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Working for a nuclear-free future since 1979

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Plume of Radiation Douses Europe Again

Ruthenium-106 Persists in the Environment for 10 years

Russia Denies Responsibility for Major Release Recorded in 43 Countries

By Bonnie Urfer

Sometime in the last week of September, somewhere south of the Ural Mountains, 1,000 miles east of Moscow near Mayak, Russia, something happened that sent a plume of radioactive ruthenium-106 across Europe. Detectors in France showed the radiation between September 27 and October 13. Italy picked it up on Sept. 29. In all, according the International Atomic Energy Agency, the release affected 43 countries, including Russia. Production of ruthenium-106 occurs in the core of a nuclear reactor or during reprocessing of used reactor fuel. In response to the unclaimed, yet significant release, an independent commission of scientists from Russia and Europe hopes to pinpoint the source of the contamination, their greatest fears being additional accidents or releases from the unidentified source.

A map from the French agency IRSN identified, on the basis of the model-measurement comparison, the most plausible release zone. The mesaurements suggest that the release came from the near the border of Russia and Kazakhstan.

Bellona, the international environmental NGO based in Oslo, reported Nov. 27: “Since late September, it’s become clear that a huge release of the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 took place at the Mayak Chemical Combine, Russia’s notorious and sprawling nuclear fuel reprocessing complex located near Chelyabinsk in the southern Ural Mountains. … But you won’t be hearing that from the Russians,” because they are busy denying or criticizing reports of the plume, and floating alternative theories.

Moscow’s history of denials, including waiting 30 years to admit the 1957 Mayak, Kyshtym nuclear fuel explosion that released 50-100 tons of high-level radioactive waste to the environment, its delay in admitting a Chernobyl reactor had exploded in 1986, and more recently, an iodine-131 plume detected in July of 2017, make today’s disavows worthless.

Since the only origin of ruthenium-106 is a nuclear reactor, and because monitors detected no other isotopes, the search narrows to several possibilities near the Russia/Kazakhstan border: a facility that either separates the isotope from a “bouquet” of others produced in a reactor; a factory that uses it to produce medical isotopes for cancer and tumor treatment; the Mayak facility itself during “vitrification” or processing of waste fuel; or a road accident involving transport of the radioactive material. Another possibility is a metal smelting mishap like happened in Spain in May 1998. The metal recycling company Acerinox melted scrap containing cesium-137, and detectors in Switzerland alerted authorities to the cesium plume that doused much of Western Europe then.

Russia denies culpability although officials there monitored the spread of the radiation and admitted something happened. Some 368 confirmations recorded the plume in Europe. A spokesperson with Russia’s nuclear entity, Rosatom, claims the level of contamination registers 20,000 times less than the allowed annual dose. “Allowed dose” sounds harmless, cumulative exposure over a lifetime increases the risks of cancer. Russia, as reported in the New York Times on Nov. 15, said, “One of the countries in the eastern part of the European Union was more likely to be the source, according to Rosatom, due to the high radiation levels over Italy, Romania and Ukraine.”

Ruthenium-106 has a half-life of 373.6 days, meaning that after one year half will have decayed (to rhodium-106) and half remains. Radioactive elements remain in the environment and the food chain for the 10 half-lives it takes to decay away.
“Ruthenium compounds should be regarded as highly toxic and as carcinogenic,” says the Royal Society of Chemistry. News organizations reporting on the contamination uniformly failed to inform the public that this dispersal adds to the radioactivity that carpeted Europe when Chernobyl burned for 40 days in 1986. Not a single story we reviewed noted that, as with all radioactive substances, 10 half-lives are needed for the ruthenium to decay away. In addition, ruthenium is a beta particle emitter, and beta radiation does the greatest damage when inhaled or ingested. In the body, ruthenium goes to the bone.

The radiation present in the village of Argayash in the Chelyabinsk region, measured nearly 1,000 times higher than normal. France’s Institute of Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) reported the contamination “major.” Russia monitored ruthenium-106 above the southern Ural Mountains in September. Nice, in southern France, experienced the worst concentrations of the isotopes between Oct. 2 and 9. The IRSN’s report of Oct. 9 says that if the accident had happened in France, people for miles around would have been evacuated and warned.

