Humankind is now threatened by the simultaneous implosion, explosion, incineration, courtroom contempt and drowning of its most lethal industry.
We know only two things for certain: worse is yet to come, and those in charge are lying about it -- at least to the extent of what they actually know, which is nowhere near enough.
Indeed, the assurances from the nuke power industry continue to flow like the floodwaters now swamping the Missouri Valley heartland.
But major breakthroughs have come from a Pennsylvania Senator and New York's Governor on issues of evacuation and shut-down. And a public campaign for an end to loan guarantees could put an end to the U.S. industry once and for all.
Fukushima: The bad news continues to bleed from Japan with no end in sight. The "light at the end of the tunnel" is an out-of-control radioactive freight train, headed to the core of an endangered planet.
Widespread internal radioactive contamination among Japanese citizens around Fukushima has now been confirmed.
Two whales caught some 650 kilometers from the melting reactors have shown intense radiation.
Plutonium, the deadliest substance known to our species, has been found dangerously far from the site.
Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government have admitted to three 100 percent meltdowns, but can't confirm with any reliability the current state of those cores. There's reason to believe one or more have progressed to "melt-throughs" in which they burn through the thick stainless steel pressure vessel and onto the containment floor.
The molten cores may be covered with water. But whether they can melt further through the containments and into the ground remains unclear.
Possibilities may include a "China Syndrome" scenario in which one or more still-molten cores does melt through the containment and hits ground water. That could lead to a steam explosion that could blow still larger clouds of radioactive steam, water and debris into the atmosphere and ocean.
At least three explosions have occurred, one of which may have involved criticality.
There is no doubt at least two containments were breached very early in the disaster. Unit Four is cracked and sinking. The status of its used radioactive fuel pool, which has clearly caught fire, is uncertain. Also unclear is the ability of the owners to sustain the stability of Units Five and Six, which were shut when the quake/tsunami hit.
That stability depends on continued power to run cooling systems, which could disappear amidst seismic aftershocks many believe are inevitable. A very substantial quake hit after the tremors that led to Indonesia's devastating tsunami, and few doubt it could happen again --soon -- at Fukushima.
All the above is dependent on reports controlled primarily by Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government. There is every reason to believe the situation is worse than it seems, and that those in charge don't really know the full of the extent of the damage or how to cope with it.
Just five years ago a quake shut seven reactors at Kashiwazaki. The entire nation of Japan sits on a wide range of fault lines. Tsunami is a Japanese word.
Radiation from Fukushima has long since been detected throughout the northern hemisphere, with health effects that will be debated forever.
Some 50 reactors still operate in Japan. According to some, the Japanese public has the legal right to shut them all.
Let us pray they do. Yesterday.
Los Alamos: A massive wildfire has swept at least to the outskirts of the national laboratory that was at the core of the program that built the Atomic Bomb.
The first explosion irradiated a nearby valley on July 16, 1945. Then came the two that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are significant quantities of stored radioactive material in and around Los Alamos. How much there is, where it is, how badly it is threatened, how much (if any) has already been engulfed in flames remains to be seen. Evacuations are underway.
Official reassurances are not reliable.
Nor are estimates of the potential for radioactive fallout to spread throughout North America and beyond.
Vermont Yankee: Entergy, owner of the one reactor in Vermont, has sued to shred a solemn public contract.
The one thing certain here is the company's contempt for the sanctity of its own word.
Years ago Entergy sought official permits at VY. It promised in return that the state could choose to shut the reactor on March 21, 2012, which it's now done.
In recent years VY has spewed tritium into groundwater and the Connecticut River, in some cases from underground pipes whose existence the company denied. A cooling tower has collapsed.
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has extended the reactor's license and asked the federal Justice Department to intervene on behalf of the utility.
Sanders has since threatened to hold up the confirmation of a new NRC Commission, then relented when it became clear the DOJ would not intervene on Entergy's behalf.
But the request trashes any credibility retained by the NRC. The Commission was established in the mid 1970s to be a disinterested party on which the public could rely. For it to now take a partisan stand on behalf of a reactor owner it's bound to regulate thoroughly contaminates the core of its existence.
Entergy has sued. It needs a decision soon because continued operations of VY require the purchase of some $65 million in new fuel.
This will go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the future legal sanctity of any and all public contracts signed by any corporation, nuclear or otherwise, may be determined.
Nebraska: The flooding Missouri River continues to threaten at least two heartland reactors.
