Putting Nukes In A Poor Black Georgia Town
If A Black President Does It, Is It Still Environmental Racism?
Bruce A. Dixon — Black Agenda Report — May 5, 2010
In the weeks since President Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to build new nuclear reactors next to an existing pair of nukes in mostly black Burke County, GA, the inconvenient questions, unanswered and mostly unasked, continue to pile up.
The first and most obvious questions are why nukes, and why Burke County?
The answer to “why nukes” is that discussion of the catastrophic risk inherent to nuclear power is pretty much off the table in mainstream media these days. The Obama administration likes to call it “safe nuclear energy,” often in the same breath as “clean coal.” Both are colossal and equally transparent lies. The 24th anniversary of the horrific nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine on April 24 passed almost unnoticed in the mainstream US media, although video of a brawl over something else in that nation’s parliament made most of the networks here. Greenpeace marked the event with the release of a study by more than 50 scientists across the planet who peg the human toll of Chernobyl at a quarter million cancers, 100,000 of them fatal. Like the anniversary of the disaster itself, the Greenpeace story dropped soundlessly down the memory hole. Our amnesia is nearly perfect. I spoke to a class of journalism students at a local university at the beginning of April. Not a one of them ever heard of Chernobyl, or even of Three Mile Island. So why not nukes?
A second set of questions are why put nukes on a river that’s already the 4th most toxic waterway in the nation, on a site just across from the contaminated Savannah River nuclear weapons installation? And if leaky civilian and military nukes really are the job-creating answers to poverty, shouldn’t Burke County, GA be one of the wealthiest, instead of the poorest places east of the Mississippi 25 years after its first civilian nukes, and six decades after neighboring towns, some of them all black on the South Carolina side of the river, were bulldozed to create the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility?
A third set of questions are whether anybody is listening to the urgent warnings from nuclear experts that the site’s planned next-generation reactors are even less safe than their leaky older cousins? Like most information unfavorable to utility companies and the nuclear industry, these warnings cannot seem to find their way into the mainstream media.
A fourth set of questions are why there are no laws requiring, and no funds to pay for, testing the air, soil, water, fish, wildlife, or the people of mostly black Burke County, who are experiencing an unexplained epidemic of cancer? The people living closest to the new and existing reactors in Waynesboro, GA depend on ground water wells for drinking and bathing water. Ground water is easily contaminated by tritium, a radioactive substance produced in abundance by civilian reactors and used on the other side of the Savannah River to produce nuclear weapons.
CNN aired a brief but excellent report from Shell Bluff, GA April 16 and 19 in which they pointed out that the cancer rate was far higher than that of surrounding communities, and that local residents have held multiple public meetings opposing the new nukes, demanding testing and answers to the widespread local cancer epidemic, to little avail. The residents of Shell Bluff don’t understand, the CNN reporter said, why their water and soil is not being tested, why nobody is interested in determining why so many of their friends, family members and neighbors are sickening and dying of cancer.
Perhaps because of the vast amounts of campaign cash the nuclear industry makes available to both Republicans and Democrats, current federal and state laws allow nuclear utilities to do their own testing, and keep the methods, extent and results of that testing confidential. And since 2004 there have been no federal funds provided to the consultants that once did limited testing on the Georgia side of the river. Persistent back channel efforts by local residents and WAND, a local, grassroots and woman-led local organization, may result in some funds being released for testing, but that outcome is by no means certain. It was the tireless work of WAND activists, who are helping locals sue in opposition to the plant’s construction and operating permits, which alerted CNN to the story in the first place.
The fifth bunch of unasked and unanswered questions are whether the people in Shell Bluff, GA want more nukes in their backward, and whether the US is democracy-proof enough to put them there anyway. The first part is easy to answer, as CNN discovered. They don’t.
“We had protests, and we voiced our opinion,” said one local resident, “and we didn’t want them, but it’s just, you know — we’re just the little peons.”
When the CNN reporter asked asked two local women whether they thought President Obama had “…done enough to make sure that people like you are safe before new reactors are built?” they opined that the president “…doesn’t know we’re down here.” That kind of answers the second part too, doesn’t it?
The last question is whether putting inherently dangerous nukes into mostly black Burke County, GA amounts to environmental racism. I asked Clark Atlanta University’s Dr. Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center and the man who first coined the term “environmental racism” to characterize the frequent placement of toxic and dangerous industrial facilities into minority communities. This is what he told us:
The siting of risky nuclear power plants in Shell Bluff community in Burke County is consistent with the environmental racism pattern I documented in Dumping in Dixie some two decades ago. In Georgia, there are currently three coal fired power plants proposed for mostly black and poor communities with the promise of jobs. In reality, fence-line black community residents don’t get the jobs. They get pollution and more poverty. And they get sick.
