the building of many more nuclear plants—and inevitably there will be more accidents as bad as or worse than the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Though ostensibly for civilian use, the reactors would also provide the fuel and give their technicians the expertise for making nuclear weapons—this is how India got the atomic bomb. The Pentagon, meanwhile, still holds nuclear war to be quite feasible. And U.S. Senator John Kyl, an Arizona Republican, is right now seeking to block ratification of a new nuclear arms pact between the U.S. and Russia, a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The treaty has done a good job in limiting the nuclear weapons stockpiles of both countries and providing transparency. Will Kyl and his followers kill that?
This, too, is a highly dangerous period.
In front of a BOMARC building, I ended the documentary asking: how long will we be able to survive by the skin of our teeth? We should give thanks this week that somehow we got through the Cold War atomic nightmare. Now we must roll back the new crazy atomic push.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Cancer--The Number One Killer--And Its Environmental Causes
The World Health Organization projects that this year cancer will become the world's leading cause of death. Why the epidemic of cancer? Death certificates in the United States show cancer as being the eighth leading cause of death in 1900.
Why has it skyrocketed to now surpass heart disease as number one?
Is it because people live longer and have to die of something? That's a factor, but not the prime reason as reflected by the jump in age-adjusted cancer being far above what could be expected from increased longevity. And it certainly doesn't explain the steep hike in childhood cancers. Is it lifestyle, diet and genetics, as we have often been told? They are factors, but not key reasons.
The cause of the cancer epidemic, as numerous studies have now documented, is largely environmental--the result of toxic substances in the water we drink, the food we eat, the consumer products we use, the air we breathe. (Some of the pollution is voluntarily caused--by smoking. But most is involuntary.)
As the President's Cancer Panel declared in May, in a 240-page report titled "Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now," "The American people--even before they are born--are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures." It said: "With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action."
It pointed to chemicals and radiation as major causes of cancer and stated: "Cancer continues to shatter and steal the lives of Americans. Approximately 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 21 percent will die from the cancer. The incidence of some cancers, including some most common among children, is increasing...The burgeoning number and complexity of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compel us to act to protect public health."
The panel urged President Obama "most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation's productivity, and devastate American lives."
In 1980, another presidential panel, the Presidential Toxic Substances Strategy Committee, came to the same conclusion. It declared: "Of the hazards to human health arising from toxic substances, cancer is a leading cause of concern. Cancer is the only major cause of death that has continued to rise since 1900. It is now second only to heart disease as a cause of death... Some of the increase in cancer mortality since 1900 is a function of the greater average age of the U.S. population and the medical progress made against infectious disease. But even after correcting for age, both mortality (death) rates and incidence (new cases) of cancer are increasing. Many now believe that environmental (nongenetic) factors--life style and work and environmental exposures--are significant in the great majority of cancer cases seen."
Meanwhile, through the years solid science done by independent researchers -- not those taking money from the chemical or nuclear industries -- has extensively documented this cancer/environment connection.
"The evidence is there that the majority of cancer cases are environmentally caused," says Dr. David Carpenter, founding dean of the University of Albany School of Public Health and now director of the Institute for Health and the Environment there. Among the research he points to is a 2000 study involving examining health records of 44,788 pairs of twins in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. If genetics were the main cause of cancer, if one twin developed cancer the other probably would, too. This was not found. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that "inherited genetic factors make a minor contribution" in most cancers. "This finding indicates that the environment has the principle role in causing sporadic cancer."
Dr. Samuel Epstein, professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, in his book The Politics of Cancer concludes that cancer is a preventable disease "caused mainly by exposure to chemical or physical agents in the environment." The huge problem, he said, is how "a combination of powerful and well-focused pressures by special industrialized interests, together with public inattention and the indifference of the scientific community" has warped public policy and thwarted "meaningful attempts to prevent the carnage." Dr. Epstein now chairs the Cancer Prevention Coalition committed to eliminating those toxins that are causing the cancer epidemic (http://www.preventcancer.com).
The initiative, Prevention is The Cure, was founded by breast cancer survivor Karen Joy Miller and on its website,(http://www.preventionisthecure.org/), declares that four decades have passed, "and the wake-up call put forth by Rachel Carson" in her book Silent Spring "and other activists has been blocked by powerful political interests that profit from pollution."
These powerful interests have long had allies in government. The late James Sibbison, who went from being a reporter for the Associated Press to press officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, would tell the story of how immediately after Ronald Reagan became president, orders were given to the EPA press office "never to use the words cancer-causing in front of the word chemical." Now the number of chemicals in commercial use in the U.S. totals 80,000. The EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 has been required to assess all of them. In over 30 years it has gotten around to examining 200.
The poisoning--and consequent cancer--is not necessary. The report by the President's Cancer Panel emphasize how "the requite knowledge and technologies exist" to provide safe "alternatives" to cancer-causing agents.
But this doesn't suit those doing the polluting--who have such a hold on government.
Why has it skyrocketed to now surpass heart disease as number one?
Is it because people live longer and have to die of something? That's a factor, but not the prime reason as reflected by the jump in age-adjusted cancer being far above what could be expected from increased longevity. And it certainly doesn't explain the steep hike in childhood cancers. Is it lifestyle, diet and genetics, as we have often been told? They are factors, but not key reasons.
The cause of the cancer epidemic, as numerous studies have now documented, is largely environmental--the result of toxic substances in the water we drink, the food we eat, the consumer products we use, the air we breathe. (Some of the pollution is voluntarily caused--by smoking. But most is involuntary.)
As the President's Cancer Panel declared in May, in a 240-page report titled "Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now," "The American people--even before they are born--are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures." It said: "With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action."
It pointed to chemicals and radiation as major causes of cancer and stated: "Cancer continues to shatter and steal the lives of Americans. Approximately 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 21 percent will die from the cancer. The incidence of some cancers, including some most common among children, is increasing...The burgeoning number and complexity of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compel us to act to protect public health."
The panel urged President Obama "most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation's productivity, and devastate American lives."
In 1980, another presidential panel, the Presidential Toxic Substances Strategy Committee, came to the same conclusion. It declared: "Of the hazards to human health arising from toxic substances, cancer is a leading cause of concern. Cancer is the only major cause of death that has continued to rise since 1900. It is now second only to heart disease as a cause of death... Some of the increase in cancer mortality since 1900 is a function of the greater average age of the U.S. population and the medical progress made against infectious disease. But even after correcting for age, both mortality (death) rates and incidence (new cases) of cancer are increasing. Many now believe that environmental (nongenetic) factors--life style and work and environmental exposures--are significant in the great majority of cancer cases seen."