Late reports indicate Cooper may still be running, with public assurances it could be shut very quickly. What might happen if the operators are a little bit late has not been explained.
Nor is there much to go on about the impacts of flooded cores and fuel cooling ponds on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers or the eco-systems along the way to a Gulf of Mexico still reeling from BP's toxic dose.
But an almost surreal set of circumstances surrounds the true nature of design specifications and protections in place (or not) at Ft. Calhoun.
They may be best summarized by what happened to a "flood berm" meant to protect Ft. Calhoun. This huge rubberized water-filled sausage was 16-feet at the base and 8-feet high.
But CNN has quoted a company representative as saying some sort of equipment "came in contact" with the berm and punctured it.
Not to worry says a company representative: "The plant remains protected to the level it would have been if the aqua berm had not been added."
In other words, the device was installed to protect the reactor. Then somebody punctured it. But things are as they were before so they must not have needed that berm in the first place. Got it?
It's as yet unclear whether flood waters will continue to rise at these two reactors, whether the operators can protect them, and what will happen if they can't.
The corporate media is carrying virtually zero coverage of any of the above stories. All are subject to rapid, dangerous changes about which we may have little reliable information.
But we do know for sure that US Senator Robert Casey, Jr. (D-PA) now wants to see more deeply into one of the key holes in the nuclear façade: evacuation.
After Three Mile Island's 1979 partial melt-down, new federal legislation allegedly gave states more power over how to get people out of the path of a melting nuke.
But after an as-yet unopened Perry reactor was damaged by a 1986 earthquake, Ohio's then-Governor Richard Celeste sued to keep Perry shut pending a state evacuation study.
The NRC refused and won in federal court. Perry opened. Ohio's official study then said evacuation was virtually impossible.
A quarter-century later, Casey wants to see what it might now take to move downwinders out of harm's way from a TMI, Perry, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Vermont Yankee, Cooper, Ft. Calhoun... you name it.
Casey's being joined by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose demands for the shut-down of Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan, have left its owners "stunned" according to news reports.
Cuomo and Casey might do well to join governors of states like Vermont, Massachusetts, California and others in testing the law on evacuation planning. Populations have vastly increased at virtually all U.S. reactor sites since TMI. And the ugly realities that define the so-called "Peaceful Atom" are still making themselves all too apparent.
Whether the U.S. will now turn with Germany, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Israel and others away from atomic power and toward a green-powered Earth is up to us. The Solartopian technologies of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal, bio-fuels, increased efficiency and conservation are now demonstrably cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable, more job-producing and quicker to install than anything atomic energy can promise.
A $36 billion loan guarantee give-away still mars the proposed 2012 federal budget. Constant pressure on Congress and the White House can kill that, and any other proposed funding for still more of these nightmares.
The stream of reactor disasters spewing from this dying industry is certain to escalate. The toll rises with each leak at Fukushima, every flame at Los Alamos, each legal brief at Vermont Yankee, every foot of Nebraska floodwater.
The need to stop the madness grows more desperate every day.
Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org and is author of SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH. His "Solartopia! Green-Power Hour" is at www.talktainmentradio.com every Wednesday, 8-9pm.
We need to s re-invent and redeploy nuclear such as with the safe Thorium reactor while taking present dangerous plants offline. Your efforts don't accomplish either goal, they just create conflict and spin.
While the US lags behind in nuclear, countries like Iran are moving forward. Iran. Geez this is the thing they really dont get. Us losing our competitive edge is also a security risk. They have the ear of ultra-liberal politicians as well.
They accept risk in their lives, risks greater than nuclear risks, and are not people of letters or applied engineering. They believe that engineering structures should be designed to the "possible" rather than the probable. They are the last to admit they are operating under a flawed premise.
Thank you antinukes for contributing to the continued murder of the planet, choking off our precious oxygen supply. People went to war over oil because of you. American lives were shed because of you. You dont care. You hated Vietnam so it all comes back full circle.
Radiation is most threatening in very large acute doses. That is, a large dose received up front. This is not the case with Fukushima. Many of the antinuclear rhetoric is on the low dose over time, which we all get for living on the planet. The other thing is their distortion of "internal emitters", which our bodies have inherrent to our makeup.
So radiation in very large doses is a concern. Radiation in very low doses over time, even considering their "Petkau effect" is not really a concern. Else we would all be dropping like flies.