Director for health at IRSN, Jean-Christophe Gariel told National Public Radio that the matter might be referred to the United Nations. In spite of the alarm, the press repeated the standard nuclear mantra, “No danger to the public.”
The New York Times reported that “German and French nuclear security agencies concluded that the pollution had not threatened the health of Europeans or the environment in which they live.” Germany’s radiation agency commented, “You could inhale from that country’s Ruthenium cloud for a straight week and still have breathed in no more radiation than you naturally do in an hour.” Time magazine claimed on Nov. 10, that “The cloud was harmless and has dissipated.” Deutsche Welle reported on Oct. 5 that “Officials say there is no risk to human health whatsoever” and assured readers that ruthenium is one of the safer isotopes.

The radioactive plume began dissipating in the first week of October, and by the 13th the IRSN declared the air clear. Random testing of mushrooms and milk may take place although the agency says contamination of food from the dispersal is “unlikely” and export of food from the area is scarce so deems food monitoring unnecessary.

The story continues as the Russian/European scientific commission gets to work. Environmental groups have demanded a full investigation, an end to waste fuel reprocessing, and the phase-out of power reactor operations that produce the waste.

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What Kind of Nuclear Attack Would be Legal?

US General Says Order To Launch Nuclear Weapons Can Be Refused If Illegal —Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18; US Nuclear Commander Would Balk at Any “Illegal” Order —MSNBC, Nov. 18; General Heading Strategic Command Says Illegal Nuclear Launch Order Can Be Refused —NBC News, Nov. 18; Top General Says He Would Resist “Illegal” Nuke Order From Trump —CBS News, Nov. 18; Top US General Says He Would Resist Illegal Nuclear Strike Order From Donald Trump —The Independent, Nov. 18.

These headlines all give the impression that a nuclear attack could be legal in some circumstances. But is this possible? Worried about what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president’s moronic understanding of nuclear weapons, two US generals have testified that they could disobey his orders to attack with nuclear weapons if they were unlawful. The question is: What kind of nuclear attack would be legal?

Air Force General John Hyten, commander of Strategic Command, told the Halifax International Security Forum Nov. 18, that an order from the president to launch nuclear weapons can be refused if that order is determined to be illegal. Four days earlier, retired General Robert Kehler, who previously held Gen. Hyten’s top job at Strategic Command, testified likewise to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying that nuclear war commanders could “ignore any unlawful order by the president to launch a nuclear strike.”

Generals Hyten and Kehler both said in their unprecedented public comments that the legal principles of “military necessity,” “discriminate destruction,” and “proportionality” all apply to decisions about nuclear attacks. Senator Ben Cardin, D-MD, asked Gen. Kehler if he meant that Strategic Command could disobey a president’s order for a nuclear attack. “Yes,” Kehler said.

Legal scholar George Delf scolded military and civilian authorities who practice this “conventionalization” of nuclear weapons, talking as if they were conventional bombs and munitions.  In Humanizing Hell: The Law V. Nuclear Weapons, Delf wrote, “There is something incongruous about lawyers who spend their working week concerned with routine [matters], and a few spare hours arguing against mass murder and the destruction of civilization.”

Saying military officers “could” disobey or “can” refuse unlawful orders understates the case. US military service manuals explicitly require military personal to refuse illegal orders. Everyone sworn in to the service is taught that disobeying illegal orders is mandatory, following them is a crime grounds for court martial. As CNN reported, “Under US military law troops are obligated to not obey an unlawful order. If they received such an order, they could resign or force Trump to fire them.” The point was made during last year’s presidential campaign, when Trump promised to illegally torture prisoners, kill the families of suspected militants, and bomb civilians. CNN reported then that “Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook noted on [Nov. 17, 2016] that all US troops have an obligation not to follow illegal orders.”