Meanwhile, through the years solid science done by independent researchers -- not those taking money from the chemical or nuclear industries -- has extensively documented this cancer/environment connection.
"The evidence is there that the majority of cancer cases are environmentally caused," says Dr. David Carpenter, founding dean of the University of Albany School of Public Health and now director of the Institute for Health and the Environment there. Among the research he points to is a 2000 study involving examining health records of 44,788 pairs of twins in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. If genetics were the main cause of cancer, if one twin developed cancer the other probably would, too. This was not found. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that "inherited genetic factors make a minor contribution" in most cancers. "This finding indicates that the environment has the principle role in causing sporadic cancer."
Dr. Samuel Epstein, professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, in his book The Politics of Cancer concludes that cancer is a preventable disease "caused mainly by exposure to chemical or physical agents in the environment." The huge problem, he said, is how "a combination of powerful and well-focused pressures by special industrialized interests, together with public inattention and the indifference of the scientific community" has warped public policy and thwarted "meaningful attempts to prevent the carnage." Dr. Epstein now chairs the Cancer Prevention Coalition committed to eliminating those toxins that are causing the cancer epidemic (http://www.preventcancer.com).
The initiative, Prevention is The Cure, was founded by breast cancer survivor Karen Joy Miller and on its website,(http://www.preventionisthecure.org/), declares that four decades have passed, "and the wake-up call put forth by Rachel Carson" in her book Silent Spring "and other activists has been blocked by powerful political interests that profit from pollution."
These powerful interests have long had allies in government. The late James Sibbison, who went from being a reporter for the Associated Press to press officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, would tell the story of how immediately after Ronald Reagan became president, orders were given to the EPA press office "never to use the words cancer-causing in front of the word chemical." Now the number of chemicals in commercial use in the U.S. totals 80,000. The EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 has been required to assess all of them. In over 30 years it has gotten around to examining 200.
The poisoning--and consequent cancer--is not necessary. The report by the President's Cancer Panel emphasize how "the requite knowledge and technologies exist" to provide safe "alternatives" to cancer-causing agents.
But this doesn't suit those doing the polluting--who have such a hold on government.
Monday, November 8, 2010
The Push To Revive Nuclear Power -- A Presentation at the State University of New York at New Paltz on October 21, 2010
I’d like to start with the bottom line: the problem with nuclear power is—in one word—radioactivity.
In a presidential election campaign several years ago, there was the line: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
When it comes to nuclear power: It’s the radioactivity.
Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was in charge of building the first nuclear power plant in the United States, Shippingport in Pennsylvania, and is heralded as the “father” of the nuclear navy, finally realized that. In a farewell address before a committee of Congress in 1982, as he retired, Rickover said, “I’ll be philosophical. 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 cosmic radiation around when the Earth was in the process of forming. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and make 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….every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed, said Rickover, “and I think there the human race is going to wreck itself.” Rickover went on to declare: we must “outlaw nuclear reactors.”
That was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear development in the U.S., not Greenpeace.
The problem is radioactivity—the radioactivity unleashed when the atom is split. That splitting is called fission.
This is a bit technical, but we need to understand it to understand the central problem of nuclear power: radioactivity.
Uranium is taken from the ground. That portion of the uranium, not much, less than 1 percent, Uranium-235, that’s fissile—which means it splits when bombarded with neutrons. What does it split into? Radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: radioactive iodine, Strontium-90, Cesium-137—all called fission products. There are 200 of them.
The body doesn’t know the difference between, for example, that radioactive iodine and the iodine you put on a cut.
If these fission products are let loose in an accident—or are released without an accident and there are what are termed “routine emissions” from nuclear plants letting out fission products—and they are absorbed by the body, they can cause cancer and other diseases. They kill.
And then also produced by fission are three forms of ionizing radiation: alpha and beta particles and gamma rays.
And, importantly, additional neutrons are set loose which bombard other atoms and cause these atoms to split and yet more neutrons to be set loose. And this goes on and on—and is called a chain reaction.
And from this there’s heat—which in a nuclear power plant is used to boil water. It’s the most dangerous way to boil water ever designed.
Fission products, further, are what radioactive waste is composed of. Some of these poisons remain hot with radioactivity for thousands, some millions of years. During this time they must be isolated from life or they’ll destroy life.
This is the problem: radioactivity. The radioactivity produced with fission. This is the “horrible force” that Rickover spoke about that is unleashed and “is going to wreck” the human race. And we should not be anthropomorphic. Other forms of life are impacted by radioactivity, too. Cockroaches somehow are resistant to radioactivity—but we don’t want to leave a planet for cockroaches.
Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity?
It has far less to do with science than it has to do with politics and economics—in specific: vested interests.
Atomic technology begins in the United States with a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, from Albert Einstein—written in Peconic on Long Island—and, if you’d like to see that letter, go to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum not far from here, in Hyde Park. It’s on display.
In 1938 fission was accomplished in Nazi Germany. Physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, like Einstein, refugees from the Nazis, fearing Hitler might develop a bomb based on fission, with others, asked Einstein to write that letter to Roosevelt.
Einstein wrote that “it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium” leading “to the construction of bombs…extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Based on, yes, fission.
Out of that letter came the Manhattan Project. Scientists and engineers were gathered and put to work at facilities secretly built at locations across the United States. Laboratories and manufacturing plants in Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; Argonne, Illinois; Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Large corporations and universities were retained to manage the facilities. General Electric and Westinghouse—which were to become the Coke and Pepsi in the U.S. in the manufacture of nuclear power plants—got their start in atomic technology as Manhattan Project contractors.
By 1945 four atomic bombs had been built, one used for a test and two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
Also by 1945, 600,000 people had become part of a program on which billions of dollars had been spent.
With the war’s end there was anxiety among many of those involved in the Manhattan Project. Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see the endeavor and their jobs over; corporations didn’t want to see their contracts ended.
As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos Laboratory, with the war over there were now problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy…without a crash program underway.”
Some of the people and corporations could continue building nuclear weapons, and they did. And they built even bigger bombs—the “super,” the hydrogen bomb. Buy nuclear weapons do not lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to perpetuate the nuclear establishment that was established with the Manhattan Project?
There were all kinds of schemes conceived: using nuclear devices as substitutes for TNT to blast huge holes in the ground.
Indeed, in the 1950s the U.S. planned to string 250 nuclear devices across the isthmus of Panama and detonate them and, presto, there’d be a new canal—dubbed the Panatomic Canal. But that would rain radioactive debris on a large section of Central America. Finally, what the Manhattan Project became in 1946, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, withdrew that project because of “prospective host country opposition to nuclear-canal excavation.”
