Q: Is this a concern”
A: ‘not alarming levels of rad’n in the US. The FDA should be regularly monitoring the seafood and publishing the results. EPA should monitor seawater. They should make results public. Different countries have reached different conclusions. GR decided to phase out nuclear power after Chernobyl. After F. they decided to accelerate phase out, shut down by 2022. France realized that an accident anything like Fuku, would cost it hundreds of billions. US has called for a few steps to address unsafe operations. China made a pause but go on building.
Nuclear Power: A Simple Question
by John Gofman http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/nwJWG.html#line41
Many people think nuclear power is so complicated it requires discussion at a high level of technicality. That's pure nonsense. Because the issue is simple and straightforward.
There are only two things about nuclear power that you need to know. One, why do you want nuclear power? So you can boil water. That's all it does. It boils water. And any way of boiling water will give you steam to turn turbines. That's the useful part.
The other thing to know is, it creates a mountain of radioactivity, and I mean a mountain: astronomical quantities of strontium-90 and cesium-137 and plutonium—toxic substances that will last—strontium-90 and cesium for 300 to 600 years, plutonium for 250,000 to 500,000 years—and still be deadly toxic. And the whole thing about nuclear power is this simple: can you or can't you keep it all contained? If you can't, then you're creating a human disaster.
You not only need to control it from the public, you also need to control it from the workers. Because the dose that federal regulations allow workers to get is sufficient to create a genetic hazard to the whole human species. You see, those workers are allowed to procreate, and if you damage their genes by radiation, and they intermarry with the rest of the population, for genetic purposes it's just the same as if you irradiate the population directly.[27]
So I find nuclear power this simple: do you believe they're going to do the miracle of containment that they predict? The answer is they're not going to accomplish it. It's outside the realm of human prospects.
You don't need to discuss each valve and each transportation cask and each burial site. The point is, if you lose a little bit of it—a terribly little bit of it—you're going to contaminate the earth, and people are going to suffer for thousands of generations. You have two choices: either you believe that engineers are going to achieve a perfection that's never been achieved, and you go ahead; or you believe with common sense that such a containment is never going to be achieved, and you give it up.
If people really understood how simple a problem it is—that they've got to accomplish a miracle—no puffs like Three Mile Island—can't afford those puffs of radioactivity, or the squirts and the spills that they always tell you won't harm the public—if people understood that, they'd say, "This is ridiculous. You don't create this astronomical quantity of garbage and pray that somehow a miracle will happen to contain it. You just don't do such stupid things!"
Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated murder. First of all, when you license a plant, you know what you're doing—so it's premeditated. You can't say, "I didn't know." Second, the evidence on radiation-producing cancer is beyond doubt. I've worked fifteen years on it, and so have many others. It is not a question any more: radiation produces cancer, and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses.
The only way you could license nuclear power plants and not have murder is if you could guarantee perfect containment. But they admit that they're not going to contain it perfectly. They allow workers to get irradiated, and they have an allowable dose for the population.[28] So in essence I can figure out from their allowable amounts how many they are willing to kill per year.
I view this as a disgrace, as a public health disgrace. The idea of anyone saying that it's all right to murder so many in exchange for profits from electricity—or what they call "benefits" from electricity—the idea that it's all right to do that is a new advance in depravity, particularly since it will affect future generations.
You must decide what your views are on this: is it all right to murder people knowingly? If so, why do you worry about homicide? But if you say, "The number won't be too large. We might only kill fifty thousand—and that's like automobiles"—is that all right?
People like myself and a lot of the atomic energy scientists in the late fifties deserve Nuremberg trials. At Nuremberg we said those who participate in human experimentation are committing a crime. Scientists like myself who said in 1957, "Maybe Linus Pauling is right about radiation causing cancer, but we don't really know, and therefore we shouldn't stop progress," were saying in essence that it's all right to experiment. Since we don't know, let's go ahead. So we were experimenting on humans, weren't we? But once you know that your nuclear power plants are going to release radioactivity and kill a certain number of people, you are no longer committing the crime of experimentation—you are committing a higher crime. Scientists who support these nuclear plants—knowing the effects of radiation—don't deserve trials for experimentation; they deserve trials for murder. . . .
. . . The only solution is, you must stop all efforts to develop first-strike force solutions everywhere — whether they be nuclear or other — and move toward a more just society.
