Wednesday, 24 February 2010 13:46
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If You Think Nuclear Power is Safe and Clean (like the President does), think again (like the President should)!
President Obama thinks he can jumpstart a new generation of safe and clean nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power is neither safe nor clean, nor cheap, nor useful, nor vital, nor good for America. And no "new" nuclear power plant design will make nuclear power any of these things.
There are "safe, clean" ways to obtain electrical energy for everybody. Obama paid them lip service in his State of the Union speech last month. But he is actually giving billions of dollars to nuclear power -- a gift from each of us, whether we like it or not. Many of us don't like it, and the rest of us might want to understand why not.
Obama's nuclear funding bill is being presented as a jobs program, but since nuclear-related construction jobs average higher salaries than many other jobs (including photovoltaic or wind turbine installation jobs -- which still pay pretty well), you get fewer jobs created for every dollar invested.
And more of the money goes out of the country, too. Many major parts of any new reactor, including many of the largest steel forged pieces and a lot of the electronic control hardware, will be made overseas, in dozens of different countries. Nuclear power plants are NOT "Made In America."
Once the plants are running the jobs are worse than ever: Every employee at a nuclear power plant is under stress not to be the cause of some trillion-dollar, million-death accident. And not to get themselves too irradiated to be allowed to work at the plant anymore.
This stress actually causes them to lie about their mistakes. Everyone is in "cover-up mode." Employees hide things from their managers for fear of retaliation, and everyone hides things from the federal inspectors. Since on average there is about one inspector on site for every 500 employees, they miss nearly everything that actually happens... When the inspectors do see problems, they help hide everything from the media and the public.
It's a dangerous cycle of lies and cover-ups and it happens at EVERY nuclear power plant.
To make matters worse, the official policy is that the nuclear industry is largely a "self-regulated" industry. The nuclear industry does not get inspected by the normal government agencies such as OSHA -- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission handles everything, due to special laws just for nuclear power plants which keep the other federal agencies out. State agencies have little or no jurisdiction, either.
The courts have abdicated responsibility, too. They say that the Federal regulators can make the decisions -- that nuclear power is too complicated for the courts to understand, so anything the NRC and/or the Department of Energy (DOE) says about nuclear power is considered to be the truth. There's no arguing in court with an NRC or DOE ruling! More scientifically accurate information will not be considered, and experts (even if you could afford them) cannot appear before the court to support your case.
Nuclear power plants all over the country -- at least 27 of our 104 operating reactors -- are leaking tritium into our water, soil, and air. Tritium is "a marker for other radionuclides" and a very hazardous radionuclide itself.
It's worse overseas, of course. Here, bribes like those my former Congressman (Randall "Duke" Cunningham) accepted will (or at least might) land you in jail, as it did Cunningham. In China, where more nuclear power plants are being built than everywhere else on earth combined, such bribes are a routine part of the process and no large project moves forward without them. But the punishment -- if the Chinese government decides you should be punished -- is likely to be death.
Here in the United States, to move a bad project forward, you have to dupe the public, using persuasive advertising and anti-environmentalist propaganda by people such as Patrick Moore, whose brief stint at Greenpeace has forever branded him -- to some people -- as a "good guy" who speaks for the environment. In fact, Moore has been well paid to speak for earth-plundering corporations for decades, culminating in years of financial support directly from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the lobbying, advertising, and media outreach arm of the nuclear industry. Each year, Moore is quoted in hundreds of articles, endorsing nuclear power. And virtually every time, his decades-old Greenpeace connection is mentioned (and usually inflated), but his current NEI connection is not.
How did America get to the point where it would even consider building a new generation of nuclear power plants? In China you can blame all kinds of things, including a lack of any semblance of democracy. But in America, blame a lack of education first. Go out on the street and randomly ask people to describe what "tritium" is. Will one in one hundred even be able to say: "It's a radioactive isotope of hydrogen"? Not a chance! Maybe not even one in one thousand. This lack of basic knowledge among the voters makes it very easy to dupe the public. One of the most abused principles of government in America is that the voting public should be properly informed about the issues. But, even the president is not properly educated about nuclear issues and won't let those with the proper knowledge have access to him. The nuclear corporation CEOs, of course, can walk right in.
