Weekly Column – Page 4

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Can Nuclear Power Be the Answer?

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

By Alfred Meyer

What are the consequences of using nuclear power to address climate change? Is nuclear power clean energy? Can it deliver reduction in greenhouse gases soon enough to help minimize climate chaos, with ‘soon enough’ defined as 10 years or less by the 2022 International Panel on Climate Change? Lastly, what part does the nuclear power industry play in enabling our nuclear navy and nuclear weapons?

The consequences of operating nuclear reactors include:

• Carbon dioxide (CO2), radioactive [1] and toxic emissions at each step in the nuclear fuel chain, the vast industrial infrastructure, parts of which are in almost every state in the U.S.;
• Regular, planned releases of radioactivity into the air and water;
• Thermal pollution of the surface water which provides the vast amounts of water needed to cool waste fuel and fissioning uranium fuel rods in the core;
• Accidents, leaks and unplanned, unregulated releases of radioactive gases, liquids and solids into the biosphere;
• Many forms of radioactive wastes, some of which remain toxic for millions of years, all while we don’t know how to safely store them for the next 100 years, much less for millions of years; and
• Providing the academic, industrial and governmental infrastructures which are, according to former Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz, fundamental enablers of our nuclear navy and nuclear weapons [2], contributing some $42.4 billion per year for these purposes.[3]

This is a formidable list of significant consequences. Given these impacts, nuclear power is clearly not a clean source of electricity, even though fissioning uranium, in and of itself, does not emit large amounts of CO2. The CO2 which nuclear power does put into the environment is hazardously radioactive.

Nuclear reactors produce many other toxic and deadly emissions, as well as nuclear waste. We don’t know the full effects of ionizing radiation on living things and our planetary ecology, but what we do know is that in humans it can cause cancer and diseases of the pulmonary, cardiac and immune systems.

In one sense, the worldwide nuclear enterprise has put all of us into a non-consensual, unplanned, unmanaged and out-of-control human experiment which involves irradiating our biosphere. Due in part to research about the radioactive strontium-90 from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests found in kids’ teeth around 1960, President John F. Kennedy signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 in an effort to reduce our exposure to radioactivity. According to the National Academy of Sciences, all exposure to ionizing radiation increases health risks, which are cumulative over our lifetimes.[4]

While one could argue based on these consequences alone that nuclear power should be stopped rather than promoted, let us consider if nuclear power can really be a part of the solution to climate change. Climate change, like nuclear weapons, poses existential threats to life on earth, so if nuclear power can play an essential part in mitigating climate change, then maybe accepting the above known and unknown detriments of nuclear power is just part of the price of survival. A steep price for sure, in environmental, health, financing, and nuclear weapons dangers, but no price is too high if it is the only path to survival, right?

Do we have to accept nuclear power’s clearly evident risks to avert climate chaos?

To avert climate chaos we have 10 years or less to significantly reduce CO2. While some of the 93 operating reactors in the U.S. are eligible for $6 billion of taxpayer subsidies to help them survive economically, the aging facilities are becoming increasingly dangerous and expensive to operate. Most of the cheerleading for new nuclear power, encouraged by $2.5 billion of new government funding, focuses on small modular reactors (SMRs), sodium-cooled reactors, generation IV reactors, and even micro reactors.

In theory, this is an impressive lineup of technology’s cutting edge. In fact, it is largely new packages for old ideas, existing on paper only. It will take decades of research & development, prototype testing, creation of industrial capacity, and the unit-by-unit construction before new nuclear reactors can be operational. But, we don’t have that much time; we need truly clean energy that we can install now at a reasonable price with minimal harmful environmental effects to be on-line in less than 10 years! New nuclear can’t meet the time line.

If nuclear is as bad as all that, why do we have it?

If nuclear power is so fundamentally dirty, dangerous and expensive — with a growing waste problem that we haven’t yet solved — and new nuclear cannot deliver in time, if at all, why is nuclear power such a prevalent hope for so many, including some anti-nuclear weapons activists who think we need it to address climate change? Remembering that the public is saddled with the risks of these endeavors — environmental, medical, and financial — while private corporations take the profit, why does anyone believe that nuclear power is worth so many of our dollars?

The short answer is “Atoms for Peace,” the U.S. government’s program announced at the UN by President Eisenhower in 1953. He introduced the peaceful uranium-235 atom, as an antidote to that war-making U-235 that incinerated Hiroshima and horrified the world.

Atoms for Peace put a smiley face on the nuclear enterprise, drawing attention away from military weapons and their massive destruction, and instead directing attention to the promises of unlimited benefits. This program proliferated nuclear technology to over 40 nations around the world, including Iran, and was based on the aspirational atom that we would “tame” to “serve” us, with electricity “too cheap to meter” — along with atomic cars, boats, ships and rockets — truly a phantasmagorical and mythical cultural promise, which does not exist in reality.

