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December 10, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Visit “Postapocalyptic” Chernoyl for “$5,495 and Up”

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2016-2017

A hair-raising ad in the Travel section of the Nov. 20 New York Times features the claim that “nature has managed an impressive comeback” in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. This debunked story might fool vacationers eyeing the so-called Science & Nature tour—with prices starting at $5,495—called “Chernobyl, 30 Year Later.”

Pripyat Hotel (above), in the radioactive exclusion zone around the devastated Chernobyl reactor site in Ukraine, is a tourist destination.

For 8 days beginning May 27, 2017, up to 25 people are invited to “explore the postapocalyptic Chernobyl zone … with a New York Times expert and a range of specialists.” No large-print in the ad uses the word “radiation,” which explains only that, “In 1986, the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, USSR, experienced a cataclysmic disaster, a cautionary tale of science gone awry.” A list of tour spots designed to excite the adventurous traveller notes these high points:

“• Explore the restricted Chernobyl exclusion zone, staying overnight in the Pripyat Hotel, the only one in the town of Chernobyl. • See the sarcophagus surrounding the reactor, and the new safe confinement structure currently under construction. • Learn what became of the many plants and animals in the Chernobyl area following the disaster, and how nature has managed an impressive comeback. • Visit Slavutych, home of the Center for Radioecology, which coordinates environmental research in the exclusion zone to study the long-term biological and ecological effects.”

A packing list was not included, but make sure to bring along disposable booties, water filter and replacement lungs.

Filed Under: Chernobyl, Environment, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

October 7, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Chernobyl

chernobyl Chernobyl after the number 4 reactor exploded.

chernobyl cover

The Chernobyl barrier constructed immediately after the explosion.

Nukewatch Fact Sheet (PDF Download) – Chernobyl: How much radiation was released?

Nukewatch Quarterly articles

April 23, 2011

WALK FOR A NUCLEAR-FREE FUTURE
Coverage on Fox 11 News from the Wisconsin Fox Valley
Marchers Remember Chernobyl

http://www.fox11online.com/dpp/news/marchers-remember-chernobyl

Marchers remember Chernobyl

25 years since Chernobyl

Saturday, 23 Apr 2011, 9:24 PM CDT
Published : Saturday, 23 Apr 2011, 6:33 PM CDT

FOX 11, WLUK-TB Green Bay, Wisconsin reporter: Beth Jones

KEWAUNEE – Protesters hit the streets in Kewaunee County opposed to the area’s two nuclear power plants.

Saturday’s action follows ongoing troubles with damaged nuclear plants in Japan.

It also marks the approach of the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine.

It’s been almost exactly two and a half decades since the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.

Those who lived near the plant in the Ukraine back then say it was a tough time for everyone.

“I just remember the emotional impact it had on people and even to this day, 25 years ago, I’m keenly aware of the radiation being in the fallen leaves in the fall, in the tap water,” explained former Ukraine resident, Natasha Akulenko.

Natasha Akulenko lived through that disaster and now is marching in protest of nuclear power plants to prevent another.

More than two dozen people from all over the state protested peacefully around the Kewanee Power station and Point Beach Nuclear Power Plant.

Members of the non-profit group, “Nukewatch,” say they want to promote a nuclear-free future, in remembrance of what happened at Chernobyl, and what is ongoing at damaged plants in Japan.

“We just think the risks are too high to justify operation of nuclear reactors,” said Nukewatch Co-Director John LaForge.

The two nuclear power plants combined produce enough electricity to power more than one million homes in Wisconsin.

But marchers feel there are better alternatives to nuclear power.

“We’re asking for the phase out of nuclear, and its replacement with renewables like wind, and solar and energy efficiency,” said “Beyond Nuclear” group member, Kevin Kamps.

Marchers say they don’t want what happened in Chernobyl or Fukushima to happen here, and they believe it could.

The Associated Press reported earlier this month that both plants drew extra attention several years ago from regulators because of spotty safety records.

However officials say operating under new ownership the plants have improved those safety grades.

Point Beach officials say safety remains their number one priority.

“It’s about having redundant systems in place,” said Point Beach Communications Manager, Sara Cassidy. “It’s about having back up diesel generators that are ready in case we need them. It’s all about doing what we can to make sure we’re promoting public health and safety.”

The Kewaunee Power Station is licensed to 2033.

Point Beach is licensed to 2030 and 2033.

