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July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Germany Shutters Remaining Reactors

By John LaForge

Germany has switched off the last of its nuclear power reactors for good.

The world’s press made much of “Europe’s largest economy” finally going nuclear-free, a renunciation of poison power that Germany has been planning for since 2011.

The country will replace the puny 6% of electricity provided by its last three plutonium/MOX-fueled behemoths with solar and wind generators, geothermal, conservation, and other renewables that already provide 46.9% of the country’s electricity.

A Greenpeace activist in Berlin on April 15, 2023. Photo Credit: ODD ANDERSEN / AFP

“The position of the German government is clear: nuclear power is not green. Nor is it sustainable,” Steffi Lemke, Germany’s Federal Minister for the Environment and Consumer Protection and a Green Party member, told CNN. Minister Lemke told France’s Le Monde, “The risks of nuclear power are ultimately unmanageable,” after making an April visit to Japan’s Fukushima disaster zone.

Earlier, the 1986 reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl in Ukraine created a plume of radioactive fallout that doused large parts of Germany, and threw nuclear power in the doghouse for millions.

The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that smashed and flooded the Fukushima-Daiichi complex in Japan resulted in three simultaneous reactor meltdowns and the largest radiation release to the environment — still ongoing — in history. For most in Germany, Fukushima was confirmation “that assurances that a nuclear accident of a large scale can’t happen are not credible,” Miranda Schreurs, professor of environment and climate policy at the Technical University of Munich, told CNN.

Emsland nuclear facility in Lower Saxony, Lingen, and two others in Germany closed on April 15. Photo Credit: Sina Schuldt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Three days after the earthquake and tsunami, Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel called Fukushima an “inconceivable catastrophe for Japan” and a “turning point” which it was, at least for Germany.

Plenty of other European countries are rejecting nuclear, CNN reported recently. Denmark passed a resolution in the 1980s not to build new reactors. Switzerland voted in 2017 to phase out nuclear. Italy closed its last reactors in 1990, and Austria’s one reactor site has never operated. Lucky for them.

“Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power is a historic event and an overdue step in energy terms,” Simone Peter, president of the German Renewable Energy Federation, told CNN. “It is high time that we leave the nuclear age behind and consistently organize the renewable age.”

— Le Monde and CNN, April 15, 2023; Reuters, Dec 16, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Ukraine De-Escalation Can Start with Ending Nuclear Weapons “Sharing”

By John LaForge

Ukraine, the United States, and NATO have condemned what they correctly called Russian President Putin’s “dangerous and irresponsible” transfer of nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus.

On June 9, Putin announced that Moscow would deploy its nuclear weapons in Belarus, reporting that work on new facilities for housing the weapons would be complete by July 7-8.

Putin had said on March 25 that Belarusian “President Alexander Lukashenko’s right: He says we’re your closest allies. Why do the Americans deploy their nuclear weapons to their allies, on their territory, train the crews, and pilots how to use this type of weapon if needed? We agreed that we will do the same.”

U.S. hyprocrisy and double-talk were on parade as Uncle Sam demanded the global community accept, ignore, or applaud destabilizing U.S. nukes stationed in Europe, yet condemns Putin for sending Russian nuclear warheads to Belarus. All nuclear sharing is escalatory, illegal and should end.

Indeed, the United States has transferred more than 100 of its 50- and 170-kiloton nuclear gravity bombs known as B61s to bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey, where allied pilots rehearse nuclear weapons attacks using their allied fighter jets. Case in point, NATO’s “Air Defender 2023,” a nine-day German-led, international war game involving 24 countries live-flying all across Germany, began on Monday June 12, in the midst of the hot war in Ukraine.

Point of information: The Associated Press keeps calling these nuclear weapons “tactical,” and less destructive than “city-busting” “strategic” devices. So it must be recalled that the city-busting Hiroshima bomb was a 15-kiloton weapon far less destructive than today’s B61 “tactical” hydrogen bombs.

Russian Iskander-E missile launcher operates during International Military and Technical Forum 2022 in Alabino outside Moscow, Russia August 17, 2022. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo

Now Putin and Lukashenko copy the U.S. practice of violating the terms of the 1970 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in the same way that the United States has for decades. All such nuclear “sharing” constitutes not just a violation of the NPT’s Articles I, II and VI, but a hair-raising and unnecessary escalation of the quagmire powder keg in Ukraine.

