Radiation Exposure

December 31, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima Filter Failure: A Million Tons of Toxic Water Far Too Radioactive for Release to the Pacific

By Dr. Gordon Edwards

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2018-19

Irradiated nuclear fuel is millions of times more radioactive than fresh nuclear fuel, due to the hundreds of varieties of human-made radioactive elements that are created during nuclear fission, many of which remain trapped in the irradiated fuel. See www.ccnr.org/hlw_chart.html

Irradiated fuel is so fiercely radioactive that it generates more than enough heat to melt the core of a nuclear reactor, just by the ongoing disintegration of radioactive atoms, even after the fission process has been completely stopped. Continual cooling of the core is essential after shutdown.

As soon as the 2011 Japan earthquake happened, all three operating reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi were shut off immediately. But nobody knows how to shut off radioactivity. The heat generated by the radioactive waste inside was what melted the cores of those three shut-down reactors at a temperature more than twice the melting point of steel. Lack of backup electricity resulted in lack of cooling. Overheating occurred, and meltdowns soon followed.

Those melted cores are still there, lodged somewhere in the sub-basements of the reactors. The melted fuel still has to be cooled, even seven and a half years after the accident.

Normally, when irradiated fuel is removed from an operating reactor, it is placed in a large pool of circulating water for about ten years. Cooling in such a pool is necessary to allow time for radioactivity levels to drop to the point where irradiated fuel no longer needs forced cooling to prevent spontaneous overheating.

Every day, for the first several years following the triple meltdown, hundreds of tons of water were pumped down into the melted cores and back up again, in order to cool the melted fuel—to prevent it from overheating again, releasing even more radioactivity into the atmosphere and groundwater.

By the time the water was pumped back to the surface it had become heavily contaminated with radioactive poisons that were flushed out of the melted reactor cores. Every day, new steel tanks had to be built at the surface to hold the highly contaminated water—much too radioactive to disperse into the ocean or the local environment. A small forest had to be cut down to make room for even more tanks to hold the radioactive waste water.

Today, there are more than a thousand such tanks covering large areas of land adjacent to the reactor site. These tanks hold about 900,000 tons of radioactive water. More contaminated water is being added to this dismal inventory every week, as cooling of the melted cores continues.

For years now, filtering equipment has been used to “decontaminate” this huge volume of water by removing over 60 varieties of radioactive contaminants. However, tritium (radioactive hydrogen) cannot be removed from contaminated water by any readily available filtration process, because radioactive water molecules incorporating tritium are chemically identical to ordinary water molecules. You cannot filter water from water. The tritium remains.

So, even if all other radioactive contaminants were totally removed, the 900,000 tons of water in storage would still remain heavily contaminated with tritium. For the last couple of years, experts from the nuclear industry have wanted to dump this contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean, claiming that tritium is not one of the most dangerous of radioactive materials.

Tritium gives off no penetrating gamma radiation, but if ingested through contaminated food or water, or inhaled as radioactive humid air, or absorbed directly through the skin, tritium damages living cells. It has been well-documented that tritium is a cancer-causing agent as well as a mutagen and teratogen, altering chromosomes and genes in a random fashion and causing abnormalities in developing embryos. See www.ccnr.org/tritium_1.html .

Moreover, since tritium is biologically and chemically indistinguishable from ordinary hydrogen, it gets built right into the body’s organic molecules, including DNA molecules. Tritium also readily crosses the placenta, entering into the body of a developing child in the womb, resulting in the embryo having a higher concentration of tritium than the mother has.

Tritium is so difficult to control, and so easily dispersed into the air and the water around nuclear facilities, industry experts frequently advocate lax standards and permissive [dispersal] practices regarding tritium. See www.ccnr.org/GE_ODWAC_2009_e.pdf .

Japanese citizens, especially fishermen, do not trust the industry. TEPCO has lied to them repeatedly both before and after the 2011 disaster. These people have fought hard to prevent TEPCO from dumping the contaminated water into the ocean, despite TEPCO’s persistent efforts to browbeat them into submission by repeatedly insisting that tritium is nothing much to worry about.

Water Filtration Has Failed

[In September 2018 it was] revealed that there are dozens of other radioactive contaminants besides tritium in the contaminated water, and that these poisons are present at unacceptably high concentrations. [See report below.] TEPCO has claimed for years that all the radioactive materials had been removed, except for tritium.

It turns out that the previous “removal”… was far from perfect, in part because workers neglected to take the time or make the effort to frequently change filters. When filters get clogged they don’t work very well.

