11/19/11
Dear Readers,
I've been following nuclear issues for more than 40 years -- since I was about fourteen years old. I watched as Three Mile Island unfolded, and then Chernobyl, the loss of the Russian submarine Kursk, and a thousand other events. I'd guess I've testified at over 100 nuke hearings (10 more, and I get a free pizza!) and written over a thousand essays (we'll call this one #1,167, though it may not be). A phone call in the middle of the night on 3/11 from Harvey Wasserman alerted me to Fukushima. (So now I owe Harvey a pizza.)
Suffice it to say, it's not often I read a headline about nuclear dangers that scares the daylights out of me. They all distress me, but I don't lose my daylights (wherever they happen to be) very often. However, here's a headline that DOES scare the daylights out of me:
"Architect of Reactor 3 warns of massive hydrovolcanic explosion."
(Full article and links, below).
Here's my take on it (with a little history to set the scene):
In the fall of 1945 Vern Partlow was a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.
After interviewing scientists about the atomic bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he became so alarmed that he wrote a song about the dangers, called Old Man Atom.
The song was an enormous hit among folksingers of the time (Pete Seeger among them) but was (famously) banned during the McCarthy Era. (Even the New York Times editorialized that the song's ban was "a threat to freedom.")
The song has a line that describes "the atom" as: "...the thing that Einstein says he's scared of" then goes on to say: "And when Einstein's scared, brother, I'M SCARED!"
If Einstein were alive today, I think he'd be VERY scared.
Of Fukushima.
Professor Haruo Uehara is a former president of Saga University and the primary architect of Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor 3. Professor Haruo is scared. So I think we should ALL be scared. Not that Professor Uehara is saying anything significantly different from what I -- and others -- have been saying we thought happened in Fukushima, or is happening, or will happen. But now it's coming from someone with very heavy credentials AND close ties to Fukushima Dai-ichi itself.
There may be nothing we can do about Fukushima, but ADDITIONAL nuclear catastrophes can be relatively easy to prevent: Shut the reactors down. Shut 'em ALL down.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author was born during atmospheric weapons testing (1956, to be exact) and is an educational software developer. He witnessed the breakup of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) into the NRC and the DOE (1974). He was working at a college news department as Three Mile Island unfolded (1979). He was a computer programmer by the time of Chernobyl (1986). His older brother died of leukemia (1994), then he had bladder cancer himself (2005). Then Fukushima started raining radioactive poisons down on us all (2011). What's next? San Onofre? Indian Point? Or any of a hundred others?
-------------------------------------------------
Architect of Reactor 3 warns of massive hydrovolcanic explosion:
http://fukushima-diary.com/2011/11/architect-of-reactor-3-warns-massive-hydrovolcanic-explosion/?mid=531
Posted by Mochizuki on November 19th, 2011
Architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, the former president of Saga University had an interview on 11/17/2011.
In this interview, he admitted Tepco’s explanation does not make sense, and that the China syndrome is inevitable.
He stated that considering 8 months have passed since 311 without any improvement, it is inevitable that melted fuel went out of the container vessel and sank underground, which is called China syndrome.
He added, if fuel has reaches a underground water vein, it will cause contamination of underground water, soil contamination and sea contamination. Moreover, if the underground water vein keeps being heated for long time, a massive hydrovolcanic explosion will be caused.
He also warned radioactive debris is spreading in Pacific Ocean. Tons of the debris has reached the Marshall Islands as of 11/15/2011.
Original source: http://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/6041353/
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Showing posts with label Ace Hoffman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ace Hoffman. Show all posts
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Black Rain for Xmas
August 3rd, 2011
Dear Readers,
3, 2, 1 ... poof! Dusted!
Houston, you caused a problem!
Even as people in Japan experience "black rain" because of Fukushima, NASA is threatening a plutonium-laden "black rain" for Christmas.
Some time between November 25th and December 15th, 2011, NASA plans to launch a plutonium 238-laden rocket carrying a robotic rover named Curiosity, aimed for Mars.
Curiosity will be NASA' 27th nuclear space launch. Three have already failed, and failures are hardly a thing of the past, nor can they be, because of the debris field, and because everything we build, and do, is imperfect.
One of the three failed nuclear launches resulted in the INTENTIONAL (as in: "this is what WILL happen in an accident, and of course, there will be accidents") release of several POUNDS of plutonium (in 1964).
There were several other failures and countless near-misses, all in just 26 flights. We can't get lucky all the time, but luck is what NASA relies on to succeed. Dumb luck.
NASA hopes you won't get too curious about Curiosity. The robotic mission is extremely risky (as in: "will probably not achieve objectives due to critical failure at some point") and should be abandoned.
NASA's use of plutonium-238 (in dioxide form) for this mission follows a pattern of partial fixes to insurmountable problems with nuclear fuels.
After getting the idea for radioisotope-powered thermoelectric generators (RTGs) for space (and undersea) missions from the Russians, NASA's original "containers" for the plutonium were designed to simply vaporize their contents in most accident scenarios: In other words, there was virtually no containment whatsoever. The "theory" was that they would be extra-careful for those flights carrying plutonium, and wouldn't have accidents that way. It didn't work out. The other part of the "theory" was that by having the thermocouples right next to the plutonium, you could get more useful heat out of the unit -- and thus it was more efficient. More electricity could be generated from a given quantity of plutonium.
The theory "snapped" when a mission blew up during late launch, destroying the Transit Satellite and its SNAP-9A nuclear power unit, scattering its deadly contents, and causing a global, measurable increase in plutonium levels and -- according to eminent nuclear physicist and medical doctor John Gofman -- causing as many as one million additional lung cancers globally.
A single pound of plutonium could cause lung cancer in every person on earth if we each inhaled a little portion of it. And then it could do it again, and again. NASA is threatening to vaporize 10.6 pounds of plutonium into our fragile environment. We should stop them.
Admittedly, the "modern" containers for the plutonium are somewhat better than the old system. The new containers are designed to safely hold the plutonium in many potential accident scenarios -- but by no means ALL accident scenarios. In fact, during EVERY phase of flight while within earth's gravitational pull, plutonium can be released which will descend back upon us. In some phases of the flight, a complete release of the entire contents is practically guaranteed if an accident occurs!
The containers (there are dozens of individual plutonium-packages inside the single RTG on Curiosity) are designed to reduce the CHANCES of SOME TYPES of releases in FAVOR of increased QUANTITIES of released plutonium in case of other types of failure, especially late in the launch, or during a full-stack powered impact into the earth (something they have self-destruct mechanisms to avoid, but even self-destruct mechanisms have been known to fail at critical times).
There are many pathways to failure in this mission. For example, the additional weight of this new rover over previous, solar-powered units demanded a new method of landing on Mars -- the old one ("Bouncy Bouncy") was unreliable anyway. The new method -- a tethered descent -- is very difficult and is sure to be unreliable, too. If we were risking only money, I guess it wouldn't matter, although a few billion dollars could build a lot of schools and pay a lot of teachers' salaries for a while.
Instead, all that money might be wasted, and all that plutonium might be launched for naught -- hundreds of billions of lethal doses' worth of one of the world's most deadly poisons.
(Plutonium-238 is about 275 times more toxic than normal "weapons grade" plutonium (Pu-239), often cited as the world's deadliest substance. Pu 238's half-life, about 87.75 years, is correspondingly about 275 times shorter than Pu-239's 24,100 year half-life. A significant portion (about 10%) of the Pu is Pu-239 with its 24,100 year half-life.)
Thousands of people have already protested these dangerous nuclear launches. But to no avail. NASA's arrogant continued use of plutonium-238 for "civilian" space purposes appears to be directly related to the U.S. government's stated desire to launch plutonium and uranium-powered military rocketry for "domination" of outer space near earth. So there are some very good reasons to oppose THIS launch, besides that it's a waste of money.
The amount of space debris already in orbit guarantees that if nuclear payloads are launched, there will be catastrophic accidents, possibly over highly-populated areas. This launch could fail over a major city, causing massive evacuations and widespread contamination! It could start a war.
Hundreds of studies with animals (and a few that were done on humans) have indicated reliably that plutonium follows a "Linear, No Threshold" health effects pattern. So, if there's an accident, no matter where or how it comes down, it's bound to poison a lot of people before all the plutonium decays, and decays again, and again, finally into something stable.
This launch is anything but an engineering marvel. It is a potential engineering disaster. Anyone truly curious about it will surely be aghast, but forcing this risk on billions of unsuspecting humans (who are now breathing Fukushima's effluent as well) is especially cruel.
There is simply no sane reason for NASA to do this.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author's prior comments on Cassini were published in Space News, The Washington Post and elsewhere. He is a computer programmer and co-author of Statistics Explained, a computer program which teaches first-year statistics for scientists. He is also the author of All About Pumps and the Animated Periodic Table of the Elements, and a co-author of The Heart: The Engine of Life, all computer programs. He has also authored a book about nuclear power called The Code Killers (2008).
************************************************
** Ace Hoffman, Owner & Chief Programmer, The Animated Software Co.
** POB 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018
** U.S. & Canada (800) 551-2726; elsewhere: (760) 720-7261
** home page: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/
** email: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
Dear Readers,
3, 2, 1 ... poof! Dusted!
Houston, you caused a problem!
Even as people in Japan experience "black rain" because of Fukushima, NASA is threatening a plutonium-laden "black rain" for Christmas.
Some time between November 25th and December 15th, 2011, NASA plans to launch a plutonium 238-laden rocket carrying a robotic rover named Curiosity, aimed for Mars.
Curiosity will be NASA' 27th nuclear space launch. Three have already failed, and failures are hardly a thing of the past, nor can they be, because of the debris field, and because everything we build, and do, is imperfect.
One of the three failed nuclear launches resulted in the INTENTIONAL (as in: "this is what WILL happen in an accident, and of course, there will be accidents") release of several POUNDS of plutonium (in 1964).
There were several other failures and countless near-misses, all in just 26 flights. We can't get lucky all the time, but luck is what NASA relies on to succeed. Dumb luck.
NASA hopes you won't get too curious about Curiosity. The robotic mission is extremely risky (as in: "will probably not achieve objectives due to critical failure at some point") and should be abandoned.
NASA's use of plutonium-238 (in dioxide form) for this mission follows a pattern of partial fixes to insurmountable problems with nuclear fuels.
After getting the idea for radioisotope-powered thermoelectric generators (RTGs) for space (and undersea) missions from the Russians, NASA's original "containers" for the plutonium were designed to simply vaporize their contents in most accident scenarios: In other words, there was virtually no containment whatsoever. The "theory" was that they would be extra-careful for those flights carrying plutonium, and wouldn't have accidents that way. It didn't work out. The other part of the "theory" was that by having the thermocouples right next to the plutonium, you could get more useful heat out of the unit -- and thus it was more efficient. More electricity could be generated from a given quantity of plutonium.
The theory "snapped" when a mission blew up during late launch, destroying the Transit Satellite and its SNAP-9A nuclear power unit, scattering its deadly contents, and causing a global, measurable increase in plutonium levels and -- according to eminent nuclear physicist and medical doctor John Gofman -- causing as many as one million additional lung cancers globally.
A single pound of plutonium could cause lung cancer in every person on earth if we each inhaled a little portion of it. And then it could do it again, and again. NASA is threatening to vaporize 10.6 pounds of plutonium into our fragile environment. We should stop them.
Admittedly, the "modern" containers for the plutonium are somewhat better than the old system. The new containers are designed to safely hold the plutonium in many potential accident scenarios -- but by no means ALL accident scenarios. In fact, during EVERY phase of flight while within earth's gravitational pull, plutonium can be released which will descend back upon us. In some phases of the flight, a complete release of the entire contents is practically guaranteed if an accident occurs!
The containers (there are dozens of individual plutonium-packages inside the single RTG on Curiosity) are designed to reduce the CHANCES of SOME TYPES of releases in FAVOR of increased QUANTITIES of released plutonium in case of other types of failure, especially late in the launch, or during a full-stack powered impact into the earth (something they have self-destruct mechanisms to avoid, but even self-destruct mechanisms have been known to fail at critical times).
There are many pathways to failure in this mission. For example, the additional weight of this new rover over previous, solar-powered units demanded a new method of landing on Mars -- the old one ("Bouncy Bouncy") was unreliable anyway. The new method -- a tethered descent -- is very difficult and is sure to be unreliable, too. If we were risking only money, I guess it wouldn't matter, although a few billion dollars could build a lot of schools and pay a lot of teachers' salaries for a while.
Instead, all that money might be wasted, and all that plutonium might be launched for naught -- hundreds of billions of lethal doses' worth of one of the world's most deadly poisons.
(Plutonium-238 is about 275 times more toxic than normal "weapons grade" plutonium (Pu-239), often cited as the world's deadliest substance. Pu 238's half-life, about 87.75 years, is correspondingly about 275 times shorter than Pu-239's 24,100 year half-life. A significant portion (about 10%) of the Pu is Pu-239 with its 24,100 year half-life.)
Thousands of people have already protested these dangerous nuclear launches. But to no avail. NASA's arrogant continued use of plutonium-238 for "civilian" space purposes appears to be directly related to the U.S. government's stated desire to launch plutonium and uranium-powered military rocketry for "domination" of outer space near earth. So there are some very good reasons to oppose THIS launch, besides that it's a waste of money.
The amount of space debris already in orbit guarantees that if nuclear payloads are launched, there will be catastrophic accidents, possibly over highly-populated areas. This launch could fail over a major city, causing massive evacuations and widespread contamination! It could start a war.
Hundreds of studies with animals (and a few that were done on humans) have indicated reliably that plutonium follows a "Linear, No Threshold" health effects pattern. So, if there's an accident, no matter where or how it comes down, it's bound to poison a lot of people before all the plutonium decays, and decays again, and again, finally into something stable.
This launch is anything but an engineering marvel. It is a potential engineering disaster. Anyone truly curious about it will surely be aghast, but forcing this risk on billions of unsuspecting humans (who are now breathing Fukushima's effluent as well) is especially cruel.
There is simply no sane reason for NASA to do this.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author's prior comments on Cassini were published in Space News, The Washington Post and elsewhere. He is a computer programmer and co-author of Statistics Explained, a computer program which teaches first-year statistics for scientists. He is also the author of All About Pumps and the Animated Periodic Table of the Elements, and a co-author of The Heart: The Engine of Life, all computer programs. He has also authored a book about nuclear power called The Code Killers (2008).
************************************************
** Ace Hoffman, Owner & Chief Programmer, The Animated Software Co.
** POB 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018
** U.S. & Canada (800) 551-2726; elsewhere: (760) 720-7261
** home page: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/
** email: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
Thursday, May 5, 2011
The first million is the hardest...
Ace Hoffman
April 26th, 2011
Today is the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. Today, a quarter century ago, the ruthless murder of a million people began. And the cover-up.
How quickly we forget! How destined we are to repeat!
Today's commemorations around the world might have gone practically unnoticed by the mainstream media, save perhaps for a 60-second spot about a decaying sarcophagus, were it not for Fukushima.
Today we honor and remember the already-dead from Chernobyl:
1) The "liquidators" who helped clean it up (about 800,000 young men) who now die like flies of cancer, leukemia, and a thousand other stranger ailments.
2) The local citizens who were not told for a week or more that anything was wrong, even while the rest of the world knew because a nuclear reactor power company in Sweden had alerted the "free" public (that is, the Western media) several days after Chernobyl exploded, after the ill winds tripped their own monitors.
3) The people around the world who also MUST have died, in addition to the million who lived nearer the plant or were among the liquidators.
4) The descendents, for at least seven generations, of all these people -- that's how far the DNA is likely to show damage, perhaps even further down the line.
"The million" are only the ones that were reasonably easy to count. I use the term "easy" very relatively: WHO wouldn't count them -- for five years they didn't even start to take a half-hearted look. IAEA wouldn't count them (and probably prevented WHO from doing so). It would be bad for the promotion of nuclear power, their mandate and perceived mission. The nuclear industry didn't want them counted. The nuke-loving cash-strapped secretive militaristic Russian government certainly didn't want them counted. Nobody wanted them counted.
So they weren't counted. Not easily, unless the term is relative. People halfway around the world, not under Soviet censorship, propaganda, or oppression, were NEVER counted by anyone. Billions of Curies, tens of thousands of terabecquerels... didn't just disappear. Many of them were breathed in by someone. They killed people all over the world, and still do. So will Fukushima Daiichi.
Cover-ups and lies hide the million-dead from the ongoing Chernobyl horror. Some say it's only tens of thousands, some say "merely" thousands, and some -- the nuclear industry in America, for instance-- just three or four dozen.
Nobody says, "nobody died at Chernobyl" like they (lie) and say about Three Mile Island.
Until last month Chernobyl was the worst industrial accident in human history -- unless you believe the lies.
New pictures have reportedly been released of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 -- the MOX reactor -- indicating the reactor pressure vessel itself had exploded last month (see Jeff's article, below).
The nuclear industry represents a small fraction of 1% of the human work force, even in America or France. These people could all be building wind turbines, except for those people who will have to guard the waste -- a cost society must incur forevermore, and which keeps getting more and more costly, and will continue to do so, at least until we stop making more waste every day.
It's time to stop the assault on human and other life. It's time to turn off the nukes.
Forced down our throats, and paid well to work there, society gave it a try.
Nuclear power has failed miserably. It's not enough to prevent new reactors, or even to prevent relicensing -- one unit at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another ten years just weeks before the catastrophe began. It's not enough to wait months and months for the "lessons learned" from Fukushima. It's not enough to be promised improvements, changes, more and better backup systems. All those are nice. But we need to close the reactors down forever.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author. 54. has, like you, seen far too many nuclear disasters (one is too many). Visit his web site: www.acehoffman.org to read his book online or as a free download: "The Code Killers", about the many ways the nuclear industry destroys humanity.
April 26th, 2011
Today is the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. Today, a quarter century ago, the ruthless murder of a million people began. And the cover-up.
How quickly we forget! How destined we are to repeat!
Today's commemorations around the world might have gone practically unnoticed by the mainstream media, save perhaps for a 60-second spot about a decaying sarcophagus, were it not for Fukushima.
Today we honor and remember the already-dead from Chernobyl:
1) The "liquidators" who helped clean it up (about 800,000 young men) who now die like flies of cancer, leukemia, and a thousand other stranger ailments.
2) The local citizens who were not told for a week or more that anything was wrong, even while the rest of the world knew because a nuclear reactor power company in Sweden had alerted the "free" public (that is, the Western media) several days after Chernobyl exploded, after the ill winds tripped their own monitors.
3) The people around the world who also MUST have died, in addition to the million who lived nearer the plant or were among the liquidators.
4) The descendents, for at least seven generations, of all these people -- that's how far the DNA is likely to show damage, perhaps even further down the line.