And the waste -- let's not forget about the waste issues. The Yucca Mountain scientific team was told they could study AND SUGGEST TO CONGRESS any alternative if it was technologically better. The only thing they were forbidden from spending time and money considering was doing the same sort of underground, monitored storage in a different location -- Kansas, for instance, or Alaska.
The Yucca Mountain team looked at all the things that Obama's new committee is going to look at. Rocketing the waste to the sun, putting it in underwater subduction zones, vitrification, on-site storage -- everything.
As to reprocessing, that's just a lousy -- and expensive -- idea. The most lethal part of the waste is NOT the uranium or even the plutonium. It's the radioactive isotopes of elements which mimic biologically-useful isotopes of those same or similar elements. These are mostly beta emitters with relatively short half-lives -- the newly-radioactive results of the nuclear reaction. Radioactive isotopes of things like strontium (which the body treats like calcium), iodine, and hydrogen. When you reprocess the waste, you don't eliminate these things, you just separate the uranium and plutonium (for bombs, if you want bombs) from them. So reprocessing, even if you can reuse some of the uranium, doesn't solve the waste problem. Additionally, reprocessing is chemically very polluting as well as invariably creating a new and very expensive clean-up nightmare.
The slightly new reactor design that Obama wants the taxpayer to fund -- the "AP-1000" -- which the nuclear industry chooses to call Gen III, practically guarantees cost over-runs. For example, they designed a less expensive containment dome, but the new design is untested and might not work (it's been described as "metal plates between layers of concrete" instead of a mesh of rebar embedded in the concrete). It's cheaper to build now, but will it last 60 years or 80 years, and THEN work when it's needed?
The containment dome is not the only acknowledged uncertainty in the new design: Technicians are also worried that the safety systems are not separated properly from the normal operating systems, and therefore a fire could destroy both. (Something similar happened at Browns Ferry in the mid 1970s.)
The first plant using the AP-1000 design is being built in Finland. It is way over budget and rocked with scandal. AND it's being built mostly by foreign (non-native) workers, as our reactors will likely be. Only the final assembly will be done in -- and regulated by --America.
Where will the money come from, that these loan guarantees guarantee? From the Feds -- that is, from the taxpayer! The funds will be distributed through banks, so they can make a profit on the transaction. Without government guarantees and government money to invest, those banks would not put one red cent into nuclear power.
Many of the cost overruns will probably be paid by the ratepayers. And we'll all pay for accidents out of our own pockets and with our health. Liability for catastrophic nuclear accidents is practically zilch, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, an archaic law allowing government to evade responsibility for its crimes. All countries operating nuclear power plants have some form of the Price-Anderson Act -- it's especially useful for evading responsibility for damage to neighboring countries.
In Obama's new nuke bill, a few million dollars has even been set aside to fight activist lawsuits. They feel a drop in the bucket is all it will take to fight the truth, probably because they know how many things are already stacked against us: The courts, the federal agencies, the corporations, the money.
But one thing Obama has clearly already miscalculated is how many people think this is a bad idea. Around the country, environmental groups which have been relatively quiet on the subject of nuclear power are decrying Obama's nuclear madness. And even the economic watchdogs are speaking out loud and clear: This is no jobs program! This doesn't solve our energy problem! It doesn't solve our balance of trade problem!
It certainly doesn't solve our nuclear waste problem (it makes it worse), and it doesn't solve anything else. The way to solve the over-use of fossil fuels is with renewable energy, not nuclear power.
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2010-02-24 16:00:05 |192.75.48.xxx| Paul Stevens - Addled?
I work at a nuclear power plant. You know nothing, as evidenced by your wildly incorrect statements, incredible lies and grotesque distortion. About 30 seconds on the internet should be sufficient for the average person to realize what a concocted pile of malarky you have put together.
