Quarterly Newsletter

June 25, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Socialized Risk, Privatized Benefits, Keep Bum Reactors Afloat

By Kelly Lundeen

Summer Quarterly 2017

Once again corporations get favors when they fail. Westinghouse Inc., maker of the untested AP1000 reactor design, declared bankruptcy March 29, choosing to restructure due to “certain financial and construction challenges.” Its reactors under construction in Georgia and in South Carolina were supposed to be producing electricity by now. Instead they’re running $12 billion over budget and three years behind schedule. Thanks to $4.5 billion in ratepayer financing in South Carolina, $3.9 billion in Georgia, and an $8.3 billion federal loan guarantee authorized by the Department of Energy, the financial picture for Westinghouse, its parent company Toshiba and the state utilities Southern Company and Scana Energy, isn’t as bad as it should be.

Nuclear industry lobbyists and their campaign donations guarantee close ties between the government and the nuclear industry which has always relied on taxpayer subsidies. Despite being hugely unprofitable, it survives. Last August, taxpayers in New York were roped into paying a $7.6 billion to bailout that will benefit Exelon, Entergy and the French firm Electricité de France. Illinois taxpayers are on the hook for a $2.34 billion bailout of Exelon. FirstEnergy is looking to rake in an additional $1.2 billion from the taxpayers of Ohio, even after vocal opposition during legislative testimony in May prompted deliberations to be suspended. Similar legislation to support reactor bailouts is in the works in Connecticut, New Jersey, Texas, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

The nuclear industry cannot survive indefinitely. France’s nuclear giant Areva has reported financial losses in the billions which, along with the rest of France’s nuclear industry, could cost French taxpayers over $10 billion. Toshiba, has announced that it will not be building any more reactors; its nuclear sector has reported a loss of $6 billion, and that could go up to $10 billion. The near future of nuclear power would appear gloomy if it weren’t for its true saviors, the taxpayers, who will never have the clout of a nuclear lobbyist.

The $8.3 billion federal loan authorized for Georgia by the DOE has barely been mentioned in mainstream media, while the “inexcusable” 2011 loan guarantee given to the solar power company Solyndra, which later failed, was covered extensively and called “scandalous” by the Washington Post among others. The Westinghouse loan was 15 times bigger than Solyndra’s. Odds are that taxpayers won’t get that federal loan money back.

The Westinghouse bankruptcy is just another sign of industry decline. Twelve reactor closures have been announced since 2015, although five of them have been reversed by bailouts. The speed of the decline will depend on how much the nuclear industry is cushioned by a plush, socialist-style welfare system draining the treasury, while the rest of us are subject to free market capitalism.

To help stop bailouts in your state, check out the Coalition Against Nuclear Bailouts (Ohio), Citizens Against Nuclear Bailouts (Pennsylvania), and Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

—PennEnergy, May 19, 2017; Christian Science Monitor, Mar. 30, 2017; The State, June 13, 2016; Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Jan. 11, 2016; Washington Post, Dec. 25, 2011

June 23, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Trouble with Our State

Through the prism of nonviolence

By John Heid

Summer Quarterly 2017

Jamar Clark, 24, was shot and killed Nov. 15, 2015 by Minneapolis police officer Dustin Schwarze while officer Mark Ringgenberg held him on the ground. No criminal or civil charges were brought against the officers. In June his family filed a federal lawsuit against the officers saying the police subjected Clark to unreasonable seizure and excessive force.

The trouble with our state / was not civil disobedience, / which in any case, was hesitant and rare./… / The trouble with our state / — we learned it only afterward / when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead / and civil virtue shone like paint on tin / and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip / — our trouble / the trouble with our state / with our state of soul / our state of siege — / was / Civil / Obedience.

— Excepted from “The Trouble with Our State” by Daniel Berrigan

“I am troubled by the ongoing civil disobedience.”

— Judge Christian Sande, Hennepin County District Court, Minn., March 29, 2017

The verdict in most political trials is usually anticlimactic. The heart of such trials lies in our testimony, and, once in a blue moon, in a prosecutor or judge’s statements. Every now and then a ray of light makes its way through the decorum into the “halls of justice.” This actually happened in Hennepin County District Court in late March when Eddie Bloomer of the Des Moines Catholic Worker and I were tried on charges stemming from an April 2016 Black Lives Matter/Catholic Worker action in Minneapolis.

My defense to the charges of trespass and obstruction of transit was based on my claim of right to stand precisely where I did, in front of a Metro Transit light rail vehicle, in order to raise awareness and create a tension that would pressure Minneapolis police to address their lethal policies and practices toward people of color. Our vigil focused particularly on the murder of an unarmed young man, Jamar Clark, who was shot in the head by a Minneapolis police officer. The investigation into Jamar’s killing was closed earlier in the year by the Minneapolis Police Department without charges against the officer involved.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. carefully laid out the rationale for the practice of creative tension in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I referenced this hallowed letter in laying out my “claim of right” defense. Throughout the three-day trial presiding Judge Christian Sande paid careful attention. Then during pre-sentencing remarks he gave a stern, thought- provoking rebuke to the rationale for my defense. He began by saying: “I am troubled by the analogies that I see—particularly, the Letter from a Birmingham Jail…. Dr. King talks about constructive tension. But again, the constructive tension he was citing in the Letter… had to do with a direct challenge to an unconstitutional law and a public sentiment that supported that unconstitutional law. This (Eddie’s and my cases) was much more amorphous and so it’s much harder for the community and the Court in a situation like this to really do much to address the issues.”

