Among the nuttiest theories about radiation is that it is good for you. Yes, radiation is good for you—it exercises the immune system.
That’s what some nuclear scientists claim. They call it the “hormesis radiation” theory. These scientists don’t just want to minimize or even flatly deny the deadly impacts of radioactivity—they want people to think it’s healthy.
An advocate of the “hormesis radiation” theory was scheduled to peddle the theory today before the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.
The DOE’s Savannah River Site is a radioactive mess—310 square miles in South Carolina—that includes the Savannah River National Laboratory and five now closed nuclear reactors. It’s been used through the years to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons, plutonium to power NASA space probes, and now seeks to make plutonium-based MOX fuel for nuclear power plants, and do other things nuclear. It is in an area of South Carolina which has a large minority population. It’s been designated a high-pollution Superfund site.
But Dr. Clinton R. Wolfe, executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, wasn’t planning to simply comfort the 25-person advisory board with the “hormesis radiation” theory as regarding the radioactive muddle where they reside.
The topic of his talk was; “A Perspective on Radiation Exposure and the Fukushima Disaster.” People in South Carolina—indeed around the world—have become more aware of and concerned about radioactivity because of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex disaster.
Wolfe, like many in his group, is a product of the system of DOE national nuclear laboratories. He was at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed, specializing in work with plutonium, then worked for Westinghouse, a nuclear industry giant where he led research on nuclear power plant corrosion issues, according to his biography on his group's website, and ended up at the Savannah River National Laboratory. After being deeply involved in nuclear technology—both its military and civilian sides—he took his position at Citizens for Nuclear Technology which, its website says, is committed “to being a credible, consistent voice on behalf of beneficial nuclear technologies and the Savannah River Site.” He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry.
Wolfe telegraphed what he intended to talk about today in an op-ed piece in The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper.
Wolfe began by explaining, “’Hormesis,’ a Greek word meaning ‘impel, urge on,’ refers to the phenomenon by which gradually adding a toxic substance to an organism produces an initial beneficial effect….The concept of small doses of radiation having beneficial effects on living organisms fits this model.” He said there “are considerable data on laboratory animals and selected populations of humans from epidemiological studies that show beneficial effects of low levels of radiation. “
He continued that “even if you don’t believe that some low levels of radiation are good for you, perhaps we can stop the hysteria about low levels causing harm. Based on what we know to date, there’s no reason to think that even the most highly irradiated workers at Fukushima will suffer harmful health effects.”
A grouping of safe-energy and environmental organizations took issue with Wolfe’s plan to pitch “hormesis radiation” to the Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.
They wrote a letter to the Department of Energy complaining that there would be “no accurate, science-based counterbalancing presentation that radiation at all doses can be harmful,” the agency’s “allowance for the presentation of a pseudo-scientific presentation to be irresponsible and believe that such a presentation may well give the false impression that hormesis is being endorsed by DOE. “
The letter discussed international and U.S. scientific bodies and reports that have concluded that there is “no threshold” for radiation exposure—that any amount can harm a person—and noted that the DOE itself “also affirms challenges to the hormesis theory.”
“Given that the hormesis theory does not comport with DOE policy and that a presentation about it is scheduled without equal time being given to an explanation of the linear no-threshold radiation dose model accepted by the scientific community, we request that you take steps to make sure that a presentation on the rejected hormesis theory does not remain on the Citizen Advisory Board’s agenda at its upcoming meeting.”
The letter also noted that Wolfe “does not appear to have requisite credentials in the medical or health physics fields.”
It was signed by: Tom Clements of Friends of the Earth, Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Susan Corbett of the South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, Glenn Carroll of Nuclear Watch South, Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Bobbie Paul of Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions, David Kyle of the Center for a Sustainable Coast, Brett Bursey of the South Carolina Progressive Network and Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.
The DOE then cancelled Wolfe’s talk.
"The public interest groups interested in the truth stopped the talk from going forward," comments Clements of Friends of the Earth.
Wolfe is not the only nuclear scientist pushing the hormesis radiation-is-good-for-you-theory. A leader in promoting it has been Dr. T. D.. Luckey, the author of Hormesis and Ionizing Radiation and Radiation Hormesis. He contends: “We need more, not less, exposure to ionizing radiation. The evidence that ionizing radiation is an essential agent has been reviewed…There is proven benefit.”
Luckey, whose Ph.D. is in biochemistry/nutrition, also states: “The trillions of dollars estimated for worldwide nuclear waste management can be reduced to billions to provide safe, low-dose irradiation to improve our health. The direction is obvious; the first step remains to be taken.”
Luckey did some of his research as a visiting scientist at another national nuclear laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory.
A medical expert on the impacts of radiation, Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, where he is a professor of epidemiology, comments that “Luckey and the others advocating hormesis are without foundation.”
Wing’s Ph.D. is in epidemiology, defined as the branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution and control of diseases in populations.
He declares that the push for “radiation hormesis” is “related to the conflicts of interest” involving these individuals connected to “universities, government agencies, industry and government laboratories that profit from nuclear weapons and the nuclear power industry.”
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
NASA and Nukes: A Recipe for Disaster
What is NASA’s future now that Atlantis has landed and the shuttle program is over? If NASA persists in using nuclear power in space, the agency’s future is threatened.
Between November 25 and December 15 NASA plans to launch for use on Mars a rover fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium, more plutonium than ever used on a rover.
The mission has a huge cost: $2.5 billion.
But if there is an accident before the rover is well on its way to Mars, and plutonium is released on Earth, its cost stands to be yet more gargantuan.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for what it calls its Mars Science Laboratory Mission says that if plutonium is released on Earth, the cost could be as high as $1.5 billion to decontaminate each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas” impacted.
What‘s the probability of an accident releasing plutonium? The NASA document says “the probability of an accident with a release of plutonium” is 1-in-220“overall.”
If you knew your chance of not surviving an airplane flight—or just a drive in a car—was 1 in 220, would you take that trip?
And is this enormous risk necessary?
In two weeks, there’ll be a NASA mission demonstrating a clear alternative to atomic energy in space: solar power.
On August 5, NASA plans to launch a solar-powered space probe it’s named Juno to Jupiter. There’s no atomic energy involved, although NASA for decades has insisted that nuclear power is necessary for space devices beyond the orbit of Mars. With Juno, NASA will be showing it had that wrong.
“Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system,” says NASA on its website. “In 2016, the spinning, solar-powered Juno spacecraft will reach Jupiter.” It will be equipped with “instruments that can sense the hidden world beneath Jupiter’s colorful clouds” and make 33 passes of Jupiter.
As notes Aviation Week and Space Technology: “The unique spacecraft will set a record by running on solar power rather than nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generators previously used to operate spacecraft that far from the Sun.”
The Mars rover to be launched, named Curiosity by NASA, will be equipped with these radioisotope thermoelectric generators using plutonium, the deadliest radioactive substance.
Juno, a large craft—66-feet wide—will be powered by solar panels built by a Boeing subsidiary, Spectrolab. The panels can convert 28 percent of the sunlight that them to electricity. They’ll also produce heat to keep Juno’s instruments warm. This mission’s cost is $1.1 billion.
In fact, Juno is not a wholly unique spacecraft. In 2004, the European Space Agency launched a space probe called Rosetta that is also solar-powered. Its mission is to orbit and land on a comet—beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
Moreover, there have been major developments in “solar sails” to propel spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched its Ikaros spacecraft with solar sails taking it to Venus. In January, NASA itself launched its NanoSail-D spacecraft. The Planetary Society has been developing several spacecraft that will take advantage of photons emitted by the Sun to travel through the vacuum of space.