Simply on the "Made in Anmerica" theme, where do you think the wind turbines and solar cells you would love to see used are going to come from? China. Even the European countries, who have been subsidizing wind energy for decades to give their own industry a boost, are getting out of the manufacture of turbines. They can't compete. The only part of a wind turbine made in America is going to be the concrete that is used in the pad that is stands on.
Get a grip.
Paul
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2010-02-24 08:49:41 |96.49.34.xxx| G.R.L. Cowan - I wish natgas had on-site federal inspectors
the way Hoffmann acknowledges nuclear plants do.
Obama used to think nuclear plants could blow up. I suspect Secretary Chu set him straight on that.
(For a fuel's energy to cause an explosion, as at Middleton, Connecticut, the fuel energy must cause the fuel's own temperature to increase until its vapour pressure much exceeds the ambient pressure. So the outside world cannot prevent, and must give way before, its rapid expansion. At Middleton, the way-givers included five people. At Ghislenghien, 28.
However, an increase in the temperature of nuclear fuel directly suppresses fission in it, and in power reactors built after 1955 outside the former USSR, loss of coolant, which may also be caused by the temperature increase, provides additional suppression. As a result, the self-heating stops with the fuel's vapour pressure still far below the ambient pressure.)
The more people know about this stuff, the less -- usually, Hoffman is an exception -- the less they fear it.
Greenpeace doesn't fear it, for instance, when they want to get around the Arctic. A stint at Greenpeace is not, in my book, a sign of integrity. It's not "Is Patrick Moore on the take now", it's "Is he still on the take".
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2010-02-24 16:54:20 |68.228.94.xxx| Ruth - Nuclear power is deadly and dirty
Excellent article. It's too bad that Obama has been bought off by people who are more interested in population control via radiation deaths than in helping those who elected him.
This nonsense must be defeated. Democrats are going to have to look seriously as to whether or not to re-elect anyone who votes for this bill. Personally, I voting against nuclear energy in the next election - even if that means members of my own party lose.
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2010-02-24 17:12:38 |208.70.106.xxx| G.R.L. Cowan - That would be a sale to a low bidder
I appreciate that Ruth can't imagine anyone honestly learning better, when advised by a Nobel laureate, than she has been able to do by selectively looking at stuff on the net.
But how does she figure that, if Obama could be bought, it would be relatively small-money buyers like the nuclear industry that would succeed in this? The natural gas-fired sector of the electricity industry in the USA is a little bigger than the nuclear sector. It has spent more on natural gas already this century than the construction cost of all American nuclear reactors, even the ones that they were able to delay for many years.
If they could get Obama to accept a millionth of what they have spent just on fuel, just this century, in return for shutting up about nuclear energy, he could have a Tesla Roadster plus Corvettes for every day of the week.
Interesting fact: there is a lot more uranium in the ocean than all man's mines have ever mined. The money spent on natural gas last year is a lot more than has been spent on uranium throughout history.
Much of it went to government, not as bribes, but as royalties and taxes. If enough government-funded people hate nuclear energy, and hate it enough to do something, they could buy uranium and dump it in the sea. Coals to Newcastle.
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2010-02-24 18:01:15 |147.72.234.xxx| Carletes - Among the many atrocious errors..
This is an extreme disservice to the 6 workers who died at the NATURAL GAS plant pictured above just a few short weeks ago. How dare you conflate that terrible accident with a completely different and unrelated power source which has the best safety record of any substantial electricity producer. You should be ashamed to use such a picture to push your agenda.
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2010-02-24 19:44:37 |68.224.249.xxx| Steve Michaelson - Inaccuracies and rumor
The author is a self-proclaimed "observer" of nuclear power issues, never having worked at or near a nuclear power plant in his life. (He's been a computer programmer since the 1980's.)
How presumptuous to claim that nuclear plant employees lie and conceal information from supervisors and inspectors. What more, that this happens at EVERY power plant. Ludicrous! Absolutely unforgivable false information. The term "fear monger" comes to mind.
