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August 24, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Tepco’s License to Kill: Japan’s Dispersal of Radioactive Waste — No Accident Anymore

South Korean protesters lampooned Japanese authorities who said you could drink the 1.37 million tonnes of radioactive wastewater they began pumping into the Pacific Ocean Aug. 24.

 

By John LaForge

Japan is set to start pumping millions of gallons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean on Thurs., August 24, from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (Tepco’s) devastated triple reactor meltdown site at Fukushima.

This deliberate contamination of the public commons — no accident this time — is a license to kill, a criminally reckless endangerment of sea life and the food web. Yet the 1992 ban on ocean dumping of radioactive waste applies only to barrels thrown from ships, not liquids sent into the sea through pipes. Further, the Law of the Sea allows victims to bring legal action only after an alleged harm has occurred, and then puts the burden of proof on victims to show that their illness(es) were caused by a particular radioactive poison.

The nuclear industry and its government protectors run this game of radioactive waste dispersal using bailouts, bribes, and the lengthy “latency period” — the time between one’s radioactive contamination and the appearance of cancer, heart disease, etc. — which produces radiation victims years or decades after the “Fuku sushi” they ate. The nuclear industry has always depended on the fact that its chance of losing a radiation damage lawsuit is somewhere between a slim one and a fat one.

The catastrophic Fukushima earthquake-tsunami-meltdown-cubed has forced Tepco’s overseers of the three ferociously radioactive masses of melted uranium/plutonium fuel, or “corium,” to continuously pour cold water on to the unapproachable wreckage. Combined with rivers of groundwater that gushes through quake-smashed cracks in reactor foundation, the water becomes poisoned with radioactive uranium, cobalt, strontium, cesium, plutonium, and more. The failed Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) has not removed these or other deadly isotopes from the wastewater now stored onshore in giant tanks. The New York Times reported Aug. 21 that, “According to Tepco’s website, just 30 percent of the approximately 473,000 tons of water in the tanks have been fully treated to the point that only tritium remains.”

Spewing radioactivity is standard industry practice

It’s no surprise that reactor-friendly governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency (whose mission is to promote nuclear reactor proliferation and to lie about radiation risks), have given Japan’s oceanic pollution scheme their seal of approval. All of them have repeatedly declared that dumping radioactive wastes into public water bodies is ordinary industrial practice and legal around the world. With straight faces, the authorities chant in unison that reactor operations contaminate the environment with radioactive liquids all day, every day, and this is somehow intended to demonstrate that such contamination is natural and danger “negligible.”

At La Hague, France and at Sellafield, England, giant reactor waste complexes process waste fuel rods, producing billions of gallons of highly radioactive liquids, and for decades the carcinogenic offal has been pumped directly into the North Sea (by France) and the Irish Sea (by England). Dr. Chris Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk which studied internal radiation contamination, has found cancer clusters among children along the Irish seacoast — likely caused by internal exposure to Sellafield’s radioactive emissions.

Scientists, ecologists, medical authorities, environmentalists, historians, and oceanographers have repeatedly pointed out that there are practical alternatives to the dumping, and that nothing positive can result from adding radioactive pollution to the environment and the food web. The British Medical Journal only last week published the latest in a long series of studies [1] that have found again and again that exposure to low levels of radiation is more harmful than scientists previously thought. [2]

The Japanese government and Tepco hope that their global dispersal of reactor disaster waste will save the industry enough money that it can stay afloat against the astronomical costs of post-Fukushima liability and disaster response. But like the plague of mass shootings in the United States, Thursday’s start of Japan’s globalized pollution solution raises the chaos and deadliness of reactor operations to new heights, while the authorities claim from their bribery zones that nothing can be done about either hand guns or nuclear reactors.

Notes

[1] British Medical Journal, Aug. 16, 2023, study finds the risk of cancer death after exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation underestimated.

[2] “Ionising radiation and risk of death from leukaemia and lymphoma in radiation-monitored workers,” The Lancet, July 7, 2015; “Even low-level radioactivity is damaging, scientists conclude,” Science Daily, Nov. 13, 2012; “With New Data, a Debate on Low-Level Radiation,” New York Times, July 19, 2005; “Epidemiology: Russian Cancer Study Adds to the Indictment of Low-Dose Radiation,” Science, Nov. 11, 2005; “Study: No Radiation Level Safe,” Associated Press, June 29, 2005; “No dose too low,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec. 1997;  “Study: Even Low-Dose Radiation is Dangerous,” Reuters, Oct. 9, 1997; “Radiation health effects understated, study shows,” AP, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 25, 1995; “Researcher discovers greater radiation risk,” AP, Milwaukee Journal, Dec. 9, 1992; “Radiation risks may be more than believed,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1991; “International Panel Urges Cut In Allowable Radiation Dose,” New York Times, June 23, 1990; “Higher Cancer Risk Found in Low-Level Radiation,” New York Times, Dec. 20, 1989; “No Safe Radiation,” Scientific American, August 1958.

