Nukewatch

Working for a nuclear-free future since 1979

by Leave a Comment

Worst Kept Secret: US Nuclear Weapons Still in Europe

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019

Nuclear weapons are secluded behind high-level security and top-secret deniability. None of the nine nuclear-armed countries ever “confirm or deny” the locations of their particular warheads. In our last issue we deciphered enough military doubletalk to confidently if unofficially verify that 20 US nuclear bombs are still deployed at Büchel.

Still it came as a surprise this summer when the Belgian newspaper De Morgen published a leaked NATO document detailing the exact numbers and locations of the US nuclear weapons now in Europe.

Quoting the leaked NATO report, De Morgen revealed that the “… US forward-deploys approximately 150 gravity bombs, specific B61 gravity bombs, to Europe for use on both US and Allied dual-capable aircraft. These bombs are stored at six US and European bases—Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Büchel in Germany, Aviano in Italy and Ghedi-Torre in Italy, Volkel in The Netherlands, and Inçirlik in Turkey.” (“Dual-capable” is a warplane that carries both nuclear weapons and others.)

De Morgen’s July 16 headline was, “Finally in black and white: There are American nuclear weapons in Belgium.” The paper’s exposé marks the first time that the officially secret deployment has been authoritatively confirmed by NATO itself. Dutch broadcaster RTL News mocked the significance of the leaked document saying, “NATO reveals The Netherlands’s worst-kept secret.”

The NATO report, titled “A new era for nuclear deterrence? Modernization, arms control, and allied nuclear forces,” was finished April 16, 2019 by the Canadian Senator Joseph Day, who is the rapporteur for the Defense and Security Committee of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly. —JL

—Brussels De Morgen, July 16; The Washington Post, The South China Morning Post, the London Sun, the London Express, and Military Times online, July 17, 2019

by Leave a Comment

Ohio School District Rejects Energy Dept. Directive to Reopen Contaminated Middle School

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019
By Kelly Lundeen
“I have a creek that runs through my property, and we have spent much time fishing and swimming in it. Does that mean my daughters [pictured] are going to possibly have reproductive issues? I think that’s a valid question at this point,” said Penny Beckwith-Carter, of Piketon, Ohio, who took the photo.
The Zahn’s Corner Middle School website announced: “Grades 4 and 5 will be located at Jasper Elementary School for the 2019-2020 school year” and “Grade 6 will be located at Piketon High School for the 2019-2020 school year.”

This fall, the middle school’s 300 children, mostly between the ages of eight and eleven, will not have to be unknowingly exposed to disputed levels of radioactivity in order to attend class.

The Columbus Dispatch reported Sept. 13 that: “cancer-causing toxins including plutonium, neptunium, americium and uranium were detected on the property, and officials say the toxins are likely from the US Department of Energy’s decommissioning and disposal of radioactive materials from the former Portsmouth Gas Diffusion Plant about 3 miles from the school.”

The area school board officially quarantined the school site in September with the superintendent, Wes Hairston reported to have said, “No student should ever be unnecessarily exposed to dangerous chemicals or toxins. (DOE officials) like to use the words ‘trace amounts.’ Well, maybe that’s accurate. If that’s your child, would you want your child exposed to those things?”

The Piketon, Ohio school was closed May 14, 2018, after an independent study reported radioactive contamination that month, followed by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) admission that it had detected the presence in the school of—but had not informed the public about—radioactive americium in 2018, and neptunium-237 in 2017 (See Summer 2019 Nukewatch Quarterly cover story). The middle school is 3 miles from the giant Portsmouth uranium processing factory, which did uranium enrichment for nuclear weapons and reactor fuel for 47 years. Closed in 2001, the factory is being demolished by the DOE. Its 10 million square feet of floor space made it one of the largest industrial facilities in the world.

In May, additional studies were planned in order to “determine the source, levels, extent, and most importantly, the risk to human health related to the offsite contamination,” stated a Pike County Health District press release. In July, the DOE and independent researcher Michael Ketterer—the Northern Arizona University professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry who originally alerted the community to the contamination—reported conflicting results from samples taken at the school.

The DOE’s Portsmouth Environmental Monitoring website says, “Results from sample analyses conducted by experts at Savannah River National Laboratory show no radioactivity detected above naturally occurring levels, and no cause for public health concern. There is no public health or safety risk from radioactive material preventing Zahn’s Corner Middle School from opening this fall.”