The gunning of rickety old nukes is getting a green light all over the region.
John LaForge, (an earlier version ran in The Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin, Dec 28, 2010)
The owners of two 40-year-old nuclear reactors at Point Beach, on Lake Michigan north of Two Rivers, want to increase the power output for each unit by 17 percent — from 1,540 megawatts to 1,800.
The gunning of rickety old nukes is getting a green light all over the country. According to NRC project manager, Nick DiFrancesco,who spoke with Nukewatch January 7, the agency has approved 149 so-called “power uprate” applications since 1977, and has denied exactly one.
The Monticello reactor, 30 miles from Minneapolis, will boost its output to 120 percent of the original licensed limit — from 613 megawatts to 684. Monticello’s been rattling along since 1971, and it rattles badly. In 2007, a 35,000-pound turbine control box (6 feet by 6 feet and 20 feet long) broke its welds and fell onto a large steam pipe that was cut open, causing the loss of so much pressure that an automatic reactor shutdown was tripped. Decades of intense vibration and poor welding were blamed for the crash. The reactor had been operating at 90 percent power. So why not push the limits to 120 percent?
One reason is that Montecello is a General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor identical to the three exploded and melted Fukushima reactors. All the Mark Ones have long been known to be vulnerable to containment failure during sever accidents – as occurred at Fukushima.
In 2009 the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected claims that the accident record at the two Prairie Island reactors, south of Minneapolis, is so bad that its license extension should be denied. In May 2006, one of them accidentally spewed radioactive iodine-131 gas over 110 of its own workers, who inhaled it. Internal radiation poisoning is the kind for which there is no decontamination. Even so, the NRC could soon OK letting the Prairie Island jalopies run until 2033 and 2034, respectively, rather than shut them down in 2013 and 2014 as the license now requires.
Back in Wisconsin, Point Beach’s “extended power uprate” (EPU) plan was published by the NRC Dec. 10 in the Federal Register. (http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/2010-31085.htm). The draft environmental assessment (EA) and “finding of no significant impact” are hair-raising. The public must get written comments to NRC on or before Jan. 8 (to: Chief, Rules and Directives Branch, RDB, TWB-05-B01M, Division of Administrative Services, Office of Administration, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC, 20555-0001, and should cite date: December 10, 2010, Vol. 75, No. 237, and page: 77010-77017, and Docket Nos. 50-266 and 50-301; NRC-2010-0380).
Should we be skeptical? Point Beach has received two of only four “Red findings” — the worst failure warning available — ever issued by the NRC. In 2006, the NRC found that operators had harassed a whistle-blower who documented technical violations. In 2005, Point Beach was fined $60,000 for deliberately giving false information to federal inspectors. In May 1996, it was the site of a potentially catastrophic explosion of hydrogen gas that upended the 3-ton lid on a huge cask filled with high-level radioactive waste. The lid was being robotically welded when the gas exploded.
Regarding cancer-causing pollution, the environmental assessment says revving up the Wisconsin reactors would cause a 17.6 percent increase in the “radioactivity in the reactor coolant, which in turn increases the radioactivity in the waste disposal systems and radioactive gases released from the plant.” Further, the “licensee (NextEra Energy LLC) stated that the in-plant radiation sources are expected to increase approximately linearly with the proposed increase in core power level,” or 17.6 percent.
In spite of these increases in radiation in discharged water and air inside reactor buildings, the environmental assessment asserts that “no physical changes would be needed to the radioactive gaseous, liquid, or solid waste systems.” Does your 1971 Caprice still run pretty well with the original air, oil and fuel systems, let alone the motor?
The assessment claims Point Beach’s 40-year-old “shielding design … is adequate to offset the increased radiation levels that are expected to occur from the proposed EPU.” This is because the change “is not expected to significantly affect radiation levels within the plant and therefore there would not be a significant radiological impact to the workers.”
Since there is no safe level of radiation exposure — no matter how “insignificant” — the NRC should hear from Wisconsin and Minnesota that we don’t believe utility lullabies, and that the last thing we should do with retirement-aged reactors is stomp on the accelerator.
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John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a Wisconsin-based organization, and edits its quarterly newsletter.