At no point will Juno (or the other solar spacecrafts) be a threat to life on Earth. This includes Juno posing no danger when in 2013 it makes a flyby of Earth. Such flybys making use of Earth’s gravity to increase a spacecraft’s velocity have constituted dangerous maneuvers when in recent years they’ve involved plutonium-powered space probes such as NASA’s Galileo and Cassini probes.
Curiosity is a return to nuclear danger.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement admits that a large swath of Earth could be impacted by plutonium in an accident involving it. The document’s section on “Impacts of Radiological Releases” says “the affected environment” could include “the regional area near the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the global area.”
“Launch area accidents would initially release material into the regional area, defined…to be within …62 miles of the launch pad,” says the document. This is an area from Cape Canaveral west to Orlando.
But “since some of the accidents result in the release of very fine particles less than a micron in diameter, a portion of such releases could be transported beyond…62 miles,” it goes on. These particles could become “well-mixed in the troposphere”—the atmosphere five to nine miles high—“and have been assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Mideast, then India and China Hawaii and other Pacific islands, and Mexico and southern Texas.
Then, as the rocket carrying Curiosity up gains altitude, the impacts of an accident in which plutonium is released would be even broader. The plutonium could affect people “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the NASA document. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth including much of South America, Africa and Australia.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has long emphasized that a pound of plutonium if uniformly distributed could hypothetically give a fatal dose of lung cancer to every person on Earth. A pound, even 10.6 pounds, could never be that uniformly distributed, of course. But an accident in which plutonium is released by a space device as tiny particles falling to Earth maximizes its lethality. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The pathway of greatest concern is the breathing in plutonium particle.
As the NASA Environmental Impact Statement puts it: “Particles smaller than about 5 microns would be transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The plutonium particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
“A small fraction would be transported over time directly to the blood or to lymph nodes and then to the blood,” it continues. Once plutonium “has entered the blood via ingestion or inhalation, it would circulate and be deposited primarily in the liver and skeletal system.” Also, says the document, some of the plutonium would migrate to the testes or ovaries.
The cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium could be, according to the NASA statement, $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
The NASA document lists “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” as: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bands on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
As to why the use of a plutonium-powered rover on Mars—considering that NASA has successfully used solar-powered rovers on Mars—the NASA Environmental Impact Statement says that a “solar-powered rover…would not be capable of operating over the full range of scientifically desirable landing site latitudes” on this mission.
There’s more to it. For many decades there has been a marriage of nuclear power and space at NASA. The use of nuclear power on space missions has been heavily promoted by the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the many DOE (previously AEC) national laboratories including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. This provides work for these government entities. Also, the manufacturers of nuclear-powered space devices—General Electric was a pioneer in this—have pushed their products. Further, NAS has sought to coordinate its activities with the U.S. military. The military for decades has planned for the deployment of nuclear-powered weapons in space.
Personifying the NASA-military connection now is NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former NASA astronaut and Marine Corps major general. Appointed by President Barack Obama, he is a booster of radioisotope thermoelectric generators as well as rockets using nuclear power for propulsion. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars through the years on such rockets but none have ever taken off and the programs have all ended up cancelled largely out of concern about a nuclear-powered rocket blowing up on launch or falling back to Earth.
Accidents have happened in the U.S. space nuclear program. Of the 26 space missions that have used plutonium which are listed in the NASA Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, three underwent accident, admits the document.
The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth and Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites—and the International Space Station—are solar-powered.
There was a near-miss involving a nuclear disaster and a space shuttle. The ill-fated Challenger’s next mission in 1986 was to loft a plutonium-powered space probe.
The NASA Environmental Impact Statement includes comments from people and organizations some highly critical of a plutonium-powered Mars Science Laboratory Mission.
Leah Karpen of Asheville, North Carolina says: “Every expansion of plutonium research, development and transportation of this deadly material increases the risk of nuclear accident or theft. In addition, plutonium production is expensive and diverts resources from the more important social needs of our society today, and in the future.” She urges NASA “to reconsider the use of nuclear” and go with solar instead.
Jeremy Maxand, executive director of the Idaho-based Snake River Alliance, calls on NASA and the Department of Energy to “take this opportunity to move space exploration in a sustainable direction with regard to power. Using solar rather than nuclear to power the Mars Science Laboratory Mission would keep the U.S. safe, advance energy technologies that are cleaner and more secure, be more fiscally responsible, and set a responsible example to other countries as they make decisions about their energy future.”
Russell Ace Hoffman of Carlsbad, California speaks of “today’s nuclear NASA” and a “closed society of dangerous, closed-minded ‘scientists’ who are hoodwinking the American public and who are guilty of premeditated random murder.” He adds: “The media has a duty to learn the truth rather than parrot NASA’s blanketly-false assertions.”
NASA, in response to the criticisms, repeatedly states in the document: “NASA and the DOE take very seriously the possibility that an action they take could potentially result in harm to humans or the environment. Therefore, both agencies maintain vigorous processes to reduce the potential for such events.”
Involved in challenging the mission is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org). Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Maine-based organization, says that “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining their dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel.”
Says Gagnon: “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the life of all the people on the planet…Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
With the return of Atlantis and end of the shuttle program, there are concerns about this being the “end” of the U.S. space program.
An accident if NASA continues to insist on mixing atomic energy and space—a nuclear disaster overhead—that, indeed, could end the space program..
Between November 25 and December 15 NASA plans to launch for use on Mars a rover fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium, more plutonium than ever used on a rover.
The mission has a huge cost: $2.5 billion.
But if there is an accident before the rover is well on its way to Mars, and plutonium is released on Earth, its cost stands to be yet more gargantuan.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for what it calls its Mars Science Laboratory Mission says that if plutonium is released on Earth, the cost could be as high as $1.5 billion to decontaminate each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas” impacted.
What‘s the probability of an accident releasing plutonium? The NASA document says “the probability of an accident with a release of plutonium” is 1-in-220“overall.”
If you knew your chance of not surviving an airplane flight—or just a drive in a car—was 1 in 220, would you take that trip?
And is this enormous risk necessary?
In two weeks, there’ll be a NASA mission demonstrating a clear alternative to atomic energy in space: solar power.
On August 5, NASA plans to launch a solar-powered space probe it’s named Juno to Jupiter. There’s no atomic energy involved, although NASA for decades has insisted that nuclear power is necessary for space devices beyond the orbit of Mars. With Juno, NASA will be showing it had that wrong.
“Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system,” says NASA on its website. “In 2016, the spinning, solar-powered Juno spacecraft will reach Jupiter.” It will be equipped with “instruments that can sense the hidden world beneath Jupiter’s colorful clouds” and make 33 passes of Jupiter.
As notes Aviation Week and Space Technology: “The unique spacecraft will set a record by running on solar power rather than nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generators previously used to operate spacecraft that far from the Sun.”
The Mars rover to be launched, named Curiosity by NASA, will be equipped with these radioisotope thermoelectric generators using plutonium, the deadliest radioactive substance.
Juno, a large craft—66-feet wide—will be powered by solar panels built by a Boeing subsidiary, Spectrolab. The panels can convert 28 percent of the sunlight that them to electricity. They’ll also produce heat to keep Juno’s instruments warm. This mission’s cost is $1.1 billion.