So the “tritium water” that TEPCO was prepared to dump is actually a stew of many other radioactive contaminants such as cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium-239, iodine-129, and many more.

Beware of industry assurances. Their experts are predisposed to protect the nuclear establishment.

—Gordon Edwards is president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

See: “Water stored at Fukushima nuclear plant still radioactive,” Mari Yamaguchi, AP, via The Toronto Star, Sept. 28, 2018

December 31, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

West Lake & Bridgeton Superfund Site Cleanup Approved

By Bonnie Urfer and Kelly Lundeen

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2018-19

Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel, co-recipients of the 2018 Whistle Blowers Award and co-founders of Just Moms STL

As it turns out, combining radioactive waste with fire is not unique to California.

Just outside St. Louis in Bridgeton, Missouri sits the radioactive West Lake Landfill, an illegal dumping ground for nuclear weapons production waste. The Bridgeton Landfill, 600 feet away, has since 2010 been threatening the radioactive waste with an underground fire smoldering at 300 degrees. Both of the problematic sites lie within a Superfund site 1.2 miles from the Missouri River. As recently as Nov. 2 the fire reached the surface for two hours before being extinguished and could be seen from several hundred feet away.

To the relief of many, on Sept. 27, 2018, US EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler signed the Record of Decision Amendment to clean up the Superfund site. It’s taken 45 years for the EPA to come up with a plan for partial cleanup of the 143,000 cubic yards or 43,000 tons of radioactive waste. Unfortunately it comes too late for the more than 2,725 residents already living with cancers, tumors and related illnesses stemming from the dumping of radioactive waste in the north St. Louis area. (See “Authorities Dismiss Coldwater Creek Cancer Cluster” in Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2013.)

The story is another tragedy of the Manhattan Project that continues to kill today through exposure to the radioactive waste all along the nuclear fuel cycle. The spread of St. Louis’s radiation began with uranium mining in the Congo, and later by processing the uranium by Mallinckrodt Chemical Works. The West Lake Landfill is only one of several sites around St. Louis where radioactive waste was scattered. In 1973 the Cotter Corporation started secretly transporting what the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health considered the most highly radioactive of the wastes to the West Lake site. Even the truckers were unaware of the contents of the black contaminated soil they carried, taking some home for their gardens. It had previously been left near Coldwater Creek, a popular place for swimming, and along the highways, where it was found by children who played in the thick, dangerous mud.

While cleanup is pending residents continue to be exposed to gamma radiation, benzene and hydrogen sulfide fumes. Aerial readings of gamma rays show the contamination plume has not spread, but the existence of gamma rays prove that the whole area is being continuously saturated with radiation.

The cost estimate of cleanup comes in at $205 million over three years and will be covered by the Department of Energy, Exelon (current owners of the Cotter Corporation), and Republic Services (owners of the West Lake and Bridgeton Landfills); however some estimates put the project on a 5-year track. The to-do list for clean-up includes excavating the hottest spots at a depth of 8 to 12 feet, and in some instances as deep as 20 feet, then leaving the rest capped and in the ground. About 61,000 cubic yards of non-radioactive waste will remain buried, 70% of the radioactive dirt will be removed, but radioactivity in the water has not been addressed.

The cleanup plan is the result of a hard-fought struggle by local grassroots organizations like Just Moms STL and Coldwater Creek-Just the Facts Please, which are made up of community members directly impacted by health issues related to the radioactive waste. Karen Nickel, co-founder of Just Moms STL and co-recipient of the 2018 Whistle Blowers Award told reporters, “Some of us can go to sleep a little easier tonight knowing that we were successful.” The fight is not over for the local community, but regarding the decision, Nickels applauded the strength of their fight. “Every single voice matters, every single letter that was written, every single call that was made: those all matter.”

—Just Moms STL, Nov. 2, 2018; St. Louis Post-Dispatch and KDSK News, Sept. 27, 2018; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Feb. 11, 2016; Coldwater Creek – Just the Facts Please, 2015; and see the 2018 documentary Atomic Homefront.

December 19, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Cold War Killer Blow Back

More Americans were killed by US weapons testing than there were deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on a recent study using National Cancer Institute statistics.

By John LaForge

Nuclear enthusiasts repeat endlessly that nuclear weapons have kept the peace. They should complete their sentence and admit it’s the peace of the dead.

