Quarterly Newsletter

June 9, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

With Ballistic Missile Defenses, There’s a Secret to Success

The corporate gravy train known as Star Wars, Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), or just Missile Defense—after having spent over $200 billion since 1983—is finally celebrating a successful test. On May 31, 2017 the Pentagon claimed that it hit a missile shot from the Pacific with a missile shot from California.

The veracity of the claim is impossible to confirm because, as always, the military did not provide details. Actual success is highly unlikely. Since 2002, the Pentagon has been allowed to keep secret all key test information, including flight test data on all its BMD experiments. The military’s blanket classification of these testing results was imposed in the face of highly embarrassing scientific evidence of test fakery and two years after the FBI began an investigation into fraud and cover-up inside the program.

Open missile hatches on one of US Navy’s 12 Trident ballistic missile-firing submarines. Each D-5 rocket can carry up to 8 nuclear warheads and have a range of 4,600 miles.

On June 6, Nukewatch asked Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapon & Nuclear Power in Space if the secrecy rules are still in place. In an email Gagnon wrote: “Sure they are. Many of the tests are scripted, what [City University of New York physicist Dr.] Michio Kaku calls ‘strap down rabbit tests.’ They can’t afford to release [details]. It would sink their boat.”

Secrecy could be the only successful thing in the BMD program. It’s been savaged, by independent and government scientists for over 26 years. In 1997, Professor Gordon Mitchell of Univ. of Pittsburgh blasted “secrecy and misinformation on missile defense research,” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, arguing that the “shackles of secrecy and classification” should be removed so that scientific peer review could protect taxpayers from fraud. Mitchell wrote: “Given the lack of grave or immediate ballistic missile threat to the US … BMD research data should be presumptively public, not born secret.”

One program centers on a rocket known as Standard Missile 3 or SM-3, which the Pentagon claimed in 2010 had succeeded in 84% of its tests. But Dr. Theodore Postol, an MIT physicist, and George Lewis, a Cornell physicist, studied the military’s data and reported that only 10 to 20 percent of the tests worked. “The system … will intercept warheads only by accident, if ever,” Postol told the New York Times May 18, 2010.

Postol has been exposing corruption in the scandal-ridden missile industry since the 1991 US war on Iraq. Back then, he proved that not one Patriot air defense rocket stopped a Scud missile. The Pentagon had claimed then the Patriot’s success rate was 80% in Saudi Arabia and 50% in Israel.

Calling the program “delusional,” Postol, Lewis, Kaku, Mitchell, Gagnon and other long-standing critics remind taxpayers that any enemy sophisticated enough to field intercontinental ballistic missiles will produce decoys and other means confounding defenses. Laura Grego, a physicist with Union of Concerned Scientists, lampooned the Pentagon’s claim of a May 30 success, blogging that the military couldn’t honestly say that the test had actually worked unless it had evaded real countermeasures like decoy warheads.

In 2012, the National Research Council, the nation’s preeminent group of scientists, issued a 260-page report critical of the program, saying current enemy “countermeasures” make the anti-missile system unworkable. The report also called a planned $28 billion group of satellites used to track enemy warheads “unneeded.”

Time magazine nailed the military’s fundamental reason for secrecy with its July 10, 2000 headline: “Missile Impossible: This week’s $100 million test of the space shield is all but fixed.” In June that year, 53 House Democrats asked the FBI to investigate the anti-missile program for “serious allegation of fraud and cover up.” The bureau later looked into allegations that the giant military contractor TRW committed fraud and a cover-up while developing a key component of BMD system.

For a more detailed look at anti-ballistic embezzlement, ask Nukewatch for its Special Report, “Missile Defense Fraud Goes Ballistic.” — John LaForge

Sources: Global Network, June 6, 2017; New York Times, May 31, 2017, Sept. 12, 2012, & May 18, 2010; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Aug. 26, 2001; Extra!, F.A.I.R., Nov. 1, 2000; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1997.

June 1, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

New H-Bomb Production Defies Public Opinion, Common Sense, Nonproliferation Treaty, and Military Experts

The US is the only government that deploys nuclear weapons in other countries. US “B61” H-bombs are still being used in The Netherlands (20), Germany (20), Italy (40),Belgium (20) and Turkey (50-90).[1]

At center, the device holding the middle section of this B61-12 nuclear bomb was designed to allow technicians to safely move around different parts of the bomb without using hoists. Senior Mechanical Engineer Jeremy McCord at the Energy Department’s National Security Campus outside Kansas City designed and built this Assembly Tooling Lifting Alignment System, or “ATLAS.” Photo by Dan Sagalyn

In January 2014, the Obama administration approved and Congress fully funded development and production of a new nuclear warhead — under a program dubbed “life extension” — known as B61-12.

