Environmental Justice

July 11, 2018 by Nukewatch 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.”

April 26, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Chernobyl Anniversary Begs Comparisons to Fukushima

Photo: The cement tomb built in 1986 over the destroyed Chernobyl reactor No. 4 in Ukraine needed replacement by 1996. It finally got re-covered in 2016. Similar abandonment has been recommended for three wrecked General Electric reactors in Fukushima, Japan.

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the “second worst” nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima are estimated to be between 5.6 and 8.1 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Professor Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the report’s Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News then, “Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has estimated that about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the updated 2016 TORCH Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels.[1] (A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. The “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels.)

Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 in Ukraine suffered several explosions, blew apart and burned for 40 days, sending clouds of radioactive materials high into the atmosphere, and spreading fallout across the whole of the Northern Hemisphere — depositing cesium-137 in Minnesota’s milk.[2]

The likelihood of similar or worse reactor disasters was estimated by James Asselstine of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), who testified to Congress in 1986: “We can expect to see a core meltdown accident within the next 20 years, and it … could result in off-site releases of radiation … as large as or larger than the releases … at Chernobyl.[3] Fukushima-Daiichi came 25 years later.

Contamination of soil, vegetation and water is so widespread in Japan that evacuating all the at-risk populations could collapse the economy, much as Chernobyl did to the former Soviet Union. For this reason, the Japanese government standard for decontaminating soil there is far less stringent than the standard used in Ukraine after Chernobyl.

Fukushima’s Cesium-137 Release Tops Chernobyl’s

The Korea Atomic Energy Research (KAER) Institute outside of Seoul reported in July 2014 that Fukushima-Daiichi’s three reactor meltdowns may have emitted two to four times as much cesium-137 as the reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl.[4]

To determine its estimate of the cesium-137 that was released into the environment from Fukushima, the cesium-137 release fraction (4% to the atmosphere, 16% to the ocean) was multiplied by the cesium-137 inventory in the uranium fuel inside the three melted reactors (760 to 820 quadrillion Becquerel, or Bq), with these results:

Ocean release of cesium-137 from Fukushima (the worst ever recorded): 121.6 to 131.2 quadrillion Becquerel (16% x 760 to 820 quadrillion Bq). Atmospheric release of cesium-137 from Fukushima: 30.4 to 32.8 quadrillion Becquerel (4% x 760 to 820 quadrillion Bq).

Total release of cesium-137 to the environment from Fukushima: 152 to 164 quadrillion Becquerel. Total release of cesium-137 into the environment from Chernobyl: between 70 and 110 quadrillion Bq.

The Fukushima-Daiichi reactors’ estimated inventory of 760 to 820 quadrillion Bq (petabecquerels) of cesium-137 used by the KAER Institute is significantly lower than the US Department of Energy’s estimate of 1,300 quadrillion Bq. It is possible the Korean institute’s estimates of radioactive releases are low.

In Chernobyl, 30 years after its explosions and fire, what the Wall St. Journal last year called “the $2.45 billion shelter implementation plan” was finally completed in November 2016. A huge metal cover was moved into place over the wreckage of the reactor and its crumbling, hastily erected cement tomb. The giant new cover is 350 feet high, and engineers say it should last 100 years — far short of the 250,000-year radiation hazard underneath.

The first cover was going to work for a century too, but by 1996 was riddled with cracks and in danger of collapsing. Designers went to work then engineering a cover-for-the-cover, and after 20 years of work, the smoking radioactive waste monstrosity of Chernobyl has a new “tin chapeau.” But with extreme weather, tornadoes, earth tremors, corrosion and radiation-induced embrittlement it could need replacing about 2,500 times. — John LaForge

_______________

[1] Duluth News-Tribune & Herald, “Slight rise in radioactivity found again in state milk,” May 22, 1986; St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch, “Radiation kills Chernobyl firemen,” May 17, 1986; Minneapolis StarTribune, “Low radiation dose found in area milk,” May 17, 1986.

[2] Ian Fairlie, “TORCH-2016: An independent scientific evaluation of the health-related effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster,” March 2016 (https://www.global2000.at/sites/global/files/GLOBAL_TORCH%202016_rz_WEB_KORR.pdf).