Certainly nuclear weapons are the most potent instruments of destruction in the world. As illustrated by the Manhattan Project begun in 1942, nuclear weapons depend upon an extensive scientific/industrial/academic/governmental infrastructure. Ernest Moniz, mentioned above, has clearly illustrated how much our nuclear military depends on the civilian nuclear power infrastructure, calling it “an essential enabler of national security.” The Atlantic Council in Washington, DC also mentioned above, calculates the value of this contribution to be $42.4 billion per year. In other words, if you support nuclear power, you are enabling nuclear weapons.

Is nuclear power really the answer?

— Alfred Meyer is a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and has worked with communities affected by both the Chernobyl and Fukushima catastrophes.

Endnotes:

[1] Radioactivity is ionizing energy that is damaging to human health and other living things; see page 4, “New Study: Cancer Epidemic.”
[2] The reference is to MIT physicist, ex-Secretary of Energy, and Co-Chair and CEO of Nuclear Threat Initiative (nti.org), Ernest J. Moniz. See: Energy Futures Initiative, “The U.S. Nuclear Energy Enterprise: A Key National Security Enabler,” August 2017.
[3] “What is the value of the U.S. nuclear power complex to U.S. national security,” an Issue Brief by The Atlantic Council, a prominent Washington, DC think tank, Oct. 21, 2019.
[4] National Academy of Sciences, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation BEIR VII, Phase 2” (2006).

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear goodbye: The future must be solar, wind, battery and LED/efficiency

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

By Harvey Wasserman

The nuclear industry has been pushing the fantasy of yet another “renaissance” of nuclear power, based on the absurd idea that atomic reactors — which operate at 571 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in substantial greenhouse gas emissions and, periodically, explosions — can somehow cool the planet.

The fact is that no more big, old-style light water reactors are likely to be built in the United States, and today’s 93 licensed U.S. reactors (there are 400-plus worldwide) grow increasingly dangerous every day.

As a green power advocate since 1973, I’ve visited dozens of reactor sites throughout the U.S. and Japan. The industry’s backers portray them as high-tech black boxes that are uniformly safe, efficient and reliable, ready to hum for decades without melt-downs, blow-ups or the constant emissions of heat, radiation, chemical pollution, and eco-devastation that plague us all.

In reality, the global reactor fleet is riddled with widely varied and increasingly dangerous defects. These range from inherent design flaws to original construction errors, faulty components, fake replacement parts, stress-damaged (“embrittled”) pressure vessels, cracked piping, inoperable safety systems, crumbling concrete, lethal vulnerabilities to floods, storms and earthquakes, corporate greed, and unmanageable radioactive emissions and wastes — to name a few.

Heat, radiation, and steam have pounded every reactor’s internal components. They are cracked, warped, morphed, and transmuted into rickety fossils virtually certain to shatter in the next meltdown.

Twice-bankrupt Pacific Gas & Electric of California has been found guilty in the 2010 burning deaths of eight San Bruno residents caused by under-maintained gas pipes. The company was also convicted in the deaths of more than eighty people when its faulty wires ignited whole northern California forests and towns in a series of fires.

Today, the utility’s two uninsured Diablo Canyon reactors threaten more than ten million people (living downwind) with potential catastrophes made possible by any of a dozen nearby earthquake faults (including the San Andreas).

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, San Luis Obispo County, Cali.

In 2003, [Ohio’s] Perry and Davis-Besse power reactor operators blacked out 50 million homes in southern Canada and the northeastern United States. The FBI has linked them to a $61-million-bribe handed to the majority leader of the Ohio House of Representatives, and possibly tens of thousands more to the former chair of the state Public Utilities Commission.

The industry’s “regulators” have turned blind eyes to crumbling concrete at the Seabrook and Davis-Besse facilities, whose “hole-in-the-head” defects almost brought Chernobyl to the shores of Lake Erie. When Diablo Canyon’s resident site inspector warned that the reactors could not withstand a likely seismic shock, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shut him up and moved him out.

The industry’s four most recent reactor construction projects include two at South Carolina’s Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station — totally abandoned after over $10 billion was spent — and two at Georgia’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, years late and costing more than $30 billion. Plagued by corruption, incompetence, design flaws, and labor problems, Plant Vogtle might never open — especially in light of the astonishing advances in renewable and efficiency technologies, which have completely buried any economic or ecological justification for atomic power, new or old.