So the question hangs — if a black president does it, is it still environmental racism?
Germans form anti-nuclear human chain
Press TV – 24 April 2010
Protestors urge govt. to change nuclear policy.
Tens of thousands of Germans have created a human chain as they expressed opposition to the use of nuclear energy.
Around 100,000 people participated in the event on Saturday to form the human chain, measuring at 120 kilometers (75 miles) along the Elbe River between the northern towns of Brunsbuettel and Kruemmel that passed through the city of Hamburg.
“The chain is almost complete,” a police spokeswoman in the northern German region of Schleswig-Holstein told AFP.
Organizers of the peaceful demonstration dubbed “Chain reaction — Stop nuclear energy” also urged the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to alter its nuclear policy.
“Today will spark a countrywide chain reaction of protests and resistance if the government does not reverse its atomic policy,” organizers said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The German government has offered delay on the closing of the country’s 17 nuclear power plants beyond a 2020 target date.
The protests come just days before Monday’s 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
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Germans call for arms embargo against Israel
BDS Day of Action | March 30, 2010
On Tuesday, 30th of March 2010 activists of different peace groups gathered close to the Berlin office of Germany’s biggest steel and arms industry company Thyssen Krupp in the centre of Berlin close to the sqare called Gendarmenmarkt to protest against the export of German Dolphin Submarines and warships to Israel.
(The text on the foto reads: “No submarines and warships to Israel!”)
The protest was part of the second Global BDS Day of Action in solidarity with the Palestinian people and for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
ThyssenKrupp is the owner of the North-German shipyard HDW (Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft GmbH). HDW already fabricated/produced 5 submarines of the Dolphin type for Israel. A further ship of this kind is planned to be sent to Israel. It is widely believed among experts that the Israeli government wants to add atomic warheads to the submarines.Later the avtivists turned to a Natural Food Store. They distributed leaflets informing the public about the fact that Israel is one of most important producer of Natural Food products. In the text of the leaflet with the headline “Off One’s Oats” (“Appetit vergangen”) it is stressed that “the Israeli organic agriculture is part of a regime of permanent human rights violations, of the destruction of the environment and violence/disregard of International Law.”
The activists are members of a group where different organisations work together – among them the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East/EJJP Germany, the Middle East Committee of Berlin Peace Coordination and the Workshop Middle East Berlin.
The Consequences of Chernobyl
By KARL GROSSMAN | April 23, 2010
Monday is the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. It comes as the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear government officials in the U.S. and other nations try to “revive” nuclear power. It also follows the just-released publication of a book, the most comprehensive study ever made, on the impacts of the Chernobyl disaster.
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment has just been published by the New York Academy of Sciences. It is authored by three noted scientists: Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Its editor is Dr. Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicologist long-involved in studying the health impacts of radioactivity.
The book is solidly based—on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports—some 5,000 in all.
It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died of cancer caused by the Chernobyl accident. That’s between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004.
More deaths, it projects, will follow.
The book explodes the claim of the International Atomic Energy Agency—still on its website – that the expected death toll from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000. The IAEA, the new book shows, is under-estimating, to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.
Comments Alice Slater, representative in New York of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: “The tragic news uncovered by the comprehensive new research that almost one million people died in the toxic aftermath of Chernobyl should be a wake-up call to people all over the world to petition their governments to put a halt to the current industry-driven ‘nuclear renaissance.’ Aided by a corrupt IAEA, the world has been subjected to a massive cover-up and deception about the true damages caused by Chernobyl.”
Further worsening the situation, she said, has been “the collusive agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization in which the WHO is precluded from publishing any research on radiation effects without consultation with the IAEA.” WHO, the public health arm of the UN, has supported the IAEA’s claim that 4,000 will die as a result of the accident.
“How fortunate,” said Ms. Slater, “that independent scientists have now revealed the horrific costs of the Chernobyl accident.”
The book also scores the position of the IAEA, set up through the UN in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy,” and its 1959 agreement with WHO. There is a “need to change,” it says, the IAEA-WHO pact. It has muzzled the WHO, providing for the “hiding” from the “public of any information…unwanted” by the nuclear industry.
“An important lesson from the Chernobyl experience is that experts and organizations tied to the nuclear industry have dismissed and ignored the consequences of the catastrophe,” it states.
The book details the spread of radioactive poisons following the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26, 1986. These major releases only ended when the fire at the reactor was brought under control in mid-May. Emitted were “hundreds of millions of curies, a quantity hundreds of times larger than the fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The most extensive fall-out occurred in regions closest to the plant—in the Ukraine (the reactor was 60 miles from Kiev in Ukraine), Belarus and Russia.