Copyright 2011 madison.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
< http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/article_8de045ad-4dbf-5767-b1f5-1bece32f4834.html>
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The Answer to Climate Change Is Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power
HUFFINGTON POST / NOV 25, 2013
< http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/the-answer-to-climate-cha_b_4337435.html>
When climate scientists and some energy policy analysts take a "tough-minded" look at the numbers, many come to the conclusion that the only technology now available to replace fossil fuels is nuclear power. Eduardo Porter of the New York Times made that argument last week when he wrote:
...nuclear power remains the cheapest and most readily scalable of the alternative energy sources.
As I indicated this past April, I disagree. There are a number of reasons that nuclear power is a bad solution to the climate crisis. The first is that the technology is really not available. Nuclear power plants are capital-intensive, technologically complex to manage, and difficult, if not impossible, to site. These are not minor issues. Investors would rather put their money elsewhere and communities intensely resist siting a plant in their backyard.
This means that even though we know how to generate electricity this way, and we have many decades of experience doing it, in the U.S. these plants will never be built in sufficient quantity to reduce global warming. In other parts of the world, we might pay attention to the lessons we should be learning in Iran. There is a thin line between the technology of nuclear power generation and the technology of nuclear bomb development. While it's too late to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, let's stop pretending that human political systems or organizational processes can manage the risks of this technology.
There are other issues associated with current nuclear technologies that render them problematic as well. The toxicity of its fuel and waste, for example, should not be ignored. Catastrophic accidents may be rare, but when they occur, their impact is intense and long-lasting. While a well-managed plant poses little real danger, it is difficult to judge the danger posed by a poorly managed one. One also cannot dismiss the possibility of sabotage. Terrorists taking over a plant and threatening to allow an accident to occur could hold a city hostage.
Electric utilities, like water and sewage utilities, are natural monopolies that require government regulation. The investment in infrastructure to generate and transmit electricity is so massive that it makes little sense to allow more than one system per city. This investment in infrastructure and equipment reinforces the tendency of electric utilities to be highly centralized, vertically integrated organizations. These utilities tend to be rigid, unimaginative and monopolistic. While most other elements of our economy have moved into decentralized networks of organizations, the energy sector remains highly centralized. This is true of oil companies as well as electric utilities. These organizations outsource, but they are far less network-dependent than many other private organizations. It should not surprise us if the energy sector is insular and resists innovation. Instead of embracing renewable energy, many, though not all, are fighting it.
Renewable energy could change the energy business. While some large-scale organizations will always be part of the energy industry, we are seeing the start of decentralized, distributed generation of energy. Although the conventional wisdom tells us that solar power, battery technology, and smart grids are far in the future, we are only a breakthrough or two away from a new age of decentralized energy technology. While none of us can predict the future, and technological breakthroughs cannot be assumed, the risk of nuclear power is not difficult to predict.
The price of solar energy continues to come down, as the number of solar cells continues to grow. Breakthroughs in nanotechnology have the potential to shrink the size of these cells, making it possible to imagine smaller, more inexpensive installations of solar arrays. While some of the discussion of solar technology imagines utility-scale centralized power stations, my own view is that improved solar cells coupled with improved battery technology makes it possible to imagine a far more decentralized approach to energy generation. Even without breakthroughs, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has projected that:
Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80 percent of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's recently published 2012 Renewable Energy Data Book reported that:
• Renewable electricity represented 14 percent of total installed capacity and more than 12 percent of total electric generation in 2012...
• The installed global renewable electricity capacity, including hydropower, doubled between 2000 and 2012, and represents a significant and growing portion of the total energy supply both globally and in the U.S.
• In 2012, wind energy and solar photovoltaics (PV) were two of the fastest growing electric generation technologies in the U.S. Cumulative installed wind energy capacity increased by nearly 28 percent and cumulative installed solar photovoltaic capacity grew more than 83 percent from the previous year.
• Renewable electricity has been capturing a growing percentage of new capacity additions during the past few years. In 2012, renewable electricity accounted for more than 56 percent of all new electrical capacity installations in the U.S. — a major increase from 2004 when renewable electricity installations captured only 2 percent of new capacity additions.