A new study by University of Arizona economist Keith Meyers concludes that radiation-contaminated milk and food (poisoned by above-ground nuclear bomb testing) caused between 340,000 and 690,000 deaths in the United States between 1951 and 1973.

Using a newly designed method to trace the radiation in the fallout from the bomb tests, Meyers estimated the radiation doses given to unsuspecting citizens around the country. With a National Cancer Institute (NCI) database produced during its 14-year-long study of fallout published in 1997, “Meyers was able to track the amount of I-131[radioactive iodine] found in local milk and compare this with the number and nature of deaths on a county level,” Matthew Davis reports for BigThink online Dec. 14.

The 1997 NCI report concluded that radioactive iodine in the fallout from nuclear bomb tests gave thyroid cancer to as many as 75,000 people in the US. Ten percent of the total number of thyroid cancers was expected to be fatal cancers, according the NCI.

Tim Fernholz, writing for the online news site Quartz Daily Brief, says, “By comparing [NCI] data with county-level mortality records, Meyers came across a significant finding: ‘Exposure to fallout through milk leads to immediate and sustained increases in the crude death rate.’ What’s more, these results were sustained over time. US nuclear testing likely killed seven to 14 times more people than we had thought, mostly in the Midwest and northeast.”

Where’d the cancer come from?

A spectacular amount of iodine-131 was released by the detonations: “150 million curies of iodine-131, mainly in the years 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1957,” the NCI reported.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council reviewed the NCI’s findings. The scientists found that, “[E]xposure to Iodine-131 from the Nevada atmospheric tests will produce between 11,300 and 212,000 excess lifetime cases of thyroid cancer…” [“Exposure of the American People to Iodine-131 from Nevada Nuclear-Bomb Tests: Review of the National Cancer Institute Report and Public Health Implications,” 1999]

Due to the high-altitude spread of radioactive materials from the open-air bomb tests in Nevada, deadly iodine-131 was dispersed to every county in the United States, according to the two-volume NCI study. For most people, the NCI noted, “The major exposure route was the ingestion of cows’ milk contaminated as the result of iodine-131 deposited on pasture grasses.” Other exposures came from eating contaminated leafy vegetables, goats’ milk, cottage cheese and eggs.

The way the radio-poisons got into US milk and then into sister Sally, cousin Billy, and pregnant mommy, etc., etc., was easy to predict and to verify. Bomb test fallout came down to earth in rainfall, contaminating grasslands and farms nationwide. Cows and goats ate the grass and produced iodine-131 tainted “hot” milk.

The 1997 NCI study focused on thyroid cancers caused by iodine-131 in bomb test fallout. Meyers’ new study looks at over-all death rates which increased significantly in counties that were hard-hit by fallout.

Other Cold War fatalities

With so much discussion of another “arms race” with the remnant of the former USSR called Russia, it’s worth recalling that there were no winners of the Cold War with the Soviets, and that there were only losers including tens or hundreds of thousands of fatalities in our own country.

McClatchy/Knight-Ridder newspapers reported Dec. 11, 2015 that over 33,000 US nuclear weapons factory workers died of cancers caused by their workplace radiation exposures. (“33,480 Americans dead after 70 years of atomic weaponry,” McClatchy)

About 16,000 US citizens were used in the government’s human radiation experiments that spanned decades. (“Count of Subjects in Radiation Experiments Is Raised to 16,000”, New York Times, Aug. 20, 1995) Our own Nazi-like experiments abused vulnerable groups including pregnant women, prison inmates, soldiers, and mentally ill children.

The United States spent at least $4 trillion on nuclear weapons between 1945 and 1995, another trillion or so since then, and yet most of the 70,000 warheads that were produced have been eliminated. Those trillions could have saved millions of lives if they’d been devoted to medical education, health care programs and preventive medicine. At least with this sort of defense, the government wouldn’t be killing the people it’s supposed to defend.

November 28, 2018 by Nukewatch 2 Comments

Woolsey Fire Started at Santa Susana Field Lab — Site of “[fourth] largest release of iodine-131 in the history of nuclear power”

Regional map showing Santa Susana Field Lab and the surrounding area.

Aerial map showing the areas affected by the Woolsey Fire. Santa Susana Field Lab is located northeast of Thousand Oaks inside the red line denoting the edge of the fire on November 16.

By John LaForge

In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles, site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.

The field laboratory operated 10 experimental nuclear reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.