–John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch and a regular contributor to CounterPunch and PeaceVoice.

 

 

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Fukushima, Nuclear Power, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste, Weekly Column

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Small Modular Reactors” Touted by Profiteers and Regulators

By Bill Christofferson

The struggling nuclear power industry’s dreams of becoming relevant again have gotten a lift from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which has certified NuScale Power’s “small modular reactor,” the first such design cleared for use in the United States.

Two utilities serving Wisconsin customers, and perhaps a third, appear eager to jump on the small reactor bandwagon, which they tout as a solution to the climate crisis. Dairyland Power Cooperative in LaCrosse, and Xcel Energies, operating as Northern States Power in Wisconsin, have contracted with NuScale, an Oregon firm, to evaluate the potential of using the small-scale reactors. NuScale is not a disinterested party; it developed the modular reactors and wants to sell them, so it is safe to expect some positive recommendations.

Madison Gas and Electric may also be interested. CEO Jeffrey Keebler said last year at a Wisconsin Technology Council meeting that he hasn’t ruled out more nuclear, including maybe partnering with Dairyland Power. But, he added, it would have to be “right for our community,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported. It would be a hard sell in Madison.

The utilities hope that new technology and smaller reactors will overcome the problems plaguing the industry since its inception. It used to promise energy “too cheap to meter.” Now it promotes poison power as a solution to climate change. It never quits pitching claptrap. Although there has not been a new reactor in Wisconsin for 50 years, hope springs eternal.

“Small modular reactors” by Mark Taylor

Critics pan the prospective new reactors, none of which is yet operating. “Too late, too expensive, too risky and too uncertain. That, in a nutshell, describes NuScale’s planned small modular reactor (SMR) project, which has been in development since 2001 and will not begin commercial operations before 2029, if ever,” according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

“Regulatory” is the NRC’s middle name, but it and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are both unabashed cheerleaders and enablers for reactors. “We are thrilled to announce the historic rulemaking from the NRC for NuScale’s small modular reactor design, and we thank the Department of Energy for [its] support throughout this process,” said NuScale President and CEO John Hopkins, who added that the DOE “has been an invaluable partner.” And that’s from a DOE press release. The DOE has invested $300 million in taxpayer handouts to support the NuScale pipe dream.

The same reactor problems that have endangered the public for decades have not magically disappeared.

A carbon-free source of energy? As emeritus professor of sociology at UW-La Crosse Al Gedicks puts it: “Nuclear power is not carbon-free electricity. At each stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining, milling, and enrichment, to construction, decommissioning and waste storage, nuclear power burns fossil fuel and contributes greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate global climate change. Compared to renewable energy, nuclear power releases four to five times the CO2 per unit of energy produced.”

Economics are the primary reason almost no new nuclear reactors have begun operating in the U.S. in decades, especially as renewable energy costs have plummeted. Reactor startups are notorious for astronomical cost overruns. NuScale has already upped the estimated energy cost for its first planned project in Idaho from $58 to $89 per megawatt-hour — before any work has even begun. The first reactors would go into operation in 2029 at the earliest, but the odds are it will be years later, given past experience.

The reactors produce high-level radioactive waste, some of which is so deadly, and decays so slowly, it must be kept out of the environment for 1 million years. Not to worry, the industry says, a permanent solution will be found, although they have been producing the waste for 65 years now with no answer in sight. In Wisconsin, the waste is accumulating next to Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River in casks that may last 100 years — if all goes well.

—Bill Christofferson is a former journalist and political consultant who worked in state and local government, now retired. He is a founder of Nukewatch and was the first director, from 1980-1983.

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

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Leaks at Minnesota Reactor

By North American Water Office
Photo Credit: Mar 17, 2023 Valley News KVLY

Events having the potential to affect public health and safety are occurring at Xcel Energy’s Monticello single nuclear power reactor, about 35 miles up the Mississippi River from Minneapolis. Primary cooling water containing tritium (radioactive hydrogen) has been leaking into the ground at least since last November.

Xcel Energy and the Minnesota Department of Health didn’t bother to report the Monticello leak of about 400,000 gallons until mid-March, and then announced, with much fanfare, that there is no risk to public health and safety and that the leak had not reached the Mississippi River. Then, a few days later Xcel Energy announced a second leak of several hundred gallons because the tank into which contaminated water had been collected overflowed. Not bad, for a clown show.