Certain Weapons Effects Always Unlawful

More importantly, there is a startling absurdity and a shocking ignorance in these public nuclear war conversations because any use of nuclear weapons would be indiscriminate and therefore illegal by definition. Only the uninitiated, uninformed or willfully blind can still imagine that nuclear weapons could be used “proportionately” to produce more military good than evil. The uncontrollable, unlimited, and unfathomable magnitude of nuclear weapons effects have been established as unlawful in countless text books, law journals, government studies and independent analyses.

Any use of nuclear weapons would be illegal because international treaties, protocols covenants, and agreements, as well as military field manuals, forbid indiscriminate destruction, attacks that are disproportionate to a military objective, and weapons’ effects that “wound treacherously,” or harm neutral states, or do long-term damage to the environment.

In her book Thermonuclear Monarchy Professor Elaine Scarry of Harvard reminds us that as long ago as 1995, Sweden, Iran and Egypt argued before the International Court of Justice that since nuclear weapons cause disproportionate suffering, they are prohibited by the 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg and the Geneva Protocols of 1925, 1949, and 1977. The Republic of the Marshall Islands argued then that using nuclear weapons would violate the 1907 Hague Conventions prohibiting weapons with effects that cross into neutral states. Both North Korea and India, neither of which possessed nuclear weapons in 1995, wrote to the World Court insisting that it judge them unlawful. India argued that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is illegal under the Charter of the United Nations and international “rules of proportionality.”

Charles Moxley, in his 813-page tome Nuclear Weapons & International Law, puts this list of treaty obligations in perspective: “Nuclear weapons are not illegal just because they violate these laws of war, as exhaustively proven in this volume. They are illegal because they cause widespread and indiscriminate destruction without promoting the purpose of war: resolving conflict … They are not weapons but only wanton machines of symmetric destruction.”

Physical Effects: “Complete ruin”

What the generals and the congressional bureaucrats fail to grasp or teach us to ignore is the vast difference between conventional and nuclear weapons, and that nukes cannot be used in war without killing hundreds of thousands of civilians—that is, without committing war crimes.

Moxley’s Nuclear Weapons & International Law reports that, “A nuclear detonation generates temperatures of 100 million degrees, while a dynamite explosive about 3000 degrees.” What this unimaginable heat does to cities is explained by Lynn Eden in her 2004 book Whole World on Fire. “Mass fire and extensive fire damage would occur in almost every circumstance in which nuclear weapons were detonated in a suburban or urban area. …damage from mass fire would extend two to five times farther than blast damage.”

In 1977, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons notes with understatement, “[P]ersons in buildings or tunnels close to ground zero may be burned by hot gases and dust entering the structure.” In its lengthy consideration of radiation effects, taken from the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, FEMA says in part, “Among them, apart from genetic effects, are the formation of cataracts, nonspecific life shortening, leukemia, other forms of malignant disease, and retarded development of children in utero at the time of the exposure.” As Ann Fagan Ginger noted in her book Nuclear Weapons are Illegal, “They continue to maim and kill long after they explode in a test or in a war.”

A mass fire or “firestorm,” Eden writes, is “the simultaneous combustion of many fires over a large area, which causes a great volume of air to heat, rise, and suck in large amounts of fresh air at hurricane speeds from the periphery,” Eden notes. “Within ten minutes after the cataclysmic events associated with the detonation, a mass of buoyantly rising fire-heated air would signal the start of a second and distinctly different event—the development of a mass fire of gigantic scale and ferocity. This fire would quickly increase in intensity. In a fraction of an hour it would generate ground winds of hurricane force with average air temperatures well above the boiling point of water (212°F, 100°C). This would produce a lethal environment over a vast contiguous area.”

Eden’s research is worth quoting at length. “The first mass fire in history was created by allied incendiary raids at Hamburg on the night of July 27-28, 1943. Within 20 minutes, two of three buildings within an area of 4.5 square miles were on fire. In three to six hours, this fire so completely burned out an area of more than 5 square miles that the area was referred to by damage analysts as the ‘Dead City.’ Well-documented accounts describe wind speeds of hurricane force within the city. Air temperatures were calculated to be between four and five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hundreds of degrees above the temperature of boiling water. [Up to] 100,000 people were killed in the attack. A mass fire resulting from a modern nuclear weapon could be expected to burn out an urban or suburban area of considerably larger size in a similarly brief time.”