"The million" are only the ones that were reasonably easy to count. I use the term "easy" very relatively: WHO wouldn't count them -- for five years they didn't even start to take a half-hearted look. IAEA wouldn't count them (and probably prevented WHO from doing so). It would be bad for the promotion of nuclear power, their mandate and perceived mission. The nuclear industry didn't want them counted. The nuke-loving cash-strapped secretive militaristic Russian government certainly didn't want them counted. Nobody wanted them counted.
So they weren't counted. Not easily, unless the term is relative. People halfway around the world, not under Soviet censorship, propaganda, or oppression, were NEVER counted by anyone. Billions of Curies, tens of thousands of terabecquerels... didn't just disappear. Many of them were breathed in by someone. They killed people all over the world, and still do. So will Fukushima Daiichi.
Cover-ups and lies hide the million-dead from the ongoing Chernobyl horror. Some say it's only tens of thousands, some say "merely" thousands, and some -- the nuclear industry in America, for instance-- just three or four dozen.
Nobody says, "nobody died at Chernobyl" like they (lie) and say about Three Mile Island.
Until last month Chernobyl was the worst industrial accident in human history -- unless you believe the lies.
New pictures have reportedly been released of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 -- the MOX reactor -- indicating the reactor pressure vessel itself had exploded last month (see Jeff's article, below).
The nuclear industry represents a small fraction of 1% of the human work force, even in America or France. These people could all be building wind turbines, except for those people who will have to guard the waste -- a cost society must incur forevermore, and which keeps getting more and more costly, and will continue to do so, at least until we stop making more waste every day.
It's time to stop the assault on human and other life. It's time to turn off the nukes.
Forced down our throats, and paid well to work there, society gave it a try.
Nuclear power has failed miserably. It's not enough to prevent new reactors, or even to prevent relicensing -- one unit at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another ten years just weeks before the catastrophe began. It's not enough to wait months and months for the "lessons learned" from Fukushima. It's not enough to be promised improvements, changes, more and better backup systems. All those are nice. But we need to close the reactors down forever.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author. 54. has, like you, seen far too many nuclear disasters (one is too many). Visit his web site: www.acehoffman.org to read his book online or as a free download: "The Code Killers", about the many ways the nuclear industry destroys humanity.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Ace Hoffman on Fukushima: Easter 2011
Ace Hoffman: It's official: Fukushima = Chernobyl
April 12th, 2011
Dear Readers,
Fukushima is now officially as bad as Chernobyl was: An INES (International Nuclear Event Scale) level seven "major nuclear accident."
Say goodbye, Chernobyl. You will soon be forgotten.
(Except for the 1,700 square mile exclusion zone that was once prime farmland, the pride of the Soviet Union. Who can forget that? And those deformed babies. Their parents don't forget them.)
Things didn't get particularly worse at Fukushima in the past few days. That's not why they went to a "level seven" accident rating -- the highest possible. Things didn't get any better, either, but that's also not why.
One thing that's changed is they had to expand the evacuation zone. This time, they've given thousands of additional residents living northwest of the plant -- as much as 30 kilometers away -- 30 days to leave. Obviously, the sooner they leave, the better, and they should not expect to be coming back any time soon, either. Possibly many generations. The soil is contaminated.
Thousands more people, just outside the current 20 kilometer depopulation area around Fukushima Daiichi, are in districts that "might" be asked to self-evacuate on a moment's notice. They have been told to make arrangements for evacuation on their own. Have a place to go. Have a way to get there. Have food and water (and cash and gas) for the journey. Pick up stragglers along the way. Turn out the lights and shut off the gas on the way out. Sayonara.
An old man was found wandering around the exclusion zone. He had been there, confused, the whole time. God knows what he breathed or ate.
Bitterness, shame, conflicting and confusing official orders, impossible orders (such as "stay indoors" and "don't drink the tap water") -- it's all there. It's all happening. A radiological crime against humanity is unfolding before us, yet again. Shall we turn a blind eye to the cause?
I ask: What are governments for, if not to stop this sort of thing? Japan has failed at Fukushima, the technological wizards of the world. Russia has failed at Chernobyl, the workers-always-know-best method failed. England has failed at Sellafield, then called Windscale, and shown that Oxford and Cambridge couldn't produce minds great enough to conquer the atom's quirks and quarks, or human's frailties and foibles. And America has failed a thousand little times and dozens of large ones, too -- Hanford being the nation's and possibly the world's most polluted site without even having a Fukushima of our own... yet... The Hanford "reservation" is strewn with enormous quantities of deadly plutonium from mostly "proper" operations. You can't live there. It poisons the Colombia River constantly. As additional radioactive plumes reach the river, they will poison it more and more.
What government, what entity, what human has any right to think they can control the atom? They can't. And even if they can, the thousands of generations who will have to mind their waste for having done so probably can't.
Now, global measurements are being compared to what was measured at the time of Chernobyl. That's one reason Japanese nuclear authorities had little choice but to raise the Fukushima tragedy from a level 5 through 6 to a 7, making it at least equal to the world's worst industrial and nuclear accident in history -- Chernobyl.
But of course, neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl were really accidents at all any more than drunks have accidents on the highway. (We just call them "statistics" here in America.) In the case of Chernobyl it was reactor operators running unapproved and dangerous experiments: Criminal negligence. At Fukushima is was improperly designed and maintained reactors and safety systems that failed just when they were needed most: Criminal negligence. Criminal negligence on the part of the entire nuclear industry. THIS could have happened anywhere!
If you tell me you've solved all the problems with nuclear power (HA!), and I'll tell you nuclear promoters all around the world told the public the same thing thousands of times in the years since Chernobyl and prior to Fukushima. And, of course, the biggest lie was that the reactors were different and this couldn't happen with "Western" style reactors.
Now, nuclear promoters are telling the public they'll apply the "lessons learned" very carefully from Fukushima to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. They're lying.
They might fix something, but they'll neglect something else. They don't have enough time or money -- or experience or know-how -- or personnel -- to fix everything. So if they fix one thing, they have to neglect something else. The income from an operating reactor is essentially finite (unless the NRC grants an uprate, which they did to one reactor yesterday, or the regulators grant a rate increase, which also happens, but only with much objection from everyone).
The reactor operators simply can't keep up. Tighter enforcement and/or new safety regulations in one area almost invariably just means something falls by the wayside in another area. So really, all they ever do is gamble with your life. They'll keep gambling until they lose -- your life.
Nevada understands gambling. That's why they want you to visit -- because you don't, and they do. They understand what a sucker's bet is. That's why Nevadan's have overwhelmingly rejected Yucca Mountain, with its TENS OF THOUSANDS of shipments of nuclear waste. Any ONE shipment could ruin Las Vegas for thousands of generations. Many thousands of shipments are supposed to pass right through that city, risking an unquenchable fire, and the city evacuated. They don't want that.
Yucca Mountain, located in an active earthquake zone, was an unworkable idea to begin with, but it was ALREADY a LAST RESORT. The Yucca scientific team was allowed to consider alternative methods, from deep-sea disposal to on-site storage to rocketing the waste into deep space, if they thought those ideas were any better (they weren't). So don't expect that cancelling Yucca Mountain will mean we'll find something else.
It's time to call an end to this obviously-unworkable "solution" to our energy problem. Nuclear power never deserved a chance anyway, and didn't live up to its promises when given a chance it didn't deserve.
Jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire simply doesn't work. Fossil fuels are not the solution. Fracking for natural gas with dangerous mixes of corporate-secret chemicals destroys the water tables and is not the solution. But there ARE solutions.
Atmospheric vortex engines could create enormous amounts of electricity across the country. We don't even have a national research plan for them, or a test site. But similar wind tunnels are used in vacuums all the time...
So what's gone wrong? We put all our tens of billions of dollars into nuclear power.
Every renewable energy system has its faults and its detractors -- mostly environmentalists and NIMBYs who won't budge. Wind farms work fine. Offshore wind farms can even be out of sight and out of mind. Transcontinental power lines can ensure that wind blowing in one place can be used anywhere. Wyoming, Wisconsin, Colorado... the "wind-swept plains" could solve all our electrical energy needs.
Wave energy systems off our coasts could provide part or even all of the electricity we need. SoCal residents (and anyone who listened to the Beach Boys) know that San Onofre is a great surf break. Fukushima probably was too, and for 20 miles around, but not any more!
If wave energy systems were, theoretically, to absorb some of the wave energy from California's coast, slightly calming some of the breaks, I'm sure it will be a long, long time before they would take even 1% of the wave energy that's out there. 99.9% of all waves are not ridden by anybody! So even surfers should not oppose wave energy systems!
And with a proper national grid system, we can capture the wave energy in the frigid Aleutians, where no one surfs, ever -- after designing them here, thank you! So don't worry, surfers, you'll catch a wave. And it won't be radioactive! At least, not any MORE radioactive! (San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station regularly poisons your water. Did you know that?)
The debris swarm from Japan that's currently coming ashore on the west coast of America represents the invisible, odorless, tasteless (except in large doses) deadly radiation that's coming along with it.
San Onofre can release tens of thousands of terabequerels of radiation per hour for hours on end, just as Fukushima has apparently done. San Onofre can do it without an earthquake or a tsunami and without ANY warning.
No time to evacuate.
So give us a break, all you other environmentalists, so busy on other projects, protecting something! I hear you. Save the trees, save the whales, save the waves, save the earth. BUT AS A MUST-DO FIRST STEP, TEAR DOWN THESE NUKES!
That's our generation's task.
Tidal energy. Most of the lagoons in California are restored using money from mitigation of other areas that were destroyed -- there is really NO natural coastline here. If a tidal energy system is workable somewhere, it should be considered.
Solar rooftops. Solar parking garages. Solar roadways, even! These all work! We still need a good nationwide or global energy grid (just like Buckminster Fuller proposed almost one hundred years ago).
Have I mentioned hydroelectric power lately? Of course not, because so many people flat-out oppose all dams, and why stir up trouble? But really, it's NOT that simple! One nuclear power plant accident can and WILL poison any river or lake, as well as the oceans, forever. So then a concrete dam doesn't look so bad, does it? It changes the landscape, but it doesn't produce ANY pollution.
So don't knock hydroelectric power too much, fellow environmentalists! The old mill by the river wasn't such a bad idea after all. Not everything is the size of the Three Gorges Dam.
There are alternatives to nuclear power, and we should use them. Where small-scale hydro works, or even where large scale hydro works, please consider that there are approximately 440 nuclear power reactors around the world threatening ALL our water supplies. Dams don't poison the water. Nuclear power does. Even when dams fail they don't kill for thousands of generations (or even one generation) afterwards! Nuclear power does. Fukushima will poison a lot of water for a long time to come.
Of course it's true that there are no perfect energy solutions and any proposed solution can AND WILL be opposed by someone -- often someone with a vested interest in an alternative system.
Nuclear power was promised to be so perfect it would become "too cheap to meter" but turned out to be the worst solution of all -- and the most expensive. Coal is the second-worst polluter but just about the cheapest energy source. Society has to overcome these obstacles somehow. Finally admitting that Fukushima is the worst nuclear "accident" in history is a good first step towards facing reality. Congratulations on facing reality, Japan.
But if we don't ALL face reality, and shut ALL the nuclear power plants down, Fukushima will be exceeded some day. And then again. And again.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Seething in...
Carlsbad, CA
The author, a computer programmer, has been writing about technology, and warning about nuclear power, for many decades. He has owned (and programmed) dozens of different types of computers in numerous languages. His web sites receive tens of millions of "hits" each year and has a top search engine ranking in hundreds of categories. This man is no Luddite! He loves body surfing in shorts or mountainbiking in full protective gear on a high-tech bike that costs more than his desktop computer. This man is a techno-geek. His book on nuclear power, for adults and children alike, is available as a free download from his web site: www.acehoffman.org
---------------------------------------------------------
Particulate radiation explained
To the Guardian
Conrad Miller, MD
It seems there is a bit of confusion here, perhaps inspired by Mr. Monbiot's eloquence & longstanding status here at the Guardian. Let's share a straight simple example to drive a point home about radiation & the human body & nuclear power. Every nuclear reactor generates between 400-1000 pounds of plutonium every year. There are about 450 reactors in the world, 55 in Japan, 104 in USA. Big point: research has shown, with the beagle dogs in Hanford Washington studies that the lung cancer causing dose of plutonium is one millionth of a gram. That is a very small microscopic particle that is inhaled into the lung. The process of developing cancer often takes 20-30 years - or longer. Plutonium-239 which is generated by fissioning uranium, has a half life of 24,000 years. That means that 24,000 years from now, half of the radioactivity in the plutonium generated today in your nuclear reactor, will still exist, possibly causing cancer over & over again. And this fantastic length of time is only part of the legacy, for scientists have determined that for any radionuclide or radioactive element, one has to worry about its toxicity for harm via radiation emission continuing for 10-20 half lives - known as a radionuclide's 'hazardous life.' That means 240,000 to 480,000 years for plutonium-239.
Now, every particle of plutonium floating from Fukushima across the Pacific & then across the Atlantic that hovers over your head (invisibly) in Merry England will not be inhaled & get down into your lung, where, as an alpha emitter, it will bleep its radioactive energy beams into your cells & their DNA, often killing the cells, or mutating their genetic code. When this happens to your germ cells, as when the liquidators at Chernobyl were exposed to radiation (not just from plutonium; more likely from a slaggy hodge podge of all the possible radionuclides released from the compromised reactor core by the steam explosion and graphite fire) without shielding protection, such mutations in your contribution of DNA can result in your offspring having such birth defects as an eye that is a bubble lying on the outside of your baby's face, or legs that are bizarrely short, or no right arm, or a heart with a misshapen chamber that cannot function properly to sustain life outside of the womb very long.
Back to the plutonium: yes, the tiny alpha particle imbedded in your lung can cause a lung cancer that will kill you, while you wonder how in the world you could've contracted this cancer. There will be no label on its source/cause.
Indeed, you might be able to wave that plutonium particle out of your lung if you didn't kill those crucial cells in your bronchial tree that have those hairs on them called 'cilia.' Smokers eventually kill too many of these cilia-cells off, impairing their ability to clear out debris from their lungs, usually leading to more infections occurring as they develop their emphysema or COPD, standing for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. People with emphysema will be more prone to have that plutonium particle get deeper into their lung sacs & end up with lung cancer. At this time, I am not aware of any study evaluating INCIDENCE of lung cancer in humans, related to exposure to plutonium. However, would you like to be in that study?
Going back to the one millionth of a gram cancer-causing dose: there are 454 grams in one pound. That means, theoretically, if an accident occurs dispersing plutonium in tiny particles into the atmosphere, as in vaporization or a hot massive explosion, as happened at Chernobyl, & also happened with the atomic bombs tested, or used on Nagasaki & Hiroshima, those particles could drift around the globe & possibly cause 454 million lung cancers per pound of plutonium. 20 pounds of plutonium could theoretically cause lung cancer in every human being on Earth! And those particles don't 'die' - if somehow they get out of the cancered, deteriorating, deceased human body, they theoretically could have a next round of killing & cancering for up to 480,000 years. That is the danger of plutonium, & that is the gravest long term threat we humans have invited by developing an industry that produces 400-1000 pounds of plutonium in every ominous unit that is used to produce heat by fissioning uranium to boil water to turn a turbine to produce electricity.
We should also be aware that the 'fallout' we heard about from the atomic bombs exploded upon our planet, is still falling even today, still up there at the top of our atmosphere from the 1940's & thereafter. Nuclear power & Chernobyl & Three Mile Island & Fukushima only add to that lode of tiny particles of plutonium forever falling from the sky.
People should also know that there are more than 500 radionuclides generated in nuclear reactors beside plutonium that can cause cancer: strontium has a hazardous life of 300-600 years. The body takes it in, mistakenly reckoning it is calcium, incorporating it into our bones & bone marrow: unfortunate results>>bone cancer, & leukemia, especially in fast-growing susceptible children. These are being discovered lately in higher concentrations around nuclear plants today, as studies are finally being funded. This occurs as 'noble' gases that we call 'inert,' like krypton & xenon, are routinely intermittently 'vented' from nuclear reactors degenerating into 'daughter products' like strontium.
------------------------------------------------------
Richard Bramhall
bramhall@llrc.org
Low Level Radiation Campaign advice for the people of Japan
Tue, 12 Apr 2011
LLRC.org has been updated with advice and information on how people can calculate their additional cancer risk at various levels of reported fallout.
"Dose" data...
Published by the Japanese government are not a measure of risk. The data are for Caesium 137 which is easy to monitor because it is a strong gamma emitter. The data are a signal for the very likely presence of alpha emitting radionuclides like Uranium and beta emitters like Strontium-90 which are very hard to detect. These contaminants are the real threat to health. No official sources are saying anything about this hazard although hundreds of tonnes of Uranium and Plutonium are missing from the spent fuel ponds. High resolution aerial photos linked from the LLRC site show fuel ponds are absent, following explosions.
Food advice:
Vegetables and other foodstuffs showing more than 50 Bq/Kg Caesium indicate airborne contamination with other radionuclides. LLRC advises food with more than 50 Becquerels per Kg should not be eaten unless there's absolutely no choice.
We recommend that the Japanese government should ask for international food aid supplies to prevent its people eating contaminated food.
Early signs of health damage:
We have received information from people in the Tokyo region stating that they have swollen lymph nodes and sores in their nostrils. These are indicators that they have probably inhaled particles of Plutonium and Uranium.
LLRC advice:
Unless it is absolutely impossible to leave, evacuate to areas where there has been no fallout. We link to Japanese government sites with local data.
To evacuate or not?
We suggest a novel scientific approach to the problem of quantifying the health effects of radioactive pollution.
Put simply, in an area now contaminated to a level of 1 microsievert per hour the fallout raises every individual person's risk of getting cancer in the next 10 years by 11%.
How we know this:
The Japanese authorities are publishing data on contamination levels in the form of hourly dose rates from Caesium137. It is therefore possible to calculate the cancer yield using the same criteria as used by Tondel and colleagues in a robust but conservative study of cancer in Sweden after Chernobyl. Sweden is known to have been contaminated with Uranium fuel although fallout mapping generally used data for Caesium, just as in Japan now, exactly 25 years later. Tondel and colleagues found an 11% increase in cancer incidence for each 100 kiloBecquerels Caesium137 on each square metre of ground. The cancers were expressed (diagnosed) in a ten year period; cancers appearing later than 10 years are of course possible but were not included in Tondel's study. The detailed method has been published on the LLRC site.
The site has simple instructions for calculating the additional risk from fallout.
We recommend you download (free) [URL #1 below] the book on Chernobyl's effect on human, animal and plant life published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences. This book tells the facts as scientists have seen, measured and counted them, free of the dogma of "dose". This means they have not ignored the evidence of their own eyes just because it isn't predicted by the ICRP model.