These data provide evidence of the growth of renewable energy in the United States, with modest, incremental improvements in technology. Large-scale implementation of smart grid technology would make it possible to accelerate this trend. This indicates a latent market that could expand rapidly following a major technological advance in solar receiver or storage technology. While windmills have generated political opposition due to impacts on views and birds, solar home installations have not generated much of any political opposition.
An important advantage of decentralized, distributed generation of energy is that it is less vulnerable to catastrophic, large-scale disruption. As our lifestyles require more and more energy, even a few days of disrupted supply can have a significant negative effect on quality of life. After Hurricane Sandy, many suburbanites in the Northeast went out and bought electric generators and gasoline tanks to keep their homes powered during and after storms. A solar system in the home, with an advanced storage battery, would be a more convenient and cleaner way to do the same job.
The Obama Administration's non-strategic "all of the above energy strategy" is a piece of political pandering that persists and continues to emphasize nuclear power and more extensive use of fossil fuels. At some point in the future, renewable energy will be able to underprice fossil fuels and they will fade away. Unfortunately, the toxicity of nuclear energy and its waste stream will last forever — or at least for a few hundred thousand years. I urge nuclear advocates to focus their attention on the very human organizational and political systems that we rely on to manage these technologies. The nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain is built but cannot be opened due to political opposition. International agreement and global pressure is required to try to dial back Iran's nuclear project to keep it focused on electricity instead of bomb making.
Nuclear remains a problematic technology. We need a focused, well-funded national effort to implement smart grids and decentralized renewable energy. We need leadership from the White House and an energy strategy that makes choices. This is not an argument made from a fear of all things nuclear. There are plenty of examples of nuclear facilities that are safe and well-managed. But political and organizational experts necessarily focus on human failures as well as successes. Even though the probability of nuclear failure is low, the certainty of occasional failure has already been demonstrated. The cost of those failures has been too high. Nuclear power is not the answer; the answer is renewable energy. Let's accept that and get to work.
Fukushima’s Radiation Gusher: Entire Pacific Fishery Could be Tainted
By John LaForge, Nukewatch
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” — Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, quoted by Sara Shannon in Diet for the Atomic Age
Distracting the public from the 300 tons of highly radioactive water (80,000 gallons) spreading into the Pacific Ocean every day from the triple reactor melt-through at Fukushima-Daiichi, is news of the plan to build an underground “ice wall” to damn up the poisoned water before it leaks to the sea. The project is reportedly a better plan than the failed concrete wall that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) first decided to build.
This frozen finger-in-the-dike won’t be completed until 2015, and it will then fail. Even if it were to work as planned, there is a risk of reversing the water flow, forcing highly radioactive water to seep out from the reactor buildings to the aquifer. Meanwhile, nothing is slowing the relentless radioactive contamination of the Pacific — the world’s largest ocean which covers about a third of Earth.
What we’re being distracted from is the threat to the fishery caused by Fukushima’s ongoing radioactive gusher. At least 300 tons of cesium- and strontium-contaminated water is still spewing into the Pacific every day. Tepco admitted in August that this massive carcinogenic hemorrhage has been going on since March 11, 2011. It amounts to about 85 million gallons — 80,000 gal. per day, for 942 days, dumped into the Pacific — and counting.
The radiation released by Fukushima into the environment in just the first three weeks has exceeded that of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the second worst nuclear power disaster. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima so far are between 5.6 and 10.5 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report based on estimates by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and Japan’s Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC).
Prof. Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News, “The situation is not under control. Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”
Tepco estimates that about 900 peta-becquerels spewed from Fukushima, and the 1996 UNSCEAR Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 85 peta-becquerels. (The mind-numbing “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels. A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second.)
Where have all the Becquerels gone?
Japan has decided that fish contaminated with fewer than 100 Becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg) of cesium-137 is good enough to eat. Some local officials have set a stricter bar of 50 Bq/kg.
In the U.S. the permissible level of cesium in food is 1,200 Bq/kg. Canada allows 1,000 Bq/kg. The difference is startling. The huge discrepancy allows importation by the U.S. and Canada of what Japan considers highly contaminated fish, vegetables and meat. Rice, fish, beef and other Japanese exports poisoned by nuclear power’s single worst nightmare is doubtless being consumed in the United States.
Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, told Canada’s CTVnews that the 1,000 Bq/kg allowance is dangerous. “It has to be recognized that even Health Canada acknowledges that even those level correspond to an increased cancer risk of eight cancers per 1,000 people exposed over a 70-year period. So these are not safe levels, even by Health Canada’s own standards,” he said.