And in addition to federal regulators, these protesters say they too will continue to keep a watchful eye on the plants.

FOX 11 did contact the Kewaunee Power Station, however no one was available for comment.

Contact us for related articles and information.

 

Filed Under: Chernobyl Tagged With: chernobyl, nuclear power

July 11, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Radiation Harm Deniers?

Pro-Nuclear Environmentalists and the Chernobyl Death Toll
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2016
By Dr. Jim Green 

When it comes to the long-term death toll from the1986 reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, most self-styled pro-nuclear environmentalists conflate uncertainty with a mortality rate of zero. Denying the deadly impact of a nuclear disaster because the exact science is uncertain is a position just as indefensible as denying the existence of climate change for similar reasons.

Before considering the pro-nuclear environmentalists’ misinformation, here is a brief summary of credible positions and scientific studies regarding the Chernobyl cancer death toll (for detail see the April 26, 2014 article in The Ecologist).

Epidemiological studies are of course important, but they’re of limited use in estimating the overall Chernobyl death toll. The effects of Chernobyl, however large or small, are largely lost in the statistical noise of widespread cancer incidence and mortality.

The most up-to-date scientific review is the TORCH-2016 report written by radiation biologist Dr. Ian Fairlie. Dr. Fairlie sifts through a vast number of scientific papers and points to studies indicative of Chernobyl’s impact:

  • An increased incidence of radiogenic thyroid cancers in Austria;
  • An increased incidence of leukemia among sub-populations in ex-Soviet states (and possibly other countries—more research needs to be done);
  • Increases in solid cancers, leukemia and thyroid cancer among clean-up workers;
  • Increased rates of cardiovascular disease and stroke that might be connected to Chernobyl (more research needs to be done);
  • A large study revealing statistically significant increases in nervous system birth defects in highly contaminated areas in Russia, similar to the elevated rates observed in contaminated areas in Ukraine; and more.
So what else have we got?

Without for a moment dismissing the importance of the epidemiological record, let alone the importance of further research, suffice it here to note that there is no way that one could even begin to estimate the total Chernobyl death toll from the existing body of studies.

Estimates of collective radiation exposure are available. For example, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates a total collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts over 50 years from Chernobyl fallout. And the collective radiation dose can be used to estimate the death toll using the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model.

If we use the IAEA’s collective radiation dose estimate, and a risk estimate derived from LNT (0.1 cancer deaths per person-Sievert), we get an estimate of 60,000 cancer deaths. Any number of studies (including studies published in peer-reviewed scientific literature) use LNT to estimate the Chernobyl death toll. These studies produce estimates ranging from 9,000 cancer deaths (in the most contaminated parts of the former Soviet Union) to 93,000 cancer deaths (across Europe).

Those are the credible estimates of the cancer death toll from Chernobyl. None of them are conclusive—far from it—but that’s the nature of the problem we’re dealing with.

Moreover, LNT may underestimate risks. The 2006 report of the US National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII) states: “The committee recognizes that its risk estimates become more uncertain when applied to very low doses. Departures from a linear model at low doses, however, could either increase or decrease the risk per unit dose.”

So the true Chernobyl cancer death toll could be lower or higher than the LNT-derived estimate of 60,000 deaths—a point that needs emphasis and constant repetition since the nuclear industry and its supporters frequently conflate an uncertain long-term death toll with a long-term death toll of zero.

A second defensible position, taken by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), is that the long-term Chernobyl cancer death toll is unknown and unknowable because of the uncertainties associated with the science.

Pro-nuclear environmentalists

A third position—unqualified claims that the Chernobyl death toll was just 50 or so, comprising some emergency responders and a small percentage of those who later suffered from thyroid cancer—should be rejected as uninformed or dishonest spin from the nuclear industry and some of its scientifically-illiterate supporters.

Those illiterate supporters include every last one of the self-styled pro-nuclear environmentalists. We should note in passing that some pro-nuclear environmentalists have genuine environmental credentials while others—such as Patrick Moore and Australian Ben Heard—are in the pay of the nuclear industry.

James Hansen and George Monbiot cite UNSCEAR to justify a Chernobyl death toll of 43, without noting that the UNSCEAR report did not attempt to calculate long-term deaths. James Lovelock asserts that “in fact, only 42 people died” from the Chernobyl disaster.

