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August 24, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Tepco’s License to Kill: Japan’s Dispersal of Radioactive Waste — No Accident Anymore

South Korean protesters lampooned Japanese authorities who said you could drink the 1.37 million tonnes of radioactive wastewater they began pumping into the Pacific Ocean Aug. 24.

 

By John LaForge

Japan is set to start pumping millions of gallons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean on Thurs., August 24, from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (Tepco’s) devastated triple reactor meltdown site at Fukushima.

This deliberate contamination of the public commons — no accident this time — is a license to kill, a criminally reckless endangerment of sea life and the food web. Yet the 1992 ban on ocean dumping of radioactive waste applies only to barrels thrown from ships, not liquids sent into the sea through pipes. Further, the Law of the Sea allows victims to bring legal action only after an alleged harm has occurred, and then puts the burden of proof on victims to show that their illness(es) were caused by a particular radioactive poison.

The nuclear industry and its government protectors run this game of radioactive waste dispersal using bailouts, bribes, and the lengthy “latency period” — the time between one’s radioactive contamination and the appearance of cancer, heart disease, etc. — which produces radiation victims years or decades after the “Fuku sushi” they ate. The nuclear industry has always depended on the fact that its chance of losing a radiation damage lawsuit is somewhere between a slim one and a fat one.

The catastrophic Fukushima earthquake-tsunami-meltdown-cubed has forced Tepco’s overseers of the three ferociously radioactive masses of melted uranium/plutonium fuel, or “corium,” to continuously pour cold water on to the unapproachable wreckage. Combined with rivers of groundwater that gushes through quake-smashed cracks in reactor foundation, the water becomes poisoned with radioactive uranium, cobalt, strontium, cesium, plutonium, and more. The failed Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) has not removed these or other deadly isotopes from the wastewater now stored onshore in giant tanks. The New York Times reported Aug. 21 that, “According to Tepco’s website, just 30 percent of the approximately 473,000 tons of water in the tanks have been fully treated to the point that only tritium remains.”

Spewing radioactivity is standard industry practice

It’s no surprise that reactor-friendly governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency (whose mission is to promote nuclear reactor proliferation and to lie about radiation risks), have given Japan’s oceanic pollution scheme their seal of approval. All of them have repeatedly declared that dumping radioactive wastes into public water bodies is ordinary industrial practice and legal around the world. With straight faces, the authorities chant in unison that reactor operations contaminate the environment with radioactive liquids all day, every day, and this is somehow intended to demonstrate that such contamination is natural and danger “negligible.”

At La Hague, France and at Sellafield, England, giant reactor waste complexes process waste fuel rods, producing billions of gallons of highly radioactive liquids, and for decades the carcinogenic offal has been pumped directly into the North Sea (by France) and the Irish Sea (by England). Dr. Chris Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk which studied internal radiation contamination, has found cancer clusters among children along the Irish seacoast — likely caused by internal exposure to Sellafield’s radioactive emissions.

Scientists, ecologists, medical authorities, environmentalists, historians, and oceanographers have repeatedly pointed out that there are practical alternatives to the dumping, and that nothing positive can result from adding radioactive pollution to the environment and the food web. The British Medical Journal only last week published the latest in a long series of studies [1] that have found again and again that exposure to low levels of radiation is more harmful than scientists previously thought. [2]

The Japanese government and Tepco hope that their global dispersal of reactor disaster waste will save the industry enough money that it can stay afloat against the astronomical costs of post-Fukushima liability and disaster response. But like the plague of mass shootings in the United States, Thursday’s start of Japan’s globalized pollution solution raises the chaos and deadliness of reactor operations to new heights, while the authorities claim from their bribery zones that nothing can be done about either hand guns or nuclear reactors.

Notes

[1] British Medical Journal, Aug. 16, 2023, study finds the risk of cancer death after exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation underestimated.

