Nuclear Power — Not Now, Not Ever
By Ernest Partridge / Dissident Voice / March 29th, 2011
Any citizen with even a casual awareness of the public debate over nuclear power is familiar with the usual talking points, pro and con, regarding this issue: safety, costs, environmental impacts, etc. I will not burden the reader with a rehash of these familiar issues.
Instead, I propose to enrich the debate with some issues with which the general public might be less familiar, all of which issues lead strongly to the conclusion that electric power generation from nuclear reactors should be phased out with deliberate speed and the technology abandoned — permanently.
This essay consists of three sections: First of all, the recent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan urgently brings the science of plate tectonics into the debate, and raises the question of whether the promoters of nuclear power are willing and able to take the long-term implications of that technology into consideration as they select sites for these facilities.
In the second section, we ask whether it is possible to accurately and reliably assess the safety of nuclear reactors. A failed attempt to do so thirty years ago suggests that such an assessment is impossible, not simply because of a lack of scientific knowledge and technological capacity, but more fundamentally, because of the insurmountable inability to anticipate all possible circumstances that might occur in the operation of the plant.
Finally, these and other considerations lead to the conclusion that nuclear power is not economically viable and sustainable without massive government subsidies that are unavailable to its competing technologies.
Fukushima: A Disaster Waiting to Happen
What were Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and General Electric thinking when they decided to site the world’s largest nuclear power complex at Fukushima, on the eastern coast of Northern Japan?
Perhaps they weren’t thinking at all, or at least they were thinking only for the short-term. Myopia is endemic to the corporate mind, which is dedicated to an early return on investment. “In the long-term,” John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, “we’ll all be dead.”
Nonetheless, a disastrous earthquake followed by a tsunami was certain to happen along the eastern coast of Japan. Not a question of if, but of when. That certainty was ordained by the science of plate tectonics and validated in the geological record.
The sword of Damocles hanging over Fukushima is the Japan Trench, located about 100 miles due east of, and parallel to, the coastline where the plant is located.
The trench is a subduction zone, where the Pacific plate dives down under the Okhotsk plate and into the mantle. The Japanese islands, like the Marianas and the Aleutians, owe their very existence to subduction which, as it grinds along, produces great earthquakes and tsunamis.
Tsunamis can be produced by volcanoes and landslides. But they most reliably occur along subduction zones, as the ocean floor during an earthquake is suddenly and violently jolted, causing a pulse of water to move outward and perpendicular to the fault line. The Indonesian tsunami of December 26, 2004, which killed almost a quarter of a million people, was caused by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake along a subduction zone about 100 miles west of Sumatra. Among other noteworthy subduction quakes/tsunamis are the “Good Friday” Alaska earthquake in 1964 (magnitude 9.1), and the Chilean earthquake of 2010 (magnitude 8.8).
And so, because the Japan Trench is parallel to the coast of northern Japan, the tsunami was aimed directly at that coast.
Because of the dynamics of plate tectonics, earthquake/tsunamis are endemic to Japan. For example, in 1923 a magnitude eight earthquake struck central Japan, leveling the city of Yokohama and destroying more than half of Tokyo, at the cost of about 100,000 lives.
The investors of the Fukushima plant knew all this, and yet they went ahead and built a facility that was designed to withstand a magnitude seven earthquake. (The Richter magnitude scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. Accordingly, the energy released in a magnitude nine quake is not two-ninths greater than that of a magnitude seven. It is about a thousand times greater). TEPCO continued to operate the facility, despite warnings from the International Atomic Energy Commission.
To put the matter bluntly, the investors and designers of Fukushima gambled that during the operational lifetime of the plant, there would be no earthquake greater than magnitude seven. They gambled, and the people of northern Japan lost. Economists call this loss an “externality.”
In California two commercial nuclear power facilities, at San Onofre between San Diego and Los Angeles and at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obisbo, are located along the Pacific coast and near seismically active faults. As a resident of southern California, I must wonder if the operator of that plant, Southern California Edison, like TEPCO in Japan, is likewise gambling with my life and the lives of my neighbors. Heads they win, tails we lose.
And earthquakes and tsunamis are not the only, or even the greatest, threat posed by nuclear power reactors. The Three Mile Island accident was caused by a mechanical failure, and the Chernobyl disaster was caused by human error.
Building a nuclear power complex along a shoreline opposite a subduction zone is risky. That fact is a “known known.” How risky? That is an unknowable unknown. Any attempt to assess the risk, or for that matter the risk associated with any and all nuclear power plants, is almost certain to underestimate that risk. A reliable and accurate assessment of the risk of a failure of a nuclear power reactor is unobtainable, now and forever.
These are bold assertions that I will endeavor to demonstrate below. To do so, we will examine an ambitious and massive attempt, some thirty years ago, to assess the safety of nuclear power plants, and its subsequent spectacular failure to achieve that objective. Because the reasons for that failure remain valid today, this is a tale well worth retelling in the light of the disaster at Fukuyama and in the face of the determination of the Obama Administration, despite that disaster, to proceed with the construction of the first new nuclear power plants in thirty years.
Reactor Safety: The Rasmussen Report Revisited
Concerned about public criticism of their nuclear energy ambitions, the promoters of commercial atomic energy at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) initiated in 1972, the “Reactor Safety Study,” which was to become known as “The Rasmussen Report,” after its Director, Norman Rasmussen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In August, 1974, the draft Report was released with much fanfare in a public-relations extravaganza that prompted one newspaper to proclaim: “Campaigners Against Nuclear Power Stations Put to Rout.” Following this triumphant entrance, scrupulous scientific assessment began behind the facade, after which it was all downhill for the Report. The AEC’s successor organization, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), quietly withdrew endorsement of the Rasmussen Report in January, 1979.
Rushed into print to provide support for a renewal of the Price Anderson Act (a federally mandated limit of industry liability following a nuclear reactor failure), an eighteen page “Executive Summary” of the final Report was distributed to Congress and the Press in October, 1975, and in advance of the release of the full, 2300 page Report.
Perhaps the most famous item of the Executive Summary was the claim that the chances of being killed by a nuclear power plant “transient” is about equal to that of being killed by a meteorite. This mind-catching statistic has proven to have a longevity far exceeding that of the Report which spawned it. In general, the Summary concluded that:
…The likelihood of reactor accidents is much smaller than that of many non-nuclear accidents having similar consequences. All non-nuclear accidents examined in this study including fires, explosions, toxic chemical releases, dam failures, airplane crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, are much more likely to occur and can have consequences comparable to, or larger than, those of nuclear accidents.
Closer examination revealed a startling discrepancy between the cheerful reassurances of the Executive Summary and the nine volumes of technical information. In his splendid book, The Cult of the Atom (Simon and Schuster, 1982), based upon tens of thousands of pages of AEC documents pried loose by the Freedom of Information Act, Daniel Ford observes that:
As one moves from the very technical material … to the Executive Summary … a change of tone as well as of technical content is evident. In the “back” of the study, there are cautionary notes, discussion of uncertainties in the data, and some sense that there may be important limitations to the results. The qualifications successively drop away as one moves toward the parts of the study that the public was intended to see. In the months following the study’s completion, the honesty of the official summary … became the most controversial issue.
The reassuring conclusions of the Rasmussen Report were based upon numerous highly questionable assumptions and methodologies. Among them:
- By definition, the report estimated damage and casualties due to anticipated events. There is no clear acknowledgment that all possible significant events were not, and could not be, covered by the study. As it turned out, the near-disaster at Three Mile Island was just one of several “unanticipated” events. And as noted above, a magnitude nine earthquake was not anticipated by the designers of the Fukushima plant.
- In fact, whole categories of failures were excluded from the risk estimates. For example, it was assumed that back-up safety systems would always operate in case of the failure of a primary system. Given this assumption, the risk of a catastrophic accident would be the product of the probability of the independent failure of both systems, and thus highly unlikely. However, this discounted the possibility of a “common-mode failure,” such as that at Browns Ferry, Alabama, in 1975 (soon after the release of the Report), where, due to faulty design, an accidental fire disabled both systems at once — yet another event excluded by the Rasmussen rules. Similarly, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 disabled both the primary and backup safety systems at the Fukushima facility.
- The Report focused on mechanical and equipment failures, and discounted design flaws and “human error,” as if these were in some sense insignificant. Also overlooked was the possibility of sabotage and terrorism.
- The report adopted the so-called “fault-tree” method of analysis, described by the Report as “developed by the Department of Defense and NASA … [and] coming into increasing use in recent years.” Not so. As Daniel Ford reports, “long before [Rasmussen] adopt the fault-tree methods … the Apollo program engineers had discarded them.” [146] As a retired professor of engineering recently explained to me: “the simulation or probability tree … analyses … are used to locate the weak links in your design, given the possible sources of failure that you know of or can specify… [However, the analyses] are not meant to yield a credible probability of failure, but instead yield at best a lower bound for that probability.” (EP emphasis)
- The “probabilities” assigned to the component “events” in the “fault tree,” leading to a hypothetical failure, were based upon almost pure speculation, since, because the technology was new, the evaluators lacked any precedents upon which to base probability assessments. (Both Rasmussen himself, and his Report, admitted as much). (Ford 138, 141). Thus, because the Report was fundamentally an advocacy document, this gave its pro-nuclear investigators the license to concoct unrealistically low risk assessments.
