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July 16, 2019 by Nukewatch 9 Comments

Contaminated Middle School Indefinitely Closed in Ohio

Zahn’s Corner Middle School in Piketon, Ohio, was closed May 14, after the Department of Energy disclosed that it had two-year-old evidence of radioactive contamination in and around its buildings. The school is two miles from the uranium enrichment factory known as the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Photo by KDAK, Channel 2/CBS, Pittsburgh.

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

See Fall 2019 update here.

Cancer-causing radioactive poisons found outside and inside an Ohio middle school near a former H-bomb materials factory have led to the school’s abrupt closure. Students won’t be returning there in the fall.

Zahn’s Corner Middle School in Piketon—two miles from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant which for decades processed uranium for nuclear weapons—was closed in the face of parents’ frantic concern for their children’s health.

In mid-May 2019, the US Department of Energy (DOE) acknowledged that in 2017 it found trace amounts of highly radioactive neptunium-237 in air monitors on the school grounds, the Ironton Tribune reported. The DOE also admitted that it found similarly toxic americium there in 2018. The Dayton Daily News reported that neptunium is a carcinogen linked to bone cancers. Why the discovery of radioactive chemicals was not made public at the time—and the school closed then—has not been explained by the DOE.

A more recent and independent study, conducted by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, found enriched uranium actually inside the middle school itself, and it found “plutonium, uranium, and neptunium in water and dust samples from other parts of the community” the Associated Press reported.

Fifteen years ago, in 2003 and 2004, the DOE disclosed that it had found traces of uranium in milk and eggs from area farms, and in vegetables from gardens next to the factory. Uranium, plutonium and or technetium were found in air, water, sediment and fish from area waterways, the Dayton Daily reported in November 2006. “Energy officials say none of the amounts are large enough to pose a health threat,” the Dayton Daily reported at the time. This reassurance is untrue because internal radiation exposures can never be considered safe, no matter how small.

In a May 14 press release, the Pike County General Health District raised concern that the government’s radioactive waste clean-up and disposal activities at Portsmouth have spewed radioactive dust clouds causing widespread dispersal downwind. The DOE has so far refused the Health District’s request to suspend its operations, claiming more data is needed.

Dusty bulldozing and open air demolition operations are now under way at the site to deconstruct the complex, decontaminate the grounds, and build a radioactive waste abandonment facility. NBC News reported May 15 that although “the contamination came from [the Portsmouth] plant … the Department of Energy has repeatedly refused to cease operations there.”

While environmental contamination with uranium-235 and other uranium isotopes is worrisome, more troubling still is the detection of neptunium, americium, cesium, technetium, and plutonium in surrounding homes, surface waters, gardens and farmlands.

Between 1954 and 2001, the Portsmouth complex did uranium “enrichment” for US nuclear weapons—the dirty, dangerous process of increasing the amount of uranium-235 in large volumes of uranium.* The factory made weapons-grade uranium (more U-235) for H-bombs, and low-enriched uranium (less U-235) for nuclear reactor fuel.

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As before, the Department of Energy said the radioactive contamination in and around the school is “well below established thresholds of concern for public health.” Likewise, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy director said “the amount reported is far below the risk level.” And in a May 16 letter to the DOE, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said his understanding was that the amounts of neptunium and americium detected “are far below any public health risks.”

In the case of the neptunium, uranium, plutonium, americium and technetium found in the water, vegetables, fish and school yards of Piketon, Ohio, the authorities do not know what has happened or for how long, or, like before, are withholding the information. They do know that alarmed parents could become enraged.

Plutonium is an extremely toxic alpha radiation emitter that if ingested or inhaled seeks bone and attacks the body’s ability to make red blood cells.

The authoritative Institute for Energy and Environmental Research reported on plutonium contamination in drinking water in its September 2005 edition of Science for Democratic Action. The institute concluded that the maximum contaminant level (MCL) for plutonium-239, and for toxins akin to it, in drinking water “should be tightened by about a factor of 100.”

“The black star in the middle shows the tracks made by alpha rays emitted from a particle of plutonium-239 in the lung tissue of an ape. The alpha rays do not travel very far, but once inside the body, they can penetrate more than 10,000 cells within their range. This set of alpha tracks (magnified 500 times) occurred over a 48-hour period.” Robert Del Tredici, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (1987), plate 39.

Children are more vulnerable to the damaging health effects of radiation than are men, according to the National Academy of Sciences and independent experts. As Science for Democratic Action (SDA) reported in August 2009, “This is because radiation doses received in childhood are more likely to lead to cancer than the same dose received as an adult.”