[3] James K. Asselstine, Commissioner, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Testimony in Nuclear Reactor Safety: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, May 22 and July 16, 1986, Serial No. 99-177, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987.

[4] Progress in Nuclear Energy, Vol. 74, July 2014, pp. 61-70; ENENews.org, Oct. 20, 2014.

April 19, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Explosive and Linguistic Events with Radioactive Waste

This week’s explosive news from the “more bang for the buck” folks is that up to three barrels of unspecified “radioactive material” either ruptured or burst or exploded at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), near Idaho Falls, on April 11. “An exothermal event” is how Energy Department (DOE) spokesperson Danielle Miller described the prompt deconstruction of the rad waste drum(s).

“Exothermal” is a nice distraction that means “a chemical reaction accompanied by the release of heat.” The usage reminds me of the May 1996 “gaseous ignition event” involving hydrogen gas in a fully loaded high-level rad waste cask at Wisconsin’s Point Beach reactor site. The cask contained 14 tons of highly radioactive used reactor fuel, and the eruption of Public Relations inventiveness popped the container’s 4,000-pound lid right off.

The Idaho Lab accident was reported by ABC News, Associated Press, the Seattle Times, the Japan Times, and Fox Radio News among others.* PR people at INL have said three 55-gallon drums holding “transuranic” (heavier-than-uranium) radioactive sludge may have “ruptured.”

One theory about the cause, according to the AP, is that “radioactive decay made the barrel[s] heat up and ignite particles of uranium.” Unfortunately for those who put out the smoldering barrels, “When the firefighters left the building emergency workers detected a small amount of radioactive material on their skin,” the AP reported April 12.

The very next sentence in this story was that the DOE’s Miller said, “None of the radioactive material was detected outside of the building where the rupture occurred” — except for the contaminated firefighters who somehow don’t count.

Because of decades of “secretive record-keeping” it is hard to find out exactly what is in the burst barrels and got on the firefighters. INL officials do not “know the exact contents,” Joint Information Center spokesman Don Miley reportedly said.

Nuclear waste explosions are us

The ruptured Idaho Lab barrels reportedly contain a mixture of fluids and solvents sent from the long-shuttered Rocky Flats plutonium weapons production site near Denver, the AP reported April 13. The name Rocky Flats should have rung a bell for INL’s “they haven’t run into this” Don Miley.

Plutonium bomb fabrication at Rocky Flats caused the second largest industrial fire in US history, Sept. 11, 1957. The blaze howled for over 13 hours, consuming two tons of plutonium and destroying all 620 industrial filters designed to trap particles. Between 30 and 44 pounds of respirable plutonium-239 and plutonium-240 escaped through chimneystacks, drifting downwind to Denver. When smokestack monitors were reconnected, radioactive measurements were 16,000 times greater than “allowable” standards. No emergency response was taken to protect the people of Denver.

Exploding rad waste has been around a long time and has a sordid history. 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. This risk always comes with high-level rad waste. It helped cancel the plan to use Yucca Mountain, Nevada for abandonment of commercial nuclear power waste, because physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory reported in 1995 that the material could erupt in a catastrophic explosion. In December 1993, DOE assistant secretary Thomas Grumbly told the New York Times that high-level rad waste in tanks at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Hanford Site in Washington State, and at Idaho Lab could also “fly apart” if it fuel fell to the bottom of storage pools and caused a “critical mass” to accumulate.

At Hanford, hydrogen gas that builds up inside large tanks of high-level liquid rad waste could “possibly cause an explosion that would release radioactive material,” the AP reported in June 2013. In 1990, Ronald Gerton, then a director of waste management there said, “A spark could really set it off,” referring to 22 tanks that generate enough hydrogen gas to cause and explosion “powerful enough to blow them open,” the Milwaukee Journal reported. The Environmental Policy Institute had warned of this risk in September 1987, reporting that the probability of such an explosion may be as high as one-in-50.

