Bad for Health, Bad for Business

Double Your Trouble With Nuclear Power
JOSEPH MANGANO and Dr. JANETTE SHERMAN, MD
December 05, 2012
CounterPunch.org

Industry leaders will have no problem closing nuclear reactors that don't generate expected profits. Exelon, the Chicago-based company that owns 17 of the 104 U.S. reactors, recently saw its stock price drop below $30 a share, the same level as mid-2003, and a whopping 70% below its peak of over $92 a share in mid-2008.

The standard explanation for this reversal is cost. In particular, electricity from growing natural gas and wind sources costs less to produce than that from nuclear reactors. The famous 1954 promise by Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss that the atom would create energy "too cheap to meter" has failed miserably. But while cost is the reason why utilities will be closing reactors, most reports fail to look beneath the surface and understand WHY nukes are so expensive.

The answer is that nuclear power poses great danger to safety and health. This danger means that reactors must comply with numerous safety regulations; must be built with many safety features; and must be manned by a large and highly trained work force ­ each a high-ticket item. In addition, the fleet of 104 U.S. reactors in operation is aging ­ most over 30 years old ­ requiring that corroding parts be replaced, pushing costs even higher.

Another element in the high cost of nukes won't be faced until they are decommissioned (after closing). Decommissioning costs run hundreds of millions of dollars per reactor. Utilities are forced by federal law to keep a large decommissioning fund while operating reactors, to prevent them from simply closing reactors, not securing them, and sticking taxpayers with the bill.

Even with all these extensive and expensive efforts to protect the public, nukes still aren't safe. The chance of a meltdown exists every day, from human error, natural disaster, or terrorist act. The disasters at Chernobyl in 1986 and at Fukushima last year remind us that catastrophic meltdowns that affect thousands to millions are a sobering reality. In addition to meltdowns, there is the matter of routine emissions from reactors and elevated cancer rates near reactors, demonstrated in many studies. Finally, the U. S. and other nations still have no long-term plans to store the massive amounts of hazardous nuclear waste.

Dominion Nuclear recently announced that the Kewaunee reactor in Wisconsin will permanently shut down in the spring. This action is a milestone. Not only will this be the first U.S. reactor closed since 1998, but it will likely be followed by numerous other shutdowns. An October 23 New York Times article was headlined "Reactors Face Mothballs."

Kewaunee's closing also represents a turning point. For over a decade, nuclear leaders steadily proclaimed an era of a revival, after years of no growth. But the word "renaissance" has vanished, and nuclear power is now in full retreat.

So which reactors will join Kewaunee and be the next to close? Nobody knows for sure, but there are a number of reactors that are faring poorly, and are candidates for shutdown:

- Crystal River (Florida), closed for over three years, needs considerable funds to replace defective parts

- San Onofre (California, two reactors), closed for nearly one year due to faulty steam generators, will require millions to repair.

- Oyster Creek (New Jersey), which must shut down by 2019, may close sooner according to Exelon executives who cite costs and market forces

- Vermont Yankee (Vermont), up for sale (and like Kewaunee with no buyers), along with stiff opposition from local citizens and elected officials

- Clinton (Illinois), another Exelon reactor, has been hit hard by cheaper alternatives

- Indian Point (New York, two reactors), faced considerable citizen and political opposition ever since a plane hijacked by terrorists on 9/11 flew directly over it on its way to the World Trade Center.

This autumn has been the worst period for U.S. nuclear reactors in a long time. Hurricane Sandy caused six reactors to close temporarily, while others were shut to change fuel, and others closed due to mechanical problems. From mid-October to late November, U.S. reactors operated at just 70-75% of capacity, down sharply from the 90% figure of the past decade.

Shrinking nuclear power is even more pronounced overseas. In Japan, nearly two years after Fukushima, only 2 of 54 reactors are operating, and the majority of Japanese are fiercely opposed to restarting any reactors. Soon after Fukushima, governments in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland announced plans to phase out nuclear power, and Germany has already closed half a dozen reactors.

The business troubles facing reactors are nothing new ­ historical construction costs far exceeded original estimates, and Wall Street executives stopped lending money for new reactors in the 1970s. Fewer reactors will mean reduced threats to health but also reduced costs ­ proving what's good for the environment is also good for business.

Joseph Mangano, MPH MBA, is an epidemiologist, and Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project (www.radiation.org).

Janette Sherman, MD is an internist and toxicologist. (www.janettesherman.com).
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman, computer programmer,
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

One Book and the Truth

September 27th, 2012

Dear Readers,

Silent Spring was first published 50 years ago today.  Rachel Carson was my age, just 56, when she died of breast cancer 18 months later.

I had cancer too (in 2007) but thankfully it was successfully treated -- I'm fine now.

But everyone around the world has already inhaled, eaten, and drank billions of nanoparticles and thousands of larger "hot particles" that have spewed from Fukushima since March, 2011, and from every other nuclear accident and chemical spill.  Fukushima and Chernobyl continue to spew, and will for generations to come.  That can't be good for any of us, and it isn't.

At a city council meeting last night in Encinitas, California, the top emergency planner in the Southern California area assured citizens and council members that although it's true that an accidental radioactive "puff" (his word) from San Onofre might cause problems with avocados (undoubtedly our state's favorite fruit), we need not worry, because they'll test all those truckloads of avocados (after WHO picks them?) and even if they're "hot" on the outside, once you peel them they might be okay, he said.