Ketterer on the other hand duplicated his earlier findings of enriched uranium contamination. When he was asked about discrepancies, he explained that he had detected uranium contamination in the blank filters used to collect samples. “I was thinking when I saw that, ‘Why would [the DOE] choose this medium because it’s contaminated?’” the Columbus Dispatch reported. In a public meeting at Piketon High School August 10, Ketterer said that the DOE agreed, “with the findings that non-fallout (uranium, neptunium and plutonium) are present in some samples, and the elemental and isotopic signatures of those materials are consistent with (uranium) from [Portsmouth’s enrichment process],” the Portsmouth Daily Times reported. Ketterer also revealed that the samples he took outside of the school indicated the presence of neptunium in the Little Beaver River that feeds the Scioto River, a primary source of drinking water for south and central Ohio.

To help resolve the issue, the DOE is funding a third study by Solutient Technologies, a firm chosen by the Pike County General Health District. After the conclusion of the study currently underway, the local school board will decide the fate of the Middle School.

Not surprisingly, area residents have been in an uproar following the disclosure of radioactive contamination in the school. At least two class action lawsuits and a cancer cluster study have been launched. The Pike County General Health District is seeking assistance from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the cancer cluster study. “There has always been speculation that the cancer rates are higher in people that live near the plant, but there has never been a scientific study to show that correlation,” said Matt Brewster, a Pike County Health commissioner. Ohio Department of Health records show that Pike County has the fifth highest rate of cancer in the state. Over the last five years, elected officials have reported five students contracting cancer while attending local schools.

Cathy Eick is a former staff member at Zahn’s Corner Middle School and a parent of two children who attended the school. “My kids have had friends that have either passed away or they’ve watched them fight cancer and it’s just not acceptable, especially when you hear the reports that they find something in your school that can make your child sick,” Eick told the Columbus Dispatch at a protest outside of a DOE event in May.

—Columbus Dispatch, Sept. 13, July 25, & May 21; Portsmouth Daily Times, Aug. 12; Department of Energy, July 2019; Cincinnati Enquirer, June 5 & May 14; WOSU Public Radio, May 15; Pike County General Health District, May 14; Ohio Department of Health, Jan. 18, 2019.

by Leave a Comment

Fukushima Waste Water Crisis Raising Alarms

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019

Japan’s environment minister Yoshiaki Harada said Sept. 10 that the operator of the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors will have to dump huge quantities of radiation-laden waste water directly into the Pacific Ocean—a threat that has enraged local fishermen and nearby countries that share Pacific Ocean-front territory.

Over 1 million cubic meters (or tons) of contaminated water has accumulated at the site since it was struck in March 2011 by the strongest earthquake in Japan’s history and the subsequent tsunami that triggered three reactor meltdowns and forced 164,865 residents to flee their homes.

“The only option will be to drain it into the sea and dilute it,” Harada told a Sept. 9 news briefing in Tokyo, the Guardian reported. “There are no other options,” he said. This claim is false, as there are at least four alternatives to ocean dumping including long-term storage.

Reactor owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) has repeatedly claimed that its filter system removes all the radioactivity from the waste water except tritium. But last year Tepco admitted that its enormous filter system had failed, and that water in the tanks still contains highly radioactive contaminants including radioactive cesium, cobalt, antimony, iodine, strontium, and tritium. The level of contamination in the stored water far exceeds legal limits allowing release into the ocean, and Tepco has promised to refilter the water, a process that will take 5-to-6 years.

Moreover, Greenpeace reports* that the water processing failure was known by Tepco from the beginning of its operation. The company kept the information secret for the five years between 2013 and 2018 because public disclosure would have ruined Tepco’s plans “to solve the enormous water crisis by discharge to the Pacific Ocean.”

Held in 1,000 huge tanks at the site, each with 1,000-1,200 tons of radioactive liquid, Tepco has said that it will run out of on-site space for more tanks by the summer of 2022. The amount of processed water increases between 2,000 and 4,000 tons each week. Dr. Gordon Edwards notes that, “In the next 4-5 years, another 750,000 tons will be added to the inventory.”

According to critics, Japan’s government and Tepco repeatedly suggest the idea of dumping the waste water into the Pacific in order to weaken resistance to the plan and to foster its acceptance among skeptics.

Japan’s Neighbors Complain

The governments of South Korea and Taiwan have formally objected to any ocean dumping of Fukushima waste water, warning that currents will bring the contamination to their own shores.

