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August 1, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Chernobyl-area Fires Spread Radiation Spewed by 1986 Disaster…Again

“Minor increases in radiation” — IAEA

Editor’s note: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the UN’s nuclear reactor agency, and was established to promote the nuclear power industry. IAEA’s purpose, announced in its charter, says it “shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy… throughout the world” and to “encourage…atomic energy for peaceful uses throughout the world.”  Often identified as a “watchdog agency,” IAEA is a fully captured arm of the nuclear power lobby. IAEA’s announcements routinely understate, or minimize the extent and the dangerousness of radiation releases, as well as the risks of radiation exposures.

Dangerously increased levels of radiation in breathable radioactive particles lofted and windblown by April wildfires in and around the Chernobyl reactor disaster exclusion zone were reported April 13 by Kiev officials.
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2020

Dangerously increased levels of radiation in breathable radioactive particles lofted and windblown by April wildfires in and around the Chernobyl reactor disaster exclusion zone—which was permanently contaminated in April 1986 by one of the world’s worst radiation catastrophes—–were reported April 13 by Kiev officials.

The BBC and Reuters reported April 13 that acting head of Ukraine’s state ecological inspection service, Yegor Firsov, said in an April 5 Facebook post that radiation levels in the area had risen substantially above normal.

“There is bad news. In the center of the fire, radiation is above normal,” Firsov said, posting a video of a Geiger counter. “As you can see in the video, the readings of the device are 2.3, when the norm is 0.14. But this is only within the area of the fire outbreak,” the UPI reported April 6. The reading was more than 16 times normal.

However, “Government officials later rejected this finding, and said the levels in the area were ‘within normal limits,’” and “Mr Firsov also withdrew his remarks,” the BBC said.

In short order Ukrainian government agencies and the IAEA went to work assuring the public that the radiation-tainted forest fire smoke was not a danger to people in Ukraine.

In an April 24 press release the IAEA said, “The burning of meadows, pastures and stubble has resulted in some minor increases in radiation due to the release of radionuclides transferred from soil contaminated in the 1986 accident. But the concentration of radioactive materials in the air remained below Ukraine’s radiation safety norms and posed no public health concern, the SNRIU said,” referring to the Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine.

“These fires happen almost every year”

Radio Free Europe reported April 26 that “Ukrainian officials have attributed smoky air in Kiev in recent days to fires in the nearby Zhytomyr region, assuring residents that radiation levels in the Ukrainian capital are within an acceptable range.”

“Background radiation in [Kiev] is ‘stable’ and does ‘not exceed the permissible values,’ [Ukraine’s] State Emergency Service said on April 26,” the 34th anniversary of the catastrophic explosions and fires caused by Chernobyl’s reactor 4, Radio Free Europe said.

Greenpeace Russia reported April 23 that “plumes of smoke caused smog in [Kiev], 250 kilometers away and although they did not exceed norms, higher levels of radioactivity than usual were detected.”

NBC News reported April 18 that Volodymyr Demchuk, director of the Emergency Response Department, said in a video statement, “The radioactive background in Kiev and the Kiev region is within normal limits.”

Official assurances of “normal limits”, and “permissible” or “acceptable” levels of radiation exposure studiously avoid saying that exposure to or inhaling radiation is “safe.” Further, the IAEA and the Ukrainian authorities neglect any mention of particular isotopes in the air, what sorts of radiation was being emitted, where the radioactive particles might settle, the length of time the particles persist in the environment, and the risks posed by radioactive “daughter” elements left for decades by the radioactive decay process.

“Forest fires in contaminated areas are a big problem for Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia where five million people still live in contaminated areas according to official data. These fires happen almost every year,” reported Greenpeace Russia’s nuclear campaigner Rashid Alimov.