There were plans to use nuclear technology to use radioactivity to zap food so it would be seemingly OK to store for years. And to build nuclear-powered airplanes and nuclear-powered rockets.
And from the earlier reactors which were built to produce fuel for atomic bombs came another idea: using the heat of fission to boil water to produce electricity.
This was all about people and corporations seeking to perpetuate their vested interests, to somehow continue the nuclear establishment first created with the Manhattan Project.
The extreme dangers of atomic energy were understood.
1957 was a pivotal year. In that year, the first U.S. nuclear power plant—that one Rickover was in charge of building called Shippingport—opened. It was constructed by the government, and Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, made a speech saying that if you, the utility industry, didn’t build nuclear plants, we, the government, would. That was the stick. The carrot: passage in 1957 of the Price-Act Act which limited liability in the event of a catastrophic accident at a nuclear plant to $560 million –with the U.S. government paying the first $500 million.
Utilities would only have to pay $60 million in the event of a meltdown or other catastrophic accident.
That was the carrot.
I could fall on the sidewalk here at SUNY New Paltz and sue the state. Or slip in front of the motel where I’m staying in town and sue 87 Motel.
But if there is an accident at a nuclear plant—like a disaster at the Indian Point plants in Buchanan just 40 miles down the Hudson from where we are tonight—and New Paltz and elsewhere around the plant is impacted, and people are irradiated and land left rendered useless because of contamination, like around the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine, we’d only be able to get reimbursed for a fraction of the loss.
Price-Anderson was supposed to be a temporary law but it has been extended and extended with now a $10.5 billion cap, still a fraction of the damages seen as resulting from a major nuclear plant accident.
Also in 1957, the first report on the consequences of a major nuclear plant accident was done, WASH-740, it was named, done at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
It said that in the “worst case” a nuclear power plant accident could kill 3,400 people. And injure 43,000—as distances of up to 45 miles. Property damage could be as high as $7 billion, it said. Not $560 million.
But WASH-740 was based on small nuclear power plants like Shippingport. Being proposed were plants five time that size, like the Indian Point plants now running not far from here.
So a WASH-740-update was done. It increased the estimated death toll from a major nuclear plant accident to 45,000, injuries to 100,000 and property damage to up to $280 billion. And over and over again WASH-740-update states “the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”
This was a decade before a major nuclear plant accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania happened.
There’s not been a new nuclear power plant ordered and built since that near-catastrophe at Three Mile Island in 1979, but now the nuclear establishment—the nuclear interests within the U.S. government and nuclear industry—are pushing for a “revival” of nuclear power, to, more than 30 years later, get new nuclear plants built again.
They are showering us with disinformation to promote their deadly technology.
Some of the claims—and the realities:
Nuclear Power “Doesn’t Contribute” to Global Warming
This is a key claim in the current drive—that nuclear plants don’t emit greenhouse gases. But what we’re not supposed to know is that the overall nuclear “chain” or “cycle” has significant greenhouse gas emissions.
As Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, which has been involved in the Indian Point issue, the “dirty secret is that nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming. Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes. These include uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel; construction and deconstruction of the massive nuclear facility structures; and the disposition of high-level nuclear waste.”
As the Nuclear Information & Resource Service notes in its report Nuclear Power Can’t Stop Climate Change, the claims that nuclear plants don’t contribute to global warming “fail to account for the entire nuclear fuel chain.” Omitted is the “fact that the nuclear fuel chain emits more CO2” than “sustainable options…Wind and solar…which are virtually greenhouse-gas free.”
Michael Mariotte, executive director of NIRS, stresses, moreover, that these sustainable alternatives, renewable energy technologies here today are the “safer, faster and cheaper way” to deal with global warming. He says: “Why not go safer, faster and cheaper when you have a choice—and we do have a choice.”
Then there’s the claim that: No One in the U.S. Has Died As a Result of Nuclear Power And Perhaps the Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster Will Be 4,000 Dead
This book, published this year by the New York Academy of Sciences, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, is the most comprehensive study ever done on the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the worst nuclear plant disaster—so far—in the world.
Written by a team of scientists, it concludes that between 1986, when the accident happened, and 2004, some 985,000 people died, especially of cancer, as a result of the radioactivity emitted. That’s based on health data, radiological reports and scientific studies especially from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus but from other affected nations as well.
This new documentation of Chernobyl casualties coincides with the estimate of Dr. Vladimir Chernousenko, the nuclear physicist in charge of the clean-up, on a television program I did with him a decade ago—The Truth About Chernobyl which you can view on YouTube—that that a million people will die due to the accident.
Incidentally, the International Atomic Energy Agency claims that 56 people have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster and the final death toll can be expected to maybe reach 4,000. The IAEA was set up through the United Nations in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy.” It was to be a mirror image of our U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC was abolished by Congress in 1974 for being in conflict of interest: promoting and at the same time supposedly regulating nuclear power. But the IAEA continues. And its Chernobyl casualty claim is quite the Big Lie.
Importantly, it doesn’t take an accident for radioactivity to be released from a nuclear power plant affecting on people (and other life). As noted, there are “routine releases” of radioactive gases because nuclear plants are not sealed—and I’d recommend you go to the website of the Radiation and Public Health Project to see important reports on the impacts through the years—especially in cancer clusters—as a result of these “routine emissions.”
Then there’s The French Nuclear “Success” Story
In fact, the French nuclear power program is a health and economic disaster. On the table in the back I’ve left a pile reports by the group Beyond Nuclear, Nuclear Power and France: Setting the Record Straight. It discloses leukemia clusters in communities around France’s La Hague nuclear reprocessing center and notes that La Hague, on the Normandy Coast, discharges 100 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste yearly into the English Channel. Marine life has been seriously contaminated. Waters off La Hague have been “measured as 17 million times more radioactive than normal sea water”—and this contamination has affected waters as far as the Arctic Circle.
Inland, there have been numerous leaks at French nuclear plants—and the problems have been rising.
And there is no French love affair with nuclear energy but rather a deep mistrust. Polls show a majority in France want nuclear power phased out. There have been massive protests against construction of new plants.
Global Chance, a French research organization, has issued a report Nuclear Power: The Great Illusion, which states that the “image” that the French nuclear program is “successful…is a sham.”
A Nuclear Plant Can Withstand an Airborne Terrorist Hit
There have been concerns about nuclear plants being terrorist targets for years. This concern was heightened after 9/11 when American Airlines Flight 11 flew over the two Indian Point nuclear plants just above New York City before, minutes later, crashing into the World Trade Center. Then came the revelation that al-Qaeda had been considering targeting nuclear plants. And, reports are, it still is.