However, there was fallout all over the world as the winds kept changing direction “so the radioactive emissions…covered an enormous territory.”
The radioactive poisons sent billowing from the plant into the air included Cesium-137, Plutonium, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90.
There is a breakdown by country, highlighted by maps, of where the radionuclides fell out. Beyond Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the countries included Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The radiological measurements show that some 10% of Chernobyl poisons “fell on Asia…Huge areas” of eastern Turkey and central China “were highly contaminated,” reports the book. Northwestern Japan was impacted, too.
Northern Africa was hit with “more than 5% of all Chernobyl releases.” The finding of Cesium-137 and both Plutonium-239 and Plutonium-240 “in accumulated Nile River sediment is evidence of significant Chernobyl contamination,” it says. “Areas of North America were contaminated from the first, most powerful explosion, which lifted a cloud of radionuclides to a height of more than 10 km. Some 1% of all Chernobyl nuclides,” says the book, “fell on North America.”
There is an examination of genetic impacts with records reflecting an increase in “chromosomal aberrations” wherever there was fallout. This will continue through the “children of irradiated parents for as many as seven generations.” So “the genetic consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe will impact hundreds of millions of people.”
As to fatal cancer, the list of countries and consequences begins with Belarus. “For the period 1900-2000 cancer mortality in Belarus increased 40%,” it states, again based on medical data and illuminated by tables in the book. “The increase was a maximum in the most highly contaminated Gomel Province and lower in the less contaminated Brest and Mogilev provinces.” They include childhood cancers, thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers.
Considering health data of people in all nations impacted by the fallout, the “overall [cancer] mortality for the period from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated as 985,000 additional deaths.”
Further, “the concentrations” of some of the poisons, because they have radioactive half-lives ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 years, “will remain practically the same virtually forever.”
The book also examines the impact on plants and animals. ”Immediately after the catastrophe, the frequency of plant mutations in the contaminated territories increased sharply.”
There are photographs of some of these plant mutations. “Chernobyl irradiation has caused many structural anomalies and tumorlike changes in many plant species and has led to genetic disorders, sometimes continuing for many years,” it says. “Twenty-three years after the catastrophe it is still too early to know if the whole spectrum of plant radiogenic changes has been discerned. We are far from knowing all of the consequences for flora resulting from the catastrophe.”
As to animals, the book notes “serious increases in morbidity and mortality that bear striking resemblance to changes in the public health of humans—increasing tumor rates, immunodeficiencies, decreasing life expectancy…”
In one study it is found that “survival rates of barn swallows in the most contaminated sites near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are close to zero. In areas of moderate contamination, annual survival is less than 25%.” Research is cited into ghastly abnormalities in barn swallows that do hatch: “two heads, two tails.”
“In 1986,” the book states, “the level of irradiation in plants and animals in Western Europe, North America, the Arctic, and eastern Asia were sometimes hundreds and even thousands of times above acceptable norms.”
In its final chapter, the book declares that the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant “was the worst technogenic accident in history.” And it examines “obstacles” to the reporting of the true consequences of Chernobyl with a special focus on “organizations associated with the nuclear industry” that “protect the industry first—not the public.” Here, the IAEA and WHO are charged.
The book ends by quoting U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s call in 1963 for an end of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.“The Chernobyl catastrophe,” it declares, “demonstrates that the nuclear industry’s willingness to risk the health of humanity and our environment with nuclear power plants will result, not only theoretically, but practically, in the same level of hazard as nuclear weapons.”
Dr. Sherman, speaking of the IAEA’s and WHO’s dealing with the impacts of Chernobyl, commented: “It’s like Dracula guarding the blood bank.” The 1959 agreement under which WHO “is not to be independent of the IAEA” but must clear any information it obtains on issues involving radioactivity with the IAEA has put “the two in bed together.”
Of her reflections on 14 months editing the book, she said: “Every single system that was studied—whether human or wolves or livestock or fish or trees or mushrooms or bacteria—all were changed, some of them irreversibly. The scope of the damage is stunning.”
In his foreword, Dr. Dimitro Grodzinsky, chairman of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, writes about how “apologists of nuclear power” sought to hide the real impacts of the Chernobyl disaster from the time when the accident occurred. The book “provides the largest and most complete collection of data concerning the negative consequences of Chernobyl on the health of people and the environment…The main conclusion of the book is that it is impossible and wrong ‘to forget Chernobyl.’”
In the record of Big Lies, the claim of the IAEA-WHO that “only” 4,000 people will die as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe is among the biggest.