Delf’s Humanizing Hell is concise, bold, and direct: “[A]rmed forces are committed by military, domestic and international law not to attack non-combatants. Any government which adopts a defense policy implying such an attack is therefore inciting its own forces to commit war crimes on a gigantic and suicidal scale.” Our military forces should not just disobey such orders but refuse this unlawful incitement.  — John LaForge

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“Scientists: Nuclear war would mean worldwide famine death of billions”

Even a very “limited” regional nuclear war would cause firestorms in urban areas that would put tons of black carbon into the stratosphere, where it would spread globally, producing a sudden drop in surface temperatures and could trigger a global nuclear famine.

An enlarged copy of this Sept. 13, 1985 headline from the Mpls. “Star and Tribune” has been on my bulletin board for decades. Back then the scientists explained the consequences of a large-scale nuclear war between the former USSR and the United States. “…the primary mechanisms for human fatalities would likely not be from blast effects, not from thermal radiation burns, and not from ionizing radiation, but, rather, from mass starvation” the US National Academy of Sciences study said, resulting in nuclear winter and “the loss of one to four billion lives.”

Left out of those grim calculations was the effect of mass firestorms caused by nuclear weapons being detonated on urban areas. In her book Whole World on Fire (Cornell Univ. Press, 2004) Lynn Eden notes, “For more than 50 years, the US Government has seriously underestimated damage from nuclear attacks.”

“The failure to include damage from fire in nuclear war plans continues today,” Eden wrote. “Because fire damage has been ignored for the past half-century, high-level US decision makers have been poorly informed, if informed at all, about the extent of damage that nuclear weapons would actually cause. As a result, any US decision to use nuclear weapons almost certainly would be predicated on insufficient and misleading information. If nuclear weapons were used, the physical, social, and political effects could be far more destructive than anticipated.”

“For nuclear weapons of 100 kilotons or more, destruction from fire will be substantially greater than from blast. … Air temperatures in the burning areas after the attack would be well above the boiling point of water; winds, hurricane force,” Eden reported.

In a 1995 letter to Eden, Harold Brode of the Defense Nuclear Agency, which conducted research on nuclear weapons effects, wrote, “The fact is that fire tends to lead to complete destruction in this context…. Because of the enhanced likelihood of spread in the event of a nuclear explosion in an urban center, fire damage is very likely to far exceed blast damage.”

Today, with the US president threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea’s 25 million people, and with three US Navy aircraft carrier battle groups conducting large-scale exercises in the Asia-Pacific involving over 22,500 personnel, it’s worth recalling that fires from even a very “limited” use of a small number of modern nuclear weapons would create so much soot and ash that the consequent collapse of agriculture could cause the famine death of two billion people.

This was the conclusion in November 2013, of Ira Helfand, MD, who wrote “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk,” 2d Edition, for the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

What nuclear war planners in the Navy and the Air Force, or sociopaths like Mr. Trump ignore or fail to grasp is this, from Whole World on Fire: “Within tens of minutes after the cataclysmic events associated with the [nuclear] detonation, a mass of buoyantly rising fire-heated air would signal the start of a second and distinctly different event — the development of a mass fire of gigantic scale and ferocity. This fire would quickly increase in intensity. In a fraction of an hour it would generate ground winds of hurricane force…”

In April 2014, a group of US atmospheric and environmental scientists published a corroborating paper titled, “Multi-decadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict.” Its co-authors Michael Mills, Owen Toon, Julia Lee-Taylor, and Alan Robock reported that, “A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 15 [kiloton] weapons could produce about 5 Tg [teragrams] of black carbon” from mass fires. A teragram/Tg is 1 million metric tons.