—JL

Filed Under: Chernobyl, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

January 10, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Dr. Janette Sherman, 1930 – 2019

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

The renowned professor of oncology and medicine Janette Sherman died Nov. 7 at 89 in Alexandria, Virginia. She had a combination of dementia and Addison’s disease, her daughter Connie Bigelow said. A chemist by training, Dr. Sherman took up toxicology and helped pinpoint how hazardous substances, toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation could lead to cancer, birth defects and other diseases. She also studied the continuing health effects of the world’s worst radiation disasters, in 1986 at Chernobyl in Ukraine and in 2011 at the Fukushima-Daiichi site in Japan. Dr. Sherman edited “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” (Boston: New York Academy of Sciences, 2007), which analyzed thousands of articles in the scientific literature and concluded that the Chernobyl disaster had caused an estimated 985,000 premature deaths…. Dr. Sherman studied the effects of radiation early in her career and later worked with Joseph Mangano, executive director of the nonprofit Radiation and Public Health Project. By analyzing the baby teeth of children who lived near nuclear reactors, they suggested in five peer-reviewed journal articles that even small doses of radiation had caused increases in childhood cancer. [Mr. Mangano emailed on Dec. 1, “Janette was an eminent toxicologist, but focused her energies on nuclear power plant emissions and their health consequences since the mid-1990s. …We all can learn from her example.”] —Excerpted from Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, Nov. 29, 2019.

Filed Under: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Uncategorized

July 6, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“I oversaw the US nuclear power industry. Now I think it should be banned.”

The Dangers of Climate Chaos No Longer Outweigh the Risks of Nuclear Reactor Accidents
US Dept. of State Geographer. Data NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO. Image (c) 2012 Terrametrics
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019
Gregory Jaczko, Washington Post, May 17, 2019

Editor’s note: Mr. Jaczko’s use of the phrase “nuclear plant” has been replaced with the word “reactor” when applicable.

Nuclear power was supposed to save the planet. The reactors that used this technology could produce enormous amounts of electricity without the pollution caused by burning coal, oil or natural gas, which would help slow the catastrophic changes humans have forced on the Earth’s climate. As a physicist who studied esoteric properties of subatomic particles, I admired the science and the technological innovation behind the industry. And by the time I started working on nuclear issues on Capitol Hill in 1999 as an aide to Democratic lawmakers, the risks from human-caused global warming seemed to outweigh the dangers of nuclear power, which hadn’t had an accident since Chernobyl, 13 years earlier.

By 2005, my views had begun to shift.

I’d spent almost four years working on nuclear policy and witnessed the influence of the industry on the political process. Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where I saw that nuclear power was more complicated than I knew; it was a powerful business as well as an impressive feat of science. In 2009, President Barack Obama named me the agency’s chairman.

Two years into my term, an earthquake and tsunami destroyed four nuclear reactors in Japan. I spent months reassuring the American public that nuclear energy, and the US nuclear industry in particular, was safe. But by then, I was starting to doubt those claims myself.

Before the accident, it was easier to accept the industry’s potential risks, because nuclear power [reactors] had kept many coal and gas plants from spewing air pollutants and greenhouse gases into the air.

Afterward, the falling cost of renewable power changed the calculus. Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, I now believe that nuclear power’s benefits are no longer enough to risk the welfare of people living near these [reactors]. I became so convinced years after departing office that I’ve now made alternative-energy development my new career, leaving nuclear power behind. The current and potential costs—personal and economic—are just too high.

Nuclear reactors generate power through fission, the separation of one large atom into two or more smaller ones. This atomic engine yields none of the air pollutants produced by the combustion of carbon-based fuels. Over the decades since its inception in the 1950s, nuclear power has prevented hundreds of fossil-fuel plants from being built, meaning fewer people have suffered or died from diseases caused by their emissions.

But fission reactors have a dark side too. If the energy they produce is not closely controlled, they can fail in catastrophic ways that kill people and render large tracts of land uninhabitable. Nuclear power is also the path to nuclear weapons, themselves an existential threat.

