Weekly Column – Page 25

January 12, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Radiation Exposures, Voluntary and Otherwise

**The Nuclear Fix: A Guide to Nuclear Activities in the Third World, by Thijs de la Court, Deborah Pick, & Daniel Nordquist, page 8, World Information Service on Energy (WISE), The Netherlands, 1982**

By John LaForge

There is no safe exposure to ionizing radiation — the alpha, beta, and gamma and X-rays given off by radioactive materials used in medicine, the military, industry, and nuclear power. The US National Academy of Sciences’ 7th book-length study on the biological effects of ionizing radiation, BEIR-VII, declared that any exposure, regardless of how small, may cause the induction of cancer, birth abnormalities, and/or other diseases. And every US government agency that regulates industrial releases or the medical uses of radiation makes the same warning, based on BEIR-VII.

Today the nuclear military-industrial-medical complex is merely required to keep radiation exposures “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.” I didn’t make that up. This uber-vague, tragi-comic standard is not a medical or scientific concept. It is however the formal admission that radiation’s producers cannot keep worker or public exposures to a level that is safe — that is to zero.

Exposure standards have been established at the convenience of the vast radiation complex, not by medical doctors or health physicists. During the Cold War arms race, the late Dr. Rosalie Bertell reported in her groundbreaking book No Immediate Danger, “[T]he people with the highest vested interest are the ones that are making the nuclear bombs. And it turns out they have complete control over setting the permissible [radiation exposure] levels. If you were to fix radiation limits at levels that were really protective of human health, you couldn’t get anybody to make bombs.” These corrupt old limits are still mostly in effect today.

What the government has declared an “allowable” dose of ionizing radiation has steadily and dramatically decreased over the years — as science has come to better understand the toxic, cancer-causing, mutagenic, and teratogenic properties of even low doses.

In the 1920s, the government set the allowable radiation dose for nuclear industry workers at 75 “rem” per year. In 1936 the limit was reduced to 50 rem-per-year; then 20-to-25 in 1948; 15 in 1954, and finally down to five rem-per-year in 1958. This legal dose limit for radiation industry workers is still in effect — in spite of the fact that the International Commission on Radiation Protection recommended in 1990 that these doses be dramatically reduced (again), from 5-rem, to 2-rem-per-year.

The US just halted its hapless, industry-opposed, 27-year effort to adopt this precautionary standard. (See last week’s column.) Amazingly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) admitted in the Federal Register that implementing the improvement would be too costly, bowing to industry’s lobby efforts rather than adopt a public health standard the rest of the world embraced decades ago.

The general public is officially allowed to be exposed to one-50th of a nuclear industry workers’ radiation dose per year, or 0.1 rem (100 millirem) over a 70-year lifespan. According to research by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, this allowable, 100 millirem public dose, set by the NRC, imposes a “one of 286” cancer fatality risk standard. That is, fatal cancer given “accidentally” to one out of every 286 people is considered “acceptable,” “permissible” and “allowable” by the federal government. You could call this a license to kill. BEIR-VII found that “radiation at this level to women results in one fatal cancer in every 201 women” — acknowledging that a given radiation dose is far more dangerous for women than for men, and, by extension, that women’s lives mean less to Uncle Sam than men’s.

The use of radiation in medicine at least involves the patient’s informed consent regarding the risks. And industry workers can be said to voluntarily accept the risks of workplace radiation exposures. But the public’s involuntary and unbeknownst radiation exposures — via the government’s and industry’s deliberate (and often secret, or misreported, or unregulated, or covered-up) venting, leaking and haphazard dispersal of radioactive gases, liquids and solid wastes — are adding to cancer statistics that grow worse every year. Radioactive emissions from operating reactors, waste fuel pools, fuel and isotope fabrication facilities, unregulated landfills, waste transports, etc., are avoidable, because the industry can be retired, nuclear weapons abolished, and waste sites cleaned up. Call that a national security objective worthy of the military budget.