The Recommendations of the European Committee on Radiation Risk are a free download linked from the site [URL #2 below]. They provide scientific material to allow the authorities in Japan to regulate industry discharges on a rational scientific basis and to take precautionary action to protect the public. Unlike the recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection the ECRR advice is specifically intended to apply to post-accident scenarios.
Earlier material from the home page has been removed and will be archived on a separate part of the site. For a few hours it will not be visible. We apologise for the delay - the emergency in Japan has placed demands on LLRC at levels we have never before experienced. For the same reason we are not able to answer all emails. We read them all, but there isn't enough time in the day to answer them all.
The site links to a video [URL #3 below] showing radiation levels on a dangerous journey approaching from the south.
URLs:
Chernobyl Book:
http://tinyurl.com/3bf4fjf
ECRR book:
http://www.euradcom.org/2011/ecrr2010.pdf
Entering the evacuation zone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp9iJ3pPuL8
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Amy Goodman interview with Thomas Breuer: "It's way worse..."
"Greenpeace has done calculations with scientists already three weeks ago, where we figured out that this accident is in a scale 7 accident. And we are wondering why the government of Japan needs three weeks to come to the same conclusion, especially because they must have way better data than we have. So, what it means now, they wasted three weeks of not informing the public about the real, real risks of this accident...
"So, from my point of view, it is not equal to Chernobyl, it is way worse..."
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/12/nuclear_catastrophe_in_japan_not_equal
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
April 12th, 2011
Dear Readers,
Fukushima is now officially as bad as Chernobyl was: An INES (International Nuclear Event Scale) level seven "major nuclear accident."
Say goodbye, Chernobyl. You will soon be forgotten.
(Except for the 1,700 square mile exclusion zone that was once prime farmland, the pride of the Soviet Union. Who can forget that? And those deformed babies. Their parents don't forget them.)
Things didn't get particularly worse at Fukushima in the past few days. That's not why they went to a "level seven" accident rating -- the highest possible. Things didn't get any better, either, but that's also not why.
One thing that's changed is they had to expand the evacuation zone. This time, they've given thousands of additional residents living northwest of the plant -- as much as 30 kilometers away -- 30 days to leave. Obviously, the sooner they leave, the better, and they should not expect to be coming back any time soon, either. Possibly many generations. The soil is contaminated.
Thousands more people, just outside the current 20 kilometer depopulation area around Fukushima Daiichi, are in districts that "might" be asked to self-evacuate on a moment's notice. They have been told to make arrangements for evacuation on their own. Have a place to go. Have a way to get there. Have food and water (and cash and gas) for the journey. Pick up stragglers along the way. Turn out the lights and shut off the gas on the way out. Sayonara.
An old man was found wandering around the exclusion zone. He had been there, confused, the whole time. God knows what he breathed or ate.
Bitterness, shame, conflicting and confusing official orders, impossible orders (such as "stay indoors" and "don't drink the tap water") -- it's all there. It's all happening. A radiological crime against humanity is unfolding before us, yet again. Shall we turn a blind eye to the cause?
I ask: What are governments for, if not to stop this sort of thing? Japan has failed at Fukushima, the technological wizards of the world. Russia has failed at Chernobyl, the workers-always-know-best method failed. England has failed at Sellafield, then called Windscale, and shown that Oxford and Cambridge couldn't produce minds great enough to conquer the atom's quirks and quarks, or human's frailties and foibles. And America has failed a thousand little times and dozens of large ones, too -- Hanford being the nation's and possibly the world's most polluted site without even having a Fukushima of our own... yet... The Hanford "reservation" is strewn with enormous quantities of deadly plutonium from mostly "proper" operations. You can't live there. It poisons the Colombia River constantly. As additional radioactive plumes reach the river, they will poison it more and more.
What government, what entity, what human has any right to think they can control the atom? They can't. And even if they can, the thousands of generations who will have to mind their waste for having done so probably can't.
Now, global measurements are being compared to what was measured at the time of Chernobyl. That's one reason Japanese nuclear authorities had little choice but to raise the Fukushima tragedy from a level 5 through 6 to a 7, making it at least equal to the world's worst industrial and nuclear accident in history -- Chernobyl.
But of course, neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl were really accidents at all any more than drunks have accidents on the highway. (We just call them "statistics" here in America.) In the case of Chernobyl it was reactor operators running unapproved and dangerous experiments: Criminal negligence. At Fukushima is was improperly designed and maintained reactors and safety systems that failed just when they were needed most: Criminal negligence. Criminal negligence on the part of the entire nuclear industry. THIS could have happened anywhere!
If you tell me you've solved all the problems with nuclear power (HA!), and I'll tell you nuclear promoters all around the world told the public the same thing thousands of times in the years since Chernobyl and prior to Fukushima. And, of course, the biggest lie was that the reactors were different and this couldn't happen with "Western" style reactors.
Now, nuclear promoters are telling the public they'll apply the "lessons learned" very carefully from Fukushima to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. They're lying.
They might fix something, but they'll neglect something else. They don't have enough time or money -- or experience or know-how -- or personnel -- to fix everything. So if they fix one thing, they have to neglect something else. The income from an operating reactor is essentially finite (unless the NRC grants an uprate, which they did to one reactor yesterday, or the regulators grant a rate increase, which also happens, but only with much objection from everyone).
The reactor operators simply can't keep up. Tighter enforcement and/or new safety regulations in one area almost invariably just means something falls by the wayside in another area. So really, all they ever do is gamble with your life. They'll keep gambling until they lose -- your life.
Nevada understands gambling. That's why they want you to visit -- because you don't, and they do. They understand what a sucker's bet is. That's why Nevadan's have overwhelmingly rejected Yucca Mountain, with its TENS OF THOUSANDS of shipments of nuclear waste. Any ONE shipment could ruin Las Vegas for thousands of generations. Many thousands of shipments are supposed to pass right through that city, risking an unquenchable fire, and the city evacuated. They don't want that.
Yucca Mountain, located in an active earthquake zone, was an unworkable idea to begin with, but it was ALREADY a LAST RESORT. The Yucca scientific team was allowed to consider alternative methods, from deep-sea disposal to on-site storage to rocketing the waste into deep space, if they thought those ideas were any better (they weren't). So don't expect that cancelling Yucca Mountain will mean we'll find something else.
It's time to call an end to this obviously-unworkable "solution" to our energy problem. Nuclear power never deserved a chance anyway, and didn't live up to its promises when given a chance it didn't deserve.
Jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire simply doesn't work. Fossil fuels are not the solution. Fracking for natural gas with dangerous mixes of corporate-secret chemicals destroys the water tables and is not the solution. But there ARE solutions.
Atmospheric vortex engines could create enormous amounts of electricity across the country. We don't even have a national research plan for them, or a test site. But similar wind tunnels are used in vacuums all the time...
So what's gone wrong? We put all our tens of billions of dollars into nuclear power.
Every renewable energy system has its faults and its detractors -- mostly environmentalists and NIMBYs who won't budge. Wind farms work fine. Offshore wind farms can even be out of sight and out of mind. Transcontinental power lines can ensure that wind blowing in one place can be used anywhere. Wyoming, Wisconsin, Colorado... the "wind-swept plains" could solve all our electrical energy needs.
Wave energy systems off our coasts could provide part or even all of the electricity we need. SoCal residents (and anyone who listened to the Beach Boys) know that San Onofre is a great surf break. Fukushima probably was too, and for 20 miles around, but not any more!
If wave energy systems were, theoretically, to absorb some of the wave energy from California's coast, slightly calming some of the breaks, I'm sure it will be a long, long time before they would take even 1% of the wave energy that's out there. 99.9% of all waves are not ridden by anybody! So even surfers should not oppose wave energy systems!
And with a proper national grid system, we can capture the wave energy in the frigid Aleutians, where no one surfs, ever -- after designing them here, thank you! So don't worry, surfers, you'll catch a wave. And it won't be radioactive! At least, not any MORE radioactive! (San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station regularly poisons your water. Did you know that?)
The debris swarm from Japan that's currently coming ashore on the west coast of America represents the invisible, odorless, tasteless (except in large doses) deadly radiation that's coming along with it.
San Onofre can release tens of thousands of terabequerels of radiation per hour for hours on end, just as Fukushima has apparently done. San Onofre can do it without an earthquake or a tsunami and without ANY warning.
No time to evacuate.
So give us a break, all you other environmentalists, so busy on other projects, protecting something! I hear you. Save the trees, save the whales, save the waves, save the earth. BUT AS A MUST-DO FIRST STEP, TEAR DOWN THESE NUKES!
That's our generation's task.
Tidal energy. Most of the lagoons in California are restored using money from mitigation of other areas that were destroyed -- there is really NO natural coastline here. If a tidal energy system is workable somewhere, it should be considered.
Solar rooftops. Solar parking garages. Solar roadways, even! These all work! We still need a good nationwide or global energy grid (just like Buckminster Fuller proposed almost one hundred years ago).
Have I mentioned hydroelectric power lately? Of course not, because so many people flat-out oppose all dams, and why stir up trouble? But really, it's NOT that simple! One nuclear power plant accident can and WILL poison any river or lake, as well as the oceans, forever. So then a concrete dam doesn't look so bad, does it? It changes the landscape, but it doesn't produce ANY pollution.
So don't knock hydroelectric power too much, fellow environmentalists! The old mill by the river wasn't such a bad idea after all. Not everything is the size of the Three Gorges Dam.
There are alternatives to nuclear power, and we should use them. Where small-scale hydro works, or even where large scale hydro works, please consider that there are approximately 440 nuclear power reactors around the world threatening ALL our water supplies. Dams don't poison the water. Nuclear power does. Even when dams fail they don't kill for thousands of generations (or even one generation) afterwards! Nuclear power does. Fukushima will poison a lot of water for a long time to come.
Of course it's true that there are no perfect energy solutions and any proposed solution can AND WILL be opposed by someone -- often someone with a vested interest in an alternative system.
Nuclear power was promised to be so perfect it would become "too cheap to meter" but turned out to be the worst solution of all -- and the most expensive. Coal is the second-worst polluter but just about the cheapest energy source. Society has to overcome these obstacles somehow. Finally admitting that Fukushima is the worst nuclear "accident" in history is a good first step towards facing reality. Congratulations on facing reality, Japan.
But if we don't ALL face reality, and shut ALL the nuclear power plants down, Fukushima will be exceeded some day. And then again. And again.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Seething in...
Carlsbad, CA
The author, a computer programmer, has been writing about technology, and warning about nuclear power, for many decades. He has owned (and programmed) dozens of different types of computers in numerous languages. His web sites receive tens of millions of "hits" each year and has a top search engine ranking in hundreds of categories. This man is no Luddite! He loves body surfing in shorts or mountainbiking in full protective gear on a high-tech bike that costs more than his desktop computer. This man is a techno-geek. His book on nuclear power, for adults and children alike, is available as a free download from his web site: www.acehoffman.org
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Particulate radiation explained
To the Guardian
Conrad Miller, MD
It seems there is a bit of confusion here, perhaps inspired by Mr. Monbiot's eloquence & longstanding status here at the Guardian. Let's share a straight simple example to drive a point home about radiation & the human body & nuclear power. Every nuclear reactor generates between 400-1000 pounds of plutonium every year. There are about 450 reactors in the world, 55 in Japan, 104 in USA. Big point: research has shown, with the beagle dogs in Hanford Washington studies that the lung cancer causing dose of plutonium is one millionth of a gram. That is a very small microscopic particle that is inhaled into the lung. The process of developing cancer often takes 20-30 years - or longer. Plutonium-239 which is generated by fissioning uranium, has a half life of 24,000 years. That means that 24,000 years from now, half of the radioactivity in the plutonium generated today in your nuclear reactor, will still exist, possibly causing cancer over & over again. And this fantastic length of time is only part of the legacy, for scientists have determined that for any radionuclide or radioactive element, one has to worry about its toxicity for harm via radiation emission continuing for 10-20 half lives - known as a radionuclide's 'hazardous life.' That means 240,000 to 480,000 years for plutonium-239.
Now, every particle of plutonium floating from Fukushima across the Pacific & then across the Atlantic that hovers over your head (invisibly) in Merry England will not be inhaled & get down into your lung, where, as an alpha emitter, it will bleep its radioactive energy beams into your cells & their DNA, often killing the cells, or mutating their genetic code. When this happens to your germ cells, as when the liquidators at Chernobyl were exposed to radiation (not just from plutonium; more likely from a slaggy hodge podge of all the possible radionuclides released from the compromised reactor core by the steam explosion and graphite fire) without shielding protection, such mutations in your contribution of DNA can result in your offspring having such birth defects as an eye that is a bubble lying on the outside of your baby's face, or legs that are bizarrely short, or no right arm, or a heart with a misshapen chamber that cannot function properly to sustain life outside of the womb very long.
Back to the plutonium: yes, the tiny alpha particle imbedded in your lung can cause a lung cancer that will kill you, while you wonder how in the world you could've contracted this cancer. There will be no label on its source/cause.
Indeed, you might be able to wave that plutonium particle out of your lung if you didn't kill those crucial cells in your bronchial tree that have those hairs on them called 'cilia.' Smokers eventually kill too many of these cilia-cells off, impairing their ability to clear out debris from their lungs, usually leading to more infections occurring as they develop their emphysema or COPD, standing for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. People with emphysema will be more prone to have that plutonium particle get deeper into their lung sacs & end up with lung cancer. At this time, I am not aware of any study evaluating INCIDENCE of lung cancer in humans, related to exposure to plutonium. However, would you like to be in that study?
Going back to the one millionth of a gram cancer-causing dose: there are 454 grams in one pound. That means, theoretically, if an accident occurs dispersing plutonium in tiny particles into the atmosphere, as in vaporization or a hot massive explosion, as happened at Chernobyl, & also happened with the atomic bombs tested, or used on Nagasaki & Hiroshima, those particles could drift around the globe & possibly cause 454 million lung cancers per pound of plutonium. 20 pounds of plutonium could theoretically cause lung cancer in every human being on Earth! And those particles don't 'die' - if somehow they get out of the cancered, deteriorating, deceased human body, they theoretically could have a next round of killing & cancering for up to 480,000 years. That is the danger of plutonium, & that is the gravest long term threat we humans have invited by developing an industry that produces 400-1000 pounds of plutonium in every ominous unit that is used to produce heat by fissioning uranium to boil water to turn a turbine to produce electricity.
We should also be aware that the 'fallout' we heard about from the atomic bombs exploded upon our planet, is still falling even today, still up there at the top of our atmosphere from the 1940's & thereafter. Nuclear power & Chernobyl & Three Mile Island & Fukushima only add to that lode of tiny particles of plutonium forever falling from the sky.
People should also know that there are more than 500 radionuclides generated in nuclear reactors beside plutonium that can cause cancer: strontium has a hazardous life of 300-600 years. The body takes it in, mistakenly reckoning it is calcium, incorporating it into our bones & bone marrow: unfortunate results>>bone cancer, & leukemia, especially in fast-growing susceptible children. These are being discovered lately in higher concentrations around nuclear plants today, as studies are finally being funded. This occurs as 'noble' gases that we call 'inert,' like krypton & xenon, are routinely intermittently 'vented' from nuclear reactors degenerating into 'daughter products' like strontium.
------------------------------------------------------
Richard Bramhall
bramhall@llrc.org
Low Level Radiation Campaign advice for the people of Japan
Tue, 12 Apr 2011
LLRC.org has been updated with advice and information on how people can calculate their additional cancer risk at various levels of reported fallout.
"Dose" data...
Published by the Japanese government are not a measure of risk. The data are for Caesium 137 which is easy to monitor because it is a strong gamma emitter. The data are a signal for the very likely presence of alpha emitting radionuclides like Uranium and beta emitters like Strontium-90 which are very hard to detect. These contaminants are the real threat to health. No official sources are saying anything about this hazard although hundreds of tonnes of Uranium and Plutonium are missing from the spent fuel ponds. High resolution aerial photos linked from the LLRC site show fuel ponds are absent, following explosions.
Food advice:
Vegetables and other foodstuffs showing more than 50 Bq/Kg Caesium indicate airborne contamination with other radionuclides. LLRC advises food with more than 50 Becquerels per Kg should not be eaten unless there's absolutely no choice.
We recommend that the Japanese government should ask for international food aid supplies to prevent its people eating contaminated food.
Early signs of health damage:
We have received information from people in the Tokyo region stating that they have swollen lymph nodes and sores in their nostrils. These are indicators that they have probably inhaled particles of Plutonium and Uranium.
LLRC advice:
Unless it is absolutely impossible to leave, evacuate to areas where there has been no fallout. We link to Japanese government sites with local data.
To evacuate or not?
We suggest a novel scientific approach to the problem of quantifying the health effects of radioactive pollution.
Put simply, in an area now contaminated to a level of 1 microsievert per hour the fallout raises every individual person's risk of getting cancer in the next 10 years by 11%.
How we know this:
The Japanese authorities are publishing data on contamination levels in the form of hourly dose rates from Caesium137. It is therefore possible to calculate the cancer yield using the same criteria as used by Tondel and colleagues in a robust but conservative study of cancer in Sweden after Chernobyl. Sweden is known to have been contaminated with Uranium fuel although fallout mapping generally used data for Caesium, just as in Japan now, exactly 25 years later. Tondel and colleagues found an 11% increase in cancer incidence for each 100 kiloBecquerels Caesium137 on each square metre of ground. The cancers were expressed (diagnosed) in a ten year period; cancers appearing later than 10 years are of course possible but were not included in Tondel's study. The detailed method has been published on the LLRC site.
The site has simple instructions for calculating the additional risk from fallout.
We recommend you download (free) [URL #1 below] the book on Chernobyl's effect on human, animal and plant life published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences. This book tells the facts as scientists have seen, measured and counted them, free of the dogma of "dose". This means they have not ignored the evidence of their own eyes just because it isn't predicted by the ICRP model.
The Recommendations of the European Committee on Radiation Risk are a free download linked from the site [URL #2 below]. They provide scientific material to allow the authorities in Japan to regulate industry discharges on a rational scientific basis and to take precautionary action to protect the public. Unlike the recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection the ECRR advice is specifically intended to apply to post-accident scenarios.
Earlier material from the home page has been removed and will be archived on a separate part of the site. For a few hours it will not be visible. We apologise for the delay - the emergency in Japan has placed demands on LLRC at levels we have never before experienced. For the same reason we are not able to answer all emails. We read them all, but there isn't enough time in the day to answer them all.
The site links to a video [URL #3 below] showing radiation levels on a dangerous journey approaching from the south.
URLs:
Chernobyl Book:
http://tinyurl.com/3bf4fjf
ECRR book:
http://www.euradcom.org/2011/ecrr2010.pdf
Entering the evacuation zone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp9iJ3pPuL8
---------------------------------------------------------
Amy Goodman interview with Thomas Breuer: "It's way worse..."
