Radiation Exposure

October 17, 2022 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

Coverup, not Cleanup, at Santa Susana, California Meltdown Site

By Bob Mayberry

Eighteen miles northwest of Hollywood and thirty miles from downtown Los Angeles, high in the Simi Hills, sits a government research site where rocket fuels and nuclear reactors were developed and tested. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), established in 1949 and home originally to Rocketdyne, has been the site of numerous radiation leaks, toxic chemical spills, and one partial reactor core meltdown. The soil on the entire site is toxic, but the responsible parties are doing nothing about it.

In January of this year, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) entered into “non-binding, confidential” negotiations with Boeing, the site’s current owner, which require Boeing to clean up no more than 1% of the contaminants. Under this proposed agreement, or Memo of Understanding (MOU), a panel will be chosen, by Boeing, to set the terms of the cleanup, without public input.

Removing the final hurdle for Boeing, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board approved the MOU at their Aug. 11 meeting in Santa Clarita. The Board ignored over 200 activists and residents who opposed it. Daniel Hirsch, retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, called the MOU “a tragedy,” adding, “it made effective the larger deal with Boeing to let them have vastly higher levels of contamination in place.” The polluter will be in charge of the cleanup.

Fairewinds Associates’ analysis of soil and dust around the California Woolsey Fire found that the fire “caused radiation from the Santa Susana Field Lab to become airborne and travel as far as nine miles into surrounding communities.” Journal of Environmental Radioactivity published Fairewinds’ paper “Radioactive microparticles related to the Woolsey Fire in Simi Valley, CA.” Graphic by Fairewinds.

Sordid history: meltdowns, spills, and negligence

In 1957, 1971, and 2005, fires at the SSFL caused massive radiation releases and intense radioactive saturation of the soil. In 1959, a catastrophic meltdown of the experimental Sodium Reactor released an estimated 15 to 459 times more radiation than the infamous Three Mile Island meltdown, causing radiation monitoring equipment to go “off-scale,” meaning the radioactivity in the air was too great to measure. The partial meltdown was particularly dangerous because “experimental” reactors lack the typical cement and steel containment structures associated with nuclear reactors like TMI.

For 20 years, the Department of Energy (DOE) successfully covered up the partial meltdown. However, in 1979, UCLA student Michael Rose and Hirsch, his faculty advisor, discovered internal company documentation of the meltdown. Later that year, Rocketdyne officials confirmed the accident.

In 1996, Boeing Corp. purchased Rocketdyne, thereby inheriting responsibility for cleanup of the SSFL. In 2005, Boeing paid restitution to 100 families affected by cancer, but the Santa Susana Advisory Panel estimates up to 1,600 deaths are directly due to radiation exposure from the site.

By 2006, Boeing had violated toxic discharge permits more than eighty times, releasing chromium, dioxin, lead, mercury, and other toxins into Bell Creek, which flows into the Los Angeles River. From 1988-1995 the incidence of cancer within two miles of the SSFL was 60% greater than in the general Southern California population.

In 2007, Boeing, NASA, and the DOE all signed a consent order agreeing to a cleanup. In 2010, NASA and DOE signed additional administrative orders promising to clean up respective portions of the SSFL to standards higher than were agreed to earlier — clean to background radiation levels. However, Boeing did not sign the administrative order and it remains subject to the 2007 consent order — which it has routinely ignored for 14 years.

Boeing’s practice has been cover-up, not cleanup

On November 8, 2018, the Woolsey Fire ignited near the SSFL and burned over 80% of the site in five days. According to Dr. Robert Dodge, president of the Los Angeles branch of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the chemicals on the SSFL site are “incredibly dangerous radionuclides and toxic chemicals … These toxic materials are in [the] SSFL’s soil and vegetation, and when it burns and becomes airborne in smoke and ash, there is real possibility of heightened exposure for area residents.”

Just nine hours after the Woolsey Fire began, the DTSC, charged with protecting “California’s people and environment from harmful effects of toxic substances,” announced that “the fire did not present any risks other than those normally present in a wildfire situation.”

However, three weeks after the fire was contained, independent researchers sampled soil in and around the SSFL and concluded that “site-related radioactive material … escaped the confines” of the SSFL. The most radioactive sample was collected nine miles from the SSFL. Had the 2007 Consent Order been enforced, the site would have been cleaned by the 2017 deadline, and radiation and toxic chemical exposure would not have been among the many dangers posed by the Woolsey Fire. Instead, the continuing presence of toxic substances at the SSFL site made the fire even more dangerous. Meanwhile, government agencies ignore the need for a cleanup and bow to the wishes of a corporation like Boeing.

For updates, see Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab: https://parentsagainstssfl.com/

— Bob Mayberry is a retired English and Theatre Professor at Cal State University-Channel Islands.