The Chernobyl accident is, as the new book documents, an ongoing global catastrophe.
And it is a clear call for no new nuclear power plants to be built and for the closing of the dangerous atomic machines now running—and a switch to safe energy technologies, now available, led by solar and wind energy, that will not leave nearly a million people dead from one disaster.
Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He is author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, Power Crazy and The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat To Our Planet and writer and narrator of television programs among them Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens (www.envirovideo.com).
French-Style Nuclear Reprocessing Will Not Solve U.S. Nuclear Waste Problems
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research | Press Release
Contrary to some prevailing opinion, reprocessing would not eliminate the need for a deep geologic disposal program to replace Yucca Mountain. It aggravates waste, proliferation, and cost problems. The volume of waste to be disposed of in deep geologic repository is increased about six times on a life-cycle basis in the French approach compared to the once-through no-reprocessing approach of the United States.
A new report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a nonprofit scientific research group, shows that France uses less than 1 percent of the natural uranium resource, contrary to an impression among some policy makers. The report has several recommendations for President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which was created to address U.S. nuclear waste issues after the administration’s cancellation of the Yucca Mountain program.
IEER President Dr. Arjun Makhijani, the author of the report: “In recent years, a ‘French fever’ has gripped the promoters of nuclear power in the United States. Praise of France’s management of spent fuel by reprocessing, including its use of the extracted plutonium as fuel in its nuclear power reactors, is now routinely heard. But it is a fantasy on the scale of the 1950s “too cheap to meter” mythology about nuclear power to imagine that 90 or 95 percent of the “energy value” of U.S. spent fuel can be extracted by reprocessing.”
Key IEER report findings include the following:
-- On a life-cycle basis, French-style reprocessing and recycling increases
the volume of waste that would have to be disposed of in a geologic
repository. Reprocessing results in high-level radioactive waste and
large volumes of Greater than Class C waste, both of which must be
managed by deep geologic disposal. Their combined volume on a
life-cycle basis is estimated to be about six times more than the
no-reprocessing approach that is current U.S. policy, according to
Department of Energy estimates. Low-level waste volume and waste
transportation shipments are also estimated to increase several-fold.
-- France spends about two cents per kilowatt-hour more for electricity
generated from reprocessed plutonium compared to that generated from
fresh uranium fuel.
-- Attempting to combine reprocessing with breeder reactors to convert
uranium in U.S. spent fuel in plutonium will create intolerable costs
and risks. Reprocessing plus breeder reactors are much more expensive
than light water reactors today, which are themselves expensive. Such
a system is required to convert most of the uranium in spent fuel into
a reactor fuel. Even a single penny in excess generation cost per
kilowatt-hour in a breeder reactor-reprocessing system would lead to
an added $8 trillion in costs to convert nearly all of the uranium in
the 100,000 metric tons of U.S. spent into usable fuel. It would take
hundreds of years to accomplish the task and require separation of
tens of thousands of bombs equivalent of fissile material each year.
The proliferation risks will be far greater than today.
-- Adoption of a French-style reprocessing program would not eliminate the
need for a deep geologic repository. Even complete fissioning of all
actinides - an unrealistic proposition - will leave behind large
amounts of very long-lived fission and activation products like
iodine-129, cesium-135, and chlorine-36 that will pose risks far into
the future -- much beyond the 24,100-year half-life of plutonium-239.
In fact, France needs a geologic repository and opposition to one has
been intense there. The French appear to dislike nuclear waste in
their backyards as much as people in the United States.
-- Proliferation risks are inherently part of the French (and any other)
approach to reprocessing. Even advanced reprocessing technologies will
not significantly reduce proliferation risks. For instance a study
authored by scientists from DOE laboratories, including Los Alamos and
Sandia, concluded that it would take only a few days or a few weeks
for a proliferant country to make material for nuclear bombs once it had
reprocessing plants. It found that new technologies, including
electrometallurgical processing, resulted in "only a modest
improvement in reducing proliferation risk over existing PUREX
technologies and these modest improvements apply primarily for
non-state actors." The IEER report concluded that electrometallurgical
increases risks in other ways. For instance, it is far less difficult
to conceal a plant than the present PUREX technology.
Other key findings include the following:
-- Six decades of sodium cooled breeder reactor development has so far
resulted in failure. Historical experience indicates no learning curve
for the sodium cooled fast breeder reactor, which is the breeder
technology that has received the most development. In fact, the two
most recent large scale demonstration reactors, Superphénix in France
and Monju in Japan, have been failures. Superphénix had a cumulative
capacity factor of less than 8 percent before it was shut. Monju has
been closed for almost 15 years, following a sodium fire, and has not
generated a significant amount of electricity. Sodium cooled breeder
reactors are not commercial today despite global expenditures on the
order of $100 billion over six decades. They face a host of safety,
proliferation and cost hurdles to overcome, some arising from the fact
that they use liquid sodium for cooling. They are unlikely to be
commercial in the near future. For instance, Japan's estimated date
for commercialization of the sodium cooled fast breeder is 2050.
