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October 31, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fall 2019 Nukewatch Quarterly

Click the links below to access articles from our 12 page Fall 2019 Quarterly Newsletter. Page numbers take you to the pdf of each page as they appear in the print version. Individual articles are also tagged by issue category.

Cover and Back Cover
Nuclear Power and Weapons Don’t Mix

Page 1
Secret, Mislabeled Radioactive Waste Shipment Discredits Department of Energy
Radioactive Particles Possibly Migrating from California’s Woolsey Fire
White House Approves Plan to Fire Reactors into Space 

Page 2
Federal Judge in Kings Bay Plowshares Case Denies Motion to Dismiss Charges
Disarmament Activists Argue Felony Charges Violate Religious Freedom

Page 3
Radiation and Colonialism Leave a Permanent Stamp on New Mexico—Part II
Nuclear Governance in Canada: A Corporate Coup?

Page 4 Nuclear Shorts
“Nuclear Titanic” Arrives at Russian Seaport
Failed Reactors Bailed Out by Taxpayers
Welding Flaws Plague French Reactors 
Europe Reactors Running Without Licenses
Disaster Planning: Germany Quadruples Stock of Iodine Pills 
Wind Power Surpasses Nuclear Capacity in the US 
Cancer Now No. 1 Killer in Wealthy Countries 
Redundant Space Command Launched 

Page 5  – Page 6   
US Delegation Again Joins Protests Against US Nuclear Weapons in Germany

Page 7 
Büchel Resisters Win German Peace Award

Page 8
Glitches Delay B61 H-Bomb Replacement
Worst Kept Secret: US Nuclear Weapons Still in Europe 
Foundation Sues German Military for Büchel Air Base Radiation Data

Page 9
Ohio School District Rejects Energy Dept. Directive to Reopen Contaminated Middle School
Fukushima Waste Water Crisis Raising Alarms 

Page 10
Plowshares Land Trust Takes a Hit! Home to Anathoth Community Farm and Nukewatch Slammed by 100 mph Summer Storm

Page 11
The False Promise of Nuclear Power in an Age of Climate Change 

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Uncategorized

October 29, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Power & Weapons Don’t Mix

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019
By John LaForge
The US military tested then cancelled plans to power rockets with reactors. Radiation vented from the unshielded flying reactor and even working as planned Project Pluto’s nuclear ramjet, above, would spew contrails full of radioactive fission products. US government photo.

Nuclear weapons and reactors give science a bad name. Combining the two can be a suicide mission.

Five Russian government scientists and three others were killed August 8 near Nyonoksa, on the White Sea in Russia’s far north, by the accidental explosion of what was reportedly a small nuclear reactor inside a missile. Exactly what kind of nuclear device blew up remains unclear.

According to news reports—frustratingly vague because of government secrecy and conflicting statements by federal agencies—the Russian Federation weapons experts who died were testing a new “nuclear-powered” Cruise missile, or trying to retrieve a failed one that fell into the sea. Pentagon analysts code-named the experimental missile “Skyfall.”

CBS News reported Aug. 12 that the explosion “could have contaminated the White Sea with radioactive waste.” Then, Sept. 4 Bellona—the environmental institute based in Oslo—reported that irradiated debris from the explosion had washed up on a nearby beach.

Rosatom, the Russian Federation’s reactor and weapons agency, said in a statement Aug. 10 that the scientists who died were testing a “liquid propellant rocket engine” at a missile test site about 40 miles from the city of Arkhangelsk, Al Jazeera reported. But Bellona reported that news services citing intelligence sources had said, “the blast occurred during a mission to salvage a nuclear powered cruise missile from the bottom of the White Sea, off Russia’s Arctic coast.”

The blast caused an international sensation, partly because a radiation spike was reported 18 miles away in Severodvinsk, a city of 183,000 people, and partly because of sketchy and contradictory information coming from Russian Federation authorities.

City officials with the Emergencies Ministry in Severodvinsk said airborne radiation levels had risen to 20 times above the area’s average, the Associated Press reported Aug. 14.

The defense ministry insisted the day of the explosion that no radiation had been released.

The online magazine Slate reviewed published accounts and reported Aug. 13 that Russian news outlets said “radiation readings briefly spiked to 200 times normal background levels, according to the New York Times, but those reports were quickly taken down. On Aug. 13, Russia’s TASS news agency reported that the state weather agency said radiation levels in the nearby city of Severodvinsk rose between four and 16 times after the explosion. … while the Russian defense ministry initially said there was no background radiation elevation at all.”

