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May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Palomares Atomic Vets Struggle for Recognition, Compensation

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
 By Kelly Lundeen

A second lawsuit has been filed on behalf of atomic veterans exposed to radiation during cleanup efforts after the 1966 nuclear weapons accident in Palomares, Spain. Last November, Edward P. Feeley filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. If successful, his administrative appeal for class action status would be the first in history before the Board of Veterans Appeals. The Feeley case follows on the heels of another major 2019 lawsuit over grievances of surviving Palomares veterans, Skaar vs. McDonough, in which the vets were granted class status by another body, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. The Feeley class of U.S. veterans has asked for the cleanup work conducted by about 1,600 service members at Palomares to be categorized as a “radiation-risk” activity, allowing them to have their radiation-related illnesses recognized as such in order to receive medical care and compensation.

When Feeley originally approached the VA for medical treatment of his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and skin cancer, he was denied. Yet, the radiation exposure levels by U.S. vets at Palomares are higher than the levels at many other already-recognized radiation-risk incidents. Vets with the same radiation-related illnesses from other contamination events qualify for medical treatment, including those who disposed of the same Palomares debris after it was shipped to the U.S.

“My fellow veterans and I spent weeks at Palomares shoveling nuclear waste without gloves or masks. We ate there and slept there,” said Feeley in a press release from the Veterans Legal Services Clinic of Yale Law School, which is handling the appeal. “At the end of the day, we would be covered in a white powder — which I later learned was radioactive debris. I was only 20 years old when I arrived at Palomares, and I’m 76 now. Most of the men I served with are older than me. Many of them have passed away since that time and the ones that are still alive deserve to have their service rewarded,” Feeley said.

Palomares Clean-up Crew

The radioactive debris they were cleaning up was from the first U.S. nuclear weapons accident. Twenty-two pounds of highly toxic plutonium was scattered over 500 acres around Palomares, on the Mediterranean coast, after a B-52 bomber carrying four 1.5 megaton nuclear warheads crashed with its refueling tanker nearly six miles in the air. Even though there was no nuclear detonation, the seven service members aboard the planes were killed.

The intensive initial cleanup operation lasted months, but the service members, the local population, the Earth, and the sea were contaminated and are still suffering to this day. In 2015, the Obama administration agreed to clean up an additional 1.8 million cubic feet of contaminated soil in Palomares, but the Trump White House claimed to have no obligation to keep promises made by prior administrations, and Biden has failed to recommit the U.S. to its responsibility for cleanup.

The 2019 case, Skaar vs. McDonough, alleges that the military used inadequate radiation data and flawed recording methods in order to deny medical benefits to the vets (see Nukewatch Spring Quarterly, “Court Orders Veterans Affairs Department to Replace Flawed Science Used to Deny Benefits to Vets Poisoned in Plutonium Disaster”). This case is scheduled for oral arguments April 7, 2022.

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, the Palomares Veterans Act in the Senate and the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act in the House of Representatives, which would compensate the veterans for their dangerous and sometimes deadly work, await approval.

— Stripes, Jan. 19, 2022; Yale Law School press release, Nov. 1, 2021; BBC, Oct. 19, 2015

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Descendants of Japanese Fishermen Sue for Bomb Test Fallout Compensation

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By Setsuko Shimomoto

Editor’s note: The Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb test was accidentally the largest nuclear weapon detonation ever made by the United States. The 15-megaton blast was three times the five megatons that was planned, due to errors made by its designers from the Los Alamos National Lab. The bomb’s colossal fallout radioactively contaminated thousands of Pacific Island inhabitants, poisoned hundreds of fishermen who were working in the area of the Marshall Islands, and dispersed radioactive particles around the world.