Patrick Moore, citing the UN Chernobyl Forum (which included UN agencies such as the IAEA, UNSCEAR, and WHO), states that Chernobyl resulted in 56 deaths. In fact, the Chernobyl Forum’s 2005 report estimated up to 4,000 long-term cancer deaths among the higher-exposed Chernobyl populations, and a follow-up study by the World Health Organization in 2006 estimated an additional 5,000 deaths among people exposed to lower doses in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

Australian “ecomodernist” academic Barry Brook says the Chernobyl death toll is less than 60. Ben Heard, another Australian “ecomodernist” (in fact a uranium and nuclear industry consultant), claims that the death toll was 43.

There doesn’t appear to be a single example of a pro-nuclear environmentalist—or a comparable organization—providing a credible account of the Chernobyl death toll. They’re perfectly entitled to follow UNSCEAR’s lead and argue that the long-term death toll is uncertain. But conflating or confusing that uncertainty with a long-term death toll of zero clearly isn’t a defensible approach.

Shaky understanding

Evidence of pro-nuclear environmentalist ignorance abounds. For the most part, pro-nuclear environmentalists had a shaky understanding of the radiation/health debates (and other nuclear issues) before they joined the pro-nuclear club, and they have a shaky understanding now.

James Hansen’s understanding of the radiation/health debates is shaky, to say the least. He falsely claims there is a “generally accepted 100 millisievert threshold for fatal disease development.” But the accepted scientific position is that there is no threshold. Thus, a 2010 UNSCEAR report states that “the current balance of available evidence tends to favour a non-threshold response for the mutational component of radiation-associated cancer induction at low doses and low dose rates.”

Barry Brook is another example of someone whose understanding was shaky before and after he joined the pro-nuclear environmentalist club. Brook says that before 2009 he hadn’t given much thought to nuclear power because of the “peak uranium” argument. By 2010, Brook was in full flight, asserting that the LNT model is “discredited” and has “no relevance to the real world.”

In fact, LNT enjoys heavy-hitting scientific support. For example the US National Academy of Sciences’ BEIR report states that “the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and … the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.”

Likewise, a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states: “Given that it is supported by experimentally grounded, quantifiable, biophysical arguments, a linear extrapolation of cancer risks from intermediate to very low doses currently appears to be the most appropriate methodology.”

Conspiracy theories

On Chernobyl, Brook said: “The credible literature (WHO, IAEA) puts the total Chernobyl death toll at less than 60. The ‘conspiracy theories’ drummed up against these authoritative organizations rings a disturbingly similar bell in my mind to the crank attacks on the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA and World Meteorlogical Organization in climate science.”

But the WHO, IAEA and other UN agencies estimated 9,000 deaths in ex-Soviet states in their 2005/06 reports, and more recently UNSCEAR has adopted the position that the long-term death toll is uncertain.

Brook repeatedly promotes the work of Ted Rockwell from “Radiation, Science, and Health,” an organization that peddles dangerous conspiracy theories such as this: “Government agencies suppress data, including radiation hormesis, and foster radiation fear. They support extreme, costly, radiation protection policies; and preclude using low-dose radiation for health and medical benefits that apply hormesis, in favor of using (more profitable) drug therapies.”

Brook promotes the discredited “hormesis” theory that low doses of radiation are beneficial to human health. …

Good for wildlife?

If Brook and contrarian scientists are right, Chernobyl (and Fukushima) have been beneficial by spreading health-giving, life-affirming ionizing radiation far and wide. And according to some pro-nuclear environmentalists, Chernobyl has been a boon for wildlife and biodiversity.

The region surrounding Chernobyl is one of Europe’s “finest natural preserves” according to Stewart Brand. Pro-nuclear environmentalist Mark Lynas says the Chernobyl “explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the 30km exclusion zone,” and he says that restrictions on fishing around Fukushima “will improve the marine environment there.”

James Lovelock says the land around Chernobyl “is now rich in wildlife” and he follows this asinine argument to its logical conclusion: “We call the ash from nuclear power nuclear waste and worry about its safe disposal. I wonder if instead we should use it as an incorruptible guardian of the beautiful places on Earth. Who would dare cut down a forest which was a storage place of nuclear ash?”

According to most pro-nuclear environmentalists, radiation exposure from Chernobyl has been harmless (except for those exposed to extremely high doses), and according to some it has been beneficial to human health. And Chernobyl has been good for wildlife and biodiversity (mutations aside). Follow the pro-nuclear environmentalists down these rabbit-holes and you come up with Hansen’s claim that the nuclear industry’s safety record is “superior to any other major industry,” or Lynas’ claim that nuclear power is “extraordinarily safe,” or Brook’s claim that “nuclear power is the safest energy option.”