Judge Sande’s comments are a rare courtroom gift. They summarize the mindset of status quo “liberal ideology—for the record. True, we were not protesting the trespass laws or the right-of-way for public transit. What we were protesting was the violation of Jamar Clark’s constitutional right to due process, civil and human rights, and to a fair trial by a jury of his peers. A Twin Cities police officer had robbed him of these rights by playing the roles of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. In a single irretrievable moment in time.

With a bullet. There is no appellate court for Jamar, let alone a trial. This killing was not an isolated incident in the Twin Cities or in our country for that matter. It is a nation-wide matter of fact and an epidemic.

Our vigil followed carefully what Dr. King laid out from his Birmingham jail cell. He wrote: “Its (Birmingham’s) ugly record of police brutality known in every section of this country.” Minneapolis’s track record of death-by-cop is not so widely published, but is well known in the black community. Dr. King was labeled an outside agitator. Yet he had local ties. We, catholic workers were invited to the Twin Cities by local human rights workers including people of color. Regardless, Dr. King reminded us from his cell that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We were victims of a broken promise… and the dark shadow of disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except for that of preparing for direct action.” In Minneapolis the investigation into Jamar Clark’s murder closed without charges. Negotiations had failed.

Judge Sande’s comments articulate the point of view that believes the system can self-correct by means of checks and balances, by petitions, sanctioned rallies, town hall meetings, and the ballot.
These activities do not change the fundamental character of the system. They don’t rock the boat. Activist Philip Berrigan called these “acts of consent. Ones that go along with business as usual.” The difference between consent and dissent lies in whether one believes that the system is fundamentally just—or not. The principle attitude underlying our direct action in Minneapolis was
dissent, challenging the system at its roots, which is what radical means. Dissent recognizes that the system is in need of radical transformation. Dr. King reminds: “My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.” Howard Zinn wrote in his A Peoples’ History of the United States that no social change has occurred in this country without both consent and dissent.

Two more black men were killed by Twin Cities police officers between the time of our vigil and our trial.

The challenge that Judge Sande laid out—however inadvertently or intentionally—is for activists to more clearly and consistently articulate the necessity and efficacy of dissent. Which, simply put, means more creative tension, more court time.

I close where I began with Daniel Berrigan. In the early 1970s, he and exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn shared a series of midnight conversations in Paris. These were printed in The Raft Is Not The Shore. Daniel said: “But nothing is understandable while it’s going on—the sixties are only understandable when they’re over, which makes most people into morticians—ready to bury the dead. But it costs something to say while the killing is going on, ‘No one should die!’ And the killing is going on.”

Over the past 10 years, 100 percent of the people killed by the Minneapolis Police Department have been black or brown. I rest my case. Again.

—John Heid volunteers for the immigrants’ rights groups No More Deaths, and Humane Borders in Ajo, Arizona.

June 22, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima’s Radiation Will Poison Food “for Decades,” Study Finds

Three of the six reactors at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi complex were wrecked in March 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami. The destruction of emergency electric generators caused a “station blackout” which halted cooling water intake and circulation. Super-heated, out-of-control uranium fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 then boiled off cooling water, and some 300 tons of fuel “melted” and burned through the reactors’ core vessels, gouging so deep into underground sections of the structure that to this day operators aren’t sure where it is. Several explosions in reactor buildings and uncovered fuel rods caused the spewing of huge quantities of radioactive materials to the atmosphere, and the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean ever recorded. Fukushima amounts to Whole-Earth poisoning.

Now, researchers say, radioactive isotopes that were spread across Japan (and beyond) by the meltdowns will continue to contaminate the food supply for a very long time.

According to a new study that focused on “radiocaesium” — as the British call cesium-134 and cesium-137 — “food in japan will be contaminated by low-level radioactivity for decades.” The official university announcement of this study neglected to specify that Fukushima’s cesium will persist in the food chain for thirty decades. It takes 10 radioactive half-lives for cesium-137 to decay to barium, and its half-life is about 30 years, so C-137 stays in the environment for roughly 300 years.

The study’s authors, Professor Jim Smith, of the University of Portsmouth, southwest of London, and Dr. Keiko Tagami, from the Japanese National Institute of Radiological Sciences, report that cesium-caused “radiation doses in the average diet in the Fukushima region are very low and do not present a significant health risk now or in the future.”

This phraseology deliberately conveys a sense of security — but a false one. Asserting that low doses of radiation pose no “significant” health risk sounds reassuring, but an equally factual framing of precisely the same finding is that small amounts of cesium in food pose a slightly increased risk of causing cancer.