- These “low risk estimates” in the Executive Summary were startling, to say the least: “non-nuclear events,” it claimed, “are about 10,000 times more likely to produce large numbers of fatalities than nuclear plants.” But the footnote to this statement gave it away, when it added that such “fatalities … are those that would be predicted to occur within a short period of time” after the accident. However, few fatalities due to radiation exposure are “short-term.” In fact, as Physicist Frank von Hipple pointed out, a careful reading of the voluminous technical material would disclose that for every ten “early deaths” conceded in the Summary, the same accident would cause an additional seven thousand cancer deaths. (Ford, 170) This was only one of the several scandalous discrepancies between the “public” Executive Summary and the Technical material in the Report, which led Morris Udall, then Chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, to demand a new Executive Summary. The NRC refused.
- The “peer review” of the Report was perfunctory at best. The reviewers were given eleven days to assess an incomplete 3,000 page draft report — a schedule virtually designed to yield invalid assessments. Even so, many of the referees returned withering criticisms, especially of the statistical methods employed by the studies. The findings of this review group were not released by the AEC or the NRC, and the published Report was unaltered by these criticisms.
These and numerous other flaws in the study led one critic to wryly comment that “the chance of the Rasmussen Report being substantially wrong is somewhat more than the chance of your being hit by a meteorite.”
Though the general public was much impressed by the public relations show orchestrated by AEC, informed professional investigators immediately began the erosion of credibility. Among these were the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and, most significantly, an independent panel set up by the American Physical Society and chaired by Harold Lewis of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Each of these returned severe criticisms of the Report.
All this bad news eventually led the Reactor Safety Study into the halls of Congress. Daniel Ford describes what followed:
In some cases [congressional] members and staff probed the issues [of reactor safety] carefully, prepared detailed follow-up reports, and tried to bring about needed reforms. Congressman Morris Udall’s Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, for example, held extensive hearings on the validity of the Reactor Safety Study. His protests about the misleading manner in which the report’s findings were presented to the public forced the NRC, in January 1979, to repudiate the results of the study. (p. 226)
And so, at length, the relentless discipline of science and scholarship, combined with a rare display of uncompromising congressional oversight investigation, brought about the downfall of the AEC/NRC “Reactor Safety Study.”
The NRC’s “withdrawal of endorsement” stood in stark contrast to its release, scarcely four years earlier. This time there were no publicity releases, media interviews or press conferences. It was hoped that the announcement would go unnoticed amidst the usual gross output of news out of Washington. Given the widespread public opposition to nuclear power, this expectation was bound to be frustrated.
In the end, the Rasmussen Report was yet another attempt at justification of “the peaceful atom” which backfired on the proponents. Historians looking back on this technological extravaganza may note, with some bewilderment, that however severe the attacks by the critics, commercial nuclear power was, in this case at least, inadvertently done in by its defenders.
Nuclear Power Fails the Free Market Test
Still more substantial objections to nuclear power have been raised by scientists and engineers much more qualified than I am. So I will not repeat them here. (To read these objections, google “Physicians for Social Responsibility,” “Union of Concerned Scientists” “Natural Resources Defense Council” and “The Rocky Mountain Institute“). However, in closing, a few additional concerns are worthy of mention.
(1) First of all, every source of electric power, with the exception of nuclear power, “fails safe.” A failure at a coal-fired plant would, at worst, destroy the plant. But the damage would be localized and short-term. Failures at a wind-farm or solar facility are trivial. However, the damage caused by a nuclear meltdown and radiation release endures for millennia and can render huge areas permanently uninhabitable, as they have in Ukraine and Belarus due to the Chernobyl disaster, and as they likely will in Japan following the Fukushima catastrophe.
(2) Nuclear industry assurances as to the safety of their facilities are flatly refuted by their unwillingness to fully indemnify the casualty and property losses that would result from a catastrophic release of radiation from a nuclear accident. Since 1957, the Price Anderson Act has set a limit on the liability that private industry must pay in the event of an accident. The amount of that limit, originally $560 million for each plant, has been routinely revised, so that as of 2005 the limit is now $10.8 billion for each incident. Clearly, the Fukushima disaster will exact a cost far exceeding that amount. Were such an event to occur in the United States, the cost of such a disaster in excess of ten billion would be born by the victims and by the taxpayers. The contradiction is stark: the nuclear industry and its enablers in the NRC tell the public that nuclear energy is safe. And yet, at the same time, they are unwilling to back up these assurances with a full indemnification of their facilities.
(3) The public has not been adequately informed of the ongoing hazards of nuclear power. For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists report that in the past year, there were fourteen “near misses” among the 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States. And according to the Washington Post (March 24), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has disclosed that “A quarter of U.S. nuclear plants [are] not reporting equipment defects.”
(4) The widely-heard claim that “nobody in the United States has ever died due to commercial nuclear power” utilizes “the fallacy of the statistical casualty.” Specific cancer deaths due to artificial nuclear radiation are, of course, indistinguishable from cancer deaths due to other causes. Yet epidemiological studies show, beyond reasonable doubt, that some deaths are attributable to artificial radiation. The inference from “no identifiable specific deaths” to “no deaths whatever” is fallacy made infamous by the tobacco industry’s successful defense against suits filed by injured smokers or their surviving families.
(5) The claim that nuclear power is the “safest” source of energy commits the “fallacy of suppressed evidence.” Such a claim pretends that the risk of nuclear power is confined to the radiation risks adjacent to a normally operating plant and immediately following each “event.” Usually excluded from such assessments are deaths and injuries involved in the mining, milling, processing, shipment, reprocessing, storage and disposal of fuel — in short, the entire “fuel cycle.”
(6) Similarly, the claim that nuclear power is the “cheapest” power available is likewise based upon “the fallacy of suppressed evidence.” Specifically, nuclear proponents arrive at this conclusion by “externalizing” (i.e., failing to include) such costs as government subsidies for research and development, the costs of disposing of wastes, the cost of decommissioning of facilities, and, again, the cost of risks to human life, health and property. As noted above, the risk factor is excluded due to the Price Anderson Act and the failure to acknowledge “statistical casualties. Once all these “externalized costs” are included, nuclear power adds up to the most expensive energy source, hands down. Over fifty years of industry research, development and operation have not altered this fact. Meanwhile, as R & D of alternative energy sources progress and economies of scale kick in, the costs of solar, wind, tide, geo-thermal and biomass energy continue to fall. (See UCS, “Nuclear Power Subsidies: The Gift that Keeps on Taking,” and Amory Lovins, “With Nuclear Power, ‘No Acts of God Can Be Permitted’”).
Because of considerations such as these, no nuclear plants have been commissioned since the completion in 1985 of the Diablo Canyon facility along the central coast of California. The Obama Administration is prepared to change all this, as the President has announced $8 billion in federal loan guarantees to allow the building of the first nuclear power plant since Diablo Canyon.
Without this “federal intervention,” along with the Price-Anderson liability cap, no new nuclear plants would be built. The “free market” would not allow it. And yet there are no conspicuous complaints from the market fundamentalists on the right.
Why am I not surprised?
PostScript: My involvement in the Diablo Canyon controversy goes way back. In 1981, a group of local citizens blockaded the Diablo Canyon construction site in an act of civil disobedience, for which, predictably, they were arrested. At the time, I was a Visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The defense team asked me to testify as to the “reasonableness” of the protesters’ belief that the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors posed a significant danger to their community and to themselves. The prosecution objected on the grounds that the defense was asking me to “do the jury’s work.” The judge concurred, and so I was not permitted to testify. My account of this experience and critique of the ruling may be found in my unpublished paper, “A Philosopher’s Day in Court” at my website, The Online Gadfly, The discussion above of the Rasmussen Report is a revision of my unpublished class discussion paper from 1980, “The Strange Saga of the Rasmussen Report”.
Ernest Partridge is the co-editor of The Crisis Papers.
EPA to Help Mainstream Media Obscure The Truth About Radiation Exposure to Americans
Brandon Turbeville | Activist Post | March 28, 2011
As Americans focus on March Madness and Dancing With the Stars instead of the radioactive plume spreading all across the country, the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is attempting to make the mainstream media cover up of the Fukushima cloud a bit easier.
The agency now notorious for its infamous claim that the air was safe to breathe after 9/11 is now seeking to raise the PAGs (Protective Action Guides) to levels vastly higher than those at which they are currently set allowing for more radioactive contamination of the environment and the general public in the event of a radioactive disaster.
PAGs are policies established by the EPA that guide the agency in enforcing the various environmental laws such as the Clean Air and Water Act in the invent of a radioactive emergency such as a nuclear/dirty bomb or factory meltdown like that occurring in Japan.
The EPA had already established PAGs in this area in 1992. They can be found here. However, the agency now plans to amend and revise these standards this year.
Because regulatory agencies form their own policies (although they can be directed by either the President or the Congress), there is no requirement to seek Congressional approval for these changes. All that is required is that the agency place the proposed changes in the Federal Register for public comment before it finalizes its draft into legal policy.