The nuclear industry insisted its plants were “robust” and could withstand such a hit. But in recent times, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which replaced the AEC) has finally stopped accepting this claim.
It has ordered the builders of all new nuclear plants in the U.S. do a “design-specific assessment of the effects of the impact of a large commercial aircraft.”
What about the existing 104 U.S. nuclear plants? They would be left as is and be, as Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear says, “pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction.” Gunter notes: “Public documents within the NRC confirm that the plants were never designed or constructed for aircraft impact, particularly explosion and fire.”
Uranium Fuel Is Abundant
The claim is made by nuclear proponents that the uranium fuel used in nuclear plants is an abundant source in comparison to oil that could vanish in several decades. But uranium fuel for nuclear plants comes from so-called “high-grade” ore containing substantial amounts of Uranium-235, the isotope of uranium that splits or fissions. It is not abundant.
Even the IAEA, that promoter of nuclear power, estimates that there is only enough high-grade uranium resources “to last only another 85 years.”
This limit is why many nuclear scientists have long said nuclear power will need to be based on manmade plutonium. But the plutonium-fueled breeder reactors can explode like atomic bombs. And they would contain tons of plutonium compared to the few pounds needed to make an atomic bomb. The first atomic bomb using plutonium, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, contained 15 pounds of plutonium. And plutonium-fueled breeder reactors, even more so than uranium-fueled reactors, can easily provide the fuel with which to make atomic bombs.
It is The “Peaceful” Atom
There has never been a “peaceful” atom. Any country which gets a nuclear facility has the materiel—the plutonium built up in a uranium reactor—and the trained technicians to make nuclear weapons. That’s how India got The Bomb in 1974. It got a “civilian” reactor from Canada and the U.S. trained Indian personnel in atomic technology. And India had nuclear weapons. Atoms for war and energy are two sides of the same coin.
Nuclear Power Is “Inexpensive”
It’s extremely expensive—now $12 to $15 billion to build a nuclear power plant. “No private money anywhere in the world is being used to build new nuclear plants,” points out Michael Mariotte of NIRS.
President Obama has called for a taxpayer-supported nuclear loan guarantee fund of $54.5 billion to build new nuclear plants. There’s been one bill that’s been in Congress, pushed by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, to provide $544 billion for new nuclear plants. There’s another bill to provide unlimited taxpayer dollars.
Says Amory Lovins, a physicist and co-founder and chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute: “Nuclear is incredibly expensive. “Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry…It’s uneconomic. It costs, for example, about three times as much as wind power, which is booming.”
Just last week, Constellation energy pulled out of building what was to be one of the first of the nuclear plants, at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, because of finance issues.
And, John Rowe, chairman of Exelon, the biggest nuclear utility in the country, said last week that the lower price of natural gas puts off the sought-for revival of nuclear power by 10 or 20 years. It need be forever.
Speaking of costs, the costs of an accident, the most recent report on the impacts of a reactor accident—and I’ve left photocopies of the Congressional breakdown of the report on the table in the back—is titled Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences for U.S. Nuclear Plants (acronymed CRAC-2).
Every nuclear plant in the U.S. was evaluated as to “early fatalities” in the event of a meltdown with breach of containment. For the Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear plants (Indian Point 1 has been permanently shut down), CRAC-2 projects 46,000 “early fatalities” if Indian Point 2 underwent a meltdown with breach of containment; 50,000 “early fatalities” from a meltdown at Indian Point 3. Peak “early injuries” from 2: 141,000. From 3, 167,000. Cancer deaths, 13,000 from 2; 14,000 from 3. As to property damage, CRAC-2 estimated $274 billion as a result of a meltdown at 2; $314 billion as a result of a meltdown at 3. But that’s in 1980 dollars which would be triple that today: a trillion dollars for an accident at one of the two Indian Point plants.
And, as noted, because of the Price-Anderson Act, all the nuclear industry would have to pay to compensate people for deaths, injuries and property damage would be $10.5 billion— a fraction of what CRAC-2 estimates would be the potential costs.
Another claim, The New Nuclear Plant Designs Are “Inherently Safe”
The nuclear industry is touting its “new and improved” nuclear plant models as “inherently safe.” They’re not. They, like all nuclear plants, are “inherently dangerous,” emphasizes Gunter of Beyond Nuclear. They are subject to catastrophic accidents, have “routine emissions” of radioactivity, produce nuclear waste which must somehow be isolated from life some of it for millions of years.
Says Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, the purportedly “inherently safe” new nuclear plants “do not exist.”
And they, in fact, never can. That’s because the basic issue about atomic energy is radioactivity. Once atom-splitting or fission occurs, radioactivity is produced—and it’s a killer.
Finally, the argument that Nuclear Power Is “Needed”
This is a central falsehood for, in fact, there’s absolutely no need to undergo the life-threatening dangers of nuclear power.
The noted British magazine, the New Scientist, put out this issue on safe renewable energy technologies based on a United Nations report that found, as the New Scientist notes, that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs.”
From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to geothermal to tidal-power to wave-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation, and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is here today.
Consider the breakthroughs at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, in using solar power to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen—with the hydrogen then being able to be used as a a fuel.
As Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at the lab told us when I did a TV shoot out there: “It’s the forever fuel. This uses are two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water–to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.”
Indeed, amazing at that lab, NREL, is whatever division you go to, scientists speak of the potential for all the energy we need from the energy technology they’re working on.
At NREL’s Solar Energy Research Facility they’ve pioneered a new amazing solar energy technology called “thin film photovoltaic.” Rather than conventional rigid solar panels, it involves flexible membranes impregnated with high-efficiency solar collectors. These sheets of solar-collecting membranes can be applied over glass buildings. Skyscrapers that rise in Manhattan or buildings here on the New Paltz campus can serve as electricity generators. “Thin film photovoltaic” is now being widely used in Europe. Scientists at NREL’s Solar Energy Research Facility say through solar we could get all the energy we’d ever need.
But then you go to NREL’s National Wind Technology Center where the scientists speak about wind providing all the energy we need. They were pioneers in the great advances in wind energy in recent years—especially the development of turbines with highly-efficient blades and wind turbines that can be…and are...being placed on land and increasingly, in Europe, offshore.
Bluewater Wind is getting set to build the first offshore wind farm off Delaware. It would be this country’s first.
Wind is now the fastest growing energy technology. It has been expanding 25 percent a year and that kind of future annual growth is predicted. Wind energy costs a fifth of what it did in the 1980s—and is now fully competitive with other energy technologies—and a continuing downward cost trend is anticipated.
