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Unwinnable War Budget Goes Nuclear

In keeping with the Trump Administration’s Feb. 2nd Nuclear Posture Review, Trump’s just-released Fiscal Year 2019 federal budget proposal dramatically ramps-up nuclear weapons research and production.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, is receiving a $2.2 billion overall boost to $15.1 billion, a 17 percent increase above FY 2018. Of that, a full $12.8 billion is for nuclear weapons — 8 percent above FY 2018.

The NNSA’s “Directed [nuclear weapons] Stockpile Work” is increased 41 percent, from $3.3 billion to $4.7 billion. The “stockpile” programs are the hands-on, nut-and-bolts operations that include extending the operational service time of today’s nuclear weapons for up to 60 years, while also endowing them with new military capabilities.

In addition, the NNSA budget shows the addition of another $1.76 billion to “Nuclear Weapons Activities,” for a grand total FY 2019 budget of $12.78 billion. The document doesn’t make clear where the additional money comes from. In the past it’s been drawn from Pentagon, but elsewhere in Trump’s budget there is a cut of over $17 billion from the anti-poverty Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which ought to cover the NNSA.

Of course, these figures cover just one fiscal year. Enormous as they are, they’re merely down-payments that only open the door on a proposed 30-year nuclear weapons “rebuild.” The $1.74 trillion “upgrade” includes $313 billion for a new fleet of missile-launching submarines; $13 billion for a “smart” hydrogen bomb the United States has never built before; $50 billion for a so-called “interoperable” nuclear warheads intended for use on either submarines, rockets, or missiles; $127 billion for a new heavy, long-range bomber dubbed the “China bomber” (to improve relations with our No. 1 trading partner); $30 billion for a new nuclear-armed Cruise missile; $149 billion for 600 new land-based missiles; and another $261 billion to rebuilt the Y-12 bomb plant in Tennessee, the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico, and the (already finished) Kansas City bomb plant in Missouri.

Trump’s plan also calls for a 13 percent increase in over all military spending (about $80 billion), raising Pentagon allotment to $686 billion. Can you say “national bankruptcy”?

In a show of fiscal responsibility, some of the increases in weapons and war planning programs are being offset by deep cuts to the social safety net, education and healthcare programs. Although Mr. Trump’s political base of undereducated white supremacists are the biggest user of food stamps in the country, his budget slashes the Department of Education by over 10 percent, and bars Food Stamp recipients from buying fresh food and vegetables, “providing only a box food delivery program,” Democracy Now! reported. Trump’s budget also phases out federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which supports public and community radio and TV stations, also known as Educational TV. With cuts to health, education and nutrition programs, you’d think the Self-proclaimed “genius” was trying to dumb down the electorate.

Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico summed up the fiscal year plan this way: “Trump’s budget prepares for nuclear war, which even Ronald Reagan said ‘can’t be won and must never be fought.’ It finances a new arms race with Russia and increases the chances of a nuclear war with North Korea. It further raids the treasury by diverting huge sums of money to the usual fat cat nuclear weapons contractors.”

There must be a way to cut military spending, but we would have to be able to grasp its magnitude. In just the fiscal year 2015, the warplane, missile and satellite maker Lockheed Martin Corporation alone won $46 billion in military contracts. –John LaForge

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US NUCLEAR WAR PLAN or “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW” 2018

The “Nuclear Posture Review” is the sterile, abstract, ambiguous, euphemistic government explanation of its plans to commit indiscriminate mass slaughter of civlians using nuclear weapons. The Feb. 2, 2018 is the newest since 2010. Photo: Peter Sellers as “Dr. Strangelove.”

HERE IS THE US GOVERNMENT’S 2018 NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY and LANGUAGE ON USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS KNOWN AS THE “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW” 

 

 

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Fukushima’s Radiation Will Poison Food “for Decades,” Study Finds

Three of the six reactors at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi complex were wrecked in March 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami. The destruction of emergency electric generators caused a “station blackout” which halted cooling water intake and circulation. Super-heated, out-of-control uranium fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 then boiled off cooling water, and some 300 tons of fuel “melted” and burned through the reactors’ core vessels, gouging so deep into underground sections of the structure that to this day operators aren’t sure where it is. Several explosions in reactor buildings and uncovered fuel rods caused the spewing of huge quantities of radioactive materials to the atmosphere, and the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean ever recorded. Fukushima amounts to Whole-Earth poisoning.

Now, researchers say, radioactive isotopes that were spread across Japan (and beyond) by the meltdowns will continue to contaminate the food supply for a very long time.

According to a new study that focused on “radiocaesium” — as the British call cesium-134 and cesium-137 — “food in japan will be contaminated by low-level radioactivity for decades.” The official university announcement of this study neglected to specify that Fukushima’s cesium will persist in the food chain for thirty decades. It takes 10 radioactive half-lives for cesium-137 to decay to barium, and its half-life is about 30 years, so C-137 stays in the environment for roughly 300 years.

The study’s authors, Professor Jim Smith, of the University of Portsmouth, southwest of London, and Dr. Keiko Tagami, from the Japanese National Institute of Radiological Sciences, report that cesium-caused “radiation doses in the average diet in the Fukushima region are very low and do not present a significant health risk now or in the future.”