October 31, 2016 by Arianne Peterson Leave a Comment

US Uranium Weapons Have Been Used in Syria

This month, the Pentagon admitted it has used uranium weapons in attacks inside Syria — violating its public promise last year that it would not use DU there, and contradicting the claim that US bombing is done in defense of the Syrian people, according to the Int’l Campaign to Ban Uranium Weapons.

Like the Pentagon’s past denials of the dangers of the chemical weapon Agent Orange, US military officials still claim publicly that its uranium weapons are not known to cause health problems. Made from waste uranium-238 — left from H-bomb and reactor fuel production — it is called “depleted” uranium (DU) but is only “depleted” of U-235. Ironically, the best evidence that it is dangerously toxic and radioactive — contrary to press pronouncements — comes from the Pentagon itself. A June 1995 report to Congress by the Army’s Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI) concluded: “Depleted uranium is a radioactive waste and, as such, should be deposited in a licensed repository.”

Military studies done in 1979, ‘90, ‘93, ‘95 and ‘97, make clear that uranium weapons are chemically toxic, alpha-radiation-emitting poisons that are a danger to target populations and to invading/occupying US forces alike. In spite of this cautionary written record, the military has been shooting its radioactive waste all over the world: into population centers in Iraq in 1991 (380 tons), in Afghanistan in 2001 (amounts unknown); in Bosnia in 1994-‘95 (five tons); in Kosovo in 1999 (10 tons), in Iraq again in 2003 (170 tons); and now in Syria.

The AEPI report above also says that DU has the potential to generate “significant medical consequences” if it enters the body. The Army’s Office of the Surgeon General, in its Aug. 16, 1993 “Depleted Uranium Safety Training Manual,” says that the expected effects of DU exposure include a possible increase of cancer, and kidney damage. The manual also warns, “When soldiers inhale or ingest DU dust, they incur a potential increase in cancer risk … (lung or bone) and kidney damage.”

The Army’s Mobility Equipment, Research & Development Command reported way back in 1979 that, “Not only the people in the immediate vicinity but also people at distances downwind from the fire are faced with potential over exposure to air-borne uranium dust.” This uranium “dust” is generated when DU shells hit and burn through hard targets like tanks or armored vehicles. The uranium is spread for miles by the wind, contaminating everything is its path including food, water, soil, schools, hospitals, etc., and DU is radioactive forever, or ten times 4.5 billion years, whichever comes first.

In 1990, the Army’s Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command radiological task group said that DU is a “low level alpha radiation emitter … linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage.” It added that “there is no dose so low that the probability of effect is zero.”

With evidence of its radio-toxicity so clear and redundant, any use of uranium weapons today appears to flaunt the military’s own Field Manual prohibition — absolute and universal — against the use of poison or poisoned weapons.

Historical Disregard Revisited

The military has a long history of deliberately exposing US citizens and others to deadly risks without their knowledge or consent, beginning with the open-air nuclear bomb tests it knew would contaminate vast areas. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chose not to evacuate or even warn downwind populations it knew would be hard-hit by radioactive fallout. (“Fallout risk near atom tests was known, documents show,” New York Times, March 15, 1995) These bomb tests exposed Nevada Test Site workers to levels of radiation that the AEC knew could cause harm, but the agency chose not to reduce workers’ exposures or to even inform them of the risks because doing so would have scandalized and halted the bombing tests. (“Records say workers faced high radiation: Suit contends US used no safeguards,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, Dec. 14, 1989)

Likewise, the government refused to inform some 600,000 H-bomb factory workers that workplace radiation exposures posed serious health risks, although enough was known about radiation to warn them in 1948. (“N-plant workers not told of risks: Report says US arms program exposed many to radiation,” Associated Press, Dec. 19, 1989) Between 1944 and 1974, “medicalized” human radiation experiments were even conducted on unwitting US citizens, 16,000 of them (The Plutonium Files, by Eileen Welsome).

Today, the Pentagon extends this ghastly history into Syria where it is deliberately exposing human beings to weaponized radiation that it knows can cause cancer and other diseases. As if the undeclared, unconstitutional war in Syria weren’t unlawful enough, now add the crime of using poison in violation of military law and the Hague Regulations of War on Land.