Rosatom officials initially told the media that what exploded was a “nuclear battery,” like the plutonium-238 packs—called “radioactive thermal generators” or RTGs—used by the United States and Russia to power instruments onboard long-distance outer space probes. “This is a nuclear battery” or a “nuclear isotope power source” for a rocket engine, said a spokesman for Rosatom, noting that the word “reactor” had nothing to do with the explosion.

However Rosgidromet, the Russian Federation’s national weather agency, reported that among the radioactive isotopes that were dispersed, some in particular—strontium-91, barium-139, barium-140, and lanthanum-140—could only have come from a nuclear reactor accident.

On Aug. 26, Bellona confirmed that “The presence of decay products like barium and strontium is … proof that it was a nuclear reactor that exploded,” quoting Nils Bøhmer, a Norwegian governmental nuclear safety expert, who spoke to the Barents Observer. “Had it been an RTG, none of these isotopes would have been detected,” Bøhmer said.

Hospital Workers Kept in the Dark

Secrecy regarding the exact nature of the accident extended to the surviving victims and the hospital staff that treated them.

Several of those seriously injured in the accident were brought to the Arkhangelsk Regional Clinical Hospital. The Moscow Times and Reuters reported that as many as six of the injured were transported by helicopter to Moscow “wrapped in film” to be treated for radiation exposure.

The Moscow Times reported Aug. 16 that three injured men arrived at the hospital “naked and wrapped in translucent plastic bags.” The state of the patients made staff suspect they were dealing with something very serious.

The New York Times said Aug. 26 that doctors and nurses in Arkhangelsk “were not warned that patients arriving from the [explosion] site were contaminated with radiation, and treated them without protective clothing.”

The Barents Observer reported that 10 of the doctors who treated the injured were sent to the Federal Medical Biophysical Center in Moscow for medical treatment. When one of the doctors was later found to have radioactive cesium 137 in his tissue, the regional government in Arkhangelsk issued a statement saying the contamination was “with some degree of certainty” unrelated to the accident, and “likely from fish, mushrooms, lichens, seaweed” contaminated by another source, the statement said.

Officials told the doctor he probably ate “Fukushima crabs” while on vacation in Thailand.   —John LaForge

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter

October 29, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Secret, Mislabeled Radioactive Waste Shipment Discredits Department of Energy

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019
By Kelly Lundeen

In early July, the US Department of Energy astonished Nevada when it divulged that for six years it had been sending mixed-level radioactive waste labeled as low-level to the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site). Nine shipments of 32 containers each were transported without proper labeling and stored at the Site without adhering to the minimal legal requirements for protective handling. The Nevada National Security Site has been designated as a permanent disposal site for low-level radioactive waste, for example rags, construction debris and other materials exposed to radioactivity as well as mixed-level radioactive waste like radioactive garbage and sludge, as long as it is in compliance with the security site’s waste acceptance criteria. The waste received was out of compliance.

This follows the recent revelation that the DOE secretly sent weapons-grade plutonium to the site last year without informing government entities or tribes. Leaders of 13 tribes and the governors of Nevada and New Mexico have publicly shown opposition to these shipments. In a letter to DOE Secretary Perry tribal chair of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, Chris Spotted Eagle wrote, “As a Southern Nevada tribe, our reservations—one in downtown Las Vegas and another in the northwestern part of the Las Vegas Valley—are in direct proximity to the transportation routes that may have been utilized for this shipment to the Nevada National Security Site.”

A coalition of nine southwest grass roots organizations including Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, Uranium Watch, the Utah Sierra Club, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and others is now putting pressure on Utah governor Gary Herbert to take a lesson from tribal and Nevada and New Mexico state leaders to express concern over radioactive shipments. Nestled between the three proposed radioactive waste sites of Yucca Mountain, Holtec in New Mexico and WCS/ISP in Texas, Utah would be along a transportation route for most of the nation’s 70,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste to reach any of these destinations if one of them is ever chosen as a storage site.

In a letter to Governor Herbert, the organizations asked that he, “(1) object to the use of Utah roads and rails to ship mischaracterized radioactive wastes that are not legal to store or dispose of at facilities in Nevada or elsewhere, and (2) oppose consolidated interim storage of [radioactive] spent nuclear fuel in Utah and in any State that objects to such a facility.” Utah residents can ask the governor to speak out at www.healutah.org/actionalert/. In essence, they would like the governor to ask the DOE to follow the law.

Following the six years of mishandling mixed-level radioactive waste, the DOE said it would temporarily halt shipments and launch an internal investigation. At the heart of the issue is the credibility of the Department of Energy. In the case of the 2018 plutonium shipment, there was an enormous quantity of highly radioactive plutonium knowingly sent across at least seven states without alerting residents or first responders along transportation routes.