In fact, Juno is not a wholly unique spacecraft. In 2004, the European Space Agency launched a space probe called Rosetta that is also solar-powered. Its mission is to orbit and land on a comet—beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
Moreover, there have been major developments in “solar sails” to propel spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched its Ikaros spacecraft with solar sails taking it to Venus. In January, NASA itself launched its NanoSail-D spacecraft. The Planetary Society has been developing several spacecraft that will take advantage of photons emitted by the Sun to travel through the vacuum of space.
At no point will Juno (or the other solar spacecrafts) be a threat to life on Earth. This includes Juno posing no danger when in 2013 it makes a flyby of Earth. Such flybys making use of Earth’s gravity to increase a spacecraft’s velocity have constituted dangerous maneuvers when in recent years they’ve involved plutonium-powered space probes such as NASA’s Galileo and Cassini probes.
Curiosity is a return to nuclear danger.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement admits that a large swath of Earth could be impacted by plutonium in an accident involving it. The document’s section on “Impacts of Radiological Releases” says “the affected environment” could include “the regional area near the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the global area.”
“Launch area accidents would initially release material into the regional area, defined…to be within …62 miles of the launch pad,” says the document. This is an area from Cape Canaveral west to Orlando.
But “since some of the accidents result in the release of very fine particles less than a micron in diameter, a portion of such releases could be transported beyond…62 miles,” it goes on. These particles could become “well-mixed in the troposphere”—the atmosphere five to nine miles high—“and have been assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Mideast, then India and China Hawaii and other Pacific islands, and Mexico and southern Texas.
Then, as the rocket carrying Curiosity up gains altitude, the impacts of an accident in which plutonium is released would be even broader. The plutonium could affect people “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the NASA document. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth including much of South America, Africa and Australia.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has long emphasized that a pound of plutonium if uniformly distributed could hypothetically give a fatal dose of lung cancer to every person on Earth. A pound, even 10.6 pounds, could never be that uniformly distributed, of course. But an accident in which plutonium is released by a space device as tiny particles falling to Earth maximizes its lethality. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The pathway of greatest concern is the breathing in plutonium particle.
As the NASA Environmental Impact Statement puts it: “Particles smaller than about 5 microns would be transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The plutonium particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
“A small fraction would be transported over time directly to the blood or to lymph nodes and then to the blood,” it continues. Once plutonium “has entered the blood via ingestion or inhalation, it would circulate and be deposited primarily in the liver and skeletal system.” Also, says the document, some of the plutonium would migrate to the testes or ovaries.
The cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium could be, according to the NASA statement, $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
The NASA document lists “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” as: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bands on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
As to why the use of a plutonium-powered rover on Mars—considering that NASA has successfully used solar-powered rovers on Mars—the NASA Environmental Impact Statement says that a “solar-powered rover…would not be capable of operating over the full range of scientifically desirable landing site latitudes” on this mission.
There’s more to it. For many decades there has been a marriage of nuclear power and space at NASA. The use of nuclear power on space missions has been heavily promoted by the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the many DOE (previously AEC) national laboratories including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. This provides work for these government entities. Also, the manufacturers of nuclear-powered space devices—General Electric was a pioneer in this—have pushed their products. Further, NAS has sought to coordinate its activities with the U.S. military. The military for decades has planned for the deployment of nuclear-powered weapons in space.
Personifying the NASA-military connection now is NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former NASA astronaut and Marine Corps major general. Appointed by President Barack Obama, he is a booster of radioisotope thermoelectric generators as well as rockets using nuclear power for propulsion. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars through the years on such rockets but none have ever taken off and the programs have all ended up cancelled largely out of concern about a nuclear-powered rocket blowing up on launch or falling back to Earth.
Accidents have happened in the U.S. space nuclear program. Of the 26 space missions that have used plutonium which are listed in the NASA Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, three underwent accident, admits the document.
The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth and Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites—and the International Space Station—are solar-powered.
There was a near-miss involving a nuclear disaster and a space shuttle. The ill-fated Challenger’s next mission in 1986 was to loft a plutonium-powered space probe.
The NASA Environmental Impact Statement includes comments from people and organizations some highly critical of a plutonium-powered Mars Science Laboratory Mission.
Leah Karpen of Asheville, North Carolina says: “Every expansion of plutonium research, development and transportation of this deadly material increases the risk of nuclear accident or theft. In addition, plutonium production is expensive and diverts resources from the more important social needs of our society today, and in the future.” She urges NASA “to reconsider the use of nuclear” and go with solar instead.
Jeremy Maxand, executive director of the Idaho-based Snake River Alliance, calls on NASA and the Department of Energy to “take this opportunity to move space exploration in a sustainable direction with regard to power. Using solar rather than nuclear to power the Mars Science Laboratory Mission would keep the U.S. safe, advance energy technologies that are cleaner and more secure, be more fiscally responsible, and set a responsible example to other countries as they make decisions about their energy future.”
Russell Ace Hoffman of Carlsbad, California speaks of “today’s nuclear NASA” and a “closed society of dangerous, closed-minded ‘scientists’ who are hoodwinking the American public and who are guilty of premeditated random murder.” He adds: “The media has a duty to learn the truth rather than parrot NASA’s blanketly-false assertions.”
NASA, in response to the criticisms, repeatedly states in the document: “NASA and the DOE take very seriously the possibility that an action they take could potentially result in harm to humans or the environment. Therefore, both agencies maintain vigorous processes to reduce the potential for such events.”
Involved in challenging the mission is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org). Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Maine-based organization, says that “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining their dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel.”
Says Gagnon: “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the life of all the people on the planet…Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
With the return of Atlantis and end of the shuttle program, there are concerns about this being the “end” of the U.S. space program.
An accident if NASA continues to insist on mixing atomic energy and space—a nuclear disaster overhead—that, indeed, could end the space program..
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Atomic Energy: Unsafe in the Real World
Nuclear power requires “perfection” and “no acts of God,” we were warned years ago. This has been brought home by the ongoing disaster caused by the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Fukushimi Daiichi nuclear plant complex, the flooding along the Missouri River in Nebraska now threatening two nuclear plants, and the wildfire laying siege to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of atomic energy.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire—these and other disasters will inevitably occur. Add nuclear power with its potential to release massive amounts of deadly radioactive poisons when impacted by such a disaster, and it is clear that atomic energy is incompatible with the real world.
There’s no perfection in human beings or in technology. Accidents will happen. And there will always be natural disasters—we can’t eliminate them. But we can—and must—eliminate atomic energy.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Hannes Alfven explained in 1972 in declaring his strong opposition to nuclear power: “Fission energy is safe only if a number of critical devices work as they should, if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions, if there is no sabotage, no hijacking of the transports, if no reactor processing plant or reprocessing plant or repository anywhere in the world is situated in a region of riots or guerilla activity, and no revolution or war—even a ‘conventional one’—takes place in those regions. The enormous quantities of extremely dangerous material must not get into the hands of ignorant people or desperados. No acts of God can be permitted.” Dr. Alfven was writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
“Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology. It allows no room for error,” wrote Carl J. Hocevar of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1975. Hocevar had earlier been an engineer working on reactor safety at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. “Perfection must be achieved if accidents that affect the general public are to be prevented,” he wrote in his foreword to the book We Almost Lost Detroit. The book is about the partial meltdown at the Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in 1966 that threatened nearby Detroit, one of numerous near-misses and many other accidents involving nuclear power in addition to the disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and now Fukushima.