As the certainty of climate change grew clearer, nuclear power presented a dilemma for environmentalists: Was the risk of accidents or further spread of nuclear weapons greater than the hazard of climate change? In the late 2000s, the arguments in support of nuclear power were gaining traction with Congress, academia and even some environmentalists, as the Chernobyl accident faded into the past and the effects of climate change became harder to ignore. No new [reactors] had been proposed in decades, because of the industry’s dismal record of construction oversight and cost controls, but now utilities were beginning to pitch new reactors—as many as 30 around the country.

But the Fukushima Daiichi crisis reversed that momentum.  A massive release of radiation from that reactor complex, as its four failed reactors, lasted for months. The world watched as hydrogen explosions sent huge chunks of concrete into the air—a reminder that radiation was streaming, unseen, from the reactor core. More than 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes and their communities.

Most have not returned, because only select areas have been remediated, making the surrounding region seem like a giant chessboard with hazardous areas next to safer ones. The crisis hobbled the Japanese economy for years. The government estimated that the accident would cost at least $180 billion. Independent estimates suggest that the cost could be three times more.

There were obvious ramifications for the entire industry. Could what happened in Japan happen elsewhere? This accident consumed my work at the NRC for the next six months. I assured the public of the safety of US reactors, because I did not have enough information or a legal basis at that point to say otherwise. But I also promised to thoroughly review the safety measures we had in place and to swiftly implement any necessary reforms the agency identified. Agency staffers soon produced a reasonable set of reactor improvements that would reduce the chance of a similar accident here. The staff found weaknesses in the programs for dealing with fires, earthquakes and flooding—the kinds of natural disasters that could trigger a catastrophe like Fukushima.

Yet after the disaster, my fellow commissioners, as well as many in Congress and the nuclear industry, fretted that the proposed new US reactors might never be built, because Fukushima would focus too much attention on the potential downsides. Westinghouse and the new [reactor] owners worried that acknowledging the need for reforms would raise even more concern about the safety of reactors. The industry wanted the NRC to say that everything was fine and nothing needed to change. So my colleagues on the commission and supporters of the industry pushed to license the first of these projects without delay and stonewalled implementation of the safety reforms. My colleagues objected to making the staff report public. I ultimately prevailed, but then the lobbying intensified: The industry almost immediately started pushing back on the staff report. They lobbied the commission and enlisted allies in Congress to disapprove, water-down or defer many of the recommendations.

Within a year of the accident at Fukushima—and over my objections—the NRC implemented just a few of the modest safety reforms that the agency’s employees had proposed, and then approved the first four new reactor licenses in decades, in Georgia and in South Carolina.

But there was a problem. After Fukushima, people all over the world demanded a different approach to nuclear safety. Germany closed several older reactors and required the rest to shut down by 2022. Japan closed most of its reactors. Last year, even France, which gets about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, proposed reducing that figure to 50 percent by 2035, because safety could not be guaranteed. Trying to make accidents unlikely wasn’t enough.

And here in the United States, those four new reactors—the vanguards of the “nuclear renaissance”—still haven’t opened. The South Carolina companies building two of the reactors canceled the project in 2017, after spending $9 billion of their customers’ money without producing a single electron of power. The construction company behind the utilities, Westinghouse, went bankrupt, almost destroying its parent company, the global conglomerate Toshiba. The other two reactors licensed while I chaired the NRC are still under construction in Georgia and years behind schedule. Their cost has ballooned from $14 billion to $28 billion and continues to grow.

History shows that the expense involved in nuclear power will never change. Past construction in the United States exhibited similar cost increases throughout the design, engineering and construction process. The technology and the safety needs are just too complex and demanding to translate into a facility that is simple to design and build. No matter your views on nuclear power in principle, no one can afford to pay this much for two [reactors]. New nuclear is simply off the table in the United States.

After I left the NRC in 2012, I argued that we needed new ways to make accidents impossible. When a reactor incident occurs, the reactor should not release any harmful radiation outside the reactor itself. I was not yet antinuclear, just pro-public-safety. But nuclear proponents still see this as “antinuclear.” They knew, as I did, that most reactors operating today do not meet the “no off-site release” test. I think a reasonable standard for any source of electricity should be that it doesn’t contaminate your community for decades.

