Nukewatch

Working for a nuclear-free future since 1979

by Leave a Comment

Shunning Nuclear Weapons: Averting a Global Catastrophe

Summer Quarterly 2018
A Global Appeal by the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross
By Peter Maurer, ICRC

The International Committee of the Red Cross appeals to all States, global leaders and citizens to act on the increasing risk of the use of nuclear weapons. Whether used in a specific region or among major powers, the use of nuclear weapons would cause a catastrophic and irreparable humanitarian disaster.

If a nuclear conflict happened today, there is no international plan or capacity to respond adequately to even a limited use of nuclear weapons. Therefore, the only sound course of action is prevention. We appeal for urgent efforts to ensure that nuclear weapons are never again used.

Avoiding a global nuclear catastrophe requires urgent action by all the world’s governments:

  • States possessing nuclear weapons and their allies must urgently take measures to reduce and eventually eliminate the risk of nuclear weapon use. All other members of the international community have a stake in ensuring they do so;
  • States Parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) must use the 2020 Review Conference, and its April 2018 Preparatory Committee in Geneva, to change course, away from threats of use and modernization of nuclear arsenals and towards full implementation of commitments they made in 2010 and previously to nuclear arms reductions, risk reduction and other effective nuclear disarmament measures; and
  • States should take the necessary steps to adhere to the 1972 NPT, the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and other nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation treaties to which they are not yet party and fully implement their provisions.

The ICRC makes this Appeal against the backdrop of a world in which the risk of use of nuclear weapons seems to be increasing. With previous restraints steadily falling away, and threats of use of nuclear weapons entering mainstream politics, we see a shift from a focus on non-use and elimination to making the use of nuclear weapons possible or more likely:

  • With military incidents involving nuclear States and their allies occurring with disturbing frequency, the danger of use of nuclear weapons may be greater today than during the cold war.
  • The UN Secretary General recently warned the Security Council that “The cold war is back… but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present.”
  • States possessing nuclear weapons have plans for adapting nuclear weapons in ways that will make them able to be used in a wider variety of contexts. In parallel, their command and control systems have become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

To be clear, the ICRC understands that all States and, in particular those engaged in conflicts in volatile areas of the world, face complex security challenges, including risks to their security and that of their allies. Regional conflicts are now intertwined with global rivalries. A multitude of protracted conflicts continue with no political solutions in sight. Yet the introduction of nuclear weapons and threats of their use only renders such conflicts more dangerous and increases the risk of a global conflagration in which much of humanity will suffer irreparably. Indeed, in some cases, the existence of nuclear weapons and the “security” benefits attributed to them are root causes of the tensions themselves.

We also recognize that in the last two decades, significant steps have been taken to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons from Cold War levels. Yet reductions alone do not reduce the risk of their use in light of the facts and dangers mentioned above. Concerted steps towards reducing nuclear risks are therefore urgently needed. Nuclear weapon States and those allied to them bear particular responsibility. Such measures are well known and include:

  • Unequivocal commitments never to use nuclear weapons first [only China, India and North Korea have done so];
  • Removal of nuclear weapons from “hair trigger” alert status;
  • Pre-notification of military exercises that may involve the launch of missiles or other vehicles associated with nuclear weapons;
  • Re-establishment of joint early-warning centers to clarify in real-time unexpected and potentially destabilizing events; and
  • Steps to progressively reduce the role of nuclear weapons in security policies.

This Appeal is rooted in what the ICRC knows through its own experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 73 years ago and that of Japanese Red Cross hospitals which, even today, continue to provide treatment for many thousands of survivors of the US atomic bombings. From this experience, and from what has been learned through engagement with environmental experts, the United Nations and other organizations, it is clear that:

  • The catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons use cannot be limited in time and space, and that more victims will die in the months and years following their use than at the moment of the blast through radiation poisoning, cancers and other diseases;
  • There is still today no international capacity or plan for humanitarian assistance to respond adequately to the use of nuclear weapons; and
  • Even the use of just a hundred nuclear weapons, which represents a fraction of existing arsenals, against urban targets could lead to [mass smoke from vast firestorms causing] a cooling of global temperatures, shortening of growing seasons, food shortages in large parts of the world, and the deaths of over a billion people.