In We Almost Lost Detroit, Hocevar described the blind faith of scientists in atomic energy and their wrong assumptions. “The scientists involved were most confident that they had covered all possible problem areas. They had built safeguards on top of safeguards. Yet in spite of the precautions in the design and construction of the Fermi reactor, and in spite of the reassurances by the scientists that a serious accident could not happen, one did occur. The results far exceeded the expectations of anyone involved with the project. Fortunately, at the time of the accident, the reactor was operating at a very low power level or the consequences could have been much worse.”
“The Fermi accident and others described in this book demonstrate the fact that no matter how much diligence is exercised in the design, construction, and operation of a nuclear reactor, things can and do go wrong,” Hocevar related. “Design errors occur, the unexpected happens, human error is a very real possibility.”
Still, “for many years, the [nuclear] industry vigorously defended the nuclear power
program as being essentially risk-free. Nuclear power was claimed to be perfectly safe. It was said that no serious accidents would ever happen,” he noted. “Such a position was of course necessary to promote the acceptance of nuclear power by the general public. It has not been until just recently that the proponents of nuclear energy have admitted that accidents can and will happen, and the public should prepare itself for such eventualities.”
Wei Zhaofeng, an energy official in China, which is now reconsidering its plans for nuclear power because of the Fukushima catastrophe, said recently: “We have to ensure 100 percent safety of these nuclear power plants.”
That cannot be. Nuclear power can never be 100 percent safe. And it must be. That is why it should not be. And, instead, we must get rid of it and fully implement the clean, renewable technologies such as solar, wind and others now available which can provide, as major studies in the last several years have shown, all the energy we need—and are safe.
As physicist Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, recently wrote: “Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving.” It’s “the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away.”
That’s been made evident by the Fukushima disaster, the crisis along the Missouri River in Nebraska and the wildfire at the gates of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
To err is human, it’s realized. Technology fails, it’s comprehended. And we must also understand that atomic energy is unsafe in the real world. It can never be safe. It must be eliminated in favor of energy we can live with.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire—these and other disasters will inevitably occur. Add nuclear power with its potential to release massive amounts of deadly radioactive poisons when impacted by such a disaster, and it is clear that atomic energy is incompatible with the real world.
There’s no perfection in human beings or in technology. Accidents will happen. And there will always be natural disasters—we can’t eliminate them. But we can—and must—eliminate atomic energy.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Hannes Alfven explained in 1972 in declaring his strong opposition to nuclear power: “Fission energy is safe only if a number of critical devices work as they should, if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions, if there is no sabotage, no hijacking of the transports, if no reactor processing plant or reprocessing plant or repository anywhere in the world is situated in a region of riots or guerilla activity, and no revolution or war—even a ‘conventional one’—takes place in those regions. The enormous quantities of extremely dangerous material must not get into the hands of ignorant people or desperados. No acts of God can be permitted.” Dr. Alfven was writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
“Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology. It allows no room for error,” wrote Carl J. Hocevar of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1975. Hocevar had earlier been an engineer working on reactor safety at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. “Perfection must be achieved if accidents that affect the general public are to be prevented,” he wrote in his foreword to the book We Almost Lost Detroit. The book is about the partial meltdown at the Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in 1966 that threatened nearby Detroit, one of numerous near-misses and many other accidents involving nuclear power in addition to the disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and now Fukushima.
In We Almost Lost Detroit, Hocevar described the blind faith of scientists in atomic energy and their wrong assumptions. “The scientists involved were most confident that they had covered all possible problem areas. They had built safeguards on top of safeguards. Yet in spite of the precautions in the design and construction of the Fermi reactor, and in spite of the reassurances by the scientists that a serious accident could not happen, one did occur. The results far exceeded the expectations of anyone involved with the project. Fortunately, at the time of the accident, the reactor was operating at a very low power level or the consequences could have been much worse.”
“The Fermi accident and others described in this book demonstrate the fact that no matter how much diligence is exercised in the design, construction, and operation of a nuclear reactor, things can and do go wrong,” Hocevar related. “Design errors occur, the unexpected happens, human error is a very real possibility.”
Still, “for many years, the [nuclear] industry vigorously defended the nuclear power
program as being essentially risk-free. Nuclear power was claimed to be perfectly safe. It was said that no serious accidents would ever happen,” he noted. “Such a position was of course necessary to promote the acceptance of nuclear power by the general public. It has not been until just recently that the proponents of nuclear energy have admitted that accidents can and will happen, and the public should prepare itself for such eventualities.”
Wei Zhaofeng, an energy official in China, which is now reconsidering its plans for nuclear power because of the Fukushima catastrophe, said recently: “We have to ensure 100 percent safety of these nuclear power plants.”
That cannot be. Nuclear power can never be 100 percent safe. And it must be. That is why it should not be. And, instead, we must get rid of it and fully implement the clean, renewable technologies such as solar, wind and others now available which can provide, as major studies in the last several years have shown, all the energy we need—and are safe.
As physicist Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, recently wrote: “Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving.” It’s “the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away.”
That’s been made evident by the Fukushima disaster, the crisis along the Missouri River in Nebraska and the wildfire at the gates of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
To err is human, it’s realized. Technology fails, it’s comprehended. And we must also understand that atomic energy is unsafe in the real world. It can never be safe. It must be eliminated in favor of energy we can live with.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The Big Fukushima Lie Flies High
The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “The big lie flies high,” comments Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear.
Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened—going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it—but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants—including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants—and U.S. government officials.
Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.
Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time—that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?
Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?
Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.
“No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington last week.
“They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.
“We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11.
There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses—as well as genetic effects—as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”
The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are “professionals” in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial camp. “Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident,” it declares on its website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: “There is no health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United States.”
Acknowledging that “radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the United States,” the American Nuclear Society asserts that’s because we are able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking water due to the Fukushima incident…The radiation from Fukushima, though detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern.”
Says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, “The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”
The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. “For anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant,” Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has insisted. “We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30 countries [and] these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of background radiation…and they do not constitute a public health risk.”
WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.
As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, says: “We do live with background radiation—but it does cause cancer.” That’s why there is concern, he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium in some soils. “That’s background [radiation] but it’s not safe. There are absolutely no safe levels of radiation” and adding more radiation “adds to the health impacts.”
“There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology,” says Dr. Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, “large populations of people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t agree to.”
Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: “The generally accepted thinking about the safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of the cancer or genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there’s a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears.”
Of the claims of “no threat to health” from the radioactivity emitted from Fukushima, that “just flies in the face of all the standard models and all the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and cancer.”
“As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other continents and around the world, the doses are spread out,” notes Dr. Wing. “But it’s important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person’s individual risk, it doesn’t reduce the number of cancers that result from that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a few thousand people exposed to that same dose.”
He believes “we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that minimizes harm,” is a “sane energy policy.” Those who have “led us into this situation” have caused “big problems.”
And they are still at it—even with radioactivity still coming out at Fukushima and expected to for months. On Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, the “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.
Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi.
Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979; Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to expand into the U.S. and worldwide.
Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor technologies; William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future set up by the Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch nuclear power supporters.
Other participants, according to the program for the event, will be “senior executives and thought leaders from the who’s who of the U.S. new nuclear community.” Bruce Llewelyn, who hosts “White House Chronicle” on PBS television, is listed as the summit’s “moderator.”
There will be programs on the “State of the Renaissance,” “China, India & Emerging Global Nuclear Markets,” “Advancing Nuclear Technology” and “Lessons from Fukushima.”