According to PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the new standards would drastically raise the levels of radiation allowed in food, water, air, and the general environment. PEER, a national organization of local, state, and federal employees who had access to internal EPA emails, claims that the new standards will result in a “nearly 1000-fold increase for exposure to strontium-90, a 3000 to 100,000-fold hike for exposure to iodine-131; and an almost 25,000 rise for exposure to radioactive nickel-63” in drinking water. This information, as well as the emails themselves were published by Collapsenet on March 24.
In addition to raising the level of permissible radiation in the environment, PEER suggests that the standards of cleanup after a radioactive emergency will actually be reduced. As a result, radioactive cleanup thresholds will be vastly lowered and, by default, permissible levels of radiation will be vastly increased in this manner as well.
As Michael Kane writes for Collapsenet, the current EPA numbers, as well as those generally agreed upon in the international radiation assessment community, all point to the fact that these increases in permissible levels would create a level of radiation where approximately 1 in 4 people would contract cancer from exposure to them.
The changes to the 1992 PAGs are not a new attempt by the EPA. The agency attempted similar changes in 2009 but the revisions were stopped largely by a barrage of FOIA requests and a lawsuit filed by PEER. However, in 2009 there was no massive radiation disaster the EPA needed to cover up as there is at the current time. In 2009, the EPA could afford to back off, regroup, and try again at a later date. Unfortunately, it is not likely to react the same way this time around.
As of the time of this writing, a toxic cloud of radiation has not only reached the US West Coast, but has spread all the way across the country to states like South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, and Massachussetts. Both the US government and the mainstream media have largely denied any risk associated with the radiation and have actively engaged in covering up the extent to which it has spread across the country.
In the event of any real journalism, the revelation of the danger and scale of the Japanese radiation cloud could be disastrous for those who hide the truth from the people who are sure to suffer the consequences. Indeed, the revelation that a toxic cloud of cancer-causing particles is littering the United States (especially in real time) might even be too much for the average television- and sports-obsessed American to handle.
However, the lowering of safety standards for radiation contamination would be a major victory for those wishing to cover it up. After all, the talking heads would then be able to claim that the radiation levels are within the safety range set by the EPA.
No cause for worry.
Regardless of the motivation behind these new changes, they must be actively opposed. We cannot allow the veil to be pulled even further over the eyes of the American people. At the very least, we cannot allow an agency charged with protecting both the environment and the people who live in it to set standards alleviating itself of that responsibility.
Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Mullins, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from Francis Marion University where he earned the Pee Dee Electric Scholar’s Award as an undergraduate.
Radiation, Japan and the Marshall Islands
Living and Dying Downwind
By GLENN ALCALAY | CounterPunch | March 29, 2011
When the dangerous dust and gases settle and we discover just how much radiation escaped the damaged Fukushima reactors and spent fuel rods, we may never know how many people are being exposed to radiation from the burning fuel rods and reactor cores, and how much exposure they will receive over time. Minute and above-background traces of Iodine-131 are already showing up in Tokyo’s water supply – 150 miles southwest of the leaking reactors – and in milk and spinach [with a dash of Cesium-137] from 75 miles away. The Japanese government has recently warned pregnant women and children to avoid drinking Tokyo tap water, and I-131 levels 1,200 times above background levels were recorded in seawater near the reactors.
Aside from sharing the dubious distinction of both nations having been at the receiving end of America’s nuclear weapons, Japan and the Marshall Islands now share another dubious distinction. The unleashed isotopes of concern from the damaged Japanese reactors – Iodine-131, Cesium-137, Strontium-90 and Plutonium-239 – are well known to the Marshall Islanders living downwind of the testing sites at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the central Pacific, following sixty-seven A- and H-bombs exploded between 1946-58. In fact, it is precisely these isotopes that continue to haunt the 80,000 Marshallese fifty-three years after the last thermonuclear test in the megaton range shook their pristine coral atolls and contaminated their fragile marine ecosystems.
In fact, it was the irradiated downwind Marshallese on Rongelap and Utrik in 1954 caught in the Bravo fallout – and I-131 – that taught the world about the thyroid effect from the uptake of radioactive iodine.
The U.S.’ largest [fusion] hydrogen bomb – Bravo – was 1,000 times the Hiroshima atomic [fission] bomb, and deposited a liberal sprinkling of these and a potent potpourri of 300 other radionuclides over a wide swath of the Central Pacific and the inhabited atolls in the Marshalls archipelago in March 1954 during “Operation Castle.”
The Rongelap islanders 120 miles downwind from Bikini received 190 rems [1.9 Sv] of whole-body gamma dose before being evacuated. The Utrik people 320 miles downwind received 15 rems [150 mSv] before their evacuation. Many of the on-site nuclear workers at Fukushima have already exceeded the Utrik dose in multiples.
Also entrapped within the thermonuclear maelstrom from Bravo was the not-so-Lucky Dragon [Fukuryu Maru] Japanese fishing trawler with its crew of twenty-three fishing for tuna near Bikini [see The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon by Ralph Lapp]. As the heavily exposed fishermen’s health quickly deteriorated after Bravo, the radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died of a liver illness six months after his exposure; his is now a household name in Japan and is associated with the “Bikini bomb.”
Meanwhile, the Japanese fishing industry was rocked when Geiger counters registered “talking fish” [what the Japanese called the clicking sound of the contaminated fish being monitored] from the 800 pounds of tuna catch of the Lucky Dragon in Yaizu and in local fish markets. Much of the Japanese tuna at the time was caught by a fleet of 1,000 fishing boats operating in the fertile tuna waters near the U.S.’ Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshalls.
In response to the plight and symbolism of the Lucky Dragon, Japanese women collected 34 million signatures on petitions advocating the immediate abolition of both atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1955. Pugwash, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-nuclear organization was founded in 1955 by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in response to Bravo. The dangers of radioactive fallout from Bravo inspired Nevil Shute’s classic nuclear dystopia On the Beach, as well as Godzilla.
To quell the diplomatic furor – whereby the Japanese representative to the U.N. accused the U.S. in March 1954 of “once again using nuclear weapons against the Japanese people” – the U.S. paid two million dollars to the fishing company which owned the Lucky Dragon; each of the 23 fishermen ended up with the princely sum of $5,000 in 1956 and the tuna company kept the rest.
AEC chair Lewis Strauss (who originally proposed nuclear energy “too cheap to meter” in the post-War Atoms for Peace program) told President Eisenhower’s press secretary James Hagerty in April 1954 that the Lucky Dragon was not a fishing boat at all – it was a “Red spy outfit” snooping on the American nuclear tests.
The legacy of latent radiogenic diseases from hydrogen bomb testing in the Marshall Islands provides some clues about what ill-health mysteries await the affected Japanese in the decades ahead. Also, the Marshall Islands provide insight about ecosystem contamination of these dangerous radioactive isotopes, and what this means for the affected Japanese.
Profiles of the four isotopes
o Iodine-131 [radioactive iodine] has a half life of eight days, and concentrates in the thyroid gland about 5,000 times more efficiently than other parts of the body. Traces of I-131 have been discovered in Tokyo drinking water and in seawater offshore from the reactors. It took nine years for the first thyroid tumor to appear among the exposed Marshallese and hypothyroidism and cancer continued to appear decades later.
o Cesium-137 has a half life of thirty years and is a chemical analog of potassium; Cs-137 concentrates in muscle and other parts of the body. Rongelap Island has a new layer of topsoil containing potassium to help neutralize the Cs-137 left over from the H-bomb tests, but the Marshallese residents remain unconvinced and suspicious about the habitability of their long abandoned home atoll. Meanwhile, the U.S. is pressuring hard for their repatriation despite the fact that most islands at Rongelap will remain off limits for many decades with strict dietary restrictions of local foods.
o Strontium-90 has a half life of twenty-eight years, is a chemical analog of calcium and is known as a “bone seeker.” Rongelap and the other downwind atolls have residual Sr-90 in their soils, groundwater and marine ecosystems.
o Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,000 years, is considered one of the most toxic substances on Earth, and if absorbed is a potent alpha emitter that can induce cancer. This isotope too is found in the soils and groundwater of the downwind atolls from the Bikini and Enewetak H-bomb tests.
Lessons from the Marshall Islands
* It took nine years after exposure to the 1954 Bravo fallout for the first thyroid tumor and hypothyroidism to occur in an exposed Utrik woman from the I-131. Several more tumors [and other radiogenic disorders] among the exposed people appeared the following year and every year thereafter. The latency period for thyroid abnormalities and other radiogenic disorders [see below] endures for several decades.
* Because a child’s thyroid gland is much smaller than an adult’s thyroid, it receives a higher concentration of I-131 than an adult dose. Also, because a child’s thyroid gland is growing more quickly than an adult’s, it requires and absorbs more iodine [and I-131] than an adult thyroid gland. That is, the thyroid effect is age-related.
* Radioactive Iodine-129 with a half-life of 15 million years and a well-documented capacity to bioaccumulate in the foodchain, will also remain as a persistent problem for the affected Japanese.