And at NREL’s National Bioenergy Center, the scientists say biomass could fulfill a huge portion of the world energy needs—and we’re not talking here about using food stocks, corn, but switchgrass and poplar trees and other, again, non-food energy crops.
The scientists at NREL might not be right on any single energy source—but all together these and other renewable energy sources, can, in a mix, provide all the energy we need. As NREL declares on its website:“There’s no shortage of renewable energy resources.”
And there’s so many more:
Consider: wave power. In Portugal, a wave power project has just begun. Pelamis Wave Power, a Scottish company, has engineered it—a line of machines will be tapping nature’s constant ocean power.
And tidal energy. The government of Nova Scotia is moving ahead with tapping the enormous power of the 40 and 50 foot tides that twice a day rush in and out of the Bay of Fundy—driven by the moon.
And energy from algae.
And micro or distributed power, smart grids, cutting energy loss from transmitting electricity over long distances.
Renewables Are Ready is the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1999. Today, they are more than ready. Combined, importantly, with energy efficiency, these clean, safe, renewable energy technologies render nuclear as unneeded.
The question, of course, is can we put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. We can and must. What people have done—things that are terrible like nuclear power—other people can undo.
Nuclear technology came out of World War II like mustard gas came out of World War I. Mustard gas, a horrible killer, has been outlawed. Nuclear power needs to be, too—and instead we need to employ energy we can live with.
In a presidential election campaign several years ago, there was the line: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
When it comes to nuclear power: It’s the radioactivity.
Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was in charge of building the first nuclear power plant in the United States, Shippingport in Pennsylvania, and is heralded as the “father” of the nuclear navy, finally realized that. In a farewell address before a committee of Congress in 1982, as he retired, Rickover said, “I’ll be philosophical. 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 cosmic radiation around when the Earth was in the process of forming. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and make 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….every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed, said Rickover, “and I think there the human race is going to wreck itself.” Rickover went on to declare: we must “outlaw nuclear reactors.”
That was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear development in the U.S., not Greenpeace.
The problem is radioactivity—the radioactivity unleashed when the atom is split. That splitting is called fission.
This is a bit technical, but we need to understand it to understand the central problem of nuclear power: radioactivity.
Uranium is taken from the ground. That portion of the uranium, not much, less than 1 percent, Uranium-235, that’s fissile—which means it splits when bombarded with neutrons. What does it split into? Radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: radioactive iodine, Strontium-90, Cesium-137—all called fission products. There are 200 of them.
The body doesn’t know the difference between, for example, that radioactive iodine and the iodine you put on a cut.
If these fission products are let loose in an accident—or are released without an accident and there are what are termed “routine emissions” from nuclear plants letting out fission products—and they are absorbed by the body, they can cause cancer and other diseases. They kill.
And then also produced by fission are three forms of ionizing radiation: alpha and beta particles and gamma rays.
And, importantly, additional neutrons are set loose which bombard other atoms and cause these atoms to split and yet more neutrons to be set loose. And this goes on and on—and is called a chain reaction.
And from this there’s heat—which in a nuclear power plant is used to boil water. It’s the most dangerous way to boil water ever designed.
Fission products, further, are what radioactive waste is composed of. Some of these poisons remain hot with radioactivity for thousands, some millions of years. During this time they must be isolated from life or they’ll destroy life.
This is the problem: radioactivity. The radioactivity produced with fission. This is the “horrible force” that Rickover spoke about that is unleashed and “is going to wreck” the human race. And we should not be anthropomorphic. Other forms of life are impacted by radioactivity, too. Cockroaches somehow are resistant to radioactivity—but we don’t want to leave a planet for cockroaches.
Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity?
It has far less to do with science than it has to do with politics and economics—in specific: vested interests.
Atomic technology begins in the United States with a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, from Albert Einstein—written in Peconic on Long Island—and, if you’d like to see that letter, go to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum not far from here, in Hyde Park. It’s on display.
In 1938 fission was accomplished in Nazi Germany. Physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, like Einstein, refugees from the Nazis, fearing Hitler might develop a bomb based on fission, with others, asked Einstein to write that letter to Roosevelt.
Einstein wrote that “it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium” leading “to the construction of bombs…extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Based on, yes, fission.
Out of that letter came the Manhattan Project. Scientists and engineers were gathered and put to work at facilities secretly built at locations across the United States. Laboratories and manufacturing plants in Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; Argonne, Illinois; Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Large corporations and universities were retained to manage the facilities. General Electric and Westinghouse—which were to become the Coke and Pepsi in the U.S. in the manufacture of nuclear power plants—got their start in atomic technology as Manhattan Project contractors.
By 1945 four atomic bombs had been built, one used for a test and two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
Also by 1945, 600,000 people had become part of a program on which billions of dollars had been spent.
With the war’s end there was anxiety among many of those involved in the Manhattan Project. Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see the endeavor and their jobs over; corporations didn’t want to see their contracts ended.
As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos Laboratory, with the war over there were now problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy…without a crash program underway.”
Some of the people and corporations could continue building nuclear weapons, and they did. And they built even bigger bombs—the “super,” the hydrogen bomb. Buy nuclear weapons do not lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to perpetuate the nuclear establishment that was established with the Manhattan Project?
There were all kinds of schemes conceived: using nuclear devices as substitutes for TNT to blast huge holes in the ground.
Indeed, in the 1950s the U.S. planned to string 250 nuclear devices across the isthmus of Panama and detonate them and, presto, there’d be a new canal—dubbed the Panatomic Canal. But that would rain radioactive debris on a large section of Central America. Finally, what the Manhattan Project became in 1946, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, withdrew that project because of “prospective host country opposition to nuclear-canal excavation.”
There were plans to use nuclear technology to use radioactivity to zap food so it would be seemingly OK to store for years. And to build nuclear-powered airplanes and nuclear-powered rockets.
And from the earlier reactors which were built to produce fuel for atomic bombs came another idea: using the heat of fission to boil water to produce electricity.
This was all about people and corporations seeking to perpetuate their vested interests, to somehow continue the nuclear establishment first created with the Manhattan Project.
The extreme dangers of atomic energy were understood.
1957 was a pivotal year. In that year, the first U.S. nuclear power plant—that one Rickover was in charge of building called Shippingport—opened. It was constructed by the government, and Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, made a speech saying that if you, the utility industry, didn’t build nuclear plants, we, the government, would. That was the stick. The carrot: passage in 1957 of the Price-Act Act which limited liability in the event of a catastrophic accident at a nuclear plant to $560 million –with the U.S. government paying the first $500 million.
Utilities would only have to pay $60 million in the event of a meltdown or other catastrophic accident.