"Greenpeace has done calculations with scientists already three weeks ago, where we figured out that this accident is in a scale 7 accident. And we are wondering why the government of Japan needs three weeks to come to the same conclusion, especially because they must have way better data than we have. So, what it means now, they wasted three weeks of not informing the public about the real, real risks of this accident...
"So, from my point of view, it is not equal to Chernobyl, it is way worse..."
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/12/nuclear_catastrophe_in_japan_not_equal
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Vexing Mess: Experts perplexed, citizens stop sex
Ace Hoffman 3/21/11
Dear Readers,
Fukushima Dai-ichi may still be getting worse, not better.
The birth rate is bound to decline in Northern Japan. Whether by choice or by biological influence, no one will be sure. Sperm counts will drop and spontaneous abortions will rise. Many people will not WANT to have babies. It happened after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It happened after Chernobyl. It will happen here to. We're only human.
Radiation monitors were blown out when the buildings exploded, or simply stopped working at some point. Readings at the plant are generally unknown, and whatever is known is seldom presented to the public.
Today, spinach, milk, and water were all reported poisoned with radiation in various places in Japan. Radiation readings 1,600 times normal were detected TWENTY KILOMETERS from the plant, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Levels were reported to be over 160 microsieverts per hour.
No one should ever believe that a ten-mile evacuation planning zone is good enough anymore. Or that evacuation zones are the answer.
The truth of what's coming over the U.S. border, here where I live, is hard to know. I finally ordered my very own radiation detector -- but it's not scheduled to be shipped until the middle of May!
Dr. Conrad Miller recommends people in California start taking KI and says he's prescribed it "more than a thousand times" for other reasons as a doctor, and has never seen a side effect in anyone. He points out that the accident has already happened, the radioactive isotopes are in the air and falling now, and the side effects of taking KI (if they happen), are typical for any allergic reaction, and will presumably go away when you stop taking the KI.
Dr. Miller additionally say's he'll "probably" take it soon himself (he lives on Long Island, New York). Dr. Miller's videos are available online here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/conradmillermd
But I should point out that as far as I know, readings are NOT elevated in California... yet...
The following are the four main barriers to radioactive releases in these types of nuclear power plants, from the outermost layer to the innermost:
1) Outer walls of a fairly airtight building. These have been blown away at three reactors.
2) Primary Containment Vessel (large steel structure with cement base and large posts inside to hold the Reactor Pressure Vessel). Hopefully these are all intact but it seems unlikely.
3) Reactor Pressure Vessel. At least one of these may be damaged. All are still in danger of catastrophic failures, especially if they run out of boron or if seaweed plugs up the reactor's water channels. "We're not out of the woods yet" is a common pronouncement from the talking heads on television today.
4) The last barrier to prevent fission products and fuel (uranium and plutonium) escaping is the fuel cladding, made of zirconium, in steel rods with hundreds of pellets in each rod. It's presumably what been burning, when things burn at the site. When that happens, fission products are released, which gathered between fuel and the inner wall of the cladding.
Keeping fission products from escaping is what the cladding is there for: To keep the Cesium-137, Iodine-131, Strontium-90 and an ugly rainbow of other isotopes isolated from the human environment. Those deadly elements -- the ones they talk about in science fiction movies -- are being released at Fukushima Dai-ichi.
Everything that breaks off is undoubtedly being washed out to sea, to enter life's many food chains. What doesn't burn or oxidize and go up in smoke or steam, that is.
Fuel claddings are never perfect, and fuel clad cracking has been a recurrent problem for the nuclear industry.
Plutonium in the fuel is another problem. The cladding burns at one temperature, the uranium / plutonium burns at another, higher temperature. MOX fuel has plutonium but of course, so does uranium-based fuel: It builds up in the reactor at the rate of about 500 pounds per year. So any fuel that has melted, has probably released plutonium into the environment, whether it was from the MOX reactor or not.
When all is said and done -- and who knows when that will be -- a perfect accounting of what's missing from the reactor site will be impossible. TEPCO records can't be trusted, and employees who might know the truth are very likely to be too sick to testify, or dead.
The spent fuel pools appeared to be burning again today. Smoke or -- hopefully -- only steam has been seen rising from two reactors at the site. Workers were pulled away because of high radiation levels -- again. Things are still very out of control.
Regarding exposure levels here in America: It's probably still true that if you smoke cigarettes, stopping smoking today will still make more of a difference for your overall health and life expectancy than the radiation plume now descending all around us will make to you as an individual.
Smoking, of course, kills tens of millions of people every year. Japan has a very high rate of smoking, which will probably increase the effect of the radiation on their bodies, since the smoking already weakens their lungs. This will be true for anyone experiencing any chemical assault or other biological assault at the same time as this "little" wave of radiation passes by and through us, falls on our food... This will tip some people over the edge. The authorities might blame increased deaths on a late flu, on some virus that's might be going around. And it might be true that such a thing caught hold and DID spread around -- because of weakened immune systems!
And then, later... cancer. This accident is something no expert who understands the dangers ever wanted to see. And yet so many activists and experts alike have said to me in the past, "IT WILL TAKE AN ACCIDENT." Well, here it is, folks. If we don't use this incident to shut down nuclear power, then there will be another incident. And another. And another.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Using my HEPA filters in...
Carlsbad, CA
The author has been studying nuclear disasters, real or imagined, for many decades. This one was easily imagined.
----------------------------------------------
Interactive live map of cross-referenced radiation readings:
http://www.rdtn.org/
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Dear Readers,
Fukushima Dai-ichi may still be getting worse, not better.
The birth rate is bound to decline in Northern Japan. Whether by choice or by biological influence, no one will be sure. Sperm counts will drop and spontaneous abortions will rise. Many people will not WANT to have babies. It happened after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It happened after Chernobyl. It will happen here to. We're only human.
Radiation monitors were blown out when the buildings exploded, or simply stopped working at some point. Readings at the plant are generally unknown, and whatever is known is seldom presented to the public.
Today, spinach, milk, and water were all reported poisoned with radiation in various places in Japan. Radiation readings 1,600 times normal were detected TWENTY KILOMETERS from the plant, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Levels were reported to be over 160 microsieverts per hour.
No one should ever believe that a ten-mile evacuation planning zone is good enough anymore. Or that evacuation zones are the answer.
The truth of what's coming over the U.S. border, here where I live, is hard to know. I finally ordered my very own radiation detector -- but it's not scheduled to be shipped until the middle of May!
Dr. Conrad Miller recommends people in California start taking KI and says he's prescribed it "more than a thousand times" for other reasons as a doctor, and has never seen a side effect in anyone. He points out that the accident has already happened, the radioactive isotopes are in the air and falling now, and the side effects of taking KI (if they happen), are typical for any allergic reaction, and will presumably go away when you stop taking the KI.
Dr. Miller additionally say's he'll "probably" take it soon himself (he lives on Long Island, New York). Dr. Miller's videos are available online here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/conradmillermd
But I should point out that as far as I know, readings are NOT elevated in California... yet...
The following are the four main barriers to radioactive releases in these types of nuclear power plants, from the outermost layer to the innermost:
1) Outer walls of a fairly airtight building. These have been blown away at three reactors.
2) Primary Containment Vessel (large steel structure with cement base and large posts inside to hold the Reactor Pressure Vessel). Hopefully these are all intact but it seems unlikely.
3) Reactor Pressure Vessel. At least one of these may be damaged. All are still in danger of catastrophic failures, especially if they run out of boron or if seaweed plugs up the reactor's water channels. "We're not out of the woods yet" is a common pronouncement from the talking heads on television today.
4) The last barrier to prevent fission products and fuel (uranium and plutonium) escaping is the fuel cladding, made of zirconium, in steel rods with hundreds of pellets in each rod. It's presumably what been burning, when things burn at the site. When that happens, fission products are released, which gathered between fuel and the inner wall of the cladding.
Keeping fission products from escaping is what the cladding is there for: To keep the Cesium-137, Iodine-131, Strontium-90 and an ugly rainbow of other isotopes isolated from the human environment. Those deadly elements -- the ones they talk about in science fiction movies -- are being released at Fukushima Dai-ichi.
Everything that breaks off is undoubtedly being washed out to sea, to enter life's many food chains. What doesn't burn or oxidize and go up in smoke or steam, that is.
Fuel claddings are never perfect, and fuel clad cracking has been a recurrent problem for the nuclear industry.
Plutonium in the fuel is another problem. The cladding burns at one temperature, the uranium / plutonium burns at another, higher temperature. MOX fuel has plutonium but of course, so does uranium-based fuel: It builds up in the reactor at the rate of about 500 pounds per year. So any fuel that has melted, has probably released plutonium into the environment, whether it was from the MOX reactor or not.
When all is said and done -- and who knows when that will be -- a perfect accounting of what's missing from the reactor site will be impossible. TEPCO records can't be trusted, and employees who might know the truth are very likely to be too sick to testify, or dead.
The spent fuel pools appeared to be burning again today. Smoke or -- hopefully -- only steam has been seen rising from two reactors at the site. Workers were pulled away because of high radiation levels -- again. Things are still very out of control.
Regarding exposure levels here in America: It's probably still true that if you smoke cigarettes, stopping smoking today will still make more of a difference for your overall health and life expectancy than the radiation plume now descending all around us will make to you as an individual.
Smoking, of course, kills tens of millions of people every year. Japan has a very high rate of smoking, which will probably increase the effect of the radiation on their bodies, since the smoking already weakens their lungs. This will be true for anyone experiencing any chemical assault or other biological assault at the same time as this "little" wave of radiation passes by and through us, falls on our food... This will tip some people over the edge. The authorities might blame increased deaths on a late flu, on some virus that's might be going around. And it might be true that such a thing caught hold and DID spread around -- because of weakened immune systems!
And then, later... cancer. This accident is something no expert who understands the dangers ever wanted to see. And yet so many activists and experts alike have said to me in the past, "IT WILL TAKE AN ACCIDENT." Well, here it is, folks. If we don't use this incident to shut down nuclear power, then there will be another incident. And another. And another.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Using my HEPA filters in...
Carlsbad, CA
The author has been studying nuclear disasters, real or imagined, for many decades. This one was easily imagined.
----------------------------------------------
Interactive live map of cross-referenced radiation readings:
http://www.rdtn.org/
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Ace Hoffman Postings on Fukushima
We're not out of the wood, by any means Ace Hoffman
3/13/11
Dear Readers,
The explosion at the Fukushima MOX plant (unit 3) looks far worse than the explosion yesterday at Fukushima Unit 1.
They are assuming it was a hydrogen gas explosion, but what happened to the spent fuel pool there? This explosion appears to be larger than the one yesterday, which destroyed the top part of Fukushima 1. These buildings are huge, these are huge explosions. This is awful.
White clouds were coming up from Unit 1 again today, which shouldn't be happening if it's under control. So it's not under control. Unit 2 apparently isn't under control, either. Having huge explosions on either side can't make things easier. Other reactors in Japan are also in trouble.
And the New York Times is saying that radioactive releases could continue for MONTHS.
May I respectfully take this moment to ask San Onofre and Diablo Canyon to shut down forever? What kind of warning do those guys want, anyway? Acts of God aren't good enough? Man's folly exposed says nothing?
The nuclear industry has been telling us for nearly 25 years that nothing as bad as Chernobyl (ONE MILLION DEAD) could EVER happen again. By the time it's over, THIS could be MUCH, MUCH WORSE.
In 2010, according to TEPCO, the operator of the site, there were already more than 10,000 spent fuel assemblies located at the Fukushima-Daiichi complex, mostly in spent fuel pools.
After Chernobyl the nuclear industry ignored cancer clusters, deformities, heart problems, and thus, undercounted the death toll a thousand different ways. But a compendium of thousands of studies, published by the New York Academy of Sciences, put the number at close to a million.
After Hiroshima / Nagasaki and all the atomic bomb testing, health effects were carefully and deliberately downplayed, too. Determining which new cancers have been caused by Fukushima won't be easy EVEN IF a million people die in and around Japan, and another million die around the rest of the planet. The winds and waters move these poisons around very quickly.
There is no way to know how much radiation is being released, or how much will reach the United States. It should be noted, however, that the Japanese military used free-floating balloons to try to bomb America during World War Two. Nearly ten thousand were launched and over a thousand bomb-balloons reportedly got through.
That's the way the winds go.
There's spent fuel in numerous locations around these reactors, including huge pools with four-foot thick concrete walls -- located ABOVE the reactors in these models. These pools need nearly constant water supplies.
Fuel in dry casks, also located at the site, have a few feet of concrete and a few inches of steel protecting them. That's not nearly good enough. In an accident, the dry casks can't simply be doused in water even if you could get near enough to throw the water on them.
The United States wants to build Yucca Mountain because dry casks aren't really a very safe or practical solution. But Yucca Mountain, planned for a seismically active area, isn't a good solution, either. So they just endlessly debate the matter and keep the plants running (and try to build new ones).
Right now, the entire core of any of these stricken reactors in Japan could be turned to rubble in an instant -- pulverized or "rubbleized". This is not a "nuclear explosion," which is not possible, but it would be very, very bad. The resulting reactor vessel steam explosion could, for example, blow the 20,000 pound top of the reactor pressure vessel half a mile high. All four reactors at Fukushima could explode in sequence: Bing bing bing bing, one after another. But that wouldn't even be the worst of it. All that spent fuel is in danger, too.
We're not out of the wood, by any means. We're not even out of the demolition derby.
Yours,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
----------------------------------------------------
Radioactive Releases in Japan Could Last Months, Experts Say:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactor.html
-----------------------------------------------------
Fukushima III explosion on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_N-wNFSGyQ
Wow.
-----------------------------------------------------
1945 Japanese Balloon Bombs to North America:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO6-96Pyi0o
***
Meltdowns and false assurances...
Ace Hoffman
3/13/11
Dear Readers,
If you think things are getting better in Japan, find another news source...
"We're still expecting to see another 7 to 8 earthquake..." -- expert interviewed by the BBC just now. He stated that at least one aftershock is usually within a digit of the main quake, although this main quake was the fifth largest ever recorded, so historic data are rare. Anything could happen.
So every nuclear reactor in Japan that isn't in dire trouble already, might be at any moment. A least three nuclear reactors in Japan have been ruined permanently, two of which have had "partial" fuel melts, many are releasing unmeasured volumes of radiation into the air and water, and the nuclear industry just watches and assures us they are "clean and green" and -- oh look, those highly skilled workers (who don't know when to call in the bucket brigade) may have managed to prevent a catastrophic explosion / meltdown!
(Note: That explosion yesterday at Fukushima 1 was NOT the reactor pressure vessel exploding, which may yet happen and if it does, that could start spent fuel pool fires and additional meltdowns of nearby reactors.)
There have been more than 200 earthquakes of 5.0 or greater in the area recently, and more than 20 above 6.0. "NO one can predict earthquakes" added the expert.
Below are some recent communications from the BBC, followed by a comment in the New York Times by former NRC commissioner Nils Diaz, an apologist for the nuclear industry. Nils Diaz is wrong to think that if this had happened here, the meltdowns that have apparently occurred would not have occurred. He claims that American power plant operators would have acted more quickly. Dumping sea water or boric acid into a reactor ruins the reactor, and there is no reason to think we wouldn't have also waited too long. In fact, the evidence suggests otherwise. For example, here in America, the Monticello nuclear reactor was found to have an inoperable Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) after operating for 30 years. Shipping bolts had been left on the baffles, and no one noticed. Had it been needed (as the ECCS was at multiple reactors in Japan), it wouldn't have been available.
So what did AMERICAN reactor operators do? Remove the bolts? Yep. Shut the reactor down until the bolts were removed? Nope.
They waited 12 hours before shutting down the reactor, because regulations said they COULD wait that long if they wanted to. The operators might have thought they could fix the ECCS in that amount of time, though it's unlikely. By the 11th hour they surely knew they weren't going to complete the task in time, BUT THEY KEPT THE REACTOR GOING.
Because an operating reactor makes money for its owners. And the regulators said they could. It's a good thing they didn't have an earthquake during those 12 hours, or a tornado or other natural disaster. Good thing nobody flipped the wrong switch and they actually needed the ECCS.
Subsequent investigations of the Fukushima ongoing disaster -- perhaps after the involved personnel have died of their radiation exposures -- might blame faulty equipment, confusing signals, or any number of things that would trip up a U.S. operator too. Nils Diaz's comments are nearly racist, actually.
And just plain wrong. It can happen here today too, tomorrow, or any time. And American nuclear operators are just as bull-headed about keeping the plants online "come hell or high water" as everyone else. These were, after all, American nuclear reactors, built by American firms. Undoubtedly American "experts" were immediately called upon to assist or advise the Japanese operators.
What's happening in Japan can happen here, too.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
NIRS fact sheet on the situation in Japan:
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/Fukushimafactsheet.pdf
Belona fact sheet:
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/mox_reactor_coolant_loss
From the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698
1721: More on the Tokai nuclear power plant: A report submitted to the Ibaraki prefectural government by the Japan Atomic Power Company said that one of the two pumps being used to cool the water of a suppression pool for the plant's nuclear reactor had stopped working, according to the Kyodo news agency. However, the other pump was still working and there was no problem with cooling the reactor, the prefectural government said. All control rods were set in completely at the reactor, it added.
1710: The crisis has renewed concern in other countries about the safety of atomic power. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said it represented a turning point for the world. She said that safety standards at her own country's nuclear power stations would now be reviewed. In the United States, Senator Joe Lieberman said Washington needed to put the brakes on the development of nuclear power plants until lessons were learned from what had happened in Japan.
1706: The news about Tokai comes as the authorities battle to prevent a meltdown at the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi complex. Sea water is being pumped into three overheating reactors there. The plant was rocked by an explosion on Saturday, which blew off the roof of one reactor building. Meanwhile, a state of emergency has been declared at a second nuclear site. The International Atomic Energy Agency said increased levels of radiation had been detected at Onagawa, close to the area worst hit by the tsunami.
From the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/world/asia/13nuclear-industry.html
“They would rather wait and do things in a perfect manner instead of doing it as good as it needs to be now,” Mr. Diaz said. “And this search for perfection has often led to people sometimes hiding things or waiting too long to do things.”
...
In the case of Saturday’s blast, experts said that problem was avoidable.
Mr. Diaz said that a comprehensive nuclear power plant safety program developed in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks would have prevented a similar accident at any of the nation’s nuclear facilities.