In spite of this, radiation risk models still in use today are often based on an outdated “reference man” standard. The model estimates the risk that radiation poses to a hypothetical adult white male between 20 and 30 years of age, 5’7” tall, and weighing 154 pounds. As SDA made clear, the vast majority of people fall outside the definition. Not a single middle school kid falls inside of it.

—Beyond Nuclear’s Kevin Kamps contributed reporting to this story. Other sources were WKRC, May 27; Downwinders, Washington Bureau, May 22; the BBC, and the Ironton Tribune, May 15 & 16; WOSU Public Radio, May 15; Newsweek, and the Pike County General Health District, May 14; the Columbus Dispatch, May 13, 2019; the Dayton Daily News, May 15, 2019 & Nov. 12, 2006; and Science for Democratic Action from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

—John LaForge

* Separating uranium-238 from the bomb-grade uranium-235 produces mountains of radioactive waste. Some 700,000 tons of waste uranium-238, known as depleted uranium, is now stored in the United States, although some is given to weapons producers that make armor plate for tanks and poisonous armor-piercing ammunition.

See Fall 2019 update here.

July 16, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Bomb Test Fallout Spread Farther and Deeper Than We Knew

The Muir Glacier, in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, has undergone well documented and very rapid retreat. According to Wikipedia, from 1892 to about 1980, it retreated nearly 20 miles; and from 1941 to 2004, it retreated over 7.5 miles and thinned by over 800 meters or 2,600 feet. Ocean water has filled the valley, replaced the ice, and created Muir Inlet at right. Photos by United States Geological Survey.

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

By Kelly Lundeen

From the South and North Poles, to the deepest ocean trenches, human-made radioactive material is being discovered in new places. Two recent studies reveal the distances that radioactive effluent and fallout have been dispersed. One international research team found radioactivity in all 17 glaciers they tested in both of the Earth’s hemispheres.

Another global study found the first evidence of fallout from bomb tests in marine life in the deepest place on Earth. With unabated production of radioactive waste, runoff, gases, and accidents, it’s no surprise to find it farther away and deeper than ever.

Fallout Found from High Glacier to Deep Ocean

The first study found measured amounts of radioactive cesium-137 and americium-241 in glacial sediments thousands of times greater than expected. “Our samples are exceptional in terms of the levels of fallout radionuclides that we find outside of nuclear exclusion zones” (contaminated “no-go” areas), said Caroline Clason, a member of the study team and a lecturer in Physical Geography at the Univ. of Plymouth, UK. “We’re talking about weapons testing from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, going right back in the development of the bomb,” Clason told Agence France-Presse. “If we take a sediment core you can see a clear spike where Chernobyl was [in April 1986], but you can also see quite a defined spike in around 1963 when there was a period of quite heavy weapons testing.” While most of the fallout from Fukushima has yet to return to land, evidence is already appearing.

After an accident or explosion, radioactive particles travel through the atmosphere and fall to Earth as radioactive rain or snow. Radioactive particles in snow fall on glaciers settling into the temporarily stable environment. However, Clason warned, “we all know that glaciers are increasingly melting and that material has to go somewhere.” The study did reveal some good news: the unique glacial sediment where radioactive particles settle is very efficient at accumulating those contaminants and may provide opportunities for bioremediation.

As radioactive glacial sediments enter the ocean, it will affect marine life which has already been doused with radioactivity. That is the subject of “Penetration of Bomb Carbon-14 into the Deepest Ocean Trench,” published in April by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). (If carbon-14 sounds familiar, you may remember that it is used to determine the age of geological samples using carbon dating.) An AGU news release explains, “Thermonuclear weapons tests conducted during the 1950s and 1960s doubled the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere when neutrons released from the bombs reacted with nitrogen in the air.” Bomb test carbon has been recorded in marine life at the ocean’s surface since the late 1950s. As these animals die and fall to the ocean floor, deep sea crustaceans as far as seven miles (11 kilometers) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench, feed on their remains and the radioactivity is passed through the food web. “However, the penetration of bomb [test] carbon-14 into the deepest fauna has not been reported until now,” the study said.

The amount of human-made radioactivity moving into the Pacific is mushrooming. New concern is being raised by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres over a leaking concrete dome built in the Marshall Islands. The concrete covers a large volume of radioactive debris that was collected from the detonation of 67 bomb tests done by the US, contaminating the islands and their people. Radioactive materials from the testing were pushed into an unlined pit and capped with the concrete. Mr. Guterres recently visited the islands, amplifying the voices of Marshall Islanders worried about radioactivity leaching into the ocean through the bottom of the hole, and the increasing potential for damage to the concrete dome by tropical storms.

From the depths of the oceans to the polar regions, more areas are being impacted by the radioactive legacy of humans, impacts accelerated with climate change which itself is rapidly accelerating.