Note from Mari Inoue of Manhattan Project for a Nuclear-Free Future: Below is a transcript of testimony by Ms. Setsuko Shimomoto, originally from Muroto, a fishing village in Kochi, Japan. In the 1950s, Setsuko’s father was a fisherman who was exposed to the radioactive fallout from the U.S. nuclear weapon testing near the Marshall Islands. It is estimated that more than 10,000 Japanese fishermen and 990 fishing boats were affected by the [1954] Castle Bravo series of tests in the Pacific, but their voices and struggles were deliberately suppressed and erased from history. Setsuko is one of the plaintiffs in two court cases in Japan seeking recognition and workers’ compensation on behalf of her late father who died from cancer. In February, one of the cases was heard in local court in Tokyo and another hearing is scheduled for May.

Setsuko Shimomoto: “In March 1954, when my father was a fisherman on a tuna fishing boat, he was exposed to radioactive fallout from U.S. hydrogen bomb testing. Deep sea fishing was thriving. Many small, 100-ton fishing boats sailed near the Marshall Islands, where 67 atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted. Some fishermen were told to keep quiet about the radiation; others were not informed. In 1955, the U.S. agreed to pay $2 million in damages to Japan. Many tuna fishermen were ignored, except for those of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5). The incidents were trivialized as the single incident of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru. Accordingly, Japan waived its right to seek damages from the U.S. without the consent of the affected.

“In 2014 after over 30 years of research by Mr. Masatoshi Yamashita, an advisor at Hata Seminar high school program in Muroto, and others, Japan’s Ministry of Health released the list of 990 fishing boats that discarded irradiated tuna and documents that recorded the radiation dose of these boats. Researchers of Hiroshima University also tested the teeth and blood of those fishermen and scientifically proved that these fishermen were indeed exposed to radiation. In 2020, we filed two lawsuits, after previous lawsuits had been dismissed; one for workers’ compensation, the other against the government for neglecting the fishermen without providing them relief.

“Why did we take action against the government more than 60 years after the incident?

“The catalyst was meeting the mother of Setsuya Fujii who was exposed to radiation in Nagasaki and the Pacific. Setsuya became ill and killed himself by drowning at the age of 27. Many fishermen have died of illnesses that were undoubtedly caused by radiation exposure. Masayasu Taniwaki was affected while on a training boat and passed away at the age of 20, only seven months after exposure. My father had an operation for stomach cancer at the age of 60 and died of bile duct cancer at 78. Mr. Minami, who was on the same boat as my father, died of liver cancer 13 years after exposure. He was 46.

“The government that failed to recognize the radiation exposure of those fishermen also promotes nuclear energy. Despite the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, the government continues its efforts to restart nuclear power plants. The Ikata Nuclear Power Plant was restarted in December 2021. Japan has also decided to dump radioactive water from Fukushima Dai-ichi into the ocean. Japan is following the lead of the U.S. in downplaying the effect of radiation. Despite being victimized by atomic bombing during the war and having victims of nuclear testing, Japan refuses to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

— Transcript translated by Yukiyo Kawano of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, and edited for space by Kelly Lundeen. See Ms. Shimomoto’s full testimony at:

youtube.com/watch?v=TuDoMrYf8s4 

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

March 2, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

 “End war, build peace” by Ray Acheson

RAY ACHESON, 1 MARCH 2022

Ray Acheson is an activist for peace, justice and abolition, director of the Women’s Int’l League for Peace & Freedom disarmament program in New York City, WILPF representative on the steering committee of ICAN, and author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy (Roman and Littlefield 2021).

Russia’s war in Ukraine is intensifying, with cities and civilians being targeted with missiles and rockets and a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding. The threat of nuclear war, the billions of dollars being promised to militarism, racist border crossing restrictions and ideas about conflict, and the ongoing climate crisis are intertwined with the already horrific violence in Ukraine. To confront these compounding crises, war and war profiteering must end, nuclear weapons must be abolished, and we must confront the world of war that has been deliberately constructed at the expense of peace, justice, and survival.

On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report, finding that human-induced climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly. “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of an IPCC working group.