Regarding Yucca Mountain... remember when Obama claimed to base decisions on science, not politics? Then why has no one in the administration responded to questions as to why the Yucca Mountain project was cancelled? It at least deserves an answer, don't you think?
And if the Yucca Mountain team looked at all the things that Obama's new committee is going to look at (I won't bother to list them again), don't you think they selected Yucca Mountain because all of the other options were either unsafe or unrealistic?
This team (as you call them) is a collective group of scientists, not a bunch of hack blog writers. They understand this very complex issue. You do not.
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2010-02-24 23:42:07 |208.114.48.xxx| John - Anyone for facts?
Um, even a quick web search would have told the author that the third Olkiluoto (Finland)reactor will be the new European Pressurized Reactor designed and constructed by Areva, not an AP-1000 (a Westinghouse design). Perhaps that explains the "mostly by foreign (non-native)workers." Um, perhaps they're Finnish.
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2010-02-27 00:46:17 |70.190.189.xxx| Dennis F. Nester - Nuclear Power Fulfills Many Agendas Including DNA
re:If You Think Nuclear Power Is Safe and Clean
Author Ace Hoffman is correct as far as he went
but the truth is far worse than the public is
allowed to know!Since the first atom bomb "test" 64 years ago
in New Mexico 1945, we all eat, drink and
breath man-made radioactive fallout everyday!
It is already in your DNA and each generation
will add the their body burden!Albert Einstein said,"Nuclear power is one
hell of a way to boil water!". That's right!
Grabbing tax payers money to make plutonium 239
for atom bombs produces heat, which boils water
that makes steam and turns the electric
turbines. It is paying for your own doomsday!A Geiger counter reading will reveal invisible,
disabling and lethal radiation. There are world
wide epidemics of obesity, cancers, diabetes,
birth defects and etc.There is no place to hide!There is abundant data on the Internet which
show the health effects of nuclear power.
Some links:
Youtube Video - The Roy Process
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7030VAeLAhttp://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl
Leuren Moret - Namaste Magazine article
http://www.namastepublishing.co.uk/Global%20Implications%20of%20Sellafield%20-%20Irish%20Sea%20Coast%20Effect.htmAtomic Age Timeline Animation:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf
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2010-03-01 08:12:49 |96.49.34.xxx| Dennis F. Nester - New Book on the Chernobyl Health Effects
A Review of:
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the EnvironmentBy Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D.
This new publication of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (Volume 1181), by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko, and Alexey Nesterenko, is the elucidation many of us have been waiting for since the 1986 disaster at the failed nuclear reactor in Ukraine. Until now we have read about the published reports of limited spotty investigations by western scientists who undertook projects in the affected territories. Even the prestigious IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR reports have been based on about 300 such western research papers, leaving out the findings of some 30,000 scientific papers prepared by scientists working and living in the stricken territories and suffering the everyday problems of residential contamination with nuclear debris and a contaminated food supply.Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment is wrtitten by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenk and Alexey Nesterenko. The senior author, Alexey Yablokov was head of the Russian Academy of Science under Gobachev – since then he receives no support. Vassily Nesterenko, head of the Ukrainian Nuclear establishment at the time of the accident, flew over the burning reactor and took the only measurements. In August 2009, he died as a result of radiation damage, but earlier, with help from Andrei Sakarov, was able to establish BELRAD to help children of the area.
The three scientists who assembled the information in the book from more than 5000 published articles and research findings, mostly available only within the former Soviet Union or Eastern block countries and not accessible in the West, are prestigious scientists who present objective facts clearly nuanced with little or no polemics. They were not encumbered by a desire to promote or excessively blame a failed technology!
The book was expertly translated into readable English by Janette Sherman, Medical Toxicologist and Adjunct Professor in the Environmental Institute at Western Michigan University.
