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March 5, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Japan to Delay Ocean Dumping of Contaminated Waste Water from Fukushima

By John LaForge

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno announced in January that his government would delay its plan to pump over 1.37 million tons of watery radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean from the devastated six-reactor complex at Fukushima-Daiichi. With the country facing harsh international pressure to cancel the dumping, Matsuno acknowledged “the need to gain public support,” for the plan, the Associated Press reported January 12. The wicked water is now being collected in large tanks that were hastily built near the wrecked reactors.

Fierce criticism of the deliberate pollution scheme has come from China, South Korea, other Pacific Rim countries, scientists, environmental groups, UN human rights experts, and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), an alliance of 17 Pacific island nations. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also indicated that the government wants a postponement of the dumping operation — designed by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) — until it is “verifiably safe to do so,” Thomas Heaton reported February 16 for Civil Beat.

The PIF, independent states where according to Reuters up to half of the world’s tuna is sourced, was crucial in forcing Japan’s apparent retreat. The PIF warned that contaminating the Pacific could harm the fishing that its economies depend on. Mary Yamaguchi reported January 12 for the AP: “Some scientists say the impact of long-term, low-dose exposure to tritium and other radionuclides on the environment and humans is still unknown and the release plan should be delayed. They say tritium affects humans more when it is consumed in fish.” A scientific expert panel assembled by the PIF urged reconsideration of the dumping “because it was not supported by data and more information was needed,” Ken Buesseler, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said in January.

Japan announced in April 2021 that it would allow Tepco to pump the nearly 1.4 million tons of liquid radioactive waste into the public commons of the Pacific Ocean beginning in spring 2023. Tepco says it intends dilute the material and pump it into the sea for the next 30 to 40 years using an underground tunnel now under construction. Media attention has focused on the tritium (radioactive hydrogen) in the waste water which cannot be removed by Tepco’s (failed) filtering system, and has generally ignored mention of the long-lived carbon-14 in the water, which likewise cannot be removed.

Often unreported about the plan is the failure of Tepco’s waste water filer system, dubbed the “Advanced Liquid Processing System,” which has not removed the dozens of long-lived radioactive substances — including ruthenium, cobalt-60, strontium-90, cesium-137, and even plutonium – that the company said it would filter.

The water becomes radioactively contaminated (150 tons more every day) after being poured over hundreds of tons of melted, ferociously radioactive uranium — and in reactor #3 plutonium — fuel, the hot wreckage amassed deep inside the foundations of the three destroyed nuclear reactors, units 1, 2 and 3. All three suffered catastrophic meltdowns following the Great Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Some of the contaminated waste is groundwater reaches the melted fuel after pouring through cracks in the reactors’ foundations caused by the earthquake. Dr. Buesseler Science magazine in 2020, “Many other isotopes are in those tanks still, and over 70 percent [of 1.37 million tons] would have to be cleaned up further before they might consider even releasing….”

Moreover, reactor 3 which was packed with “mixed oxide” fuel made of combined uranium and plutonium, suffered a huge hydrogen explosion at 11 a.m. on March 14, and Tepco announced that on March 21 and 22, in soil collected on the Fukushima site, plutonium was detected. Hydrogen explosions also caused severe damage to reactors 1 and 2, and to the waste fuel pool of reactor 4. (Three additional hydrogen explosions caused severe damage: to reactor 1 on March 11, and to reactor 2 and to the waste fuel pool of reactor 4 on March 15.)

In April 2021, Cindy Folkers, a radiation and health hazards specialist at Beyond Nuclear in Maryland, told Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams, “TEPCO data show that even twice-through filtration leaves the water 13.7 times more concentrated with hazardous tritium — radioactive hydrogen — than Japan’s allowable standard for ocean dumping, and about one million times higher than the concentration of natural tritium in Earth’s surface waters.”

Secretary Matsuno said in his January statement that the delayed dumping plan “includes enhanced efforts to ensure safety.” This vague reassurance comes from the same authorities that caused the triple meltdown and consequently the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean in history; it follows two years of iron-clad declarations from Tepco and government regulators that contaminating the ocean will be safe. The plan to add more radioactive poisons to the Pacific in order to save money has also been approved by the U.S. government and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency. ###

— Used by Counterpunch, March 3, 2023, https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/03/japan-to-delay-ocean-dumping-of-contaminated-waste-water-from-fukushima/

 

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Fukushima, Nuclear Power, Radiation Exposure, Weekly Column

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Elementary School Contaminated by Nuclear Weapons Production