The IPCC report was released five days after Russia launched an imperial war of aggression against Ukraine—a war that itself is fossil-fueled and wrapped up with energy and economic interests, and that will contribute further to carbon emissions. Furthermore, this report comes one day after the Russian president ordered his country’s nuclear forces to be put on “combat duty,” escalating the risk of nuclear war and threatening climate catastrophe.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has already seen violations of international humanitarian law and human rights, including Russian forces using banned weapons such as cluster munitions and using explosive weapons in populated areas, hitting hospitals, homes, schools, and other civilian infrastructure. The conflict has also already involved severe environmental impacts, including pollution from military sites and material, as well as from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, radiation risks from fighting at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility, groundwater contamination, and more.

Now, it risks becoming nuclear, putting the entire world at risk. The use of even a single nuclear bomb would be absolutely devastating. It would kill hundreds of thousands of people, it would destroy critical infrastructure, [and] it would unleash radiation that will damage human bodies, animals, plants, land, water, and air for generations. If it turns into a nuclear exchange with NATO or the United States, we will be facing an unprecedented catastrophe. Millions of people could die. Our health care systems, already overwhelmed by two years of a global pandemic, will collapse. The climate crisis will be exponentially exacerbated; there could be a disastrous decline in food production and a global famine that might kill most of humanity.

In this moment, everyone must condemn the threat to use nuclear weapons, as well as the ongoing bombing of civilians, the war in general, and the Russian government’s act of imperial aggression. Providing humanitarian relief, ending the war, and preventing it from turning nuclear are top priorities. But we must also recognize what led us here. This crisis is the inevitable result of building a world order based on militarism, just as the nuclear dimension is an inevitable result of the possessing nuclear weapons and claiming they are a legitimate tool of “security”.

READ THE FULL POST HERE:

End war, build peace

 

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Military Spending, Nuclear Weapons, Radiation Exposure, Renewable Energy, War

January 7, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Plans for Mass Shipments of High-Level Radioactive Waste Quietly Disclosed

BY JOHN LAFORGE, COUNTERPUNCH, JANUARY 7, 2022

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/07/plans-for-mass-shipments-of-high-level-radioactive-waste-quietly-disclosed/

How far is your house or apartment from a major highway, or railroad line? Do you want to play Russian roulette with radioactive waste in transit for 40 years?

Last month US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff quietly reported preparing for tens of thousands of cross-country shipments of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear reactors to the desert Southwest. The oft-disparaged US infrastructure of decrepit of roads, faulty bridges, rickety rails, and rusty barges may not be ready for such an onrush of immensely heavy rad waste casks.

Steel and concrete canisters known as “dry casks” are set outside near nuclear reactors holding the high-level radioactive waste fuel rods that must be containerized for over one million years. The casks are not designed or engineered for trans-shipment to centralized waste dumps. Photo by Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Diane D’Arrigo, of Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Maryland, and Leona Morgan, with Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico, report for NIRS that the transports would carry “the hottest, most concentrated atomic waste from the nuclear fuel chain, misleadingly dubbed “spent nuclear fuel. This radioactive waste can cause death in minutes if unshielded, and remains radioactive for literally millions of years; it is one of the most deadly materials on Earth.”

In his Dec. 2, 2021 letter to NRC commissioners, Daniel Dorman, NRC’s Executive Director for Operations, wrote that: “To prepare for a potential large-scale commercial transportation campaign, staff … assessed the NRC’s readiness for oversight of a large-scale, multi-mode, multi-package, extended-duration campaign” of heavy radioactive waste shipments by trains, trucks, and barges. The NRC’s “assessment” was published December 17 with Dorman’s letter, which noted that storage of the waste is now done in cooling pools and/or heavy outdoor casks near the reactors that produce it — at 75 sites across the country.