[2] “Ionising radiation and risk of death from leukaemia and lymphoma in radiation-monitored workers,” The Lancet, July 7, 2015; “Even low-level radioactivity is damaging, scientists conclude,” Science Daily, Nov. 13, 2012; “With New Data, a Debate on Low-Level Radiation,” New York Times, July 19, 2005; “Epidemiology: Russian Cancer Study Adds to the Indictment of Low-Dose Radiation,” Science, Nov. 11, 2005; “Study: No Radiation Level Safe,” Associated Press, June 29, 2005; “No dose too low,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec. 1997;  “Study: Even Low-Dose Radiation is Dangerous,” Reuters, Oct. 9, 1997; “Radiation health effects understated, study shows,” AP, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 25, 1995; “Researcher discovers greater radiation risk,” AP, Milwaukee Journal, Dec. 9, 1992; “Radiation risks may be more than believed,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1991; “International Panel Urges Cut In Allowable Radiation Dose,” New York Times, June 23, 1990; “Higher Cancer Risk Found in Low-Level Radiation,” New York Times, Dec. 20, 1989; “No Safe Radiation,” Scientific American, August 1958.

–John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch and a regular contributor to CounterPunch and PeaceVoice.

 

 

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

July 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Failed Fukushima System Should Cancel Wastewater Ocean Dumping

Photo Credit: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/04/contaminated-water-from-fukushima-nuclear-plant-to-be-released-into-the-ocean/.

By John LaForge, PeaceVoice, 22 July 2023

From the Fukushima-Daiichi triple-reactor meltdown wreckage, Japan’s government and “Tepco,” the owner, are rushing plans to pump 1.37 million tons (about 3 billion pounds) of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific.

Their record is poor. Their lies are documented. This is not safe, at all.

To keep the three meltdowns’ wasted fuel from melting again, Tepco continuously pours cold water over 880 tons of “corium,” the red-hot rubblized fuel amassed somewhere under three devastated reactors. “That water leaks into a maze of basements and trenches beneath the reactors and mixes with groundwater flowing into the complex,” Reuters Reported Sep. 3, 2013.

Most of this water is collected and put through Tepco’s jerry-rigged mechanism dubbed ALPS, for Advanced Liquid Processing System, which it turns out hasn’t processed much of anything.

Tepco, Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and much of the media endlessly repeat that ALPS removes over 62 radioactive materials from the ever-expanding volume of wastewater. Reports Regularly Claim the planned dumping is routine, safe, and manageable.

This unverified PR loop has fooled a lot of people, but the ALPS is a fraud. As early as 2013, The Filter System Stalled and the IAEA reported that April that ALPS had not “accomplished the expected result of removing some radionuclides,” Reuters Reported.

In September 2018, the ALPS was revealed to have drastically failed, Forcing Tepco To Issue A Public Apology and a promise to re-filter huge volumes of the waste.

According To Reuters, Oct. 11, 2018, documents on a government committee’s website show that 84 percent of water held at Fukushima contains concentrations of radioactive materials higher than legal limits allow to be dumped.

Among the deadly isotopes still in the waste are cesium-137, strontium-90, cobalt-60, ruthenium, carbon-14, tritium, iodine-129, plutonium isotopes, and more than 54 more.

In a June 14, 2023 op/ed for the China Daily, Shaun Burnie, the Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia, reported that The ALPS “Has Been A Spectacular Failure,” and noted:

“About 70 percent or 931,600 cubic meters of the wastewater needs to be processed again (and probably many more times) by the ALPS to bring the radioactive concentration levels below the regulatory limit for discharge. Tepco has succeeded in reducing the concentration levels of strontium, iodine, and plutonium in only 0.2 percent of the total volume of the wastewater, and it still requires further processing. But no secondary processing has taken place in the past nearly three years. Neither Tepco nor the Japanese government has said how many times the wastewater needs to be processed, how long it will take to do so, or whether the efforts will ever be successful. … none of these issues has been resolved.”

Tepco says it will re-filter more than 70 percent of the wastewater through ALPS again, a process that itself leaves massive amounts of highly radioactive sludge that must be kept out of the environment for centuries.

Hoping to slow the rush to dump, Professor Ryota Koyama from Fukushima University, Said In An Interview With China Media Group last May, “If the Japanese government or the Tokyo Electric Power Co. really wants to discharge contaminated water into the sea, they need to explain in more detail whether the nuclides have really been removed.”

International law governing state-sponsored or corporate pollution of the seven seas is relatively useless in challenging Tepco’s outrageous transfer of private industrial poison into the public commons. The global ban on ocean dumping of radioactive waste adopted in 1993 applies only to barrels. It has allowed Britain and France to pump billions of gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Irish Sea and the North Sea respectively, for decades.