By Bob Mayberry

The US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) returned yet again to a Missouri elementary school in November to test for radioactivity on the playgrounds and in the classrooms. In 2018 and 2019, the Corps “identified an area of low-level radioactive contamination” in a heavily wooded area on the edge of the Jane Elementary School property in northern St. Louis. The school serves mostly Black students and sits in the flood plain of Coldwater Creek, contaminated during the 1940s and 1950s when waste from uranium processing for nuclear weapons was dumped nearby. For twenty-plus years, the Corps has been cleaning up the creek and testing for radioactive contamination in the area, but never within 300 feet of the school.
The 2018 tests, revealing low-level contamination nearby, prompted parents to request tests inside school buildings. The Corps declined. Community pressure finally compelled school officials to order third-party testing. According to a report released in October, the Boston Chemical Data Corp. discovered 22 times the expected levels of radioactive isotopes on the playground and more than 12 times expected levels in the gymnasium, resulting in the school’s shutdown in late October. The company found radioactive lead-210, thorium-230, polonium-210, and radium-226 “far in excess” of what the analysts expected.

Jana Elementary School in Florissant, Missouri, sits by Coldwater Creek, a waterway contaminated by improperly stored radioactive waste. Photo Credit: CNN

Corps program manager Phil Moser disagreed with the Boston Chemical findings, claiming the report was not consistent with “accepted evaluation techniques,” but promised the agency would reevaluate Boston Chemical’s report and methods. At the urging of local lawmakers, the Corps has agreed to conduct new tests at Jane Elementary School.

—The Guardian, Nov. 2; Huffington Post, Smithsonian, and NBC News, Oct. 18; Associated Press, and St. Louis Post Dispatch, Oct. 17, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Fallout”: Investigative Series on Cancer Connection to Nuclear Weapons Production

By Lindsay Potter

Over two years in the making, Cincinnati, Ohio’s TV station WKRC Local 12 has produced a 12-part investigative series on radioactive contamination from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) near Piketon, Ohio. The giant complex processed uranium for nuclear weapons for decades. The hard-hitting news reports are available online and come with startling headlines including, “Was [Mr.] Farmer’s cancer death connected to PORTS?” “Kids dying and middle school closed,” “Pike county tops state with ‘alarming’ cancer rates,” “Is radiation on our doorstep?,” “Scientists concerned with radioactive fallout from America’s nuclear plants,” “The cancer connection to Cold War plants,” and “Researcher connects radioactive contamination to PORTS.”
WKRC pitches the series online noting: “Our Local 12 Investigation has revealed children dying from rare cancers, air monitors around PORTS capturing dangerous radioactive particles, and confirmation from scientists that PORTS is causing the contamination…” — To see all 12 segments in the series “Fallout,” go to: https://local12.com/news/investigates/congressman-demands-answers-to-questions-raised-in-local-12s-fallout-investigation-cincinnati-duane-pohlman-pike-county-radiation-investigate-radiactive-dangers-contamination# 

PhotoCredit:https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2019/06/30/lawsuit-residents-near-portsmouth-plant-have-been-sacrificial-lambs/1611619001/

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

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Olson Brings Radiation Risk to Mainstream News

PhotoCredit:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310326102_Gender_Summit_EU_Nov_2016_Atomic_Radiation_is_More_Harmful_to_Girls_and_Women
By Lindsay Potter

Newsweek recently featured biologist Mary Olson’s work on the disproportionate impact of radiation on young girls, citing, “young girls could be up to 10 times more vulnerable, with girls [under] five twice as likely to develop cancer as boys of the same age.” Olson, who recently retired from a long career with the nonprofit Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Maryland, told Newsweek that rapid cell division in infants and children makes “their DNA more vulnerable to tumor-inducing damage.” This is particularly true in young girls because, Olson explains, stem cells are sensitive to harm from radiation and young females have higher concentrations of stem cells than males or pubescent females.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s archaic and grossly biased standard called “Reference Man” estimates health risks from ionizing radiation based on a male who is “20 to 30 years old, weighs 154 pounds, is 5-foot and 6 inches tall, and is Caucasian with a Western European or North American lifestyle” — a reference nothing like the profile of the most vulnerable — girls under five. Olson’s work demonstrates that “Reference Man” exposes girls and young women to dangerously high radiation, “not just from nuclear warfare but also from more routine radiation exposures like CT scans, air travel, and medical x-rays.” — Sources: Newsweek, October 10, 2022; and the Gender and Radiation Project at genderandradiation.org.

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

November 7, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

HORRIFYING “SMALL” TALK OF NUCLEAR WAR

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
By John LaForge

Gideon Rachman claimed October 31 in a Financial Times column that, “… senior U.S. officials point out that the smallest tactical nuclear weapons might kill hundreds of people, rather than thousands — and devastate and irradiate just a few square miles.”