It is so easy to prove that DU is poison, that a group of four non-lawyers, myself included, convinced a Minneapolis jury in 2004 that AlliantTechsystems’ manufacture of the shells is unlawful enough to excuse an otherwise illegal trespass; our minor offense was justified in order to prevent the greater harm of DU weapons production. Like torture, the use of such poison in war is always criminal, akin to gas war. This latest US government war crime must be condemned in the harshest terms.

For more information on DU weapons and the global effort to have them banned, see ICBUW.org.

This article was published by Counterpunch on October 28, 2016 and the Duluth Reader Weekly on October 27, 2016.

September 2, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Poly-Met’s 500-Year Copper Nickle Pollution

The answer man Donald Trump said August 8 that halting all new federal regulations will create jobs. Notwithstanding the jobs created by implementing new regulations, Trump’s proposal has already been tried by the State of Minnesota, in a retroactive way, with consequences that are predictably toxic to water.

In 2015, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) was forced to abandon its duty to protect state waters from mining runoff after the Legislature passed bills that “essentially exempted taconite mining” operations from complying with the 40-year-old sulfate standard for waters with wild rice — as Mordecai Specktor reports in the August 2016 issue of The Circle.

Paula Maccabee, advocacy director and chief counsel of the non-profit group Water Legacy, interviewed by Specktor, said the 2015 law that instructed the MPCA not to enforce the sulfate pollution standard “was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Water Legacy then petitioned the US Environmental Protection Agency over the State Legislature’s and the MPCA’s “failure to respect the [US] Clean Water act and to enforce laws limiting mine pollution.”

Maccabee tole me in an email Aug. 8 “We consider the EPA’s protocol and the EPA’s many letters and requests for information from Minnesota agencies to function as replies to WaterLegacy’s petition to remove Minnesota state agencies” from oversight of mining operations.”

EPA staff are still in the process of conducting an in-depth investigation, so they have neither reached conclusions regarding their potential findings nor communicated them either to WaterLegacy or to MPCA. … I expect that both WaterLegacy and the MPCA will be given an opportunity to comment when EPA has reached the point of preparing draft findings resulting from its investigation.

“I believe it is likely that the MN attorney general will respond to EPA’s questions by August 12, since the AG hasn’t requested an additional extension of time.

PolyMet’s early pollution projections admitted that acid mine drainage – which permanently destroys surface water systems — from its proposed sulfide mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness would be a serious problem for over 500 years. Consequently, PolyMet must be legally required to monitor for and clean up acid mine drainage for 500 years.

A 500-year cleanup mandate must also be applied to all future follow-on companies that will replace what’s now called “PolyMet.” Changing the name of mining companies is an age-old method of avoiding legal liability. PolyMet’s promises of clean copper-sulfide mining must be backed up with permanent guarantees for monitoring, and waste disposal, cleanup and reclamation no matter what subsequent PolyMet knockoff companies might be named.
Of course such a mandate has never been imposed on a mine project and would probably kill the proposal if imposed. This is why the embarrassing 500-year pollution warning has been buried by PolyMet and never appeared in the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) Nov. 6, 2015.
Instead, the company and DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr use the term “indefinitely.” How can PolyMet be forced to prevent pollution “indefinitely”?

This is because PolyMet’s promises are really hot air, and Minnesota’s reputation at a good environmental steward is actually a myth that has never applied to Minnesota mining practices.

• Why has there been no independent water modeling required in the environmental review process? Critics point out that all the data and analysis of how much polluted water could drain from the mine site and the tailings site has come from PolyMet.

• As Water Legacy notes, “Across the country, there is no example where a sulfide mine has been operated and closed without polluting surface and/or groundwater with acid mine drainage, sulfuric acid and/or toxic metals.” Why has PolyMet been allowed to submit a shabbily supported environmental review based on unsubstantiated claims and faulty data?

• The FEIS concludes that it’s “unlikely” acid mine drainage will move north into the pristine Boundary Waters Wilderness, but that if the permanent pollution does flow north (permanently), PolyMet will “fill cracks in the bedrock.” Why is the potential devastation of the Boundary Waters, an otherwise highly-protected national wilderness treasured because of its lack of pollution, allowed to be brushed off with such fatuous gibberish?