* The Majuro-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established in 1988 to settle all past and future claims against the U.S. for health injury and property loss damages from the nuclear tests. As of 2006, the NCT had paid out $73 million [of the $91 million awarded] for 1,999 Marshallese claimants. There are thirty-six medical conditions that are presumed to be caused by the nuclear tests [http://www.nuclearclaimstribunal.com]. Eligibility for Marshallese citizens consists of having been in the Marshall Islands during the testing period [1946-58] and having at least one of the presumptive medical disorders.
* The sociocultural and psychological effects [e.g., PTSD] of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will be long-lasting, given the uncertainty surrounding the contamination of their prefecture and beyond. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton eloquently detailed this uncertain future and fears about “invisible contamination” concerning the Hiroshima and Nagasaki “hibakusha” [“A-bomb survivors”] in his award-winning 1968 magnum opus Death in Life.
* Noted radiation experts John Gofman [co-discoverer of U-232 and U-233 and author of Radiation and Human Health], Karl Z. Morgan [a founder of health physics] and Edward Radford [Chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ BEIR III committee and advisor to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal] stated that there is no threshold dose for low level ionizing radiation:
Any amount of ionizing radiation – which is cumulative – can pose a health threat for certain individuals, and especially those with compromised immune systems.
Glenn Alcalay is an adjunct professor of anthropology at Wm Paterson Univ. and Montclair State Univ. in New Jersey. Alcalay was a Peace Corps volunteer on Utrik Atoll in the Marshalls, speaks fluent Marshallese, and has conducted anthropological research re: reproductive abnormalities among the downwind islanders. He can be reached at: alcalayg@wpunj.edu
‘Safe’ radiation is a lethal TMI lie
By HARVEY WASSERMAN | Intrepid Report | March 29, 2011
There is no safe dose of radiation.
We do not x-ray pregnant women.
Any detectable fallout can kill.
With erratic radiation spikes, major air and water emissions and at least three reactors and waste pools in serious danger at Fukushima, we must prepare for the worst.
When you hear the terms “safe” and “insignificant” in reference to radioactive fallout, ask yourself: “Safe for whom?” “Insignificant to which of us?”
Despite the corporate media, what has and will continue to come here from Fukushima is deadly to Americans. At very least it threatens countless embryos and fetuses in utero, the infants, the elderly, the unborn who will come to future mothers now being exposed. (http://nukefree.org/arnie-gundersen-radiation-dangers )
No matter how small the dose, the human egg in waiting, or embryo or fetus in utero, or newborn infant, or weakened elder, has no defense against even the tiniest radioactive assault.
Science has never found such a “safe” threshold, and never will.
In the 1950s Dr. Alice Stewart showed a definitive link between medical x-rays administered to pregnant women and the curse of childhood leukemia among their offspring.
After a fierce 30-year debate, the medical profession agreed. Today, administering an x-ray to a pregnant woman is universally understood to be a serious health hazard.
Those who pioneered the health physics profession—towering greats like Dr. Karl Z. Morgan and Dr. John Gofman—set a definitive, impenetrable standard. A safe dose of radiation does not exist. All doses, “insignificant” or otherwise, can harm the human organism.
That has been repeatedly shown in major studies—done most notably by Dr. ErnestSternglass, Jay Gould, Joe Mangano, Arnie Gundersen, Dr. Steven Wing (http://nukefree.org/tmia-bloomberg-dr-ed-lyman-developments-fukushima )and others—showing that among human populations near commercial reactors, infant death rates plummet once the reactors shut down.
In 1979, 32 years ago this March 28, the owners of Three Mile Island said therewas no meltdown, no serious radiation release and no need for evacuation.
All were lies.
To this day no one knows how much radiation was released or where it went or who it killed.
TMI’s owners ran ads dismissing the emissions as the equivalent of a single chest x-ray given to everyone within a ten mile radius.
But that included all the pregnant women.
Soon infant death rates soared in nearby Harrisburg. Some 2400 central Pennsylvania families sued based on the health impacts.
In 1980 I interviewed dozens of these people. Cancer, leukemia, birth defects, stillbirths, sterility, malformations, open lesions, hair loss, a metallic taste and much more were among the symptoms. (http://www.loran-history.info/health/Killing_Our_Own.pdf )
The death and mutation rate among farm and wild animals was also thoroughly documented by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and a team of investigators from the Baltimore News-American.
We were again told there were “no health dangers” from radiation that hit California from Chernobyl ten days after that 1986 explosion. But bird births at the Point Reyes National Seashore quickly dropped 60% from the levels that had been carefully monitored and recorded through the previous decade.
The cloud then crossed the northern tier of the United States. Heightened radiation levels were found in milk in New England—as they were throughout Europe from clouds that had blown from Chernobyl in the other direction.
The doses were neither “insignificant” nor “safe” to those far or near.
In Russia ten years later, I interviewed dozens of downwind victims, and many of the 800,000 “liquidators” who ran into Chernobyl’s seething corpse to helpclean it up. After TMI, it was déjà vu all over again.
The most recently published findings, from a compendium of more than 5,000 studies, indicate a global Chernobyl death toll in excess of 985,000, and still counting. ( http://www.nukefree.org/node/1828 ).
Today we are assaulted by yet another radioactive death cloud from yet another “perfectly safe” nuclear plant.
Fukushima’s radiation is pouring into the air and water. The operators have reported radiation levels a million times normal, then retracted the estimate to a “mere” 100,000. Workers are being exposed to doses that are certain to be lethal. At least three of the reactors, and one or more of the spent fuel pools, hover at the brink of catastrophe.
Fukushima’s radiation has now been detected in Los Angeles and Sacramento, and has blown east across North America. It has also been detected in Sweden, which means it’s blowing across Europe as well.
Radiation is not being released as a single puff. Rather it’s a steady stream that could yet turn into a tsunami.
Fukushima’s worst may be yet to come. Its collective emissions are virtually certain to exceed Chernobyl’s.
And yet we continue to hear smug, misinformed “experts,” TV meteorologists and industry talking heads saying these are “safe” doses.
The response of the Obama Administration has been beyond derelict. As the accident began, the President went on national television to assure us there was nothing to worry about, and that he would continue to demand $36 billion in loan guarantees to build new nuclear plants.
Since then, even as the Fukushima crisis mounts, President Obama has remained silent.
Millions of Americans have heard about potassium iodide (KI), which can be used block the uptake of radioactive iodine and perhaps protect the thyroid.
But KI can have potential medical side-effects for some individuals. And timing can be critical. To say the least, we need to know when the radioactive fallout is present.
Yet the administration has not provided us with a national supply of KI, or guidance for using it.
At very least we need reliable real-time mapping of the radioactive clouds as they cross the nation. Every American should be issued a mask, and sufficient KI pills with directions on how to use them, if necessary.
Above all, we need national leadership that puts the health of our people first and foremost.
Americans who are of reproductive age—and their unborn, our babies, the elderly, those of us who may be especially sensitive—we all deserve better.
As we have learned so tragically from Drs. Stewart, Morgan, Gofman and Sternglass, from Gundersen and Mangano and so many other researchers, from TMI and Chernobyl, and from the on-going operation of nuclear plants where infant death rates continue to be affected—a “perfectly safe” dose of radiation does not exist.
No truly informed or responsible scientist, medical doctor, health researcher, TV weatherman, bloviating “expert” or on-the scene reporter would ever tell you otherwise.
Who Are the Liquidators?
Charles M. Young | This Can’t Be Happening | March 29, 2011
The prime minister of Japan has said that his government is “not in a position where we can be optimistic” about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Is there any logical conclusion to draw from that statement other than that a large chunk of Japan is going to be uninhabitable?
They’ve got four nuclear reactors right next to each other in various states of disaster and probably meltdown. Two more are damaged. The workers on site are exhausted, sick and dying. The ocean and air around the plant are highly radioactive. The surrounding farms are producing radioactive vegetables. The drinking water in Tokyo is radioactive. If the Fukushima reactors keep exploding and burning and blowing radiation into the reservoirs, how long before Tokyo becomes Jonestown with a population of 13,000,000?
Michio Kaku, the physicist and author, has suggested on CNN that the best option right now is entombment. There’s nothing to salvage, he said, so the Japanese government should get some shielded helicopters and dump sand, boric acid, dolomite and concrete on the reactors and bury them for eternity. This could be done in ten days, he said, if they just got the materials together, which they aren’t doing because the government is not facing the implications of its own declared lack of optimism.
I’m not a physicist, but entombment at Chernobyl was vastly more complicated than Kaku was able to discuss in the time limits of American television. The Chernobyl reactor had to be mostly neutralized before being permanently buried, which meant that 800,000 or so “liquidators” had to run into the plant, perform some menial task in the presence of boiling nuclear waste for a minute or two, and then run out. Most of them are now sick, dying or dead from radiation poisoning.
Perhaps burying Fukushima will be a simpler process, because of robots or other technological developments. Perhaps burying Fukushima will be a more complicated process, because it has a lot more waste lying around and four out-of-control reactors while Chernobyl had just one. I don’t know. Either way, there is a moral problem that needs to be discussed.
Who will be the liquidators?
Whether Japan needs a few hundred volunteers to shovel boric acid on burning plutonium, or whether Japan needs 800,000 draftees, as in the Soviet Union, somebody’s got to do it.