Nuclear power the safest energy option? Safer than wind and solar? To arrive at that conclusion, Brook and others understate the death toll from Chernobyl (and Fukushima) by orders of magnitude. They conflate an uncertain long-term Chernobyl death toll with a long-term death toll of zero, ignoring the science every bit as much as do climate change deniers.

—Dr. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter. This article, which has been edited for length,was written for the April 7, 2016 edition of The Ecologist.

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

July 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Chernobyl and the Fire Next Time

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2015
By John LaForge 

The April 26, 1986 Chernobyl disaster was remembered unhappily the world over. In Germany, 29 years after the fact, the ancient custom of wild boar hunting is still prohibited because the animals remain too contaminated with Chernobyl’s long-lived radioactive fallout.

Government warnings of Chernobyl’s dispersed cancer agents are nearly forgotten today, but a May 14, 1986 bulletin from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)said, “[A]irborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States.”

A week later, Minnesotans read, “For the second time since the [Chernobyl disaster] last month, a slightly elevated level of radioactive iodine has been found in a Minnesota milk sample, state health officials said. … The amount of iodine-131 in the air also increased slightly [May 19] after several days of decline, health officials said.” (“Slight rise in radioactivity found again in state milk,” Duluth News-Tribune & Herald, May 22, 1986)

The AP reported May 15, 1986, “State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time being.” Likewise, regarding the triple reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, Forbes reported on April 11, 2011: “Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk—in Montpelier, Vermont—for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began, according to data released by the EPA late [April 8].”

Wildfires put contamination back in the air 

Chernobyl exploded and burned out of control for weeks. The French Nuclear Energy Agency’s “2002 Update of Chernobyl,” noted that “[C]ontinuing low-level releases occurred … for up to 40 days after the accident, particularly on 15 and 16 May, attributable to continuing outbreaks of fires or to hot areas in the reactor.…”

Demonstrating nuclear power’s capacity for whole-earth poisoning, the catastrophic consequences are still spreading three decades later.

The dispersion of large amounts of radioactive cesium-137—which persists in the environment for at least 300 years—was especially concentrated in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, where half the spewed radiation fell. The other half spread to every country in the Northern Hemisphere. The American Geophysical Union reported in 2009 that radioactive cesium-137 dispersed by Chernobyl wouldn’t “disappear” from the environment through decay for up to 320 years.

Cesium has heavily contaminated forested areas of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, an area of some 1,000 square miles surrounding the reactor where access and habitation are severely limited. When the forests catch fire, radioactive materials including cesium are again dispersed to the winds.

For two months in the summer of 2010, wildfires in Russia burned over 2 million acres and caused at least 50 deaths. The August 10, 2010 the New York Times noted that “dozens of fires have been burning in contaminated zones.” Two days later, the AP and the Agency France Presse cited government reports that at least six wildfires had been extinguished “this week” in the heavily-contaminated Bryansk region.

About the 2010 wildfires, Time magazine reported that Russian leaders had removed maps of likely radiation-contaminated fires from web sites maintained by the national forestry agency. (Taking a lesson from the Russians, the US government halted its emergency radiation monitoring of water and milk on the West Coast a mere two months after the start of Fukushima’s three explosions and meltdowns.)

In 2002, dozens of peat fires and wildfires again spread across heavily-contaminated Belarus. The AP reported July 22, 2002 that “Belarusian Emergency Minister Valery Astapov said radiation levels in the fire zone are elevated…”

The Washington Post and AP reported in April 1996 that a wildfire had “spread quickly through five villages in the exclusion zone, carried by strong winds blowing toward Kiev and its 2.6 million residents. It burned pines and buildings in one of the areas most heavily contaminated with radioactive cesium.”

“Eight percent” of radioactive fallout re-suspended—but eight percent of what? 

The latest news of cesium spreading from Chernobyl comes from a team of researchers led by Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina. According to Dr. Mousseau’s report, published in Ecological Monographs, wildfires that burned in the exclusion zone in 2002, 2008 and 2010 have together redistributed approximately eight percent of the original amount of cesium-137 released by the 1986 disaster—the world’s worst accidental airborne release. The researchers warned that large blazes in the future could spread significant amounts of radioactive soot across Europe, leading to contamination of food crops, the New York Times reported April 6, 2015.