The new device is a so-called “variable yield” thermonuclear bomb, and is designed to have four separate explosive yields, to be chosen like from a menu: 0.3 kilotons (kt); 1.5 kt; 10 kt; and 50 kt.[2] The dial-a-massacre weapon can burn with between 50 and 83 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb that turned 140,000 people into powder and ash. Yet in the cold blooded jargon of nuclear war planners the B61-12 is known as “low-yield.” Business writer Jeremy Bender called it “tiny”![3]

With a projected cost of $12.2 billion the B61-12 may be the most expensive nuclear bomb in history. At about $25 million apiece, and weighing 700 pounds, each bomb will cost more than if it were made of solid gold ($14.6 million).

For 50 years, the B61 has been a major federal jobs program for the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, which has engineered 15 different versions. Five B61 types are still in use: the B61-3, -4, -10, -7; and -11. The Obama administration announced plans to retire three of them and “convert” the B61-4 into the B61-12.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 300 of the current 820 B61s are kept at bases with B61-capable aircraft, “including 184 B61s deployed in Europe.” About 250 B61-7 and 50 B61-11 bombs are stored at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Now in just an engineering phase, the first production of B61-12s could begin in 2022. Altogether about 480 may be built.

“One NATO exercise in 1962 estimated that 10 to 15 million German civilians would be killed in a tactical nuclear exchange,” Foreign Affairs reported.[4] The self-destructiveness of such war plans helps explain why the US European Command gave up “advocating for maintaining nuclear weapons in Europe,” the authors said. EUCOM leaders told an oversight task force in 2008 there would be “no military downside to the unilateral withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Europe.” They noted that, “prominent critics … have long argued that the military rationale for keeping nuclear weapons in Europe is an anachronism.”

“Militarily useless”

Opposition to the B61s and their replacement is gaining strength in the US and Europe where high-level politicians have called them “militarily useless.” Gen. James Cartwright, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the B61s “redundant,” and Gen. Colin Powell favored eliminating them in the 1990s when he was Chair of the Joint Chiefs.[5] In 2013, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Representatives Mike Quigley and Jared Polis tried to curtail the B61-12 program. In 2010, five NATO partners — Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Holland and Norway — asked that the B61s be permanently removed from Europe.

In its 2012 Posture Review, NATO’s 28 ministers pledged to work for a world without nuclear weapons. In Germany, thanks to widespread protest and education) every major political party has formally called for withdrawal of the B61s. In one widely published article, former NATO Secretary-General Willy Claes and three senior Belgian politicians wrote, “US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe have lost all military importance.”

Germany’s Der Spiegel online reported Dec. 9, 2016: “By be-coming a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1975, the Germans committed ‘not to receive the transfer of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly.’ During negotiations over German reunification in 1990, then-Chancellor Kohl also affirmed Germany’s ‘renunciation’ of the manufacture, possession and control of nuclear weapons.” — John LaForge
_____

[1] Hans Kristensen & Robert Norris, “US Nuclear Weapons, 2015,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April, 2015; Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 107-119.
[2] Hans Kristensen & Matthew McKinzie, Fed. of Am. Scientists, Jan. 14, 2016, https://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/01/b61-12_earth-penetration.
[3] Business Insider, July 28, 2015.
[4] Barry Blechman & Russell Rumbaugh, “Bombs Away: The Case for Phasing Out US Tactical Nukes in Europe,” Foreign Affairs, July/Aug. 2014.
[5] Richard Sokolsky & Gordon Adams, Foreign Affairs, Feb. 9, 2016.

May 29, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Prison Gang” Peace Delegation to Join International Call for Ouster of US Nuclear Weapons from Germany

For the first time in a long-standing campaign to remove US nuclear weapons from Germany, a delegation of US peace activists will participate in protests at the Büchel Air Base, July 12 to 18, demanding the withdrawal of the 20 remaining US H-bombs still deployed there. Notable among the 11-person delegation are seven participants who have served a combined total of 36 years in US jails and prisons for protest actions taken against nuclear weapons programs and the war system.

The delegation of eleven US activists* — from Wisconsin, California, Washington-DC, Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Maryland — has been brought together by Nukewatch and will join the coalition of 50 German peace and justice groups and organizations converging on the air base.