Coal and natural gas do not create this kind of acute accident hazard, though they do present a different kind of danger. Large dams for hydroelectric power could require evacuation of nearby communities if they failed—but without the lasting contamination effect of radiation. And solar, wind and geothermal energy pose no safety threat at all.

For years, my concerns about nuclear energy’s cost and safety were always tempered by a growing fear of climate catastrophe. But Fukushima provided a good test of just how important nuclear power was to slowing climate change. In the months after the accident, all nuclear reactors in Japan were shuttered indefinitely, eliminating production of almost all of the country’s carbon-free electricity and about 30 percent of its total electricity production. Naturally, carbon emissions rose, and future emissions-reduction targets were slashed.

Would shutting down reactors all over the world lead to similar results? Eight years after Fukushima, that question has been answered. Fewer than 10 of Japan’s 50 reactors have resumed operations, yet the country’s carbon emissions have dropped below their levels before the accident. How? Japan has made significant gains in energy efficiency and solar power. It turns out that relying on nuclear energy is actually a bad strategy for combating climate change. One accident wiped out Japan’s carbon gains. Only a turn to renewables and conservation brought the country back on target.

What about the United States? Nuclear accounts for about 19 percent of US electricity production and most of our carbon-free electricity. Could reactors be phased out here without increasing carbon emissions? If it were completely up to the free market, the answer would be yes, because nuclear is more expensive than almost any other source of electricity today. Renewables such as solar, wind and hydroelectric power generate electricity for less than the nuclear reactors under construction in Georgia, and in most places, they produce cheaper electricity than existing nuclear reactors that have paid off all their construction costs.

In 2016, observing these trends, I launched a company devoted to building offshore wind turbines. My journey, from admiring nuclear power to fearing it, was complete. This tech is no longer a viable strategy for dealing with climate change, nor is it a competitive source of power. It is hazardous, expensive and unreliable, and abandoning it wouldn’t bring on climate doom.

The real choice now is between saving the planet and saving the dying nuclear industry. I vote for the planet.

—Jaczko served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2005 to 2009, and as its chairman from 2009 to 2012. The author of Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator, he teaches at Georgetown University and Princeton University.

Filed Under: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

July 6, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

…Wish I’d Have Said That

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

Writers sometimes hit home runs against nuclear power that bear repeating, like two recent letters to the editor that were simple, sharp, clear, and brief. Len Charlap of Princeton, New Jersey wrote in part: “I will support nuclear power the day after the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act is repealed. If insurance company actuaries consider nuclear power to be so dangerous that they cannot compute premiums that the industry can afford, then that industry is not economically viable. If the government (i.e., taxpayers) has to cover the industry with catastrophic insurance, then the government should own the reactors and provide nonprofit energy.” Roger Johnson of San Clemente, Calif. put it this way: “Will it take another Chernobyl or Fukushima, possibly in an American city, to quiet the disinformation coming from nuclear activists? What the world needs is energy that is both carbon-free and radiation-free. Those of us who live near a failed nuclear power [reactor] know the truth: Nuclear power is by far the most expensive, the most dangerous, the most unreliable, and the most environmentally unfriendly form of energy production.”

—Letters, New York Times, April 10, 2019

Filed Under: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter

April 22, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Chernobyl’s Deadly Effects Estimates Vary

By John LaForge

April 26 marks the 33rd anniversary of the 1986 radiation disaster at Chernobyl reactor Number 4 in Ukraine, just north of Kiev the capital. It is still nearly impossible to get scientific consensus on the vast extent of the impacts. The explosions and two-week long fire at Chernobyl spewed around the world something between one billion and nine billion curies of radiation — depending on whose estimates you choose to believe. The accident is classified by the UN as the worst environmental catastrophe in human history.

Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout has been blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) acknowledges only 56 deaths among firefighters who suffered and died agonizing deaths in the disaster’s immediate aftermath. However, the IAEA’s officially chartered mission is “to accelerate and enlarge the contributions of nuclear power worldwide.” Because of its institutional bias, one can dispute nearly everything the IAEA says about radiation risk.