Radioactive waste storage may be consolidated

Dorman’s letter — unearthed January 4 by Michael Keegan of the Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes — reminds us, “The NRC received two applications to construct and operate consolidated interim storage facilities for [high-level waste], using dry storage systems, at sites in Texas and New Mexico.” In September 2021, the NRC issued a license to Interim Storage Partners Inc., for the Texas site, and a license decision is pending on a Holtec Corp. proposal for New Mexico. Both projects are the subject of lawsuits that will slow the industry’s and government’s rush to dump.

Critics of the proposed licensing are demanding that the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board halt the Holtec licensing because it is illegal. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act “only allows the US Department of Energy (DOE) to take ownership of irradiated nuclear fuel at an operating permanent geologic repository,” NIRS notes. “Such a title- and liability-transfer to DOE at the ‘interim’ site proposed by Holtec, is not allowed.”

NIRS reports that “The Holtec [company’s] license application says the lethal waste at the site would be owned by either the DOE or the nuclear utility companies that made it.” Yet at one licensing hearing, Holtec’s lawyer, Jay Silberg, admitted that under current law, DOE cannot take title and ownership of the waste at an “interim” centralized storage site.

Presently, “dry casks” that hold the waste onsite near reactors are not the same canisters required for long-haul transport. Dangerous repackaging, testing, and mishaps will be required. Government environmental impact statements regarding the thousands of these shipments over a decades-long timeline have officially predicted an alarming number of accidents, crashes, and potential disasters.

Maps of likely transport routes produced by the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects are available at Beyond Nuclear. They show cities, states, and congressional districts “potentially affected by shipments,” and are based on DOE plans in 2008 for the discredited Yucca Mountain dump site near Las Vegas. Yucca Mountain was scientifically disqualified and cancelled during the Obama Administration, but Nevada’s maps shed light on routes to the New Mexico and Texas sites, because the further away from the Southwest such waste shipments originate, the more similar-to-identical the transport routes would be.

The Tex-Mex dump site owners (Interim Storage Partners, and Holtec) in league with the NRC, have kept their shipment plans obscure and secretive. The waste’s producers and managers don’t want the public to know if or when “Mobile Chernobyls” could pass through their communities, or to start organizing to stop them. They know there are reasons to protest. The government has notoriously proposed water-borne routes that would see high-level waste casks on barges — a scheme critics call “Floating Fukushimas” or “Edmund Fitzgerald Follies.” The gales of November be damned. ###

—John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.

Filed Under: Environment, Nuclear Power, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste, Weekly Column

December 21, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Study: Contrary to Early ‘All Clear’, California’s Woolsey Wildfire  Dispersed Radioactivity from Contaminated Santa Susana Lab Site

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022
From Denise Duffield, PSR Los Angeles; Melissa Bumstead, Parents Vs SSFL; and Marco Kaltofen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

A study published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity finds that radioactive contamination from California’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) was lofted off site during the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which began at SSFL. The study calls into question early and highly implausible claims by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) and its toxics department that no contamination was released.

SSFL is a former testing complex for nuclear reactors and rocket engines located about 30 miles from Los Angeles in hills above the San Fernando Valley. For decades, accidents, spills, and fires at the SSFL, including a partial reactor meltdown in July 1959, resulted in extensive radioactive and chemical contamination that has not been cleaned up. The 1959 fuel melting caused the worst atmospheric release of radioactive iodine-131 in US history, and was the fourth worst in the world after Fukushima, in Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Windscale in England.

This photo’s black star shows tracks made by alpha rays emitted from a particle of plutonium in the lung tissue of an ape. Inside the body, alpha rays can penetrate more than 10,000 cells within their range. Photo by Robert Del Tredici, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, 1987.

The study found radioactive particles associated with the fire at SSFL as high as nineteen times background [radiation levels] as much as nine miles away. And it concludes that “some ashes and dusts collected from the Woolsey Fire zone in the fire’s immediate aftermath contained high activities of radioactive isotopes associated with the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. … and confirmed the presence of radioactive micro-particles in the Woolsey Fire-related ashes and dusts.”