-- Storage of liquid high-level wastes creates some risk of catastrophic
releases of radioactivity. For instance, the Norwegian Radiation
Protection Authority has estimated that a severe accident at the
liquid waste storage facility in Sellafield, Britain, could result in
cesium-137 contamination between 10 percent and 5,000 percent of that
created in Norway by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident,
which is the worst commercial accident to date, by far. A catastrophic
release of radioactivity from a military high-level waste tank
occurred in the Soviet Union in 1957.
-- Using more than 1 percent of the uranium resource in a light water
reactor system is technically impossible even with reprocessing and
re-enrichment. In light water reactor systems, almost all the uranium
resource winds up as depleted uranium or in spent fuel. Even with
repeated reprocessing and re-enrichment, use of the natural uranium
resource cannot be increased to more than 1 percent in such a system.
A corollary is that the use of 90 to 95 percent of the uranium
resource or of the material in the spent fuel is impossible in a light
water reactor system even with reprocessing.
These are physical constraints that go with the system and also apply to France’s system.
The IEER report also sets out a number of recommendations for the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future appointed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu:
-- Spent fuel from existing reactors should be slated for direct geologic
disposal without reprocessing of any kind; a suitable path for a
scientifically sound program should be set forth.
-- In the interim, spent fuel should be stored on site as safely as
possible - in low density configurations while in pools and in
hardened storage when moved to dry casks.
-- Breeder reactors and reprocessing are not commercial after six decades
of development of sodium cooled breeder reactors, and enormous
expenditures. Given the long time frame for commercialization
estimated even by some promoters, the proliferation risks, and efforts
already made, it does not appear to be a good investment to spend more
R&D money in that direction. Rather energy supply R&D resources should
be focused on development and deployment of renewable energy
technologies and energy efficiency.
-- The Commission should request the French company AREVA and/or the
French government to supply it with data on the present use of the
natural uranium resource purchased for French nuclear reactors,
including, specifically, the increases in fission fraction that have
actually been achieved by reprocessing and recycling.
-- The Commission should also request official data on Greater than Class
C waste equivalent expected to be generated on a life-cycle basis in
France, and the total volumes and heat generation of packaged waste
expected to be disposed of in a deep geologic repository, including
estimates of decommissioning waste.
-- The Commission should investigate the public support or lack thereof
for repository programs in France and Britain, the countries with the
longest history of commercial spent fuel reprocessing.
-- The Commission should make the same requests regarding the British
reprocessing program.
-- Official analyses of the mechanisms, probability, and consequences of
large accidental releases of radioactivity to the atmosphere from
liquid high-level waste storage in tanks should be requested from the
French and British governments.
ABOUT IEER
On March 24, 2010, IEER held a news conference to release documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showing that the outgoing Bush Administration inked 11th-hour agreements with more than a dozen utilities involving 21 proposed nuclear reactors. As IEER noted, between the output of existing commercial nuclear reactors and the 21 proposed nuclear reactors covered by the agreements quietly signed by the outgoing Bush Administration, the U.S. already has agreed to store enough spent (used) reactor fuel to fill the equivalent of not one, but two, Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repositories. For more information on the March 24th news event, go to
The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research provides policy-makers, journalists, and the public with understandable and accurate scientific and technical information on energy and environmental issues. IEER’s aim is to bring scientific excellence to public policy issues in order to promote the democratization of science and a safer, healthier environment.
Source: Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Takoma Park, MD
Swedes embrace nuclear waste land
By John Tagliabue | Scotsman | 11 April 2010
INGER Nordholm quit her job as a hairdresser in the Swedish seaside town of Osthammar 12 years ago, fearing the chemical treatments she had to use were bad for her health. Now, the town is competing for the right to become Sweden’s permanent storage site for radioactive waste and Nordholm works for the company that wants to build it. She guides visitors through a temporary warehouse for nuclear waste, hoping to reassure them that it poses no danger to their health.
Eighty per cent of the town’s 21,000 inhabitants are in favour of the facility and Osthammar is one of two finalists among Swedish communities vying for the right to host the nuclear waste dump.
Sweden would seem an unlikely setting for such a competition as the country turned its back on nuclear power in the 1980s after less than 20 per cent approved of it in a referendum. But it has reversed course recently and is now planning to begin building new nuclear reactors, adding to the ten it already operates.
