A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

For 10 years now, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been busily extending the operating license of nuclear power plants—designed to run for 40 years—another 20 years.

Imagine driving down a highway in a 60-year-old car.

But safety concerns are minimized by the NRC, a lapdog of the nuclear industry. Just as the NRC has never denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anywhere, anytime in the U.S., it has rubber-stamped every application for a 20-year extension for now 52 nuclear plants.

That’s half the 104 nuclear plants in the U.S. and, as the 40-year licenses of the rest get set to expire, watch the NRC extend their licenses to run for another 20 years, too.

And it may end up to be more than 20 years. The New York Times in a report April 2 on the NRC extending the operating license to 60 years of the oldest nuclear plant in the U.S., Oyster Creek in New Jersey, noted that “some commission officials have even discussed the possibility of a second round of extensions that would allow reactors to operate for up to 80 years.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/science/earth/02nuclear.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=Nuclear%20Regulatory%20Commission%20&st=cse

Imagine driving down a highway in an 80-year-old car.

Consider how trustworthy that 1929 antique would be racing down the interstate.

“This decision is radioactive. To keep open the nation’s oldest nuclear power plant for another 20 years is just going to lead to a disaster,” said Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club. “We could easily replace the plant with 200 windmills that will not pose a danger.”

At the NRC hearings on the re-licensing of Oyster Creek, evidence was presented that the critical drywell liner—the shell that encases the reactor and is supposed to suppress radioactive steam during an accident—is too corroded to deal with a mishap. Major deterioration was also found in other areas of the plant 60 miles south of New York City.

Even an avid nuclear power booster, William Tucker, who recently published a pro-nuclear book, is calling for no operating license extensions for Oyster Creek and the Indian Point nuclear plants, 28 miles north of New York City which the NRC is also soon to rule on re-licensing. “Veterans of the nuclear industry I talk to say they are very concerned that relying on aging reactors like Oyster Creek and Indian Point is eventually going to lead to an accident which will kill nuclear power in this country forever,” said Tucker in a statement last week.

But many, many people would be killed, too.

The NRC working with Sandia National Laboratories did an analysis in the 1980s on the consequences of a meltdown with breach of containment at every nuclear plant in the United States—including Oyster Creek and the two operating Indian Point plants.

Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences for U.S. Nuclear Plants (acronymed CRAC-2) projected, for Oyster Creek: 16,000 “peak early fatalities;” 10,000 “peak early injuries;” 23,000 “peak cancer deaths;” and $79.8 billion in “scaled costs” in terms of property damage—and that was in 1980 dollars. For Indian Point 2, in a more densely populated area with more valuable real estate that would be rendered uninhabitable for millennia, it would be: 46,000 “peak early fatalities;” 141,000 “peak early injuries;” 13,000 “peak cancer deaths” and $274 billion in “scaled costs.” And for the slightly larger Indian Point 3 plant, it would be 50,000 “peak early fatalities;” 167,000 “peak early injuries;” 14,000 “peak cancer deaths;” and $314 billion in “scaled costs.” Again, those are 1980 dollars; it would be triple that today.

The World Nuclear Organization notes how “most of today’s nuclear plants…were originally designed for 30 or 40-year operating lives…Some components simply wear out, corrode or degrade to a low efficiency…The properties of materials may degrade with age, particularly with heat and neutron irradiation.”

But operators of nuclear power plants want to wring out as much from their investments as they can—and not only do they want them to operate beyond their expected lifetimes, they are seeking to run them hotter and harder in order to generate more power. And the NRC has been obliging the industry on this, too.

The first nuclear facilities the NRC gave permission to operate another 20 years were the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plants in Maryland 45 miles southeast of Washington, D.C. That was in 1999.

“The public has been closed out of the process,” said Paul Gunter, then with the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. He added: “The whole term ‘nuclear safety’ is an oxymoron. It’s an inherently dangerous process and an inherently dangerous industry that has been aging.”

Last week Gunter, now director of the Reactor Oversight Program of the organization Beyond Nuclear, said the NRC re-licensing program is “blind to how these machines are breaking apart at the molecular level…they embrittle, crack and corrode.” The agency in its “rigged game” is driving the nation toward a nuclear disaster, he said.

Can the NRC be stopped before disaster occurs?

The U.S. Congress finally became so disgusted with the Atomic Energy Commission and its nuclear boosterism—it, too, never denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anywhere, anytime in the U.S..—that it abolished the AEC in 1974. Congress then created the NRC to ostensibly properly regulate the nuclear industry.

That has never happened.

It’s time that the NRC be abolished, too, along with the toxic technology that it promotes—nuclear power—before it is too late. Safe, clean renewable energy technologies are here today making dangerous nuclear power unnecessary.