October 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Radiation More Harmful to Girls and Women than to Boys and Men

By Mary Olson

Editor’s note: The author, the founder of the Gender and Radiation Impact Project,* spoke to the Vienna Conference on the Impact of Nuclear Weapons. Because of the significance of her findings on harms of radiation exposure, we share an edited version of her remarks.

If exposed to the same amount of radiation, girls under five are twice as likely to develop cancer as boys in the same age group. Graphic by Saro Lynch-Thomason, Fullsteam Labs.

On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear weapon [uranium fission] detonation was conducted in south central New Mexico and was code‐named “Trinity.” There were roughly 15,000 children, women, and men living within fifty miles of the test site.

My focus is on the prompt gamma and neutron pulse from fission — it is 5% of the total release. More than 2,000 nuclear explosions have already occurred. Our planet is already deeply contaminated, even without waging a full‐scale nuclear war.

My government chose to use the first nuclear weapons on cities full of people. More than 200,000 people perished in the blasts or soon after.

Five years later, the United States initiated a long‐term study of some of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors. Researchers assumed that humanitarian aid might “skew the results” of their study. They did not provide medical treatment to the victims they studied.

This data resulting from the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is used widely, including by me, here. I need to say I am sorry. I deeply regret this history. I continue to use these numbers because what they say is vital to our survival.

Radiation is invisible but we can see the damage it has done to chromosomes. Dicentric [or double centered] and other chromosomal aberrations are common in people who have suffered acute radiation exposure.

When reproductive cells are harmed, deformations are one outcome. This happens to all babies: plants, animals, and humans. [Adults] can also suffer loss of fertility, spontaneous abortion, and miscarriage, possible heritable mutations, and avoidance of reproduction due to uncertainty. Nuclear colonialism is responsible for disproportionate harm to Indigenous Peoples from nuclear weapons testing.

A clear spike in the death of infants [under 1 year old] followed the 1945 Trinity nuclear detonation. This finding was only recently reported by Tucker and Alvarez in 2019. The consequences of nuclear tests are tragic and often irreparable.

When genetic material inside a living cell is damaged, sometimes our bodies can repair that damage. Otherwise the abnormal cell may sit quietly in the body for years or even decades before it makes us sick.

There is no way to predict which exposure will result in cancer. …even an exposure too-small-to-measure could, sometimes, result in cancer death.

The 2006 report, The Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, #7, or “BEIR VII” assumes that the victim’s radiation exposure was an acute external exposure (the moment of the bomb explosion). Internalized radioactivity from fallout or other environmental contamination was not considered.

Children’s bodies are small, so the same amount of radiation delivers a larger dose [to children than to adults]. Since children are growing, the cells in their bodies are dividing more rapidly. The DNA in cells is more likely to be damaged when [undergoing] cell division.

The atomic‐bomb survivors in Japan were grouped by the age they were at the time of the bombing. These groups were tracked over their lifetimes. Cancers and cancer deaths were counted. The focus of the data is on the outcome of the prompt radiation exposure from the bombs.

There are problems with this data, but we can broadly say that those who were five years or younger when exposed had the most cancer at some point in their lives.

Here is the news: Girls in this youngest age group were twice as likely to get cancer at some point in the next 60 years, than were boys. For every male in the birth‐to-5-year group that suffered cancer, two females got cancer. This is not childhood cancer — it is total incidence.

The BEIR VII report is where these numbers are found; the report itself does not discuss gender as a risk factor. I first published my findings in 2011, and they are independent confirmation of work published in 2006 by Dr. Arjun Makhijani and his team.
It is extremely important to understand that little girls are not a “sub‐population.” Girls are an inextricable link of the human life cycle.

Biological sex was also a factor for those who were adults at the time of the bombings.

Over their lifetime women exposed as adults suffered 50% more cancer death than did men in the same age group. For every 2 men in these cohorts who died of cancer, three women died of cancer.

… females suffered more cancers than males in every age group, and the difference is greatest when the exposure was in childhood.

Why is biological sex a factor in harm from exposure to ionizing radiation? We don’t know. One hypothesis, from my mentor, the late Dr. Rosalie Bertell, is the greater amount of radio-sensitive reproductive tissue in female bodies. This, and other research questions, need to be tested by qualified institutions of excellence. The answers will impact all of us.

Three points to take away:
1. Ionizing radiation is harmful to living cells—harm is greater when children are exposed, compared to adults.
2. At any age, radiation is more harmful to females than to males. Young girls are most harmed by radiation (measured as cancer across their lifetime). Radiation protection rules do not yet reflect this finding. Prior to the work reported here, it was presumed that radiation, like the weapons that make it, was indiscriminate. Not so.
3. These points provide strong evidence for the jurisdiction of Humanitarian Law over fission — most especially, nuclear weapons.

The future is in our hands.