This fact was acknowledged by Prof. Smith in the June 14 University of Portsmouth media advisory that announced his food contamination study, which was published in Science of the Total Environment. Because of above-ground atom bomb testing, Prof. Smith said, “Radioactive elements such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and carbon-14 contaminated the global environment, potentially causing hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths.”

No less an authority than the late John Gofman, MD, Ph.D., one of the first scientists to produce plutonium, and Professor Emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, spent 50 years warning about the threat posed by low doses of radiation. In May 1999, Gofman wrote, “By any reasonable standard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose, which means that just one decaying radioactive atom can produce permanent mutation in a cell’s genetic molecules. My own work showed this in 1990 for X rays, gamma rays, and beta particles.”

The Fukushima-borne cesium in Japan’s food supply, and in the food-web of the entire Pacific Ocean, emits both beta and gamma radiation. Unfortunately, it will bio-accumulate and bio-concentrate for 300 years, potentially causing, as Dr. Gofman if not Dr. Smith might say, hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths. — John LaForge

June 13, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Government “Low-balls” Likelihood and Radiation Effects of Reactor Waste Fuel Fires — Study

A radiation disaster, worse than the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi catastrophe in Japan, could hit the United States because of ignored risks, according to a startling new study from Princeton University. The US Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC) has greatly underestimated the risk of major radiation releases from a reactor waste fuel fire. Such reactor fuel fire could erupt in the event of a “station blackout”—the loss of off-site and emergency electric power—and the consequent boiling off of cooling water in waste fuel pools.

The wrecked waste fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi reactor No. 3, pictured in March 2013, two years after hydrogen explosions destroyed its outer shell.

Frank von Hipple, a nuclear security expert at Princeton, and the historian Michael Schoeppner, are the study’s coauthors. The dispersed radioactive contamination from such a fire “would be an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe,” the authors conclude in their paper.

Von Hipple and Schoeppner argue that the NRC’s gross minimization of risk is the result of corporate and political interference. “The NRC has been pressured by the nuclear industry, directly, and through Congress, to low-ball the potential consequences of a fire because of concerns that increased costs could result in shutting down more nuclear power plants,” von Hipple told Science Daily. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” he said.

Waste uranium fuel rods, often called “spent fuel,” are kept in cooling pools near reactors for several years. Although still very hot, they can then be moved into so-called “dry cask” storage. While nuclear reactors themselves have emergency, back-up generators to circulate cooling water inside the “reactor core” (these generators were wrecked at Fukushima), US waste fuel pools do not have back-up, emergency power. The pools are especially vulnerable to station blackouts.

Cooling pool water is normally pumped from a nearby lake, river or sea, and must constantly circulate and cover the waste fuel, which is the hottest and most radioactive material in the commercial nuclear industry. (Waste fuel from Navy propulsion reactors is reportedly more deadly.) Any loss of on-site electric power—like happened at Fukushima—can stop cooling water circulation, causing the water to boil away, and expose the fuel rods. Such loss of coolant can ignite a fuel fire and cause catastrophic amounts of radiation to be released.

Waste Fuel Fire Barely Avoided in Fukushima

The world watched dreadfully in March 2011 as the station blackout at Fukushima-Daiichi threatened to cause this sort of fuel fire. The earthquake and tsunami cut off all cooling water-pumping and circulation. At a congressional hearing March 16, 2011, six days into the triple meltdowns, the head of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, said in a Congressional hearing in Washington that all the water was gone from one of Fukushima’s waste fuel pools. Although Jaczko was mistaken, the nightmare was possible, likely even, and observers counted the hours until cooling water boiled off and a fuel fire would ignite.

An in-tact cooling pool in Japan, with one “assembly” of waste fuel rods being moved in the 20-foot covering of water which keeps the hot irradiated uranium from catching fire.

The NRC has estimated, for example, that a major waste fuel pool fire at the Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania would force the evacuation of 3.46 million people from 12,000 square miles, reports Richard Stone writing in Science magazine May 24. But the Princeton researchers, who say they used a better computer modeling system, estimate that such a disaster would force 18 million people to evacuate from the surrounding 39,000 square miles.

Von Hipple’s and Schoeppner’s report followed, by only one week, a study from the US National Academies of Sciences that urges the United States to make improvements at its waste fuel pools. The NAS’ study recommends that the NRC and reactor operators upgrade monitoring of the waste pools—most do not even have a waste pool water-level monitor in the operator control rooms!—and improve the means of topping up water levels during an accident.

Another way to reduce the risk of waste fuel fires is to hurry the transfer of fuel from the cooling pools to dry casks. “As recently as 2013, the NRC concluded that the projected benefits do not justify the roughly $4 billion cost of a wholesale transfer. But the national academies’ study concludes that the benefits of expedited transfer to dry casks are five-fold greater than NRC has calculated,” Stone reported in Science.

The paper, “Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era,” was published May 26 in Science. —John LaForge

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Stay Connected