Meanwhile, by extending the licenses of nuclear plants by 20 and now perhaps 40 years, the NRC has gone beyond tempting fate. It is asking for it, the it being an atomic catastrophe which would kill tens of thousands and render a part of the United States a dead zone.

(Published on CounterPunch April 13, 2009)

Damage Not Done By W

One of the things we must be thankful for during this time of economic instability is that former President George W. Bush never got his way in privatizing social security. Bush had wanted social security accounts transferred from the government to the stock market.

If millions upon millions of Americans today had had their social security accounts invested in the stock market, consider the situation.

The distress of folks has been intense enough seeing their 401(k) retirement accounts—heavily based on stocks—lose a good part of their value with the decline of Wall Street. Imagine if this had happened to their social security accounts.

This privatization of social security was not some incidental issue for the Bush administration. Bush built is second-term domestic policy agenda around it.

There were critics of the scheme. It was a “lethal plan,” insisted Edith Weller of the Economic Policy Institute. She wrote that social security under the Bush proposal “would no longer be a social insurance program providing a guarantee of…lifelong retirement income. Instead,” peoples “core retirement income would be put at risk.”

She said “social security is too important a source of income for America’s families to be left to the uncertainties of the stock market.”

And this was well before the stock market demonstrated something beyond uncertainties—it had a meltdown, as it has every few decades in U.S. history.

The AARP campaigned against the Bush plan and was part of the coalition that successfully stopped it in Congress.

Importantly, polls showed that a majority of Americans were dead-set against it—although that often doesn’t deter politicians.

The AARP noted that Bush’s line was that with privatization, Americans would have “a chance to make money in the stock market.” It emphasized that it “and other critics contend that private accounts carved out of social security funds add an element of risk to retirement savings.”

Bush was on social security privatization—as he was on so many issues—as stubborn as could be. Even as he saw his plan failing, he insisted he was “confident that eventually the will would be there to make it a reality.”

It’s a new day today. This and so many of Bush’s bad calls—from environmental protection to regulatory issues to health matters and on and on—are gone, thank the democratic process.

We All Live, More Or Less, In Illinois

The antics of now thankfully former Governor Rod Blagojevich—and the jailing of his predecessor and two other former Illinois governors for corruption—resulted in the perception that Illinois is the most corrupt state.

As an FBI agent commented when the infamous tapes of Blagojevich were presented: “If it is not the most corrupt state in the United States, Illinois is certainly one hell of a competitor.”

Following that, the New York Times devoted nearly a full page to listings of comparative corruption among states. http://nytimes.com/2008/12/14/weekinreview/14marsh.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=corruption%20state&st=cse

One chart was based on local, state and federal officials convicted of federal corruption charges between 1996 and 2007. Florida topped the list followed by New York and Texas. As for my neighboring state of Connecticut—sometimes called Corrupticut after the jailing for corruption of former Governor John Rowland—it was smack in the middle, 26.

Then there was a chart based on convicted public officials per one million constituents. This was described as “perhaps a better measure”—crookedness based on one-person, one vote.

Well, North Dakota topped that list, with Alaska second—you betcha.

Then there was a chart based on the views of journalists who cover state governments. In their minds, Rhode Island, which also not long ago had a governor jailed for corruption, was Number One. Louisiana, Two. New York was pretty well down on that list—16, even below Connecticut, 12.

Back to Illinois, Chicago and that long-corrupt county in which the windy city sits, Cook County. There was a kind of contest as last year ended, on the website http://www.reformcookcounty.com/ on Cook County’s Most Corrupt Activities of 2008.

Among the top were, of course, Blagojevich’s attempted sale of now President Obama’s Senate seat.

Also on the list was the enactment of a hefty sales tax increase—giving Cook County the highest sales tax in the country: 10.25%. Ouch.

Yeah, we pay for corruption in many ways.

Which takes us to Wall Street’s now fallen financial lions, the failed bank tycoons, the other corporate crooks in the tradition of Enron, etc.

Corrupt politicians. Corrupt financial titans.

It’s like comparing typhoid and malaria.

Both must be eradicated.

If there’s to be a civilized society there needs to be integrity and honesty.

At this point, we all live, more or less, in Illinois.

Cold War Atomic Craziness

On Long Island, where I live, a bill was recently passed by the Suffolk County Legislature providing for prisoner labor to sort metal which has piled up at the former BOMARC base in Westhampton.

The legislature’s presiding officer said that Suffolk County could make millions of dollars by selling the metal as scrap.

The base was transferred to the county after its closing and has been used as a firing range for police, an impoundment yard for vehicles and for storage of old equipment and county records. .