The "some sort of" equipment was a buldozer. Cooper is safe for now, and they're not expecting to increase water output from the six odd dams that manage the river upstream so the river only rises briefly during rainstorms. Really, way to induce panic there. Nebraska doesn't belong in the same category as fukushima or even VY.
1) Fukushima showed that "turning off" a nuclear reactor isn't really possible. It takes about 30 years to cool to a safe level, during which time failures in cooling due to power loss can cause a meltdown. At Ft. Calhoun, shoulda levee fail, the cooling will stop and your "shut down" nuclear reactor will still melt down.
2) Berms are cool. But should a dam upstream fail, you'd have fukushima all over again because the wave would go right over the berm.
RULE #1 of safe systems: don't have one critical system depend on another because the probability for failure will equal the multiple of the two failure probabilities. If the Dam is 99% reliable and the nuke is 99% reliable, then the dam-nuke system which controls whether there is a meltdown or not will be 98% reliable, and so on. Not a good way to go, since Japan just showed the results of that kind of thinking.
The only reason a power loss caused a meltdown was because the reactors had just tripped following a long power run. Having operated all kinds of nuclear reactors, I understand my inside knowledge gives me a unique perspective from which t draw on.
2). The berm was "defense in depth" and not "safety related". These classifications show a graded approach to safety
Your Rule #1 is not accurate. YOu are talking about common cause failure and Double Contingency, yet applying it differently. That statement does not take into account independent probablities. You arent mixing the tails of distributions either properly. Each is independent. If the Dam is 99% reliable, and the Nuke is 99% reliable, a failure of each is 99%. A failure of both is 0.01*0.01= 1e-4. This is a simplistic treatment and I am sure the cut set isnt this contrived.
Cancers do not happen overnight they from a few years to 25 years to develop. Parading around unscientific pronouncements seems to be your fortay when the evidence of radiation induced cancer, leukemia and genetic disease are a fact of radiation exposure. Instead, you have chosen to hide behind the cold corpse theory. If there are no bodies in the street, then everything must be fine.
http://www.ieer.org/comments/beir/beir7pressrel.html
Again: the Japanese public will not suffer any health consequences from their radiation exposure. Your ghoulish fearmongering is completely wrong.
Incidentally, documents from Arjun Makhijani's fake "institute" IEER are really not convincing. Chris Busby delights in setting up fake entities that you link to regularly - LLRC CCNR, ECRR. These people are clearly dishonest in their presentation to the world. Doesn't it give you even a moment's pause about believing what they say?
Radiation in very low low doses would not cause cancer over that which is statistically probable (25% of the population).
There are medical professionals that use radiation in their daily practice to fight cancer. Seems counter productive to produce cancer from fighting cancer.
From your missive, I take it you are not versed in the radiation protection profession as many of us here are.
I would suggest http://www.hps.org - Health Physics Society. Peruse there all you want. It might help your understanding.
Oh and REAC/TS is very much a respected medical incident response organization.
They also state the low low doses are not statistically signficant (maybe 0.5% per person above 25%)
Every year, 10 or more thousand* Americans die of preventable disease related to coal power. Every year, our economy absorbs $100bn* or more of economic impacts related to health effects on our fellow citizens from coal power.
Since you are opposing the only technology provably capable of replacing coal now, today, at approximately the same cost**, what percentage of coal-related death, illness, and economic hardship can we fairly lay at your feet?
There are real consequences to real people for fearmongering, Harvey.
--
*per CATF
**per MIT
Energy efficiency, energy conservation, wind, solar, geothermal wave and tidal power are here now and can be rapidly developed compared to nuclear. Your arguments aren't even weak, they are preposterous.
It's just that only one low carbon source can provide the mind-bogglingly massive amount of power necessary to replace coal in the US and China (which, incidentally, would slash CO2 emissions worldwide).
All others are inherently limited - by location, by land use issues, by cost, by maturity, by resource availability. We can and should use them where they can be used best.
A properly managed nuclear power infrastructure is limited, essentially, only by manpower and manufacturing capacity.
Indeed, MIT's recent look at this suggests it's not even economical to reprocess spent fuel and won't be for decades, because nuclear fuels are so plentiful and relatively cheap.
Meanwhile, every year that we have burned coal instead of using nuclear - since the 70s - has cost us the lives of thousands of Americans. You can try to claim that it's a false dichotomy all you like, but what HAPPENED is that the nuclear plants were replaced by coal, as what is HAPPENING in Germany is that nuclear plants are mothballed and they are building coal.