Michio Kaku suggested the Japanese military, presumably because they are available and can fly helicopters. One could also argue that soldiers are paid to risk their lives for their country, and Japan has never needed them more.
Lets think about this, I say. The Japanese military is constitutionally forbidden to make war on anyone, so they are probably the nicest military in the world. And like every other military, it is full of young men who aren’t paid much, who haven’t lived much, who haven’t even started their families yet. Most important, Japanese soldiers bear no moral responsibility at all for the problem. Why should they die to solve it?
If someone has to die an agonizing, terrifying, nauseating, blistering, stinking, metastasizing death, who should be first guy to run into the Fukushima reactors with a bucket of wet cement?
I nominate Jeffrey Immelt.
Immelt is chairman and CEO of General Electric. General Electric designed all six of the faulty Fukushima reactors. General Electric built three of them. General Electric claimed it was safe to build these reactors next to the ocean in an earthquake zone. General Electric built 23 reactors in the United States exactly like the ones melting down right now in Japan. General Electric has made colossal profits promoting nuclear power in Japan and around the world. Jeffrey Immelt made $15.2 million last year.
He makes the most money, it’s his company, and he tells everyone else what to do. At any time since taking over GE in 2000, he could have said, “Those plants are too dangerous. We sold them to Japan. We need to shut them down.” He didn’t do that. Hence the nuclear waste in Tokyo’s drinking water belongs to Jeffrey Immelt.
This is what Immelt says on the GE website: “I’m out talking about this company seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with nothing to hide. We’re a 130-year-old company that has a great record of high-quality leadership and a culture of integrity.”
That is the statement of a moral turd. A shameless, sociopathic, moral turd. GE ran the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, one of the most polluted places on the planet. GE has paved parking lots with nuclear waste. GE has released vast clouds of radiation on innocent, unwarned people in United States just to see what would happen. GE has done radiation experiments on the testes of prisoners without properly warning them. GE dumped 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River, making it poisonous for generations. GE has refused to clean up the PCBs in the Hudson and elsewhere. GE has lied repeatedly about the PCBs. GE is a serial polluter of ground water. GE takes enormous pride in paying no corporate taxes in the United States. GE has been fined many times for defrauding the the Defense Department. GE has been fined many times for design flaws and safety violations at its nuclear plants in the United States. GE has shipped most of its operations overseas so it can pay workers less and get fined less. GE owns a big chunk of NBC and MSNBC, which has been covering Japan less and less as the meltdown gets worse and worse. GE sees to it that all those NBC Dateline true crime documentaries don’t inform anyone about GE crimes. And last, but far from least, GE launched the political career of Ronald Reagan.
For all that, GE has been named “America’s Most Admired Company” in a poll conducted by Fortune magazine.
For all that, Jeffrey Immelt has been named Chairman of Obama’s Economic Advisory Panel.
For all that, I say give Jeffrey Immelt a one-way ticket to Fukushima and a bucket of wet cement. While he’s pouring it on the burning fuel rods, he can throw in his MBA from Harvard.
Then give another one-way ticket and bucket of wet cement to Jack Welch, who was head of GE from 1981 to 2000. He can toss his #1 best-selling autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut, onto the fuel rods as well.
Then the Japanese get to pick between their prime minister and the head of the Tokyo Electric Power Company. But GE should go first. It’s the honorable way. Harakiri for the 21st century.
Deconstructing Nuclear Experts
Some May be More Dangerous Than Radiation
By CHRIS BUSBY | CounterPunch | March 28, 2011
Since the Fukushima accident we have seen a stream of experts on radiation telling us not to worry, that the doses are too low, that the accident is nothing like Chernobyl and so forth. They appear on television and we read their articles in the newspapers and online. Fortunately the majority of the public don’t believe them. I myself have appeared on television and radio with these people; one example was Ian Fells of the University of Newcastle who, after telling us all on BBC News that the accident was nothing like Chernobyl (wrong), and the radiation levels of no consequence (wrong), that the main problem was that there was no electricity and that the lifts didn’t work. “ If you have been in a situation when the lifts don’t work, as I have” he burbled on, “you will know what I mean.”
What these people have in common is ignorance. You may think a professor at a university must actually know something about their subject. But this is not so. Nearly all of these experts who appear and pontificate have not actually done any research on the issue of radiation and health. Or if they have, they seem to have missed all the key studies and references. I leave out the real baddies, who are closely attached to the nuclear industry, like Richard Wakeford, or Richard D as he calls himself on the anonymous website he has set up to attack me, “chrisbusbyexposed”.
I saw him a few times talking down the accident on the television, labelled in the stripe as Professor Richard Wakeford, University of Manchester. Incidentally, Wakeford is a physicist, his PhD was in particle physics at Liverpool. But he was not presented as ex- Principle Scientist, British Nuclear Fuels, Sellafield. That might have given the viewers the wrong idea. Early on we saw another baddy, Malcolm Grimston, talking about radiation and health, described as Professor, Imperial College. Grimston is a psychologist, not a scientist, and his expertise was in examining why the public was frightened of radiation, and how their (emotional) views could be changed. But his lack of scientific training didn’t stop him explaining on TV and radio how the Fukushima accident was nothing to worry about. The doses were too low, nothing like Chernobyl, not as bad as 3-Mile Island, only 4 on the scale, all the usual blather. Most recently we have seen George Monbiot, who I know, and who also knows nothing about radiation and health, writing in The Guardian how this accident has actually changed his mind about nuclear power (can this be his Kierkegaard moment? Has he cracked? ) since he now understands (and reproduces a criminally misleading graphic to back up his new understanding) that radiation is actually OK and we shoudn’t worry about it. George does at least know better, or has been told better, since he asked me a few years ago to explain why internal and external radiation exposure cannot be considered to have the same health outcomes. He ignored what I said and wrote for him (with references) and promptly came out in favour of nuclear energy in his next article.
So what about Wade Allison? Wade is a medical physics person and a professor at Oxford. I have chosen to pitch into him since he epitomises and crystallises for us the arguments of the stupid physicist. In this he has done us a favour, since he is really easy to shoot down. All the arguments are in one place. Stupid physicists? Make no mistake, physicists are stupid. They make themselves stupid by a kind of religious belief in mathematical modelling. The old Bertie Russell logical positivist trap. And whilst this may be appropriate for examining the stresses in metals, or looking at the Universe (note that they seem to have lost 90% of the matter in the Universe, so-called “dark matter”) it is not appropriate for, and is even scarily incorrect when, examining stresses in humans or other lifeforms. Mary Midgley, the philosopher has written about Science as Religion. Health physicists are the priests. I have been reading Wade Allison’s article for the BBC but also looked at his book some months ago. He starts in the same way as all the others by comparing the accidents. He writes:
More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died – and is unlikely to.
Then we move to 3-Mile Island: There were no known deaths there.
And Chernobyl:
The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll – 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer – which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan).
This is breathtaking ignorance of the scientific literature. Prof. Steve Wing in the USA has carried out epidemiological studies of the effects of 3-Mile Island, with results published in the peer-review literature. Court cases are regularly settled on the basis of cancers produced by the 3-Mile Island contamination. But let us move to Chernobyl. The health effects of the Chernobyl accident are massive and demonstrable. They have been studied by many research groups in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, in the USA, Greece, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan. The scientific peer reviewed literature is enormous. Hundreds of papers report the effects, increases in cancer and a range of other diseases. My colleague Alexey Yablokov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published a review of these studies in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2009). Earlier in 2006 he and I collected together reviews of the Russian literature by a group of eminent radiation scientists and published these in the book Chernobyl, 20 Years After. The result: more than a million people have died between 1986 and 2004 as a direct result of Chernobyl.
I will briefly refer to two Chernobyl studies in the west which falsify Wade Allison’s assertions. The first is a study of cancer in Northern Sweden by Martin Tondel and his colleagues at Lynkoping University. Tondel examined cancer rates by radiation contamination level and showed that in the 10 years after the Chernobyl contamination of Sweden, there was an 11% increase in cancer for every 100kBq/sq metre of contamination. Since the official International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) figures for the Fukushima contamination are from 200 to 900kBq.sq metre out to 78km from the site, we can expect between 22% and 90% increases in cancer in people living in these places in the next 10 years. The other study I want to refer to is one I carried out myself. After Chernobyl, infant leukaemia was reported in 6 countries by 6 different groups, from Scotland, Greece, Wales, Germany, Belarus and the USA. The increases were only in children who had been in the womb at the time of the contamination: this specificity is rare in epidemiology. There is no other explanation than Chernobyl. The leukemias could not be blamed on some as-yet undiscovered virus and population mixing, which is the favourite explanation for the nuclear site child leukemia clusters. There is no population mixing in the womb. Yet the “doses” were very small, much lower than “natural background”. I published this unequivocal proof that the current risk model is wrong for internal exposures in two separate peer-reviewed journals in 2000 and 2009. This finding actually resulted in the formation in 2001 by UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher of a new Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters CERRIE. Richard Wakeford was on this committee representing BNFL and he introduced himself to me as “BNFL’s Rottweiler”. No difference there.