***
Quotes collected by Ace Hoffman:
========================================
"Nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary world. People are not curious about the details." -- Paul Brians (author; quote is from: Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction)
----------------------------------------------
“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” -- Sinclair Lewis (first American Nobel Prize winner in Literature, 2.7.1885 - 1.10.1951)
----------------------------------------------
"There is no such thing as a pro-nuclear environmentalist." -- Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa, 1992)
----------------------------------------------
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." -- Sun Tzu (Chinese general b.500 BC)
----------------------------------------------
"The most intolerable reactor of all may be one which comes successfully to the end of its planned life having produced mountains of radioactive waste for which there is no disposal safe from earthquake damage or sabotage." -- A. Stanley Thompson (a pioneer nuclear physicist who later realized the whole situation)
----------------------------------------------
"Any dose is an overdose." -- Dr. John W. Gofman (another pioneer nuclear physicist who saw the light (9.21.1918 - 8.15.2007))
----------------------------------------------
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." -- Octavia Butler (science fiction writer, 7.22.1947 - 2.24.2006)
----------------------------------------------
"If you want real welfare reform, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.
If you want to reduce poverty, you focus on a good education, good healthcare, and a good job.
If you want a stable middle class, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.
If you want to have citizens who can participate in democracy, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.
And if you want to end the violence, you could build a million new prisons and you could fill them up, but you never end this cycle of violence unless you invest in the health and the skill and the intellect and the character of our children. You focus on a good education, good health care and a good job.
And other than that, I don't feel strongly about anything."
-- Paul Wellstone (US Senator, D-Minnesota, 7.21.1944 - 10.25.2002)
----------------------------------------------
"There are no warlike peoples - just warlike leaders." -- Ralph Bunche (8.7.1903 - 12.9.1971)
----------------------------------------------
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson
----------------------------------------------
"Officials from the San Onofre nuclear reactor said the warning siren that went off yesterday was just a malfunction and no one should worry. Hey, I worry, if they can't even get the siren to work right, what the hell are they doing with the reactor??" Jay Leno 1/20/10
----------------------------------------------
"Please send this to everyone you know!" -- Ace Hoffman (original collector of the above quotes, January, 2008)
***
Things are really bad, folks...
Ace Hoffman
3/14/11
Dear Readers,
I'm aghast. Frightened. Shaking. This is the worst day of my life.
Helen Caldicott said on the radio earlier tonight: "This could be much worse than Chernobyl."
Chernobyl killed about a million people.
And this could be worse?!?
This figure, a million people, is denied by the nuclear industry, but was the conclusion after researchers assessed over five thousand individual studies. The final report was translated into English last year, and published in the United States by the New York Academy of Sciences.
That's fifty times greater than the common figure for the next-worst industrial disaster in history -- Bhopal, India. And four times worse than the worst "natural" disaster in history, the Indonesia tsunami of 2004.
Which, thankfully, didn't severely damage any nuclear power plants, although one reactor site thousands of miles from the epicenter was closed for many months afterwards.
Not one thing that is happening in Japan right now comes as a surprise to knowledgeable so-called "anti-nuclear activists" around the world. We saw it coming decades ago. We really did. No one should deny us that.
Not one step in the horror that is unfolding went unpredicted.
We even presented decades-old historic documents proving our case, such as CARTOONS showing the worries about airplane impacts. And worries about earthquakes. And tsunamis. We kept saying something like this was inevitable. Containments would be breached. Radiation would be released. Deaths will occur globally forever.
THIS WAS UNTHINKABLE. But we thought it out.
It will happen again. That's the really unthinkable part.
Even as this horror unfurls, the bravado of the employees at America's nuclear power plants is unimaginable. Moments ago, a reporter in a live broadcast said the nuclear industry would have lot of new data to figure out what to do next, to keep things safe!
But instead, they'll deny that even a 7.1 earthquake can happen here. And only a "tiny" tsunami...
San Onofre, in Southern California (and downwind from Fukushima-Daiichi) is only built to a 7.0 earthquake standard. It is right near the Pacific Ocean, only "protected" by a 25-foot sea wall. That wouldn't have resisted these waves, or the Indonesian waves of 2004.
ACTUAL tsunami waves washing over San Onofre (and Diablo Canyon) might be HUNDREDS of feet high because nearby underwater canyons can create skyscraper-high waves of water.
Scare tactics? I'm so tired of being accused of scare tactics! The public has a right to know that their participation in opposing nuclear power is required to get these awful nuclear power plants shut down forever -- which HAS to happen, or else THIS will keep happening.
The media also needs to have a better understanding of what's happening. But how can anyone be asked to understand what is going on, when even the experts don't know what is happening inside the containment buildings, let alone inside the reactors pressure vessels themselves? They know that pumping more water into them helps. But even that is very hard to do. And isn't good for the water.
Telling the truth about what's happening right now isn't a scare tactic. Even more than a hundred miles from the site of the accident, the U.S. Navy was getting so irradiated (the equivalent of an entire month's "normal" radiation exposure per hour, we're told) that they lumbered out of the area as fast as their TWO NUCLEAR REACTORS ON BOARD COULD CARRY THEM.
Lucky they didn't blow a gasket in their rush to save themselves.
Three -- now I hear four -- nuclear reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi have suffered explosions. This is unprecedented. And workers are being pulled away... it will get even worse if no one mans the pumps! (See below).
The nuclear industry calls this a great surprise, unpredictable. We'll just build to higher standards, they say, as they continue to run there old reactors despite the dangers.
But we predicted it! We even predicted cascading nuclear accidents!
Harvey Wasserman, like Helen Caldicott a distinguished critic of nuclear power, whose comments have fallen on deaf ears for years ... sounded like he was crying, as I have been, on the interview today. Things are really, really bad.
This is a silent genocide. The deaths will occur for decades, centuries, and millennia to come.
If the winds blow the poisons here, as they typically do, our children will be the first to suffer. Our infants, our fetuses... our pregnant young mothers. No racial or religious group did this to us, industrial arrogance brings these ill winds. We are in for a dousing. A black rain. Parts of Japan may be getting radioactive soot rain-outs, called fallout, right now. And Korea, China, etc... And this isn't even as bad as it can get.
The spent fuel pools: One of them is draining itself. They can't seem to prevent it. Several reactor pressure vessels might suffer a steam explosion at any moment. If the pools empty, then inevitably the fuel will soon catch fire and burn.
This is awful. Thanks, Toshiba. Thanks, Hitachi. Thanks, General Electric. Thanks, nuclear industry.
THIS event, as bad as it is and as bad as it might become, is fair warning for what might happen at every other nuclear site around the world. NO NEW NUKES! is not nearly enough. NO NUKES! Scrap the old ones.
It's now well past too late. We don't need to wait 20 years for a new set of studies of the health effects.
Everywhere along the coast where the tsunami struck, people will be moving back and rebuilding their homes. But around Fukushima-Daiichi, they won't be moving back in our lifetime. And the exclusion zone was just expanded again, and probably will be again. Or should be.
Actions have always spoken louder than words. Acts of God, acts of Mother Nature, have always trumped arrogance. Acts of arrogance should be followed by acts of contrition. But if you expect the nuclear industry to fold, don't hold your breath.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Hoping San Onofre is spared until we can shut it down forever and get the waste stored properly! (Catch-22: There is no proper storage of the waste.)
One-minute tutorial on wind patterns:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tPT6VWZ9mk
***
Fukushima News 3-14-11
Ace Hoffman
3/14/11
Dear Readers,
Today's news is worse than yesterday's, which was worse than the day before. Now THREE reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility (or perhaps I should say, former nuclear power facility) are permanently disabled -- damaged by the introduction of boric acid and sea water in a desperate measure to prevent a full-scale disaster. It might work yet... it might not. This "hail mary" approach has to work perfectly three times... seaweed clogging the pipes could spell doom...
The reactor cores are apparently already in some state of partial meltdown. The exact conditions inside the reactor pressure vessels are unknown. The three reactors that are in trouble are, not coincidentally, the three that were operating at the time the earthquake struck. They automatically shut down, but all the backup generators failed when the tsunami struck an hour later
Unpredictable? Not at all!
Read my own blogs, or read any of a thousand other activists who have been warning about these sorts of problems for YEARS!
Yet, even recently, at San Onofre in California, the backup generators have failed to start in scheduled TESTS because required maintenance had not been not performed. How will they perform in an emergency?
California's four operating nuclear reactors are Pressurized Water Reactors. The reactors at Fukushima are all Boiling Water Reactors. The differences are not particularly important at the moment: Both types are dangerous. Both need to be eliminated from the earth. There is no type of reactor which is safe from catastrophic fuel melting, burning, vaporizing, or otherwise escaping into the environment.
If you didn't believe it before, remember that THIS basic reactor design is more than 50 years old. Tried and true? So they said. For half a century we've been told that nothing like this could possibly happen anywhere: A cascade of nuclear reactor accidents.
Now we're being told that we're in "uncharted territory" and nobody knows what to do... the nuclear industry admits there are lessons to be learned from this. Yes, there is one lesson. It's this: SHUT 'EM DOWN NOW. All of them forever.
Below are the four main points from today's British Mail Online, about fallout coming to America. These headlines are terrifying.
From:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366055/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-America-nuclear-alert-Fukushima-explosion.html
'Worst-case scenario' could send nuclear cloud across Pacific
30,000ft winds would carry radioactive material across the ocean
U.S.S. Ronald Reagan hit by month's radiation in just one hour
Japanese reactors are very similar to 23 in America
Let's hope this doesn't get any worse. Don't think it can't.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
I've released another version of the Chernobyl winds video, this time centered over Fukushima. Here's the URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tPT6VWZ9mk
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
3/13/11
Dear Readers,
The explosion at the Fukushima MOX plant (unit 3) looks far worse than the explosion yesterday at Fukushima Unit 1.
They are assuming it was a hydrogen gas explosion, but what happened to the spent fuel pool there? This explosion appears to be larger than the one yesterday, which destroyed the top part of Fukushima 1. These buildings are huge, these are huge explosions. This is awful.
White clouds were coming up from Unit 1 again today, which shouldn't be happening if it's under control. So it's not under control. Unit 2 apparently isn't under control, either. Having huge explosions on either side can't make things easier. Other reactors in Japan are also in trouble.
And the New York Times is saying that radioactive releases could continue for MONTHS.
May I respectfully take this moment to ask San Onofre and Diablo Canyon to shut down forever? What kind of warning do those guys want, anyway? Acts of God aren't good enough? Man's folly exposed says nothing?
The nuclear industry has been telling us for nearly 25 years that nothing as bad as Chernobyl (ONE MILLION DEAD) could EVER happen again. By the time it's over, THIS could be MUCH, MUCH WORSE.
In 2010, according to TEPCO, the operator of the site, there were already more than 10,000 spent fuel assemblies located at the Fukushima-Daiichi complex, mostly in spent fuel pools.
After Chernobyl the nuclear industry ignored cancer clusters, deformities, heart problems, and thus, undercounted the death toll a thousand different ways. But a compendium of thousands of studies, published by the New York Academy of Sciences, put the number at close to a million.
After Hiroshima / Nagasaki and all the atomic bomb testing, health effects were carefully and deliberately downplayed, too. Determining which new cancers have been caused by Fukushima won't be easy EVEN IF a million people die in and around Japan, and another million die around the rest of the planet. The winds and waters move these poisons around very quickly.
There is no way to know how much radiation is being released, or how much will reach the United States. It should be noted, however, that the Japanese military used free-floating balloons to try to bomb America during World War Two. Nearly ten thousand were launched and over a thousand bomb-balloons reportedly got through.
That's the way the winds go.
There's spent fuel in numerous locations around these reactors, including huge pools with four-foot thick concrete walls -- located ABOVE the reactors in these models. These pools need nearly constant water supplies.
Fuel in dry casks, also located at the site, have a few feet of concrete and a few inches of steel protecting them. That's not nearly good enough. In an accident, the dry casks can't simply be doused in water even if you could get near enough to throw the water on them.
The United States wants to build Yucca Mountain because dry casks aren't really a very safe or practical solution. But Yucca Mountain, planned for a seismically active area, isn't a good solution, either. So they just endlessly debate the matter and keep the plants running (and try to build new ones).
Right now, the entire core of any of these stricken reactors in Japan could be turned to rubble in an instant -- pulverized or "rubbleized". This is not a "nuclear explosion," which is not possible, but it would be very, very bad. The resulting reactor vessel steam explosion could, for example, blow the 20,000 pound top of the reactor pressure vessel half a mile high. All four reactors at Fukushima could explode in sequence: Bing bing bing bing, one after another. But that wouldn't even be the worst of it. All that spent fuel is in danger, too.
We're not out of the wood, by any means. We're not even out of the demolition derby.
Yours,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
----------------------------------------------------
Radioactive Releases in Japan Could Last Months, Experts Say:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactor.html
-----------------------------------------------------
Fukushima III explosion on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_N-wNFSGyQ
Wow.
-----------------------------------------------------
1945 Japanese Balloon Bombs to North America:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO6-96Pyi0o
***
Meltdowns and false assurances...
Ace Hoffman
3/13/11
Dear Readers,
If you think things are getting better in Japan, find another news source...
"We're still expecting to see another 7 to 8 earthquake..." -- expert interviewed by the BBC just now. He stated that at least one aftershock is usually within a digit of the main quake, although this main quake was the fifth largest ever recorded, so historic data are rare. Anything could happen.
So every nuclear reactor in Japan that isn't in dire trouble already, might be at any moment. A least three nuclear reactors in Japan have been ruined permanently, two of which have had "partial" fuel melts, many are releasing unmeasured volumes of radiation into the air and water, and the nuclear industry just watches and assures us they are "clean and green" and -- oh look, those highly skilled workers (who don't know when to call in the bucket brigade) may have managed to prevent a catastrophic explosion / meltdown!
(Note: That explosion yesterday at Fukushima 1 was NOT the reactor pressure vessel exploding, which may yet happen and if it does, that could start spent fuel pool fires and additional meltdowns of nearby reactors.)
There have been more than 200 earthquakes of 5.0 or greater in the area recently, and more than 20 above 6.0. "NO one can predict earthquakes" added the expert.
Below are some recent communications from the BBC, followed by a comment in the New York Times by former NRC commissioner Nils Diaz, an apologist for the nuclear industry. Nils Diaz is wrong to think that if this had happened here, the meltdowns that have apparently occurred would not have occurred. He claims that American power plant operators would have acted more quickly. Dumping sea water or boric acid into a reactor ruins the reactor, and there is no reason to think we wouldn't have also waited too long. In fact, the evidence suggests otherwise. For example, here in America, the Monticello nuclear reactor was found to have an inoperable Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) after operating for 30 years. Shipping bolts had been left on the baffles, and no one noticed. Had it been needed (as the ECCS was at multiple reactors in Japan), it wouldn't have been available.
So what did AMERICAN reactor operators do? Remove the bolts? Yep. Shut the reactor down until the bolts were removed? Nope.
They waited 12 hours before shutting down the reactor, because regulations said they COULD wait that long if they wanted to. The operators might have thought they could fix the ECCS in that amount of time, though it's unlikely. By the 11th hour they surely knew they weren't going to complete the task in time, BUT THEY KEPT THE REACTOR GOING.
Because an operating reactor makes money for its owners. And the regulators said they could. It's a good thing they didn't have an earthquake during those 12 hours, or a tornado or other natural disaster. Good thing nobody flipped the wrong switch and they actually needed the ECCS.
Subsequent investigations of the Fukushima ongoing disaster -- perhaps after the involved personnel have died of their radiation exposures -- might blame faulty equipment, confusing signals, or any number of things that would trip up a U.S. operator too. Nils Diaz's comments are nearly racist, actually.
And just plain wrong. It can happen here today too, tomorrow, or any time. And American nuclear operators are just as bull-headed about keeping the plants online "come hell or high water" as everyone else. These were, after all, American nuclear reactors, built by American firms. Undoubtedly American "experts" were immediately called upon to assist or advise the Japanese operators.
What's happening in Japan can happen here, too.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
NIRS fact sheet on the situation in Japan:
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/Fukushimafactsheet.pdf
Belona fact sheet:
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/mox_reactor_coolant_loss
From the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698
1721: More on the Tokai nuclear power plant: A report submitted to the Ibaraki prefectural government by the Japan Atomic Power Company said that one of the two pumps being used to cool the water of a suppression pool for the plant's nuclear reactor had stopped working, according to the Kyodo news agency. However, the other pump was still working and there was no problem with cooling the reactor, the prefectural government said. All control rods were set in completely at the reactor, it added.
1710: The crisis has renewed concern in other countries about the safety of atomic power. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said it represented a turning point for the world. She said that safety standards at her own country's nuclear power stations would now be reviewed. In the United States, Senator Joe Lieberman said Washington needed to put the brakes on the development of nuclear power plants until lessons were learned from what had happened in Japan.
1706: The news about Tokai comes as the authorities battle to prevent a meltdown at the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi complex. Sea water is being pumped into three overheating reactors there. The plant was rocked by an explosion on Saturday, which blew off the roof of one reactor building. Meanwhile, a state of emergency has been declared at a second nuclear site. The International Atomic Energy Agency said increased levels of radiation had been detected at Onagawa, close to the area worst hit by the tsunami.
From the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/world/asia/13nuclear-industry.html
“They would rather wait and do things in a perfect manner instead of doing it as good as it needs to be now,” Mr. Diaz said. “And this search for perfection has often led to people sometimes hiding things or waiting too long to do things.”
...
In the case of Saturday’s blast, experts said that problem was avoidable.
Mr. Diaz said that a comprehensive nuclear power plant safety program developed in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks would have prevented a similar accident at any of the nation’s nuclear facilities.
***
Quotes collected by Ace Hoffman:
========================================
"Nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary world. People are not curious about the details." -- Paul Brians (author; quote is from: Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction)
----------------------------------------------
“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” -- Sinclair Lewis (first American Nobel Prize winner in Literature, 2.7.1885 - 1.10.1951)
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"There is no such thing as a pro-nuclear environmentalist." -- Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa, 1992)
----------------------------------------------
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." -- Sun Tzu (Chinese general b.500 BC)
----------------------------------------------
"The most intolerable reactor of all may be one which comes successfully to the end of its planned life having produced mountains of radioactive waste for which there is no disposal safe from earthquake damage or sabotage." -- A. Stanley Thompson (a pioneer nuclear physicist who later realized the whole situation)
----------------------------------------------
"Any dose is an overdose." -- Dr. John W. Gofman (another pioneer nuclear physicist who saw the light (9.21.1918 - 8.15.2007))
----------------------------------------------
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." -- Octavia Butler (science fiction writer, 7.22.1947 - 2.24.2006)
----------------------------------------------
"If you want real welfare reform, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.
If you want to reduce poverty, you focus on a good education, good healthcare, and a good job.
If you want a stable middle class, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.
If you want to have citizens who can participate in democracy, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.
And if you want to end the violence, you could build a million new prisons and you could fill them up, but you never end this cycle of violence unless you invest in the health and the skill and the intellect and the character of our children. You focus on a good education, good health care and a good job.
And other than that, I don't feel strongly about anything."