On March 20 this year, US Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada announced that DOE Secretary Rick Perry had “promised to give her a firm time line as to when the weapons-grade plutonium that was secretly shipped into Nevada last year will leave the state,” according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. However in August a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals not only denied the state’s request to remove the plutonium, but also dismissed the appeal for a ban on new shipments of highly radioactive plutonium. The Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford will seek a new court order for its removal.

—Mineral County Independent-News, Aug. 22; Washington Post, Aug. 16; Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, accessed July 29; Native News Online, Mar. 27, 2019

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

October 29, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Radioactive Particles Possibly Migrating from California’s Woolsey Fire

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019
By Kelly Lundeen and Maggie Gunderson

Last November, the Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles, California caused three immediate deaths and concern nationwide—from West Coast residents including the Kardashians to the East Coast nonprofit organization Fairewinds Energy Education.

What’s worrisome is the potential re-suspension and dispersal of radioactive contamination from the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a Superfund site where the fire began. A partial meltdown of the Sodium Reactor Experiment at SSFL—which was the first nuclear reactor meltdown in the US and cause of the fourth largest release of radioactive iodine-131 in the history of nuclear power—occurred in 1959 and was kept secret for two decades. See the cover story in the Winter 2018-19 Nukewatch Quarterly.

Responding to public alarm, both the US Department of Energy and the California Dept. of Toxic Substances Control initially assured the public that the 2018 Woolsey Fire had not affected the contaminated areas, that no radioactivity was released, and that there was no threat to nearby communities. When satellite photographs revealed the contrary, both agencies were forced to walk back their statements.

Following reactor meltdowns in Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011), nearby wildfires have repeatedly re-suspended radioactive materials that were spewed, dispersed and deposited on surrounding territory. To ascertain where radioactively contaminated micro particles of dust and dirt may have migrated—in the winds that drove the Santa Susana fire all the way to Malibu Beach—Fairewinds Energy Education and Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA) have embarked on an independent sampling project. Fairewinds developed protocols for a “citizen science” program along with Dr. Marco Kaltofen, a radioactive dust expert and professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a private research university in Worcester, Mass. PSR-LA instructed area citizens in gathering more than 400 dust and soil samples following the fire, making this study statistically meaningful. Due to the high cost of the five-stage process using Geiger counters, liquid scintillation detectors, and scanning electron microscopes, only 20 of the first batch of 100 samples are currently at the laboratory. Learn more about the ongoing program at <www.fairewinds.org/woolsey-fire-blog>.

—M. Gunderson, Fairewinds Energy Education, Sept. 2019; Gar Smith, Nuclear Roulette, Chelsey Green Publishing, 2012, p. 63.

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

October 29, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Federal Judge in Kings Bay Plowshares Case Denies Motion to Dismiss Charges

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019

By The Nuclear Resister on August 27, 2019.

On August 26, a federal judge denied all the pre-trial motions of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7. The activists had urged US District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood to dismiss their charges for numerous legal reasons as well as the fact that the hundreds of first-strike nuclear weapons on the submarines based at Kings Bay Naval Base are illegal and immoral.

The judge found the Plowshares activists did establish a case under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because they were sincerely religiously motivated to challenge the nuclear weapons at the Naval Base. Wood also found that the government’s actions substantially burdened their right to exercise their religious beliefs. However, the judge went on to rule that the government had a compelling interest in keeping unauthorized people out of the base, and the prosecution of the Plowshares activists was the “least restrictive” means of protecting the safety of the base.

The seven activists argued that the government action of bringing multiple and duplicative charges, threatening 25 years in prison, is far from the “least restrictive” option to keep unauthorized people out. On April 4, 2018, the seven activists entered the naval base in St. Mary’s, Georgia. They undertook various nonviolent actions such as pouring blood, hammering on a statue of a Trident II D5 missile, and placing crime scene tape in front of the entrance to a headquarters building.

“We took these actions to say the violence stops here, the perpetual war stops here—at Kings Bay, and all the despair it represents,” said Clare Grady, one of the Plowshares activists. “We took these actions grounded in faith and the belief that Jesus meant what he said when he said, ‘Love your enemies,’ and in so doing offers us our only option for hope.…”

Trial Set for Oct. 21

After denying the disarmament activists’ motions for dismissal, Judge Wood set October 21 for a trial by jury at the federal courthouse in Brunswick, Georgia, in Glynn County on the state’s southeast coastline.

Supporters from throughout the country are expected to attend the trial. Earlier this month nearly 100 people attended events around the Aug. 26 hearing held by Judge Wood, who also presided over the October trial.

For more info., see: https://kingsbayplowshares7.org.

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter

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