The Law of the Sea might be able to bring Japan’s deliberate poisoning to an end only after a victim or class of victims harmed by Tepco’s meltdown waste brings a lawsuit that proves it. But showing that your illnesses or cancers were caused by ingested or inhaled radiation is so difficult that the nuclear power and weapons industry has skated along for 70 years — routinely and legally venting, leaking, releasing and dumping radioactive materials — without comeuppance.

Radioactivity is colorless, odorless, and invisible. Birth defects and cancers caused by exposure to ionizing radiation are entirely too visible.

###

John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.

 

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

July 8, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Failed Fukushima Fixes Falling Like Dominoes

By John LaForge

Japan’s breathtaking earthquake and tsunami waves of March 11, 2011— which first smashed the Fukushima Daiichi reactors’ foundations and the electrical grid, and then destroyed all its back-up power generators — led to a “station blackout” and the meltdown of three large reactors and to hydrogen explosion that blew apart four reactor containment structures.

Before the disaster, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) had refused to sufficiently upgrade its protective sea wall, although it had been warned of the risk of extreme tsunamis. The site was hit by a tsunami of a height of 46 feet, but Tepco had prepared for a wave of up to only 18 feet.  (Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster, Takashi Hirose, p. 30) The result was a catastrophic, unprecedented simultaneous triple reactor meltdown: an earthquake-tsunami-radiation event that had never before been seen on Earth.

Tepco’s cost-avoidance on its sea wall was only the first in a string of failures that have followed like dominos. The corruption led in July 2022 to convictions of four top Tepco executives for negligence and a fine of $95 billion.

In the 12 years since the meltdowns, Tepco’s disaster response efforts, always heralded as fixes, have been a series of hugely expensive failures: the “advanced” wastewater filter system “ALPS” has failed; the buried “ice wall” groundwater barrier has failed; containers made for the radioactive sludge produced by ALPS have failed; and plans to deal with millions of tons of collected debris — now kept in plastic bags — are being fiercely resisted by Japanese citizens.

Tons of cooling water is still being poured every day into Fukushima’s triple reactor wrecks to keep the hot melted fuel from again running amok. Additionally, groundwater gushes through the reactors’ foundations’ countless cracks and breaks caused by the staggering earthquake into what’s left of the structures’ sub-floors. All this water becomes highly radioactive as it passes over and through three giant masses — totaling at least 880 tonnes — of melted and mangled uranium and plutonium fuel.

You read that right. Fukushima’s destroyed reactor No. 3 was using fuel made partly of plutonium (see below), and so plutonium contaminates not just the ground and cooling water running over the melted fuel, but the ALPS apparatus, its filters, the containers used to store the radioactive sludge extracted by ALPS, and of course the sludge itself. You would think that the word plutonium would appear occasionally in news coverage of this ongoing disaster.

Failed ALPS means million-tonne do-over

Tepco’s jerry-rigged system dubbed Advanced Liquid Processing System or ALPS has never worked as planned. As early as 2013 the machinery was stalled. “The ALPS system failed to reduce radioactive elements, as claimed by the owner,” Power Technology, reported June 2, 2021.

Tepco has repeatedly said ALPS would remove 62 radioactive materials — all but tritium and carbon-14 from the continuously expanding volume of wastewater. Documents on a government committee’s website show that of 890,000 tonnes of water held at Fukushima, 750,000 tonnes, or 84 percent, contain higher concentrations of radioactive materials than legal limits allow, according to Reuters, Oct. 11, 2018. Among the long-lasting and deadly isotopes picked up by the water runs that through melted fuel wreckage are cesium, strontium, cobalt, ruthenium, carbon-14, tritium, iodine, plutonium, and at least 54 others.

In a June 14 op/ed for the China Daily, Shaun Burnie, the Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia, reported that the ALPS “has been a spectacular failure” and noted that:

“About 70 percent or 931,600 cubic meters of the wastewater needs to be processed again (and probably many more times) by the ALPS to bring the radioactive concentration levels below the regulatory limit for discharge. Tepco has succeeded in reducing the concentration levels of strontium, iodine, and plutonium in only 0.2 percent of the total volume of the wastewater, and it still requires further processing. But no secondary processing has taken place in the past nearly three years. Neither Tepco nor the Japanese government [have] said how many times the wastewater needs to be processed, how long it will take to do so, or whether the efforts will ever be successful. Greenpeace reported on these problems and why the ALPS failed nearly five years ago, and none of these issues has been resolved.”