While state and corporate officials say not to worry, the problem is that these same people fail to consider the authority of the National Academy of Sciences in its 2006 report BEIR VII — the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. The book-length BEIR VII conclusively reported that there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation, no level of exposure that can be declared harmless. Every exposure, no matter how small, carries a potential for causing cancers and other mutations.

Considering that the radioactive half-life of tritium is just over 12 years, and that it takes about 10 half-lives before a radioactive substance becomes relatively benign biologically, it is probably premature to speculate about public health and safety impacts. In fact, there are three pathways for leaked radiation to affect the public: it can migrate to the river, which supplies most of the drinking water for Minneapolis; it can migrate into groundwater off-site, where it becomes available for private and municipal water pumps; and it can evaporate. There is no doubt that during the next 120 years, some fraction of the leakage will follow each of these pathways and then affect biological activity. Of course, nobody will ever know how much contamination went where, or know what it did when it got there, because radiation monitoring at Monticello, as well as at the rest of the global commercial nuclear fleet, is mostly incapable of detecting radiation in any of these pathways. It makes better PR to just say there is no threat to public health and safety.

This Monticello pipe leak could be an omen of things to come. The leak occurred because a pipe carrying primary cooling water broke. Primary cooling water circulates through the reactor and thereby becomes radioactive. This radioactivity bombards the pipe through which it flowed with neutrons, and over time, this neutron bombardment causes metals to get brittle. Arguably, the pipe broke because it had become embrittled and something jarred it. The problem here – as with all nuclear reactors — is that every bit of metal at Monticello that is part of the primary system, which contains and controls the nuclear reaction, has also been subjected to this same neutron bombardment. All these metals are at some elevated state of embrittlement, now that the reactor is over 50 years old. As a result, we all now get to sit around and wait to see which components will be next in line to brake, and what the consequences of that breakage will be. That could get real exciting very quickly.

— Additional news on Minnesota reactor troubles can be found at Water for Life, the newsletter of the North American Water Office (nawo.org)

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste, Uncategorized

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Earth Day ‘23: A Newly Post-Nuclear Germany vs. California’s Reactor Relapse

Germany’s initiative calls out California’s backpedaling

 

By Harvey Wasserman
Reuters reported on December 16, 2022 that renewable sources like these wind turbines now produce over 46% of Germany’s electricity.

This year’s Earth Day marked a massive green energy triumph in Germany that stands in stark contrast to a bitter nuclear challenge in California.

A wide range of estimates puts the two regions at a virtual tie for the world’s fourth and fifth-largest economies.

They also share a leading growth industry — renewable energy — with unprecedented investments in wind, solar, batteries, and efficiency. But when it comes to atomic power, they are headed in very different directions.

On April 15, 2023 Germany claimed a huge global landmark by becoming one of the world’s wealthiest nations to pull the plug on atomic power.

The decision dates back to 2011, when Germany’s powerful Green movement led a national demonstration aiming to shut the seventeen atomic reactors that, at the time, provided around a quarter of the nation’s electricity.

Before the rally took place, four reactor buildings blew up in Fukushima, Japan, sending huge clouds of radioactive fallout into the air and ocean.

Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel — who has a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry — ordered eight reactors immediately shut, and soon announced a plan to shut the remaining nine by December 31, 2022.

This “energiewende,” or “energy transition,” substitutes wind, solar, battery storage, and increased efficiency for nuclear reactors, moving Germany toward full reliance on renewables. Germany, since then, has invested billions in the renewables sector, transitioning whole towns to locally owned, rooftop solar power and corporate wind power pumped in from large turbines in the North Sea.

The shutdown of Germany’s last three reactors was delayed by nearly four months due to natural gas shortages caused by the Russian war in Ukraine.

It was also complicated by a major atomic breakdown in neighboring France. Heavily reliant on nuclear power, France’s more than fifty standard-design reactors succumbed to a wide range of problems, including generic structural flaws and warming rivers too hot to cool their super-heated radioactive cores. In 2022, with more than half its fleet of reactors under repair, France made up for the energy shortfall by importing power from Germany, much of it generated by the burning of coal.

This prompted the nuclear industry to criticize Germany’s plan by pointing to a rise in the country’s CO2 emissions from burning increased quantities of coal, failing to note that much of that power was being exported to France to compensate for its own shuttered reactors.

California, whose economy may now be slightly larger than Germany’s, has taken an opposite route.

Two of its last four reactors — at San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego — were shuttered in 2012, and closed permanently in 2013, after flaws were found in the turbines and other components.

In 2016, a deal was reached to shut the Golden State’s last two reactors, located at Diablo Canyon, nine miles west of San Luis Obispo. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of protestors were arrested at Diablo Canyon, more than at any other American nuclear reactor.