Legislation requires that before any new plants are built, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company, SKB, must create permanent storage space for the radioactive waste the reactors produce.
SKB found 18 of 20 possible towns near proposed sites intrigued by their proposition. Then it had to whittle the list down to two, Osthammar and Oskarshamn, both already the sites of nuclear plants.
The company has now said it will ask the Swedish government later this year for permission to build the storage depot in Osthammar. If the government gives the green light, construction could begin some time after 2015.
Nuclear physicist and SKB chief executive Claes Thegerstrom attributed Swedes’ new attitude towards nuclear energy to fears over global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions. Nuclear power plants do not produce carbon dioxide. […]
The dump’s opponents, Osthammar residents such as Mats Tornqvist, a retired chemist who returned to his native Osthammar from Stockholm, have conceded the fight, if not the argument.
“I’m a chemical engineer, I’ve worked with waste problems since 1985, I’ve read all the papers,” he said. “They can say all they want, they have no solution.”
He agreed with Jansson that the prospect of jobs brought people around. “We have a community here that is very dependent on this industry.” – Full article
Radiation leakage in Delhi panics nuclear establishment
The News | April 11, 2010
NEW DELHI: The discovery of at least nine powerful Cobalt-60 sources of nuclear radiation, which have fatally infected five people in a West Delhi industrial area, has sent shock waves among the local population as well as nuclear establishment in India.
Experts fear that many more people might have been exposed to strong radiation and would be in need of immediate medical attention.
Panic gripped Mayapuri industrial locality after news broke out that exposure to a ‘mysterious shining object’ had resulted in the emergence of strange symptoms in the owner of a scrap shop who was admitted to hospital on 4th April. India’s scientific community was alerted once the doctors diagnosed the symptoms as a result of exposure to strong doses of nuclear radiation. Nuclear and medical experts from Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and the Narora Atomic Power Plant in Uttar Pradesh were rushed to the site to scan the area and help doctors confirm the diagnosis.
Cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope of Cobalt was confirmed as the source of radiation.
According to the experts, this is not the first incident when radioactive material has found its way to the unauthorised places in India raising the specter of it being used in nuclear terrorism.
Security at Indian nuclear facilities has been breached time and again when nuclear material was stolen from nuclear installations. As late as Nov 2000 Indian Police seized 57 pounds of Uranium and arrested two persons for illicit trafficking of radioactive material. Lack of security at the Indian nuclear plants was underscored recently when on 25 Nov 2009 some rogue elements at the Kaiga Atomic Power Station in Karnataka, laced the drinking water with Tritium , contaminating at least 90 employees.
Death of a nuclear scientist, under mysterious circumstances at Kaiga in Jun 2009 has further raised the issue of security of personnel at the highly sensitive nuclear reactors of India, particularly those chosen to remain outside of the IAEA scrutiny.
The discovery of clandestine radioactive material in Delhi only serves to highlight the poor state of affairs at the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), the authority for controlling the security of radioactive material in India , say analysts.
Paying Now for the Next Three Mile Island
By HARVEY WASSERMAN | March 29, 2010
As radiation poured from 3 Mile Island 31 years ago this week, utility executives rested easy.
They knew that no matter how many people their errant nuke killed, and no matter how much property it destroyed, they would not be held liable.
Today this same class of executives demands untold taxpayer billions to build still more TMIs. No matter how many meltdowns they cause, and how much havoc they visit down on the public, they still believe they’re above the law.
Fueled with more than $600 million public relations slush money, they demand a risk-free “renaissance” financed by you and yours.
AS IF!
In 1980 I reported from central Pennsylvania on the dead and dying one year after. Dozens of interviews documented a horrifying range of radiation-related diseases including cancer, leukemia, birth defects, still births, malformations, sterility, heart attacks, strokes, emphysema, skin lesions, hair loss, a metallic taste and much more. As reported by the Baltimore News-American among others, such ailments also ripped through the animal population.
To this day no one knows how much radiation was released at the 1979 TMI accident, where it went or whom it harmed. The official line that “no one was killed” is arguably the biggest lie ever told in US industrial history. It is to public health what the promise of power “too cheap to meter” was to public finance.
It parallels Soviet lies about the 1986 catastrophe at Chernobyl, whose health effects continue to skyrocket. A devastating summary report issued by the New York Academy of Sciences (Yablokov, Nesterenko & Nesterenko: Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People & the Environment) says at least 980,000 people are likely to die from the fallout.
That would be a small fraction of the casualties had 9/11 terrorists dived into the two reactors at New York’s Indian Point instead of hitting the World Trade Center.