This Appeal by the ICRC also reflects the urgent concerns of the entire International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, including 191 National Societies and millions of volunteers around the world. Just last November, the Movement expressed its deep alarm at the increasing risk that nuclear weapons may be used and stressed “that any risk of use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable given their catastrophic consequences.” Together we adopted an ambitious four-year Action Plan to ensure nuclear weapons are never again used and are eliminated.

Three years ago in my statement on nuclear weapons to the Geneva diplomatic corps ahead of the 2015 Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, I concluded: “We know now more than ever before that the risks are too high, the dangers too real. It is time for States, and all those in a position to influence them, to act with urgency and determination to bring the era of nuclear weapons to an end.”

Too often, the international community has been unable to prevent foreseeable crises. This time it is imperative that we prevent impending nuclear catastrophe. Seldom has collective action to reduce nuclear weapon risks and move towards their elimination been more urgent. —April 23, 2018

by Leave a Comment

Rad Waste’s “Gaseous Ignition” & “Exothermal Events” are Explosions

Some of the 177 tanks holding 56 million gallons of liquid high-level radioactive wastes at the Hanford Reservation on the Columbia River in Washington state. At least 77 of the tanks are leaking. Over a period of 40 years, nine Hanford reactors along with chemical “reprocessing” to get plutonium for weapons, produced billions of gallons of such waste. At least 450 billion gallons were dumped on land or injected into deep wells. Clean up operations could last 100 years were estimated in 1988 to cost $175 billion. Energy Dept. photo.

Summer Quarterly 2018
By John LaForge

Last April’s explosive news from the folks who bring us safe, effective, reliable nuclear power and weapons, was that at least four barrels of military radioactive waste blew apart somewhere inside Idaho National Laboratory (INL) property, near Idaho Falls. INL officials said the “ruptured” or “breached” barrels contained a sludge of unidentified fluids and solvents from the long-shuttered Rocky Flats plutonium weapons site near Denver. INL officials said they were trying to determine which radioactive materials are in the sludge.

The April 11th accident was reported by ABC News, the Associated Press, the Seattle Times, the Japan Times, Industrial Equipment News, and Fox Radio among others. Laboratory spokespersons at first said a single 55-gallon drum holding radioactive sludge “ruptured.” Energy Department (DOE) spokesperson Danielle Miller wrote April 12 that, “Later, there were indications that a second and possibly a third drum may have been involved.” On April 25 Erik Simpson, a spokesman for DOE contractor Fluor Idaho, announced that in fact four barrels had burst. Simpson said the “ruptures” were heard outside the building where they took place, but he didn’t call them explosions.

The DOE’s Miller called the prompt deconstruction of the waste barrels an “exothermal event”—a pseudonym for “bomb” that means “a chemical reaction accompanied by a burst of heat.” The phrase harkens back to the official gibberish used to describe an explosion of hydrogen gas in a loaded high-level radioactive waste cask at Wisconsin’s Point Beach reactor site in May 1996. The cask contained 14 tons of highly radioactive used reactor fuel, and the explosion (a word strenuously avoided by industry PR folks) lifted the cask’s 4,000-pound lid and left it askew. Point Beach operators called it a “gaseous ignition event.”

One theory about the cause of the bursting waste drums is that “radioactive decay made the barrel[s] heat up and ignite particles of uranium,” the AP reported April 12. Unfortunately for the first responders, “When the firefighters left the building, emergency workers detected a small amount of radioactive material on their skin.” The very next sentence in this AP story has the DOE’s Miller saying, “None of the radioactive material was detected outside of the building where the rupture[s] occurred.”

Because of what officials said was “decades of secretive record-keeping,” INL officials do not “know the exact contents,” of the barrels, Joint Information Center spokesman Don Miley reportedly said. Neither DOE nor INL described what got on the firefighters’ skin.

Rad Waste Explosions “Actually Happening”

Miley told the press, “They haven’t run into anything like this actually happening”—but exploding rad waste has been around a long time.

It happened on Valentine’s Day 2014, at the US Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. A barrel of military plutonium waste exploded underground, contaminating the entire facility, including the elevator and ventilator shafts, and even poisoned 22 workers internally because they inhaled plutonium-laced dust.