To get some background on the BOMARC base, I went to Google, putting in the words BOMARC and Suffolk. Among the first websites listed was that of the New York State Military Museum which related: “BOMARC, the missile site in Westhampton was operated by the 6th Air Defense Missile Squadron of the USAF Air Defense Command. It was operational with the first version of the BOMARC missile, the BOMARC A, from 1959 through 1964. The base has 56 missile shelters. Each missile was armed with a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead.” http://www.dmna.state.ny.us/forts/fortsA_D/bomarc.htm

What was that? “Each missile was armed with a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead.” The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the TNT equivalent of 13 kilotons.

There were further details on other websites. They told of how the mission of the BOMARC base in Westhampton—and BOMARC bases set up all over the nation—was to blast Soviet bombers from the sky. Why use nuclear-tipped missiles? That way a direct hit need not be made. Once a BOMARC missile came close to the Soviet bombers, the atomic weapon on its tip would be detonated and destroy not one but part of a formation of bombers.

A November 21, 1958 front-page article in the New York Times (downloadable from the New York Times’ online archive) was headlined: “Riverhead Missile Base to Get Bomarcs With Nuclear Warheads by ’60.” It began: “The Suffolk Bomarc Base, ninety miles east of New York City, will be equipped with anti-aircraft missiles carrying nuclear warheads. The missiles, which have a range up to 250 miles, will be launchable from the site near Riverhead, L.I.” There would be 56 Bomarc missiles “at the ready.” The article spoke of there being, a day earlier, a “press conference by Army and civilian engineers” and “Air Force and Boeing Airplane Company specialists” at which these “experts confirmed that the Bomarc base would soon be fully operational atomically.” The story further noted: “No special provisions have been made for atomic hazards; they are not needed, the engineers said.”

Curiosity led me to information on the Nike bases I knew were set up on Long Island around the same time. BOMARC was an Air Force project and its acronym combined the names of its developers: BO for Boeing and MARC for Michigan Aerospace Research Center. Nike was an Army missile program and named for the mythical Greek goddess of victory.

There are numerous websites about the Nike bases established on Long Island and elsewhere in the U.S. and how the Nike Hercules model was nuclear-tipped—with bases on Long Island armed with nuclear-tipped Nikes including those in Rocky Point, Amityville, Lido Beach, Oyster Bay and Lloyd Harbor. While a main reason for the BOMARC base in Westhampton was to intercept Soviet bombers headed to New York City, the Nike bases were primarily set up to defend facilities on Long Island considered strategic, among them, according to the New York State Military Museum website, Brookhaven National Laboratory and military industrial facilities including the then Grumman Corp. and Republic Aviation factories.

There were three types of Nike nuclear tips: “low-yield” 3-kiloton; “medium yield” 20-kiloton; and “high yield” 30-kiloton

I put together an article for Long Island newspapers on the metal scavenging project at the ex-BOMARC base and referred to some of the history of nuclear-tipped missiles on Long Island. Editors inquired: how could this be? If these nuclear-tipped missiles were detonated over and around Long Island, wouldn’t there be impacts to people on the ground? Absolutely. We would have had warheads with vast explosive power—comparable to and greater than the Hiroshima atomic bomb—detonating all around us, spreading deadly radioactive fall-out.

With all the violence of recent years—and our concerns of violence ahead—we should give thanks that somehow we got through this Cold War atomic nightmare.

Killer Tobacco

It’s high time the U.S. government regulate tobacco for what it is—a dangerous drug.

There’s a bill that’s been in Congress that would empower the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the content and marketing of tobacco products.

The FDA would not be able to ban tobacco products outright under the bill, or to eliminate in them nicotine—that ingredient which hooks smokers, narcotic like.

But the FDA would be able to mandate a reduction in levels of nicotine and other harmful ingredients—cancer-causing ingredients—in cigarettes. And it would be able to restrict tobacco advertising.

The legislation has been strongly endorsed by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free kids, and other organizations around the country.

In the Senate, Democrat Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, are the sponsors. In the House, Democrat Henry Waxman of California and Republican Tom Davis of Virginia are the sponsors, all of identical, bipartisan measures.

No surprise, the administration of George W. Bush was against the legislation.

President Barak Obama is for it.

The New York Times, in an editorial, has described the legislation as “the culmination of more than a decade of struggle to bring the renegade tobacco industry under regulatory control.”

The tobacco industry has been out of control for many decades.

Its liars-for-hire denied the connection between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. Its advertising in newspapers led to a press silence on the smoking-cancer link, broken only decades-ago by independent investigative reporter George Seldes. It plied politicians with money to fend off government action.

