Nuclear Power

July 12, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Summer 2018 Nukewatch Quarterly Newsletter

Click the links below to access articles from our Summer 2018 Quarterly Newsletter. Page numbers show the pdf version of each page. Individual articles are also tagged by issue category.

Cover and Page 8

National and Personal Interests in Negotiations Between North Korea and the United States
Tritium and Cesium Contamination at Long-Closed Wisconsin Reactor

Page 1

Sea Monsters: Rudderless Reactors on the High Seas

Page 2

Shunning Nuclear Weapons: Averting a Global Catastrophe: A Global Appeal by the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross

World’s Biggest Submarine Base Targeted by Plowshares Action

Page 7

Nuclear Shorts

July 11, 2018 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

Tritium and Cesium Contamination at Long-Closed Wisconsin Reactor

The Genoa La Crosse reactor in Wisconsin has been shut down since 1987, but is still undergoing dismantlement, a dangerous process that has caused radioactive contamination.

Summer Quarterly 2018

By John LaForge

Last February, the Genoa La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor, on the Mississippi River near Genoa, Wisconsin, was found to be leaking radioactive tritium into the groundwater.

The La Crosse Tribune reported March 14 that the firm LaCrosseSolutions, Inc. reported a reading of 24,200 picocuries-per-liter* in water taken from a monitoring well on Feb. 1. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allows tritium in drinking water up to 20,000 picocuries-per-liter. This allowable contamination is ten times higher than what the European Union allows.

The tritium in the groundwater from La Crosse’s reactor is a danger to everyone drinking it, but the Tribune reported that the monitoring well water is “not used for human consumption.” This assurance did not come as a relief to people in the area using well water that’s not been tested. Tritium stays in the environment for 123 years, about ten of its radioactive “half-lives” of 12.3 years. This time scale gives the it a lot of time to move through the water and enter the food chain. As an emitter of beta particle radiation it isn’t a great danger outside the body, but can do damage inside the body if inhaled or ingested.

The EPA estimates that seven out of 200,000 people who drink water with 20,000 picocuries-per-liter of tritium for decades would develop cancer. However, because tumors or other cancers may not appear for decades, victims or their survivors are generally unable to be compensated.

LaCrosseSolutions is working an $85 million contract to deconstruct or “decommission” the long-shuttered and partly dismembered La Crosse boiling water reactor. The small unit was shut down in 1987, 31 years ago, after operating for 20 years. Yet it’s still poisoning the environment with radioactive leaks. Unlike other heavy industries, nuclear power’s machinery can keep on poisoning its surroundings even three decades after its profitable public service has ended.

Operating reactors release tritium from vent stacks in the form of tritiated water vapor. This can produce radioactive rainfall, “which can contaminate surface water bodies as well as groundwater,” according to Annie and Arjun Makhijani, of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. But since the La Crosse reactor has ceased operations, the tritium is no long released into the air but now its legacy is poisoned ground, contaminated and corroded pipes and duct work, and tritium leaking into the ground.

Dairyland Power Co-op, which operated the reactor from 1967 to 1987, but transferred its license to LaCrosseSolutions in 2016, isn’t alone in its contamination of groundwater. In June 2011, part two of the Associated Press’s comprehensive four-part investigation of US nuclear power, found that tritium leaks were underway at 48 of 64 US reactor sites, three-quarters of all the country’s commercial reactor operations, “often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping.”

LaCrosseSolutions’s Dirty Clean-up

In addition to the poisoning of groundwater with leaking tritium, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced on March 26 that LaCrosseSolutions had spilled 400 gallons of radioactively contaminated water directly into the Mississippi River in February 2017.

The NRC determined that the spill of waste water containing the deadly isotope cesium-137 was a violation of federal regulations—one of three low-level violations identified in its annual inspection of decommissioning being done by LacrosseSolutions—and that the cesium-137 in water samples was at concentrations exceeding federal limits. The NRC did not issue a citation but found LaCrosseSolutions had violated NRC policy.

* A picocurie is one/trillionth of a curie, or 2.2 atomic disintegration per minute. A curie is a very large amount of radioactivity, about 2.2 trillion atomic disintegrations per minute, or 37 billion disintegrations per second.