—Sources: The London Sunday Express, May 19; American Geophysical Union, May 18 & 8, 2019; Agence France-Presse, May 16 & Apr. 10, 2019; CNN, May 13, 2019; Live Science, Apr. 15, 2019; European Geosciences Union April 10, 2019.

July 6, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Trump’s Ministry of No Information

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

By John LaForge

The Trump administration has halted, without explanation, the routine practice of reporting the current number of nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, the AP and United Press International report. The new secrecy will make it nearly impossible to estimate the true cost of nuclear weapons, to show adherence to arms control treaties, or to pressure others nuclear weapons states to disclose the size of their arsenals.

The secrecy decision was revealed in an April 5 letter from the Department of Energy’s Office of Classification to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). Hans M. Kristensen, director of the group’s Nuclear Information Project, said the FAS regularly asks for the information and that it’s been made public for decades.

“The decision walks back nearly a decade of US nuclear weapons transparency policy—in fact, longer if including stockpile transparency initiatives in the late 1990s,” Kristensen wrote in an April 17 memo, according to the AP.

There is no national security rationale for keeping the number secret, Kristensen told the AP, adding that it is “unnecessary and counterproductive.”

“This is curious,” he reportedly said, “since the Trump administration had repeatedly complained about secrecy in the Russian and Chinese arsenals. Instead, it now appears to endorse their secrecy.”

Military classifies news of war in Afghanistan

In April, the Pentagon halted its public disclosure of how much of Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban, adding to a long list of progress reports from the war that are now being kept secret.

John Sopko, US Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, told the New York Times, “We’re troubled by it.” Keeping Sopko’s reports secret means, “The only people who don’t know what’s going on and how good or bad a job we’re doing are the people paying for it,” he said. Sopko and some in Congress have access to some of the information.

The new restrictions on public information about the 18-year-long occupation of Afghanistan are in addition to the October 2017 halt to disclosing Afghan military casualties, its performance assessments, and anti-corruption efforts by the Afghan Ministry of Interior, David Zucchino reported May 1 for the Times. Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the paper, “There is no reliable way to know who is ‘winning’ or the level of stalemate.”

Pentagon secrecy hides missile defense program

Today’s increased military secrecy follows the March 2018 announcement by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) that it would no longer post the public calendar of upcoming missile tests and will keep the testing schedule classified. The schedule will only be made available to Congress the Seattle Times reported April 11, 2018. Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, director of the MDA which spans 14 time zones and employs over 9,000 military and civilian workers, reportedly said his test results will be made available after launches.

Expanding military control of information continues a pattern. Since June 8, 2002, the Pentagon has been allowed to keep secret all key missile defense test results. The military’s blanket classification of performance data was imposed following the disclosure of scientific evidence of a string of failed or faked tests and fabricated results, and after the FBI began an investigation into fraud and cover-ups inside the program. Then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also waived all procurement oversight rules for the agency, laws designed to keep federal programs on budget.

Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space wrote in June 2017 that, “Many of the tests are scripted, what [physicist] Michio Kaku calls ‘strap down rabbit tests.’ They can’t afford to release [details]. They would sink their boat.”

With secret test data, secret schedules, and an unaccounted, bottomless budget, the MDA’s mission impossible — “hitting a bullet with a bullet” — has wasted over $200 billion since 1983. Other military impossibilities — like victory in Afghanistan, or winning at nuclear deterrence — have cost trillions. They appear guaranteed to gobble up billions more as long as Pentagon censorship is allowed to hide the facts.

Published at

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/26/trumps-ministry-of-no-information/

also at

http://www.peacevoice.info/2019/06/25/trumps-ministry-of-no-information/#more-13795

July 6, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima Disaster Response and Recovery a Vexing Radiation Colossus

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

By John LaForge

Eight years into Fukushima’s 3-reactor catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami and meltdowns, and after the industry’s and government’s multiple recovery schemes, an overview is in order.*

The three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi caused the worst dump of radioactivity to the Pacific Ocean in history. “This event is unprecedented in its total release of radioactive contamination into the ocean” wrote Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for PBS News Hour in March 2016. Buesseler has been recording Fukushima’s Pacific Ocean contamination since it started on 3/11/11. While Fukushima is often called the “2nd worst” radiation accident behind Chernobyl, Buesseler said, “More than 80% of the radioactivity from the damaged reactors ended up in the Pacific—far more than reached the ocean from Chernobyl.” Buesseler reported that this radiation gusher continues. “It is incorrect to say that Fukushima is under control when levels of radioactivity in the ocean indicate ongoing leaks, caused by groundwater flowing through the site and enhanced after storms,” he wrote.