In the world of theory, it might be a false dichotomy. In the practical world, it's coal or nuclear.
The coal lobby funds antinuclear activities.
A simple 503 (c) audit of NIRS and their cronies might be revealing. The DOE also funds antinuclear organizations to do independent investigations - such as Santa Susanna Field Lab. Look at their report in the forward - $6 million funded to UCS and others so they can provide contrarian views.
Cmon when will it end? Its a he said, she said and unfortunately they both cant be right.
Get your science and engineering facts straight. Do you even have the background?
Ive been doing nuclear for over 30 years, longer than most here have been alive.
While your idealism is noted, it just doesnt cut the mustard. Nuclear has the power to save the planet as Gweneth Cravens writes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2010981/You-mustnt-believe-lies-Green-zealots-And-I-know--I-one.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
'Greenpeace routinely inflates the death toll for the 1986 Chernobyl disaster by a factor of 1,000 (the true total is likely to have been less than 50) in order to stoke fears about atomic energy.
The German Greens have forced the country’s government to forswear nuclear after the Fukushima accident in Japan, which, while serious, has so far killed no one and is unlikely to do so.
Nuclear power does not harm the planet in any meaningful way. I continue to support renewables, too, especially offshore wind, which can produce a substantial percentage of Britain’s power, but wind is not the only answer.
Nuclear fission produces no CO2 and its overall carbon emissions (factoring in concrete and uranium mining, which are necessary to create nuclear power) are comparable to those of wind turbines and lower than solar. Of course, the alternative to nuclear as our primary source of electricity is coal, which is dirtier and more dangerous in every way.'
F&F
The NRC refused and won in federal court. Perry opened. Ohio's official study then said evacuation was virtually impossible."
Same same with the SEC, MMS, and FCC-- all IN BED with the corporations/financial industries they're supposed to be regulating. These so-called regulatory agencies are rot.ten w/ corruption, through and through. If We The People don't start massively demanding that the Prez, the Congress, and the DOJ restructure and clean up these agencies, the doom we now see on the horizon will be on our doorstep.
Oh wait... it's already in the yard.
btw, Good blog, Harvey. I liked the spacing- 'twas easier on the eyes.
The entire quake tsunami disaster would have been a non event to a modern nuke.
Los Alamos is a nuke weapon facility, there are no problems at Vermont Yankee and yes work needs to be done on old reactors to mitigate for Black Swan events.
None of this has anything to do with the fact that nuke power is the only in time solution to the fast approaching civilization ending peak oil/ climate crisis as well as being the only industrially and economically feasible one.
I suspect we really will begin to see the calamitous health effects down the road.
I can only hope most of those in charge of energy policy experience them along with the rest of us. If not, there needs to be some way to spread the joy.
Nebraska. Big State. Cornfed Football Players. Most of the Ladies are the Beauties of the Mid-west, and then there is Fort Calhoun and Coopers. Tempests in danger of blowing their tea-pots all the was across Kansas and more. Toto and Dorothy should be concerned. A couple of Nuclear Plant Core Meltdowns around Omaha could ruin that whole "yellow brick road" gig far past Kansas to include Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio... oh hell, there is the whole Eastern Seaboard down wind from Omaha. I have monitored Fukushima since March 11th, 6 days before Obama attacked Libya to apparently take the worlds eyes off the most catastrophic nuclear disaster in world history. General Electric is a good friend of Obama's. He could not (continued on FB)
Now add melted coriums, steam in and burning sfp, and thousands of tones of contaminated water dumped into the ocean...
BTW, why is Japan still hunting WHALES??
I think you are mistaken about a lot of those facts about plutonium...
I'm not challenging the others...
Fanned and Fav'd!
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/interrogation-of-helen-caldicotts-responses/
I have been involved in the nuclear enterprise since 1978. I have long known of your antinuclear bias and unwillingness to learn about the benefits of the technology. I invite you to watch the following video:
http://fora.tv/2007/09/14/Could_Nuclear_Power_Save_the_Planet
Juries would immediately call you a "hired gun" or worse.
You cant stand to be an outsider, receiving imperfect information from the Internet. You cant even imagine how wrong you are on many topics in this enterprise.
Faved for wanting all the facts!
Ask Japan how forthcoming TEPCO is...
This is BIG $$$$, so expect BIGGER Coverups for your own good...