Also on the low-end of fatality estimates is the World Health Organization which has to have its radiation studies approved by the IAEA! In 2006, the WHO’s “Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240,000 liquidators; 116,000 evacuees, and the 270,000 residents of the Strictly Controlled Zones).” The WHO added to this 4,000 the estimate that “among the five million residents of areas with high levels of radioactive cesium deposition” in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine” predictions suggest “up to 5,000 additional cancer deaths may occur in this population from radiation exposure…”

Alternately, Ukraine’s Minister of Health Andrei Serkyuk estimated in 1995 that 125,000 people had already died from the direct effects of Chernobyl’s radiation. Serkyuk said a disproportionate share of casualties were among children, pregnant women and rescue workers or “liquidators.” Liquidators were soldiers ordered to participate in the removal and burial of radioactive topsoil, heavy equipment, trees, and debris, wearing no protective clothing, respirators or radiation monitors.

On January 10, 2010 The Guardian reported that “reputable scientists researching the most radiation-contaminated areas of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine” dispute the IAEA estimates that only 56 firefighters died “and that about 4,000 will die from it eventually.” The paper noted for example, that, “The International Agency for Research on Cancer, another UN agency, predicts 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; an assessment by the Russian academy of sciences says there have been 60,000 deaths so far in Russia, and an estimated 140,000 in Ukraine and Belarus.”

The Guardian further noted that, “Meanwhile, the Belarus national academy of sciences estimates 93,000 deaths so far and 270,000 cancers, and the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far.”

The Los Angeles Times reported in 1998 that, “Russian officials estimated 10,000 Russian ‘liquidators’ died.” The article quoted health officials who said “close to 3,600 Ukrainians who took part in the cleanup effort have died of radiation exposure.” In 2001, the BBC upped the estimate and reported, “More than 30,000 Russians have died from radiation, half of whom were involved in dealing with the immediate aftermath….”

An August 4, 2003 New Yorker magazine article noted vaguely that, “Thousands of people died of cancers and other diseases in the years after the Chernobyl disaster,” while The New York Times said April 23, 2003, “Thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers have skyrocketed in the area around the reactor.” Around the 10th anniversary, under the headline, “Genetics: Chernobyl’s burst in mutations,” The Washington Post reported that, “Studies indicated that people … living near Chernobyl are giving birth to offspring with a higher number of genetic mutations.” In her April 27, 1996 dispatch for the Associated Press, journalist Angela Charlton noted “a hundred-fold increase in the incidence of childhood thyroid cancers in the affected region.”

Chernobyl’s health effects were felt much further away than the area around the reactor. The Los Angeles Times reported July 25, 1996, that radiation from Chernobyl was “linked to leukemia cases in Greece.” Epidemiologic Reviews in Oxford Journals for March 30, 2005 reported, “The releases of radioactive materials were such that contamination of the ground was found to some extent in every country in the Northern Hemisphere.” In its 1988 Report to the General Assembly, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation found, “The accident at the Chernobyl … resulted in radioactive material becoming widely dispersed and deposited … throughout the northern hemisphere.”

In 2001, Alex Kuzma, executive director of the Children of Chernobyl Relief Fund, documented an 80-fold increase in cancers in Belarus and Ukraine, and reported that 50 million people, including 1.26 million children, are affected. Eugene Cahill of the Dublin-based Chernobyl Children’s Project reported in the Irish Times in 2005 that, “Nine million people in Belarus, the Ukraine and Western Russian have been directly affected by the fallout.”

Thirty-six hundred deaths, or 125,000? Nine million people affected, or 50 million? The health effects of exposing everyone in the hemisphere to Chernobyl’s radiation (and Windscale’s, and Santa Susana’s, and Fukushima’s) — effects that are often delayed for decades — are quite incalculable. Got cancer?

Filed Under: Chernobyl, Nuclear Power, Radiation Exposure, Weekly Column

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