Imagine trying to sell "hot" California avocados after a meltdown at San Onofre by assuring customers around the country that "they're only hot on the outside!"  He said they might also make great guacamole.

Later he admitted he's not a nuclear physicist.  It appears he also neglected to study the uptake of cesium by plants through the soil after it's soaked in for a few years.

Two scientists who HAVE studied such things are Joe Mangano and Janette Sherman.  They have co-authored a wonderful article honoring Rachel Carson and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, which I am happy and honored to be able to include below, as it was sent to me this morning by one of the authors.

Yours,

Ace
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends:

I'm sharing an essay I co-wrote with Dr. Janette Sherman marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson's classic Silent Spring, and its enduring legacy. It is being published in the October 1 issue, available online now to subscribers of The Washington Spectator.

We at Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) believe we must continue the effort begun by Carson to reduce the poisons in our environment, and improve the health of our people, by continuing our research on radiation health risks from nuclear reactors (30 journal articles, 8 books) and spreading the word to public officials, citizen leaders, and the public at large.

We would like you to consider subscribing to The Washington Spectator. A subscription to this outstanding journal supports RPHP in two ways: not only are outlets like this crucial to informing people of our research documenting the hazards of nuclear power, but the Spectator has kindly offered to share 50% of the revenues derived from this special promotion, so we can continue our crucial work.

To obtain your subscription to The Washington Spectator, and provide much-needed support for RPHP, go to https://secure.ablesoftsolutions.com/pdmg/SecurePages/newsub.aspx?pi=tws&o=webrphp to begin. Please be sure to click Apply Code as part of Step 1 in order to identify your order as a contribution.

With kind regards,

Joe Mangano, Executive Director, RPHP

The Washington Spectator is a project of The Public Concern Foundation, Inc., a non-profit 501(c)(3) educational foundation. Since 1974, this bimonthly bulletin has given independent-minded readers behind-the-scenes insight into significant news ignored by the corporate media. In concise and fact-packed reporting, the Editor of the Spectator and other expert contributors offer insightful commentary on issues of war and peace, the environment, religion, education, law, and economics. Over the years, The Washington Spectator has stood consistently­and persistently­for human rights, international peace, civil liberties, and for an open, accountable government.

One Book and the Truth
Rachel Carson's Brave, Groundbreaking 'Silent Spring' at 50 Years
October 1, 2012 | by Joseph J. Mangano and Janette D. Sherman
http://www.washingtonspectator.org/index.php/One-Book-and-the-Truth/rachel-carsons-brave-groundbreaking-silent-spring-at-50-years.html

Fifty years ago, a Johns Hopkins­educated zoologist did something that few at the time thought was possible. With the publication of one book, she started a national debate about the universally accepted use of synthetic pesticides, the irresponsibility of science, and the limits of technological promise. She also challenged the metastatic growth of the synthetic chemicals industry that grew out of World War II.

Silent Spring was Rachel Carson's third book, following The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. The Sea Around Us had won the 1952 National Book Award for nonfiction and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 21 months. Yet it is unlikely that Carson, who had spent most of her career as an editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had any idea of what the publication of Silent Spring would engender.

Carson became interested in the harmful effects of pesticides, especially DDT, in the late 1950s. DDT was first commercially produced just prior to World War II, and was used to reduce the threats posed by insects to U.S. troops overseas. After the war, DDT was promoted as a great scientific advance and was widely and successfully used as an insect killer in the United States. The chemical was considered to be so benign that parents casually watched their children running in billowing white DDT clouds sprayed from trucks in residential neighborhoods.

Carson's research focused on organic pesticides like chlordane, heptachlor, and aldrin, as well as DDT. She documented the widespread death of birds that had been exposed to the chemicals, as well as reproductive, birth, and developmental abnormalities in mammals. All life, she wrote, is a 'chemical factory' dependent upon oxygen to power the cell machinery. Citing the work of Nobel scientist Otto Warburg, she explained in clear terms why repeated small exposures to pesticides and nuclear radiation change the ability of the cell to carry out normal activities, resulting in malignancy or defective offspring­the reason there is no 'safe' dose of a carcinogen. Many scientific experts shared her concerns.

The New Yorker ran three excerpts of Silent Spring in June 1962, before the official September 27 publication date. The response was swift and resounding. CBS began preparing a nationally broadcast special on the book. Page one of the July 22 New York Times featured a story entitled 'Silent Spring Is Now a Noisy Summer.' On August 29, a reporter attending President Kennedy's press conference asked if the federal government was examining the growing concern about DDT and other pesticides. Kennedy responded: 'Yes...I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson's book.' A month before the publication date, Houghton Mifflin had advance orders for 40,000 copies and had a 150,000-copy contract with the Book-of-the-Month Club.

The chemical industry didn't wait to read the book. Carson's short but devastating treatise was a threat to their bottom line, and the industry that manufactured DDT and other pesticides Carson had described reacted angrily to her scientifically sound arguments that their products were harmful. They attacked Carson's expertise. They attacked her methods. They attacked her motivations. They attacked her conclusions. They threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin and The New Yorker.