Rachman’s use of the phrases “might kill hundreds” and “just a few square miles” is outrageous in its callous trivialization of what would occur inside the kill zone.

The crude, “small” atomic bomb the United States used to smash and burn Hiroshima was a 15-kiloton device. This “small” atom bomb incinerated five square miles and “…turned into powder and ash the flesh and bones of 140,000 men, women and children,” as historian Howard Zinn noted in his essay The Bomb. Likewise, in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell reported that the bomb’s detonation resulted in “killing 100,000 people immediately, and fatally injuring at least 50,000 others.”

Today, the “smallest” U.S. nuclear weapons are B61gravity bombs which have a maximum explosive force of between 50 and 170 kilotons, and so are between three and eleven times more devastating than the U.S. Hiroshima bombing. There are 2.9 million people in Kyiv, so one 170-kiloton U.S. B61 could potentially kill 1.5 million of them, and burn 40 square miles with firestorm.

The creation of firestorm or mass fire — simultaneous combustion of many fires over a large area, causing a great volume of air to heat, rise and suck in large amounts of fresh air at hurricane speeds from the periphery — is the unique contribution that nuclear weapons make to humankind’s mechanized destruction. At Hiroshima, “The fire covered an area of roughly 4.4 square miles and burned with great intensity for more than six hours,” according Dr. Lynn Eden in Whole World on Fire, her 2004 study of how and why the U.S. government vastly underestimates the destructiveness of nuclear weapons by failing to consider damage from firestorms.

Rachman and the unnamed “senior officials” vastly understate the physically, medically, socially and ethically grotesque explosive and incendiary force of so-called “tactical” hydrogen bombs. They either misunderstand or have lied, and they cynically imply that the uncontrollable, indiscriminate mass destruction of civilian populations using fire and radiation is a military “tactic.”

Richard Rhodes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb reports, “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy [Hiroshima] fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away…. The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands.” In The Bomb, Zinn notes that of 1,780 nurses in Hiroshima, 1,654 were killed or so badly injured that they could not work.

CNN reported on September 26 that nuclear weapons called “tactical” have “explosive yields of 10 to 100 kilotons of dynamite, [and] are also called ‘low yield.’” But Pentagon boss General Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee in 2018, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon.’ Any nuclear weapon used anytime is a strategic game-changer.”

Reuters reported on October 17, “These 12-ft B61 nuclear bombs, with different yields of 0.3 to 170 kilotons, are deployed at six air bases across Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands.” These “forward deployed” U.S. H-bombs are so provocative and destabilizing that hundreds of European and U.S. dissidents, including Members of the European Parliament and this reporter, have committed acts of civil resistance against air bases hosting them.

Whether conscious or subconscious, the chronic dread of impending catastrophe caused by the manufactured and ceaseless threat to “go nuclear” — known as deterrence — was described in all its homicidal absurdity by the coldblooded Winston Churchill in 1955. He said about our governments’ nonstop readiness to commit massacres with nuclear weapons: “Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”

By trivializing the effects of today’s nuclear weapons, Rachman, his unnamed senior officials, and his editors at The Financial Times, demonstrate that, unlike Churchill, they either lie about what they know or know nothing at all about the established facts of thermonuclear explosions. Such misinformed or intentional minimization weakens the near universal stigma of criminality that adheres to the Bomb, and increases the possibility that Hiroshima could be repeated. Such horrifying nuclear “small” talk sanitizes and routinizes military schemes for deliberate mass murder, as if such a thing could be tactical.

— A version of this opinion ran at Counterpunch Nov. 7, 2022

Addendum:

Historian David Talbot recounts this episode from the spring of 1954, when John Foster Dulles wat the head of the CIA:

Foster seemed to have a chillingly remote perspective on what it meant to drop a nuclear bomb. When the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was on the verge of collapse, he offered to give two “A-bombs” to French foreign minister Georges Bidault. The French official was deeply shaken by Foster’s blithe offer. Bidault responded “without having to do much thinking on the subject.” He pointed out to Foster that “if those bombs are dropped near Dien Bien Phu, our side will suffer as much as the enemy.” Likewise, during the Formosa Strait crisis, Foster was surprised to learn that the ‘precision’ nuclear bombing of Chinese targets that he was advocating would kill more than ten million civilians. (The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, Harper Collins, 2015, p. 245.)

Filed Under: B61 Bombs in Europe, Nuclear Weapons, Radiation Exposure, US Bombs Out of Germany, War, Weekly Column

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