As the nuclear Pinocchios lie, the nuclear promoters push ahead.
Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened—going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it—but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants—including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants—and U.S. government officials.
Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.
Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time—that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?
Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?
Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.
“No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington last week.
“They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.
“We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11.
There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses—as well as genetic effects—as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”
The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are “professionals” in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial camp. “Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident,” it declares on its website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: “There is no health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United States.”
Acknowledging that “radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the United States,” the American Nuclear Society asserts that’s because we are able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking water due to the Fukushima incident…The radiation from Fukushima, though detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern.”
Says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, “The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”
The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. “For anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant,” Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has insisted. “We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30 countries [and] these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of background radiation…and they do not constitute a public health risk.”
WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.
As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, says: “We do live with background radiation—but it does cause cancer.” That’s why there is concern, he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium in some soils. “That’s background [radiation] but it’s not safe. There are absolutely no safe levels of radiation” and adding more radiation “adds to the health impacts.”
“There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology,” says Dr. Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, “large populations of people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t agree to.”
Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: “The generally accepted thinking about the safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of the cancer or genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there’s a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears.”
Of the claims of “no threat to health” from the radioactivity emitted from Fukushima, that “just flies in the face of all the standard models and all the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and cancer.”
“As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other continents and around the world, the doses are spread out,” notes Dr. Wing. “But it’s important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person’s individual risk, it doesn’t reduce the number of cancers that result from that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a few thousand people exposed to that same dose.”
He believes “we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that minimizes harm,” is a “sane energy policy.” Those who have “led us into this situation” have caused “big problems.”
And they are still at it—even with radioactivity still coming out at Fukushima and expected to for months. On Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, the “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.
Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi.
Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979; Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to expand into the U.S. and worldwide.
Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor technologies; William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future set up by the Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch nuclear power supporters.
Other participants, according to the program for the event, will be “senior executives and thought leaders from the who’s who of the U.S. new nuclear community.” Bruce Llewelyn, who hosts “White House Chronicle” on PBS television, is listed as the summit’s “moderator.”
There will be programs on the “State of the Renaissance,” “China, India & Emerging Global Nuclear Markets,” “Advancing Nuclear Technology” and “Lessons from Fukushima.”
As the nuclear Pinocchios lie, the nuclear promoters push ahead.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Nuclear Pinocchios
Published in Long Island newspapers this week.
“Remember, we can change the world. Or at least Long Island,” Nora Bredes, former executive director of the Shoreham Opponents Coalition, just wrote on her Facebook page. With her message was a New York Times article about a massive demonstration 25 years ago this month protesting the Shoreham nuclear plant.
“More than 600 protesters were arrested here today after 15,000 demonstrators gathered,” the piece began. The headline noted it was “One of the Largest Held Worldwide” against nuclear power.
Because of demonstrations, legal challenges, political initiatives and other actions by organizations and individuals, and work by Suffolk County, state and local officials, the Shoreham plant was stopped.
Two months before that June 1986 demonstration, the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe occurred in the former Soviet Union clearly showing the deadliness of nuclear power, despite the claims of nuclear promoters—including on Long Island—that it was safe.
Now, the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan has again proven the lethality of nuclear power. A baseline for how many people will likely die from Fukushima radiation is provided by a 2009 book published by the New York Academy of Sciences, “Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, a team of eminent European scientists concludes that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from Chernobyl. And the Fukushima disaster involved not one but a cluster of nuclear power plants and is ongoing with radioactivity still streaming out and spreading worldwide.
But the nuclear Pinocchios are still at it.
Last week, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, held a press conference in Washington at which it issued a statement asserting: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima.” And as for the rest of us: don’t worry.
“This is as believable as the Marlboro man offering you the same assurance,” said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight at the organization Beyond Nuclear (www.beyondnuclear.org). “The global nuclear industry should focus on bringing this catastrophic nuclear accident to an end rather than damage control for its increasingly radioactive public image.”
Reaction to Fukushima has varied. Germany, Switzerland, Italy and other nations have declared they will now abandon nuclear power and instead pursue safe, clean, renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind. A difference between today and 25 years ago is that such technologies are more highly developed and if fully utilized can provide all the energy the world needs, as recent studies have shown. They render nuclear power unnecessary.
In Washington this week, a Congressional Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Expo and Forum involving safe energy advocates and members of Congress was held. But the Obama administration, heavily influenced by Steven Chu, the nuclear scientist who heads the Department of Energy, is still pushing atomic power. It wants, despite the Fukushima disaster, more nuclear plants built in the U.S. and is seeking $34 billion in taxpayer monies to build them. Next week, a New Nuclear Energy Summit to “advance” nuclear power will be held in Washington involving Obama administration and nuclear industry officials.
Shoreham was stopped, along with Long Island Lighting Company plans to build other nuclear plants here as well. Long Island is nuclear-free. But across the Sound in Connecticut, the two Millstone nuclear plants continue to operate, dangerously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just issued a report finding “pervasive performance lapses” by plant operators during a serious “unexpected power spike” at Millstone 2 on February 12, a month before the Fukushima meltdowns. Taking on Millstone is the Standing for Truth About Radiation Coalition, restarted by Priscilla Star of Montauk (priscillaastar@hotmail.com) since Fukushima.
The threat of nuclear power continues, as does the struggle to end the deadly technology and shift to safe, clean, renewable energy.
“Remember, we can change the world. Or at least Long Island,” Nora Bredes, former executive director of the Shoreham Opponents Coalition, just wrote on her Facebook page. With her message was a New York Times article about a massive demonstration 25 years ago this month protesting the Shoreham nuclear plant.
“More than 600 protesters were arrested here today after 15,000 demonstrators gathered,” the piece began. The headline noted it was “One of the Largest Held Worldwide” against nuclear power.
Because of demonstrations, legal challenges, political initiatives and other actions by organizations and individuals, and work by Suffolk County, state and local officials, the Shoreham plant was stopped.
Two months before that June 1986 demonstration, the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe occurred in the former Soviet Union clearly showing the deadliness of nuclear power, despite the claims of nuclear promoters—including on Long Island—that it was safe.
Now, the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan has again proven the lethality of nuclear power. A baseline for how many people will likely die from Fukushima radiation is provided by a 2009 book published by the New York Academy of Sciences, “Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, a team of eminent European scientists concludes that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from Chernobyl. And the Fukushima disaster involved not one but a cluster of nuclear power plants and is ongoing with radioactivity still streaming out and spreading worldwide.
But the nuclear Pinocchios are still at it.
Last week, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, held a press conference in Washington at which it issued a statement asserting: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima.” And as for the rest of us: don’t worry.
“This is as believable as the Marlboro man offering you the same assurance,” said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight at the organization Beyond Nuclear (www.beyondnuclear.org). “The global nuclear industry should focus on bringing this catastrophic nuclear accident to an end rather than damage control for its increasingly radioactive public image.”
Reaction to Fukushima has varied. Germany, Switzerland, Italy and other nations have declared they will now abandon nuclear power and instead pursue safe, clean, renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind. A difference between today and 25 years ago is that such technologies are more highly developed and if fully utilized can provide all the energy the world needs, as recent studies have shown. They render nuclear power unnecessary.
In Washington this week, a Congressional Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Expo and Forum involving safe energy advocates and members of Congress was held. But the Obama administration, heavily influenced by Steven Chu, the nuclear scientist who heads the Department of Energy, is still pushing atomic power. It wants, despite the Fukushima disaster, more nuclear plants built in the U.S. and is seeking $34 billion in taxpayer monies to build them. Next week, a New Nuclear Energy Summit to “advance” nuclear power will be held in Washington involving Obama administration and nuclear industry officials.