Cesium-137 and -134— muscle-seeking isotopes that can cause cancers and other illnesses when ingested or inhaled — were and are being dumped into the atmosphere in huge quantities by Fukushima. An April 12, 2011 warning about food contamination from the Low Level Radiation Campaign in England said: “Vegetables and other foodstuffs showing more than 50 Bq/kg of cesium indicate airborne contamination with other radionuclides. LLRC advises food with more than 50 Bq/kg should not be eaten unless there’s absolutely no choice. We recommend that the Japanese government ask for international food aid supplies to prevent its people eating contaminated food.”
The Seattle Times reported last October that researchers found small amounts of Fukushima’s cesium in albacore tuna caught off the coasts of Washington and Oregon. The albacore warning followed the May 2012 and Feb. 2013 findings of cesium-contamination in Blue fin tuna caught off California.
The Huffington Post said Aug. 28 that out of 170 types of fish tested in the Fukushima area, 42 species were put off limits. CBS News put it a little differently Aug. 20, noting that in the same region only 16 types of fish are considered safe to catch, compared with 150 types before the catastrophe. Japanese public television reported July 11 that sea bass were found with 1,037 Bq/kg, or ten times the allowed contamination. The Tokyo daily Asahi Shimbun noted Aug. 29, 2013 that a greeling had 25,800 Bq/kg cesium, an all-time record in the 2 ½ years since the radiation gusher began. Pacific cod and black sea bream had 3,300 Bq/kg.
Environmental radioactivity bio-accumulates as it climbs the food chain. Smaller species now under Japanese fishing bans — which are eaten by the big tuna — eat species that are smaller yet. So prize fish like tuna, which can live 30 years and are at the top of the food chain, will eventually be poisoned with far more than “trace” amounts of cesium.
Prof. Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says the seafloor is a major reservoir for Fukushima’s cesium. “It looks to me like the bottom fish, the fish that are eating, you know, crabs and shellfish, the kinds of things that are article feeders — they seem to be increasing their accumulation of the cesium isotopes because of their habitat on the seafloor,” he told Science in Oct. 2012. The BBC reported Oct. 25, 2012 that flounder, conger, Pollock, rockfish, skate and the popular U.S. imports cod, sole and halibut — all bottom feeders or demersal — “consistently showed the highest cesium counts.”
Bon appétit! ( John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.)
Chernobyl in 2011 – 25 Years, only 275 to Go
CHERNOBYL & FUKUSHIMA: NUCLEAR’S FINAL INSULTS
By John LaForge
The word ‘Chernobyl has come to represent the deadly, terrifying risks posed by nuclear power. Twenty-five years ago Chernobyl Unit 4 ran out of control, caused two giant explosions and burned for 40 days,81 spreading radioactive contamination to every country in the northern hemisphere.82 Chernobyl radiation was detected in Minnesota’s milk83 and it still makes wild boar meat in Germany too dangerous to eat. Ironically today, high levels of fallout were measured in Hiroshima, Japan, 4,900 miles away.84
With radiation now spreading everywhere from four wrecked Fukushima reactors in northeast Japan — contaminating water, milk and crops here — we are reminded that nuclear reactors threaten whole-earth contamination. Forbes reports that Fukushima’s iodine-131 — near the EPA’s maximum legal limit — has been found in drinking water in dozens of U.S. cities from California to Massachusetts, from Washington to Alabama. The EPA found cesium-137 in Idaho, Nevada, Hawaii, Florida and Utah.85 How dangerous is it?
The AP’s Eric Talmadge quoted an unnamed official March 17: “In Ibarak prefecture, just south of Fukushima, officials said radiation levels were about 300 times normal levels… It would take three years of constant exposure to these higher levels to raise a person’s risk of cancer.” This disinformation contradicts the published positions of every U.S. agency that regulates radiation. The National Council on Radiation Protection says for example that “… every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.”86 The EPA, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Energy Department, National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and Health & Human Services all say there is no safe dose.87
Chernobyl caused the permanent evacuation of 350,000 of from within an 18-mile “exclusion zone” and elsewhere in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.88 Japan is limiting its evacuation to 200,000 from within a 20 kilometer radius, even though cesium-137 was found in a village 25 miles from Fukushima in amounts over twice the evacuation standard used at Chernobyl. Surveyors found up to 3.7 million becquerels per square meter—the abandonment standard used at Chernobyl was 1.48 million.89 Why pretend the consequences are so light?