Consequently, Tepco says it will re-filter over 70 percent of the 1.37 million tonnes of wastewater stored in giant tanks on site. Approximately 875,000 tons of contaminated water must be put through the system again, a process that will leave behind more of the highly radioactive and corrosive waste sludge.

Hoping to slow the rush to dumping, Ryota Koyama, a professor at Fukushima Univ. in Japan, said in an interview with China Media Group last May, “If the Japanese government or the Tokyo Elec Power Co really wants to discharge contaminated water into the sea, they need to explain in more detail whether the nuclides have really been removed.”

Ice wall also melts

Tepco intended to reduce the volume of groundwater gushing into the reactor building foundations by digging a $350 million “ice wall” into the earth between the destroyed reactors and the mountains behind. The company placed 1,568 heavy pipes filled with coolant 90 feet deep. It was to freeze the ground to form a deep impenetrable barrier, diverting groundwater to either side of the destroyed six-reactor Fukushima complex and prevent it seeping inside. It has failed to do so, The Guardian reported. In 2016, the Times of London reported that the scheme had only a “minor impact” on the volume of groundwater rushing in, which at the time still averaged 321 tonnes a day. Tepco announced then that it would retrofit the system and fix the leaks, but Science/The Wire reported in January 2022 that the company had admitted that its ice wall was “partially” melting. About 150 tonnes per day still gushes in.

Filtered sludge burning through containers

The ALPS filter has produced over 4,000 large containers filled with highly radioactive slurry and sludge left from the treatment.

Like the use of the word “advanced” in the name of the failed ALPS machinery, the cylinders used for the caustic, highly radioactive sludge are called “High Integrity Containers” or HICs, but in fact they are made of plastic and have degraded far faster than Tepco anticipated.

By March 2, Tepco had filled 4,143 containers, according to the daily Asahi Shimbun. At 30 cubic feet each, the cylinders now store a total of about 124,290 cubic feet of the highly radioactive sludge that will soon require expensive repackaging and, eventually, isolation from the biosphere for thousands of years.

Over two years ago, on June 8, 2021, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) announced that 31 of the containers had “exceeded their lifespans” and were corroded badly enough by the harsh toxic material that they must be replaced. The NRA also warned that another 56 cylinders would need replacing within two years.

Japan’s Mainichi newspaper reported that the government regulators blamed Tepco for “underestimating the radiation the 31 plastic cylinders were exposed to.” The company then claimed it would start moving the contents to new containers.

The Asahi Shimbun reported April 27, 2023, that the HICs must be stored in concrete boxes that can block radiation evidently being emitted by the HICs.

Rad waste to be dumped, deregulated

As early as next month, Japan intends to begin dispersing 1.37 million tonnes of contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The government has steadfastly ignored fierce local and international opposition to the plan from the fishing community, marine scientists, Pacific Island nations, environmentalists, South Korea, and China. So far only South Korean politicians have suggested bringing international legal action against the dumping.

Since the 2011 meltdowns spewed radioactive materials broadly across Japan’s main island, some 14-million tonnes of cesium-contaminated soil, leaves, and debris have been scraped from the ground and stored in one-tonne bags.  Citizens are struggling desperately prevent authorities from using the radioactive waste in road building or burning it in incinerators. The bags are currently stacked in tens of thousands of piles all over the region.

Even more protest was raised last February 10 when the NRA said it would allow Tepco to severely weaken its monitoring of the wastewater’s radioactivity. The NRA said would but the number of radioactive elements to be measured from 64 to 34.

The environment minister of Hong Kong — a coastal metropolis of 7.5 million people — charged in June that Japan is “violating its obligations under international law and endangering the marine environment and public health.” Minister Tse Chin-wan wrote in the daily Ta Kung Pao that Hong Kong would “immediately prohibit imports of seafood caught off the coast of Fukushima prefecture.”

Plutonium Spread Long Distances from Fukushima

Very few reports of the Fukushima catastrophic releases of radiation have mentioned plutonium contamination. Yet plutonium was used in fuel rods in Fukushima’s reactor number 3 which was destroyed by meltdown and several hydrogen explosions. Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known to science, and fine particles are far more biologically hazardous than larger particles.