Shoreham was stopped, along with Long Island Lighting Company plans to build other nuclear plants here as well. Long Island is nuclear-free. But across the Sound in Connecticut, the two Millstone nuclear plants continue to operate, dangerously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just issued a report finding “pervasive performance lapses” by plant operators during a serious “unexpected power spike” at Millstone 2 on February 12, a month before the Fukushima meltdowns. Taking on Millstone is the Standing for Truth About Radiation Coalition, restarted by Priscilla Star of Montauk (priscillaastar@hotmail.com) since Fukushima.
The threat of nuclear power continues, as does the struggle to end the deadly technology and shift to safe, clean, renewable energy.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Downplaying Deadly Dangers in Japan and at Home, After Fukushima, Media Still Buying Media Spin
Published in Extra! The Magazine of FAIR—The Media Watch Group
May 2011 Cover Story
Ever since the start of nuclear technology, those behind it have made heavy use of deception, obfuscation and denial--with the complicity of most of the media. New York Times reporter William Laurence, working at the same time with the Manhattan Project, wrote a widely-published press release covering up the first nuclear test in New Mexico in 1945, claiming it was nothing more than an ammunition dump explosion. The Times and Laurence went on to boost nuclear power for years to come (Beverly Deepe Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb).
A central concern of nuclear promoters, as Rosalie Bertell writes in her book No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, has been: "Should the public discover the true health cost of nuclear pollution, a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people would refuse to cooperate passively with their own death." In the U.S., nuclear industry and government nuclear agencies lied after the accident at Three Mile Island. In the Soviet Union, government lies flowed after the catastrophe at Chernobyl. There have been cover-up after cover-up of the smaller accidents in between (Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own, The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation; Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, Deadly Deceit; Low-level Radiation, High-level Cover-up).
The nuclear enterprise, with its army of PR people, has had little trouble through the years manipulating a largely compliant media, a major component of which it has owned: Westinghouse owning CBS for many years, and General Electric, NBC. And this continues in the still-unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan.
Media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power facility disaster has ranged from dreadful to barely passable. Much of the reporting about the threats of nuclear power and the impacts of radioactivity has been outrageously poor, as journalists and their talking-head experts have parroted the assurances of Japanese and other officials that the amounts of radioactivity being released were low and thus posed "no health threat" to people (e.g., AP, 3/21/11).
Decades ago, there was the notion of a "threshold dose" of radiation, below which there was no harm. That’s because when nuclear technology began and people were exposed to radioactivity, they didn’t promptly fall down dead. But as the years went by, it was realized that lower levels of radioactivity take time to result in cancer and other illnesses--that there is a five-to-40-year "incubation" period.
Now most scientists acknowledge that any amount of radioactivity can lead to illness and death, especially in fetuses and children whose cells are dividing more rapidly than in adults. As the National Council on Radiation Protection (No. 136, 2001) has said: "Every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer." Or the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ("Fact Sheet: Biological Effects of Radiation"): "Any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer.”
Much coverage reassured the public that, even if there was some risk, potassium iodide pills being distributed in Japan "block radioactivity" (CNN, 3/18/11). In fact, potassium iodide pills work only on the thyroid, filling it with "good" iodine so radioactive iodine-131, which causes thyroid cancer, cannot be absorbed. But there are hundreds of other fission products--including cesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which were discharged when the Fukushima nuclear plants erupted--and there are no magic pills for any of them.
Fox News took its coverage to another level, with Geraldo Rivera declaring (3/18/11): "I love nuclear power." And right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter on the O'Reilly Factor (Fox News, 3/17/11) asserted that "radiation [amounts] in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer." Even fellow right-wing firebrand Bill O’Reilly was taken aback. "You have to be responsible," he told her.
Coulter's comment stems from a wild theory of some nuclear scientists called "hormesis," which holds that radioactivity is good because it exercises the immune system. Coulter challenged media for not pursuing the radiation-is-good hypothesis. They should--they'll find that it's been dismissed by national and international agencies involved with radiation protection, including the U.S. National Research Council, the National Council on Radiation Protection and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
There have been huge scientific errors, even by people who acknowledged the seriousness of the disaster—such as the explanation for cesium-137 by "expert" Bill Nye, aka "The Science Guy," on CNN (3/12/11). "We hear about this substance called cesium, which is being released," anchor John Vause said to Nye. "What's the significance of that?" The "Science Guy" responded: "Cesium is used to slow and control the nuclear reaction, the fission of these very large atoms of uranium. And so when cesium can’t get in there to slow things down, it gets hotter and hotter."
In fact, cesium-137 has absolutely nothing to do with slowing or controlling fission (that's boron); it is one of the deadliest radioactive products created by fission, and one of the main reasons there's still a 1,660-square-mile Exclusion Zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. "The Science Guy" flubs a high-school physics exam question, and one that is crucial to understanding the health effects of nuclear accidents.
Media have betrayed a lack of understanding about the hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off the Fukushima plants as well. It was reported that this had to do with fuel rods, and sometimes zirconium was mentioned. (e.g. LA Times, 3/16/11). But missed was a huge issue: Zirconium, which is used to make nuclear fuel rods because it allows neutrons to pass freely, is extremely volatile. It explodes at 2,000[o] F with the explosive power, pound for pound, of nitroglycerin. (A tiny speck of zirconium produces the flash in a flashbulb; a typical nuclear plant contains 20 tons.) With lesser heat, it emits hydrogen, which itself can explode, and this is what occurred at Fukushima. Using zirconium in a nuclear plant is like building a bridge out of firecrackers. It’s not hard to explain, but that didn’t happen.
Then there were the reports about three GE nuclear engineers who resigned because of defects in the GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor used at Fukushima (ABC News, 3/16/11). This was in line with the spin that the problem is not nuclear power in general, but merely one flawed plant design.
While the Mark 1 design was, indeed, a factor in why the three GE nuclear engineering supervisors, Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor, left the nuclear industry, their broader point went missing in media coverage: As they declared in a statement to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress in 1976,
"We did so because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the
continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power--a system we
believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on
this planet."
Meanwhile, disinformation about the impacts of previous nuclear plant disasters has served to downplay the potential impacts of the Fukushima disaster.
U.S. media regularly reported that only a few thousand people died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe--commonly used as a baseline of comparison (e.g. New York Times, 3/27/11). These numbers ignore the most comprehensive study done on the effects of Chernobyl, a book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences titled Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of scientists from Russia and Belarus studied health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports--some 5,000 in all--from 1986 to 2004, and estimated that the accident caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide. More deaths, they wrote, will follow. That’s the real baseline for a major disaster at one nuclear power plant.
Indeed, the senior scientist in that study, Dr. Alexey Yablokov, at a March 25 press conference in Washington, D.C., pointed out that because of the multiple nuclear power plants and spent fuel pools involved in the Fukushima disaster, and "because the area is far more densely populated than around Chernobyl, the human toll could eventually be far worse." The New York Times did not cover or run a story on that press conference at the National Press Club--or the New York Academy of Science's book.
There were also declarations that "no one died" as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 (e.g., O'Reilly Factor, 3/16/11). NPR (3/28/11) went so far as to claim that "relatively small amounts of radiation had escaped from the plant. No one was even injured."