Wade then turns to a comparison of contamination:
So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let’s look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).
A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m – areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl
But the IAEA themselves, not known for their independence from the nuclear industry, report that contamination levels out to 78km were between 200 and 900kBq/sq metre. And Wade has been rather selective with his data, to put it kindly. The UN definition of radioactively contaminated land is 37kBq/sq metre just as he writes, but actually, in all the maps published, the inner 30km Chernobyl contamination exclusion zone is defined as 555kBq/sq metre and above. This is just a fact. Why has he misled us? In passing, this means that there are 555,000 radioactive disintegrations per second on one square metre of surface. Can you believe this is not harmful? No. And you would be correct. And another calculation can be made. Since the IAEA data show that these levels of contamination, from 200,000 to 900,000 disintegrations per second per square metre, exist up to 78km from Fukushima, we can already calculate that the contamination is actually worse than Chernobyl, not 1% of Chernobyl as Wade states. For the area defined by a 78km radius is 19113 sq km compared to the Chernobyl exclusion zone of 2827 sq km. About seven times greater.
Now I turn to the health effects. Wade trots out most of the usual stupid physicist arguments. We are all exposed to natural background, the dose is 2mSv a year and the doses from the accident are not significantly above this. For example, the Japanese government are apparently making a mistake in telling people not to give tap water containing 200Bq/litre radioactive Iodine-131 to their children as there is naturally 50Bq/l of radiation in the human body and 200 will not do much harm. The mistake is made because of fears of the public which apparently forced the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP, to set the annual dose limits at 1mSv. Wade knows better: he would set the limits at 100mSv. He is a tough guy. He shoots from the hip:
Patients receiving a course of radiotherapy usually get a dose of more than 20,000 mSv to vital healthy tissue close to the treated tumour. This tissue survives only because the treatment is spread over many days giving healthy cells time for repair or replacement. A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information.
But Wade, dear, these people are usually old, and usually die anyway before they can develop a second tumour. They often develop other cancers even so because of the radiation. There are hundreds of studies showing this. And in any case, this external irradiation is not the problem. The problem is internal irradiation. The Iodine-131 is not in the whole body, it is in the thyroid gland and attached to the blood cells: hence the thyroid cancer and the leukaemia. And there is a whole list of internal radioactive elements that bind chemically to DNA, from Strontium-90 to Uranium. These give massive local doses to the DNA and to the tissues where they end up. The human body is not a piece of wire that you can apply physics to. The concept of dose which Wade uses cannot be used for internal exposures. This has been conceded by the ICRP itself in its publications. And in an interview with me in Stockholm in 2009, Dr Jack Valentin, the ex-Scientific Secretary of the ICRP conceded this, and also made the statement that the ICRP risk model, the one used by all governments to assess the outcome of accidents like Fukushima, was unsafe and could not be used. You can see this interview on the internet, on www.vimeo.com.
Why is the ICRP model unsafe? Because it is based on “absorbed dose”. This is average radiation energy in Joules divided by the mass of living tissue into which it is diluted. A milliSievert is one milliJoule of energy diluted into one kilogram of tissue. As such it would not distinguish between warming yourself in front of a fire and eating a red hot coal. It is the local distribution of energy that is the problem. The dose from a single internal alpha particle track to a single cell is 500mSv! The dose to the whole body from the same alpha track is 5 x 10-11 mSv. That is 0.000000000005mSv. But it is the dose to the cell that causes the genetic damage and the ultimate cancer. The cancer yield per unit dose employed by ICRP is based entirely on external acute high dose radiation at Hiroshima, where the average dose to a cell was the same for all cells.
And what of the UN and their bonkers statement about the effects of the Chernobyl accident referred to by Wade Allison? What you have to know, is that the UN organisations on radiation and health are compromised in favour of the nuclear military complex, which was busy testing hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere at the time of the agreement and releasing all the Strontium, Caesium, Uranium and plutonium and other stuff that was to become the cause of the current and increasing cancer epidemic. The last thing they wanted was the doctors and epidemiologists stopping their fun. The IAEA and the World Health Organisation (WHO) signed an agreement in 1959 to remove all research into the issue from the doctors of the WHO, to the atom scientists, the physicists of the IAEA: this agreement is still in force. The UN organisations do not refer to, or cite any scientific study, which shows their statements on Chernobyl to be false. There is a huge gap between the picture painted by the UN, the IAEA, the ICRP and the real world. And the real world is increasingly being studied and reports are being published in the scientific literature: but none of the authorities responsible for looking after the public take any notice of this evidence.
As they say on the Underground trains in London: Mind the Gap. Wade Allison and the other experts I refer to need to do just this for their own sake. The one place that this gap is being closed rapidly and savagely is in the courts. I have acted as an expert witness in over 40 cases involving radiation and health. These include cases where Nuclear Test veterans are suing the UK government for exposures at the test sites that have caused cancer, they include cases involving nuclear pollution, work exposures and exposures to depleted uranium weapons fallout. And these cases are all being won. All of them. Because in court with a judge and a jury, people like Wade Allison and George Monbiot would not last 2 minutes. Because in court you rely on evidence. Not bullshitting.
Joseph Conrad wrote: “after all the shouting is over, the grim silence of facts remain”. I believe that these phoney experts like Wade Allison and George Monbiot are criminally irresponsible, since their advice will lead to millions of deaths. I would hope that some time in the future, I can be involved as an expert in another legal case, one where Wade Allison, or George or my favourite baddy, Richard Wakeford (who actually knows better) are accused in a court of law of scientific dishonesty leading to the cancer in some poor victim who followed their advice. When they are found guilty, I hope they are sent to jail where they can have plenty of time to read the scientific proofs that their advice was based on the mathematical analysis of thin air.
In the meantime, I challenge each of them to debate this issue with me in public on television face to face, so that the people can figure out who is right. For the late Professor John Gofman, a senior figure in the US Atomic Energy Commission until he saw what was happening and resigned, famously said: “the nuclear industry is waging a war against humanity.” This war has now entered an endgame which will decide the survival of the human race. Not from sudden nuclear war. But from the on-going and incremental nuclear war which began with the releases to the biosphere in the 60’s of all the atmospheric test fallout, and which has continued inexorably since then through Windscale, Kyshtym, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Hanford, Sellafield, La Hague, Iraq and now Fukushima, accompanied by parallel increases in cancer rates and fertility loss to the human race.
There is a gap between them and us. Between the phoney scientists and the public who don’t believe what they say. Between those who are employed and paid to protect us from radioactive pollution and those who die from its consequences. Between those who talk down what is arguably the greatest public health scandal in human history, and the facts that they ignore.
Mind the Gap indeed.
Chris Busby is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. He is visiting Professor at the University of Ulster and also Guest Researcher at the Julius Kuehn Institute of the German Federal Agricultural Institute in Braunschweig, Germany. He was a member of the UK Committee Examining Radiation Risk on Internal Emitters CERRIE and the UK MoD Depleted Uranium Oversight Board. He was Science and Policy Interface leader of the Policy Information network on Child Health and Environment based in the Netherlands. He was Science and Technology Speaker for the Green Party of England and Wales. He has conducted fundamental research on the health effects of internal radiation both at the theoretical and epidemiological level, including recently on the genotoxic effects of the element uranium.
Updating Japan’s Nuclear Disaster
By Stephen Lendman | March 27, 2011
Japan’s March 11 earthquake/tsunami-caused nuclear disaster affects millions of people regionally and throughout the Northern Hemisphere. But you’d never know it from most major media reports, downplaying an unfolding catastrophe.
In fact, distinguished experts like Helen Caldicott long ago warned of inevitable nuclear disasters, especially in seismically active areas. On May 23, 2004, The Japan Times contributor Leuren Moret headlined, “Japan’s deadly game of nuclear roulette,” saying:
“Of all the places in all the world no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list.”
“Japan sits on top of four tectonic plates….and is one of the most tectonically active regions of the world. (There) is almost no geologic setting in the world more dangerous for nuclear power than Japan.”
In 2004, Kobe University Seismologist/Professor Katsuhiko Ishibashi called the situation then “very scary. It’s like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode.”
American cities like New York have no credible evacuation plans in case of nuclear disasters. Neither does Japan, its Fukushima response a clear example. In fact, however, there’s no adequate plan possible in cases of catastrophic nuclear events. How and to where do you transfer millions of people. Abandoning the technology alone can work, a possibility not considered, at least not so far.
Japanese nuclear engineer Yoichi Kikuchi told Moret about serious longstanding safety problems at Japanese nuclear facilities, including cooling system cracks in pipes from reactor vibrations. Operators are thus “gambling in a dangerous game to increase profits and decrease government oversight,” he said.
Former GE senior field engineer Kei Sugaoka agreed, saying:
“The scariest thing, on top of all the other problems, is that all the nuclear power plants are aging, causing a deterioration of piping and joints which are always exposed to strong radiation and heat.”
As a result, Moret, like Caldicott, said:
“It is not a question of whether or not a nuclear disaster will occur in Japan (or most anywhere); it is a question of when it will occur,” and if catastrophic enough, perhaps nothing can be done to contain it.