More recently, on October 18, 2015, a fire and explosions spurred by rainfall hurled 11 buried barrels of radioactive chemical waste from a trench into the air and spewed debris like a geyser 60 feet high at a “US Ecology” site near Beatty, Nevada. This shocking fire in one of 22 shallow trenches of radioactive waste couldn’t be put out with water hoses because water started it in the first place. Authorities had to close US Highway 95, cancel school, and await more explosions while they let the fire burn itself out. US Ecology had its records seized by Nevada’s Radiation Control Program, which has never disclosed what sorts of radioactive materials were burned in exploded Trench 14—although the dump site is known to hold a total of 47 pounds of plutonium and uranium isotopes.

In September 1957 at Kyshtym in Russia, a tank holding 70 million metric tons of highly radioactive waste exploded and produced a massive plume that contaminated 250,000 people across 410 square miles.

High-level radioactive waste always comes with the risk of explosions, and the danger helped move the Obama Administration in 2010 to cancel plans to use Yucca Mountain, Nevada, northwest of Las Vegas, for the burial of 80,000 tons from commercial US reactors. Physicists Charles Bowman and Francesco Venneri at the Los Alamos National Laboratory warned in 1995 that at the Yucca site the material could erupt in a catastrophic explosion after steel containers dissolve. Bob Halstead, Director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office, has called the Yucca project, “an exercise in planning for a nuclear catastrophe that is fundamentally rhetorical. It’s theatrical security because the preparations that are being made by the Department of Energy have no real chance of succeeding. They satisfy the public…because they’re a symbol of control….This waste is going to be deadly for tens of millions of years….”

by Leave a Comment

Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island: Just the Tip of Disaster Iceberg

Summer Quarterly 2018

The World Nuclear Association says on its website that its goal is “to increase global support for nuclear energy,” and repeatedly claims that “there have only been three major accidents across 16,000 cumulative reactor-years of operation in 32 countries.” At least the lobby group acknowledges the catastrophes at Three Mile Island in 1979 (US), Chernobyl in 1986 (USSR), and at Fukushima in 2011 (Japan).

However, claiming that these three stand alone as “major” disasters cynically ignores the series of large-scale disasters that have been caused by uranium mining, nuclear power and weapons, radioactive waste,  handling, and the nuclear fuel chain. The following is an abbreviated list of some of the world’s other major radiation accidents.

CHALK RIVER (Ontario), Dec. 2, 1952: A Canadian reactor’s loss-of-coolant caused a meltdown and an explosion and became the first major commercial nuclear reactor disaster.

ROCKY FLATS (Colorado), Sept. 11,1957: This Cold War factory that produced plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons factory 16 miles from Denver caused 30 to 44 pounds of breathable plutonium-239 and Pu-240 to catch fire in what would come to be known as the second largest industrial fire in US history. Filters used to trap the plutonium were destroyed and it escaped through chimneys, contaminating parts of Denver. Nothing was done to protect its downwind residents.

WINDSCALE/SELLAFIELD (Britain), Oct. 7, 1957: The worst of many fires burned through one reactor igniting three tons of uranium and dispersed radionuclides over parts of England and northern Europe. The site was hastily renamed Sellafield.

KYSHTYM/CHELYABINSK-65 (Russia), Sept. 29, 1957: A tank holding 70 to 80 metric tons of highly radioactive liquid waste exploded, contaminating an estimated 250,000 people, and permanently depopulating 30 towns which were leveled and removed from Russian maps. Covered up by Moscow until 1989, Russia finally revealed that 20 million curies of long-lived isotopes like cesium were released and it was later declared a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The long covered-up disaster contaminated up to 10,000 square miles making it the third- or 4th-most serious radiation accident ever recorded.

SANTA SUSANA (Simi Valley, Calif.), July 12, 1959: The meltdown of the Sodium Reactor Experiment just outside Los Angeles caused “the third largest release of iodine-131 in the history of nuclear power,” according to Arjun Makhajani, President of the Institute for Energy & Environmental Research. Released radioactive materials were never authoritatively measured because “the monitors went clear off the scale,” according to an employee. The accident was kept secret for 20 years.

CHURCH ROCK (New Mexico), July 16, 1979: Ninety-three million gallons of liquid uranium mine waste and 1,000 tons of solid wastes spilled onto the Navajo Nation and into Little Puerco River, and became the largest radiological disaster in US history. Little Puerco feeds the Little Colorado River, which drains to the Colorado River which feeds Lake Mead—a source of drinking water for Los Angeles.