This phraseology deliberately conveys a sense of security — but a false one. Asserting that low doses of radiation pose no “significant” health risk sounds reassuring, but an equally factual framing of precisely the same finding is that small amounts of cesium in food pose a slightly increased risk of causing cancer.

This fact was acknowledged by Prof. Smith in the June 14 University of Portsmouth media advisory that announced his food contamination study, which was published in Science of the Total Environment. Because of above-ground atom bomb testing, Prof. Smith said, “Radioactive elements such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and carbon-14 contaminated the global environment, potentially causing hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths.”

No less an authority than the late John Gofman, MD, Ph.D., one of the first scientists to produce plutonium, and Professor Emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, spent 50 years warning about the threat posed by low doses of radiation. In May 1999, Gofman wrote, “By any reasonable standard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose, which means that just one decaying radioactive atom can produce permanent mutation in a cell’s genetic molecules. My own work showed this in 1990 for X rays, gamma rays, and beta particles.”

The Fukushima-borne cesium in Japan’s food supply, and in the food-web of the entire Pacific Ocean, emits both beta and gamma radiation. Unfortunately, it will bio-accumulate and bio-concentrate for 300 years, potentially causing, as Dr. Gofman if not Dr. Smith might say, hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths. — John LaForge 

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Government “Low-balls” Likelihood and Radiation Effects of Reactor Waste Fuel Fires — Study

A radiation disaster, worse than the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi catastrophe in Japan, could hit the United States because of ignored risks, according to a startling new study from Princeton University. The US Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC) has greatly underestimated the risk of major radiation releases from a reactor waste fuel fire. Such reactor fuel fire could erupt in the event of a “station blackout”—the loss of off-site and emergency electric power—and the consequent boiling off of cooling water in waste fuel pools.

The wrecked waste fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi reactor No. 3, pictured in March 2013, two years after hydrogen explosions destroyed its outer shell. 

Frank von Hipple, a nuclear security expert at Princeton, and the historian Michael Schoeppner, are the study’s coauthors. The dispersed radioactive contamination from such a fire “would be an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe,” the authors conclude in their paper.

Von Hipple and Schoeppner argue that the NRC’s gross minimization of risk is the result of corporate and political interference. “The NRC has been pressured by the nuclear industry, directly, and through Congress, to low-ball the potential consequences of a fire because of concerns that increased costs could result in shutting down more nuclear power plants,” von Hipple told Science Daily. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” he said.

Waste uranium fuel rods, often called “spent fuel,” are kept in cooling pools near reactors for several years. Although still very hot, they can then be moved into so-called “dry cask” storage. While nuclear reactors themselves have emergency, back-up generators to circulate cooling water inside the “reactor core” (these generators were wrecked at Fukushima), US waste fuel pools do not have back-up, emergency  power. The pools are especially vulnerable to station blackouts.

Cooling pool water is normally pumped from a nearby lake, river or sea, and must constantly circulate and cover the waste fuel, which is the hottest and most radioactive material in the commercial nuclear industry. (Waste fuel from Navy propulsion reactors is reportedly more deadly.) Any loss of on-site electric power—like happened at Fukushima—can stop cooling water circulation, causing the water to boil away, and expose the fuel rods. Such loss of coolant can ignite a fuel fire and cause catastrophic amounts of radiation to be released.

Waste Fuel Fire Barely Avoided in Fukushima

 The world watched dreadfully in March 2011 as the station blackout at Fukushima-Daiichi threatened to cause this sort of fuel fire. The earthquake and tsunami cut off all cooling water-pumping and circulation. At a congressional hearing March 16, 2011, six days into the triple meltdowns, the head of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, said in a Congressional hearing in Washington that all the water was gone from one of Fukushima’s waste fuel pools. Although Jaczko was mistaken, the nightmare was possible, likely even, and observers counted the hours until cooling water boiled off and a fuel fire would ignite.

An in-tact cooling pool in Japan, with one “assembly” of waste fuel rods being moved in the 20-foot covering of water which keeps the hot irradiated uranium from catching fire.

The NRC has estimated, for example, that a major waste fuel pool fire at the Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania would force the evacuation of 3.46 million people from 12,000 square miles, reports Richard Stone writing in Science magazine May 24. But the Princeton researchers, who say they used a better computer modeling system, estimate that such a disaster would force 18 million people to evacuate from the surrounding 39,000 square miles.

Von Hipple’s and Schoeppner’s report followed, by only one week, a study from the US National Academies of Sciences that urges the United States to make improvements at its waste fuel pools. The NAS’ study recommends that the NRC and reactor operators upgrade monitoring of the waste pools—most do not even have a waste pool water-level monitor in the operator control rooms!—and improve the means of topping up water levels during an accident.

Another way to reduce the risk of waste fuel fires is to hurry the transfer of fuel from the cooling pools to dry casks. “As recently as 2013, the NRC concluded that the projected benefits do not justify the roughly $4 billion cost of a wholesale transfer. But the national academies’ study concludes that the benefits of expedited transfer to dry casks are five-fold greater than NRC has calculated,” Stone reported in Science.

The paper, “Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era,” was published May 26 in Science. —John LaForge

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