Likewise, the often-repeated Chernobyl death toll from the United Nations’ 2005 “Chernobyl Forum,” it its projected 9,000 eventual deaths in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. This study has been lambasted for not considering fatalities beyond those three republics. Only 7 million people live in the area studied by the “Chernobyl Forum,” yet about 600 million live in Western Europe and elsewhere where about two-thirds of Chernobyl’s collective dose was deposited.90
Author Alexey Yablokov argues, “There is no reasonable explanation for the fact that the [Chernobyl Forum] completely neglected the consequences of radioactive contamination in other countries, which received more than 50% of the Chernobyl radionuclides....”91 Yablokov’s 2009 book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, estimates 985,000 Chernobyl deaths, at least 100,000 from among the 830,000 men used in clean-up teams.92
Fukushima, is still releasing large amounts of radiation to the atmosphere and into the Pacific. As in Chernobyl, independent analysts have called for broader evacuations and stricter limits on food and water use. But a radiation emergency is like a war zone, and truth is the first casualty.
French Nuclear Energy Agency, “Update of Chernobyl: Ten Years On,” Chap. II, “The release, dispersion and deposition of radionuclides,” April 2002, p. 3
(http://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c02.html)
2 UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, “Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident,” “Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation,” Vol. II, Annex D, 2011, pp. 4, 310, 311, 315, 316, 343; Alexey Yablokov, et al, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1181, Boston, 2009, pp. vii, & 1; AP, Duluth Herald, May 15, 1986: “Airborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said.”
3 Duluth News-Tribune & Herald, “Slight rise in radioactivity found again in state milk,” May 22, 1986; St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch, “Radiation kills Chernobyl firemen,” May 17, 1986; Minneapolis StarTribune, “Low radiation dose found in area milk,” May 17, 1986
4 Fairlie & Sumner, “TORCH: The Other Chernobyl Report,” April 2006, p. 30
5 “Radiation Detected In Drinking Water In 13 More U.S. Cities, Cesium-137 In Vermont Milk,” Forbes, April 11, 2011; “Japan nuke accident seen from Seattle,” Science News, Vol.179, #9, April 23, 2011, p. 16
6 Institute for Energy & Environmental Research, Science for Democratic Action, June 2005, citing National Council on Radiation Protection, “Evaluation of the Linear-Non-threshold Dose-Response Model for Ionizing Radiation,” NCRP report 136, Bethesda, Maryland, June 4, 2001
7 EPA, “Ionizing Radiation Series,” No.2, May 1998, “Air & Radiation,” 6601J, EPA 402-F-98-010; “Radiation: Risks & Realities,” Air & Radiation 6602J, EPA 402-K-92-004, Aug. 1993, p. 3; DOE, “Understanding Radiation,” DOE/NE, 0074, p. 8 & 9 <http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdfFiles/underrad.pdf>; NRC, “How Does Radiation Affect the Public?” <http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/radiation/affect.html>; DHHS, “Cancer and the Environment: Ionizing radiation,” p. 10 <www.cancer.gov/images/Documents /5d17e03e-b39f-4b40-a214-e9e9099c4220/ Cancer%20and% 20the%20Environment.pdf>; and NAS, Sharan Daniel, Stanford Univ., Stanford Report, Oct. 25, 2005
8 “Chernobyl Effects Could Last Centuries,” Inter Press Service, Rome, August 20, 2010; “Some 350,000 people were evacuated forever from their homes,” Anna Melnichuk, AP, Chicago Sun Times, Apr. 26, 2006
9 “Dangerous Levels of Radioactive Isotope Found 25 Miles from Nuclear Plant,” New York Times, March 31, 2011, p.A7
0 Stephanie Cooke, In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age, Bloomsbury, New York, 2009, p. 322
1 Alexey Yablokov, et al, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1181, Boston, 2009, p. 5
2 Ibid., pp. 192 and 210; and “Russia and Ukraine bicker over Chernobyl,” Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 2003, p. 8
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Counterpunch // JANUARY 23, 2013 // The Energy Department's Crazy Plan for Radioactive Scrap
Nuclear Weapons Waste in Your Water Bottle, Hip Replacement, Baby Toys?
by JOHN LaFORGE
Even the deregulation-happy Wall St. Journal sounded shocked: “The Department of Energy is proposing to allow the sale of tons of scrap metal from government nuclear sites — an attempt to reduce waste that critics say could lead to radiation-tainted belt buckles, surgical implants and other consumer products.”