The findings contradict conclusions by CalEPA’s Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), which, a mere nine hours after the fire began on November 8, 2018, declared that the fire didn’t result in releases of hazardous materials. CalEPA/DTSC issued an interim study in December 2018, affirmed in a final version in December 2020, which asserted that “data from sampling and measurements did not detect the release of chemical or radiological contaminants from SSFL.” The assurances were widely criticized at the time, and the new findings have both disproved them and have reinvigorated widespread concerns about the failure to fully clean up SSFL as long promised.

The new study “Radioactive micro-particles related to the Woolsey Fire in Simi Valley, CA” was conducted by Marco Kaltofen of the Dept. of Physics, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Maggie and Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education. It examined 360 samples of household dust, surface soils, and ash from 150 homes and elsewhere, collected from December 2018 to February 2019.

Radioactive micro-particles in ash and recently-settled dusts collected just after the Woolsey fire, were “found in Thousand Oaks, CA, and Simi Valley, CA, about nine and three miles from SSFL, respectively. The Thousand Oaks samples had alpha count rates up to 19 times background,” the study reports. The researchers noted that alpha radiation-emitting thorium was the source of this excess radioactivity. The authors warn of small, dispersed alpha particles because of the “high risk of inhalation-related long-term biological damage from internal alpha emitters compared to external radiation,” the authors report.

Had the state and the parties responsible for the contamination (Boeing, NASA, and the Energy Department) met their legally binding obligations to clean up SSFL by the 2017 deadline, the 2018 fire couldn’t have released contamination. Further failure to clean the site poses continuing risks to the nearby population, warned Congressional and local elected officials in an Oct. 14 letter.

Lawmakers Complain of Clean-up Failure, Delays, and Gutted Decontamination Standards

There is widespread concern among elected officials and the community about secret negotiations between the state and Boeing Corp. that could further delay the cleanup, and allow giant military contractor to walk away from its radioactive and chemical contamination. California Congressional rep’s Brad Sherman, Julia Brownley, Jose Luis Correa, Graciela Flores Napolitano, and US Senator Alex Padilla sent a letter to CalEPA October 14 reminding the agency: “The 2007 Consent Order and 2020 Administrative Orders on Consent … required that soil cleanup be completed by 2017, however the agreed upon soil remediation at the site has yet to begin. We are deeply concerned about the lengthy delays….” In addition, County Supervisors from Ventura and Los Angeles County, six city mayors, and a Los Angeles City Council member wrote October 14 to CalEPA declaring, “We are opposed to any action that would significantly delay or weaken site cleanup.” The officials singled out the state’s failure to enforce the 2007 Consent Order, confidential negotiations between DTSC and Boeing, and potential changes to methodology rules that could delay or weaken clean-up requirements; as well as delays in the Programmatic Environmental Impact Report.

The core of such a Boeing-Newsom Administration deal could allow as much as twenty times higher levels of contamination than permitted currently. CalEPA remains in secret negotiations with Boeing.

“Federally funded studies have previously confirmed that contamination [above] US EPA levels of concern has migrated off site, and that the incidence of key cancers in the neighboring communities increases with proximity to the site,” said Denise Duffield, associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles. “In addition, site owner Boeing has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for exceeding contamination limits in surface water runoff leaving the site over many years. Until [those] responsible for the pollution finally live up to their clean-up agreements, people living around the site will be at further risk to their health,” Duffield said.

“The bottom line is, if SSFL had been cleaned up by 2017 as required by the clean-up agreements, the community wouldn’t have had to worry about contamination released by the Woolsey Fire,” said Melissa Bumstead, co-founder of Parents vs. SSFL. “My daughter is a two-time cancer survivor, and no parent should have to worry that the SSFL might give their child cancer when there’s a fire on site, or when it rains or it’s windy.”

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

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