Professor Dr. of Biology, Dimitro Grodzinsky, Chair of the Department of Biology of the Ukraine National Academy of Sciences, and member of the National Commission wrote the Forward to the book. His statement relative to Western reporting of the accident is illuminating:
“For a long time I have thought that the time has come to put an end to the opposition between technocracy advocates and those who support objective scientific efforts to estimate the negative risks for people exposed to the Chernobyl fallout. The basis for believing that these risks are not minor is very convincing.”
The government of the former Soviet Union previously classified many documents now accessible to the authors. For example, we now know that the number of people hospitalized for acute radiation sickness was more than a hundred times larger than the number recently quoted by the IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR. Unmentioned by the technocrats were the problems of “hot particles” of burning uranium that caused nasopharyngeal problems, and the radioactive fallout that resulted in general deterioration of the health of children, wide spread blood and lymph system diseases, reproductive loss, premature and small infant births, chromosomal mutations, congenital and developmental abnormalities, multiple endocrine diseases, mental disorders and cancer.
The authors systematically explain the secrecy conditions imposed by the government, the failure of technocrats to collect data on the number and distribution of all of the radionuclides of major concern, and the restrictions placed on physicians against calling any medical findings radiation related unless the patient had been a certified “acute radiation sickness” patient during the disaster, thus assuring that only 1% of injuries would be so reported..
This book is a “must read” for all of those bureaucrats currently promoting nuclear power as the only “solution” for climate change. Those who seek information on the disaster only from the official documentation provided by the IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR need to broaden their reading to include the reality check from those scientists who have access to local findings and are simply telling the truth, with no hidden propaganda agenda.
I was impressed by the simple message of the cover of this volume, which shows a number of felled logs with clearly distinguishable colors of wood: before and after Chernobyl. The reader will find that the environment, living plants and animals all suffered ill effects from this experience, as did the human population. It should be a sobering read for all those who have believed the fiction that “low doses of radiation are harmless”, or that a severe nuclear accident is easily contained within the human environment.
Below is the New York Academy of Sciences site for the book. Unfortunately, its selling price is now about $150, which may limit its distribution.
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
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DEPLETED URANIUM IN THE HUMAN BODY: Sr Rosalie Bertell, PhD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgQ79-oDX2o&feature=related
http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobylhttp://www.chernobyl20film.com
Dr. Ernest Sternglass speaks on the bad effects of radiation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEtRFBNfSAg&feature=PlayList&p=B86847E1B7B9909D&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=2
Learn more about Uranium's effects from nuclear
reactors, weapons, and so-called "testing":http://iicph.org/tag/depleted-uranium/>http://iicph.org/tag/depleted-uranium/
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/
http://www.radiation.org
http://www.llrc.org
Berkeley Citizen - Radiation Index Issues
http://www.berkeleycitizen.org/radiation.htmlVideo - Ret. Army Maj. Dr. Doug Rokke - Depleted Uranium
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-8PlJVhogs
LEUREN MORET Big Gaza Rally 1 10 09 Portland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4puQLxABr08&feature=related
Ace Hoffman BOOK: The Code Killers
http://www.acehoffman.org/
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2010-03-01 12:50:52 |68.12.247.xxx| Bob R - Yes, I DO in fact believe nukes are safe and clean
...at least relatively speaking. C'mon Ann, did your "research" for this column include even a glance at Wikipedia. Nuclear power has an excellent track record (yes, Chernobyll is a separate issue: poor design, even worse operating practice. 3-Mile Island was over by the time US press got its hands on the "story"). If you want to do something useful for your next editorial, research the human toll per million kWh for every competing commercial energy source: OIL (geopolitical instability, military adventures in the Persian Gulf region, oil tanker accidents, Exxon Valdez); COAL (thousands of UG miner deaths per year in China and elsewhere from methane explosions, air pollution, acid mine drainage); HYDROELECTRIC (how many more Hoover dams can we build, and where will we find another river?); SOLAR and WIND are nice, but they will never light up Los Angeles on a Friday night. Tritium, by the way, decays very quickly, and I doubt if anyone has ever lost a minute of life-span from drinking it from a nuke plant's contamination plume. In fact, a coal-fired power plant is actually MORE RADIOACTIVE (at the fence around the facility) than a nuke plant, due to low levels of U and Th in the coal ash. An average American, if he or she were to get 100% of their lifetime energy from nuclear power, would create a volume of waste approx the size of one softball. Obama is right to support nuclear power, which deserves to be an important element in any serious energy policy. Ann: take a remedial 6-grade physics class, and then get back to us. (P.S. no spelling errors, though, so good work on that part).