An international banner displayed at the Nukewatch office.

This past March 26, activists in Germany launched a 20-week-long series of nonviolent protests to rid Büchel of the US B61 nuclear-armed gravity bombs. The actions continue through August 9, the anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. The US delegation will join the International Week, July 12 to 18, along with peace activists from Belgium, The Netherlands, and France, as well as Germany.

“The world wants nuclear weapons abolished,” said US delegate Bonnie Urfer, a long-time peace activist and former staffer with the nuclear watchdog group Nukewatch, in Wisconsin. “To waste billions of dollars replacing the B61s when they should be scrapped is criminal considering how many millions are in need famine relief, emergency shelter, and safe drinking water,” Urfer said. Urfer has spent 6 and 1/2 years incarcerated for a string of misdemeanor-level protests she calls “civil resistance” against war, nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

The US delegation and the German public is particularly concerned that the US is planning to produce 480 new hydrogen bombs — the so-called “B61-12”— to replace the 180 B61 bombs now deployed in five European NATO countries including the 20 at Büchel. Production is not expected to start before 2022.

“Our united resistance will stop the new, illegal nuclear bombs nobody needs,” said Marion Küpker, a disarmament campaigner and organizer with DFG-VK, Germany’s oldest peace organization, this year celebrating its 125th anniversary. “We want Germany to be nuclear weapons free,” Küpker said.

Under a scheme known as “nuclear sharing,” Germany, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, and The Netherlands still deploy and conduct NATO nuclear war maneuvers using the US H-bombs, although all six states are parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Articles I and II of the NPT explicitly prohibit nuclear weapons from being either transferred to or accepted from other countries. The US is the only country in the world that arms other countries with its nuclear weapons. (China may lease a nuclear-powered submarine but not nuclear weapons from Russia.)

Although the planned B61 replacement bomb is a completely new weapon, the Pentagon calls the program “modernization” in order to skirt the NPT’s prohibitions. The new bomb is being touted as the first ever “smart” or precision nuclear weapon, built to be guided by satellites, and aimed with a new tailfin attachment, making it unprecedented. New nuclear weapons are unlawful under the NPT, and President Barak Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review required that “upgrades” to the Pentagon’s current H-bombs must not have “new capabilities.” Overall cost of the new bomb, which is not yet in production, is estimated to be up to $12 billion.

German Parliament resolved to evict US H-bombs

The March 26 start date of “Twenty Weeks for Twenty Bombs” is significant for Germans. First, on March 26, 2010, Germany’s Bundestag voted overwhelmingly — across all parties — to have the government work to remove the US weapons from German territory. In 2008, US and NATO officials claim that “deterrence” makes retaining the B61 important in Europe, but the US European Command said that there would be “no military downside to the unilateral withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Europe.”

Second, on March 27 this year the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York launched formal negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons. The UNGA will convene a second session, June 15 to July 7, to produce a binding “convention” banning any production, possession, deployment, or use of nuclear weapons, in accordance with Article 6 of the NPT. (Similar treaty bans prohibit poison and gas weapons, land mines, and cluster bombs.) A formal Draft Treaty was unveiled May 22 in Geneva. Nuclear-armed countries led by the United States tried unsuccessfully to derail the negotiations and boycotted the first round. Germany’s government under Angela Merkel joined the boycott in spite of broad public support for nuclear disarmament.

A huge majority of the German public supports both the UN treaty ban and the ouster of US nuclear weapons from its territory. According to a poll commissioned by the German chapter of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and published in March 2016, a staggering 93% want nuclear weapons banned. Some 85% agreed that the US weapons should be withdrawn from Germany, and 88% said they oppose US plans to replace the current H-bombs with the new B61-12.

*The United States delegation includes: Steve Baggarly, Norfolk, VA; Kathy Boylan, Washington, DC; Zara Brown, Minneapolis, MN; Susan Crane, Redwood City, CA; Ralph Hutchison, and Carmella Cole, both of Knoxville, TN; Sr. Carol Gilbert and Sr. Ardeth Platte, both of Baltimore, MD; Leona Morgan, Albuquerque, NM; and Bonnie Urfer and John LaForge, both of Luck, WI.

For more information, contact John LaForge: nukewatch1@lakeland.ws; 715-472-4185; or Marion Küpker (Germany) mariongaaa@gmx.de +49 (0)172 771 32 66.