These five metric tons of black carbon, the report notes, “would self-loft to the stratosphere, where it would spread globally, producing a sudden drop in surface temperatures and intense heating of the stratosphere. … The combined cooling and enhanced UV [ultra violet radiation] would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine.” Of course, much of the black carbon would be radioactive as well causing long-lived contamination of water and food.

The authors conclude that with this understanding of the impacts of mere 100 “small” Hiroshima-sized nuclear detonations (actual US bombs are far more powerful), the world should be motivated to demand “the elimination of the more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that exist today.”  — John LaForge

 

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The Case for Nuclear Power Fails Fact-Vs-Fiction Test

 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Banana Comparison 

The nuclear industry often compares the radioactive wastes produced inside reactors with naturally-occurring radioactive elements like potassium-40 which is found in bananas. This disinformation is deliberately used to give the impression that consuming radiation is normal. “But this is a false comparison, since most naturally occurring long-lived radioactive elements, commonly found in Earth’s crust, are very weakly radioactive,” explains Dr. Steven Starr, the Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri. “Note that potassium-40 has a specific activity [radioactive strength] of 71 ten-millionths of a curie per gram. Compare that to 88 curies per gram for cesium-137, and 140 curies per gram for strontium-90 [both created inside nuclear reactors]. In other words, cesium-137 is 12 million times more radioactive than potassium-40…. Strontium-90 releases almost 20 million times more radiation per unit mass than potassium-40. Which one of these would you rather have in your bananas?” — Steven Starr, “The Contamination of Japan with Radioactive Cesium,” in Crisis Without End, edited by Helen Caldicott, The New Press 2014, p. 46.

With five works of fiction under her belt, novelist Gwyneth Cravens makes a case for nuclear power as a way to fight climate change in “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy” (2007). The old fiction that nuclear power is safe and cool is presented her online PowerPoint lecture where Cravens lists items that convinced her to quit anti-nuclear work. The list is either an industry PR gimmick or just bad math, or both, but Cravens’ powerless points are easily rebutted.

Cravens: “Huge reserves of uranium, in geopolitically favorable places.”

This claim gives the impression of low price and easy access to uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that the world faces uranium deficits between 2025 and 2035. This means the price goes up. The “politically favorable” spots for uranium mining are all overseas (ending hope of energy independence). Kazakhstan mines the most uranium — 24 times the US volume; Canada, 14 times the US; Australia, six times the US. Even with the Trump cabinet’s de-regulation- and pollution-happy agenda, the US must clean up from past uranium mining. There are now 15,000 abandoned uranium mines and mills in the American Southwest, mostly located on Indian Land. Uranium mine and mill tailings have been left in the open air of the desert — 190 million metric tons of them — so wind and rain spread the contamination.

Cravens: “Fuel can be recycled many times. Only 2% used on one trip through a reactor.”

If this were factual, if “recycling” waste reactor fuel was being done for a profit anywhere, the industry would be gobbling up the money at factories everywhere. Formally known as reprocessing (the PR dept. dubbed it “recycling”), was abandoned in the United States after decades of expensive, dangerous attempts. The process produces huge quantities of highly radioactive liquid wastes that can’t be contained, the sort that is leaking from hundreds of tanks at Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina. “Recycling” is being done by France, but only because a legal loophole allows the factory to pour one million liters (264,000 gallons) of liquid radioactive waste per day into the Irish Sea from its reprocessing. Studies by Dr. Chris Busby in England show that the dumped radioactive materials accumulating on local beaches have caused cancer in Irish children.

Cravens: “Mature technology with recent advances: inherently safe; large-scale hydrogen production; able to burn up nuclear waste.”

Nuclear power is mature alright. Most of the 447 reactors in the world are around 40 years old and near the end of their operational life. They provide about 6% of the world’s electricity. But scientists say that to have a minimum impact on climate change — and this is the whole point of Craven’s tour — nuclear would have to be 20% of the energy mix. This means that after today’s units are replaced, an additional 1,600 reactors need to be built — to get to 20%, not 6%. But this requires that three new reactors be built every 30 days for 40 years — and by that time climate change will have done its damage to us. “Inherently safe” reactors are unknown and untested except on drawing boards. Not one has been built. The dream of “burning up nuclear waste” hasn’t been demonstrated anywhere. Besides, the burning of waste adds heat, soot and ash to global warming.