That was the carrot.
I could fall on the sidewalk here at SUNY New Paltz and sue the state. Or slip in front of the motel where I’m staying in town and sue 87 Motel.
But if there is an accident at a nuclear plant—like a disaster at the Indian Point plants in Buchanan just 40 miles down the Hudson from where we are tonight—and New Paltz and elsewhere around the plant is impacted, and people are irradiated and land left rendered useless because of contamination, like around the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine, we’d only be able to get reimbursed for a fraction of the loss.
Price-Anderson was supposed to be a temporary law but it has been extended and extended with now a $10.5 billion cap, still a fraction of the damages seen as resulting from a major nuclear plant accident.
Also in 1957, the first report on the consequences of a major nuclear plant accident was done, WASH-740, it was named, done at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
It said that in the “worst case” a nuclear power plant accident could kill 3,400 people. And injure 43,000—as distances of up to 45 miles. Property damage could be as high as $7 billion, it said. Not $560 million.
But WASH-740 was based on small nuclear power plants like Shippingport. Being proposed were plants five time that size, like the Indian Point plants now running not far from here.
So a WASH-740-update was done. It increased the estimated death toll from a major nuclear plant accident to 45,000, injuries to 100,000 and property damage to up to $280 billion. And over and over again WASH-740-update states “the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”
This was a decade before a major nuclear plant accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania happened.
There’s not been a new nuclear power plant ordered and built since that near-catastrophe at Three Mile Island in 1979, but now the nuclear establishment—the nuclear interests within the U.S. government and nuclear industry—are pushing for a “revival” of nuclear power, to, more than 30 years later, get new nuclear plants built again.
They are showering us with disinformation to promote their deadly technology.
Some of the claims—and the realities:
Nuclear Power “Doesn’t Contribute” to Global Warming
This is a key claim in the current drive—that nuclear plants don’t emit greenhouse gases. But what we’re not supposed to know is that the overall nuclear “chain” or “cycle” has significant greenhouse gas emissions.
As Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, which has been involved in the Indian Point issue, the “dirty secret is that nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming. Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes. These include uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel; construction and deconstruction of the massive nuclear facility structures; and the disposition of high-level nuclear waste.”
As the Nuclear Information & Resource Service notes in its report Nuclear Power Can’t Stop Climate Change, the claims that nuclear plants don’t contribute to global warming “fail to account for the entire nuclear fuel chain.” Omitted is the “fact that the nuclear fuel chain emits more CO2” than “sustainable options…Wind and solar…which are virtually greenhouse-gas free.”
Michael Mariotte, executive director of NIRS, stresses, moreover, that these sustainable alternatives, renewable energy technologies here today are the “safer, faster and cheaper way” to deal with global warming. He says: “Why not go safer, faster and cheaper when you have a choice—and we do have a choice.”
Then there’s the claim that: No One in the U.S. Has Died As a Result of Nuclear Power And Perhaps the Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster Will Be 4,000 Dead
This book, published this year by the New York Academy of Sciences, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, is the most comprehensive study ever done on the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the worst nuclear plant disaster—so far—in the world.
Written by a team of scientists, it concludes that between 1986, when the accident happened, and 2004, some 985,000 people died, especially of cancer, as a result of the radioactivity emitted. That’s based on health data, radiological reports and scientific studies especially from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus but from other affected nations as well.
This new documentation of Chernobyl casualties coincides with the estimate of Dr. Vladimir Chernousenko, the nuclear physicist in charge of the clean-up, on a television program I did with him a decade ago—The Truth About Chernobyl which you can view on YouTube—that that a million people will die due to the accident.
Incidentally, the International Atomic Energy Agency claims that 56 people have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster and the final death toll can be expected to maybe reach 4,000. The IAEA was set up through the United Nations in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy.” It was to be a mirror image of our U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC was abolished by Congress in 1974 for being in conflict of interest: promoting and at the same time supposedly regulating nuclear power. But the IAEA continues. And its Chernobyl casualty claim is quite the Big Lie.
Importantly, it doesn’t take an accident for radioactivity to be released from a nuclear power plant affecting on people (and other life). As noted, there are “routine releases” of radioactive gases because nuclear plants are not sealed—and I’d recommend you go to the website of the Radiation and Public Health Project to see important reports on the impacts through the years—especially in cancer clusters—as a result of these “routine emissions.”
Then there’s The French Nuclear “Success” Story
In fact, the French nuclear power program is a health and economic disaster. On the table in the back I’ve left a pile reports by the group Beyond Nuclear, Nuclear Power and France: Setting the Record Straight. It discloses leukemia clusters in communities around France’s La Hague nuclear reprocessing center and notes that La Hague, on the Normandy Coast, discharges 100 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste yearly into the English Channel. Marine life has been seriously contaminated. Waters off La Hague have been “measured as 17 million times more radioactive than normal sea water”—and this contamination has affected waters as far as the Arctic Circle.
Inland, there have been numerous leaks at French nuclear plants—and the problems have been rising.
And there is no French love affair with nuclear energy but rather a deep mistrust. Polls show a majority in France want nuclear power phased out. There have been massive protests against construction of new plants.
Global Chance, a French research organization, has issued a report Nuclear Power: The Great Illusion, which states that the “image” that the French nuclear program is “successful…is a sham.”
A Nuclear Plant Can Withstand an Airborne Terrorist Hit
There have been concerns about nuclear plants being terrorist targets for years. This concern was heightened after 9/11 when American Airlines Flight 11 flew over the two Indian Point nuclear plants just above New York City before, minutes later, crashing into the World Trade Center. Then came the revelation that al-Qaeda had been considering targeting nuclear plants. And, reports are, it still is.
The nuclear industry insisted its plants were “robust” and could withstand such a hit. But in recent times, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which replaced the AEC) has finally stopped accepting this claim.
It has ordered the builders of all new nuclear plants in the U.S. do a “design-specific assessment of the effects of the impact of a large commercial aircraft.”
What about the existing 104 U.S. nuclear plants? They would be left as is and be, as Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear says, “pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction.” Gunter notes: “Public documents within the NRC confirm that the plants were never designed or constructed for aircraft impact, particularly explosion and fire.”
Uranium Fuel Is Abundant
The claim is made by nuclear proponents that the uranium fuel used in nuclear plants is an abundant source in comparison to oil that could vanish in several decades. But uranium fuel for nuclear plants comes from so-called “high-grade” ore containing substantial amounts of Uranium-235, the isotope of uranium that splits or fissions. It is not abundant.
Even the IAEA, that promoter of nuclear power, estimates that there is only enough high-grade uranium resources “to last only another 85 years.”