Back at the Idaho Lab, spokesman Don Miley said, “They haven’t run into anything like this actually happening” but he has a short memory. It happened four years ago, on Valentine’s Day 2014, at the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. A barrel of plutonium waste exploded underground, contaminating the entire facility, including the elevator and ventilator shafts, and internally poisoned 22 workers who inhaled the 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 burned 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 dump site is known to hold a total of 47 pounds of plutonium and uranium isotopes.

In the Idaho Lab accident, the first responders “got some radioactive contamination on their skin, but emergency workers washed it away,” the DOE’s Danielle Miller told reporters. And, she added, “The firefighters did not inhale any of the radioactive material.” Miller can’t possibly know this, but it could be true, someday, when our noses and mouths aren’t attached to our skin.

*Sources:

Keith Ridler, Associated Press, “Radioactive sludge barrel ruptures at eastern Idaho nuclear facility” (AP), April 13, 2018; and Keith Ridler, “Radioactive sludge barrel ruptures at Idaho nuclear site,” Seattle Times (AP), April 12, 2018;

Japan Times (AP), “Sludge barrel ruptures at Idaho nuclear site; no injuries or public risk reported,” April 13, 2018;

ABC News, “Radioactive material washed off 3 firefighters,” (AP) April 12, 2018;

Associated Press, “More Barrel Ruptures Possible at Idaho Nuke Site,” April 12, 2018;

FOX news radio (AP), “Incident Reported At Idaho Nuclear Site, Crews Responding,” April 12, 2018;

Danielle Miller, DOE Idaho Communications announcement, April 12, 2018, which noted, “Later, there were indications that a third drum may have been involved.”

— John LaForge

April 2, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Grand Canyon Threatened by Federal Give-Away to Uranium Multinationals

Foreign Corporations Redraw National Park Boundaries

Spring Quarterly, 2018

By Kelly Lundeen

If the water was to be contaminated, we believe that the existence of the Havasupai will disappear.
— Carletta Tilousi, Havasupai Tribal Council

We will stand and fight all the way.
— Russell Begaye, Navajo Nation President

The price of uranium is at its lowest in over a decade. Renewable energy production in the US has surpassed nuclear. So why is the Trump administration making it easier to mine uranium? Did the uranium mining companies ask politely? Let’s look at what the first year of Trump has brought uranium mining corporations.

Last March Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to propose ways to remove “burdens” from the nuclear and fossil fuel industry. Use of federally protected lands was one area these “burdens” could be removed. Native American communities were not consulted regarding the “burdened” industries and the false, but common assumption was made, that the fate of federal land should be a matter of the United States government rather than its original inhabitants.

In November the Department of Agriculture responded to Trump’s order, in part, with a recommendation to lift the ban on new uranium mines near the Grand Canyon. The 20-year ban was put in place in 2012 after five years of campaigning by a coalition of tribal and environmental organizations. In December, the ban was upheld by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, a move lauded the world over. However, uranium multinationals have not let the Grand Canyon out of their sight, and the Trump administration may still overturn the ban. On Dec. 20, less than a week after the ban was preserved, another executive order was issued to reduce reliance on foreign imports of “critical” minerals. A draft list of the minerals released in February included uranium.

The same day the Grand Canyon mining ban was upheld, there was a separate ruling against the Havasupai Tribe allowing the Canyon Mine, located on sacred ancestral Havasupai land to open only six miles from the Grand Canyon. The Canyon Mine, owned by a subsidiary of Energy Fuels Resources of Canada, began the licensing process before the ban was in place.

Energy Fuels had another success in December when Trump used the Antiquities Act to slash the size of Bears Ears National Monument (BENM) in Utah by 85%. (The simultaneous reduction in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was related to coal interests.) Although Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke had stated that there was no mine within Bears Ears, the New York Times found 300 claims according to data from the Utah Bureau of Land Management. Just outside of the Monument’s newly drawn boundaries, about one-third of those claims are associated with Energy Fuels.

This is not surprising considering they openly lobbied for the reduction in the Monument and distributed maps to legislators carefully detailing areas they would like removed from protected status. In a letter to Secretary Zinke obtained by the Washington Post, Energy Fuels Chief Operating Officer Mark Chalmers spelled out the company’s areas of concern and added unabashedly, “There are also many other known uranium …deposits located within the newly created BENM that could provide valuable energy and mineral resources.” Despite the overwhelming support (98%) for maintaining or expanding the National Monuments demonstrated in public comments to the Department of Interior, a foreign mining company had more influence.