In a relentless campaign to destroy her character, the industry distributed pamphlets, published articles, and vilified Carson in media interviews. They described her as 'fanatic' and 'hysterical,' yet almost all international scientists agreed with Carson. A Scientific Advisory Committee assembled by Kennedy issued a supportive report in May 1963. In response to the shrill attacks of her industry critics, Carson calmly stuck to the facts. She died at age 56 from breast cancer, 18 months after Silent Spring was published.

Many regard Carson as the founder of the American environmental movement. Yet the movement had already begun. Albert Schweitzer, well-known scientists such as Linus Pauling, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had already been speaking out against the dangers of above-ground atom-bomb testing. Citizen groups like Women Strike for Peace organized increasingly large demonstrations against such tests.

But to a large extent, Silent Spring sparked the movement that endures today. In 1967, scientists and activists founded the Environmental Defense Fund. On April 29, 1970, one week after widespread demonstrations on the first Earth Day, President Nixon's Advisory Council on Executive Action proposed the Environmental Protection Agency, which became a reality later that year. And in June 1972, after three years of federal hearings and scientific inquiries into the question Carson raised in Silent Spring, EPA Director William Ruckelshaus issued an order that banned the use of DDT in the United States. The environmental movement was in full swing.

Despite the efforts of Carson and others who followed, a long list of chemicals is still in daily use­arguably more than ever. It includes pesticides, herbicides, industrial agents, fuels, preservatives, food additives, dyes, household products, medicines, and more.

The benefits of chemicals must always be weighed against their risks­but those risks must be objectively calculated. As Carson wrote in Silent Spring:

"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable: the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but also in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world­the very nature off its life."

Fifty years after the publication of the book, the corporations that produce and market the chemicals are far larger. Their lobbyists and PR machines are more well-funded and sophisticated and exert unprecedented influence over regulators, the media, and, most critically, elected officials.

A Congressional resolution introduced by Maryland Democratic Senators Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski, honoring Carson on what would have been her 100th birthday in 2007, was blocked by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), who complemented his vote with disparaging remarks about the author. "Millions of people in the developing world, particularly children under 5, died because governments bought into Carson's junk-science claims about DDT," he said in response to the resolution.

Today, the industry and its trade associations echo Coburn's remarks and depict Carson as the leader of a mass-murder campaign that today allows diseases such as malaria to proliferate because there is no chemical check on mosquitoes. In 2009, Todd Seavey of the industry-backed American Council on Science and Health wrote on World Malaria Day:"We need DDT Day.... Anti-chemical greens (inspired by Rachel Carson's fear-mongering book Silent Spring) may already be humanity's most prolific killers."

The EPA never banned DDT for use against malaria, and Carson herself never supported a universal ban on pesticides. Instead, she wrote, "Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity.'"

Man-made chemicals will always be a part of life on earth. The volume of chemicals is massive, and the slow decay of many means they will be part of the biosphere for decades and centuries. The legacy of Silent Spring is that much can and should be done to reduce the health risks they pose, without sacrificing progress. About 41 percent of Americans will develop cancer. The current generation of children, compared to their parents or grandparents, has higher rates of disorders including low weight births, cancer, asthma, diabetes, autism, and ADHD. While multiple factors influence disease risk, exposure to toxic chemicals is one factor.

We have ignored Carson's findings to our peril.

Joseph J. Mangano is Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project and author of Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment (O/R Books). Janette D. Sherman is an internist and toxicologist and a contributing editor of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (New York Academy of Medicine). Visit www.radiation.org and www.janettesherman.com.
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman, computer programmer,
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

Three-Eyed Nuclear 'Simpsons' Fish Caught

Seen here looking like about 40 fish sticks, a group of fishermen caught this three-eyed Simpsons 'blinky' fish in a lake near a nuclear power plant in Argentina...

Full Article:

http://www.geekologie.com/2011/10/threeeyed-nuclear-simpsons-fish-caught.php

It’s Time to Close California’s Nuclear Power Plants

Norman Solomon
Thursday, April 28, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/28-10

The facts all point to this “inconvenient truth” -- the time has come to shut down California’s two nuclear power plants as part of a swift transition to an energy policy focused on clean and green renewable sources and conservation.

The Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo and the San Onofre plant on the southern California coast are vulnerable to meltdowns from earthquakes and threaten both residents and the environment.

Reactor safety is just one of the concerns. Each nuclear power plant creates radioactive waste that will remain deadly for thousands of years. This is not the kind of legacy that we should leave for future generations.

In the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, we need a basic rethinking of the USA’s nuclear energy use and oversight. There is no more technologically advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power isn’t safe there, and it isn’t safe anywhere.

The perils to people are clear. In a recent letter to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein noted that “roughly 424,000 live within 50 miles of the Diablo Canyon and 7.4 million live within 50 miles of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.”

As someone who was an Obama delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, I believe it would be a tragic mistake for anyone to loyally accept the administration’s nuclear policy. The White House is fundamentally mistaken in its efforts to triple the budgeting of federal loan guarantees for the domestic nuclear power industry, from $18 billion to $54 billion.