That myth was long ago long exploded by the book Killing Our Own, which includes a chapter called "People Died at Three Mile Island," detailing infant and adult deaths. I wrote and narrated a TV documentary on the impacts of the TMI partial meltdown, Three Mile Island Revisited, that focused on the cancers and death in the area around the plant, and how its owner has quietly given pay-outs, many for $1 million apiece, to settle with people who suffered health impacts or lost family members because of the accident.
Meanwhile, media didn't mention that Japan in recent years has become a global giant in the sale of nuclear power plants. GE and Westinghouse have long been the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power plants worldwide, historically manufacturing or designing 80 percent of all nuclear plants. In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse's nuclear division and Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE to run its nuclear division. How might this huge Japanese stake in selling nuclear plants worldwide affect what Japanese officials were saying about Fukushima? This area was ignored by U.S. media--many of which have links to the nuclear industry themselves. (See FAIR Blog, 4/12/11).
A pioneer journalist on nuclear technology, Anna Mayo, had one word to describe U.S. media coverage of the Japanese disaster: "grotesque." From 1969 to 1989, Mayo worked for the Village Voice, writing a column titled "Geiger Counter." She once said (Karl Grossman, Cover Up), "I built a full-time career on covering nuclear horror stories that the New York Times neglected." Mayo was forced out after changes of ownership at the Village Voice, with "nuclear industry pressure" having much to do with her ouster: "The nuclear industry went after me. It was very obvious."
The nuclear industry on the disaster in Japan, said Mayo, "is trying desperately to conceal the extent of radiation exposure, and they’ve wheeled out the same old lies." And media, as usual, have bought the deadly nuclear deception.
May 2011 Cover Story
Ever since the start of nuclear technology, those behind it have made heavy use of deception, obfuscation and denial--with the complicity of most of the media. New York Times reporter William Laurence, working at the same time with the Manhattan Project, wrote a widely-published press release covering up the first nuclear test in New Mexico in 1945, claiming it was nothing more than an ammunition dump explosion. The Times and Laurence went on to boost nuclear power for years to come (Beverly Deepe Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb).
A central concern of nuclear promoters, as Rosalie Bertell writes in her book No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, has been: "Should the public discover the true health cost of nuclear pollution, a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people would refuse to cooperate passively with their own death." In the U.S., nuclear industry and government nuclear agencies lied after the accident at Three Mile Island. In the Soviet Union, government lies flowed after the catastrophe at Chernobyl. There have been cover-up after cover-up of the smaller accidents in between (Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own, The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation; Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, Deadly Deceit; Low-level Radiation, High-level Cover-up).
The nuclear enterprise, with its army of PR people, has had little trouble through the years manipulating a largely compliant media, a major component of which it has owned: Westinghouse owning CBS for many years, and General Electric, NBC. And this continues in the still-unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan.
Media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power facility disaster has ranged from dreadful to barely passable. Much of the reporting about the threats of nuclear power and the impacts of radioactivity has been outrageously poor, as journalists and their talking-head experts have parroted the assurances of Japanese and other officials that the amounts of radioactivity being released were low and thus posed "no health threat" to people (e.g., AP, 3/21/11).
Decades ago, there was the notion of a "threshold dose" of radiation, below which there was no harm. That’s because when nuclear technology began and people were exposed to radioactivity, they didn’t promptly fall down dead. But as the years went by, it was realized that lower levels of radioactivity take time to result in cancer and other illnesses--that there is a five-to-40-year "incubation" period.
Now most scientists acknowledge that any amount of radioactivity can lead to illness and death, especially in fetuses and children whose cells are dividing more rapidly than in adults. As the National Council on Radiation Protection (No. 136, 2001) has said: "Every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer." Or the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ("Fact Sheet: Biological Effects of Radiation"): "Any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer.”
Much coverage reassured the public that, even if there was some risk, potassium iodide pills being distributed in Japan "block radioactivity" (CNN, 3/18/11). In fact, potassium iodide pills work only on the thyroid, filling it with "good" iodine so radioactive iodine-131, which causes thyroid cancer, cannot be absorbed. But there are hundreds of other fission products--including cesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which were discharged when the Fukushima nuclear plants erupted--and there are no magic pills for any of them.
Fox News took its coverage to another level, with Geraldo Rivera declaring (3/18/11): "I love nuclear power." And right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter on the O'Reilly Factor (Fox News, 3/17/11) asserted that "radiation [amounts] in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer." Even fellow right-wing firebrand Bill O’Reilly was taken aback. "You have to be responsible," he told her.
Coulter's comment stems from a wild theory of some nuclear scientists called "hormesis," which holds that radioactivity is good because it exercises the immune system. Coulter challenged media for not pursuing the radiation-is-good hypothesis. They should--they'll find that it's been dismissed by national and international agencies involved with radiation protection, including the U.S. National Research Council, the National Council on Radiation Protection and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
There have been huge scientific errors, even by people who acknowledged the seriousness of the disaster—such as the explanation for cesium-137 by "expert" Bill Nye, aka "The Science Guy," on CNN (3/12/11). "We hear about this substance called cesium, which is being released," anchor John Vause said to Nye. "What's the significance of that?" The "Science Guy" responded: "Cesium is used to slow and control the nuclear reaction, the fission of these very large atoms of uranium. And so when cesium can’t get in there to slow things down, it gets hotter and hotter."
In fact, cesium-137 has absolutely nothing to do with slowing or controlling fission (that's boron); it is one of the deadliest radioactive products created by fission, and one of the main reasons there's still a 1,660-square-mile Exclusion Zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. "The Science Guy" flubs a high-school physics exam question, and one that is crucial to understanding the health effects of nuclear accidents.
Media have betrayed a lack of understanding about the hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off the Fukushima plants as well. It was reported that this had to do with fuel rods, and sometimes zirconium was mentioned. (e.g. LA Times, 3/16/11). But missed was a huge issue: Zirconium, which is used to make nuclear fuel rods because it allows neutrons to pass freely, is extremely volatile. It explodes at 2,000[o] F with the explosive power, pound for pound, of nitroglycerin. (A tiny speck of zirconium produces the flash in a flashbulb; a typical nuclear plant contains 20 tons.) With lesser heat, it emits hydrogen, which itself can explode, and this is what occurred at Fukushima. Using zirconium in a nuclear plant is like building a bridge out of firecrackers. It’s not hard to explain, but that didn’t happen.
Then there were the reports about three GE nuclear engineers who resigned because of defects in the GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor used at Fukushima (ABC News, 3/16/11). This was in line with the spin that the problem is not nuclear power in general, but merely one flawed plant design.
While the Mark 1 design was, indeed, a factor in why the three GE nuclear engineering supervisors, Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor, left the nuclear industry, their broader point went missing in media coverage: As they declared in a statement to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress in 1976,
"We did so because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the
continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power--a system we
believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on
this planet."
Meanwhile, disinformation about the impacts of previous nuclear plant disasters has served to downplay the potential impacts of the Fukushima disaster.
U.S. media regularly reported that only a few thousand people died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe--commonly used as a baseline of comparison (e.g. New York Times, 3/27/11). These numbers ignore the most comprehensive study done on the effects of Chernobyl, a book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences titled Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of scientists from Russia and Belarus studied health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports--some 5,000 in all--from 1986 to 2004, and estimated that the accident caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide. More deaths, they wrote, will follow. That’s the real baseline for a major disaster at one nuclear power plant.