-- Paul Wellstone (US Senator, D-Minnesota, 7.21.1944 - 10.25.2002)
----------------------------------------------
"There are no warlike peoples - just warlike leaders." -- Ralph Bunche (8.7.1903 - 12.9.1971)
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"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson
----------------------------------------------
"Officials from the San Onofre nuclear reactor said the warning siren that went off yesterday was just a malfunction and no one should worry. Hey, I worry, if they can't even get the siren to work right, what the hell are they doing with the reactor??" Jay Leno 1/20/10
----------------------------------------------
"Please send this to everyone you know!" -- Ace Hoffman (original collector of the above quotes, January, 2008)
***
Things are really bad, folks...
Ace Hoffman
3/14/11
Dear Readers,
I'm aghast. Frightened. Shaking. This is the worst day of my life.
Helen Caldicott said on the radio earlier tonight: "This could be much worse than Chernobyl."
Chernobyl killed about a million people.
And this could be worse?!?
This figure, a million people, is denied by the nuclear industry, but was the conclusion after researchers assessed over five thousand individual studies. The final report was translated into English last year, and published in the United States by the New York Academy of Sciences.
That's fifty times greater than the common figure for the next-worst industrial disaster in history -- Bhopal, India. And four times worse than the worst "natural" disaster in history, the Indonesia tsunami of 2004.
Which, thankfully, didn't severely damage any nuclear power plants, although one reactor site thousands of miles from the epicenter was closed for many months afterwards.
Not one thing that is happening in Japan right now comes as a surprise to knowledgeable so-called "anti-nuclear activists" around the world. We saw it coming decades ago. We really did. No one should deny us that.
Not one step in the horror that is unfolding went unpredicted.
We even presented decades-old historic documents proving our case, such as CARTOONS showing the worries about airplane impacts. And worries about earthquakes. And tsunamis. We kept saying something like this was inevitable. Containments would be breached. Radiation would be released. Deaths will occur globally forever.
THIS WAS UNTHINKABLE. But we thought it out.
It will happen again. That's the really unthinkable part.
Even as this horror unfurls, the bravado of the employees at America's nuclear power plants is unimaginable. Moments ago, a reporter in a live broadcast said the nuclear industry would have lot of new data to figure out what to do next, to keep things safe!
But instead, they'll deny that even a 7.1 earthquake can happen here. And only a "tiny" tsunami...
San Onofre, in Southern California (and downwind from Fukushima-Daiichi) is only built to a 7.0 earthquake standard. It is right near the Pacific Ocean, only "protected" by a 25-foot sea wall. That wouldn't have resisted these waves, or the Indonesian waves of 2004.
ACTUAL tsunami waves washing over San Onofre (and Diablo Canyon) might be HUNDREDS of feet high because nearby underwater canyons can create skyscraper-high waves of water.
Scare tactics? I'm so tired of being accused of scare tactics! The public has a right to know that their participation in opposing nuclear power is required to get these awful nuclear power plants shut down forever -- which HAS to happen, or else THIS will keep happening.
The media also needs to have a better understanding of what's happening. But how can anyone be asked to understand what is going on, when even the experts don't know what is happening inside the containment buildings, let alone inside the reactors pressure vessels themselves? They know that pumping more water into them helps. But even that is very hard to do. And isn't good for the water.
Telling the truth about what's happening right now isn't a scare tactic. Even more than a hundred miles from the site of the accident, the U.S. Navy was getting so irradiated (the equivalent of an entire month's "normal" radiation exposure per hour, we're told) that they lumbered out of the area as fast as their TWO NUCLEAR REACTORS ON BOARD COULD CARRY THEM.
Lucky they didn't blow a gasket in their rush to save themselves.
Three -- now I hear four -- nuclear reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi have suffered explosions. This is unprecedented. And workers are being pulled away... it will get even worse if no one mans the pumps! (See below).
The nuclear industry calls this a great surprise, unpredictable. We'll just build to higher standards, they say, as they continue to run there old reactors despite the dangers.
But we predicted it! We even predicted cascading nuclear accidents!
Harvey Wasserman, like Helen Caldicott a distinguished critic of nuclear power, whose comments have fallen on deaf ears for years ... sounded like he was crying, as I have been, on the interview today. Things are really, really bad.
This is a silent genocide. The deaths will occur for decades, centuries, and millennia to come.
If the winds blow the poisons here, as they typically do, our children will be the first to suffer. Our infants, our fetuses... our pregnant young mothers. No racial or religious group did this to us, industrial arrogance brings these ill winds. We are in for a dousing. A black rain. Parts of Japan may be getting radioactive soot rain-outs, called fallout, right now. And Korea, China, etc... And this isn't even as bad as it can get.
The spent fuel pools: One of them is draining itself. They can't seem to prevent it. Several reactor pressure vessels might suffer a steam explosion at any moment. If the pools empty, then inevitably the fuel will soon catch fire and burn.
This is awful. Thanks, Toshiba. Thanks, Hitachi. Thanks, General Electric. Thanks, nuclear industry.
THIS event, as bad as it is and as bad as it might become, is fair warning for what might happen at every other nuclear site around the world. NO NEW NUKES! is not nearly enough. NO NUKES! Scrap the old ones.
It's now well past too late. We don't need to wait 20 years for a new set of studies of the health effects.
Everywhere along the coast where the tsunami struck, people will be moving back and rebuilding their homes. But around Fukushima-Daiichi, they won't be moving back in our lifetime. And the exclusion zone was just expanded again, and probably will be again. Or should be.
Actions have always spoken louder than words. Acts of God, acts of Mother Nature, have always trumped arrogance. Acts of arrogance should be followed by acts of contrition. But if you expect the nuclear industry to fold, don't hold your breath.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Hoping San Onofre is spared until we can shut it down forever and get the waste stored properly! (Catch-22: There is no proper storage of the waste.)
One-minute tutorial on wind patterns:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tPT6VWZ9mk
***
Fukushima News 3-14-11
Ace Hoffman
3/14/11
Dear Readers,
Today's news is worse than yesterday's, which was worse than the day before. Now THREE reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility (or perhaps I should say, former nuclear power facility) are permanently disabled -- damaged by the introduction of boric acid and sea water in a desperate measure to prevent a full-scale disaster. It might work yet... it might not. This "hail mary" approach has to work perfectly three times... seaweed clogging the pipes could spell doom...
The reactor cores are apparently already in some state of partial meltdown. The exact conditions inside the reactor pressure vessels are unknown. The three reactors that are in trouble are, not coincidentally, the three that were operating at the time the earthquake struck. They automatically shut down, but all the backup generators failed when the tsunami struck an hour later
Unpredictable? Not at all!
Read my own blogs, or read any of a thousand other activists who have been warning about these sorts of problems for YEARS!
Yet, even recently, at San Onofre in California, the backup generators have failed to start in scheduled TESTS because required maintenance had not been not performed. How will they perform in an emergency?
California's four operating nuclear reactors are Pressurized Water Reactors. The reactors at Fukushima are all Boiling Water Reactors. The differences are not particularly important at the moment: Both types are dangerous. Both need to be eliminated from the earth. There is no type of reactor which is safe from catastrophic fuel melting, burning, vaporizing, or otherwise escaping into the environment.
If you didn't believe it before, remember that THIS basic reactor design is more than 50 years old. Tried and true? So they said. For half a century we've been told that nothing like this could possibly happen anywhere: A cascade of nuclear reactor accidents.
Now we're being told that we're in "uncharted territory" and nobody knows what to do... the nuclear industry admits there are lessons to be learned from this. Yes, there is one lesson. It's this: SHUT 'EM DOWN NOW. All of them forever.
Below are the four main points from today's British Mail Online, about fallout coming to America. These headlines are terrifying.
From:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366055/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-America-nuclear-alert-Fukushima-explosion.html
'Worst-case scenario' could send nuclear cloud across Pacific
30,000ft winds would carry radioactive material across the ocean
U.S.S. Ronald Reagan hit by month's radiation in just one hour
Japanese reactors are very similar to 23 in America
Let's hope this doesn't get any worse. Don't think it can't.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
I've released another version of the Chernobyl winds video, this time centered over Fukushima. Here's the URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tPT6VWZ9mk
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Nuclear Disaster in Japan - workers and citizens at high risk
A media release from South Africa:
13 March 2011
Courtesy of Ace Hoffman of AceHoffman.org
The massive explosion following a cooling problem at one Fukushima’s nuclear reactors, Daiichi, has not only released radiation and other toxic compounds, but has created an untenable situation for workers at Fukushima’s other nuclear reactors nearby, called Daini, especially given that a state of emergency has been declared for five reactors at the two plants. Latest news is that a hydrogen explosion is now possible at the No. 3 reactor at Fukushima 1.
“Workers are being exposed to the ‘allowable’ annual dose of radiation every hour that they remain on site. Our hearts go out to them,” said Muna Lakhani, co-ordinator of Earthlife Africa’s Unplug Nuclear 1 campaign. The danger is not over. There are fears of another explosion as the cooling system at a second reactor has also failed, as of Sunday morning. “The measuring of Caesium at the plant indicates that a meltdown has indeed taken place, which raises the levels of radiation released to catastrophic proportions” suggested Lakhani. Latest news on Sunday confirms fears of a multiple meltdown.
The reactors have all been shut down. The reactor core remains hot for days after shutdown, however, so workers have been busy ensuring that the fuel rods do not melt down. For this the cooling systems need to be operational requiring a power source. The quake has disrupted the backup supplies of power including diesel generators. The IAEA supplied batteries and coolant in the interim. They are now flushing the highly radioactive core with seawater which will cause massive seawater contamination whilst preventing a full scale Chernobyl type meltdown. This is an act of desperation and unprecedented.
Platitudes by the Japanese government and nuclear industry suggesting that the radiation threat is minimal must be treated with great caution, as reports confirm that not only has the containment been breached, and that ‘venting’ is taking place, but also that radiation levels at about 1000 higher than normal have been measured. The 24 hr monitoring that is supposed to happen as a matter of course, has been shutdown (www/nu/pamp/index-j.html) Japanese activists suggest that this is so that the public and the world at large will not be told how much radiation has and is being released” said Gray Maguire, ELA branch secretary.
It took local activists many hours to get the exclusion zone expanded from the initial 10km to 20 km, which, while not completely safe, helps limit harm to local residents.
“We call upon the nuclear industry, and the South African government, to take this disaster seriously, and abandon all nuclear plans for our country. Given that proposed sites are all along the coast, we believe that this gamble is unacceptable. Not only are sustainable and safe alternatives cheaper than nuclear power, but they are also better solutions to the creation of decent work and energy security, as well as the best solutions to limit climate change,” Lakhani states. The public should note that our existing nuclear power plant Koeberg is on a geological fault on the Cape Fold Belt with the last destructive large earthquake occurring in 1809. Interesting also is that if we were to apply the 20km exclusion/ evacuation zone (which has been applied to Fukushima) to Koeberg this would mean evacuating most of Cape Town.
There has been a history of safety problems and cover-ups by TEPCO at the Fukushima reactor complex:
http://cnic.jp/english/newsletter/nit92/nit92articles/nit92coverupdata.html
South Africa is considering a ‘fleet’ of nuclear reactors, at Thyspunt, Bantamklip and additional reactors at Koeberg, at a potential cost of hundreds of billions of Rands. Yje National Nuclear Regulator has also come under fire, for not mobilising a “hazmat” team, with local activists questioning their ability to respond to a disaster at Koeberg.
*
Examples of problems and cover ups:
Local concerns had already been fuelled by revelations, which came to light in 2002 and 2003, that data at the plant had been deliberately falsified to comply with regulations on wastewater discharges into the sea.
In 1999, the seeming lack of controls at nuclear power plants caused widespread alarm when three workers at Tokaimura, in Ibaraki prefecture, suffered high doses of radiation and more than 100 local residents were exposed to low levels of radiation due to a “criticality” event, which is a limited, uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.
It emerged that Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Company (JCO), which operated the plant, had modified its enriched uranium processing procedure, without approval from the authorities and removed various safety measures aimed at ensuring prevention of criticality.
Not long before the Tokaimura accident, on December 8, 1995, a fast-breeder reactor, known as Monju, which uses plutonium fuel instead of uranium, suffered a serious accident, which led to leakage of sodium coolant.
Issued by:
Earthlife Africa Cape Town
Unplug Nuclear 1 Campaign
Contact:
Muna Lakhani
083-471-7276
muna@iafrica.com
13 March 2011
Courtesy of Ace Hoffman of AceHoffman.org
The massive explosion following a cooling problem at one Fukushima’s nuclear reactors, Daiichi, has not only released radiation and other toxic compounds, but has created an untenable situation for workers at Fukushima’s other nuclear reactors nearby, called Daini, especially given that a state of emergency has been declared for five reactors at the two plants. Latest news is that a hydrogen explosion is now possible at the No. 3 reactor at Fukushima 1.
“Workers are being exposed to the ‘allowable’ annual dose of radiation every hour that they remain on site. Our hearts go out to them,” said Muna Lakhani, co-ordinator of Earthlife Africa’s Unplug Nuclear 1 campaign. The danger is not over. There are fears of another explosion as the cooling system at a second reactor has also failed, as of Sunday morning. “The measuring of Caesium at the plant indicates that a meltdown has indeed taken place, which raises the levels of radiation released to catastrophic proportions” suggested Lakhani. Latest news on Sunday confirms fears of a multiple meltdown.
The reactors have all been shut down. The reactor core remains hot for days after shutdown, however, so workers have been busy ensuring that the fuel rods do not melt down. For this the cooling systems need to be operational requiring a power source. The quake has disrupted the backup supplies of power including diesel generators. The IAEA supplied batteries and coolant in the interim. They are now flushing the highly radioactive core with seawater which will cause massive seawater contamination whilst preventing a full scale Chernobyl type meltdown. This is an act of desperation and unprecedented.
Platitudes by the Japanese government and nuclear industry suggesting that the radiation threat is minimal must be treated with great caution, as reports confirm that not only has the containment been breached, and that ‘venting’ is taking place, but also that radiation levels at about 1000 higher than normal have been measured. The 24 hr monitoring that is supposed to happen as a matter of course, has been shutdown (www/nu/pamp/index-j.html) Japanese activists suggest that this is so that the public and the world at large will not be told how much radiation has and is being released” said Gray Maguire, ELA branch secretary.
It took local activists many hours to get the exclusion zone expanded from the initial 10km to 20 km, which, while not completely safe, helps limit harm to local residents.
“We call upon the nuclear industry, and the South African government, to take this disaster seriously, and abandon all nuclear plans for our country. Given that proposed sites are all along the coast, we believe that this gamble is unacceptable. Not only are sustainable and safe alternatives cheaper than nuclear power, but they are also better solutions to the creation of decent work and energy security, as well as the best solutions to limit climate change,” Lakhani states. The public should note that our existing nuclear power plant Koeberg is on a geological fault on the Cape Fold Belt with the last destructive large earthquake occurring in 1809. Interesting also is that if we were to apply the 20km exclusion/ evacuation zone (which has been applied to Fukushima) to Koeberg this would mean evacuating most of Cape Town.
There has been a history of safety problems and cover-ups by TEPCO at the Fukushima reactor complex:
http://cnic.jp/english/newsletter/nit92/nit92articles/nit92coverupdata.html
South Africa is considering a ‘fleet’ of nuclear reactors, at Thyspunt, Bantamklip and additional reactors at Koeberg, at a potential cost of hundreds of billions of Rands. Yje National Nuclear Regulator has also come under fire, for not mobilising a “hazmat” team, with local activists questioning their ability to respond to a disaster at Koeberg.
*
Examples of problems and cover ups:
Local concerns had already been fuelled by revelations, which came to light in 2002 and 2003, that data at the plant had been deliberately falsified to comply with regulations on wastewater discharges into the sea.
In 1999, the seeming lack of controls at nuclear power plants caused widespread alarm when three workers at Tokaimura, in Ibaraki prefecture, suffered high doses of radiation and more than 100 local residents were exposed to low levels of radiation due to a “criticality” event, which is a limited, uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.
It emerged that Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Company (JCO), which operated the plant, had modified its enriched uranium processing procedure, without approval from the authorities and removed various safety measures aimed at ensuring prevention of criticality.
Not long before the Tokaimura accident, on December 8, 1995, a fast-breeder reactor, known as Monju, which uses plutonium fuel instead of uranium, suffered a serious accident, which led to leakage of sodium coolant.
Issued by:
Earthlife Africa Cape Town
Unplug Nuclear 1 Campaign
Contact:
Muna Lakhani
083-471-7276
muna@iafrica.com
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Ace Hoffman on San Onofre Nukes
December 26th, 2010
Dear Readers,
It always breaks my heart when I hear nuclear workers say they wouldn't be doing it if they thought they were putting their children at risk. These same workers take their children to McDonald's. No risk there, huh? A disproportionate number of them smoke tobacco, and inevitably, their children become smokers more frequently, too. They likewise ignore the dangers from CT scans, x-rays, sunlight and tritium, and they, and their children, get cancer and die, just like the rest of us. Death leaves no voter behind. Even if they "wise up" as they whither and die, it does society no good. Their voting days are done. Today, they might be on the local school board, stopping opinions they don't agree with, and a long-time employee of the nuclear power plant. But tomorrow perhaps, they'll feel a sudden pain that won't stop, or they'll cough up blood, or -- like me -- they'll piss blood, and then their life changes.... but all too often, it's too late by then.
And they don't know if it was the cigarettes or the hamburgers or the x-rays or the CT scans or the sun or their job or something else, but it doesn't really matter, it's over. And if they DO survive, a lot of times, radiation is given in ample quantities before, during, and after treatment, and it's hard to complain about getting too much radiation when the doctor's telling you he thinks he sees a lump... Radiation to find the cancer. Radiation to cure it. Radiation to be sure it remains gone. Radiation to prevent its recurrence. Radiation to keep the hospital's liability down.
The main key to cancer survivability is early detection followed by timely and skilled medical care. No infections, no tools left inside the body, all the holes sewed up nicely. No matter how good it gets, it's not nearly as fun as not getting cancer in the first place.
Many, if not most, cancers are the result of a series of changes in the DNA structure. Although the final initiating event will likely be one random change to the DNA of one cell in the body, out of 10s of trillions of cells, frequently many cells are in the "pre-cancerous" stage by then, which makes "curing" cancer very difficult indeed.
On Tuesday, December 14th, 2010, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a Special Hearing on San Onofre's ongoing problems with worker honesty, integrity, and related morale issues. The dangers to children from environmental radiation were not discussed, although they should have been. Scores of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station workers showed up at the hearing, wearing "SONGS" dress shirts, polo shirts, jackets, patches, name tags, and/or beepers. The CEO of Edison International (the parent company of Southern California Edison (SCE), which operates the facility (with a lot of sub-contractors such as Bechtel and The Shaw Group)), had flown in, and he sat in the front row along with several other Edison corporate celebrities and NRC mucky-mucks, as well as a couple of recently-retired, 25-year SONGS veterans who are now whistleblowers.