Last May 15, ICAN, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, confronted the increasingly globalized war in Ukraine by sending a set of four demands to the G7 — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S., all of which are actively arming Ukraine — noting that every one of the them employ nuclear weapons “either as nuclear-armed states or as host or umbrella states.” ICAN’s four demands included a clear denunciation of nuclear sharing, as practiced by the U.S. and NATO, noting:

“Following Russia announcing plans to place nuclear weapons in Belarus, the G7 leaders must agree to end all nuclear-armed states stationing their weapons in other countries and engage Russia to cancel its plans to do so. Several G7 members are currently involved in nuclear sharing arrangements of their own, and can demonstrate their opposition to Russia’s recent deployment announcement by commencing negotiations of new Standing of Forces Agreements between the U.S. and Germany and the U.S. and Italy, to remove the weapons currently stationed in those countries.”

This important call for an end to the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons in other countries, and its direct reference to the U.S. and its allies, helps contextualize Russia’s escalation. The only practically workable way to move Putin to reverse his deployment to Belarus, is to offer to reverse the Pentagon’s deployment.

Call it a Cuban Missile Crisis Redux. That terrible confrontation was resolved when President Kennedy offered to, and then did, withdraw U.S. nuclear-armed missiles from Turkey. De-escalation works, and it can lead to further breakthroughs.

— BBC Mar 26, 2023

— A version of this opinion was syndicated by PeaceVoice.org

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, War

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Stop Holtec’s Radioactive Wastewater Dump

By Mari Inoue

Holtec International wants to dump radioactive wastewater from decommissioning nuclear facilities. People and elected officials are fighting back to halt such outrageous, unilateral plans.

Photo Credit: Alamy

Founded in 1986 in New Jersey by Kris Singh, Holtec manufactures dry storage and transport casks for highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel waste from reactors. The company also built the Central Spent Fuel Storage Facility inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 2021 for Energoatom, Ukraine’s national nuclear energy company. Its wholly-owned subsidiary, Holtec Decommissioning International, provides dismantling work for Holtec nuclear power reactors, including Indian Point on the Hudson River, 24 miles north of New York City, and Pilgrim Nuclear Station on Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts.

 

On February 2, 2023, at a public forum of the Indian Point Decommissioning Oversight Board (DOB), Holtec announced its plans to dump highly radioactive wastewater from Indian Point’s fuel cooling pools into the Hudson River. On April 27, 2023, Holtec explained that approximately 1.3-to-1.5 million gallons from the radioactive fuel pools, a refueling water storage tank, the reactor cavity, and elsewhere need to be “processed and discharged via its Liquid Waste Processing System.” Holtec intends to begin dumping as early as September. The “processed” wastewater that will be dumped into the river contains tritium (radioactive hydrogen) and possibly other radioactive isotopes.

Tritium is clinically known to cause more harm and death to living cells than gamma rays. Numerous studies show that tritium produces common radiogenic impacts including cancerous tumors, reproductive and genetic effects, and developmental abnormalities. Studies also indicate that smaller doses of tritium can cause more mutations, chromosome damage, and cell death than larger doses. Tritium crosses the placenta and can impact an embryo or fetus.

In Massachusetts, fisheries and neighbors along Cape Cod Bay are pushing back against Holtec’s plans to dump more than 1.1 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Bay from Pilgrim. A warning issued by the Environmental Protection Agency states that Holtec’s unauthorized discharge into the Bay would be in violation of the Clean Water Act. Holtec agreed to cooperate with an independent environmental study, but refused U.S. Senator Ed Markey’s demand that they pay for it.

In New York, State Senator Pete Harckham and Assemblywoman Dana Levenberg introduced legislation that makes it unlawful to release any radiological agents into the Hudson River during decommissioning of nuclear reactors, and failure to comply shall result in fines. The “Save the Hudson” bill passed the state senate unanimously, and activists are calling on the Assembly to call a special session to do the same after it initially failed June 10.