Our tax dollars should not be used to subsidize the nuclear power industry. Instead, we should be investing far more in solar, wind and other renewable sources, along with serious energy conservation.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a nuclear-friendly fox guarding the radioactive chicken coop. The federal government has no business promoting this dangerous industry while safe and sustainable energy resources are readily available.

The fact that federal law imposes a liability cap of about $12 billion on a nuclear power accident is a reflection of the fact that those plants are uninsurable on the open market.

As a candidate for Congress in the district that includes Marin and Sonoma counties, I intend to make this a major campaign issue. It remains to be seen whether my one declared opponent, Assemblyman Jared Huffman, will join me in urging a rapid timetable for the closure of California’s nuclear power plants.

Huffman has ties to California’s nuclear-invested utility PG&E. Between 2007 and 2009, according to campaign finance data compiled by nonpartisan Maplight.org, he received $11,100 from PG&E, which owns and operates the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.

While Huffman and other state lawmakers in February signed a letter to a federal commission on America’s nuclear future citing seismic “concerns which deserve to be more closely examined,” the time for equivocation on nuclear power is long past. We don’t need yet more study on whether to operate nuclear plants on fault lines.

People want bold and responsible leadership as we face up to the well-documented realities of nuclear power on this fragile planet.

Norman Solomon was the director of the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims in 1980 and co-authored “Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation,” which exposed the health and environmental effects of the nuclear industry. For two years ending in late 2010, he served as co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay. For more information, go to: http://www.solomonforcongress.com/.

Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe

Karl Grossman
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/26-2

With the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe having arrived, and with the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex still unfolding and radioactivity continuing to spew from those plants some people are asking: can nuclear power be made safe?

The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.

This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power and urged that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”

The basic problem: radioactivity.

“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”

“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated.

This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.

The problem is radioactivity unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the “new, improved” nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology. All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.

Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they’re produced in a nuclear plant to when they’re taken out as hotly radioactive “nuclear waste,” they must be isolated from life for thousands for some millions of years.

In the nuclear process, mildly radioactive uranium is taken from the ground and bombarded by neutrons and that part of the uranium which can split, is “fissile,” Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: There are hundreds of these “fission products.” The human body doesn’t know the difference between these lethal twins and safe and stable elements. Also produced are alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, all radioactive.

In addition, much of the larger part of uranium, Uranium-238, which cannot split, grabs on to neutrons and turns into Plutonium-239, the most radioactive substance known.

In this atom-splitting, too, heat is produced which is used to boil water. Nuclear power plants are simply the most dangerous way to boil water ever conceived.

Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity? It has far less to do with science than with politics and economics from the aftermath of the Manhattan Project to today During the World War II Manhattan Project, scientists working at laboratories secretly set up across the U.S. built atomic weapons. By 1945, it employed 600,000 people and billions of dollars were spent. Two bombs were dropped on Japan. And, with the war’s end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and more nuclear weapons were built. But what else could be done with nuclear technology to perpetuate the nuclear undertaking?

Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see their jobs end; corporations which were Manhattan Project contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, didn’t want to see their contracts ended. As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the war over there were problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy.”

Nuclear weapons don’t lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to keep the nuclear establishment going? Schemes advanced included using nuclear devices as substitutes for dynamite to blast huge holes in the ground including stringing 125 atomic devices across the isthmus of Panama and setting them off to create the “Panatomic Canal,” utilizing radioactivity to zap food so it could seemingly be stored for years; building nuclear-powered airplanes (this didn’t go far because of the weight of the lead shielding needed to protect the pilots) and using the heat built up by the nuclear reaction to boil water to produce electricity.

All along, the nuclear scientists such as Chu now attempted to minimize, indeed deny, the lethal danger of radioactivity and, like Nuclear Pinocchios, they pushed their technology.

Nuclear power plants all 443 on the earth today should be closed and no new ones built. As Rickover declared, nuclear reactors must be outlawed.

During the Bill Clinton campaign years ago, the slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” With nuclear power plants, “It’s the radioactivity” inherent in the process and deadly.

Instead we must fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies like solar, wind (now the fastest growing energy source and cheaper than nuclear) and geothermal and all the rest which, major studies have concluded, can provide all the energy the world needs energy without lethal radioactivity, energy we can live with.

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, has long specialized in doing investigative reporting on nuclear technology. He is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He is the host of the nationally aired TV program, Enviro Close-Up (envirovideo.com).

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)
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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)
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"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 Power Madness

Norman Solomon Monday, March 14, 2011
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/14-5

Like every other president since the 1940s, Barack Obama has promoted nuclear power. Now, with reactors melting down in Japan, the official stance is more disconnected from reality than ever.

Political elites are still clinging to the oxymoron of “safe nuclear power.” It’s up to us -- people around the world -- to peacefully and insistently shut those plants down.

There is no more techno-advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power is not safe there, and it is not safe anywhere.

As the New York Times reported on Monday, “most of the nuclear plants in the United States share some or all of the risk factors that played a role at Fukushima Daiichi: locations on tsunami-prone coastlines or near earthquake faults, aging plants and backup electrical systems that rely on diesel generators and batteries that could fail in extreme circumstances.”

Nuclear power -- from uranium mining to fuel fabrication to reactor operations to nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years -- is, in fact, a moral crime against future generations.