Facing the audience were four SCE executives at one table -- the top one yet another new guy -- and four NRC inspectors at another table. At its peak, there were about 150 people in the room.
During the "formal" part of the meeting, we were told that all the important "metrics" show improvement, and nothing unsafe is happening at the plant. The NRC feels that they are getting the proper feedback from the utility workers so that they can maintain a "Safety-Conscious Work Environment" ("SCWE") and proper regulatory control. We were told that all the workers now carry a "blue book" which tells them how to behave, and many members of the audience held up their "blue books" to show that they carry them all the time, along with their beepers.
However, when the public comment period began and the whistleblowers started speaking out, a completely different picture emerged. Things are, once again, worse than ever at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
Regarding the steel I-beam that was dropped into the spent fuel pool last month (which I had written about in a previous newsletter), we were told that it "only" weighed about 40 pounds. The NRC assumes that even if the I-beam had fallen vertically it wouldn't have been able to damage a 1,400-pound reactor fuel assembly, considering that the reactor fuel assemblies are designed to withstand a second reactor fuel assembly falling on top of them vertically at "terminal velocity" through water.
We were told that even if a fuel leakage issue was somehow caused by such an accident, or any "foreseeable" accident, the radiation would be contained inside the spent fuel pool building, which is very large and "negatively pressurized."
Of course. in order to have negative pressure, you have to suck air out, at least somewhat, because everything leaks, at least somewhat, and people have to go in and out through doorways, and fuel has to go in and out.
Fans draw the excess air out, but not to worry: Everything goes through a HEPA filter! HEPA filters were designed for the nuclear industry, and the standards are written by the Department of Energy (DOE).
So just because they can't even stop a 40-pound I-beam from falling, there's nothing to worry about, because they'll still achieve a 99.99% containment of any radioactive crud that is released, thanks to the HEPA filters, right?
Well, not quite.
To use the word "HEPA" when you market your filter, you are required to achieve a 99.97% filtration of particles larger than 0.3 microns in diameter. At 99.97% efficiency, 3 out of every 10,000 large particles gets through, which can quickly add up to trillions of large particles "legally" getting through the filter. Most of the particles that are released above 0.3 microns will be right around the 0.3 micron size.
Anything smaller than 0.3 microns isn't required to be stopped at all, and of course, any accident will release a spectrum of particle sizes, and many accidents are likely to have average particle sizes in the 0.1 micron size. So HEPA filter aren't all they're cracked up to be! And industry standards are three times weaker than what you probably would go buy yourself at the store.
As a HEPA filter is used, the average particle size it can stop will get smaller as material cakes around the filter material, while the pressure to push air through the filter increases accordingly. If the caked material reacts chemically with the filter material, it can damage the fibers and greatly reduce the effectiveness of the filter. Radiation would, of course, damage the filter material, no matter what that material is.
A good eye can discern objects down to about 10 microns in size, so what HEPA filters do let through is, conveniently enough, invisible. HEPA filters do not stop ANY noble gases, which don't clump into large particles. AND is it just a coincidence that noble gases that might be released in an accident aren't normally measured, reported, considered, or believed to be any cause for concern? Noble gases are generally considered "harmless" because the body doesn't utilize them in any way. But the body absorbs them "accidentally" all the time, so they are in the body at a fairly constant rate.
HEPA filters also won't stop tritium. A single gram of tritium will undergo about 370 trillion (370,000,000,000,000) decays per second.
Fortunately, when they dropped the steel I-beam, it didn't get jammed beside a fuel assembly, which then got damaged as they tried to remove it... I'm just saying, it COULD have happened... Nothing went wrong THIS time. And the NRC feels they learned something.
Did they learn that since 40-year-old steel hooks fail (that's the probable age of the part) that perhaps the whole rest of the plant is falling apart, embrittling unexpectedly, deteriorating from the salty air, the radiation, the heat, the humidity, father time, and poor maintenance?
No!
Instead, the utility replaced the hook and the NRC made a generic new rule: Lanyards should be used for lifts over the spent fuel pool.
Duh.
Which reminds me of the (true story!) guy who was demonstrating safety procedures for a class of young mountain-climbers. He cut his main rope in order to show how the safety rope will catch you safely.
Only it didn't, and he fell 40 feet to his death.
Lanyards break, too.
At the nuclear power plant, the "Standard Operating Procedure" is that there is no such thing as a warning sign of an upcoming catastrophic failure. There are just "lessons learned." So here we sit, at the brink of disaster, and all we have are "lessons learned"!
And actually, we don't even have THAT!
Why not?
Because one lesson learned at San Onofre over and over again is that the records kept by the employees there are NOT ACCURATE! So whatever lessons COULD be learned will soon be forgotten.
I'm sure there are still a lot of good people left at San Onofre.
Let's guess that 90% of the workforce are decent, honest people. That seems kind of high to me, but if that's the case, then about 200 to 300 people, depending on how many contractors are on the staff at any one time, are dishonest at San Onofre. That leaves a lot of room for fraud and deceit!
But even if 99% are honest (a hopelessly optimistic number, judging by the "human factors" problems they are having at the plant) that would still mean that 20 to 30 people are running around the plant faking things, covering up problems, pretending everything went well when it didn't, not finishing jobs... how many screw-ups does it take to cause a meltdown? Just one.
A year ago I heard about problems with integrity in dry fuel cask fabrication, problems of not performing work to specifications. The whistleblower, a long-time San Onofre employee, was also a former Los Alamos technician and a former Marine sniper as well. Now we're hearing that pressure tests (which I assume should normally follow cask fabrication) are being done improperly too.
How DO you spell "recipe for disaster"? SONGS.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author, a bladder cancer survivor, has been studying nuclear-related issued independently for about 40 years. He is an educational software developer and author of THE CODE KILLERS (an in-depth look at nuclear power), available as a free download from:
http://www.acehoffman.org/
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Dear Readers,
It always breaks my heart when I hear nuclear workers say they wouldn't be doing it if they thought they were putting their children at risk. These same workers take their children to McDonald's. No risk there, huh? A disproportionate number of them smoke tobacco, and inevitably, their children become smokers more frequently, too. They likewise ignore the dangers from CT scans, x-rays, sunlight and tritium, and they, and their children, get cancer and die, just like the rest of us. Death leaves no voter behind. Even if they "wise up" as they whither and die, it does society no good. Their voting days are done. Today, they might be on the local school board, stopping opinions they don't agree with, and a long-time employee of the nuclear power plant. But tomorrow perhaps, they'll feel a sudden pain that won't stop, or they'll cough up blood, or -- like me -- they'll piss blood, and then their life changes.... but all too often, it's too late by then.
And they don't know if it was the cigarettes or the hamburgers or the x-rays or the CT scans or the sun or their job or something else, but it doesn't really matter, it's over. And if they DO survive, a lot of times, radiation is given in ample quantities before, during, and after treatment, and it's hard to complain about getting too much radiation when the doctor's telling you he thinks he sees a lump... Radiation to find the cancer. Radiation to cure it. Radiation to be sure it remains gone. Radiation to prevent its recurrence. Radiation to keep the hospital's liability down.
The main key to cancer survivability is early detection followed by timely and skilled medical care. No infections, no tools left inside the body, all the holes sewed up nicely. No matter how good it gets, it's not nearly as fun as not getting cancer in the first place.
Many, if not most, cancers are the result of a series of changes in the DNA structure. Although the final initiating event will likely be one random change to the DNA of one cell in the body, out of 10s of trillions of cells, frequently many cells are in the "pre-cancerous" stage by then, which makes "curing" cancer very difficult indeed.
On Tuesday, December 14th, 2010, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a Special Hearing on San Onofre's ongoing problems with worker honesty, integrity, and related morale issues. The dangers to children from environmental radiation were not discussed, although they should have been. Scores of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station workers showed up at the hearing, wearing "SONGS" dress shirts, polo shirts, jackets, patches, name tags, and/or beepers. The CEO of Edison International (the parent company of Southern California Edison (SCE), which operates the facility (with a lot of sub-contractors such as Bechtel and The Shaw Group)), had flown in, and he sat in the front row along with several other Edison corporate celebrities and NRC mucky-mucks, as well as a couple of recently-retired, 25-year SONGS veterans who are now whistleblowers.
Facing the audience were four SCE executives at one table -- the top one yet another new guy -- and four NRC inspectors at another table. At its peak, there were about 150 people in the room.
During the "formal" part of the meeting, we were told that all the important "metrics" show improvement, and nothing unsafe is happening at the plant. The NRC feels that they are getting the proper feedback from the utility workers so that they can maintain a "Safety-Conscious Work Environment" ("SCWE") and proper regulatory control. We were told that all the workers now carry a "blue book" which tells them how to behave, and many members of the audience held up their "blue books" to show that they carry them all the time, along with their beepers.
However, when the public comment period began and the whistleblowers started speaking out, a completely different picture emerged. Things are, once again, worse than ever at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
Regarding the steel I-beam that was dropped into the spent fuel pool last month (which I had written about in a previous newsletter), we were told that it "only" weighed about 40 pounds. The NRC assumes that even if the I-beam had fallen vertically it wouldn't have been able to damage a 1,400-pound reactor fuel assembly, considering that the reactor fuel assemblies are designed to withstand a second reactor fuel assembly falling on top of them vertically at "terminal velocity" through water.
We were told that even if a fuel leakage issue was somehow caused by such an accident, or any "foreseeable" accident, the radiation would be contained inside the spent fuel pool building, which is very large and "negatively pressurized."
Of course. in order to have negative pressure, you have to suck air out, at least somewhat, because everything leaks, at least somewhat, and people have to go in and out through doorways, and fuel has to go in and out.
Fans draw the excess air out, but not to worry: Everything goes through a HEPA filter! HEPA filters were designed for the nuclear industry, and the standards are written by the Department of Energy (DOE).
So just because they can't even stop a 40-pound I-beam from falling, there's nothing to worry about, because they'll still achieve a 99.99% containment of any radioactive crud that is released, thanks to the HEPA filters, right?
Well, not quite.
To use the word "HEPA" when you market your filter, you are required to achieve a 99.97% filtration of particles larger than 0.3 microns in diameter. At 99.97% efficiency, 3 out of every 10,000 large particles gets through, which can quickly add up to trillions of large particles "legally" getting through the filter. Most of the particles that are released above 0.3 microns will be right around the 0.3 micron size.
Anything smaller than 0.3 microns isn't required to be stopped at all, and of course, any accident will release a spectrum of particle sizes, and many accidents are likely to have average particle sizes in the 0.1 micron size. So HEPA filter aren't all they're cracked up to be! And industry standards are three times weaker than what you probably would go buy yourself at the store.
As a HEPA filter is used, the average particle size it can stop will get smaller as material cakes around the filter material, while the pressure to push air through the filter increases accordingly. If the caked material reacts chemically with the filter material, it can damage the fibers and greatly reduce the effectiveness of the filter. Radiation would, of course, damage the filter material, no matter what that material is.
A good eye can discern objects down to about 10 microns in size, so what HEPA filters do let through is, conveniently enough, invisible. HEPA filters do not stop ANY noble gases, which don't clump into large particles. AND is it just a coincidence that noble gases that might be released in an accident aren't normally measured, reported, considered, or believed to be any cause for concern? Noble gases are generally considered "harmless" because the body doesn't utilize them in any way. But the body absorbs them "accidentally" all the time, so they are in the body at a fairly constant rate.
HEPA filters also won't stop tritium. A single gram of tritium will undergo about 370 trillion (370,000,000,000,000) decays per second.
Fortunately, when they dropped the steel I-beam, it didn't get jammed beside a fuel assembly, which then got damaged as they tried to remove it... I'm just saying, it COULD have happened... Nothing went wrong THIS time. And the NRC feels they learned something.
Did they learn that since 40-year-old steel hooks fail (that's the probable age of the part) that perhaps the whole rest of the plant is falling apart, embrittling unexpectedly, deteriorating from the salty air, the radiation, the heat, the humidity, father time, and poor maintenance?
No!
Instead, the utility replaced the hook and the NRC made a generic new rule: Lanyards should be used for lifts over the spent fuel pool.
Duh.
Which reminds me of the (true story!) guy who was demonstrating safety procedures for a class of young mountain-climbers. He cut his main rope in order to show how the safety rope will catch you safely.
Only it didn't, and he fell 40 feet to his death.
Lanyards break, too.
At the nuclear power plant, the "Standard Operating Procedure" is that there is no such thing as a warning sign of an upcoming catastrophic failure. There are just "lessons learned." So here we sit, at the brink of disaster, and all we have are "lessons learned"!
And actually, we don't even have THAT!
Why not?
Because one lesson learned at San Onofre over and over again is that the records kept by the employees there are NOT ACCURATE! So whatever lessons COULD be learned will soon be forgotten.
I'm sure there are still a lot of good people left at San Onofre.
Let's guess that 90% of the workforce are decent, honest people. That seems kind of high to me, but if that's the case, then about 200 to 300 people, depending on how many contractors are on the staff at any one time, are dishonest at San Onofre. That leaves a lot of room for fraud and deceit!
But even if 99% are honest (a hopelessly optimistic number, judging by the "human factors" problems they are having at the plant) that would still mean that 20 to 30 people are running around the plant faking things, covering up problems, pretending everything went well when it didn't, not finishing jobs... how many screw-ups does it take to cause a meltdown? Just one.
A year ago I heard about problems with integrity in dry fuel cask fabrication, problems of not performing work to specifications. The whistleblower, a long-time San Onofre employee, was also a former Los Alamos technician and a former Marine sniper as well. Now we're hearing that pressure tests (which I assume should normally follow cask fabrication) are being done improperly too.
How DO you spell "recipe for disaster"? SONGS.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author, a bladder cancer survivor, has been studying nuclear-related issued independently for about 40 years. He is an educational software developer and author of THE CODE KILLERS (an in-depth look at nuclear power), available as a free download from:
http://www.acehoffman.org/
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Chernobyl
March 8th, 2010
Dear Readers,
Nearly 24 years later, Chernobyl is still a dirty place, a dirty word.
Chernobyl has almost surely killed hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps already it is more than a million. And over time, it will kill many more. In fact, many estimates are that the vast majority who will be killed or harmed by Chernobyl were not even born at the time of the accident.
This is the legacy denied by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI, the public relations arm of the American nuclear industry) and other nuclear supporters -- including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organization (WHO, which submits all its regulations to the IAEA for approval).
IAEA and WHO admit to a few thousand dead. The NEI claims that only 38, or "under 50" people were killed due to Chernobyl (their exact guess changes now and then, but never by enough). But the truth, like the poisons, seeps out anyway. A new book about Chernobyl was recently published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The book's esteemed authors collected several thousand scientific studies about the after-effects of the Chernobyl meltdown. Until now these studies have never seen the light of day in America, mainly because both America and the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as all the other nuclear nations of the world, do not want this information "scaring" the public.
It IS scary, but it's worth knowing!
The book, painstakingly edited in English by Dr. Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger, is both shocking and depressing (this author had the honor of co-writing an article with Dr. Sherman in 2009, published in Friends Journal). The book is 335 pages long, and nearly every page has about two dozen studies described briefly (more than 33,000 studies of Chernobyl's effects have been done; they could not all be reviewed or included in the book). It's stupefying. One goes numb. One can't believe the figures (and occasionally, in part due to translation errors from the European mathematical conventions to American notation, the figures undoubtedly ARE wrong). But taken as a group, the evidence is overwhelming.
So many numbers to absorb!
But fear not: The authors have thankfully provided dozens and dozens of graphical charts.
After a while, when you turn to a new page and see a new chart, you can put your finger on "1986" virtually every time (some effects are delayed). Things start to go wrong in dozens of countries: Birth rates go down, perhaps due to people being cautious about having children right after Chernobyl, or perhaps due to unrecorded miscarriages, or both. Age at time of death is down, childhood leukemia is up. The list goes on and on and on.
Chernobyl has killed as many as a hundred times more people than the next-biggest industrial disaster in human history, generally considered to be the mass chemical poisoning in Bhopal, India in 1984. Chernobyl has probably killed more people than the atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, including their horrible (and continuing) aftermath.
To this day, the nuclear industry pretends that Chernobyl killed only as many people as might die in a train wreck, or maybe in a bus going over a mountainside. Sad, but nothing substantial.
Chernobyl kills every which way imaginable. But the NEI and other pro-nuclear advocates only count obvious, unmistakable, indisputably-attributable deaths. For every death they acknowledge, their methodologies inevitably miss tens of thousands of deaths that were, in reality, caused by Chernobyl. One could dismiss their estimates out-of-hand as being the work of fools, but the problem with doing that is that a lot of fools believe those estimates.
It's the biggest lie of the 21st Century, since trillions of dollars are being spent based on the idea that nuclear power is "safe" and "clean." In reality, all designs of reactors -- new and old (and old with new names and minor refinements) -- are capable of releasing huge quantities of radioactive isotopes into the environment. Certainly, most designs are different from Chernobyl. But none are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps an accident in America is less likely, but there is NO significant evidence of that. There is only evidence that America has been very, very LUCKY not to have experienced a full-blown meltdown yet. (Google Davis-Besse 2002 for one example of a "close call.")
The more reactors we build (if we build ANY more) and the longer we let our old reactors continue to operate, the greater the likelihood that a Chernobyl-size disaster will happen here. Many U.S. reactors are now well beyond their designed-for years of operation, but the old clunkers are kept going by a corrupt regulatory system that refuses to do its job.
And then there is the spent fuel. A catastrophe just as big or BIGGER than Chernobyl could happen in any spent fuel pool, or any dry fuel storage cask, at any time. These imperfect and inadequate storage methods are subject to earthquake or construction failures, as well as terrorists, tornados, tsunamis, even asteroids! No one can rightly claim that our nuclear facilities are secured -- not even against rogue employees. We have built the seeds of our own destruction into our environment. We should be reducing the risk, not increasing it.
But what if we are led to believe that the "disaster" would be minor? What if we are told that wildlife is flourishing in the "exclusion zone" around Chernobyl, now that there are no humans? Would it make us happy? Or would we look for the underlying facts: Birds and other animals can't read signs saying "KEEP OUT!" (in any language). So yes, there is wildlife in the "exclusion zone," but there is strong evidence that many of the creatures are dying when they get there. They don't reproduce properly, and more birds and animals from the nearby, less-contaminated areas come in to replace them, and this just keeps on happening. Migratory species pass through, eat Chernobyl's plants and animals, which are often highly irradiated, and then leave their droppings (or die) elsewhere, in a continuous, deadly, but gradual cycle.