This limit is why many nuclear scientists have long said nuclear power will need to be based on manmade plutonium. But the plutonium-fueled breeder reactors can explode like atomic bombs. And they would contain tons of plutonium compared to the few pounds needed to make an atomic bomb. The first atomic bomb using plutonium, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, contained 15 pounds of plutonium. And plutonium-fueled breeder reactors, even more so than uranium-fueled reactors, can easily provide the fuel with which to make atomic bombs.
It is The “Peaceful” Atom
There has never been a “peaceful” atom. Any country which gets a nuclear facility has the materiel—the plutonium built up in a uranium reactor—and the trained technicians to make nuclear weapons. That’s how India got The Bomb in 1974. It got a “civilian” reactor from Canada and the U.S. trained Indian personnel in atomic technology. And India had nuclear weapons. Atoms for war and energy are two sides of the same coin.
Nuclear Power Is “Inexpensive”
It’s extremely expensive—now $12 to $15 billion to build a nuclear power plant. “No private money anywhere in the world is being used to build new nuclear plants,” points out Michael Mariotte of NIRS.
President Obama has called for a taxpayer-supported nuclear loan guarantee fund of $54.5 billion to build new nuclear plants. There’s been one bill that’s been in Congress, pushed by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, to provide $544 billion for new nuclear plants. There’s another bill to provide unlimited taxpayer dollars.
Says Amory Lovins, a physicist and co-founder and chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute: “Nuclear is incredibly expensive. “Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry…It’s uneconomic. It costs, for example, about three times as much as wind power, which is booming.”
Just last week, Constellation energy pulled out of building what was to be one of the first of the nuclear plants, at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, because of finance issues.
And, John Rowe, chairman of Exelon, the biggest nuclear utility in the country, said last week that the lower price of natural gas puts off the sought-for revival of nuclear power by 10 or 20 years. It need be forever.
Speaking of costs, the costs of an accident, the most recent report on the impacts of a reactor accident—and I’ve left photocopies of the Congressional breakdown of the report on the table in the back—is titled Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences for U.S. Nuclear Plants (acronymed CRAC-2).
Every nuclear plant in the U.S. was evaluated as to “early fatalities” in the event of a meltdown with breach of containment. For the Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear plants (Indian Point 1 has been permanently shut down), CRAC-2 projects 46,000 “early fatalities” if Indian Point 2 underwent a meltdown with breach of containment; 50,000 “early fatalities” from a meltdown at Indian Point 3. Peak “early injuries” from 2: 141,000. From 3, 167,000. Cancer deaths, 13,000 from 2; 14,000 from 3. As to property damage, CRAC-2 estimated $274 billion as a result of a meltdown at 2; $314 billion as a result of a meltdown at 3. But that’s in 1980 dollars which would be triple that today: a trillion dollars for an accident at one of the two Indian Point plants.
And, as noted, because of the Price-Anderson Act, all the nuclear industry would have to pay to compensate people for deaths, injuries and property damage would be $10.5 billion— a fraction of what CRAC-2 estimates would be the potential costs.
Another claim, The New Nuclear Plant Designs Are “Inherently Safe”
The nuclear industry is touting its “new and improved” nuclear plant models as “inherently safe.” They’re not. They, like all nuclear plants, are “inherently dangerous,” emphasizes Gunter of Beyond Nuclear. They are subject to catastrophic accidents, have “routine emissions” of radioactivity, produce nuclear waste which must somehow be isolated from life some of it for millions of years.
Says Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, the purportedly “inherently safe” new nuclear plants “do not exist.”
And they, in fact, never can. That’s because the basic issue about atomic energy is radioactivity. Once atom-splitting or fission occurs, radioactivity is produced—and it’s a killer.
Finally, the argument that Nuclear Power Is “Needed”
This is a central falsehood for, in fact, there’s absolutely no need to undergo the life-threatening dangers of nuclear power.
The noted British magazine, the New Scientist, put out this issue on safe renewable energy technologies based on a United Nations report that found, as the New Scientist notes, that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs.”
From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to geothermal to tidal-power to wave-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation, and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is here today.
Consider the breakthroughs at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, in using solar power to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen—with the hydrogen then being able to be used as a a fuel.
As Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at the lab told us when I did a TV shoot out there: “It’s the forever fuel. This uses are two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water–to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.”
Indeed, amazing at that lab, NREL, is whatever division you go to, scientists speak of the potential for all the energy we need from the energy technology they’re working on.
At NREL’s Solar Energy Research Facility they’ve pioneered a new amazing solar energy technology called “thin film photovoltaic.” Rather than conventional rigid solar panels, it involves flexible membranes impregnated with high-efficiency solar collectors. These sheets of solar-collecting membranes can be applied over glass buildings. Skyscrapers that rise in Manhattan or buildings here on the New Paltz campus can serve as electricity generators. “Thin film photovoltaic” is now being widely used in Europe. Scientists at NREL’s Solar Energy Research Facility say through solar we could get all the energy we’d ever need.
But then you go to NREL’s National Wind Technology Center where the scientists speak about wind providing all the energy we need. They were pioneers in the great advances in wind energy in recent years—especially the development of turbines with highly-efficient blades and wind turbines that can be…and are...being placed on land and increasingly, in Europe, offshore.
Bluewater Wind is getting set to build the first offshore wind farm off Delaware. It would be this country’s first.
Wind is now the fastest growing energy technology. It has been expanding 25 percent a year and that kind of future annual growth is predicted. Wind energy costs a fifth of what it did in the 1980s—and is now fully competitive with other energy technologies—and a continuing downward cost trend is anticipated.
And at NREL’s National Bioenergy Center, the scientists say biomass could fulfill a huge portion of the world energy needs—and we’re not talking here about using food stocks, corn, but switchgrass and poplar trees and other, again, non-food energy crops.
The scientists at NREL might not be right on any single energy source—but all together these and other renewable energy sources, can, in a mix, provide all the energy we need. As NREL declares on its website:“There’s no shortage of renewable energy resources.”
And there’s so many more:
Consider: wave power. In Portugal, a wave power project has just begun. Pelamis Wave Power, a Scottish company, has engineered it—a line of machines will be tapping nature’s constant ocean power.
And tidal energy. The government of Nova Scotia is moving ahead with tapping the enormous power of the 40 and 50 foot tides that twice a day rush in and out of the Bay of Fundy—driven by the moon.
And energy from algae.
And micro or distributed power, smart grids, cutting energy loss from transmitting electricity over long distances.
Renewables Are Ready is the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1999. Today, they are more than ready. Combined, importantly, with energy efficiency, these clean, safe, renewable energy technologies render nuclear as unneeded.