In 2006, The Other Report on Chernobyl (TORCH, by Ian Fairlie and David Sumner) concluded that about 30 percent of the reactor’s radioactivity was distributed over the reactor building and surrounding areas and about 1–2 percent was ejected into the atmosphere. The sum total of radioactivity released was about 324.3 million curies. All of the reactor’s radioactive gases (xenon and krypton) were released.

In 2005, the Chernobyl Forum—comprised of more than 100 scientists, eight UN agencies and the governments of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine—estimated that the total release over the first 10 days reached 378.3 million curies. (Bob Edwards, “Major UN report counts human cost of Chernobyl,” New Scientist, Sept. 5, 2005.)

The Lawrence Livermore National Lab suggested in 1986 that 50 percent of the core’s radioactivity was spewed—4.5 billion curies, according to Science, June 13, 1986. In 1991, Vladimir Chernousenko, a fellow of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and chief scientific supervisor of “clean up” in the 10-kilometer zone around the demolished reactor, noted that independent experts estimated that 80 percent of the reactor’s radioactivity escaped—over 6.4 billion curies.

According to Mousseau, forests covered 50 percent the Chernobyl exclusion zone before 1986, but trees and brush now cover 70 percent of the no-go area. Mousseau’s team reports that as climate change increasingly heats and dries the region, wildfires are expected to rage more often and more fiercely.

Asked by the Times what the consequences of this dispersion of radioactive materials might be, Mousseau was circumspect and grim. “There is never a positive consequence of having increased amounts of mutagenic materials in our environment,” he said. “It’s always negative.”

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

May 4, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Spring Melt: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl & Fukushima Taint the Season

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2015
By Arianne Peterson

“Following the accident at the nuclear power plant, government authorities realized to their horror that their existing plans for such an emergency were too vague to address the challenges now facing them. Making matters worse, technical experts disagreed about the state of the crippled reactor and what might happen next. Some confidently asserted that events were ‘under control,’ while others warned that ongoing radioactive emissions might portend an imminent release of catastrophic proportions. More worryingly still, no one could predict the likelihood or timing of such a development confidently enough to inform decisions about ordering evacuations. Should the local population be evacuated, or would that measure only incite unnecessary panic? Proximity to the capital gave the situation extra urgency. Might it, too, have to be evacuated, with all the unfathomable costs that might entail? Without reliable measurements of the total radioactivity released to the environment or estimates of how large it might grow, policy makers had no choice but to answer these fraught questions on the basis of guesswork.”

This account of a major nuclear reactor catastrophe appeared in an April 2014 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article by Edward M. Geist, Nuclear Security Fellow at RAND. But which disaster was Geist recounting? Was it Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima? In fact, his description applies to all three. This narrative played out exactly the same way three separate times over the past thirty-six years.

Crime scene: The control room at Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 in 2005—nearly 20 years after the meltdown. Photo: Gerd Ludwig, National Geographic.

As we at Nukewatch sat down to choose the content for this issue, we noticed another pattern: all three of these disasters began in the spring—Three Mile Island on March 28, 1979; Chernobyl on April 26, 1986; and Fukushima on March 11, 2011.

Thus, spring—which otherwise brings promises of new life here in the frozen north—now portends the potential self-destruction and long-lived pollution that compound the costs of nuclear power. As we ponder which of the world’s 438 nuclear power reactors might melt down next, we brace ourselves for the idea that, if this pattern holds true, the next disaster will happen in spring. If there are any more of these awful anniversaries to commemorate, we’ll have to add extra pages to every spring Quarterly.

As Geist’s narrative illustrates, there are more common elements among these three catastrophic events than their seasonal timing—similarities that should inform a public interested in protecting itself and the planet from complete devastation. The overall pattern shows clear evidence that neither can we handle nuclear technology safely, nor do we have any reason to believe we are more prepared to deal with a major “accident” (we’re unsure the term applies to an event precipitated by gross corporate and government negligence) now than we were in 1979, 1986 or 2011. Here, we review in more detail just a few of the common elements of these spring nuclear catastrophes—and their implications for future meltdowns.

Operators, regulators and corporations ignored warnings.