Having failed in the ‘80s and ‘90s to free the nuclear bomb factories and national laboratories of millions of tons of their radioactively contaminated scrap and nickel, the DOE is trying again. Its latest proposal is moving ahead without even an Environmental Impact Statement. Those messy EISs involve public hearings, so you can imagine the DOE’s reluctance to face the public over adding yet more radiation to the doses we’re already accumulating. It would be a pretty hard sell, what with dental X-rays, medical X-rays, mammograms, CAT scans, PET scans, radio-isotope “seeds” and cocktails, food irradiation, every-day releases of radioactive gases and water from 104 nuclear power reactors, major releases like Fukushima, radon from rocks, whole-body X-rays at airports (that you can refuse) and cosmic rays during flights.
Not long after Chernobyl spread radiation around the world in 1986, the National Council on Radiation Protection doubled its estimate of our annual radiation dose, from 170 millirems to 360. A few years ago it raised the estimate again, to 620 millirems per year. The agencies that both create radioactive waste and estimate the radiation doses it gives to us, say the latest increase is due mostly to rapid growth in the use of medical X-rays and radio-isotopes in medicine. Should the DOE be allowed to haphazardly add still more?
Still, the DOE wants to deregulate and actually sell 14,000 tons of radioactive scrap metal (both volumetrically and topically contaminated) from the nuclear war system — uranium enrichment, plutonium extraction, etc. — and “recycle” the waste to the commercial clean scrap metal industry. From there, according to the watchdog group Nuclear Information and Resource Service, the radioactive stuff “could be turned into anything from your next pants zipper to baby toys.”
The DOE claims that potential radiation exposures to men, women and children would amount to a “negligible individual dose.” But anyone with a scrap of understanding of DOE and the Atomic Energy Commission knows not to believe a word of their assurances. The DOE famously said that rainwater would take thousands of years to seep through Yucca Mountain to a deep waste repository; it ran through the mountain in 40 years.
Even Some in Congress Object
Rep. Ed Markey wrote to Energy Secretary Steven Chu Jan. 11, calling the deregulation proposal “unwise” and urging that it “should be immediately abandoned.” Rep. Markey warned that radioactive products could “ultimately be utilized by pregnant women, children and other vulnerable populations.”
The DOE has never officially acknowledged — in spite of the National Academy of Sciences’ 2006 findings — that the same radiation dose does far more harm to women than to men. The drastically increased vulnerability of fetuses and infants is well known, but the whole population is nevertheless treated as the same big, young, Caucasian male (“reference man”) in most radiation risk assessments.
The DOE’s assessment of the proposal’s risks neglects the fact that exposures can go on for years from a watch or from medical implants or tableware or other items, leading to many millirems for many years. A millirem per year over 30 or 70 years is 30 or 70 millirems which is not trivial, NIRS points out.
The DOE currently bans the release of its radioactive scrap under a moratorium that began in 2000. The ban must not be lifted, but should be made permanent and expanded to keep all radioactive waste — plastic, concrete, soil, asphalt, etc. in addition to all metals — under control, out of commercial recycling and managed as the deadly hazard it is. NIRS.org has more details.
You can tell the DOE to continue to keep its radioactive metal out of the commercial metal supply, commerce, and our personal items. You can demand a full environmental impact statement. Comment deadline is Feb. 9, 2013. Email to: scrap_PEAcomments@hq.doe.gov (with an underscore after “scrap”). Snail mail to: Jane Summerson / DOE NNSA / PO Box 5400, Bldg. 401K. AFB East / Albuquerque, NM 87185
John LaForge works for Nukewatch and edits its Quarterly newsletter.