But syrupy rhetoric has always marinated the nuclear age. From the outset -- even as radioactive ashes were still hot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- top officials in Washington touted atomic energy as redemptive. The split atom, we were to believe, could be an elevating marvel.

President Dwight Eisenhower pledged “to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma” by showing that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

Even after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 -- and now this catastrophe in Japan -- the corporate theologians of nuclear faith have continued to bless their own divine projects.

Thirty years ago, when I coordinated the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims on the edge of Capitol Hill, we heard grim testimony from nuclear scientists, workers, downwinders and many others whose lives had been forever ravaged by the split atom. Routine in the process was tag-team deception from government agencies and nuclear-invested companies.

By 1980, generations had already suffered a vast array of terrible consequences -- including cancer, leukemia and genetic injuries -- from a nuclear fuel cycle shared by the “peaceful” and military atom. Today, we know a lot more about the abrupt and slow-moving horrors of the nuclear industry.

And we keep learning, by the minute, as nuclear catastrophe goes exponential in Japan. But government leaders don’t seem to be learning much of anything.

On Sunday, even while nuclear-power reactors were melting down, the White House issued this statement: “The president believes that meeting our energy needs means relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes renewables like wind and solar, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power. Information is still coming in about the events unfolding in Japan, but the administration is committed to learning from them and ensuring that nuclear energy is produced safely and responsibly here in the U.S.”

Yet another reflexive nuclear salute.

When this year’s State of the Union address proclaimed a goal of “clean energy sources” for 80 percent of U.S. electricity by 2035, Obama added: “Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all -- and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.”

Bipartisan for nuclear power? You betcha. On Sunday morning TV shows, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell voiced support for nuclear power, while Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer offered this convoluted ode to atomic flackery: “We are going to have to see what happens here -- obviously still things are happening -- but the bottom line is we do have to free ourselves of independence from foreign oil in the other half of the globe. Libya showed that. Prices are up, our economy is being hurt by it, or could be hurt by it. So I'm still willing to look at nuclear. As I’ve always said it has to be done safely and carefully.”

Such behavior might just seem absurd or pathetic -- if the consequences weren’t so grave.

Nuclear power madness is so entrenched that mainline pundits and top elected officials rarely murmur dissent. Acquiescence is equated with prudent sagacity.

In early 2010, President Obama announced federal loan guarantees -- totaling more than $8 billion -- to revive the construction of nuclear power plants in this country, where 110 nuclear-power reactors are already in operation.

“Investing in nuclear energy remains a necessary step,” he said. “What I hope is that, with this announcement, we’re underscoring both our seriousness in meeting the energy challenge and our willingness to look at this challenge, not as a partisan issue, but as a matter that’s far more important than politics because the choices we make will affect not just the next generation but many generations to come.”

Promising to push for bigger loan guarantees to build more nuclear power plants, the president said: “This is only the beginning.”

Norman Solomon is president of the Institute for Public Accuracy and a senior fellow at RootsAction. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Behind the Hydrogen Explosion at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Karl Grossman Saturday, March 12, 2011
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/12-3

The explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is being described as caused by a “hydrogen build-up” The situation harks back to the “hydrogen bubble” that was feared would explode when the Three Mile Island plant in 1979 underwent a partial meltdown.

The hydrogen explosion problem at nuclear power plants involves a story as crazy as can be. As nuts as using nuclear fission to boil water to generate electricity is, the hydrogen problem and its cause cap the lunacy.

Eruption of hydrogen gas as a first reaction in a loss-of-coolant accident has been discussed with great worry in U.S. government and nuclear industry literature for decades.

That is because a highly volatile substance called zirconium was chosen back in the 1940’s and 50’s, when plans were first developed to build nuclear power plants, as the material to be used to make the rods into which radioactive fuel would be loaded.

There are 30,000 to 40,000 rods—composed of twenty tons of zirconium—in an average nuclear power plant. Many other substances were tried, particularly stainless steel, but only zirconium worked well. That’s because zirconium, it was found, allows neutrons from the fuel pellets in the rods to pass freely between the rods and thus a nuclear chain reaction to be sustained.

But there’s a huge problem with zirconium—it is highly volatile and when hot will explode spontaneously upon contact with air, water or steam.

The only other major commercial use of zirconium through the years has been in flashbulbs used in photography. A speck of it, on a flashbulb, ignites to provide a flash of light.

But in a nuclear plant, we’re not talking about specks—but tons and tons of zirconium, put together as a compound called “zircaloy” that clads tens of thousands of fuel rods.

Heat, a great deal of heat, builds up in a very short time with any interruption of coolant flow in a nuclear power plant—the problem at Fukushima after the earthquake that struck Japan.

Zirconium, with the explosive power, pound for pound, of nitroglycerine, will catch fire and explode at a temperature of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the 5,000 degree temperature of a meltdown.

Before then, however, zirconium reacts to the heat by drawing oxygen from water and steam and letting off hydrogen, which itself can explode—and is said to have done so at Fukushima.

As a result of such a hydrogen explosion, there is additional heat—bringing the zirconium itself closer and closer to its explosive level.

Whether in addition to being a hydrogen explosion, zirconium also exploded at Fukushima remains to be known.