Cravens: “US reactors operate at over 95% capacity.”

This is a verbal magic trick, helping distract the audience. What the word “capacity” distracts from is that nuclear reactors are about 33 percent “efficient,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. This means that “for every three units of thermal energy generated by the reactor core, one unit of electrical energy goes out to the grid and two units of waste heat go into the environment.” The gargantuan use of water by nuclear reactors is a problem that most people don’t realize. Dr. Jeremy Rifkin, the renowned economist, notes that 40% of all the fresh water consumed in France each year goes to cooling its nuclear reactors. “When it comes back it’s heated and it’s dehydrating and threatening our agriculture and ecosystems. We don’t have the water, and this is true all over the world,” Rifkin said in 2013.

The US Energy Information Administration says, “Most power plants do not operate a full capacity every hour of every day of the year.” Reactors are routinely shut down for re-fueling, for replacement of worn-out parts, and for “unusual events” and accidents.

Cravens: “Over 12,000 reactor-years passed in safety.”

The risk of catastrophic reactor disasters is permanent and makes us permanently unsafe. Dismantling and shipping the Three Mile Island reactor, destroyed in 1979, took over 25 years. The Chernobyl reactor has been in cover-up mode for 30 years, contaminating land, water, and air ever since 1986. Whenever wildfires ravage the “exclusion zone,” they re-suspend radioactive fallout spreading it again and again. Fukushima, Japan’s three destroyed reactors will continue to poison the Pacific Ocean ever day until groundwater stops moving; the owners will be at least 40 years in the “clean-up” mode.

Even without such reactor catastrophes, federal agencies in the United States all warn that there is “no safe exposure to radiation.” Every dose, no matter how small, carries a risk of causing illness or cancer, and the risks are far higher for women girls and infants than for men. Since nuclear reactors can’t operate without continuously venting and pouring radioactively contaminated liquids and gases (from the core, from cooling water circulation systems, and from the waste fuel cooling pools) into the environment, the government has set “allowable” limits to this radioactive pollution of the water and air. The industry calls these limits “safe” but in fact they are all dangerous and merely “allowable.” This venting and pouring of radioactive gases and liquids from operating reactors has caused the spike in childhood leukemias and infant mortality in communities downwind from operating reactors, as  documented in studies in Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United States. The German studies were so convincing that the country decided to close all its 17 reactors by 2022.

Cravens: “Nuclear plant has small environmental footprint — less than a square mile.”

This claim ignores the mining, milling, processing, and fuel fabrication of uranium; the production of vast amounts of concrete and steel for reactors; and the vast quantities of cold water returned hot to oceans, lakes and rivers. It neglects to mention the acreage needed to transport, isolate, and manage 70,000 to 140,000 tons of highly radioactive waste fuel for up to one-million years, and the thousands of square miles of ordinary landfill space taken up by low- and intermediate level radioactive wastes.

Cravens: “Nuclear plant radiation emissions per year: less than you get from eating one banana.”

The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin debunked this absurdity in 2013 in a review of the pro-nuclear propaganda film “Pandora’s Promise.” Revkin wrote that the film “includes an interview in which the novelist Gwyneth Cravens claims that drinking one day’s tritium leakage from the Vermont Yankee plant in 2010 would have deposited no more radiation inside someone than eating one banana. Actually, it would have delivered about 150,000 times that much, calculates Ed Lyman.” A physicist, Dr. Lyman is the senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of “Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster” (The New Press, 2014).

Cravens’ one banana’s worth of “emissions per year” overlooks the 400-500 pounds of plutonium created annually in the reactor core. This material and other fission products emit heat and radiation for 240,000 years, and must be isolated from the environment for at least that long. Craven’s  banana emission hooey  also neglects the millions of tons of reactor-heated cooling water that is dumped back into rivers, lakes and oceans after being used to cool the reactor cores and tons of waste fuel in cooling pools.