— Key sources: Olson, 2011, NIRS Briefing Paper: “Atomic Radiation is more harmful to women,” https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/radiation/radiationharm2pg.pdf; Olson 2019, “Disproportionate impact of ionizing radiation and radiation regulation,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, May 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2019.1603864; Makhijani, et al, October 2006, Science for the Vulnerable, Institute for Energy & Environmental Research; https://ieer.org/projects/healthy-from-the-start/.

* Gender and Radiation Impact Project, 30 Westgate Pkwy, #362, Asheville, NC 28715; (828) 242‐5621; www.genderandradiation.org

October 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Reactors and Weapons Electrify a Warzone

Throwing gas on a burning roulette table

By John LaForge

Photo by ANDREY BORODULIN/AFP via Getty Images

The risk of catastrophic radiation releases is in the news again. Today it’s not because of the frequently recurring earthquakes jolting the site of three simultaneous reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi, in northeast Japan. This year’s radiation risk focus is the shooting war in Ukraine, a country with 15 operational nuclear reactors, and in particular the Zaporizhzhia complex in the city of Enerhodar. The site has six large reactors lined up like dominoes, and hundreds of tons of thermally hot and ferociously radioactive waste that must be continuously cooled in huge, engineered pools on site. As of September 15, all six reactors have been put to cold shut down for a multitude of reasons, but their hot cores and hot waste systems all still require millions of gallons of cooling water every day.

Shrouding the risks of reactor meltdowns in a cloud of grim apprehension are thinly veiled threats of attacks using nuclear weapons by Russia and NATO. Major news services repeatedly showcase supposed nuclear weapons threats hinted at by Russian authorities, while NATO’s and the United States’ official and long-standing threat of nuclear first-use — and their stationing of US nuclear bombs in five European NATO states — doesn’t warrant a mention. The risk of nuclear weapons detonations is said to be as high as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but this is due as much to NATO’s threatening “Strategic Concept” declaration of June 29 as to anything President Vladimir Putin of Russia has said.

News reports repeatedly claim that the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex—which is on the Dnieper River and close to the fighting in the south—is being shelled and rocketed by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. CNN reported August 18: “Kyiv has repeatedly accused Russian forces of storing heavy weaponry inside the complex and using it as cover to launch attacks, knowing that Ukraine can’t return fire without risking hitting one of the six reactors. Moscow, meanwhile, has claimed Ukrainian troops are targeting the site. Both sides have tried to point the finger at the other for threatening nuclear terrorism.”

However, this “both” sounds like an absurdity, since Russian troops surrounded the vast complex soon after invading, and seized it in March. These occupying Russian forces have kept the reactor site running using its Ukrainian engineers. For Russia to attack the site would be to fire on its own personnel, endanger the operating technicians, and risk catastrophe. As such, news reports that Russia is firing on the complex appear to be disinformation or propaganda.

The Mayor of Enerhodar on August 31 again accused Russia of doing the shelling, but the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said during his visit there the next day, “We don’t have the elements to assess that.” What’s more likely is that the Russians are using the huge reactor site as a safe area, amassing equipment and munitions on the sprawling compound, as CNN noted.

“It is not difficult to figure out who is shooting at this power plant”

Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in New Mexico, asserted August 14, “It is not difficult to figure out who is shooting at this power plant, and the dam, and hydroelectric facility on the Dnieper [River], which are necessary for its operation and safety even in a shutdown condition.” With Ukraine forces shelling the area on a regular basis, there is an ongoing chance that munitions aimed at Russian forces surrounding the site could strike one of the reactors, one of its high-level waste storage units, or power lines that supply the site with electricity to circulate cooling water.

Robert Mardini, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Guardian, “The slightest miscalculation could trigger devastation we will regret for decades,” adding that the stakes were “immense … When hazardous sites become battlegrounds, the consequences for millions of people and the environment can be catastrophic and last many years.”

In this context, Reuters news agency reported Sept. 1, “Russia’s defense ministry said up to 60 Ukrainian troops had crossed the Dnieper in boats at 6:00 a.m. local time, in what it said was a ‘provocation’ aimed at disrupting the IAEA visit’ referring to an International Atomic Energy Agency delegation. It said ‘measures had been taken’ to destroy the opposing troops.” Reuters could not verify those reports.

Additional risks were highlighted the week of August 25, when wildfires knocked out electric power to the complex. Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear reactor agency, said fires at a nearby thermal power plant caused the reactor complex’s last remaining electric power line to disconnect twice. The site’s three other lines were “lost earlier during the conflict,” the agency said, according to CNN, and the cut-off caused emergency diesel electric generators to start up in order to keep cooling water circulating, preventing potentially disastrous overheating and even reactor and/or fuel pool meltdown(s).

Electricity was restored to the site the next day, but the shutoff terrified observers who were reminded that massive radiation releases can be caused by a power outage — like the station blackout and destroyed backup generators that caused three meltdowns in Fukushima.