LA’s KABC-7 TV reported Nov. 13 that the Santa Susana lab site “appears to be the origin of the Woolsey Fire” which has now torched over 96,000 acres, and Southern Calif. Public Radio said, “According to Cal Fire, the Woolsey Fire started on the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 8 at E Street and Alfa Road, on the Santa Susana site.”

In the 11/16 column I noted that Dr. Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy & Environmental Research, estimated that the partial meltdown of the lab’s Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) caused “the third largest release of iodine-131 in the history of nuclear power,” according to Gar Smith in his 2012 book Nuclear Roulette.

But Makhijani was speaking in 2006, so now of course the SRE meltdown counts as the fourth largest radio-iodine release—after the triple meltdowns at Fukushima in Japan in 2011, Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, and Windscale in England in 1957.

Santa Susana’s operators caused the destruction of the liquid sodium-cooled SRE on July 12, 1959—“showering the downwind hills and meadows of the 2,850-acre site with a fog of chromium and radioactive isotopes, including iodine-131,” according to Nuclear Roulette. It was these hills and meadows that were burned so completely by the Woolsey wildfire.

“It [the fog of isotopes] likely spread to nearby communities such as Simi Valley, Chatsworth and Canoga Park,” according to Southern Calif. Public Radio’s Elina Shatkin (“What Happened at the Santa Susana Nuclear Site During the Woolsey Fire?” Nov. 13.) Makhijani calculated that fallout from the meltdown contained “80 to 100 times the amount of iodine-131 released at Three Mile Island” [in Harrisburg, Penn., in 1979], Smith reports in Nuclear Roulette. Canoga Park Senior High School is one of four Red Cross evacuation centers for the Woolsey Fire.

During the two weeks after the partial meltdown of the SRE, workers tried to repair it. “When they couldn’t, they were ordered to open the reactor’s large door, releasing radiation into the air,” Shatkin reported for public radio.

Radioactive materials released by the meltdown were never accurately measured in part because monitors inside the SRE went off scale. Yet the melting of fuel didn’t cause the only releases of radiation from SRE—just the single largest. According to Joe Mangano in his 2012 book Mad Science, “Every day, radioactive gases from holding tanks in the reactor building were released into the air—often at night … sometimes twice a day.” In Atomic Accidents, Mahaffey describes the same practice writing, “The fission gases were piped off and compressed into holding tanks for controlled release into the environment…”

After the July meltdown was halted, Atomics International, which ran the SRE, concocted a report for the Atomic Energy Commission on Aug. 29, 1957. The report falsely declared: “No release of radioactive materials to the plant or its environs occurred and operating personnel were not exposed to harmful conditions.”

However, conditions inside the reactor building were extremely dangerous for workers, and radiation levels are estimated to have reached between 10,000 and one million times greater than normal. According to one worker, staff radiation measuring badges were taken away. John Pace, a young trainee at the lab, “Before July 13, we wore film badges, and after then, at some point they [Atomics International] took them away, since they know that the levels would be really high.”

With 10 experimental reactors, radiation routinely released to the air, years of accidents, and four core meltdowns, the “downwind hills and meadows” can be considered permanently compromised with cancer-causing toxins. Dan Hirsch, president of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear policy organization told public radio that Santa Susana’s soil has, “a mix of radioactive materials like plutonium, strontium-90 and cesium-137” and perhaps 100 toxic chemicals “such as PCBs, dioxins, heavy metals like mercury and chromium-6 and volatile organic compounds like PCE.” In 2012, the US EPA reported that its soil tests found radioactive cesium-137 at 9,328 times ordinary background levels.

Citizens living in the vicinity of Santa Susana have become harshly critical of the site’s early operators—Boeing, Atomic International and Rocketdyne—who for years burned toxic and radioactive wastes in open pits, endangering all the downwinders. In 2005, Boeing paid $30 million to compensate nearby residents for early mortalities and a range of rare diseases.

For more info about the Department of Energy’s attempt to avoid cleanup of the Santa Susana Field Lab see “Dept. of Energy secretly funding front group to sabotage its own Santa Susana Field Lab cleanup.“

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Cold War Killer Blow Back

By John LaForge

Where’d the cancer come from?

Other Cold War fatalities

Woolsey Fire Started at Santa Susana Field Lab — Site of “[fourth] largest release of iodine-131 in the history of nuclear power”

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By Dr. Gordon Edwards

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2018-19

Water Filtration Has Failed

By Bonnie Urfer and Kelly Lundeen

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2018-19

By John LaForge

Where’d the cancer come from?

Other Cold War fatalities

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