*Detailed information about the US delegation to Büchel:

https://buechel-atombombenfrei.jimdo.com/international/u-s-biographies-in-english-2017/

May 17, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Whack-a-Mole Brings Canadian Rad Waste to the US

Confronting radioactive waste seems like a Whack-a-Mole game. The nuclear industry pops up with a new dumping or dispersal scheme just when the opposition slows or halts the last one.

After millions of citizens pushed Canada’s Environment Minister to question and delay plans for an underground radiation dump right next to Lake Huron (this fight is not over yet), the Canadian companies UniTech and PermaFix now make news with plans to ship radioactive waste from Canada to the United States. UniTech wants to truck ten-thousand tons of it across the border using five different border crossings.

Ten-thousand tons is a lot of material; one equivalent is a Navy Heavy Cruiser which is two football fields long, four stories high, and 60 feet wide. Cut up into trailer-sized chunks, think of thousands of truckloads of dirty bombs moving throughout the country around lakes and rivers, through cities and towns, and over bridges for years and years. Can you say Homeland Security?

Both UniTech and PermaFix have applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for licenses to “export” and “import” thousands of truckloads of “radioactive-contaminated tools, metals and other solid materials.” The vagueness of the applications, with nondescript references to “tools,” “metals,” “other solid materials,” and the curious mention of “incremental amounts of special nuclear material”– is only partly cleared up by a list of 48 different radio-isotopes that will contaminate the “materials.”

These so-called “low-level” wastes are not benign. The allowed “special” materials will include plutonium, strontium, cobalt-60, americium, and neptunium, which are some of the deadliest and most long-lasting poisons on Earth and the worst to come from nuclear power. These and the other 43 identified poisons give off radioactive alpha particles, beta particles, or gamma rays — or some combination — to one degree or another. It’s this “radiation” that makes the waste deadly, because exposure or inhaling or ingesting it can cause heart disease, immune system dysfunction, cancers and leukemias. The effects are cumulative too, so adding more radiation to the exposures we’ve already had shortens our lives even more.

UniTech has already won an NRC “export” license allowing it to ship wastes into the US. (The plan to ship some of it back across the border to Canada is still being contested with the NRC and may end up in court.) Some of UniTech’s waste will be trucked to waste-handling factories in Tennessee, Illinois, and Pennsylvania for “processing.” The bulk of the waste is coming from Canadian nuclear reactors and laboratories.

Shuffle board, bumper cars, demolition derby: pick a metaphor

The proposed US “processing” is, according to UniTech’s license, for: “…segregation, survey, decontamination, unrestricted release, beneficial reuse.” Kay Cumbow, Secretary of the Great Lakes Environmental Alliance, warns that “unrestricted release” means the waste can be dumped in ordinary municipal landfills, and “beneficial reuse” means that contaminated metals can be used in regular smelters like ordinary recycling and ultimately used in consumer products like jungle gyms, frypans, nails and silverware.

This gigantic shell game warrants deeper investigation because waste resulting from the processing and declared “un-usuable” is to be shipped back into Canada, adding another lengthy round of handling and transport risks.

If all this sounds absolutely cray-cray, you may be a precautionary or a prudent person. Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, says that the processing can be done in Canada, so there is no need for the program at all. There must be a substantial financial interest involved in order to voluntarily compound the United States’ own waste containment dilemmas by adding thousands of additional risks.

Pierre Sadik, of US Public Interest Research Group has pointed out that the Department of Energy and the nuclear industry try to create the impression that the transport of radioactive waste has been entirely safe. But this is bunk. A 1996 report by the State of Nevada documented 72 rad waste transport accidents in the US over 50 years.

Sadik reported that four accidents involved radioactive material contamination beyond the vehicle; four involved contamination confined to the vehicle; 13 involved traffic accidents with no release or contamination; 49 involved accidental container surface contamination. The waste’s radiation can escape through container leaks, poor shielding, or during truck crashes or fires,

Thanks to the unsung effort of watchdogs like Diane D’Arrigo and May Olson of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, US citizens have successfully rejected previous attempts to deregulate rad waste and allow it into the scrap metal business. Federal attempts to declare some radioactive waste “below regulatory concern” have repeatedly been halted as completely unacceptable. But the Whack-a-Mole game won’t let up. –– John LaForge

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima: Six Years On

A five-year-old undergoes a thyroid exam in February 2015 at a clinic at a temporary housing complex in Nihonmatsu, about 40 miles from the devastated Fukushima reactor site. Photo: Toru Hanai, Reuters.