In a time of deep financial stress, it also counts that the TMI accident turned a $900 million asset into a $2 billion liability in a matter of minutes. Chernobyl has cost Belarus and Ukraine at least $500 billion and counting. And the price tag on a major meltdown anywhere in the US is virtually beyond calculation.
Thus those who think a flood of new nukes will flow unimpeded into the American pocketbook haven’t been paying attention:
1) Four northeastern nukes—in Vermont, New Jersey and the two at Indian Point— are under intense public pressure to shut within the next two years. Numerous other elderly reactors are likely to go down long before any new nukes could come on line.
2) French President Sarkozy is demanding that world financial institutions buy a bevy of new French-built reactors. But huge delays and cost-overruns at French projects in Finland and France itself have made the investment community wary to say the least, thus prompting his foot-stomping.
3) Documents leaked from inside France’s national utility EDF indicate cost-cutting has made the new French reactor design exceedingly prone to explosion, further unsettling potential investors.
4) The future of new US reactor construction hinges on massive loan guarantees and handouts. The public number is $54 billion, but the Nuclear Information & Resource Service says the real bill could top a trillion.
5) In the polarized, cost-conscious wake of the health care bill, and the apparent demise of cap and trade as a centerpiece of climate legislation, the idea of such huge sums flowing to a deeply polarizing energy source has become increasingly problematic. Without a clear trade-off for fossil/nuclear giveaways, and with stiffening resistance from the rightist National Taxpayers Union, Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, the nuke bonanza is anything but certain. The technology may now, in fact, be “too expensive to matter.”
6) An attempt by Entergy to shift six reactors into an asset-free corporate shell has been nixed by New York authorities, leaving liability for Vermont Yankee, Indian Point and other northeastern nukes in limbo.
7) As elderly nukes stumble toward oblivion, various funds allegedly set aside for decommissioning may be significantly under-funded, deeply exacerbating the financial battles that now encircle the industry.
8) As a lame duck, George W. Bush signed agreements apparently obligating the feds to assume responsibility for enough radioactive waste to fill two of the cancelled Yucca Mountain waste dumps. The complete lack of even one such facility means the potential taxpayer bill is beyond meaningful calculation.
9) Above all the exemption from liability for a major accident—first perpetrated by a pro-nuke Congress in 1957—remains the largest potential cost to us all. Renewed by Bush in 2005, some believe the statute is clearly unconstitutional.
To this day the families of those harmed by radiation at Three Mile Island have been denied the right to make their case in federal court.
But now the shoe is on the other foot.
Desperate for cash, the nuclear industry wants us all to pay hundreds of billions for the joy of living downwind from still more 3 Mile Islands for which they intend to assume NO liability.
They want our money AND our lives.
From central Pennsylvania after 31 years, the message is clear: Just Say NO!
Germany to extend nuclear plant phase-out by 28 years
Press TV – March 28, 2010
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government is pushing to extend the lifespan of some of the country’s nuclear power plants to 60 years, amid opposition.
The new plans come a week after an agreement between the environment and finance ministries, backed by the government, to add 20 more years to a previous compromise which had established that all of the countries’ nuclear power plants be shut down by 2022.
The opposition has slammed the move, arguing that this would endanger the safety of citizens as well as slowing down the progress in the filed of renewable energy sources.
In an interview published last Friday in the Munich-based daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen said a 28-year extension of the previous phase-out plans could have the last nuclear power plant go off the grid in 2050.
Roettgen stressed that the government was just at the stage of considering all its options, with evaluators now discussing scenarios of extending the phase-out by four, 12, 20 and 28 years.
The paper criticized the government for treating the power plants like old bicycles, stressing that unlike a bike, nuclear facilities could not be patched up and reused for an unlimited amount of time.
This is while a 2002 Atomic Energy Act, currently in force, outlines a total phase-out by the next twelve years and bans the extension of the residual life of reactors, which have already produced an amount of electricity equivalent to 32 years of operation.
Nuclear power production is highly unpopular in Germany, where leaks at nuclear waste dumps and accidents at aging power plants have led to several controversies in the past years.
Many experts believe the aging nuclear power plants can not endure 60 years of operation, stressing that such a decision would be extremely dangerous.
Nuke pushers to Vermont: ‘Drop dead’
By Harvey Wasserman | Online Journal | March 18, 2010
The nuclear power industry is sending a clear and forceful message to the citizens of Vermont: “Drop dead.”
The greeting applies to Ohio, New York, California and a nation under assault from a “renaissance” so far hyped with more than $640 million in corporate cash.