July 11, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Sea Monsters: Rudderless Reactors on the High Seas

Summer Quarterly 2018

By John LaForge

*Akademik Lomonosov*, a Russian barge holding two nuclear reactors, left St. Petersburg April 28 for Murmansk where it will undergo fueling and test startup. Critics dubbed the vessel “Nuclear *Titanic*” and “Chernobyl On-the Rocks.” *AFP photo/Alexander Nemenov*

Joke: Did you hear the one about the Exxon Valdez-Fukushima-Chernobyl-Gulf-Oil-Titanic? Yeah: Russia towed a floating double reactor barge 3,000 miles in the Arctic Ocean to power off-shore oil rigs and nothing went wrong!

Announced with sarcastic headlines around the world, Russian engineers launched a giant ocean-going nuclear power barge, carrying two reactors, on a lengthy voyage over the Arctic Ocean from Russia’s far northwest to its far northeastern reaches.

Sailing from St. Petersburg April 28, the one-of-a kind Akademik Lomonosov presents such an obvious and appalling risk to sea life and seacoasts that even Newsweek magazine said in an April 30th headline, “Russia’s ‘Nuclear Titanic’ Raising Fears of ‘Chernobyl On Ice.’”

The barge has no propulsion of its own and must be tugged and towed for a year-long journey of over 3,000 miles. Its manufacturer, the Russian corporation Rosatom, said at the send-off celebration that it has built in “a great margin of safety” that is “invincible for tsunamis and natural disaster.” Chortles of “Titanic!” couldn’t be resisted since it’s been reported that when White Star Line Vice President P.A.S. Franklin was informed that Titanic was in trouble, he announced “We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe the boat is unsinkable.”

The teetering, 12-story-tall Akademik Lomonosov has travelled through the Baltic Sea and the North Sea—having so far avoided collisions with icebergs, shoals, or oil tankers—and docked May 17 at the far-northernwestern city of Murmansk, where planners intend to load its two reactors with uranium fuel and conduct startup tests. The government initially intended to load and test the reactors in downtown St. Petersburg, a city of 5.3 million. But Greenpeace activists and others successfully petitioned to have the dangerous operation done far away from the metropolis. The fueling and startup will still be done close to Murmansk, a city of 300,000 in Russia’s far northwest. Greenpeace reported: “Only a petition by 12,000 St. Petersburg citizens, questions in the city’s legislative assembly, and major concerns from Baltic Sea countries about transporting two reactors filled with irradiated fuel, without its own propulsion, along their rocky coasts, caused Rosatom to use some common sense and shift loading plans to a less densely populated area.

If the fission reactor tests go as planned, the barge is to be towed some 3,000 miles through the Arctic Ocean to the far northeastern Siberian city of Pevek and go online sometime in 2019.

In what could be called a Faustian Rube Goldberg scheme, the “floating Chernobyl” is supposed to provide electric power to oil drilling platforms. The breath-taking self-destructive carbon footprint of this fossil fuel-consuming, pollution-spewing sea monster can hardly be exaggerated. The mining, milling, processing and reactor fissioning of uranium, the production of radioactive wastes that need managed isolation for a million years, all done to drill for oil which is then transformed into pollution, cannot be smarter or cheaper than conservation and efficiency that cost next to nothing and are pollution-free.

As a public relations cover, the Nuclear Titanic will also provide electricity to the city of Pevek (pop. 100,000) and to a desalination plant, replacing four small reactors called the “Bilibino” complex, which is set for decommissioning beginning in 2021.

Undersea earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricane winds and rogue waves are dangerous, unpredictable and inevitable, but they are natural disasters. Placing hot, bobbing vulnerable nuclear reactors directly into a pristine wilderness like the Arctic Ocean in the face of such enormous risks is not just tempting fate, but constitutes reckless endangerment of the public commons. The Bellona Foundation in Oslo warned, using more diplomatic and understated terms, that “far-flung locations present hurdles to proper disaster response in the event of an accident.”

Most governments with nuclear stationary reactor operations understand them to be uniquely dangerous. Ordinary reactors stand alone among all the world’s potentially disastrous industrial operations in being required to have evacuation plans before powering up. But how to evacuate the oceans?

July 11, 2018 by Nukewatch 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).

July 11, 2018 by Nukewatch 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.”

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Summer Quarterly 2018

By John LaForge

Summer Quarterly 2018

By John LaForge

Summer Quarterly 2018

Summer Quarterly 2018

By Jack Loughran

“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

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