Following the March 14, 2011 explosion, experts worried about the release of extremely dangerous radioactive substances, and then a week later, on March 21 and 22, Tepco announced that it had detected plutonium in soil collected from its compound. (Fukushima Meltdown, Takashi Hirose, p. 51)

Now, studies published in the journals Science of the Total Environment, Nov. 15, 2020, and Chemosphere, July 2023, report that researchers found that cesium and plutonium “were transported over long distances,” and that deposits of them were recorded in “downtown Tokyo,” about 142 miles from the meltdowns.

According to the authors, very high concentrations of radioactive cesium were released during the accident as particles referred to as “cesium-rich micro-particles” (CsMPs). The researchers say CsMPs they found are mainly composed of silicon, iron, zinc, and cesium, and minor amounts of radioactive tellurium, technetium, molybdenum, uranium, and plutonium.

The studies, involving scientists from six countries and led by Associate Professor Satoshi Utsunomiya, a researcher at Kyushu University, found that “plutonium was included inside cesium-rich micro-particles that were emitted from the site.”

Radioactive CsMPs released from Fukushima are a potential health risk through inhalation. “Given the small size of the particles, they could penetrate into the deepest parts of the lung, where they could be retained,” Utsunomiya wrote. “The route of exposure of greatest concern is inhalation,” the authors reported, because plutonium, lodged in the lungs, can “remain for years.”

Utsunomiya summed up his team’s work saying, “It took a long time to publish results on particulate [plutonium] from Fukushima … but research on Fukushima’s environmental impact and its decommissioning are a long way from being over.”

John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch. A version of this article was published July 6, 2023 at CounterPunch.org.

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

June 30, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S. Depleted Uranium to Make Ukraine War Dirtier

By John LaForge

The Biden administration is expected to supply Ukraine with highly controversial depleted-uranium munitions which are to be fired from the Abrams battle tanks the U.S. is sending to Kyiv, the Wall St. Journal reported June 13.

Any delivery of U.S. depleted uranium (DU) weapons to Ukraine would be in addition to the State Department’s Dec. 22, 2022 approval of the sale to Poland of as many as 112,000 heavy 120-millimeter DU shells, which was announced by the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

The British Ministry of Defense announced last March 20 that it too would send depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine  along with its Challenger battle tanks. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded at the time charging that sending DU into Ukraine would mean the U.K. was “ready to violate international humanitarian law as in 1999 in Yugoslavia.”  The reference may be to the United Nations Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights which in 2002 labeled the use of DU “inhumane” and a violation of treaties like the Hague Conventions which expressly forbid any use of “poison or poisoned weapons.”

The Wall St. Journal’s understated sub-headline on June 13 warned: “The armor-piercing ammunition has raised concerns over health and environmental effects.” Indeed, between 1997 and 2004, USA Today, the Associated Press, New York Daily News, Life magazine, CNN, and others reported that studies were finding a significantly increased rate of birth abnormalities among children of U.S. Gulf War veterans and among Iraqi children born after 1991. (“DU in UKRAINE – John Pilger & Phil Miller,” Consortium News, May 11, 2023; “Tainted uranium, danger widely distributed,” USA Today, June 25, 2001)

The Journal’s article acknowledged that “The United Nations Environment Program said in a report last year that the [depleted uranium] metal’s ‘chemical toxicity’ presents the greatest potential danger, and ‘it can cause skin irritation, kidney failure, and increase the risks of cancer.’”

However, the paper “balanced” this U.N. warning by quoting John Kirby, a National Security Council coordinator, who reportedly dared to say last March that “studies indicate it isn’t a radioactive threat.” In fact, the most damning reports about the harmful health and environmental effects of exposure to DU contamination come from the U.S. military itself. (See below.)

If the shells are used in the Ukraine war, the soil, water, crops, and livestock of the territory being contested will likely be contaminated with uranium and the other radioactive materials that are in the armor-piercing munitions. This is because when DU smashes through tank armor, it becomes an aerosol of dust or gas-like particles that can be inhaled and carried long distances on the wind.