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2010-03-01 12:54:11 |68.12.247.xxx| Bob R - Sorry, Ace...
...I mis-read your name and referred to you as Ann. Actually, I don't think "ACE" is a very good pen name though, would recommend another 3-letter name beginning with "A".
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2010-03-01 13:06:32 |68.12.247.xxx| Bob R - Abundant Data?
Any comment that proclaims the "abundant data on the Internet" and then immediately directs me to a YOU TUBE VIDEO makes me wonder if the author is a stand-up comic. Thanks, Dennis. Yes, too much radiation is bad for you. So is eating too many french fries. Speaking of the French, for decades now, they've been happily heating and illuminating their homes with nuclear power; France is also the world's largest exporter of electricity. If you're still worried about health effects of nuke power, do as the French do: ride your bike to work...that will more than offset your imaginary risks.
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2010-03-01 18:19:45 |70.190.189.xxx| Dennis F. Nester - 1/3 of French nuclear reactors were shut down!
[url]Atomic Age Timeline Animation:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf
-------------Would you like some nuclear waste with your champagne?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbRP-QfeI-8Berkeley Citizen - Radiation Index Issues
http://www.berkeleycitizen.org/radiation.htmlVideo - Ret. Army Maj. Dr. Doug Rokke - Depleted Uranium
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-8PlJVhogsAce Hoffman BOOK: The Code Killers
http://www.acehoffman.org/http://www.radiation.org/
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1/3 of French reactors where shut down and electricity imported
at millions of dollars! Like pro-nuke propaganda, just the opposite is true!
--------http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100226-water-energy-climate-change-dams-nuclear/
. . . .nuclear power plants—which must draw water from seas, rivers, lakes, or reservoirs to cool their reactors—are logically situated near water, putting them in the path of sea level rise and storm surges, Paskal said.
Flooding has already affected production in some plants in the U.S., France, and India. For instance, in 1992 Hurricane Andrew caused major damage to the Turkey Point nuclear power plant on Biscayne Bay, Florida.But perhaps more troubling for nuclear facilities are heat waves, which will be commonplace in Europe by 2040—well within the life spans of reactors now coming online, according to the Met Office Hadley Centre, a climate-research center in the U.K.
In a normal scenario, as cold water from nearby water bodies enters the plant, it's circulated to absorb excess heat and released from the plant at a higher temperature, Paskal said.
But during a heat wave, hotter air warms the water even before it goes into the plant. So when wastewater is pumped back into the environment, it can reach temperatures blistering enough to kill off ecosystems.
That's why the French government has set a temperature limit—77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) on how hot nuclear-plant water outflow can be. When waste water exceeds this temperature—for instance during a heat wave—reactors must shut off or power down, which means keeping the plant running at a lower energy level.