In the case of Three Mile Island (TMI), at least three individuals testified to the president’s Kemeny Commission after the partial meltdown with evidence that their efforts to warn operators of the likelihood for a disaster were thwarted. Two safety engineers at Babcock and Wilcox (which built TMI’s reactors), Joseph J. Kelly and Bert M. Dunn, testified that they had written numerous memos attempting to convince their supervisors to notify Babcock and Wilcox (B & W) reactor operators of the risk of a loss-of-coolant accident after a similar emergency at another B & W reactor, Davis-Besse, in 1977. Corporate officials thwarted the engineers’ attempts to let operators know what to look for—and, more importantly, exactly how to deal with such an emergency.

Similarly, an inspector for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), James Creswell, testified that he warned his supervisors just a few weeks before the accident that all B & W reactors should be shut down in order to properly address the safety concerns raised by the Davis-Besse incident. NRC officials dismissed his concerns. Also, a broken cooling valve contributed to the disaster—the eleventh such valve failure at the facility within one year. Clearly, operators should have identified and addressed this problem.

In 2003, Ukraine released more than 100 previously secret intelligence files proving that government officials knew the Chernobyl nuclear facility was flawed from the start of its operation. The files show that operating authorities ignored KGB warnings about the use of sub-standard building materials and technicians ignoring safety regulations, with twenty-nine accidents occurring between 1977 and 1981. A 1979 KGB report stated, “According to operational data, there were deviations from design and violations of technology procedures during building and assembling works. It may lead to accidents.” After an inspection of the nuclear facility just one week before the meltdown, engineers recommended the reactors be shut down because conditions at the facility were so dangerous.

In his May 2011 book Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster, Takashi Hirose refutes claims by the Japanese government and Fukushima Daiichi reactor owner Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) that the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami to the six-reactor complex was “beyond expectation.” In August of 2010, Hirose published a warning that was partly an attempt to amplify the conclusions of a well-known seismologist, Ishibashi Katsuhiko. Katsuhiko had been warning of the potential for what he called a genpatsu shinsai (“nuclear-power-plant-earthquake-disaster”) since the late 1990s. Hirose asserts that Katsuhiko’s work was so well-known it would have been impossible for Tepco officials not to have seen it. In Fukushima Meltdown, Hirose asks, “If I, neither a scholar nor a specialist, was able to foresee this, and the nuclear power specialists from Tepco and from the government’s nuclear-related agencies were not, then for what do they exist?”

Evacuation efforts were grossly inadequate.

The government never issued an evacuation order to protect residents living near the Three Mile Island facility, and Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh held off for two days before issuing an evacuation advisory for pregnant women and preschool children living within five miles of the reactors. Former nuclear industry executive Arnie Gundersen maintains that under the Nucular Regulatory Commission’s own rules, an evacuation should have been ordered on March 28, the first day of the disaster, due to calculated radiation exposures in the town of Goldsboro, Penn. reaching 10 rems per hour. Given the authorities’ inability to measure the nature and amount of radioactive elements released, the decision not to evacuate is inexcusable at best, if not an act of reckless endangerment, based on long-term death toll estimates.

Soviet officials did not begin evacuating residents from around Chernobyl until 36 hours after the explosions that spewed radioactive particles from Unit 4 around 1:30 a.m. on April 26, 1986. Though residents could see the graphite fire burning on the roof of the facility and many felt ill within hours of the explosion, they were not immediately informed of the disaster, and the evacuation of the eighteen-mile exclusion zone around the reactors did not begin until 2:00 p.m. on April 27. Health workers and volunteers did not start distributing potassium iodine, which blocks the absorption of radioactive iodine in the thyroid, until more than 24 hours after the initial release. Measurements in the city of Pripyat, next to the reactor complex, showed street-level radiation as high as 6.5 roentgens per hour (an exposure to 500 roentgens in five hours is usually lethal for human beings), with 50 percent of the radioactive particles containing radioactive iodine-131. Residents were told that they only needed to evacuate for three days—when in reality most were never able to return. Authorities later reported they had to scrap their original and grossly inadequate emergency plans and start from scratch during the catastrophe, in order to reformulate how to handle the evacuation of 135,000 people.

After the tsunami hit Japan’s shores in the late afternoon of March 11, 2011, the government knew that all six of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi were in danger of melting down due to the loss of coolant at the facility. Yet, just like their United States and Soviet counterparts, Japanese officials moved slowly in evacuating residents, only completing the first evacuation—from within a radius of less than two miles around the facility—the next morning. Officials kept slowly expanding the evacuation zone, and only after the massive explosion in reactor 1, which occurred at 4:30 p.m. on March 12, did they expand the zone to a radius of 12.5 miles. Months later, on July 20, the US State Department restated its advisory that US citizens keep 50 miles away from the wrecked reactor complex. Later, a former senior US diplomat in Japan disclosed that the original plan of evacuating all 90,000 US citizens in Tokyo at the time of the meltdown was rejected not because it was unnecessary but because “it could have … caused panic among the Japanese.”