Cutting Corners, Cutting Costs, Creating Cancer
For Future Reactor Meltdowns, EPA Means: “Extra Pollution Allowed”
by JOHN LaFORGE, JULY 09, 2013 counterpunch
As the nuclear power industry struggles against collapse from skyrocketing costs, bankrupting repair bills and investor flight (four operating reactors were permanently closed this year, more than in any previous 12 month period), the government seems to have capitulated to political pressure to weaken radiation exposure standards and save nuclear utilities billions. On April 15, the EPA issued new Protective Action Guides (PAGs) for dealing with large scale radiation releases — like the catastrophic triple reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, Japan that spread cesium and radio-iodine worldwide. The new PAGs are like a government bailout, saving reactor owners the gargantuan costs of comprehensive cleanup. And eerily, the new PAGs seem to presume the inevitability of radiation disasters that the industry — with its fleet of 100 rickety 40-year-old units — can’t currently afford to withstand.
According to Daniel Hirsch, President of Committee to Bridge the Gap, the latest PAGs took effect in April but can be amended — and EPA is taking comments. Hirsch says that the National Council on Radiation Protection’s plans for implementing the new PAGs “would allow the public to be exposed to extraordinarily higher levels of radiation than previously permitted” during reactor accident emergencies. The new PAGs also allow extremely high contamination of food, he says. “In essence,” Hirsch reports, the PAGs say “nuclear power accidents could be so widespread and produce such immense radiation levels that the government would abandon cleanup obligations” forcing people to absorb and live with far more cancers.
To cut costs, industry has long pushed for weakening radiation exposure rules. In 2002, Roger Clarke president of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) warned in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Some people think that too much money is being spent to achieve low levels of residual contamination.” The ICRP recommends exposure standards to governments for nuclear industry workers and the public.
Permissible radiation doses established by polluters
There is no exposure to ionizing radiation that’s safe. Even the smallest exposures have cellular-level effects that can lead to immune dysfunction, birth defects, cancer and other diseases. The National Academy of Sciences’ 7th book-length on the biological effects of ionizing radiation, BEIR-VII, declared that any exposure, regardless of how small, may cause the induction of cancer. BEIR-VII also explicitly refuted and repudiated the pop culture “hormesus” theory, promoted by industry boosters, that a little radiation is good for us and acts like a vaccination.
Today, the nuclear industry — military, industrial and medical — is required to keep radiation exposures only “as low as reasonably achievable.” This tragicomic standard is neither a medical nor scientific concept. It’s not based on health physics or biology. It’s merely the formal admission that radiation producers cannot keep worker or public exposures to a level that is safe — that is zero.
Exposure limits have been established at the convenience of the military and industrial producers of radioactive pollution, not by medical doctors of health physicists. The late Dr. Rosalie Bertell made clear 36 years ago in Robert Del Tredici’s book At Work In the Fields of the Bomb, “The people with the highest vested interest are the ones that are making the nuclear bombs. And it turns out they have complete control over setting the permissible [radiation exposure] levels.” Since then, little has changed in the regulatory world (although scientists have found that far more damage is caused by low dose radiation than was earlier thought possible): the ICRP’s 1990 recommendations to reduce worker and public exposures by three-fifths has yet to be adopted by the United States.
We can thank industrial and political roadblocks for that, yet in spite of them the government’s permissible dose (lazy reporters often write “safe” dose) of radiation has dramatic-ally decreased over the years — as we’ve come to better understand the toxic, carcinogenic and mutagenic proper-ties of low-level exposures. In the 1920s the permissible dose was 75 rem (radiation equivalent man) per year for nuclear industry workers. In 1936, the limit was reduced to 50 rem per year; then 20-25 in 1948; 15 in 1954; and down to 5 rem per year in 1958. The general public is officially allowed to be exposed to one-tenth the workers’ dose, or 0.5 rem per year. The ICRP’s 1990 suggestion was to cut this to 2 and 0.2 respectively.
With cancer rates at pandemic proportions, adding higher radiation exposures to the effects of 80,000 chemicals that contaminate our air, water and food only makes our chance of avoiding the dread disease slimmer. Rather than permit-ting increased doses of dangerous and sometimes deadly radiation, especially following reactor disasters, the government should be acting to prevent them — like Germany, Italy and Japan — by preparing the phase-out of the country’s accident-prone nukes.
— John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, edits its Quarterly, and writes for PeaceVoice.
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