Moreover, all radiation, especially large amounts, is harmful, cumulative, permanent and unforgiving. Yet lunatic fringe, self-styled “nuclear experts” like Ann Coulter told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that a “growing body of evidence (shows radiation) is actually good for you and reduces cases of cancer.” Even O’Reilly reacted skeptically to the “hormesis” notion. Wikipedia calls it:
“the term for generally-favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors,” including radiation.
Other toxins aside, no amount of radiation is safe. In her book “Nuclear Madness,” Helen Caldicott explained:
“Lower doses of radiation can cause abnormalities of the immune system and can also cause leukemia five to ten years after exposure; (other) cancer(s), twelve to sixty years later; and genetic diseases and congenital anomalies in future generations.”
“Nuclear radiation is forever,” she added. It doesn’t dissipate or disappear. Jeff Patterson, former Physicians for Social Responsibility president said, “There is no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from food, water or other sources. Period.” In 1953, Nobel laureate George Wald agreed saying “no amount of radiation is safe. Every dose is an overdose.”
On March 19, Ralph Nader’s “Nuclear Nightmare” article said:
“Over 40 years ago….the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) estimated that a full nuclear meltdown could contaminate an area ‘the size of Pennsylvania’ and cause massive casualties.”
In square miles, Pennsylvania is one-third the size of Japan. Nader said that “people in northern Japan may lose their land, homes, relatives, and friends as a result of a dangerous technology designed simply to boil water.”
On March 25, New York Times writers Hiroko Tabuchi, Keith Bradsher and David Jolly headlined, “Japan Encourages a Wider Evacuation from Reactor Area,” saying:
“New signs emerged Friday that parts of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were so damaged and contaminated that it would be even harder to bring the plant under control soon.”
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) measured seawater showing “the level of iodine-131 at 50 becquerels per cubic centimeter – 1,250 times the legal limit.”
Moreover, several workers were contaminated by water measuring 10,000 times above normal, according to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences. In addition, a senior nuclear executive said “a long vertical crack” running down the side of the reactor vessel (expected to enlarge) was detected “leaking fluids and gases.” The Times said, “There is a definite crack in the vessel – it’s up and down and it’s large. The problem with cracks is they do not get smaller.”
In addition, contamination is spreading, now affecting Tokyo water with elevated radioactive iodine levels, an alert saying don’t let infants drink it. Milk, vegetables, fruits, and likely all crops in northern Japan are affected. Further, on March 25, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said:
“Iodine-131 detected in Tokyo hit 12,000 becquerels, compared with the previous day, a tenfold increase in both radioactive iodine and cesium.” In addition, “Hitachinaka City, Ibaraki Prefecture, saw the highest radioactive values recorded, with 12,000 becquerels of cesium, iodine and 85,000 becquerels.”
On March 25, the Takoma Park, MD-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) said:
“Radioactive iodine releases from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi reactors may exceed those of Three Mile Island by over 100,000 times….While Chernobyl had one source of radioactivity, its reactor, there are seven leaking radiation sources at the Japanese site. Together, the three damaged reactors and four spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiicho contain (much) more long-lived radioactivity, notably cesium-137, than the Chernobyl reactor.”
Its half life is about 30 years. According to IEER president Arjun Makhijani, “This accident has long since passed the level of Three Mile Island.” Already, large parts of Honshu, Japan’s main island, have been affected. Even so, Japanese authorities haven’t been forthcoming about actual radiation releases that independent experts believe are extremely high and dangerous.
On March 26, government officials said predictions on when Fukushima could be stabilized aren’t known, spokesman Yukio Edano saying “this is not the stage for predictions.” According to IAEA head Yukiya Amano, “(t)his is a very serious accident by all standards, and it is not yet over.” Ending it “will take quite a long time.”
So far efforts to stabilize the damaged reactors haven’t succeeded. On March 24, Natural News.com writer Mike Adams headlined, “Radioactive fallout from Fukushima approaching same levels as Chernobyl,” saying:
“The radioactive (iodine-131) fallout is now as much as 73 percent of the daily radiation emitted from Chernobyl following its meltdown disaster.” For cesium-137, it’s 60%.
Monitoring in Hawaii, Alaska, California, Montreal and other cities are registering Fukushima fallout. Yellow rain in Japan was reported, much like what happened after Chernobyl. Whether it’s entirely radioactive isn’t known. Contamination, however, is spreading, yet “the nuclear industry says stop worrying….it’s all safe!”
On March 25, Natural News.com writer Ethan Huff headlined, “Ominous smoke plumes, contaminated water and food, but everything is just fine in Japan, suggest authorities,” saying:
“….black smoke….was seen billowing from Reactor 3, (containing) highly dangerous MOX plutonium fuel,” prompting an “evacuation at all four reactors.” No explanation was given.
In addition, Kyodo News said “mysterious neutron beams (were seen) coming from the plant 13 times since” the earthquake/tsunami, suggesting uranium and plutonium releases from damaged reactors and fuel rods.
Interviewed on March 17, nuclear expert Hirose Takashi doubts water sprayed on damaged reactors was effective, saying:
“If you want to cool a reactor down with water, you have to circulate the water inside and carry the heat away, otherwise it has no meaning. So the only solution is to reconnect the electricity. Otherwise, it’s like pouring water on lava.”
Moreover, by using salt water “(y)ou get salt. The salt will get into all these valves and cause them to freeze. They won’t move. This will be happening everywhere. So I can’t believe that it’s just a simple matter of reconnecting the electricity and the water will begin to circulate….I can’t understand it….Now it’s a complete mess inside….I’m speaking of the worst case, but the probability is not low….Only in Japan it is being hidden.”
“I hate to say it, but I am pessimistic….We have to think of all six (reactors) going down, and the possibility of that happening is not low.”
On March 26, Reuters headlined, “Radiation spikes in seawater by stricken Japanese plant,” saying:
“Radioactivity levels are soaring in seawater near (Fukushima), Japan’s nuclear safety agency said on Saturday….” On March 25, tests showed they spiked to 1,250 times normal. NISA official Hidehiko Nishiyama criticized Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) for not following safety procedures inside the turbine building. Throughout the crisis, TEPCO hasn’t given accurate information on the disaster’s severity, downplaying it instead.
As a result, independent experts express grave concerns that conditions are much worse than reported. They also believe it will take months perhaps to contain Fukusima. In the meantime, radiation keeps leaking and spreading, but it will be years before the real toll is known. Downplaying its gravity is scandalous.
~
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com
Fukushima troubles affecting other nuclear plants
NHK World | March 26, 2011
Japanese electric power companies that operate nuclear power plants are facing difficulty in either restarting nuclear reactors in their checkups or transporting nuclear fuel to the power plants.
Municipal governments that host nuclear power plants are urging plant operators to freeze expansion projects and to review safety measures.
Hokuriku Electric Power Company has indicated that the firm has difficulty in rebooting two reactors at its Shika plant in Ishikawa Prefecture without the understanding of the prefectural government and residents. The reactors were taken out of operation for either mechanical trouble or regular inspection.
In western Japan, Kansai Electric Power Company has decided to postpone transporting nuclear fuel to one reactor at its Takahama plant in Fukui Prefecture from France.
The company cites difficulty in ensuring the fuel’s safe delivery because the government is busy handling the aftermath of the March 11th disasters and can’t provide the necessary safeguards for transport.
Kyushu Electric Power Company has delayed restarting its two reactors at the Genkai plant in Saga Prefecture.
Ichiki-Kushikino City in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, says it will ask Kyushu Electric to freeze planned construction of a new reactor at its Sendai plant until the safety of the plant is guaranteed. Most of the city is within 20 kilometers of the nuclear power plant in neighboring Sendai City.
Fukui Prefecture in central Japan has urged Japan Atomic Power Company, which runs Tsuruga Power Station, to do all it can to ensure safety of its plant.
The plant operator replied that it has just installed portable emergency power generators for its two reactors.
The company has also revealed new safety measures costing nearly 250 million dollars, including a plan to add pipes that supply water directly from a fire truck to one of its reactors and its spent fuel pool.
The reactor is a boiling-water type, the same as those at Tokyo Electric’s troubled Fukushima plant.
JAPAN: RADIATION ‘SAFE’, PRESS EVACUATES, INVESTORS SCARED
NO RADIATION THREAT SAYS MEDIA: REPORTERS PULLED OUT OF JAPAN
Meanwhile, Frightened Investors in the USA and Europe Seek Protection
by keith harmon snow | 20 March 2011
Reporting about the nuclear crises in Japan and around the world is getting curiouser and curiouser. Western media are heavily downplaying the threat of radiation in what amounts to an Alice in Wonderland fable of disinformation straight out of the rabbit hole.
Worried about profits and the the destabilization of the YEN and NIKKEI Index, the media is doing damage control to help keep people from flooding out of Japan and further destabilizing the Japanese economy. Given the evidence, the history of disasters and epidemics of disease, reporting that downplays Japan’s radiation threat is criminal.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., frightened investors are seeking protections and insurances from industry and government. Wall Street is worried. This is getting curiouser and curiouser.