Officials could not—or would not—adequately measure, track or publicize radioactive releases.

In all three nuclear disasters, evacuation and other disaster mitigation efforts were significantly hindered by uncertainty about “source term,” or the total amount and type of radiation released. Though operators of nuclear facilities usually have a good understanding of which isotopes are inside a reactor, the nature of the source term can change upon release depending on the means by which they escape containment and their interaction with the surrounding environment. Nuclear experts have had difficulty reconstructing the source term, even after catastrophic events, and predicting them in advance is almost impossible. Essentially, this means that even the best emergency response plans are still based on guesswork.

On the day of the Chernobyl meltdown, children played in this kindergarten in Pripyat, Ukraine, the town next to the reactors. Authorities evacuated the area the next day. Photo by Gerd Ludwig, National Geographic, 2005.

During the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima as well as the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, radiation monitors in the immediate vicinity of the reactors either maxed out or were destroyed (23 of 24 monitors at Fukushima were wrecked by the giant earthquake). We have only computer modeling to determine how much radioactive material was dispersed to the winds during the melting. Our understanding of the total radiation released—and thus, potential long-term health and environmental impacts—is extremely limited and difficult to predict. This uncertainty enables regulators and industry lobbyists to assume a minimum amount of damage and resist citizen-driven attempts for more rigorous safety standards.

Though technology for measuring the amount and nature of isotopes released during a radioactive release is still dangerously inadequate, operators at Fukushima did have access to a modern system for tracking the direction of the radioactive plume in real time (dubbed System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or SPEEDI). It is more sophisticated than those available at TMI and Chernobyl decades earlier. But we operate nuclear reactors in a political and economic atmosphere, rather than just a scientific landscape. Just having access to this data was not incentive enough for Japanese officials to make use of it to protect their own populations.

In a lengthy investigative August 2011 report, the New York Times found that Japanese authorities deliberately endangered even the most vulnerable individuals—women, children, infants and the elderly—by at first denying and then covering up its own data about wind direction and radioactive fallout. According to the report, Japan’s SPEEDI radiation tracking program, “had been churning out maps and other data hourly since the first hours after the catastrophic earth quake and tsunami.” But officials withheld this data until March 23, even from rescue workers and local authorities, in violation of the prime minister’s own nuclear disaster manuals. This meant that the residents of the town of Namie, which is outside of the evacuation zone, carried on life as usual for three days while being exposed to the highest levels of radiation in the area—directly under the radioactive plume that, it turns out, was visible on the government’s real-time maps.

We keep operating nuclear reactors the same way, expecting different results.

Reactor operators and government officials around the world continue to ignore warning signs that more nuclear reactor meltdowns are imminent. In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) continues to extend the operating licenses and approve power “uprates” at its aging fleet of nuclear reactors for as much as twenty years beyond their originally planned forty-year lifetimes. In January of this year, the NRC rejected a petition, signed by 10,000 members of the US public and submitted by watchdog group Beyond Nuclear, asking the agency to suspend operating licenses at the US’s twenty-two General Electric Mark I boiling water reactors. These reactors are identical to those that melted down at Fukushima Daiichi and, experts have long argued, they have major design flaws.

Though the US State Department recommended an evacuation radius of 50 miles for its citizens near the Fukushima disaster zone, the NRC refuses to require evacuation and communication planning for areas more than 10 miles from our 99 operating reactors. This kind of negligence could lead to a disaster with an impact on a scale we have never seen—for example, if one of the reactors at New York’s Indian Point melted down. Indian Point is less than 40 miles from Manhattan and New York’s roughly 8.5 million residents, who live close enough to be severely affected by a radiation release—but not close enough that the government requires anyone to plan for their evacuation. Similarly, should a meltdown occur at the Pilgrim nuclear facility in Massachusetts, over 200,000 Cape Cod inhabitants could be forced to flee toward the source of the radiation in order to escape a radioactive plume, through the bottlenecks of only two bridges that connect them with the mainland.

How many more times must we relive this horror story before we decide to shut down all nuclear reactors for good?

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

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