But sometimes governments will temporarily allow wastewater to exceed that temperature limit: During a record-breaking heat wave in France in 2003, the government upped the temperature maximum to 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius).Eventually, though, France decided to shut down or power off 17 nuclear reactors during the 2003 event, costing the country about U.S. $408 million (300 million Euros). More recently, during a 2009 heat wave, a third of the country's plants powered down, requiring France to buy energy from the United Kingd
"OFFICIALS FROM THE SAN ONOFRE NUCLEAR REACTOR SAID THE WARNING SIREN THAT WENT OFF YESTERDAY WAS JUST A MALFUNCTION AND NO ONE SHOULD WORRY. HEY, I WORRY, IF THEY CAN'T EVEN GET THE SIREN TO WORK RIGHT, WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING WITH THE REACTOR?" Jay Leno 1/20/10
"No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economical affairs of man as if people did not matter at all." -- E. F. Schumacher “Small is Beautiful”
Molly P Johnson
Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility www.a4nr.orgH.O.M.E. (Healing Ourselves & Mother Earth) www.h-o-m-e.org
Grandmothers for Peace www.grandmothersforepeace.org[/url]
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2010-03-01 18:47:14 |70.190.189.xxx| Dennis F. Nester - Chernobyl URL
Chernobyl URL
http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl<br />
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2010-03-01 21:45:34 |68.12.247.xxx| geobob - Chernobyl link
Dennis, your Chernobyll link didn't connect. Can you re-send? Coincidentally, in my past life as a geologist, I spent considerable time at a titanium mining combinat in Ukraine (Zhitomyr Oblast) which was on the Chernobyl grid. Asked one of our interpreters about that "event," which produced an immediate and angry reaction from him....semms his father, a firefighter, lost his life to acute radiation poisoning.
There's absolutely no doubt that a meltdown, whether deliberate or accidental (at Chernobyll, it was hard to tell the diff) is a serious matter for nearby residents (including downwind population in Belarus in 1985). That being said, most of the confirmed deaths outside of the first responders were the elderly and infirm who perished in unheated apartments during the following winter.
The Soviet-style "RBMK" design would NEVER have been approved by the NRC or its equivalents elsewhere in the 1st World. Basically, its flawed design is the potential for excessive steam and uncontrolled core temperatures to interact with each other in an uncontrolled meltdown. Chernobyll was exacerbated by a poorly-trained staff who thought they were staging a "test" and starved the reactor core of cooling water...essentially inadvertent terrorists.
My experience with the Ukrainians - decent, intelligent people harmed in countless ways by corrupt and incompetent fools in Moscow - drove home for me how distant central government can produce disastrous results across the board: the professional staff was well-educated but oblivious to technological progress availabe to most of the world since 1960s, due to their Cold War isolation, and incompetent bureaucrats in Moscow have now been replaced by corrupt politicians in Kiev. Of course, in 1985, the US and Western Europe quickly responded to Chernobyll with aid ($$), which was used to build a 4-story monolithic bldg in Kiev for hundreds of paper-pushing bureaucrats for many years forward. (Not much can be done for Chernobyll reactor 4, which was encased in concrete after the fire subsided; the remainder of the facility continues to produce electricity for a somewhat more enlightened public.) Had the government warned parents to keep their children indoors until the radioactive cloud drifted away, many of the confirmed or suspected cases of leukemia and other effects could have been avoided. Instead, news reports out of Moscow and Kiev downplayed the "minor accident" in a criminal way.
Please excuse my sarcasm...I am not dismissive of the potential danger of nuclear power if it is of poor design and operated by poorly-trained personnel. I also realize my pre-emptive response to your link seems a bit condescending. I simply believe that risks inherent in handling radioactive materials is easily managed via 20th century technology, much less what is available now. All other forms of power generation have (to my way of thinking) more serious drawbacks in terms of their respective supply chains - including over 4,000 US casualties and $1 trillion cost from two wars in the Middle East, neither of which would have been an imperative for Washington if not for strategic importance of the Persian Gulf oil fields.
Finally, thank God for finally putting the knife in the Hummer production line. Everyone get a bike if you don't have one, and lobby your municipal leaders for good paths.
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2010-03-01 22:40:35 |70.190.189.xxx| Dennis F. Nester - New Book Review - Chernobyl
A Review of:
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the EnvironmentBy Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D.