But what has happened regarding hydrogen at Fukushima, like the “hydrogen bubble” when the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania underwent its near partial meltdown, is no mystery—but precisely what is expected in a loss-of-coolant accident.

It is described in U.S. government and nuclear industry accident studies as a “metal-water” reaction. It’s a reaction, the research has long stated, that can easily trigger a meltdown.

Using tons of a material otherwise used as the speck that explodes in a flashbulb in nuclear power plants —yes, absolutely crazy.

Moreover, in the spent fuel pools usually situated next to nuclear power plants, there are large numbers of additional fuel rods, used ones, disposed of as waste. There must be constant water circulation in the spent fuel pools. In what is labeled a “loss-of-water’ accident in a spent fuel pool, the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods is projected as exploding—sending into the environment the lethal nuclear poisons in a spent fuel pool.

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, has long specialized in doing investigative reporting on nuclear technology. He is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He is the host of the nationally aired TV program, Enviro Close-Up (envirovideo.com).

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

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

Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant

February 14th, 2010
Dear Readers,

Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant is leaking copious quantities of tritium, a relatively rare (in nature) and extremely hazardous radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium can be absorbed through the skin, as well as ingested or inhaled.

Water from test wells around the Vermont Yankee reactor has over 2 million picoCuries of tritium per liter -- more than 100 times the legal limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for tritium in drinking water, which is 20,000 picoCuries of tritium per liter (20,000 picoCuries equals about 740 radioactive decays per second (740 Becquerel ("Bq")).

Two million picoCuries per liter is nearly as poisonous as the 2.7 million picoCuries per liter that occurs in the chemical brew of a nuclear reactor's primary coolant loop.

Nuclear reactor operators are allowed to release a small fraction of a teaspoon of tritium offsite per year. But even that tiny amount must be diluted in billions of gallons of water to meet the legal standards for drinking water. If the water in your body was polluted with tritium at the legal limit, it would contain about 400 times the average concentration of tritium in the human body.

Tritium has a half-life of about 12.3 years, meaning half of any given quantity of tritium will decay in that time and in the next 12.3 years, half of what is left will spontaneously decay, and so on. It takes about 20 half-lifes (about 250 years) for any spilled tritium to be eliminated from the environment.

By definition all hydrogen has one proton, but the tritium isotope also has two neutrons in its core and is unstable -- radioactive. The most common isotope of hydrogen is stable and has no neutrons. Hydrogen with one neutron in its core, called deuterium, is also stable.

The body cannot detect the difference between radioactive tritium and stable isotopes of hydrogen (nor can it distinguish radioactive isotopes of any other elements from stable isotopes of the same (or chemically similar) elements).

When a tritium atom decays, it releases a beta particle. Beta particles are normal electrons, except they are traveling at very high speed (within a few percent of the speed of light). The beta particle immediately starts to slow down as it passes things with electrical charges -- other negatively-charged electrons and positively-charged protons.

Beta particles only exist for a fraction of a second. Tritium's beta particle typically travels less than a millimeter through human tissue before it is slowed to normal electron speeds and is captured by something needing an extra electron.

The nuclear industry likes to point out that tritium's beta decay particle is a "low energy beta particle." That's true, as beta particles go. But here's what the nuclear industry doesn't like to tell you about "low energy beta particles": They are essentially just as dangerous as high-energy beta particles because nearly all the damage from a beta particle comes at the end of its travel, when it's slowed down so much that it stays near the last few thousand atoms it passes long enough to have a significant effect on each of them in turn as it passes.

Since radiation damage is often measured in total energy dumped into a given quantity of tissue, by that measure, low-energy beta particles are actually proportionately MORE damaging! Just the opposite of what the industry claims!

When the beta particle is released, one of the neutrons in the core of the tritium atom converts to a proton. With two protons and one neutron in the nucleus of the atom, the element is now a stable isotope of helium, not hydrogen. Chemically, helium won't combine with much of anything. Certainly not with a molecule comprising one hydrogen and one oxygen atom, which is what's left of the water molecule the tritium atom probably was originally a part of. The remaining "OH" molecule is a potent "free radical" which can damage your body until it is absorbed by something: Vitamin C or some other anti-oxidant, for instance.

Tritium is called an "activation product." Vermont Yankee is not only leaking tritium: Within the millions of gallons of chemically-treated and highly irradiated primary coolant loop water that has been spewing out of Vermont Yankee -- probably for years, maybe even for decades -- are undoubtedly a whole rainbow of radioactive elements, including long-lived isotopes of elements such as iodine and technetium and many others.

Fuel assemblies in nuclear reactors commonly fail by cracking slightly. The zirconium shielding deteriorates and the radioactive uranium gets out, and so does anything else inside. What's inside, besides the unfissioned uranium, are "fission products." Fission is what they are trying to do inside the reactor, enough to boil water but not enough to melt down the reactor. For every uranium atom that is fissioned, there are usually two fission products that result, each of which is radioactive and each of which weighs, on average, about half as much as the original uranium atom. All fission products are radioactive because they invariably have too many neutrons to be stable.