And the tobacco industry and its products kill.

In a recent report, the federal Centers for Disease Control determined that nationwide, tobacco use kills more than 443,000 persons a year. That’s nearly a half million people a year—dying because of smoking.

The number of non-smokers who die each year from exposure to second-hand smoke: 50,000.

The related health care costs: enormous, more than $100 billion annually.

Tobacco use is the leading cause of death in the United States that’s preventable.

But the huge problem has been the powerful tobacco industry—compromising government and the press, peddling its cancer-sticks with abandon, addicting millions of people and lying about the harm of its deadly products.

There’s been litigation against tobacco companies and huge financial judgments.

There needs to be far more action—and now.

Not Just Peanuts

It’s being charged that the Peanut Corporation of America knowingly sold peanuts tainted with salmonella in 2007 and 2008.

The Food and Drug Administration, which made the allegation, has, meanwhile, asked retailers and consumers to throw out every product made with peanuts processed by the corporation’s plant in Blakeley, Georgia. It has produced peanut butter, paste and granules used in products including cookies and ice cream.

FDA officials said four different strains of salmonella have been detected at the plant at which, in 14 inspections made in January, it found unsanitary conditions, including dead roaches and gaps where rodents could enter.

The situation has been linked to a salmonella outbreak in 43 states in which nine people have died, 500 have become ill.

Officials of the Peanut Corporation of America have a lot of answering to do and that might be in criminal court. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut has called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation.

But, meanwhile, what about the FDA—which is supposed to protect us from bad food?

Until its 14 inspections after the salmonella outbreak happened, the last time the FDA inspected the Blakeley plant was in 2001.

Representative John Dingell of Michigan has said the Peanut Corporation of America situation demonstrates that the FDA “can’t and doesn’t do its job, and American lives are at risk. We’re killing Americans.”

This is a very old story: about those who are supposed to protect us from tainted food and other poisons failing to do so, and that’s often because of a coziness with those they’re supposed to be regulating.

I wrote a book about this in which I told the tale of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, regarded as the father of the FDA. Indeed, there’s even a postage stamp in his honor. As chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he played a large part in getting the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 passed and the FDA created.

But in 1912, as a matter of conscience, Dr. Wiley resigned from the government and wrote a book, The History of a Crime Against the Food Law, about how the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act was not being properly enforced because of power of those it was supposed to police.

President Barak Obama has an opportunity to do something about a century of failure by U.S. regulatory agencies—especially the FDA. It’s a matter of life and death.

Solar Bonanza

It’s amazing—I’m seeing our electric meter going backwards.

We’ve just gotten solar panels installed on the roof of our house and they harvest all the electricity we need. And under the net metering program of our region’s utility, the Long Island Power Authority, that means LIPA is to send us a check for the excess electricity fed back into the grid. Also, we’ve put up panels on the roof that heat water. Even on cold days, as long as the sun is shining water comes down from those panels at 100 to 120 degrees.

You can do the same thing. And with federal and state tax credits and with LIPA, a big rebate, you can do it with an astonishing financial break.

You can now get 70 percent—yes, 70 percent—off the cost of a solar photovoltaic installation.

I’ve reported on solar power for decades—but it took doing a TV documentary this summer, “Renewable Energy Is More Than Ready,” for WVVH-TV, to see the reality of the feasibility of solar energy.

To see the program, go to YouTube:
WVVH-TV Renewable Energy is More Than Ready (Part 1)http://youtube.com/watch?v=1Iug28mWSlY
WVVH-TV Renewable Energy is More than Ready (Part 2)http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xw0qLzaqmos

A main figure in the program is Gordian Raacke of Renewable Energy Long Island. We went to his home where solar photovotaic panels produce all the electricity he and his wife need. And solar thermal panels furnish hot water.

So we arranged to have photovoltaic and hot water panels installed on our roof. The work was done by Majestic Son and Sons of Patchogue, New York. If the Obama administration is looking for infrastructure projects that produce jobs and have a grand energy pay-off, solar energy is Number One.

A swarm of Majestic workers, including the company’s president, Dean Hapshe, and two of his sons, were all over our roof merrily installing panels.

For Hapshe, it’s far more than a business. He’s a pioneer in solar power installing solar systems for 29 years. He says of solar: “It’s limitless. And free.” And, with global warming, vital .

As noted, the final price is a bonanza. A 3,000-watt photovoltaic system (what the Raackes have) costs $27,000. But then reduce that by 70 percent. And you, too, can watch electric meter go backward.

Imagine if all over the United States, houses and businesses were equipped with solar panels. Energy independence—courtesy of the sun. Just great.