This new publication of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (Volume 1181), by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko, and Alexey Nesterenko, is the elucidation many of us have been waiting for since the 1986 disaster at the failed nuclear reactor in Ukraine. Until now we have read about the published reports of limited spotty investigations by western scientists who undertook projects in the affected territories. Even the prestigious IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR reports have been based on about 300 such western research papers, leaving out the findings of some 30,000 scientific papers prepared by scientists working and living in the stricken territories and suffering the everyday problems of residential contamination with nuclear debris and a contaminated food supply.Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment is wrtitten by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenk and Alexey Nesterenko. The senior author, Alexey Yablokov was head of the Russian Academy of Science under Gobachev – since then he receives no support. Vassily Nesterenko, head of the Ukrainian Nuclear establishment at the time of the accident, flew over the burning reactor and took the only measurements. In August 2009, he died as a result of radiation damage, but earlier, with help from Andrei Sakarov, was able to establish BELRAD to help children of the area.
The three scientists who assembled the information in the book from more than 5000 published articles and research findings, mostly available only within the former Soviet Union or Eastern block countries and not accessible in the West, are prestigious scientists who present objective facts clearly nuanced with little or no polemics. They were not encumbered by a desire to promote or excessively blame a failed technology!
The book was expertly translated into readable English by Janette Sherman, Medical Toxicologist and Adjunct Professor in the Environmental Institute at Western Michigan University.
Professor Dr. of Biology, Dimitro Grodzinsky, Chair of the Department of Biology of the Ukraine National Academy of Sciences, and member of the National Commission wrote the Forward to the book. His statement relative to Western reporting of the accident is illuminating:
“For a long time I have thought that the time has come to put an end to the opposition between technocracy advocates and those who support objective scientific efforts to estimate the negative risks for people exposed to the Chernobyl fallout. The basis for believing that these risks are not minor is very convincing.”
The government of the former Soviet Union previously classified many documents now accessible to the authors. For example, we now know that the number of people hospitalized for acute radiation sickness was more than a hundred times larger than the number recently quoted by the IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR. Unmentioned by the technocrats were the problems of “hot particles” of burning uranium that caused nasopharyngeal problems, and the radioactive fallout that resulted in general deterioration of the health of children, wide spread blood and lymph system diseases, reproductive loss, premature and small infant births, chromosomal mutations, congenital and developmental abnormalities, multiple endocrine diseases, mental disorders and cancer.
The authors systematically explain the secrecy conditions imposed by the government, the failure of technocrats to collect data on the number and distribution of all of the radionuclides of major concern, and the restrictions placed on physicians against calling any medical findings radiation related unless the patient had been a certified “acute radiation sickness” patient during the disaster, thus assuring that only 1% of injuries would be so reported..
This book is a “must read” for all of those bureaucrats currently promoting nuclear power as the only “solution” for climate change. Those who seek information on the disaster only from the official documentation provided by the IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR need to broaden their reading to include the reality check from those scientists who have access to local findings and are simply telling the truth, with no hidden propaganda agenda.
I was impressed by the simple message of the cover of this volume, which shows a number of felled logs with clearly distinguishable colors of wood: before and after Chernobyl. The reader will find that the environment, living plants and animals all suffered ill effects from this experience, as did the human population. It should be a sobering read for all those who have believed the fiction that “low doses of radiation are harmless”, or that a severe nuclear accident is easily contained within the human environment.
Below is the New York Academy of Sciences site for the book. Unfortunately, its selling price is now about $150, which may limit its distribution.
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
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2010-03-01 22:53:47 |70.190.189.xxx| Dennis F. Nester - URLs
Video - Damaged Male Sperm: Interview #2 Leuren Moret
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRq5iY6C1dM&feature=related
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Chernobyl - Geiger counter reading
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDH6w181Obw
Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet 1/7http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z21On24m4Lc&feature=related
Russian village huge human nuclear experiment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR1wo5s3Ua4&feature=related
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Cry8: Nuclear Contamination in the contributaries to the Rio Grande
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtObjDlUUuk[/url]
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I think that is one of the worst written articles I've ever read. The comment box isn't long enough to critique the errors written above! Next time your going to take a stand read a book and get some facts. Don't just string a bunch of misleading unsubstantiated sentences that say nothing but what you've figured out about nuclear power from watching the Simpsons.