In 2003, experts at the Pentagon and the United Nations estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 tonnes of DU were used by U.S.-led forces during their attack on Iraq in March and April that year. That same year, the British Royal Society, declared that hundreds of tons of DU used by Britain and the U.S. against Iraq should be removed to protect the civilian population, contradicting Pentagon claims it was not necessary. (“Scientists Urge Shell Clear-Up to Protect Civilians, Royal Society spells out dangers of depleted uranium,” The Guardian, April 17, 2003)

After NATO’s use of DU weapons in Kosovo in 1999, the Council of Europe called for a world-wide ban on the production, testing, use, and sale of DU weapons, asserting that DU pollution would have “long term effects on health and quality of life in South-East Europe, affecting future generations.” The call went unheeded.

Background

Depleted uranium is uranium hexafluoride or uranium-238, a waste material left from reactor fuel and nuclear warhead production. It is radioactive and a toxic heavy metal, and there are between 560,000 and 700,000 metric tons of this waste stored in the United States. On March 25, 1997 the New York Times reported the volume as 1.25 billion pounds. The military calls DU munitions “armor piercing cartridges” avoiding the taint of the word “uranium.”

In 1991, between 300 and 800 tons of DU munitions were blasted into Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait by U.S. forces. The Pentagon says the U.S. military fired about 10,800 DU rounds — about three tons — into Bosnia in 1994 and 1995. Over 31,000 DU rounds — about ten tons — were shot into Kosovo in 1999 according to NATO. In Iraq, in the number of birth abnormalities skyrocketed following the massive use of DU in the Persian Gulf War. (“EU begins inquiry of veterans’ cancer,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, January 4, 2001) In Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age (International Physicians Press, 1992), the authors say, “… plutonium is probably the most carcinogenic substance known.”

The U.S. Department of Energy admitted in January 2000 that the metal in DU shells is often contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, and americium, long-lived, highly radioactive isotopes, much more hazardous than DU, or uranium-238. (“Pentagon admits plutonium exposure: NATO shells used radioactive metals,” London, AP, The Capital Times, February 3, 2001; New York Times, February 14, 2001)

While the U.S. military repeatedly declares that its uranium weapons contain uranium-238, and that its DU shells “are less radioactive than natural uranium,” the United Nations Environment Program and others demonstrated that uranium shells used by the U.S. and the U.K. were contaminated with fission products including plutonium. (“DU at Home,” The Nation, April 9, 2001)

Government evidence of harm

* In 2002, the U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute found in a preliminary report that DU produces one-million times as much chromosome damage as would be predicted from its radioactivity alone, and that it causes a form of long-term “delayed reproductive death” of cells. The AFRR institute then canceled the funding of this research.

* In 1997, the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute reportedly found that, “In animal studies, embedded DU, unlike most metals, dissolves and spreads throughout the body depositing in organs like the spleen and the brain, and a pregnant female rat will pass DU along to a developing fetus.”  The Army’s Office of the Surgeon General’s 1993 manual “Depleted Uranium Safety Training” says the expected effects of DU exposure include a possible increase of cancer (lung and bone) and kidney damage. It recommends that the Army “… convene a working group … to identify countermeasures against DU exposure.”

* In 1995, the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute reported, “The radiation dose to critical organs depends upon the amount of time that depleted uranium resides in the organs. When this value is known or estimated, cancer and hereditary risk estimates can be determined.” Depleted uranium has the potential to generate “significant medical consequences” if it enters the body, the AEPI found.

* In 1990, the Army’s Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command radiological task group said that depleted uranium is a “low level alpha radiation emitter … linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage.” The group’s report said that “long term effects of low doses [of DU] have been implicated in cancer … there is no dose so low that the probability of effect is zero.”

* In 1984, the Federal Aviation Administration warned its investigators, “If particles are inhaled or ingested, they can be chemically toxic and cause a significant and long-lasting irradiation of internal tissue.”

* In 1979, the U.S. Army Mobility Equipment, Research & Development Command warned, “Not only the people in the immediate vicinity (emergency and fire-fighting personnel) but also people at distances downwind from the fire are faced with potential over exposure to airborne uranium dust.”

Any threatened or actual use of poisonous, gene-busting depleted uranium munitions in Ukraine cannot be considered lawful or ethical and must be condemned unreservedly by civil society on all sides of the Ukraine war.  ###

— John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States. A version of this was published June 30, 2023 by CounterPunch.org.