In addition, South Korea’s Olympic committee has raised concerns about the risk to Olympic athletes who will attend the 2020 summer games in Tokyo. With baseball and softball games set to be played in Fukushima City, South Korea’s committee asked in August whether food served in the Athletes’ Village could be contaminated with radioactive fallout that was widely dispersed by the wrecked reactors. Japan’s Olympic Committee replied by down playing the concerns.

South Korea should restrict imports of processed foods from Japan’s Fukushima region as radiation has been found in shipments, an opposition lawmaker said Aug. 19, Korea Times reports. Citing data from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, South Korean Rep. Kim Kwang-soo of the Party for Democracy and Peace has reported that radiation was discovered in almost 17 tons of processed foods imported from the eight prefectures, or 35 shipments, over the past five years. South Korea banned seafood imports from states or prefectures near Fukushima in 2013 over reports of radioactive contamination. But no import restrictions have been put on processed foods from the areas. —JL

—Guardian, Sept. 10; Asia Times, Sept. 25; NHK Japan Public TV, Aug. 21; Korea Times, Aug. 19; Seattle Times, Sept. 28, 2018.

* “Tepco Water Crises,” Greenpeace Germany, Jan. 22, 2019.

by Leave a Comment

Plowshares Land Trust Takes a Hit!

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019

Home to Anathoth Community Farm and Nukewatch Slammed by 100 mph Summer Storm

All 25 big red oaks looked like this.

On July 19, a storm with 100 mph straight-line winds and localized twisters smashed across the Plowshares Land Trust, where the Nukewatch office is located, downing over 1,000 trees and forever altering the landscape and the skyline. Nobody here was injured, and the five houses we’ve built here were spared serious damage. A few outbuildings and pieces of farm equipment were tossed like salad. Garden hoop houses, the mobile chicken coop, a tool shed, an outhouse, and a couple of hay wagons were either broken up or knocked over or both.

The only tamarack we had on the land.

There were so many trees downed across paths and roads that several days of cutting and hauling were needed just to walk between houses, get to the office, move cars, and get out of the driveway. As we go to press, our wood splitting machine was only just freed from the fallen oaks, ash, elms, and birches that had it surrounded.

Oaks, maples and ash missed the solar house.

Retired Nukewatch co-director Bonnie Urfer, whose house is 300 yards from the office, was at home during the howling tempest and heard the “locomotive noise” associated with tornados. Bonnie said, “The worst part only lasted ten minutes”—an amazingly short maelstrom considering the depth of the damage. I was at the Büchel peace camp in Germany when the storm hit, and over the phone everybody at the farm said there was no reason to change my ticket and hurry back, “because it is going to take years to clear the trees.”

Six ash together
Giant red oak

This is the emotionally hurtful reality of living so close to the woods and spending so may days out in them. Living here on the Land Trust for 30 years, and collecting fire wood for as many as three houses and the sauna, has taught me a lot about our nearly 30 acres of trees, and the damage to our little patch of forest is overwhelming. Nearly every big oak and maple—including the biggest—was blown down, many of them well over 100 years old. A week later when I got home, Barbara Kass met me in the driveway and said, “All your friends are gone.”

Long, 40-foot-tall windrows of pine and spruce that we’d planted to keep paths and the driveway free of winter snowdrifts were toppled or snapped. Amazingly, some 600-pound, oversized round hay bales were tossed around and even thrown into the trees like beach balls.

Heavy hay bales were tossed into the windrow.

We are lucky that no one was hurt and that houses or cars weren’t smashed. But it’s also fact that material things can be fixed or replaced, but the big trees are really gone.

Nukewatch’s 10,000-watt photovoltaic system, which powers the office and the whole land trust, was only made possible by a generous bequest from Ethel and Carl Sanjines.

Besides the new office that we build in 1998, Nukewatch’s single largest investment here—the $38,000 solar panel array that produces more electricity than the whole farmstead needs, including the Nukewatch office—was somehow spared any damage, even though four tall trees stand directly behind it. In September we cleared everything within 50 feet of the panels in anticipation of the increasing frequency and strength of chaotic wind storms.

The Nukewatch office roof had only light damage.

We wish to thank people who’ve come out and helped clear roads and paths, free-up fences and trails, and cut and split stove wood including: Barb Katt and Randy Surbaugh, Oma “Vic” McMurray, Chris, Mike, and Kristen Boland, Jen and Paul Vos Benkowski, Chris Paul, Sadie Green, Jeff Peterson, José Morales, Andrew Claeys, Adina Stackhouse, Greg Klave, Kurt Seaburg, Jason Malmquist, Michael Aldarbrook, Joel Kilgour, Drew Anderson, Donna Howard, Shelly Braecken, Chelsea Froemke, Maweja “Mo” Henderson, Günes Henderson, Kenji Xiong, and Leela Xiong. — John LaForge

by Leave a Comment

The Other Wall

Book Review by John Heid

Don’t Label Me, An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times by Irshad Manji, St. Martin’s Press, 2019

Don’t Label Me — An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times opens with an invitation to expand our moral imagination and concludes with an eleven step moral courage regimen. The pages in between read like a manifesto as radical, i.e. deeply rooted, as any I have come across in years. This is a book acutely for our times. Irshad Manji offers critical analysis, alongside a crash course in nonviolent engagement techniques. Theory and practice all in one. The content is at once a life-size mirror and flashing red lights for the progressive left.

I have subconsciously been waiting for this book since November 2016. One that addresses the gut punch I felt within 24 hours of Donald Trump’s election. No, not the election; it was the response of friends, peers, and even mentors that blind-sided me. The hostile reaction I had feared from the conservative right, was coming instead from my beloved community, from us not them.

Incredible Conversation, as the book is subtitled, is a discussion between two sentient beings, an aged, blind rescue dog, Lily, and Irshad Manji, a queer, Muslim, immigrant, woman of color. While it may seem a paradox to use labels, in the second paragraph of a book review of Don’t Label Me, Irshad Manji writes early on: “View labels as starting points, not finish lines. They eclipse truth. We have relevance beyond our labels.” These two engage in an animated, sometimes humorous, often provocative dialogue. They unpack, debate, and offer a way out of the vicious cycle of the “Us vs. Them” conundrum which defines contemporary US culture.

Conversation is a fertile mixture of stories, personal experiences, queries and challenges. The reader is walked through a labyrinth of hot button topics: racism, white privilege and black, honest and dishonest diversity, multiculturalism, critical theory and more. No stone is unturned, or thrown. The elephants in the living room of the progressive left are exposed by one of our own.

Manji’s insights flow from diverse sources. She crosses ideologies and eras from Audre Lourde to Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Andrea Dworkin, Bruce Lee to Cornell West, theologian Walter Wink to Mississippi rap artist, Genesis, to name a few.

While her premises are timeless, there is timely relevance to the insights Manji offers. We are just over midway between elections. As a nation, we have not been so divided since the War Between the States. Why? One reason, Manji argues, is negative polarization. That’s when voters take sides not out of faith in a candidate, but out of fury with the other side. Even after their side wins, it is consumed with ensuring that the other camp keeps losing; such is their disdain for the “enemy.”

Manji explains: “Near as I can tell, much of today’s polarized politics stems from the shaming that the diversity movement’s been doing—not only to authentic racists, but to anyone who’s got an honest disagreement with us. I take it as a warning for worse to come. We have underestimated the power of humiliation. Dishonest diversity labels people as a substitute for understanding them. Honest diversity moves people beyond prefabricated labels. If diversity of opinions, ideas, and perspectives won’t be tolerated in movements that prize emancipation, then what kind of utopia are we emancipating into? If you won’t make peace with different points of view, what’s inclusive about your diversity?”

These lines hit me right between the eyes. I have been asking myself, Why are thinking people digging in their heels against what I consider their best interests? Manji posits that Mr. Trump is empowered by the chronic shaming of his supporters. So, can I, can we, disagree in a shame-free environment? She reminds us that listening does not translate into losing. If we want to see change, we need to risk unusual conversations with unfamiliar people—the Other.

Still, Manji is not focused solely on developing personal relationships. She writes: … honest diversity needs diverse forms of advocacy. Voting. Petitions. Walkouts. Sit-ins. Strikes. Satire. Formal deliberations. The last seven pages of Don’t Label Me offer an 11-step exercise which Manji calls a moral courage training regimen. Her prescription for change begins by inviting us to examine the systems within ourselves as we struggle to change the systems within which we live.

It is a gross understatement to say there is much to disagree about in this country. Manji views this disagreement as an invitation, something to be approached with courage and dignity, not shaming. Otherwise we perpetuate an ideological border wall and hunker down deeper into our gated realities. The long term consequences of this stand-off will reach far beyond an election in 2020.

—John Heid is a house painter who lives in Ajo, Arizona and volunteers with the groups No More Deaths and Humane Borders.

 

Contact Us

(715) 472-4185
nukewatch1@lakeland.ws

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

Donate To Nukewatch

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

Stay Connected