MONJU (Japan), Dec. 8, 1995: This sodium-cooled “breeder reactor” caused a fire and a large leak of sodium coolant that contaminated the Pacific. Liquid sodium coolant catches fire on contact with air, explodes on contact with water, and costly efforts to engineer commercial models of breeder reactors have failed.

TOKAI-MURA (Japan), Sept. 30, 1999: A uranium “criticality” or “neutron burst” killed three workers and dispersed radioactivity across the populated urban area surrounding the factory.

—Sources: Gar Smith, Nuclear Roulette (Chelsea Green, 2012); Joseph Mangano, Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment (OR Books 2012);Stephanie Cooke, In Mortal Hands, (Bloomsbury, 2009); Jinzaburo Takagi, Criticality Accident at Tokai-Mura (Citizens’ Nuclear Info. Center, 2000); Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Madness, Revised (Norton, 1995); Arjun Makhijani, et al, Nuclear Wastelands (MIT Press, 1995), and The Nuclear Power Deception (Apex Press, 1999); Catherine Caufield, Multiple Exposures (Harper & Row, 1989); John May, Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age (Pantheon, 1989); Anna Gyorgy, No Nukes (South End Press, 1979).

by Leave a Comment

Fukushima Radiation Contamination Worse Than Initial Estimates

Summer Quarterly 2018
By Jack Loughran

Scientists using a new method of detecting radioactive particles have warned that there was a significant release during the Fukushima nuclear accident that could pose a risk to humans.

[The study was published in Environmental Science & Technology, Feb. 13, 2018.]

The method allows scientists to quickly count the number of cesium-rich micro-particles in Fukushima soils and quantify the amount of radioactivity associated with these particles.

The research, which was carried out by scientists from Kyushu University, Japan, and the University of Manchester, contradicts initial [government and industry] findings in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns.

It was thought that only volatile, gaseous radionuclides, such as cesium and iodine, were released from the damaged reactors. [*See Nukewatch’s related article Fukushima’s “Hot Particles” Travelled Extreme Distances.] However, it has become apparent that small radioactive particles, termed cesium-rich micro-particles, were also released.

Scientists have shown that these particles … contain significant amounts of radioactive cesium as well as smaller amounts of other radioisotopes, such as uranium and technetium.

The abundance of these micro-particles in Japanese soils and sediments, and their environmental impact, is poorly understood. But the particles are very small and do not dissolve easily, meaning they could pose long-term health risks to humans if inhaled.

At present scientists don’t know how many of the micro-particles are present in Fukushima. The new method makes use of a technique called autoradiography, which uses an imaging plate placed over contaminated soil samples…. The radioactive decay from the soil is recorded on the plate as an image, which is then read onto a computer.

The scientists say radioactive decay from the cesium-rich micro-particles can be differentiated from other forms of cesium contamination in the soil.

The scientists tested the new method on rice-paddy soil samples retrieved from different locations within the Fukushima prefecture. The samples were taken close to and far away from the damaged nuclear reactors, at four kilometers and 40 kilometers. The new method found cesium-rich micro-particles in all of the samples and showed that the amount of cesium associated with the micro-particles in the soil was much larger than expected.

“There is a need for further detailed investigation on Fukushima fuel debris, inside, and potentially outside the nuclear exclusion zone.”

— Dr. Gareth Law, Center for Radiochemistry Research, School of Chemistry, Univ. of Manchester

Dr. Satoshi Utsunomiya, associate professor at Kyushu University, Japan, and the lead author of the study, said: “When we first started to find cesium-rich micro-particles in Fukushima soil samples, we thought they would turn out to be relatively rare. Now, using this method, we find there are lots of cesium-rich micro-particles in exclusion zone soils and also in the soils collected from outside of the exclusion zone.”

“We hope that our method will allow scientists to quickly measure the abundance of cesium-rich micro-particles at other locations and estimate the amount of cesium radioactivity associated with the particles….” Utsunomiya said.

In March 2018, a Greenpeace survey found that even seven years after the catastrophic disaster, the people, towns and villages in the surrounding area are still being exposed to excessive levels of radiation.