“The worst airborne radiation spill in 25 years.”: Like the 1986 Chernobyl disaster that spread radiation across the Northern Hemisphere, Forbes reported March 28, 2011 that the US EPA recorded Fukushima’s radioactive iodine-131 in rainwater in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts at levels above what the agency allows in drinking water. The EPA’s air monitoring also found Fukushima’s radioactive iodine-131 in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Washington, and Nevada. Nothing close to this immense, hemisphere-wide radiation dispersal has happened since Chernobyl.
Japanese foods were tainted widely. Traces of radioactive cesium were found in a popular baby formula according to Japan Today, Dec. 7, 2011. Hundreds of thousands of babies may have eaten it before it was pulled from store shelves. The Japan Times reported April 22, 2011 that Fukushima’s iodine-131 was detected in the breast milk of women living near Tokyo, 150 miles from the meltdowns. The public demanded an investigation into the impact on mothers and babies. In April 2013, Japan’s Ministry of Health reported that levels of cesium-137 and cesium-134 found in produce and rice crackers 225 miles away from Fukushima “are high enough to cause residents to exceed the annual radiation exposure limit in just a few months, or even weeks.”
Fukushima is the world’s worst reactor disaster by volume of fuel melted and waste in cooling pools. Major reactor meltdowns at Santa Susanna in California (1959), Windscale in England (1957), Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania (1979), and Chernobyl in Ukraine (1986), involved a single reactor fuel inventory. Fukushima’s meltdowns involve three reactors full of melted and mangled fuel rods, and an additional 1,573 waste fuel rods in damaged condition in damaged pools of cooling water. The three masses of melted reactor fuel may never be recovered or containerized.
Fukushima caused the largest evacuation in the history of nuclear power: 160,000 evacuated from the zone first set at 12, and later expanded to 19 miles. (116,000 were forced to leave Chernobyl’s dead zone.) Two weeks after the start of the meltdowns, people from between 12 to 19 miles away were encouraged to “voluntarily evacuate.” The US government recommended that US citizens stay 50 miles away.
Of the colossal volumes of radioactive debris produced by the catastrophe, the New York Times provided this list in March 2017: 400 tons of contaminated cooling water produced every day since March 2011; 3,519 containers holding 60,000 tons of radioactive mud or sludge; 64,700 cubic meters of discarded protective clothing; branches and logs from 220 acres of deforested land; 200,400 cubic meters of radioactive rubble; and 3.5 billion gallons [17 million cubic yards] of radioactive soil. According to Greenpeace, 11 million tons of this radioactive soil is to be incinerated, which spreads airborne radioactive contamination in fly ash from smoke stacks, and leaves behind radioactively contaminated bottom ash in need of containment. (Will the consequently contaminated soil again be collected for re-incineration?)
The vexing problems of disaster response have seen ever-changing estimates of the amount of radiation released. The amount released to the air was “twice as large as previous estimates by research institutions both in Japan and overseas,” according to a Feb. 2012 report by the Meteorological Research Institute. The volume and variety of contaminated materials that have been collected for disposal is astounding. Greenpeace reported in December 2017 that while towns like Iitate and Namie had contaminated topsoil scraped off from populated areas, the problem remained because the soil removal left “islands … which are surrounded by forested mountains, for which there is no possible decontamination.” Consequently, cleaned-up areas “are subject to recontamination through weathering processes and the natural water and lifecycle of trees and rivers.” Because of how long cesium-137 persists in the environment, “this will be an on-going source of significant recontamination for … 300 years.”
The failure of the “ice wall,” designed to divert groundwater away from the three reactor foundations which were cracked open by the record 9.0 earthquake, means that hundreds of tons of water keep pouring every day into the wreckage of the reactor chambers. There the water is contaminated by contact with the masses of melted uranium fuel and either rushes out to sea or is collected for filtration in the failed Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS).
The notorious failure of the ALPS, which was intended to partially clean up highly contaminated cooling water and groundwater, means that possibly 1-million tons of waste water now held in 1,000 giant tanks near the coastline is not cleaned up at all, and must be filtered again by an as-yet-unknown method that needs to be designed and engineered from scratch. Meanwhile the tanks are vulnerable to another earthquake that could happen any time. One Japan Times headline on March 29, 2018 warned, “Seven years on, radioactive water at Fukushima plant still flowing into ocean, study finds”.

Detailed and well-documented reports by Greenpeace provide some of the best background and investigative information. See:

* Reflections in Fukushima: The Fukushima Daiichi Accident, Seven Years On, March 2018

* Nuclear Scars: The Lasting Legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima, March 2016

* Fukushima Fallout: Nuclear business makes people pay and suffer, February 2013

* Lessons from Fukushima, February 2012

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Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

See Fall 2019 update here.

See Fall 2019 update here.

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

By Kelly Lundeen

Fallout Found from High Glacier to Deep Ocean

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

By John LaForge

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

By John LaForge

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