Communities on the frontlines and nationwide coalitions are actively opposing the special interests and are not giving up without a fight. To help resist Energy Fuel’s Canyon Mine and the transport of uranium is to take Haul No!’s Pledge of Resistance.

— Arizona Public Media, Feb. 6; New York Times, Jan. 13; CNN, Jan. 9, 2018; Energy Fuels Resources, Inc., & Washington Post, May 25; USA Today, Apr. 4, 2017

April 2, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Dismantling the Nuclear Beast in New Mexico

By Leona Morgan

Spring Quarterly 2018

The Albuquerque-based Nuclear Issues Study Group (NISG), formed in June 2016 “To Protect New Mexico from All Things Nuclear.” NISG came together in response to the lack of young organizers, young activists, and people of color at the forefront of nuclear issues affecting New Mexico. We live in a state that is targeted by the nuclear/industrial complex and we see this as environmental racism. We are primarily concerned about new threats of uranium mining, weapons modernization, and nuclear waste dumping, while many long-standing issues remain unaddressed. We emphasize the need for a new way to reach out to young people, with a focus on recruiting a new generation of New Mexicans to get involved in resisting every level of the deadly nuclear fuel chain.

The co-founders, Eileen Shaughnessy and I, wanted to bring the perspectives of a more diverse and younger population to the decision-making table of national organizing against nuclear proliferation. Eileen started a class within the Sustainability Studies Program at the University of New Mexico (UNM) called “Nuclear New Mexico”—now in its 7th semester. The class gives students an honest history of nuclear colonialism in our state, as well as a pathway into activism. I have more than a decade of experience organizing against uranium mining on indigenous lands. Between the two of us, we’ve been able to tap into a wide network of resources and support to start NISG.

The symposium explored every aspect of the nuclear fuel chain—past, current, and future—as well as highlight some key threats to New Mexico that Nuclear Issues Study Group is focusing on including: Sandia National Laboratories’ Mixed Waste Landfill and the proposed Centralized “Interim” Storage of high-level radioactive waste.

In December 2017, we held our first major event, an educational gathering called “Dismantling the Nuclear Beast: Connecting Local Work to the National Movement.” The symposium featured over 60 organizers, artists, and student presenters, and welcomed more than 200 attendees from across the country. We heard directly from indigenous leaders, organizers, and community members impacted by various stages of the nuclear fuel chain, from uranium mining and milling, to bomb building at Los Alamos and Sandia National labs. Down-winders of the Trinity bomb blast in 1945, and students from Ukraine and Japan—places devastated by nuclear disasters—presented as well. We also had guests from the East Coast and the Deep South who are confronting nuclear reactor and radioactive waste issues. (Videos available on YouTube.com.)

Since then, we have been steadily focused on resisting the proposed Centralized “Interim” Storage, aka “CIS” of high-level radioactive waste in the area. NISG proudly participated in the 2018 New Mexico Legislative Session, helping to educate legislators about the threat of CIS and asking them to intervene on the issue. Currently, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is processing an application from Holtec International to build a CIS facility between Carlsbad and Hobbs, a “temporary” dump that would hold all of the nation’s waste uranium fuel from commercial nuclear reactors for up to 120 years. In a collaborative effort, NISG worked with UNM students, New Mexico activists and organizers, the SEED Coalition from Texas, and legislators on a letter urging the NRC to slow down the licensing process and allow more time to thoroughly study how this facility and waste transport could impact New Mexico. In total, 21 representatives and nine senators signed on to this letter! Along with local community members, we will present the letter and our concerns at this spring’s public hearings to show how, collectively, we believe that nationwide waste transports and dumping on New Mexico are injustices that must be addressed on local, state, and national levels. We will continue to work toward stopping additional radioactive waste from being created in our state, as well as keeping it from being transported and dumped here.

—Leona Morgan works with the Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico.