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March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Weapons Treaty the Right Way Forward, Has Already Strengthened Peace and Safety in 50 Countries

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

Editor’s note: A model of public engagement, Nukewatch volunteer Joel Bransky had this excellent letter published in his local paper….

Fifty nations just outlawed nuclear weapons forever. The international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, came into force on January 22 after the 50th country, Honduras, ratified it. The people of these countries will never have to worry about cancer-causing weapons tests or pay for the secretive governmental nonsense required to manufacture and store nuclear warheads.

The treaty’s entry into force comes at a critical time. Just three years ago, while living in South Korea, I watched our president joke about the size of his launch button and challenge a volatile dictator to a game of nuclear chicken. Congress held hearings on how a nuclear strike would be carried out. The world was one miscalculation away from nuclear war, it seemed — yet many people have already forgotten. The enormity of the problem makes it seem unsolvable.

But we can solve this problem, and the TPNW maps the path to nuclear disarmament. The treaty has already strengthened peace and safety in 50 countries. This is remarkable, given the opposition to the Treaty from the US government and weapons manufacturers. It shows that a nuclear-free future is coming. In fact, for the citizens of those 50 countries, it is already here.

I am tired of our government wasting taxpayer money on weapons that are never used and that, if used, would kill us through incineration, radiation poisoning, or starvation. We must tell our government that this is absurd and outdated. Now is the time. Please call or email your US senators and representative and tell them you support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.— Joel Bransky, Duluth News Tribune, Feb. 25, 2021

March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Court Orders Veterans Affairs Department to Replace Flawed Science Used to Deny Benefits to Vets Poisoned in Plutonium Disaster

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

By John LaForge

In a major class action ruling issued Dec. 17, 2020, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims in Washington, DC, has ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to re-examine how it evaluates disability claims from veterans exposed to deadly alpha radiation during cleanup operations following a disastrous nuclear weapons accident at Palomares, Spain.

The ruling follows oral arguments made Sep. 2, 2020, and comes one year after the court’s historic decision to certify “class action” status for the veterans of the radioactive disaster response effort. The Veterans Legal Services Clinic of Yale Law School, which since 2016 has assisted in litigating the case, Skaar v. Wilkie, along with the New York Legal Assistance Group, announced the decision.

On Jan. 17, 1966, during an airborne refueling gone wrong, an Air Force B-52 bomber exploded over the village of Palomares. Seven crew members were killed and four hydrogen bombs were thrown to the Earth. Upon impact, conventional explosives inside two of the H-bombs detonated, blasting two giant craters and spreading as much as 22 pounds of highly radioactive, carcinogenic pulverized plutonium across the Spanish village and countryside. (See Dec. 18 report, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/18/air-force-veterans-of-plutonium-dust-disaster-win-class-action-standing)

In its new decision, the court said the VA violated federal law requiring that its assessment of veterans’ radiation exposures be based on sound science. The VA has so far relied on faulty methods to deny disability benefits to veterans for radiation-related illnesses caused by the nuclear weapons disaster, the legal services clinic said, calling the decision “a long-awaited step toward recognizing the Palomares veterans’ service and ensuring they have access to the benefits they earned,” it said. Even a single particle of plutonium if inhaled or ingested can cause cancer.

The injured veterans’ lawsuit is led by Chief Master Sergeant Victor Skaar (USAF, Ret.) of Nixa, Missouri, who participated in the cleanup. Skaar and the class argue that the VA’s radiation exposure methodology “ignored 98 percent of the radiation measurements taken from veterans after the incident,” an error so grave that, “Dr. von Hippel and even the VA’s own consultant have faulted the method,” the law clinic said.

Skaar and at least 1,500 others were sent to clean up plutonium-contaminated debris and lived amidst the wreckage and the plutonium dust for weeks — handling it, cleaning it from clothes, washing it off of village surfaces, placing contaminated soil in barrels, and even incinerating truckloads of poisoned debris. Now, “many of the veterans have radiation-related illnesses that require medical treatment. Others have died from these conditions…” the law clinic said.

Referring to a December 2017 report by Princeton University physicist Frank von Hippel about 26 GIs who were identified in 1966 as having received the highest exposures, the court wrote: “Dr. von Hippel concluded that ‘The Air Force’s dose estimates have huge uncertainties and the maximum doses incurred by those not in the “High 26” could be hundreds of times higher than those that the Air Force has recommended to the VA for determination of benefits.’”

The court said further that the VA never explained why it adopted the flawed methodology. The court’s opinion, written by Judge Michael Allen, admonished the Board of Veterans’ Appeals declaring that it may not “abdicate its responsibility to assess whether the evidence before it is ‘sound.’” The court ordered the VA to review the parties’ evidence and provide considered analysis of the methodology to ensure that only sound scientific evidence is used to determine veterans’ eligibility for disability benefits.

John Rowan, Air Force Veteran and National President of Vietnam Veterans of America said in a statement, “Thanks to the court’s decision and the continuing advocacy of Mr. Skaar and other class members, the VA must now justify its practice of arbitrarily dismissing the exceedingly high levels of radiation these veterans encountered and continue to suffer from … [and] fulfill its duty under law to assist these veterans and ensure their claims are evaluated using methods that are both scientifically and legally sound.”

Startlingly, the Air Force has never included the weeks-long Palomares plutonium cleanup on its list of “radiation risk activities” which it uses to rule on disability claims, in spite of its own 1967 finding that service members’ “health is in no jeopardy from retention of radioactive materials as a result of participation in the [Palomares] operation.” Asked how the Air Force can keep such an admittedly radiation-heavy cleanup operation off the list, the law clinic’s Molly Petchnik told me the list was drawn up long ago and the military is reluctant to expand it.

The official list in the Code of Federal Regulations recognizes only four service-related radiation risk areas since 1966, including work at nuclear weapon production sites in Paducah, Kent.; Portsmouth, Ohio; and Oak Ridge, Tenn. in 1991; and on Amchitka Island, Alaska in 1974, involving underground hydrogen bomb tests.

March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Early Opposition to the Atomic Bomb Came from Black America

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

By Dan Park

Editor’s note: On August 17, 1945, only days after the US atomic bombings, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News, put it this way: “Last week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. …We shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. …We…did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. … Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in Slaughterhouse Five, said, “I know a single word that proves our democratic government is capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid, racist, yahoo-istic murder of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. The word is a foreign word. The word is Nagasaki.”

While the Japanese faced widespread, extreme racism during World War II, Black leftists were among the first critics of the US atomic bombings of Japan.

Three days after the initial attack, the United States dropped a plutonium bomb on the port city of Nagasaki, killing at least 40,000 and as many as 70,000 people, or more. Within months, almost a quarter million would be dead from just the two attacks — with the victims being overwhelmingly civilians. Much has been written about the morality and military expediency of using the bomb, but missing from many of these discussions is a critical examination of the extreme racist hatred that rapidly developed in the United States against people of Japanese descent, and how that led to the annihilation of two cities.

Also missing is the recognition that African-Americans were some of the first in the country to voice concern about or even condemn the bomb, and that Black leftists were some of the first to draw the connections between colonialism, racism, capitalism and war.

The general American hatred for the Japanese during World War II cannot be overstated. Thanks to the tireless activism of younger Japanese-Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans now know about the inhumane internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII — fewer know that Nazi POWs held in American camps were often treated with musical, theatrical, and movie showings on most nights, set up volleyball leagues with their guards, were invited to dances and other social events, and were able to visit shops and restaurants in town that Black American G.I.s could not. Some historians have pointed out that most Americans at the time could differentiate between Nazis and Germans, fascists and Italians — but with Japan, all Japanese people were not only suspect, but by their very nature, the enemy. Everything was done to dehumanize Japanese people, from seemingly all major forces of society:

• From a January 1945 issue of Newsweek: “Never before has the nation fought a war in which our troops so hate the enemy and want to kill him.”

• From Time magazine around the same period: “The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing … indicates it.”

• From General Joseph Stilwell in a letter to his wife: “When I think of how these bowlegged cockroaches have ruined our calm lives it makes me want to wrap Jap guts around every lamppost in Asia.”

• From commander of the South Pacific Force, Admiral William Halsey: “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.”

• From a US Marine Corps slogan of the time: “Remember Pearl Harbor — keep’em dying.”

• From the popular press, public discourse, and military culture: “yellow monkeys,” “apes,” “gorillas,” “demons,” “savages,” “subhumans.”

Indeed, by the end of the war and even well past it, the general mood in the United States was one of vicious and unrestrained vengeance for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which claimed 2,403 American lives, 50 of whom were civilians.

Polls were conducted periodically after the end of the war regarding citizens’ attitudes toward this new weapon of mass destruction, the results of which are somewhat disturbing. Less than a week after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 85 percent of Americans approved of the attacks according to a Gallup poll. Indeed, historian Lawrence Wittner notes that through late 1945, in all the polls conducted on the issue, none saw more than 4.5 percent of respondents opposing the use of the atomic weapons.

In fact, when one Roper poll asked whether we should have: 1) not used the bombs at all, 2) dropped the first in an unpopulated area and the second on a city if they don’t surrender, 3) used the bombs as we did, 4) used many more bombs before they could surrender, or 5) don’t know, 22.7 percent of respondents answered with option four. Two months after defeating the enemy, almost a quarter of respondents prioritized killing as many Japanese people as possible.

Meanwhile, a new generation of African-Americans had won positions in the sciences, in certain parts of the military, and in other previously inaccessible fields. After the Japanese surrender, Black newspapers and magazines of the time frequently made note of Black chemists, physicists and other scientists who had worked on the atomic bomb. Many Black moderates had believed that such contributions to the war effort — from normal Black soldiers fighting valorously, to Black scientists harnessing the power of the atom — would win greater freedoms and opportunities for Black people in America after the war.

But some of the earliest criticisms of the atomic bomb came from African-American communities. Of course Black America is not monolithic but contains a multiplicity of diverse opinions. Even so, concern about the bomb was noticeably higher in Black communities than in white ones. Indeed, the warnings and recommendations of the racially integrated National Committee on Atomic Information more closely followed Black concerns about atomic weapons than they did general white-dominant American concerns.

Conservative journalist George Schuyler wrote about the horrors of the “murder of men wholesale” and “being able to slaughter whole cities at a time.” …. Clergy members also began to speak up. Rev. J.E. Elliot of St. Luke Chapel said, “I have seen the course of discrimination throughout the war and the fact that Japan is of a darker race is no excuse for resorting to such an atrocity.” Rev. Louis F. Lomax of Taber Presbyterian Church, said “[The atomic bomb is a] diabolical weapon [and we have] more scientific knowledge than religion to control it.”

In 1946, the NAACP called for nuclear disarmament at its annual conference. Poet Langston Hughes, author Zora Neale Hurston, NAACP leader Walter White, and many others were early critics of atomic weapons.

But it was really the Black leftists who saw the connections between racism, colonialism and war early on. For many of them, it started with the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia — the last holdout of African resistance to European colonialism. The invasion made it clear to Black leftists that colonialism was at its core a perpetual war of racial domination. The event radicalized many African-Americans. Singer and actor Paul Robeson noted that since the invasion, “The parallel between his [African Americans’] own interests and those of oppressed peoples abroad had been impressed upon him daily.” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about his fear that “If power can be held through atomic bombs, colonial peoples may never be free.”

In 1942, James Farmer along with A.J. Muste, George Houser, and others founded the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, which grew out of the pacifist movement, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Harlem Ashram. Marjorie Swann, co-founder of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, or CNVA, which started the Voluntown Peace Trust, was also a charter member. Bayard Rustin gave support as an “uncle” to CORE, a role he played for so many organizations.

Six years later, CORE joined two hundred other activists in Chicago to form a new movement of “revolutionary pacifism” which included campaigning against building nuclear weapons. From this conference emerged the Peacemakers — one of the very first groups outside of the scientific community to organize opposition to nuclear-arms proliferation. Among the founders were Wally Nelson, one of CORE’s first nonviolence trainers, as well as his partner Juanita Morrow Nelson. Both would become dear friends of CNVA/Voluntown Peace Trust. The Peacemakers and CNVA became influential groups that would train countless activists and organizers in the peace, justice and civil rights movements.

In 1946, Paul Robeson gave a scathing, brilliant speech about the connections between nuclear weapons, racism against the Japanese, and Black liberation. He said, “it is all part of one problem, this matter of discrimination, and it may be the foremost question facing us today in the atomic age.”

Robeson puts the crux of the problem not on the weapon itself, but on the ideologies and prejudices that compel its use. As a rising Black performer with much to lose, Robeson made these dangerous connections between racism, capitalism, colonialism, war, and ultimately, extinction.

“Our government is getting uranium from the Belgian Congo for atomic bombs. American companies are prospecting for oil in Ethiopia and for minerals in Liberia,” he said. “But, although the enemy has all the advantage and has a head start in the race, it is yet possible for us to catch up and win. It is possible to win if the majority of the American people can be brought to see and understand in the fullest sense the fact that the struggle in which we are engaged is not a matter of mere humanitarian sentiment, but of life and death. The only alternative to world freedom is world annihilation.”

— Dan Park (he/they) is an educator and historian who does Communications and Outreach for the Voluntown Peace Trust, which produced this story in 2020.

March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Reactors and Radioactive Waste: “safe, clean, too cheap to meter”

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

By Christine Manwilller

“Millions” of Radioactive Shipments Move Cross-Country Every Year

On Feb. 18, 2021, an exclusive investigation by WKRC-TV’s chief investigative reporter Duane Pohlman in Cincinnati looked into widespread US transportation of radioactive materials and associated risks of poor regulation and management. Every year around three million shipments of radioactive material travel across the US, most in trucks on the highways, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. While the EPA assures that these shipments are safe, individuals directly involved aren’t convinced. In an interview with Pohlman, trucker Andy Charles relayed his experience hauling radioactive materials, traveling non-stop from Ohio to Kentucky, and from Tennessee to Texas. Many warning signs came up that Charles now wishes he had taken more seriously.

First was the lack of cargo information, “They did tell us it was uranium, but that was pretty much it.” Exactly how radioactive the cargo was remained a mystery. Charles also doubted the effectiveness of the cylindrical shipping containers, and although such shipments are supposed to be in “special containers,” government agencies admit that they are often not used. Charles spoke of concerns for the safety of other travelers, “We were blazing down the highway, 60-70 miles an hour. If there’s any kind of leak, or whatever, it’s blowing in the wind.” Drivers wore no safety gear, only a dosimeter which was rarely checked by safety officers. Charles told Pohlman, “It was not like they was really concerned with it.” A panic button was installed in the truck cab, with the promise that “if we noticed any suspicious activity from cars or anything around us, that we would push that button and somebody would be to us in minutes,” Charles said. The designated route to be traveled could not be deviated from, and had to be completed non-stop.

Charles was right to doubt his safety. Jim Walburn, a retired transportation specialist, worked at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio, one of Charles’ drop points. In his interview with Pohlman, Walburn insisted they did “what the federal regulations required us to do.” He did admit some of the shipments likely exceeded permitted radioactivity limits, and said, “I don’t have any proof.” Radioactive material occasionally leaked during transport, requiring the floorboards in trucks to be disposed of. “The metal itself could be cleaned,” Walburn told Pohlman.

If anything, Walburn’s experience reinforces Charles’ concerns about his own safety, and that of other travelers driving right next to such dangerous cargo. Pohlman’s report ends with Andy Charles’ haunting words. “I look back now and I wished to God that I’d never done it.”

— Duane Pohlman, WKRC-TV, Local 12, Cincinnati, Ohio, Feb. 18, 2021; https://local12.com/news/investigates/semis-trains-hauling-millions-of-radioactive-loads-across-the-country-duane-pohlman

Spectacular Bribery Shows Nuclear Can’t Compete, Has to Cheat

In Ohio, a $61 million bribery scheme surrounding FirstEnergy Solutions (now known as Energy Harbor) and Republican House Speaker Larry Householder became public in July 2020.

Nuclear power is increasingly incapable of competing with safe renewably energy sources, forcing operators to consider shutdowns, but some state legislatures have approved “socialism for the rich” bailouts to keep high-priced, retirement-age reactors operating.

Last year, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, David DeVillers, charged Speaker Householder and four others with racketeering for accepting $61 million in bribes to pass House Bill 6, a bailout measure to save the Davis Besse and Perry reactors. “The conspiracy was to pass and maintain a $1.5 billion bailout in return for $61 million in dark money,” DeVillers said. Householder has pleaded not guilty.

FirstEnergy Solutions, one of Ohio’s largest utility companies, failed for many years to win legislative subsidies to prop up its reactor operations. It turned to bribery to push through House Bill 6, dubbed “the Ohio Clean Air Fund.” In fact it was “a smoke screen for the real purpose: to siphon nearly $150 million annually to FirstEnergy,” DeVillers said. In neighboring Illinois, Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) a subsidiary of Exelon, was also charged with bribing House Speaker Michael Madigan to achieve similar ends. ComEd is paying a $200 million fine to settle the bribery charges.

Reactor operators in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York have also been gifted with legislative bailouts to keep retirement-age reactors on life support. According to the Public Service Enterprise Group, “Since 2018, three nuclear [reactors] have closed in the eastern US, all for economic reasons, and the impact has had a ripple effect.” As the cost steadily drops for renewable energy sources like solar and wind, they are outperforming the nuclear dinosaurs. However, large utilities and others are heavily invested in old reactors, and are using their political clout in increasingly underhanded ways to keep their income sources in operation. — Reuters Legal, Feb. 1, 2021; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Feb. 12, 2021; Nukewatch Quarterly, Fall 2020, & Augusta Free Press, Sep. 8, 2020

Lawsuit Filed Against Licensing of Texas Radioactive Waste Dump

Beyond Nuclear, the watchdog group in Takoma Park, Maryland, filed suit Feb. 10, 2021 to prevent the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from permitting a “consolidated interim storage facility” (permanent high-level radioactive waste dump) in Andrews County, Texas. The proposed ground-level storage facility would gather 40,000 metric tons of highly radioactive irradiated waste fuel from US nuclear reactors. Planned by Interim Storage Partners (ISP), the facility would be on the site of an existing “low-level radioactive waste” burial project. The location is near the Ogallala Aquifer, a source of water for many of the High Plains states. Above-ground storage of this waste is dangerous for workers handling or transporting the casks, and for people living along transport routes, and in the dumpsite vicinity where chances of earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and plane crashes all pose accident risks.

Beyond Nuclear’s suit challenges the federal government’s taking ownership of the high-level waste (now owned by private companies) through transportation and storage — ownership that is prohibited by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act prior to the licensing of a centralized national repository. The Department of Energy suggests such a federal site will not be available until 2048. In 2020, the NRC dismissed the waste ownership question by indirectly pushing Congress to alter the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. One of the group’s attorneys, Mindy Goldstein, said in announcing the suit, “The Commission lacks a legal or logical basis for its rationale that it may issue a license with an illegal provision, in the hopes that the ISP or the Department of Energy won’t complete the illegal activity it authorized.… The NRC is not above the law, nor does it stand apart from it.” The final Environmental Impact Statement is expected by July 2021. As license approval hangs in the balance, over 70,000 tons of the high-level radioactive waste fuel is currently stored at US reactor sites, cooled underwater in deep pools, or in concrete and metal “dry cask” containers.

New Mexico Target of “Nuclear Colonialism”

Holtec International, a self-described energy company “widely recognized as the foremost technology innovator in the field of carbon-free power generation, specifically commercial nuclear,” is pushing plans for a “temporary” collection pad for highly radioactive waste from power reactors dubbed “Consolidated Interim Storage.” Targeted for New Mexico, between Hobbs and Carlsbad, the site could potentially hold 174,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste fuel from nuclear reactors across the US.

Public hearings regarding the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) switched to online platforms due to coronavirus restrictions, ignoring requests by New Mexico lawmakers to pause the hearings. The move by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) potentially shut out dissenters that would have made public their concerns about the proposed facility. Many tribal areas in New Mexico have limited access to the internet. Leona Morgan of the Nuclear Issues Study Group protests this action, calling it “nuclear colonialism.” The EIS is due for release in July 2021.

If Holtec is given a green light, as many as 10,000 heavy waste casks could be concentrated, and the company’s track record is notoriously corrupt. Holtec originally designed storage systems for radioactive waste like the casks that could be used at the New Mexico site. Holtec’s regulatory and criminal violations over 40 years — bribery, tax fraud, and questionable offshore banking among them — should arguably disqualify the company from future government work. But enforcement of regulations is weak.

Elsewhere, Holtec’s improper handling of rad waste also raises alarms. During the movement of waste fuel at the beachside San Onofre reactor site in southern California, a 50-ton canister was nearly dropped down an 18-foot concrete silo. The canister being loaded was thicker than the ones employees practiced with, and the larger size caused the cask to get stuck during placement. Workers allowed the heavy cask to hang unsupported for an hour. For failing to report the potentially catastrophic accident to the NRC, Southern California Edison was fined $116,000.

This incident revealed other problems during loading, namely “scratching or gouging” of canister walls which increases the chances of corrosion in the salty coastal sea air. Donna Gilmore, founder of the premier watchdog group SanOnofreSafety.org, is alarmed by the violations in California Edison’s flawed loading system. Holtec’s operating license prohibits “contact between the canister and the interior of the [ground-level burial silos],” she says. And Gilmore reports, “The NRC admits Holtec is out of compliance, but refuses to cite Holtec for this violation.” To put things in perspective, she says, “Each canister holds roughly the radioactivity of a Chernobyl disaster, so this is a critical issue people need to know about.”

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Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

By John LaForge

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

By Dan Park

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

By Christine Manwilller

“Millions” of Radioactive Shipments Move Cross-Country Every Year

Spectacular Bribery Shows Nuclear Can’t Compete, Has to Cheat

Lawsuit Filed Against Licensing of Texas Radioactive Waste Dump

New Mexico Target of “Nuclear Colonialism”

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