The 2016 shutdown deal involved another energiewende, based on blueprints to replace Diablo’s power with a huge influx of new wind, solar, battery, and efficiency installations. The agreement was approved by the California state legislature, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the state Public Utilities Commission. It was signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown, then-Lieutenant-Governor Gavin Newsom, and a wide range of local governments, unions, and environmental groups, all of whom assumed the state would thus be nuke-free once Unit Two was shut in 2025 — the date its original forty-year license would expire.

But along the way, the state experienced two close calls with partial blackouts. During both incidents, Newsom, now the governor, asked consumers to dial back their energy use. Ironically, independent battery capacity — mostly controlled by individual owners — helped the state stay lit.

But Newsom reversed course and now argues that California must keep Diablo open. Infuriating the national safe energy movement, Newsom rammed through the legislature a $1.4 billion midnight bailout for PG&E, to be funded by all of the state’s consumers, including many who live hundreds of miles from the reactors, and receive no energy from it at all.

The Biden Administration also kicked in $1.1 billion, money that safe energy advocates angrily argue would be far better spent on renewables.

In 2019, a statewide petition signed by Hollywood’s Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, Lily Tomlin, Eric Roberts, and some 2,500 other Californians demanded that Newsom facilitate an independent inspection. Nearing forty years of age, both Diablo reactors suffer a wide range of structural and age-related defects.

They are also surrounded by at least a dozen known earthquake faults, sitting just forty-five miles from the infamous San Andreas fault. Former NRC site inspector Michael Peck, who was stationed at Diablo for five years, has warned it might not survive a major earthquake, for which its owner, PG&E, has little or no private insurance. The state has never made public any plans to evacuate Los Angeles or other heavily populated areas in the event of an accident.

Newsom has also supported moves by state regulators to severely slash compensation paid by utilities to solar panel owners who feed their excess energy into the grid. While 1,500 workers are stationed at Diablo, some 70,000 work in the state’s solar industry, which angrily charges that Newsom’s pro-nuclear, anti-green positions are crippling the state’s top job creator.

Indeed, the irony of these twin economies heading in opposite energy directions is hard to ignore. In the 1970s, much of America’s early anti-nuclear movement was inspired by mass demonstrations led by German Greens (with the slogan “Atomkraft? Nein, danke!”). Both movements succeeded in massively moving their communities toward a renewable future.

But at this critical moment, Germany appears to be moving beyond nuclear power, while California clings to a hugely controversial technology it had once planned to transcend.

— Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman, the author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Energy and other books, is a senior editor and columnist for FreePress.org

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Germany Shutters Remaining Reactors

By John LaForge

Germany has switched off the last of its nuclear power reactors for good.

The world’s press made much of “Europe’s largest economy” finally going nuclear-free, a renunciation of poison power that Germany has been planning for since 2011.

The country will replace the puny 6% of electricity provided by its last three plutonium/MOX-fueled behemoths with solar and wind generators, geothermal, conservation, and other renewables that already provide 46.9% of the country’s electricity.

A Greenpeace activist in Berlin on April 15, 2023. Photo Credit: ODD ANDERSEN / AFP

“The position of the German government is clear: nuclear power is not green. Nor is it sustainable,” Steffi Lemke, Germany’s Federal Minister for the Environment and Consumer Protection and a Green Party member, told CNN. Minister Lemke told France’s Le Monde, “The risks of nuclear power are ultimately unmanageable,” after making an April visit to Japan’s Fukushima disaster zone.

Earlier, the 1986 reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl in Ukraine created a plume of radioactive fallout that doused large parts of Germany, and threw nuclear power in the doghouse for millions.

The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that smashed and flooded the Fukushima-Daiichi complex in Japan resulted in three simultaneous reactor meltdowns and the largest radiation release to the environment — still ongoing — in history. For most in Germany, Fukushima was confirmation “that assurances that a nuclear accident of a large scale can’t happen are not credible,” Miranda Schreurs, professor of environment and climate policy at the Technical University of Munich, told CNN.

Emsland nuclear facility in Lower Saxony, Lingen, and two others in Germany closed on April 15. Photo Credit: Sina Schuldt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Three days after the earthquake and tsunami, Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel called Fukushima an “inconceivable catastrophe for Japan” and a “turning point” which it was, at least for Germany.

Plenty of other European countries are rejecting nuclear, CNN reported recently. Denmark passed a resolution in the 1980s not to build new reactors. Switzerland voted in 2017 to phase out nuclear. Italy closed its last reactors in 1990, and Austria’s one reactor site has never operated. Lucky for them.

“Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power is a historic event and an overdue step in energy terms,” Simone Peter, president of the German Renewable Energy Federation, told CNN. “It is high time that we leave the nuclear age behind and consistently organize the renewable age.”

— Le Monde and CNN, April 15, 2023; Reuters, Dec 16, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

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