When setting standards, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) generally does not aggregate radioactive components in your drinking water. Just because you have one contaminant in your water doesn't mean you don't have many others there as well. In the case of Vermont Yankee, the pollutants presumably include strontium, cesium, and many other radioactive elements. But as long as each one has been diluted to Below Regulatory Concern (BRC), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) doesn't care, and EPA doesn't care, and the nuclear industry certainly doesn't care. Just dilute it, and, as far as they're concerned, it disappears. Such thinking is self-serving, insulting, dangerous, and archaic. It flies in the face of the standard, accepted scientific theory that radiation damage follows an "LNT" ("Linear, No Threshold") pattern. (In fact, some experts believe low levels of radiation cause proportionately more damage. And admittedly, there will probably always be a few "experts" (usually well-paid by the nuclear industry) who "honestly" believe that low doses of radiation are actually beneficial, regardless of how randomly those doses are administered.)

The only way to clean up the radiation at Vermont Yankee is to close the plant, build a big pit somewhere where it doesn't rain much, line it with a lining that will last practically forever (good luck finding these things) and move all of the waste (including the dirt and concrete) there. But instead, right now, Vermont Yankee's tritium, strontium, iodine, technetium, and everything else WILL get into the drinking water in Vermont and into the Connecticut River. It WILL kill children and other living things in the communities downwind and downstream of the reactor, which potentially includes anywhere on Earth. Radiation from Vermont Yankee has undoubtedly been killing people for years, and it will continue to kill for many years to come even if the reactor is shut down permanently, as it should be.

Vermont Yankee is one of the oldest reactors in America. So what's happening there -- namely, it is falling apart and it's owners don't want to spend any more than they have to to keep it going -- is a precursor of what's to come at other reactors. The owner (Entergy, which is trying to sell it) claimed in sworn testimony to the people and elected officials of Vermont that Vermont Yankee was NOT leaking tritium, but they knew it was. Then they said it wasn't leaking MUCH tritium, but they knew it was. Now they say the tritium is harmless, but any sane person knows that's a lie, too.

In addition to the leaks, Vermont Yankee also is piling up enormous quantities of used reactor cores at the site. One third of the reactor core assemblies are removed every eighteen months to two years. These irradiated "hot" fuel assemblies are extremely hazardous -- ten million times more hazardous than when they were placed inside the reactor (approximately).

By now there is about a thousand tons of "spent fuel" (what an innocuous-sounding name!) located at Vermont Yankee. A fraction of a milligram is a lethal dose, if inhaled or ingested. You could not stand near the fuel for 2 seconds if it were unshielded. If it catches fire, the local fire department will not be able to extinguish the flames, and cancer clusters will appear later, as much as 500 miles (or more) downwind. A single gram of "spent fuel" would have a significant impact on Vermont and its neighboring states, were it to be released by accident or by terrorism or acts of God.

Vermont Yankee is a relatively small reactor, about half the size of more modern reactors in terms of electrical output, and it could easily be replaced by renewable options. Nuclear reactors are terrible "baseline" power sources anyway, since they are prone to sudden and prolonged shutdowns. They create, and then leak, horrifically dangerous poisons which deform our babies, give our children cancer, and can cause heart attacks, dementia, and a thousand other illnesses -- and they make other illnesses worse. Their owners lie and obfuscate, and their nuclear waste is a growing nightmare.

It's time to shut Vermont Yankee down -- and the rest of our reactors, too.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author, born and raised in Connecticut (now living in California), is a computer programmer. He has interviewed hundreds of nuclear experts, and has based this article on the information gleaned from his research. Any errors are his own. For more information on tritium, please see:

The Code Killers (book) / free download (2008):
http://www.acehoffman.org/


It's All About the DNA (2007):
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environment/tritium/2007/ItsAllAboutTheDNA.htm

Tritium Explained (why "Low Level Radiation" can be disproportionately harmful) (2006):
http://animatedsoftware.com/environment/tritium/2006/EPATritiumStandard.htm

Tritium -- A response to a San Onofre employee's comments (also included) published in the North County Times (2004):
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/2004/TritiumComments%2020041223.htm
-----------------------------------------
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

No such thing as safe, clean nuclear power

February 4th, 2010

Dear Readers,

There is no such thing as safe, clean nuclear power, and there never will be. There is no such thing as safe containment of nuclear waste, and there never will be. Therefore, we should not put our money into President Obama's misguided nuclear dementia.

Did we learn nothing from 9-11? Did we learn nothing from the tsunami in Banda-Ache? Did we learn nothing from the earthquake in Japan that nearly initiated "Genpatsu-Shinsai"? Did we learn nothing from Davis-Besse's near-meltdown in 2002? Did we learn nothing from Chernobyl?

So far we have been lucky: Lucky the terrorists only flew directly over, instead of into, the Indian Point Nuclear Power Facility. Lucky the nearest nuclear power facility to the 2004 tsunami was thousands of miles away and the waves only did "minor" damage. Lucky none of the seven nuclear power plants at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Facility melted down when a "beyond design basis" earthquake occurred in 2007. Three years later, only two of those plants have come back online. Lucky a worker at Davis-Besse inadvertently leaned against a control rod housing during maintenance, and it gave way, alerting them to the severe corrosion in the reactor pressure vessel head below them. Lucky Chernobyl happened there, not here.