By John LaForge

Spring 2017 Quarterly

March 11 marks the 6th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear reactor disaster: the 2011 meltdown of three large power reactors on the Pacific Coast of Japan—Fukushima Daiichi—following a staggering 9.0 magnitude earthquake—the biggest in recorded Japanese history—and its 50-foot tsunami. The “station blackout” or total loss of electric power and cooling in six reactors, and the consequent hydrogen explosions and uncontrolled overheating and “melt-through” of three reactors, has resulted in the most devastating and complicated radiation catastrophe in history.

Fukushima is regularly misreported as less drastic than the singe-reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, in 1986. But France’s Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, reported five years ago that Fukushima was already the biggest single spill of man-made radioactive materials into to the marine environment ever seen or recorded.¹ At least 300 tons of highly contaminated runoff have poured daily into the Pacific ever since.

Dr. Helen Caldicott says in the documentary short “Fukushima: Beyond Urgent,” that aired Feb. 13 says, “Japan is by orders of magnitude many times worse than Chernobyl.” In Crisis Without End (2014), Caldicott warned: “The Fukushima disaster is not over and will not end for many millennia. The radioactive fallout, which has covered vast swaths of Japan, will remain toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. It cannot simply be ‘cleaned up,’ and it will continue to contaminate food, humans, and animals.”

The disaster of “Fukushima squared” (earthquake + tsunami + station blackout times three melted reactor cores) was caused by deliberate decisions made by General Electric, Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the government: to build reactors in earthquake zones; to place emergency back-up generators in flood-prone basements; and to ignore long-standing warnings about inadequate seawall protection.

For these reasons, Nukewatch never calls what’s happened at Fukushima an accident. Rather, we believe with Mayor Tamotsu Baba, of the town of Namie, who said in August 2011 that his “people were unnecessarily exposed….” and that the government’s withholding of warnings about radioactive fallout was comparable to “murder.”²

Radiation-caused illnesses, cancers and fatalities that result from reactor disasters (Windscale in England, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima) are scientifically predictable and known in advance. Researcher Arnie Gunderson noted two years ago that “Two reports recently released in Japan, one by Japanese medical professionals and the second from Tokyo Electric Power Corp., acknowledged that there will be numerous cancers in Japan, much greater than normal, due to the radioactive discharges from the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi… I believe, as do many of my colleagues, that there will be at least 100,000 and as many as one million more cancers in Japan’s future as a result of this meltdown… The second report received from Japan proves that the incidence of thyroid cancer is approximately 230 times higher than normal in Fukushima Prefecture… So what’s the bottom line? The cancers already occurring in Japan are just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sorry to say that the worst is yet to come.”³

**Japanese soldiers collect contaminated leaves in Fukushima Prefecture. AFP/Getty Images.**

Japanese authorities now overseeing Fukushima’s disaster response are pressuring citizens to live in or return to areas that are contaminated with up to four times the annual radiation exposure allowed in similarly contaminated areas around Chernobyl.⁴ Thousands of Japanese incinerators are burning thousands of tons of contaminated debris collected in clean-up efforts—spreading radiation to the winds; and millions of tons of related debris will reportedly be used in road construction throughout Japan, exposing highway workers and nearby residents to long-term radiation risks.

On this somber anniversary, we remember the 19,000 people killed by the tsunami, the 160,000 evacuees who fled radiation zones contaminated by wreckage, and the infants, children and parents who endlessly endure examinations and treatments for thyroid problems stemming from the disaster.

The total cost of decommissioning the destroyed reactor complex and providing compensation to victims has repeatedly doubled. A December 2016 estimate puts the cost at $250 billion.⁵

The Japan Times reported this February that “Scientists still don’t have all the information they need for a cleanup that the government estimates will take four decades….. It is not yet known if the fuel melted into or through the containment vessel’s concrete floor, and determining the fuel’s radioactivity and location is crucial to inventing the technology to remove the melted fuel.”⁶

According to Dr. Shuzo Takemoto, a professor of Geophysics at Kyoto University, “The problem of Unit 2… If it should encounter a big earth tremor, it will be destroyed and scatter the remaining nuclear fuel and its debris, making the Tokyo metropolitan area uninhabitable. The Tokyo Olympics in 2020 will then be utterly out of the question.”⁷

Dr. Caldicott wrote this February, “should there be an earthquake greater than 7 on the Richter scale, it is very possible that … structures could collapse, leading to a massive release of radiation as the building falls on the molten core[s] beneath.”⁸

“Voluntary” evacuees to lose housing support

Some 27,000 so-called “voluntary evacuees”—people who fled their homes in areas beyond mandatory evacuation zones after the disaster began—were to lose their six-year-old housing subsidies at the end of March, 2017.