The question, of course, is can we put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. We can and must. What people have done—things that are terrible like nuclear power—other people can undo.
Nuclear technology came out of World War II like mustard gas came out of World War I. Mustard gas, a horrible killer, has been outlawed. Nuclear power needs to be, too—and instead we need to employ energy we can live with.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Jellyfish Revenge, continued
Summer was officially over last week and it was some summer in the Greater New York Area: record hot and a summer—and this is related—in which we were hit with loads of jellyfish off Long Island, where I live.
It used to be that jellyfish would arrive in these parts in August—when the waters off our shores had become sufficiently warm. But again this year, those stinging globs were here in June and by July there were swarms of them, remaining through August.
This jellyfish explosion here is mirrored around the world. With global warming a prime culprit, there’s been the revenge of the jellyfish for those who love the water all over this earth.
“There has been a global increase in jellyfish with the higher temperatures of recent years,” explains Dr. Christopher Gobler, associate professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at New York’s Stony Brook University. “With global warming, jellyfish emerge earlier, grow quicker and stay around longer.”
He notes other factors, too—also having to do with the activities of people.
There’s eutrophication, the process in which water bodies receive excess nutrients. Algal blooms are triggered by eutrophication, Dr. Gobler notes, and the blooms “reduce oxygen and water clarity. These conditions have adverse effects on planktivorous fish [fish that eat plankton] meaning the fish consume lower amounts of plankton. Because jellyfish are non-visual predators and are less sensitive to low oxygen” they can feast on the plankton that the planktivorous fish are missing. Jellyfish “thrive under these conditions.”
Then there’s overfishing. “The overharvest of filter feeding bivalves and planktivorous fish such as menhaden leaves more plankton for jellyfish to consume,” says Dr. Gobler.
And there is what’s termed “shoreline hardening—the building of bulkheads, docks and jetties which encourages greater jellyfish populations because jellyfish polyps attach to these “hard surfaces” and “we have more of these now,” says Dr. Gobler.
What was termed a worldwide “jellyfish plague” was examined a while back by the British magazine, New Scientist, in an article -- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626323.700-insight-overfishing-is-creating-a-jellyfish-plague.html -- that began: “Global warming is starting to sting—literally.” The story by Debora Mackenzie told of how warmer water caused by global warming has resulted in mammoth swarms of jellyfish—such as one 20 square miles in area, 33 feet deep in the Irish Sea that hit a salmon farm “killing all 100,000 fish in it.
The piece also linked the increased levels of carbon dioxide being released on the planet—central to global warming—to the jellyfish explosion. The CO2 discharges are causing seawater to become more acidic. This has been harming “small creatures with acid-soluble shells that compete with jellyfish.”
It stressed overfishing, and what was described as “a vicious cycle” was outlined. “Overfishing means we need more fish farms and it also boosts populations of jellyfish which damage fish farms,” it related. “As the growing human population needs more food, that exacerbates warming, and…jellyfish prosper. The final irony: small plankton-eating fish, which compete most directly with jellyfish” are being “overfished—largely to make fishmeal, the main food for fish farms.”
The article stated: “Fisheries scientists have warned for years that we are replacing an ocean full of fish with one full of jellyfish.”
Wow, what an aquatic mess.
Now with due respect to those in the Orient who like to eat jellyfish, I must say I don’t like them at all—I can’t imagine eating them and I don’t like swimming around them.
Considering that humans are the prime culprits when it comes to the conditions that have created the huge uspsurge in jellyfish, it’s obvious that we must change course, and fast. The jellyfish explosion is sending us a very clear message.
It used to be that jellyfish would arrive in these parts in August—when the waters off our shores had become sufficiently warm. But again this year, those stinging globs were here in June and by July there were swarms of them, remaining through August.
This jellyfish explosion here is mirrored around the world. With global warming a prime culprit, there’s been the revenge of the jellyfish for those who love the water all over this earth.
“There has been a global increase in jellyfish with the higher temperatures of recent years,” explains Dr. Christopher Gobler, associate professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at New York’s Stony Brook University. “With global warming, jellyfish emerge earlier, grow quicker and stay around longer.”
He notes other factors, too—also having to do with the activities of people.
There’s eutrophication, the process in which water bodies receive excess nutrients. Algal blooms are triggered by eutrophication, Dr. Gobler notes, and the blooms “reduce oxygen and water clarity. These conditions have adverse effects on planktivorous fish [fish that eat plankton] meaning the fish consume lower amounts of plankton. Because jellyfish are non-visual predators and are less sensitive to low oxygen” they can feast on the plankton that the planktivorous fish are missing. Jellyfish “thrive under these conditions.”
Then there’s overfishing. “The overharvest of filter feeding bivalves and planktivorous fish such as menhaden leaves more plankton for jellyfish to consume,” says Dr. Gobler.
And there is what’s termed “shoreline hardening—the building of bulkheads, docks and jetties which encourages greater jellyfish populations because jellyfish polyps attach to these “hard surfaces” and “we have more of these now,” says Dr. Gobler.
What was termed a worldwide “jellyfish plague” was examined a while back by the British magazine, New Scientist, in an article -- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626323.700-insight-overfishing-is-creating-a-jellyfish-plague.html -- that began: “Global warming is starting to sting—literally.” The story by Debora Mackenzie told of how warmer water caused by global warming has resulted in mammoth swarms of jellyfish—such as one 20 square miles in area, 33 feet deep in the Irish Sea that hit a salmon farm “killing all 100,000 fish in it.
The piece also linked the increased levels of carbon dioxide being released on the planet—central to global warming—to the jellyfish explosion. The CO2 discharges are causing seawater to become more acidic. This has been harming “small creatures with acid-soluble shells that compete with jellyfish.”
It stressed overfishing, and what was described as “a vicious cycle” was outlined. “Overfishing means we need more fish farms and it also boosts populations of jellyfish which damage fish farms,” it related. “As the growing human population needs more food, that exacerbates warming, and…jellyfish prosper. The final irony: small plankton-eating fish, which compete most directly with jellyfish” are being “overfished—largely to make fishmeal, the main food for fish farms.”
The article stated: “Fisheries scientists have warned for years that we are replacing an ocean full of fish with one full of jellyfish.”
Wow, what an aquatic mess.
Now with due respect to those in the Orient who like to eat jellyfish, I must say I don’t like them at all—I can’t imagine eating them and I don’t like swimming around them.
Considering that humans are the prime culprits when it comes to the conditions that have created the huge uspsurge in jellyfish, it’s obvious that we must change course, and fast. The jellyfish explosion is sending us a very clear message.
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