Desperate atomic cultists including Bill Gates are now touting small modular reactors. But they’re unproven, can’t deploy for years to come, can’t be guarded against terrorists, and can’t beat renewables in safety, speed to build, climate impacts, price, or job creation. Our energy future should consist of modern solar, wind, battery and LED/efficiency technologies, not nuclear reactors. Let’s work to guarantee that none of them explode before we get there.

— Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the weekly Election Protection 2024 Zoom. His People’s Spiral of U.S. History is at www.solartopia.org. Reader Supported News.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Shorts

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

Shorts compiled by Lindsay Potter, Bonnie Urfer, Kelly Lundeen, and John LaForge.

On Earth Day, April 22, a coalition coordinated by the Japan Council Against A and H Bombs submitted petitions to Japan’s Foreign Ministry with 960,538 signatures urging the government to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Several prominent members of the campaign used the petition delivery ceremony, pictured, to condemn Japan’s recent promotion of “nuclear sharing” and “enemy base attack capability.”

Ultra-fast Missile Tested by U.S. Air Force

The U.S. Air Force reported its first successful “hypersonic” missile test, overseen by Edwards Air Force Base in northern California on May 14th. After the potentially nuclear-armed missile, dubbed “Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon” (ARRW), was launched from a B-52 bomber, its “booster ignited … achieving a speed five times the speed of sound” [about 3,835 mph], according to the Air Force. Russia and China have reportedly tested similar ultra-fast weapons. “U.S. defense officials have said that Russia has used hypersonic weapons an estimated 10 to 12 times in its invasion of Ukraine,” according to CBS News, and Democracy Now reported that Russian President Putin confirmed the report. Because of its speed and maneuverability, the ARRW is hard to follow or obstruct. But in a statement to Congress, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, couldn’t identify any other benefits that the weapon offers. “We are not seeing really significant or game-changing effects to date with the delivery of the small number of hypersonics that the Russians have used,” Milley said, according to CBS. — Reuters, CBS News, May 16, 2022 and Democracy Now, May 19, 2022

Accident at Deep Military Waste Dump

Troubles continue to plague the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a deep burial site carved out of an ancient salt formation half a mile beneath Carlsbad, New Mexico. Workers had to hastily leave the above-ground facilities April 9, 2022, when radioactive liquid was found inside an outer shipping container. WIPP officials announced before an investigation had even begun that there was “no risk of radiological release and there is no risk to the public or the environment.” The 2,000-foot deep waste dump scheme has been excavated for burial of plutonium-contaminated radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production. The Energy Department (DOE) says the waste is “mostly clothing, gloves, lab coats, tools and other debris” from the Cold War, raising questions about the presence of liquid involved in the contamination accident.

The site hasn’t fully recovered from a February 2014 accident — when a waste barrel burst and spewed contamination throughout the whole complex — and now the dump must contend with yet another accident. WIPP was closed for several years after the 2014 barrel explosion in which a drum “self-heated” to almost 1,600 degrees, ripped open and scattered uranium, plutonium, and americium throughout the underground burial rooms, the whole ventilation shaft, and the above-ground buildings. At the surface, 22 workers were internally contaminated after inhaling the radioactive poisons, and independent monitors recorded radiation a half-mile away. Construction of a new ventilation system, three years behind schedule, and costing up to $486 million, still prevents employees from fully utilizing the site. The (DOE) investigation of the April contamination is ongoing. — Carlsbad Current-Argus, Apr 14; Cortez, Colo. Journal, Apr 11, 2022; AP, April 11 & March 15, 2022; New Mexican, Apr. 23, 2015; Albuquerque Journal, Aug. 23, 2015; New York Times, May 31, & Oct. 30, 2014

Ohio Rad Waste Handler Spreading Contamination

Austin Master Services (AMS) is a radioactive waste management firm with offices in Martins Ferry, Ohio. The grassroots group Concerned Ohio River Residents (CORR) sent soil samples from around the firm’s site to a laboratory for tests that found radium-226 over ten times normal background levels. Radium-226 persists in the environment for 16,000 years. Results for lead-214 and bismuth-214 showed radioactivity also “approaching or exceeding regulatory limits,” said Beverly Reed of CORR. The lab analysis showed the hottest radioactivity near the firm’s entrance. AMS, with operations in ten states, handles and transports materials largely from oil and gas industry projects like fracking. While AMS operates without regulation by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), the agency insists some of its waste must be shipped to Utah because it’s too radioactive for regular state landfills. The AMS site, about 2,500 feet from a school stadium and a regional hospital, and several hundred feet from a water plant and homes, sits above the public drinking water aquifer and within a flood plain. In 2014, AMS relocated to Martins Ferry from Youngstown, Ohio after Fire Chief Silverio Caggiano opened an investigation into its facility. When approached by news station WTRF in April, Martins Ferry Mayor John Davies said, “I believe [CORR is] spreading mistruths… I drink the water every day. My kids drink it. My grandkids drink it.” CORR stands by its scientific findings and warns of the contamination’s threat to groundwater. The group hopes the ODNR will halt AMS’s operations and that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will name the area as a Superfund site to encourage clean-up. — CORR Original Documents; WTRF-TV, Apr. 6; The Times Leader, May 19, 2022; and AustinMasterServices.com