Steven Chu and the entire DOE (Department of Energy) couldn't stop 9-11 style terrorists no matter how much money Obama gives them to "solve" the nuclear waste problem with so-called "temporary" onsite storage. In fact, DOE won't even try -- they say the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) handles that. Since no planes will ever be hijacked again, they don't have to protect against airplane strikes structurally. No airplane will fall uncontrollably out of the sky onto a nuclear power plant, either -- even though numerous commercial flight paths overfly nuclear power plants around the country. The containment domes are touted as being airplane-proof but they aren't. And even if they were, MOST of the nuclear poisons at each reactor site are stored OUTSIDE the containment domes, in the spent fuel pools and dry casks. The control rooms are also outside the domes, and without the control rooms, the plants would surely melt down, releasing billions of Curies of deadly radiation.

Only geologic storage combined with constant monitoring has any hope of protecting nuclear waste from a 9-11 type of attack, and even then, rogue employees can sabotage any physical fortress.

Geologic storage also may not be able to protect the radioactive waste from earthquakes or other hazards. For the past 20 years Yucca Mountain was the presumed future national repository for nuclear waste, but it has technical flaws as well as political hurdles. Any repository will have such problems. Over time, water, rodents and insects will always move the waste out of the repository. Finding a community that accepts nuclear waste means finding a community that is desperately poor, poorly educated, and has corrupt leaders. The Yucca Mountain team was allowed to suggest anything different if they could -- just not the same thing in a different place.

Obama is correct that Yucca Mountain is a flawed solution for the waste problem, but so is Obama's current plan for spent fuel -- known as "on-site storage" -- which means dozens of different things at dozens of different reactor sites, each with a scandal behind it.

Reprocessing is intensely polluting and expensive, and doesn't eliminate the deadly fission products. And worst of all, reprocessing enables the nuclear weapons industry.

Rocketing spent nuclear reactor cores to the sun costs too much and would fail too often, because humans fail, and so do their materials. Materials ARE failing at all our old nuclear power plants, and so are the humans. Fraud, cover-ups, circular arguments, intimidation of activists, and lies are the stock-in-trade of the nuclear industry.

Radiation, heat, pressure, and vibration are all very damaging, even to so-called super-alloys. New steam generators start to fail almost as soon as they are installed, but the industry accepts this, and makes wild claims about the great research and new materials that will be used to replace the old stuff. And then they deliver the same old leaky parts made of the same old leaky materials, and that's why there is tritium (and other radioactive substances) in the groundwater under so many reactors.

Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen, the most common element in our bodies and in the universe. Hydrogen is used in our bones, brains, heart, blood... everywhere. The legal limit for reactors to release each year is about one thirtieth of a teaspoon of tritium, and they have to dilute even that much in billions of gallons of water before they can legally release it. Neither the Nuclear Regulatory Commission nor the nuclear reactor operators care about tritium leaks as long as the deadly pollutant is diluted to legally-dispersible (but still hazardous) quantities.

The nuclear industry assumes that a little radiation, of any type, absorbed by any part of the body, is good for you. Therefore, they believe that every release is harmless as long as it's sufficiently diluted. In reality there is no safe dose of radiation. Benefits from using radiation in medicine come at a price in cancers for some percentage of the patients later, and even in cancers for the medical personnel.

The nuclear industry and its supporters insist that renewables won't work. But wind power ALONE could supply all of America's energy needs -- with a properly-designed power grid. We need a better grid anyway, to avoid colossal blackouts like we had in the Northeast in 2003, impacting approximately 50 million people and causing emergency shut downs at dozens of nuclear power plants, when their offsite emergency backup power supplies failed. Even Obama favors investing in a better, more robust power grid.

The nuclear industry claims nuclear power can be a cure for global warming. It can't be. There are the uranium mining companies with their enormous earth-moving equipment, the construction process, the storage of the waste for millennia afterwards, the operational costs in fossil fuels for the thousands of employees at the plants, the superfund cleanup sites the nuclear fuel cycle has already created, and the hospitalizations resulting from accidental (and intentional) releases of radiation. These are all "carbon intensive" activities.

President Obama wants to invest $54 billion dollars (of taxpayer's money) in a "new" generation of nuclear power plants which will be marginally more efficient -- if that -- and marginally safer -- if that -- and dozens of times more expensive than previous generations of nuclear power plants. And they'll generate thousands of tons of new nuclear waste each year, just like the currently-operating, "old" generations of nuclear power plants do.

Instead of finally ending the senseless production of more nuclear waste, Obama has set up a new committee to "study" the waste problem for two more years. In two years, these people will throw up their arms, like everyone else before them, and declare, as quietly as possible, that they couldn't solve the problem either. But creating the committee gives the 104 currently-operating nuclear power plants a green light to keep making more waste. Over the next two years, thousands of TONS of NEW nuclear waste will be created, any milligram of which can kill, and kill, and kill, and will destroy any container you put it in.

All just for electricity (or so they say). Electricity which is easily obtained through other methods that are truly safe, clean, and green.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author has written thousands of essays about nuclear power but only one book, THE CODE KILLERS, which is available as a free download from his web site: www.acehoffman.org . The author is also a computer programmer; his educational software programs are used by students and teachers at over 1000 universities around the world: www.animatedsoftware.com .
-----------------------------------------
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