Chernobyl had a poor design. The operators were running unauthorized experiments without proper safety equipment ready. There was no containment dome. Well, that had plusses, actually. In fact, it saved the day in some sense, since they were able to pour sand, lead, and other materials directly onto the hot reactor from helicopters flying overhead, through the invisible radioactive plume. Otherwise, the reactor might have burnt completely. As it was, "only" about 3 to 5% of the reactor core was dispersed into the environment. The rest sits there to this day, still hot thermally and radioactively, still seeping nuclear poisons into the ecosystem, untouched for the most part. Covered once with a poorly-built concrete sarcophagus, it is soon to be covered again. Right now, water gets in, and then radioactive crud oozes out. Radioactive gasses seep constantly from the numerous cracks in the "vault".
What once were some of the richest agricultural areas in the world are now foraged by scavengers: Poor, uneducated people who drift into the "exclusion zone" that surrounds the plant, where only authorized people taking proper protective measures are supposed to go.
Chernobyl's pollution is still spreading. The soil holds the cesium and the strontium and other radioactive elements, until years of rain bring them down to the roots of deep-root trees, which take them up to the surface again. Then a wildfire burns those trees, and a cloud of radioactive crud is wafted onto some other community downwind from Chernobyl. Of course the dose will be lower, but the damage will be more widespread.
Currently, most of the radiation doses that the residents of the contaminated regions are receiving are from the food they eat and the water they drink (mostly the food), not the air they breath (although that too is poisoned).
Chernobyl changed the definitions of words and gave us many new phrases which the book discusses.
Perhaps the most well-known new term is: "Children of Chernobyl."
Each year, a few hundred young children, usually with thyroid problems but always with health problems, are brought to "healthy" environments such as Southern California, USA (where this author lives and got bladder cancer a few years ago). There is always a lot of media publicity about the children, which is good for the organizers, fun for the children, and useful for the public, who are thus reminded each year of the horrible events that occurred in Chernobyl 24 years ago next month. The downside is that the public is led to believe that helping these few means the problem is being properly handled. There is, for the most part, no assistance for most of the millions who have been harmed.
Normally, and thankfully, only a small fraction of children are born with health problems. In areas that were heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's invisible poisons (invisible, but relatively easy to measure IF you have the money, the time, and the equipment), 80% of the children are born with health problems. In very heavily contaminated areas, 98% are not healthy. One of the "solutions" recommended in the book -- presumably out of desperation -- is better testing of fetuses, and abortions if the findings are severe enough.
Another new term that came out of Chernobyl is: "Liquidators." Liquidators are the people who went into the reactor to put out the fire, or flew over it -- people who put their lives on the line to save their families, their country, and our environment. There were over 800,000 liquidators. Now they are dying in droves, dying early, of cancer, heart disease, leukemia, and a general degradation of their body organs. (That's what radiation does at the very least: It ages you.)
Another new term that came out of Chernobyl is "Chernobyl AIDS." One of the main ways that radiation damages the body is that it weakens the immune system, leading to death from infectious diseases that the person might have otherwise survived.
"Chernobyl babies" are children who have serious malformations such as organs outside their bodies, shortened limbs, or no brain (only a brain stem, so they breath, but can never think). Some have essentially no bones -- they are called "jellyfish children" and the only other place they have been seen was on the Marshall Islands after nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. The children of liquidators are especially likely to be "Chernobyl babies."
What a thing to look forward to if YOUR nuclear power plant melts down, or if its spent fuel burns up, or if some other catastrophe causes another massive spill! Or if your local nuclear power plant just leaks too much tritium, like so many do.
If you live in the northern hemisphere (as most of us do), Chernobyl is blamed for about 2% of what is now called your "natural background radiation." But one should not be too encouraged to hear that it is "only" 2%. For one thing, it is reasonable to believe that the background radiation, which is unavoidable, is also the root cause of many cancers which have no other obvious cause. Second, the actual value for some places may be much higher than the "average" for the whole planet (or a little lower). There are millions of hectares of farmland which still have significantly higher radiation levels as a result of Chernobyl.
Monitoring what is being fed to people who already live in contaminated zones is one of the most important tools for protecting them from the damages of radiation. Needless to say, it's expensive and is rarely done. Another problem is that companies which know they are "over the limit" with some of their supplies mix the contaminated food with less radioactive food so the average dose is legally permissible. But the same amount of radionuclides are being dispersed into the population. It's an inexcusable crime that happens all the time.
More new phrases and meanings:
The "Red Forest" is the area immediately surrounding Chernobyl -- hundreds of square miles -- where the trees have turned color for some unknown reason.
The "Chernobyl effect" is an increased thyroid cancer rate. There is also an increased mortality rate if you do get the disease than in the less contaminated regions of the world (perhaps because your entire body is already degraded by the radioactive poisons).
We all are degraded by Chernobyl. Chernobyl's radioactive isotopes continue to invade us all. The general term for what Chernobyl has done is "geobotanical catastrophe."
Like the "Children of Chernobyl," "Physicians of Chernobyl," "Widows of Chernobyl" and "Liquidators Unions" are large groups of people who have been adversely affected by the tragedy.
"Chernobyl limbs" are deformities of the arms and/or legs, more common in the more contaminated zones.
"Chernobyl heart" is a malformed heart the does not do its job properly.
"Radiation in utero" is the poisoning of a fetus in the womb, also an ongoing problem.
Other new medical terms arising from the Chernobyl disaster include "vegetovascular dystonia," a nervous system breakdown, "incorporated long-life radionuclides," and "acute inhalation lesions of the upper respiratory tract" which are mainly seen in liquidators, and include a combination of: "rhinitis, throat tickling, dry cough, difficulty breathing, and shortness of breath, owing to the effect of inhaled radionuclides, including 'hot particles'."
Chernobyl illnesses are no fun. "Typical complaints from liquidators" include: "severe headaches, not relieved by medication, impaired memory of current events, general weakness, fatigue, diminished capacity for work, generalized sweating, palpitations, bone and joint pains and aches that interfere with their sleep, sporadic loss of consciousness, sensation of fever or heat, difficulty in thinking, heart seizures, flashes, loss of vision, and numbness in hands and feet."
Chernobyl's tendrils of poison have only begun to spread. Inadequate containment measures ensure that more of the original reactor core will leak out of the site, into the environment, and into our bodies. Chernobyl's radiation has damaged hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, and continues to do so.
The truth about the Chernobyl catastrophe is being systematically hidden from the people, especially in every country with nuclear power, by their governments and by their nuclear industries. It is good to read the truth, but it hardly feels like a breath of fresh air.
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Hoffman is an educational software developer and the author of The Code Killers, a technical guide to the nuclear industry. The Code Killers is available as a free download from the author's web site: http://www.acehoffman.org/ .
URL to obtain a copy of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (unfortunately, the cost is ~$150!):
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
Written by Alexey V. Yablokov (Center for Russian Environmental Policy, Moscow, Russia), Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko (Institute of Radiation Safety, Minsk, Belarus). Consulting Editor Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger (Environmental Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan).
Volume 1181, December 2009, 335 Pages
Ralph Nader: No Nukes (includes comments about the book):
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/13
Karl Grossman talks about the book (a more complete review from Karl will be forthcoming):
http://www.counterpunch.org/grossman02172010.html
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
phone: (800) 551-2726; (760) 720-7261
address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Dear Readers,
Nearly 24 years later, Chernobyl is still a dirty place, a dirty word.
Chernobyl has almost surely killed hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps already it is more than a million. And over time, it will kill many more. In fact, many estimates are that the vast majority who will be killed or harmed by Chernobyl were not even born at the time of the accident.
This is the legacy denied by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI, the public relations arm of the American nuclear industry) and other nuclear supporters -- including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organization (WHO, which submits all its regulations to the IAEA for approval).
IAEA and WHO admit to a few thousand dead. The NEI claims that only 38, or "under 50" people were killed due to Chernobyl (their exact guess changes now and then, but never by enough). But the truth, like the poisons, seeps out anyway. A new book about Chernobyl was recently published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The book's esteemed authors collected several thousand scientific studies about the after-effects of the Chernobyl meltdown. Until now these studies have never seen the light of day in America, mainly because both America and the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as all the other nuclear nations of the world, do not want this information "scaring" the public.
It IS scary, but it's worth knowing!
The book, painstakingly edited in English by Dr. Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger, is both shocking and depressing (this author had the honor of co-writing an article with Dr. Sherman in 2009, published in Friends Journal). The book is 335 pages long, and nearly every page has about two dozen studies described briefly (more than 33,000 studies of Chernobyl's effects have been done; they could not all be reviewed or included in the book). It's stupefying. One goes numb. One can't believe the figures (and occasionally, in part due to translation errors from the European mathematical conventions to American notation, the figures undoubtedly ARE wrong). But taken as a group, the evidence is overwhelming.
So many numbers to absorb!
But fear not: The authors have thankfully provided dozens and dozens of graphical charts.
After a while, when you turn to a new page and see a new chart, you can put your finger on "1986" virtually every time (some effects are delayed). Things start to go wrong in dozens of countries: Birth rates go down, perhaps due to people being cautious about having children right after Chernobyl, or perhaps due to unrecorded miscarriages, or both. Age at time of death is down, childhood leukemia is up. The list goes on and on and on.
Chernobyl has killed as many as a hundred times more people than the next-biggest industrial disaster in human history, generally considered to be the mass chemical poisoning in Bhopal, India in 1984. Chernobyl has probably killed more people than the atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, including their horrible (and continuing) aftermath.
To this day, the nuclear industry pretends that Chernobyl killed only as many people as might die in a train wreck, or maybe in a bus going over a mountainside. Sad, but nothing substantial.
Chernobyl kills every which way imaginable. But the NEI and other pro-nuclear advocates only count obvious, unmistakable, indisputably-attributable deaths. For every death they acknowledge, their methodologies inevitably miss tens of thousands of deaths that were, in reality, caused by Chernobyl. One could dismiss their estimates out-of-hand as being the work of fools, but the problem with doing that is that a lot of fools believe those estimates.
It's the biggest lie of the 21st Century, since trillions of dollars are being spent based on the idea that nuclear power is "safe" and "clean." In reality, all designs of reactors -- new and old (and old with new names and minor refinements) -- are capable of releasing huge quantities of radioactive isotopes into the environment. Certainly, most designs are different from Chernobyl. But none are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps an accident in America is less likely, but there is NO significant evidence of that. There is only evidence that America has been very, very LUCKY not to have experienced a full-blown meltdown yet. (Google Davis-Besse 2002 for one example of a "close call.")
The more reactors we build (if we build ANY more) and the longer we let our old reactors continue to operate, the greater the likelihood that a Chernobyl-size disaster will happen here. Many U.S. reactors are now well beyond their designed-for years of operation, but the old clunkers are kept going by a corrupt regulatory system that refuses to do its job.
And then there is the spent fuel. A catastrophe just as big or BIGGER than Chernobyl could happen in any spent fuel pool, or any dry fuel storage cask, at any time. These imperfect and inadequate storage methods are subject to earthquake or construction failures, as well as terrorists, tornados, tsunamis, even asteroids! No one can rightly claim that our nuclear facilities are secured -- not even against rogue employees. We have built the seeds of our own destruction into our environment. We should be reducing the risk, not increasing it.
But what if we are led to believe that the "disaster" would be minor? What if we are told that wildlife is flourishing in the "exclusion zone" around Chernobyl, now that there are no humans? Would it make us happy? Or would we look for the underlying facts: Birds and other animals can't read signs saying "KEEP OUT!" (in any language). So yes, there is wildlife in the "exclusion zone," but there is strong evidence that many of the creatures are dying when they get there. They don't reproduce properly, and more birds and animals from the nearby, less-contaminated areas come in to replace them, and this just keeps on happening. Migratory species pass through, eat Chernobyl's plants and animals, which are often highly irradiated, and then leave their droppings (or die) elsewhere, in a continuous, deadly, but gradual cycle.
Chernobyl had a poor design. The operators were running unauthorized experiments without proper safety equipment ready. There was no containment dome. Well, that had plusses, actually. In fact, it saved the day in some sense, since they were able to pour sand, lead, and other materials directly onto the hot reactor from helicopters flying overhead, through the invisible radioactive plume. Otherwise, the reactor might have burnt completely. As it was, "only" about 3 to 5% of the reactor core was dispersed into the environment. The rest sits there to this day, still hot thermally and radioactively, still seeping nuclear poisons into the ecosystem, untouched for the most part. Covered once with a poorly-built concrete sarcophagus, it is soon to be covered again. Right now, water gets in, and then radioactive crud oozes out. Radioactive gasses seep constantly from the numerous cracks in the "vault".
What once were some of the richest agricultural areas in the world are now foraged by scavengers: Poor, uneducated people who drift into the "exclusion zone" that surrounds the plant, where only authorized people taking proper protective measures are supposed to go.
Chernobyl's pollution is still spreading. The soil holds the cesium and the strontium and other radioactive elements, until years of rain bring them down to the roots of deep-root trees, which take them up to the surface again. Then a wildfire burns those trees, and a cloud of radioactive crud is wafted onto some other community downwind from Chernobyl. Of course the dose will be lower, but the damage will be more widespread.
Currently, most of the radiation doses that the residents of the contaminated regions are receiving are from the food they eat and the water they drink (mostly the food), not the air they breath (although that too is poisoned).
Chernobyl changed the definitions of words and gave us many new phrases which the book discusses.
Perhaps the most well-known new term is: "Children of Chernobyl."
Each year, a few hundred young children, usually with thyroid problems but always with health problems, are brought to "healthy" environments such as Southern California, USA (where this author lives and got bladder cancer a few years ago). There is always a lot of media publicity about the children, which is good for the organizers, fun for the children, and useful for the public, who are thus reminded each year of the horrible events that occurred in Chernobyl 24 years ago next month. The downside is that the public is led to believe that helping these few means the problem is being properly handled. There is, for the most part, no assistance for most of the millions who have been harmed.
Normally, and thankfully, only a small fraction of children are born with health problems. In areas that were heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's invisible poisons (invisible, but relatively easy to measure IF you have the money, the time, and the equipment), 80% of the children are born with health problems. In very heavily contaminated areas, 98% are not healthy. One of the "solutions" recommended in the book -- presumably out of desperation -- is better testing of fetuses, and abortions if the findings are severe enough.
Another new term that came out of Chernobyl is: "Liquidators." Liquidators are the people who went into the reactor to put out the fire, or flew over it -- people who put their lives on the line to save their families, their country, and our environment. There were over 800,000 liquidators. Now they are dying in droves, dying early, of cancer, heart disease, leukemia, and a general degradation of their body organs. (That's what radiation does at the very least: It ages you.)
Another new term that came out of Chernobyl is "Chernobyl AIDS." One of the main ways that radiation damages the body is that it weakens the immune system, leading to death from infectious diseases that the person might have otherwise survived.
"Chernobyl babies" are children who have serious malformations such as organs outside their bodies, shortened limbs, or no brain (only a brain stem, so they breath, but can never think). Some have essentially no bones -- they are called "jellyfish children" and the only other place they have been seen was on the Marshall Islands after nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. The children of liquidators are especially likely to be "Chernobyl babies."
What a thing to look forward to if YOUR nuclear power plant melts down, or if its spent fuel burns up, or if some other catastrophe causes another massive spill! Or if your local nuclear power plant just leaks too much tritium, like so many do.
If you live in the northern hemisphere (as most of us do), Chernobyl is blamed for about 2% of what is now called your "natural background radiation." But one should not be too encouraged to hear that it is "only" 2%. For one thing, it is reasonable to believe that the background radiation, which is unavoidable, is also the root cause of many cancers which have no other obvious cause. Second, the actual value for some places may be much higher than the "average" for the whole planet (or a little lower). There are millions of hectares of farmland which still have significantly higher radiation levels as a result of Chernobyl.
Monitoring what is being fed to people who already live in contaminated zones is one of the most important tools for protecting them from the damages of radiation. Needless to say, it's expensive and is rarely done. Another problem is that companies which know they are "over the limit" with some of their supplies mix the contaminated food with less radioactive food so the average dose is legally permissible. But the same amount of radionuclides are being dispersed into the population. It's an inexcusable crime that happens all the time.
More new phrases and meanings:
The "Red Forest" is the area immediately surrounding Chernobyl -- hundreds of square miles -- where the trees have turned color for some unknown reason.
The "Chernobyl effect" is an increased thyroid cancer rate. There is also an increased mortality rate if you do get the disease than in the less contaminated regions of the world (perhaps because your entire body is already degraded by the radioactive poisons).
We all are degraded by Chernobyl. Chernobyl's radioactive isotopes continue to invade us all. The general term for what Chernobyl has done is "geobotanical catastrophe."
Like the "Children of Chernobyl," "Physicians of Chernobyl," "Widows of Chernobyl" and "Liquidators Unions" are large groups of people who have been adversely affected by the tragedy.
"Chernobyl limbs" are deformities of the arms and/or legs, more common in the more contaminated zones.
"Chernobyl heart" is a malformed heart the does not do its job properly.
"Radiation in utero" is the poisoning of a fetus in the womb, also an ongoing problem.
Other new medical terms arising from the Chernobyl disaster include "vegetovascular dystonia," a nervous system breakdown, "incorporated long-life radionuclides," and "acute inhalation lesions of the upper respiratory tract" which are mainly seen in liquidators, and include a combination of: "rhinitis, throat tickling, dry cough, difficulty breathing, and shortness of breath, owing to the effect of inhaled radionuclides, including 'hot particles'."
Chernobyl illnesses are no fun. "Typical complaints from liquidators" include: "severe headaches, not relieved by medication, impaired memory of current events, general weakness, fatigue, diminished capacity for work, generalized sweating, palpitations, bone and joint pains and aches that interfere with their sleep, sporadic loss of consciousness, sensation of fever or heat, difficulty in thinking, heart seizures, flashes, loss of vision, and numbness in hands and feet."
Chernobyl's tendrils of poison have only begun to spread. Inadequate containment measures ensure that more of the original reactor core will leak out of the site, into the environment, and into our bodies. Chernobyl's radiation has damaged hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, and continues to do so.
The truth about the Chernobyl catastrophe is being systematically hidden from the people, especially in every country with nuclear power, by their governments and by their nuclear industries. It is good to read the truth, but it hardly feels like a breath of fresh air.
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Hoffman is an educational software developer and the author of The Code Killers, a technical guide to the nuclear industry. The Code Killers is available as a free download from the author's web site: http://www.acehoffman.org/ .
URL to obtain a copy of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (unfortunately, the cost is ~$150!):
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
Written by Alexey V. Yablokov (Center for Russian Environmental Policy, Moscow, Russia), Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko (Institute of Radiation Safety, Minsk, Belarus). Consulting Editor Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger (Environmental Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan).
Volume 1181, December 2009, 335 Pages
Ralph Nader: No Nukes (includes comments about the book):
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/13
Karl Grossman talks about the book (a more complete review from Karl will be forthcoming):
http://www.counterpunch.org/grossman02172010.html
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
phone: (800) 551-2726; (760) 720-7261
address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
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