Cravens: “Lowest environmental impact of any large-scale energy resource.”

This zinger rivals the nuclear industry’s most bogus of fraudulent slogans: “Energy too cheap to meter.”

Anyone who’s spent even a month looking at US electric power usage knows that conservation and efficiency have the lowest environmental impact of any large-scale producer. Dubbed “NegaWatts” by the Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, conserving electricity can eliminate over 1/3 of current US usage.

The IAEA reported in 2014, that “avoided energy” or NegaWatts — the difference between the amount actually used each year and the amount that would have been used had there been no conservation since 1974 — is now equivalent to two-thirds of annual consumption. That is almost as much as the world’s output of oil, gas and coal combined, The Economist reported.

Nuclear reactors only provide about 19% of the electricity used in the US, so conservation and efficiency could replace them without cost (beyond public education), without pollution, and without much delay. — John LaForge

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Haul No! Tour Report: Building Momentum in Resistance to Grand Canyon Uranium Mining & Transport

Leona Morgan (standing) of Diné No Nukes in Albuquerque, New Mexico, spoke to an international gathering July 14 in Büchel Germany about the deadly colonial effects of the uranium fuel chain.
Fall Quarterly 2017
By Haul No!

This article was edited for length, with permission, from the original post at: www.haulno.org

In December 2016, Indigenous anti-nuke and sacred sites organizers formed volunteer-based Haul No! to raise awareness, organize, and take action to protect sacred lands, water, and health from the toxic threat of radioactive uranium ore transport from the Grand Canyon to the White Mesa Mill. In March 2017, Energy Fuels Inc. (EFI), the owner of Canyon Mine and White Mesa Mill (the only commercially operating uranium processing plant in the US), announced that it could start mining uranium in June 2017. Haul No! kicked into gear and started organizing an awareness and action tour along the 300-mile planned haul route.

Bluff, Utah — Shut Down White Mesa Mill

Haul No! initiated the tour on June 13, 2017 in Bluff, Utah, just 20 miles south of the White Mesa Mill. Since 1979, the mill has processed and disposed of some of the most toxic radioactive waste produced in the US. Energy Fuels stores the mill tailings in “impoundments” that occupy about 275 acres next to the mill, which was built on sacred Ute Mountain Ute land. The site includes more than 200 rare and significant cultural sites, several of which have already been destroyed by Energy Fuels.

The White Mesa Mill is currently undergoing renewal of its Byproduct Radioactive Material License and Groundwater Quality Discharge Permits.

Ute Mountain Ute residents of White Mesa joined Haul No! and shared their experiences with the Bluff community. Ephraim Dutchie spoke about the spiritual quality of the land and the environmental racism they experience from mill workers, pro-mill residents, and law enforcement. “They don’t care about our community they only care about money. White Mesa is not the only community that will be affected by this. Keep water pure and land sacred,” Ephraim said.

Bluff and White Mesa residents expressed great concern that their drinking water will be contaminated by further milling. In the past two years alone, two spills have occurred en route to the mill. Both involved trucks from the Cameco Resources uranium mine in Wyoming, and one spill spread radioactive barium sulfate sludge along US Highway 191.

The next day, Haul No! met up with Ute Mountain Ute organizers at the White Mesa Mill. Haul No! volunteer Leona Morgan, who also organizes the Radiation Monitoring Project, donned her hazmat suit and mask to monitor radioactive pollution at the entrance of the mill. Part of the crew went directly to the mill site to bring the message that we want them to shut down. Yolanda Badback, White Mesa Concerned Community Organizer, confronted EFI workers as law enforcement agents arrived in response to a call regarding trespassing and vandalism. Yolanda stated, “This was our land and now it’s poisoned, Energy Fuels has no right to be here.” There were no issues aside from a warning.