Russia’s invasion is doubtless an international crime under the UN Charter, and the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The world has justifiably condemned it, as it recalls the thundering denunciation of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg which declared: “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Of course this applies as well to NATO’s and the United States’ supremely criminal wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Panama, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine is the first bombardment and invasion of a country with operational nuclear power reactors. For the global anti-nuclear movement — whose teachers, scientists, physicians, and parliamentarians have warned that reactors are sitting-duck dirty bombs, perpetually threatening major radiation releases — its worst-case scenario of deadly risks have been realized, foisted upon the world in an enormously dangerous powder keg we can call “nuclear Russian roulette.” The US role so far has been to play “weapons testing trade show host,” offering over $40 billion in weapons, artillery, ammunition, military training, logistics, and satellite-aided intelligence to enrich our arms merchants and throw gas on the burning roulette table.

The tragic irony of war zone nuclear targets in Ukraine is the country’s zealous embrace of nuclear power on one hand, and its horrifying, ongoing experience of Chernobyl on the other. Chernobyl’s 1986 unit 4 reactor explosions, 40-day graphite fire, and hemisphere-wide radioactive fallout have killed between half-a-million and 900,000 people. In a world not turned upside-down, Ukrainians would be the last people on Earth to risk damaging nuclear reactors.

– CNN, Aug. 18; Reuters, Sept. 1; Reuters, Sept. 1; The Guardian, Sept. 3

August 31, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Point Beach Reactors Pose Needless Risks

By Al Gedicks*

On July 31, 2021 the operators of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant on the shore of Lake Michigan had to shut down the 52-year-old reactor after a cooling pump failed and waste heat was vented into the atmosphere.

According to Physicians for Social Responsibility and Nukewatch, two anti-nuclear groups, the shutdown “was caused by a failure to adequately monitor and maintain the aging and outmoded components in the Point Beach reactor” (“Questions about nuclear safety,” La Crosse Tribune, August 14, 2022).

ups have told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that the plant is operating beyond the 40- year lifespan of its 1960s design and questioned the agency’s oversight of the plant’s safety.

One of the most serious safety questions for aging nuclear reactors is the problem of neutron embrittlement of the nuclear reactor. Scientists have long been aware that neutron radiation from inside the nuclear core would gradually destroy the thick metal reactor that surrounds the core.

According to nuclear expert Arnold Gundersen: “If embrittlement becomes extensive, the dense metallic reactor can shatter like glass…creating what the NRC calls a Class 9 Accident, which is the worst nuclear catastrophe acknowledged by the NRC…The NRC has identified that NextEra’s Point Beach Reactors are the most embrittled operating reactors in the United States.” NextEra Energy is the owner of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant in Two Rivers.

Neutron embrittlement happens to all reactors, but the issue is especially crucial in reactors built before 1972, such as Point Beach. Those vessels were built using copper – which is no longer used in reactor construction because it is more prone to embrittlement – in the walls and welds.

The NRC estimated that both the Point Beach 2 reactor, located on Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan shoreline, and the Palisades nuclear power plant, also located on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Covert, Michigan, were expected to reach the traditional embrittlement screening limits in 2017. Some scientists have called embrittlement the single most important factor in determining the life span of a reactor.

Unlike the Palisades reactor that has announced permanent closure by May 31, 2022, Point Beach has sought permission to operate 20 more years, despite increasing age-related degradation risks. The current licenses for the two reactors are set to expire in 2030 and 2033.

With thermal shock from rapid cooling or from overheating, the steel vessel could crack, releasing coolant from around the fuel rods, leading to a core meltdown, as it did at the Fukushima Daiichi site in Japan on March 11, 2011. Pressurized thermal shock is a problem most severe in the older generation of reactors such as Point Beach.

In 1982, Demetrios Basdekas an NRC Reactor Safety Engineer, expressed his concern about the age-degradation risks of reactor embrittlement in a letter published in the New York Times: “There is a high, increasing likelihood that someday soon during a seemingly minor malfunction at any of a dozen or more nuclear plants around the United States, the steel vessel that houses the radioactive core is going to crack like a piece of glass. The result will be a core meltdown, the most serious kind of accident, which will injure many people, and probably destroy the nuclear industry with it.”

The casualty and property damage figures from the NRC’s “CRAC-2 Report on Accident Consequences for Point Beach, Units 1 & 2, Two Rivers, Wisconsin,” show that a reactor meltdown would have catastrophic negative impacts on health and the economy of nearby neighborhoods and the people who live and work in those communities.

This level of risk justifies serious consideration for shutting down the plant. Renewable energy sources would provide safer alternatives to this threat.

* Al Gedicks is executive secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council in La Crosse. This report was first published in La Crosse Tribune as ‘Nuclear Safety Must be Focus’, Aug. 31, 2022