Thousands of Japanese, wary of government assurances that radiation was limited to official exclusion zones, chose to leave their homes. Many families reported suffering health problems beyond the officially contaminated area, including nose bleeds and nausea.

A local Fukushima Prefecture government spokesman told the news agency AFP that areas not covered by the original evacuation orders have been deemed safe, so housing subsidies were no longer necessary. “The environment is safe for leading a normal life and that means we are no longer in a position to provide temporary housing,” he told AFP.⁹

Greenpeace has said, “This amounts to economic coercion of those individuals and families that are victims of a nuclear disaster they had no part in creating. The group called on the Japanese government to cease its return policy, provide full financial support to evacuees, and “allow citizens to decide whether to return or relocate free from duress.”¹⁰

Groundwater from the mountains behind Fukushima gushes into the quake-smashed reactor foundations, pours over the melted fuel and becomes highly contaminated. This water then runs to the Pacific Ocean which is undergoing the largest radiation dump in recorded history.

A deeply trenched and drilled underground wall of ice that was supposed to divert ground water away from the reactors failed. Nuclear Engineering International reported last August 23 that according to experts, “little or no success was recorded in the wall’s ability to block the groundwater and the amount reaching the buildings has not changed after the wall was built.”

The Pacific covers more than 30% of the Earth’s surface, and with a surface area of more 62 million square miles, its basin is larger than the landmass of all the continents combined.

Part of the reason that whole-sea contamination can result from Fukushima was revealed last February when radiation gauges for the first time got near the melted fuel.

What the Tepco called “astounding” and “unimaginable” levels of radiation were recorded in January and February inside reactor 1. The radiation reading 530 sieverts per hour in January and 650 sieverts/hr on Feb. 9, Tepco said.¹¹

News accounts first called this a “spike” in radiation levels, since the highest reading even during the disaster’s first days was 73 sieverts/hr.

The Washington Post reported that Azby Brown of the citizen science group Safecast, said “It doesn’t necessarily signify any alarming change in radiation levels at Fukushima. It’s simply the first time they’ve been measured that far inside the reactor.”¹²

On Safecast’s website, Brown wrote: “While 530 Sv/hr is the highest measured so far at Fukushima Daiichi, it does not mean that levels there are rising.” Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear also said “The 530 sieverts or 53,000 rems per hour has probably been there the whole while since March 2011.”

Further, the 530 sievert reading was taken some distance from the melted fuel, so the actual lever could be 10 times higher than recorded, according to Hideyuki Ban, of Japan’s Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, who spoke to the Washington Post.

Dr. Caldicott writes that “These facts illustrate why it will be almost impossible to ‘decommission’ units 1, 2 and 3 as no one could ever be exposed to such extreme radiation.”

Exposure to just one sievert is enough to result in infertility, hair loss and cataracts. According to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, a mere four sieverts can kill a person.

Notes

¹ “Fukushima Disaster Produces World’s Worst Nuclear Sea Pollution,” Maritime Executive.com, Oct. 28, 2011

²“Japan Held Nuclear Data, Leaving Evacuees in Peril,” New York Times, Aug. 9, 2011

³GreenMediaInfo.org, Nov. 18, 2015

⁴ Editorial Board, “Fukushima’s voluntary evacuees,” Japan Times, Dec. 3, 2016

⁵ “Tepco: Fukushima nuclear clean-up, compensation costs nearly double previous estimate at $250 billion,” Australian Broadcasting Corp./ABC News Online, Dec. 16, 2016

⁶ Emi Urabe, “Fukushima Fuel-Removal Quest Leaves Trail of Dead Robots,” Japan Times, Feb. 17, 2017

⁷Shuzo Takemoto, “Potential Global Catastrophe of the Reactor No. 2 at Fukushima Daiichi,” Feb. 11, 2017

⁸ “The Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown Continues Unabated,” Independent Australia, Feb. 13, 2017

⁹AFP, Straight Times, Jan. 17; and Japan Today, Jan. 18, 2017

¹⁰Greenpeace, “Nuclear Scars: The Lasting Legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima,” March 2016, p. 22

¹¹Japan Times, Feb. 9, 2017

¹²Washington Post, Feb. 8, 2017

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The US is the only government that deploys nuclear weapons in other countries. US “B61” H-bombs are still being used in The Netherlands (20), Germany (20), Italy (40),Belgium (20) and Turkey (50-90).[1]

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