The irony: “art project” photographed in Tokyo depicts humans in states of decay, resembling images of children with deformed limbs born near Chernobyl. © Keith Harmon Snow, 1992
For example, on 20 March 2011, CNN ran a video story, “Facts whisper, fears scream during crises,” where their experts proclaim that fears of radiation are unfounded and misinformation abounds. CNN’s latest nuclear expert — Dan Polansky — calls this radiophobia: an irrational fear of radiation with no basis in fact. Even for the Japanese nuclear workers who are closest to the Fukushima hot zone, says CNN reporter Stan Grant, “radiation might make people sick, but it won’t kill them.”
Meanwhile, CNN describes Dan Polansky as a “nuclear expert”, who “specializes in weapons of mass destruction and knows about radiation.” What they don’t tell us is that Polansky works for the Georgia (USA) Department of Community Health, he studied at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL), and is a recent graduate of Radiological Emergency Planning at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Pretty good credentials, no doubt. Must be telling the truth. [Quack.]
However, LLNL and INEL are two of the Department of Energy and Department of Defense top classified weapons laboratories, both also SUPERFUND sites of massive toxic nuclear waste. Work at national laboratories like INEL and LLNL requires high-level national security clearances: it looks like Daniel Polansky is another spook.
The Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has produced some studies that show some incidence of disease around the Yankee Rowe reactor (Rowe, MA, U.S.A.), which is now decommissioned; but they have also helped to whitewash nuclear (and other) risks of modern day society.
This is indeed very curious.
The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA) was founded by John D. Graham and specializes in advocating forms of risk-assessment widely criticized by community groups and legitimate health professionals. The Center gained funds from both industry and government agencies, including nuclear interests like: General Electric, the Edison Electric Institute, Electric Power Research Institute, New England Electric System (at least five nukes on the New England power grid) and Westinghouse Electric. GE and Westinghouse are two of the U.S.A.’s biggest nuke companies, and EPRI is a pro-nuke think tank that has produced propaganda about nukes for more than four decades.
Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis are not the same thing. Harvard School of Public Health supports the nuclear industry and helps to downplay radiation threats at many levels. However, Harvard Center for Risk Analysis is an industry front producing junk science — spurious information posited as science — and debunking truth everywhere in the corporate media.
Looking a little deeper down the rabbit hole we find, for one curious example, that David Ropeik is an Instructor in the Harvard University School of Continuing Education, Environmental Management program. Ropeik is also a former affiliate at the Harvard Center for Risk Assessment (which he says he left in 2004).
According to his own public relations biography advertised on the BAYER CropScience web page [Bayer is the big German multinational pharmaceutical corporation], Ropeik has also worked closely with the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and he “has been interviewed on risk perception by ABC Nightline, National Public Radio, NBC Dateline, ABC 20/20, Fox News, CNN, CNN International, BBC, CBC, CNBC, Voice of America, and dozens of regional radio stations nationwide.”
He has also “taught courses on media coverage of risk issues at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Kennedy School of Government, the Neiman Fellowship Program at Harvard, the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship program at MIT, Boston University’s Program in Science Journalism, the Emerson College program in Health Communication, and to the National Association of Science Writers, the Council for the Advancement of Science Writers, and the Society of Environmental Journalists.”
A long-time member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, David Ropeik is now a private consultant in Risk Perception, Risk Communication, and Risk Management with Ropeik & Associates, whose nuclear clients include Entergy Power Corporation (owns the dangerously unsafe Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station), Edison Electric Institute, the Electric Power Research Institute, the American Nuclear Society, the Egyptian Nuclear Authority, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Nuclear Institute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (who did a study on the incidence of disease on the radiation ‘pathways’ from the Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station), The Veterans Board for Dose Reconstruction, Department of Defense, and etc., and etc., and etc.
“Risk is a subjective affair,” reads the home page of Ropeik & Associates. “It’s not just a matter of the facts, but also how those facts feel. Understanding why some risks feel more frightening, and some less, is essential for communicating about risk effectively, and for tackling the human behavioral aspects of overall risk management.”
As far as the Society of Environmental Journalists, this is just another trade industry group, like any ‘Society of Professional This-or-That’, which maintains deep ties to industry and the media corporations that have censored and distorted the truth about radiation, nuclear weapons and nuclear power. For example, a look at their sponsors and foundation donors quickly leads to a large list of corporate interests, including nuclear corporations.
What a curious world we live in.
Given that there is “so little threat from radiation” in Japan, it is very curious that NBC pulled their entire news team out of Japan. Curiously, it seems that CNN’s Anderson Cooper also pulled out of Japan — and who could blame him! — and is now reporting on Libya from somewhere else (Hong Kong?).
On March 20, 2011, Japanese Officials confirmed radiation food poisoning. “Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said checks of milk from Fukushima prefecture, where the plant is located, and of spinach grown in Ibaraki, a neighbouring prefecture, surpassed limits set by the government… It was the government’s first report of food being contaminated by radiation since the March 11 quake and tsunami unleashed the nuclear crisis.”
Thousands of U.S. military families have also been evacuated from Japan under the U.S. Department of Defense ‘voluntary evacuation’ program initiated because of radiation concerns.
Meanwhile, on March 19, 2011 financial media began reporting that U.S. investors seeing the nuclear industry in Japan crash, burn and melt are frightened of Financial Losses due to Boring Utility Debt.
Curiouser and curiouser.
“Investors are seeking protection from a public backlash against nuclear power producers as the threat from earthquake-damaged reactors in Japan stokes calls by U.S. lawmakers to limit plants in this nation,” reported Bloomberg News.
“Utility companies, typically considered a haven among credit investors because of their resilience in economic downturns, are being punished as Tokyo Electric Power Co. struggles to cool damaged reactors. Environmental groups want limits on U.S. nuclear plants, and Representative Edward Markey is seeking a moratorium on facilities in seismically active areas. Nuclear-power executives say the nation’s reactors can withstand such disasters.”
Behind the scenes, corporations and money markets managers and futures investors are swapping debt portfolios and jockeying to maximize profits and minimize losses.
While the people of Japan suffer the fate of massive radiation emissions — ‘leaks’ is another term invested by the industry and used by media to downplay the invisible radiation dispersed near any reactor — the utility companies are portrayed as the victims. Utility companies are “being punished” and “investors seeking protection” are now the victims.
Curiouser, and curiouser, and curiouser.
~
March 23, 2011
Guns and Butter KPFA radio program interviews Kieth Harmon Snow
See also:
Featured Video
Seyed M. Marandi: U.S. Military DIVIDED? Iran’s Secret Defense EXPOSED
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
‘Israel sees Iran as obstacle to its policies’
Press TV – August 25, 2017
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel felt threatened by Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East. Netanyahu expressed his Iranophobic view in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday. Press TV has asked Scott Rickard, former American intelligence linguist from Tampa, Florida, and Brent Budowsky, a columnist at The Hill from Washington, to give their thoughts on the issue.
Rickard said Tel Aviv is concerned about the fact that the regime could not carry out its old project to spread sectarian divisions and pave the way for dismemberment of the countries in the Middle East region because of the Iranian-led resistance against Israeli policies, not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but also in the whole region.
“Iran is not a threat to Israel whatsoever. The threat that Israel sees is the fact that their Oded Yinon Plan is being put to a hold by Iran,” the intelligence linguist said on Thursday night.
“They (the Israelis) look at Iran as a threat only because they have no influence on their governments and Iran is autonomous and is not under the Zionist influence,” he added.
Since the victory of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Tehran has been critical of Israel’s policies in the region, whereas “no leaders [of other states] even dared to speak out against Zionism,” Rickard argued. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran declares ‘historic victory’ over US, says enemy forced to accept its proposal
- Trump Claims Ceasefire, Reopening of Strait of Hormuz Agreement with Iran
- Israeli tank fire killed UN peacekeeper in Lebanon, UNIFIL investigation finds
- Russia, China block Bahrain-sponsored UN resolution on Strait of Hormuz
- The US-Israeli War on Science is an Assault on our Future
- Trump’s Promise to Bomb Iran ‘Like Never Before’ Faces Brutal Logistics — Expert
- Germany seeks to restrict stays abroad for men of fighting age – Berliner Zeitung
- Evidence points to Ukraine being behind TurkStream attempted sabotage, but that should come as no surprise
- Sri Lanka secures supplies of Russia oil – minister
- Nations across Asia strike direct deals with Iran for Hormuz passage
- If Americans Knew
- Thousands dead and neighborhoods razed to the ground: Aid agencies fear southern Lebanon is becoming the new Gaza
- The war the US is fighting for Israel could cost trillions
- ‘Cigarette Burns, Nail Wounds’: Toddler Tortured in Gaza to Coerce Father
- Trump Says US Sent ‘a Lot of Guns’ to Protesters in Iran
- Israeli forces destroy 17 UN peacekeeper cameras in south Lebanon
- US-Israeli strikes ‘completely destroy’ synagogue in Tehran
- Archbishop for US Military Says Iran War Is Unjust Under Catholic Teaching
- Iranian leaders’ Open Letters to the American People
- Trump says Iranians appreciate bombs, WHO warns of nuclear risks – Daily Update
- U.N. experts demand Israel release prominent Gaza doctor after reports of ‘severe torture’
- No Tricks Zone
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
Aletho News 