Indeed, the senior scientist in that study, Dr. Alexey Yablokov, at a March 25 press conference in Washington, D.C., pointed out that because of the multiple nuclear power plants and spent fuel pools involved in the Fukushima disaster, and "because the area is far more densely populated than around Chernobyl, the human toll could eventually be far worse." The New York Times did not cover or run a story on that press conference at the National Press Club--or the New York Academy of Science's book.
There were also declarations that "no one died" as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 (e.g., O'Reilly Factor, 3/16/11). NPR (3/28/11) went so far as to claim that "relatively small amounts of radiation had escaped from the plant. No one was even injured."
That myth was long ago long exploded by the book Killing Our Own, which includes a chapter called "People Died at Three Mile Island," detailing infant and adult deaths. I wrote and narrated a TV documentary on the impacts of the TMI partial meltdown, Three Mile Island Revisited, that focused on the cancers and death in the area around the plant, and how its owner has quietly given pay-outs, many for $1 million apiece, to settle with people who suffered health impacts or lost family members because of the accident.
Meanwhile, media didn't mention that Japan in recent years has become a global giant in the sale of nuclear power plants. GE and Westinghouse have long been the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power plants worldwide, historically manufacturing or designing 80 percent of all nuclear plants. In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse's nuclear division and Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE to run its nuclear division. How might this huge Japanese stake in selling nuclear plants worldwide affect what Japanese officials were saying about Fukushima? This area was ignored by U.S. media--many of which have links to the nuclear industry themselves. (See FAIR Blog, 4/12/11).
A pioneer journalist on nuclear technology, Anna Mayo, had one word to describe U.S. media coverage of the Japanese disaster: "grotesque." From 1969 to 1989, Mayo worked for the Village Voice, writing a column titled "Geiger Counter." She once said (Karl Grossman, Cover Up), "I built a full-time career on covering nuclear horror stories that the New York Times neglected." Mayo was forced out after changes of ownership at the Village Voice, with "nuclear industry pressure" having much to do with her ouster: "The nuclear industry went after me. It was very obvious."
The nuclear industry on the disaster in Japan, said Mayo, "is trying desperately to conceal the extent of radiation exposure, and they’ve wheeled out the same old lies." And media, as usual, have bought the deadly nuclear deception.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe
With the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe having arrived, and with the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex still unfolding—and radioactivity continuing to spew from those plants—some people are asking: can nuclear power be made safe?
The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.
This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power—and urged that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”
The basic problem: radioactivity.
“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”
“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated.
This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.
The problem is radioactivity—unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the “new, improved” nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology.
All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been—and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.
Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they’re produced in a nuclear plant to when they’re taken out as hotly radioactive “nuclear waste,” they must be isolated from life—for thousands for some millions of years.
In the nuclear process, mildly radioactive uranium is taken from the ground and bombarded by neutrons—and that part of the uranium which can split, is “fissile,” Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: There are hundreds of these “fission products.” The human body doesn’t know the difference between these lethal twins and safe and stable elements. Also produced are alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, all radioactive.
In addition, much of the larger part of uranium, Uranium-238, which cannot split, grabs on to neutrons and turns into Plutonium-239, the most radioactive substance known.
In this atom-splitting, too, heat is produced—which is used to boil water. Nuclear power plants are simply the most dangerous way to boil water ever conceived.
Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity? It has far less to do with science than with politics and economics—from the aftermath of the Manhattan Project to today During the World War II Manhattan Project, scientists working at laboratories secretly set up across the U.S. built atomic weapons. By 1945
it employed 600,000 people and billions of dollars were spent. Two bombs were dropped on Japan. And, with the war’s end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and more nuclear weapons were built. But what else could be done with nuclear technology to perpetuate the nuclear undertaking?
Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see their jobs end; corporations which were Manhattan Project contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, didn’t want to see their contracts ended. As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the war over there were problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy.”
Nuclear weapons don’t lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to keep the nuclear establishment going? Schemes advanced included using nuclear devices as substitutes for dynamite to blast huge holes in the ground—including stringing 125 atomic devices across the isthmus of Panama and setting them off to create the “Panatomic Canal,” utilizing radioactivity to zap food so it could seemingly be stored for years; building nuclear-powered airplanes (this didn’t go far because of the weight of the lead shielding needed to protect the pilots)—and using the heat built up by the nuclear reaction to boil water to produce electricity.
All along, the nuclear scientists—such as Chu now—attempted to minimize, indeed deny, the lethal danger of radioactivity and, like Nuclear Pinocchios, they pushed their technology.
Nuclear power plants—all 443 on the earth today—should be closed and no new ones built. As Rickover declared, nuclear reactors must be outlawed.
During the Bill Clinton campaign years ago, the slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” With nuclear power plants, “It’s the radioactivity”—inherent in the process and deadly.
Instead we must fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies like solar, wind (now the fastest growing energy source and cheaper than nuclear) and geothermal and all the rest which, major studies have concluded, can provide all the energy the world needs—energy without lethal radioactivity, energy we can live with.
The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.
This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power—and urged that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”
The basic problem: radioactivity.
“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”
“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated.
This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.
The problem is radioactivity—unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the “new, improved” nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology.
All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been—and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.
Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they’re produced in a nuclear plant to when they’re taken out as hotly radioactive “nuclear waste,” they must be isolated from life—for thousands for some millions of years.
In the nuclear process, mildly radioactive uranium is taken from the ground and bombarded by neutrons—and that part of the uranium which can split, is “fissile,” Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: There are hundreds of these “fission products.” The human body doesn’t know the difference between these lethal twins and safe and stable elements. Also produced are alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, all radioactive.
In addition, much of the larger part of uranium, Uranium-238, which cannot split, grabs on to neutrons and turns into Plutonium-239, the most radioactive substance known.
In this atom-splitting, too, heat is produced—which is used to boil water. Nuclear power plants are simply the most dangerous way to boil water ever conceived.
Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity? It has far less to do with science than with politics and economics—from the aftermath of the Manhattan Project to today During the World War II Manhattan Project, scientists working at laboratories secretly set up across the U.S. built atomic weapons. By 1945
it employed 600,000 people and billions of dollars were spent. Two bombs were dropped on Japan. And, with the war’s end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and more nuclear weapons were built. But what else could be done with nuclear technology to perpetuate the nuclear undertaking?
Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see their jobs end; corporations which were Manhattan Project contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, didn’t want to see their contracts ended. As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the war over there were problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy.”
Nuclear weapons don’t lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to keep the nuclear establishment going? Schemes advanced included using nuclear devices as substitutes for dynamite to blast huge holes in the ground—including stringing 125 atomic devices across the isthmus of Panama and setting them off to create the “Panatomic Canal,” utilizing radioactivity to zap food so it could seemingly be stored for years; building nuclear-powered airplanes (this didn’t go far because of the weight of the lead shielding needed to protect the pilots)—and using the heat built up by the nuclear reaction to boil water to produce electricity.
All along, the nuclear scientists—such as Chu now—attempted to minimize, indeed deny, the lethal danger of radioactivity and, like Nuclear Pinocchios, they pushed their technology.
Nuclear power plants—all 443 on the earth today—should be closed and no new ones built. As Rickover declared, nuclear reactors must be outlawed.
During the Bill Clinton campaign years ago, the slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” With nuclear power plants, “It’s the radioactivity”—inherent in the process and deadly.
Instead we must fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies like solar, wind (now the fastest growing energy source and cheaper than nuclear) and geothermal and all the rest which, major studies have concluded, can provide all the energy the world needs—energy without lethal radioactivity, energy we can live with.
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