Dr. Gareth Law, an analytical radiochemistry lecturer at the Univ. of Manchester in England and one of the paper’s authors, said in a news release, “Our research strongly suggests there is a need for further detailed investigation on Fukushima fuel debris, inside, and potentially outside the nuclear exclusion zone.”

—Loughran wrote this article for Engineering & Technology, May 25, 2018

by Leave a Comment

Fukushima’s “Hot Particles” Travelled Extreme Distances

Summer Quarterly 2018
By John LaForge
Black star shows tracks of alpha particles in an ape’s lung much like ours. Breathable hot particles of cesium, which emit alpha and gamma radiation, were spread long distances by Fukushima, Japan’s triple reactor meltdowns in 2011. Photo by Robert Del Tredici.

Contrary to reports that only gaseous radioactive materials were released by the triple-reactor Fukushima meltdowns in Japan in 2011, scientists reported early on that highly radioactive “hot particles” were released and carried long distances by wind.

“Cesium found 375 miles from Japanese plant,” read the headline in the Japanese daily paper Yomiuri Shimbun — and reprinted in dozens of US papers March 17 and 18, 2012. The report noted that radioactive cesium-137 was found in plankton 375 miles east of the destroyed Fukushima reactors. Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute warned that “the radioactive cesium is likely to have accumulated in fish that eat plankton.” The cesium then bio-accumulates and bio-concentrates as the fish continue to consume bad plankton, and as bigger fish (tuna, cod, haddock, pollock, carp) eat smaller contaminated fish.

According to a 2012 report from Bellona Foundation, “radionuclides from the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant’s triple meltdown last year radioactively contaminated the entire northern hemisphere within days and the US west coast bore a significant brunt of so called hot particles, an independent scientific paper released yesterday claims.” (“Impact to US West Coast from Fukushima disaster likely larger than anticipated, several reports indicate,” Bellona, Sept. 19, 2012)

Earlier field sampling of vehicle air filters done in April 2011 by Marco Kaltofen, of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, discovered breathable hot particles contaminated with cesium-137 in Seattle, Washington. (“Radiation Exposure to the Population in Japan after the Earthquake,” Marco Kaltofen, MS, PE, Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Inst., October 31, 2011)

Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear reactor engineer with Fairewinds Associates, reported June 12, 2011 that, “Air filters in Seattle indicate that people there were absorbing five hot particles every day for the month of April [2011]. That means that that hot particle gets absorbed in your lung, or winds up in your intestines, or it winds up in your muscle, or it winds up in your bone [where it] constantly bombards a very narrow piece of tissue.”

On July 18, 2011, Dr. Chris Busby, scientific secretary of the Low-Level Radiation Campaign in England and co-author of Fukushima and Health: What to Expect (Green Audit, 2011), said in an interview, “When we put the elements from the air filter next to x-ray film and we develop the film, we see different light sources and flashes of light. These are called ‘hot particles.’ They are very small. You cannot see them — they are almost like a gas. If they are in the car filters, because cars ‘breathe’ air — then they are inside of people, inside the lungs, inside the nose, inside the guts… and they will be causing significant harm.”

The journal Science of the Total Environment reported December 31, 2017 on a more recent and lengthier study in which detectable levels of hot particles of cesium-134 and cesium-137 were collected across Northern Japan and analyzed over a five-year period, from 2011 to 2016. (“Radioactively-hot particles detected in dusts and soils from Northern Japan,”) The hot particles were found in dusts and soils in over 80 percent of the samples. The study’s authors, Marco Kaltofena and Arnie Gundersen, said, “Some of the hot particles detected in this study could cause significant radiation exposures to individuals if inhaled. Exposure models ignoring these isolated hot particles would potentially understate human radiation dose.”

Proponents of nuclear power still get away with denying that such inhaled or ingested exposures cause harm. This is because when the cancers begin appearing 10, 15 or 20 years from exposure, no one can to prove they were caused by Fukushima’s hot particles. “Got cancer?” they ask. “Not our fault. Nuclear power is safe.”

Contact Us

(715) 472-4185
nukewatch1@lakeland.ws

Address:
740A Round Lake Road
Luck, Wisconsin 54853
USA

Donate To Nukewatch

News & Information on Nuclear Weapons,
Power, Waste & Nonviolent Resistance

Stay Connected