Photo Credit: The Cape Cod Times

In early April, U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand wrote to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission expressing “significant concerns” regarding Holtec’s planned discharge of large amounts of radioactive wastewater from Indian Point. The NRC dismissed their concerns in a letter that states “to date, all releases at Indian Point have been a small fraction of the allowable limits for such releases.”

As of early May, more than two dozen municipal resolutions were adopted in New York, with more pending, to stop Holtec’s dumping plans. On May 6, 2023, the Save the River Rally at Cortlandt Waterfront Park was organized by the town of Cortlandt. Hundreds of local residents, kayakers, environmental activists, and public elected officials participated to demand the dumping be halted. They are calling for keeping the waste contained onsite.

— Arjun Makhijani, Exploring Tritium Dangers: Health and Ecosystem Risks of Internally Incorporated Radionuclides, 2023; Beyond Nuclear report “Leak First, Fix Later,” April 2010.

— For more info., or to get involved, see: Food & Water Watch, www.foodandwaterwatch.org

— Mari Inoue, a lawyer and activist based in New York City, was born and raised in Tokyo, and is co-founder of Manhattan Project for a Nuclear-Free World (mp-nuclear-free.com).

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Seeking Nuclear Justice: Voices from the Marshallese Diaspora in Arkansas

By Benetick Kabua Maddison, and the
Marshallese Educational Initiative team
“… for the good of mankind,” by Marshallese artist Marino Morris. U.S. military authorities who commandeered the Marshall Islands in 1946 and targeted them with over 60 nuclear bomb blasts, declared to the Indigenous Marshallese inhabitants that the destruction of their islands was being done, “for the good of mankind.”

This year marks the expiration of the Compact of Free Association, an agreement between the United States and Marshall Islands governments originally signed in 1986, in part to mitigate the damages from U.S. nuclear weapons testing. The United States conducted 67 high-yield nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands from 1946-1958, the biological, ecological, and cultural consequences of which are ongoing.

My homelands, which were characterized as tiny and scattered islands with a small, expendable population when lands were needed for nuclear tests for the “good of mankind” and for “world peace,” now looms large in U.S. national security interests in the Pacific, due to the perceived threat of China. Marshallese leaders want the Biden Administration to fairly address the nuclear legacy. It appears the administration is willing to do so. They should.

The Marshall Islands needs well-funded medical facilities with cancer specialists and educational facilities that can accommodate trained teachers until we can produce our own, along with scholarships for our youth seeking higher education, and improvements to infrastructure and communications. Addressing the needs and well-being of the Marshallese people was promised under the Trust Territory of the Pacific framework, an agreement that the U.S. government forged under the United Nations from 1947 to 1986, but never came to fruition. Under a new compact and with a Biden Administration committed to equity and justice, the United States must do better.

And what of Marshallese who have already left the islands seeking access to healthcare, education, and employment? Those of us in diaspora now make up two-thirds of the Marshallese population. How can both sides say they are committed to nuclear justice and yet not address the needs of the Marshallese in the United States?

The nuclear weapons testing legacy — the driving force behind migration and the need for a compact — has taken its toll on all Marshallese people. The ongoing consequences of the nuclear legacy, including its impact on Marshallese bodies and culture, recognizes no geopolitical boundaries.

In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Marshallese living in the United States were among the hardest hit of all ethnic groups. In Northwest Arkansas, where the highest concentration of Marshallese reside in the continental United States, we make up 3% of the population, but accounted for 40% of the deaths due to Covid-19 in the early summer. Part of our vulnerability was due to underlying health conditions — cancer and diabetes —that are a direct result of U.S. post-war occupation and the weapons testing legacy.

Most public benefits that were a part of the original compact have been removed over the years, chipped away by new legislation, sometimes purposeful, sometimes not. However, Medicaid was finally restored in December 2020. Most Marshallese remain without healthcare and are vulnerable.

What Marshallese qualify for under the full Compact of Free Association is unknown not just to most U.S. citizens, but to federal officials whose responsibility it is to make decisions on Marshallese eligibility. There are still issues with Medicaid enrollment, and there is confusion among U.S. officials regarding the correct documentation needed for entering and working in the United States, while interpretations of what federal financial aid Marshallese students qualify for differ from state to state.