Oljato, Utah/Monument Valley/Kayenta, Ariz. — A Legacy of Abandoned Uranium Mines
Haul No! volunteer Leona Morgan, who also works with Diné No Nukes and Radiation Monitoring Project, donned her hazmat suit & mask to monitor radioactive pollution at the entrance of the mill. When mistaken for being simply a photo-op, Leona said, “I’m not just messing around guys…I’m really working here.”

Our next stop was Oljato, Utah, which is located within the iconic Monument Valley. Oljato Chapter was the first to pass a resolution opposing transport in December 2016 and has long been plagued by abandoned uranium mines.

More than 523 abandoned uranium mines remain throughout the Navajo Nation, where Diné families have been subject to decades of radioactive contamination. The Navajo Nation banned uranium mining and milling in 2005 and transport of radioactive materials in 2012, though this matter is one of conflict due to lack of jurisdiction over state and federally-controlled highways such as EFI’s planned Canyon Mine haul route. This point is a policy focus of Haul No!

While two of our group headed to Blanding, Utah to testify at a White Mesa Mill hearing, the rest of the crew headed to Kayenta. Folks there stated that they’ve already seen trucks that look like uranium hauling barreling through their town. We clarified that at this point we know that uranium and arsenic-laced water from Canyon Mine was being transported in unmarked vehicles, and that this may be un-permitted—but no ore has been mined or transported. It was very clear that those in attendance do not want any more radioactive transport through their community.

Tuba City, Ariz. — Rare Metals’ Deadly Legacy

At the Tuba City Flea Market, our table volunteers heard constant accounts of cancer and passing of relatives due to work at the Tuba City Rare Metals mill. From June 1956 to November 1966, the mill processed 796,489 tons of uranium ore. In 1988, Department of Energy started cleaning up this Superfund site, where a layer of soil and rock remains the only covering over 2.3 million tons of hazardous waste. A rock dam surrounds the radioactive waste to control runoff water that flows into nearby Moenkopi Wash.

During our presentation that evening, Leona asked how many of the 40 or so people in attendance had a relative or were themselves directly impacted by uranium mining or milling, and everyone raised their hands. All expressed strong opposition to further transport of radioactive materials through their lands.

 Flagstaff, Ariz. — A Critical Point Of Intervention

Our tour continued on Monday, June 19 in Flagstaff, where 65 people attended our presentation.  The next day our crew and local residents delivered a petition to Flagstaff City Council calling for a resolution and ordinance to oppose uranium transport. The City of Flagstaff has jurisdiction over a small part of the transport route and organizers see this as a possible stopping-point to safeguard all communities.

Cameron, Ariz. — A Legacy Of Abandoned Uranium Mines

On Tuesday, June 20 we made it to Cameron, where everyone at our tour stop had been directly impacted by uranium mining and expressed great concern of high-level radioactive ore coming through their lands. The small community has faced uranium contamination for decades. Cameron officials have already expressed that they are willing to block uranium transport if necessary.

Gathering at Red Butte

The Haul No! Tour culminated at the Red Butte Gathering hosted by the Havasupai Tribal Council, June 23-25. We set up camp near Sacred Red Butte on traditional Havasupai homelands about 4 miles from Canyon Mine. Haul No! offered training in Non-Violent Direct Action and gave updates on the mine and transport issues. We listened to talks, participated in prayer walks, and round danced in blistering Arizona temperatures. We will focus more on the Red Butte Gathering in Part 2 of the Haul No! Tour Report Back.

Flagstaff City Council

On July 5, 2017, our request for “Consideration of Council Action to Oppose Uranium Transport” was approved despite a surprise appearance by Energy Fuels President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Chalmers, who claimed that the transport is not more dangerous than other transport that happens on a daily basis. He also informed the Council that EFI’s preferred route would go north of the San Francisco Peaks and not through Flagstaff. The agenda item will be discussed at the City of Flagstaff regular council meeting on October 10, 2017.

Further updates will be posted at www.haulno.org, where you can sign our pledge of resistance. For inquiries or to make a donation; email: stopcanyonmine@gmail.com.

—Arianne Peterson and Leona Morgan helped edit this article.

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