I’m sure I’m not the first person to howl at that concept of “filling cracks in the bedrock.” The idea sounds like bovine excrement, or like the unworkable “ice wall” being built in Japan to slow groundwater flowing through Fukushima’s three melted reactors.

September 1, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Dangerous Nuclear Plant Rising on DC’s Doorstep

By JOHN LAFORGE / CounterPunch / SEPT. 1, 2016

Dominion Virginia Power, a section of the giant utility Dominion, is proceeding unlawfully with construction of its $19-billion-plus power reactor 80 miles from Washington, DC — called North Anna 3 — and must get formal approval from the Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) before it can continue, according to a petition filed August 30th by the Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (VCCC; ), a nonprofit group based in Elliston, Va.

The group’s “Petition for a Declaratory Judgment” says in part: “At an estimated total cost of at least $19.2 billion, North Anna 3 would be the most expensive power [reactor] ever built in the United States and could raise customers’ rates by 26 % or more according to the Virginia Attorney General. While Dominion claims that North Anna 3 is needed for compliance with the federal Clean Power Plan, it would be far costlier than the low-carbon alternative of combined renewables, demand-side management, and efficiency … Dominion has not complied with Virginia law by failing to seek SCC approval before making expenditures on project development and beginning preliminary construction of North Anna 3.”

VCCC President Irene Leech said in a statement: “This is a huge raid on the pocketbooks of Virginia consumers and businesses. Dominion has spent approximately $600 million on project development and preliminary construction of North Anna 3, but has not yet sought or obtained Virginia State Corporation Commission approval for those expenditures. This is not a lawful or prudent way for Dominion to proceed when ratepayers are going to end up footing the bill. We’ve already seen ratepayers in this state stuck with a tab for over $300 million for the North Anna 3 project and there is no guarantee a reactor will ever be built or a single electron of power will be generated.”

In a formal declaration submitted in support of VCCC’s petition, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Commissioner Peter Bradford, who also served as chairman of state utility regulatory agencies in both New York and Maine and now is an adjunct professor at Vermont Law School, wrote: “The economic impact of North Anna 3 on Virginia will be immense. Dominion’s construction cost estimate of $19.2 billion dollars (including financing costs) for the proposed 1470 megawatt power reactor would be a commitment of about $2,400 for every citizen of Virginia, or $9,600 per family of four, and — of course — the impact is even greater because it is confined to Dominion customers.”

“Abysmally wasteful and unnecessary”

On July 12, 2016, Dr. Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis, Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, also submitted formal comments on behalf of VCCC. Dr. Cooper calls the North Anna 3 project “abysmally wasteful and unnecessary,” concluding that it would cost twice as much as solar to generate the same amount of energy, [and] fatten profits for shareholders by inflating Virginia ratepayer bills by up to 36% (reflecting $6-12 billion in unnecessary costs).

Dr. Cooper’s analysis concluded: “North Anna 3 is unreasonable, unnecessary, inefficient and wasteful and should be removed from Dominion’s Integrated Resource Plan. Dominion is incorrect in asserting that North Anna 3 is needed to satisfy the requirements of the (EPA) Clean Power Plan. To the contrary, a combination of renewables, demand side management, and efficiency can not only provide equivalent capacity, but also the same level of excess capacity.”

Dominion’s corporate website says the company “is a safe, world-class nuclear operator, and as part of its strategy to ensure adequate, reliable electricity for the future, the company is taking steps toward constructing a third nuclear generating unit adjacent to its existing two nuclear units at its North Anna Power Station in Louisa Co., Va.”

On Aug. 23, 2011, the North Anna site was rocked by a 5.8-magnitude earthquake that shook Dominion’s old reactors 1 & 2 twice as hard as they were built to handle. This unanticipated “violation” was the first of its kind in the country’s 60-year-long history of nuclear power, and came six months after the catastrophic earthquake-tsunami-and-triple meltdown in Fukushima, Japan. The Virginia quake moved 25 of Dominion’s outdoor waste casks — that hold highly radioactive, extremely hot waste fuel and weigh 115 tons each — up to 4.5 inches.

Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but the $19 billion Unit 3 is being built above an earthquake fault.

For more info: VCCC: www.consumerfed.org/virginia-citizens-consumer-council

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

August 23, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Waste Isolation Pilot” Becomes $2 Billion Waste Dispersal Site

In 1989, the renowned undersea explorer Jacque Cousteau said, “A common denominator in every single nuclear accident — a nuclear plant or on a nuclear submarine — is that before the specialists even know what has happened, they rush to the media saying, ‘There’s no danger to the public.’ They do this before they themselves know what has happened because they are terrified that the public might react violently, either by panic or by revolt.”

On Feb. 14, 2014 a barrel of plutonium-contaminated waste blew apart deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The WIPP experiment was an attempt to discard some plutonium wastes left from 60 years of nuclear weapons production. The uncontrolled explosion spewed plutonium particles throughout the vast, mine-like underground chambers and scattered them all up and down the 2,150-foot deep elevator and ventilations shafts, closing the dumpsite indefinitely. This week the Los Angeles Times reports that it will cost at least $2 billion to repair the damage and to attempt decontamination.

Ventilation shaft filtration systems failed to keep the contamination underground, and a federal investigation found two dozen violations of safety procedures, yet even 2.5 years later the government doesn’t know why the barrel blew. “And [the $2B] does not include the complete replacement of the contaminated ventilation system or any future costs of operating the mine longer than originally planned,” the Times reported.

At WIPP, Cousteau’s ‘common denominator’ kicked in as usual. As the LA Times said: “When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department [DOE] rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations. The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation…”

Dispersed plutonium-laden dusts were pulled up the deep shafts by the huge ventilation fans on the surface and at least 13 workers on site that day were exposed.

The DOE now says 13 workers present during the radioactive release “were tested for internal radioactive contamination” (emphasis added) and that “Initial fecal samples measured some radioactivity above normal background levels.” This admission is vanishingly rare and extremely serious for the victims, considering the inability to decontaminate your insides.

The DOE also says that 140 workers were exposed to radiation the following day (it doesn’t use the word “plutonium” much), and that “… 22 were notified that their exposure was below the 10 millirem level, which is about the same exposure a person would get from a chest x-ray.”

Regular readers will recall that for the government to compare internal radiation exposure to X-rays is deliberate, sophisticated disinformation, because X-rays only dose the target with radiation externally. The difference is highly significant. Dr. Chris Busby, of the Low Level Radiation Campaign (llrc.org), says it’s the difference between sitting in front of a warm fire, and popping a hot coal from the fire into your mouth. (The Energy Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the National Nuclear Security Administration all use this magician’s trick: getting us to look at the wrong thing.)

WIPP’s worker exposures were internal or breathed-in exposures, in which hot particles can lodge in tissue or bone and then for long periods of time bombard surrounding cells with deadly radiation.

The pro-nuke lobby will chant that ‘nobody died at WIPP’ because of the 2014 disaster. But radiation shortens lives and causes dozens of debilitating diseases and disorders short of death including nose bleeds, bleeding gums, joint pain, hair loss, liver disorders, elevated blood pressure, gastro intestinal problems, muscle pain, headaches, fatigue, skin rashes, respiratory problems, heart problems, miscarriages, stillbirths, infant mortality, birth abnormalities, and cancers.

The so-called Pilot Project at Carlsbad had been promoted as the disposal answer for plutonium-tainted nuclear weapons waste, and was “designed to last 10,000 years.” But as Santa Monica, Calif. activist Myla Reson reports, “The dump failed 9,985 years ahead of schedule.”

And we’re safer for it, Reson says, “because justification for approval of the dump relied on a fabricated site characterization and analysis” which made continued use of the dump potentially catastrophic — either through onsite explosions, long-term ground water contamination, or transportation disasters involving crashes en route from Hanford, Washington and the Idaho National Lab, and a dozen other H-bomb production sites from Livermore, Calif., to Oak Ridge Tenn.