Under the current Compact, the United States continues to designate the nuclear-affected as only those from the atolls in which the tests took place, Bikini and Enewetak, and the two atolls that received the heaviest fallout from the 1954 Castle Bravo detonation, Rongelap and Utrōk. However, according to witnesses and the U.S. government’s own documents released in the 1990s, contamination was much more widespread.

Marshallese government officials made this case to the United States in 2000 when it submitted a Changed Circumstances Petition that included evidence from newly released U.S. documents that confirm the contamination. The George W. Bush White House and Congress rejected that petition. Will this administration do better in the cause for nuclear justice?

Many of our families have migrated and continue to migrate in increasing numbers, now more and more due to climate change. For my family and all Marshallese families living in diaspora in Arkansas and across the United States, whose lands, bodies, and culture were sacrificed, we ask to be heard, to be seen, and to be treated fairly.

—Benetick Kabua Maddison, Executive Director of the Marshallese Educational Initiative. Contact: info@mei.ngo. For more on nuclear testing history, visit www.mei.ngo/nuclear.

Filed Under: Environmental Justice, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Decades of Radioactive Dumping Tied to Cancers at Coldwater Creek

DOE and Army Corps accused of negligence over St. Louis radioactive waste

By Bob Mayberry

Last year the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declined to test for radioactive contamination inside the Jane Elementary School in northern St. Louis, in spite of considerable community pressure to do so. Outside testing eventually revealed levels of contamination 22 times higher than background levels in the playground, and 12 times higher than average inside the gymnasium. The school was closed and local lawmakers persuaded the Corps to conduct new tests.

But it was not until early this year that the Department of Energy (DOE) finally requested permission to test for contamination along Coldwater Creek, and even then only at one site, the historic Fort Belle Fontaine, the first U.S. military installation west of the Missouri River. Meanwhile, reports of disease and incidences of cancer at several sites along the creek continue to surface, and residents complain that federal agencies do not communicate about the dangers in the area.

Brief History of Radioactivity in Metro St. Louis – Missouri Coalition for the Environment

Jane Elementary School sits adjacent to Coldwater Creek, which runs 19 miles between the St. Louis airport and the Missouri River. In 2014, state health officials reported higher incidences of rare cancers associated with low-dose radioactive exposure in areas adjacent to the creek. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended residents avoid getting into or playing near the creek, and in 2019 the federal Department of Health and Human Services released a report concluding that “Radiological contamination in and around Coldwater Creek … could have increased the risk of some types of cancer in people who played or lived there.”

In early March, the Missouri House of Representatives heard testimony about compensation for St. Louis area residents exposed to radioactive waste. State Representative Tricia Byrnes accused the DOE of negligence for failing to remove “the considerable amount of waste around the region.”

The problems began during World War II when the Mallinckrodt Chemical Company began to secretly process uranium ore north of downtown St. Louis as part of the Manhattan Project. Radioactive byproducts were first stored on the St. Louis airport’s northern edge, adjacent to Coldwater Creek, then later trucked to sites further east along the creek, including a site near where the Jane Elementary School now sits. Mallinckrodt officials dismissed the dangers of radioactive waste in a 1946 statement to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, claiming the waste materials “were not radioactive and not dangerous.”

Brief History of Radioactivity in Metro St. Louis  – Missouri Coalition for the Environment

Though processing of uranium by Mallinckrodt Co. ended in 1957, radioactive and chemical waste materials continued to be shipped to and from sites in and around St. Louis. Between 1957 and 1966, uranium ore was processed near Weldon Spring, west of Coldwater Creek along the Missouri River. Approximately 1.5 million cubic yards of radioactive and chemical waste were piled 75 feet high along Route 94 South, near another St. Louis public school. In 1973, nearly 8,700 tons of barium sulfate waste from the Coldwater Creek area was mixed with 40,000 tons of topsoil and shipped to a landfill in Weldon Spring. Residents claim not to have been notified about any of these dangerous practices.

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mar 20, 2023

— Bob Mayberry is a retired English and Theater professor at Calif. State Univ. – Channel Islands.

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste

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