 

Filed Under: Depleted Uranium, Environment, Environmental Justice, Radioactive Waste, War, Weekly Column

April 24, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Treaty Law ‘Enforcer’ Endures Prison, While U.S. Nuclear Bombs in Europe Give Putin an Idea

Dennis DuVall, pictured at the main gate to the nuclear NATO base Büchel in Germany, began a 60-day prison sentence in Germany on 23 March.

By John LaForge

You have to hand it to Dennis DuVall. At age 81, he’s on the cutting edge of the hottest of political and military issues — nuclear weapons — and has put life and limb on the right side of history.

On March 23, DuVall began a 60-day prison sentence in Germany for refusing to pay fines for nonviolent interference with the lawless stationing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Deutschland, at the Büchel air base. (U.S. H-bombs are also ‘forward deployed’ in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey.)

DuVall recently wrote a ‘Büchel Manifesto’ where he says: ‘Nonviolent direct actions at Büchel NATO base … intended to stop, prevent, or disrupt German Tornado pilots of the 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing and the U.S. Air Force’s 702nd Munitions Support Squadron from training to drop B61 thermonuclear bombs on targets in Russia.’

Now, with renewed alarm over the nuclear threats due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, DuVall is shining a spotlight on the risk escalation posed by the United States and NATO. It’s not just Russia that’s ratcheted up the chances of nuclear weapons’ use. It was blundering German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock who blurted out Jan. 24 in Strasbourg, France, ‘We are fighting a war against Russia …’

Two days after DuVall entered Bautzen prison, east of Dresden, Russia’s Vladimir Putin announced plans to station Russian nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, causing a loud if hypocritical reaction from the U.S. and NATO. Overnight, the imprisonment of a long-time Veteran for Peace and Air Force veteran of the U.S. war in Vietnam looked like a bellwether for a long-overdue debate on U.S. nukes stationed in Europe, because Putin said his March 25 announcement was a tit-for-tat.

According to Newsweek, ‘“… the United States has been doing this for decades. They have long deployed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of their allied countries,” said Putin.’ Then, after French President Macron declared, ‘In no case can nuclear weapons be deployed outside the territory of nuclear power, especially in Europe,’ the Russian Foreign Ministry asked with a smirk: ‘Is Paris’ demand “not to deploy nuclear weapons on foreign territory” addressed to Washington?’ according to Hindustan Times. In a related rejoinder, “Putin said he made this decision because the United Kingdom agreed to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds that contain depleted uranium,” Foreign Policy reported March 27.

German’s branch of International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms joined the debate March 29 noting in a press release, “Nuclear sharing violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the human right to life.”

Andrea Sasse of the German foreign ministry described Russian but not NATO’s nuclear sharing as “irresponsible”, “escalatory”, and “another attempt at nuclear intimidation”, the Guardian reported March 27. Germany’s hypocrisy is rich. Just last August, its UN Ambassador Thomas Göbel declared to the General Assembly in writing: “NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements, which include U.S. nuclear weapons forward-deployed in Europe and Dual-Capable Aircraft provided by a number of European Allies, continue to be, fully consistent and compliant with the NPT.”

With tongue firmly in cheek, Putin’s announcement used the same falsehood as Amb. Göbel, and claimed that nuclear sharing could be done “without in any way violating our obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

The Pentagon’s critique included a veiled reminder of the threat posed by its own H-bombs in Europe: ‘“We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture”, the U.S. Defense Department said in a statement’, Reuters reported March 26. It’s worth recalling that Gen. Tod Wolters, head of U.S. European Command and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, testified to the Senate Feb. 25, 2020: “I’m a fan of flexible [nuclear weapons] first-use policy.” This ‘policy’ is the standing threat by the US and NATO to start nuclear attacks not in retaliation, but without first being so attacked.

In his obscure cell in Bautzen, DuVall is doing time for acting as if the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty were the law of the land. He’s a crime fighter for interfering with U.S./NATO’s plans for initiating nuclear attacks. He can take some credit for the fact that the “sharing” of U.S. B61 H-bomb’s, and “strategic” threats to use them, are in the news more than ever before. #######

— John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch and co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A guide to the 450 land-based missiles of the United States. An edited version of this comment was syndicated by PeaceVoice.org.

 

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

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