U.K. Activists See Return of U.S. Nuclear Bombs

The Guardian reports that bunkers at Britain’s Lakenheath Air Base, operated by the United States, are being refurbished “to be used again after 14 years to house U.S. nuclear weapons,” according to Pentagon defense documents unearthed by Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. U.S. nuclear weapons like the B61 gravity H-bombs in five European NATO states were withdrawn from Britain in 2008 after massive protests. “At the time of the withdrawal, gravity bombs were widely considered militarily obsolete, and hopes of further disarmament by the nuclear-armed powers were high,” the Guardian reported. With the new B61-model 12 now in production, the United States plans to replace over 100 B61-3 and -4 models now in Europe. The 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty prohibits any such sharing of nuclear weapons. Peace activists protested the reported return of U.S. nuclear weapons May 21 at Lakenheath, and the group Stop the War’s Chris Nineham “reminded the crowd that it was people power that forced nuclear missiles to be removed from Lakenheath in 2008” Popular Resistance reported. “It is because of what ordinary people did — what you did — and we can do it all again,” Nineham said.
— Popular Resistance, May 22; The Guardian, Apr. 12; and Federation of American Scientists, April 11, 2022

Poland “Might be open” to Hosting U.S. Bombs

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party, said April 3 that he “might be open” to the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons in Poland, in spite of prohibitions enshrined in the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) that explicitly forbid it. “If the Americans asked us to store American nuclear weapons in Poland, we would be open to it,” Kaczynski told the German Sunday paper Welt Am Sonntag. “The initiative would have to come from the Americans. In principle, however, it makes sense to extend nuclear weapons sharing to the eastern flank,” Kaczynski said, according to Newsweek. Both Poland and the United States are signatories to the NPT. — New York Post, April 4; and Newsweek, April 3, 2022

Protest and Resistance Continues in Germany

This year’s International Week gathering, focused on the U.S. nuclear weapons stationed at Büchel air base in southeast Germany, is set for July 11 to 17. Peace activists from Germany, the U.S., Holland, and elswhere will also travel north to Nörvenich Air Base where Tornado jet fighters from Büchel will temporarily be stationed while their home base runway is refurbished. The Büchel base’s bunkers that hold U.S. nuclear gravity bombs are also being rebuilt to handle the delivery of the new B61-model 12 bombs now in production.

Meanwhile, nuclear weapons abolitionists continue to appear in court for go-in actions resulting in trespass charges. Susan Crane of the Redwood City California Catholic Worker will appear for an appeal hearing in Koblenz Regional Court September 20, as she is contesting her earlier conviction in Cochem District Court. Frits ter Kuile of the Amsterdam Catholic Worker has been ordered to self-report to jail in Germany after the authorities failed to coerce his payment of the civil penalty for a go-in trespass conviction. In a case that stems from the same July 15, 2018 go-in action as Frits and Susan — when eighteen resisters got through the fence at Büchel in broad daylight — Nukewatch’s John LaForge has formally appealed lower court convictions for trespass to Germany’s highest tribunal, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Attorney Anna Busl in Bonn submitted a 36-page appeal brief to Germany’s “Supreme Court” on April 24. The appeal centers on the lower courts’ refusal to hear testimony from expert witnesses, arguing that the courts erred by denying LaForge his right to present a defense. Like many other resisters, LaForge argues that because planning nuclear attacks is an international criminal conspiracy to commit massacres, the defense of “crime prevention” excuses the trespass. The court won’t rule before August.

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Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

By John LaForge

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

By Alfred Meyer

Do we have to accept nuclear power’s clearly evident risks to avert climate chaos?

If nuclear is as bad as all that, why do we have it?

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

By Harvey Wasserman

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

Shorts compiled by Lindsay Potter, Bonnie Urfer, Kelly Lundeen, and John LaForge.

Ultra-fast Missile Tested by U.S. Air Force

Accident at Deep Military Waste Dump

Ohio Rad Waste Handler Spreading Contamination

U.K. Activists See Return of U.S. Nuclear Bombs

Poland “Might be open” to Hosting U.S. Bombs

Protest and Resistance Continues in Germany

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Donate To Nukewatch

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