The Vermont attack includes:
1) A direct threat to ignore the state Senate’s 26-4 February vote against renewing the Yankee reactor’s operating license. As a condition of buying Yankee, Entergy long-ago ceded to the legislature approval of any extension of an operating license, which expires in 2012. But Entergy now says it will spend all the corporate cash it needs to evict the current Senate and install one more to its liking.
2) Vermont’s pro-nuclear Republican Governor Jim Douglas says the Senate’s vote is “meaningless.” Douglas is not running for re-election but is certain to become a high-priced Yankee arm-twister when he leaves office.
3) Entergy has also implied that if it fails to buy itself a pro-nuke legislature in 2010, it will sue over any denial of the license extension.
4) Entergy is trying to shift ownership of Yankee into a shell corporation called Enexus which would allow it to avoid financial exposure. The scheme has been attacked by regulators and analysts in New York (Entergy also owns Indian Point) and elsewhere. “With its leaks and lies,” says Yankee activist Deb Katz, VY “is a liability for Entergy and a black eye” which some observers think the industry may want to jettison.
5) Entergy’s decommissioning fund has been radically drained by stock market losses and mismanagement. It retains nowhere near enough money for safe dismantlement, so Entergy says Yankee must operate for decades more to recoup the losses.
6) Under oath and in public, Entergy officials have denied the existence of underground piping at Vermont Yankee which does exist and is leaking radioactive tritium as well as other deadly isotopes.
7) A probe (nicknamed “Rover”) sent into the piping system to locate the leak has become stuck in radioactive muck.
8) State regulators and others warn that Yankee’s radioactive offal may already be pouring into the Connecticut River.
As angry citizens in Vermont and downwind New Hampshire and Massachusetts are told their worries have no place in a reactor renaissance, the message to “drop dead” has spread.
In Ohio, the infamous Davis-Besse reactor has turned up — again — with potentially catastrophic defects. In 2002 Davis-Besse came within a fraction of an inch of a catastrophic meltdown when boric acid ate nearly all the way through the reactor pressure vessel. Now assemblies that guide rods into the reactor core are again cracking. Davis-Besse’s owner, First Energy, is ignoring demands from terrified downwinders that the nuke be permanently shut.
In New York, Entergy’s Indian Point is leaking inside and out. Entergy continues to resist public demands for shut-down or a definitive clean up.
In California, Pacific Gas & Electric is pushing hard to extend the operating license for its Diablo Canyon reactor, ignoring public demands for a three-year project to map earthquake faults that run within three miles of the plant.
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
German nuclear waste dump plans sparks row
Press TV – March 15, 2010
Germany’s environment ministry has come under fire for green-lighting further exploration of a disused salt mine in northern Germany as a potential final storage site for nuclear waste.
Germany’s Green party and environmental leaders are protesting the decision, which comes after a 10-year moratorium in the exploration plans for the controversial Gorleben nuclear waste dump.
Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen confirmed on Monday that talks on turning the Gorleben salt mine into a permanent nuclear waste dump are set to resume.
Roettgen added that he did not expect the storage facility to reopen before 2030, even if Gorleben analysis and tests are positive.
Gorleben has been used as temporary repository for nuclear waste since 1983, and led to a huge controversy after revelations that the German government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl had suppressed scientific evidence showing the site was not suitable for the job.
While extremely unpopular with the public, Germany relies on nuclear power to cover a quarter of its energy consumption.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new ruling coalition is planning to extend the lives of the country’s 17 nuclear plants, arguing that nuclear power could not be replaced until cost-efficient renewable power is more widely used.
This is while a previous center-left government in 2002 approved a decision to shut down the country’s aging reactors by the mid-2020s.
Israel ‘to unveil plans to build nuclear power plant’
BBC | March 8, 2010
Israel is expected to unveil plans this week to build a nuclear power plant, reports say.
They say an announcement will be made by Israeli Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau at an energy forum in Paris.
Israel is facing a crisis over electricity supplies, but environmental objections have blocked efforts to build a new coal-fired plant.
Israel has two nuclear reactors, including the Dimona facility which is said to have produced nuclear weapons.
The secret reactor is located in the south of the country. Israel neither confirms nor denies having nuclear weapons under its policy of “ambiguity”.
The other facility is a research reactor near Tel Aviv, which is open to international inspections.
Israel is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which is designed to curb the spread of nuclear technologies with bomb-making potential.
‘Joint project’
Mr Landau is expected to tell the conference in Paris that Israel is considering building a nuclear power plant, reports say.
He has reportedly discussed the possibility of co-operating in the project with French Energy Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, together with neighbouring Jordan.
France is one of the world leaders in electricity production from nuclear power.
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From the Archives
Genetic baloney in thick slices
MAYBE COULD BE INC.
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
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