Ace Hoffman's Nuclear Failures Reports

Nuclear power is clean -- as long as you ignore "safety"!

2012-01-25T17:33:00.000-08:00

January 25th, 2012

Dear Readers,

In the United States, radiation-related "safety" decisions regarding commercial nuclear power plants are handled very undemocratically. They are considered to be strictly the purview of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. State and federal courts, public utilities commissions, state energy commissions, water boards, air boards, EPA, DOE, and everyone else whose regulatory authority touches on nuclear power will insist that you cannot talk to them about "safety." You must go to the NRC.

And the folks at the NRC think they know everything because they've: "watched a lot of valves get turned" as one NRC resident inspector actually put it at a public hearing here last year.

Somehow that makes them "experts" regarding the economic costs of genetic damage to embryos in the womb, but I'm not sure how.

Ninety percent of the NRC's funding comes from the industry they regulate. The five largest nuclear power corporations own nearly half of the 104 commercial reactors in operation in the U.S.: Exelon (17), Entergy (11), FPL (8), Duke and Dominion (7 each). Lobbyists from these and other nuclear corporations hound our Congresspeople every day.

There are about 4,000 people on the NRC's staff. Usually two NRC inspectors are on site at each location, which might have 1,500 employees (the number of workers varies with the work load, the reactor design, the number of reactors on site, etc.). Overall, less than 1/2 of 1% of the working public is employed by the nuclear industry.

Radiation is supposed to be carefully contained on site. Assurances of >99.999999% containment are given with straight faces. Yet for every atom split for energy, at least two dangerous fission products are created on average, which are the first in a long chain of perhaps dozens of "radioactive decay products," all of which are harmful to humans. Every radioactive decay is capable of destroying DNA (the genetic code of life), or any container the radioactive material is stored in. Some of the radioactive products are noble gasses or radioactive hydrogen, which are virtually impossible to contain. Yet containment is always promised anyway (and always with a straight face).

Although records are invariably poorly kept, 2011 was surely the nuclear industry's worst year for containment ever, because of Fukushima. A million years worth of promised containment has already left the containment buildings, and Fukushima is still spewing more poisons daily. No matter how radiation escapes -- willfully, accidentally, noticed or unnoticed -- it can give you cancer or make you sick in all sorts of other ways.

On March 10, 2011, the day before Fukushima, the NRC revealed to the media that Vermont Yankee, a poorly-designed old reactor in America, would be granted a license extension in a few days. After an earthquake and tsunami in Japan the next day, a slew of nearly identical reactors began melting down and exploding before our eyes. Did the NRC change their minds and delay their decision? NO! Did they want to find out if what went wrong in Japan was applicable to Vermont? NO! The NRC does not lack in hubris, or in skill in manipulating the media to its advantage. Every accident -- even Fukushima -- is an "opportunity to learn," and so in their macabre way of thinking, every accident, no matter how severe, can be considered a GOOD thing!

Five politically-appointed commissioners make all the "big" decisions at the NRC, and so just three commissioners constitute a majority. There are about 320 million citizens in America, so in a sense, these three people -- who are not elected -- control the fate of more than one hundred million Americans each. That's what we call "democracy"?

And it gets worse: They have very finely-crafted laws to protect their power, such that over the past half century, thousands of local, state, and federal judges, as well as commissioners and other officials at all levels, have all deferred to the NRC, and thus, to these three individuals, whose identities change over time, but whose basic philosophy -- "keep the nuclear industry running, ignore the dangers" -- remains the same.

In addition to being lobbied constantly, politicians (who pick the commissioners) are given huge campaign contributions by the nuclear industry -- hundreds of millions of dollars every decade. Often, campaign contributions are given to BOTH candidates in a close election, so regardless of who wins, the winner is beholden to the nuclear industry.

In Vermont recently, a Federal judge threw out the state's attempt to get Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant shut down permanently after 40 years of constant leaks, piling waste, and random outages, because the judge was convinced the "real" reason Vermonters want the plant shut down is safety concerns -- regardless of the OTHER legal rationalities brought forth by the state's attorneys, such as: A prior agreement by the utility to shut the plant down if requested by the state; Lies told repeatedly by the utility to the state's citizens, and: Overpriced electricity the utility was offering the state.

But sooner or later, it always comes down to "safety". And as long as the NRC says the plants are safe, everyone else says they're safe too.

America is the most energy-wasting nation on the planet. Every nuclear power plant in America could be closed down if Americans would turn off extra lights, change to LED and CFL bulbs from incandescents, buy energy-efficient computers and other appliances, and make other small but important lifestyle changes and conservation efforts. No matter how frequently or how loudly the pro-nukers say it can't be done, the data clearly shows that it CAN be done (and dozens of other countries are doing it).

Instead, the NRC plans to continue to allow on-site nuclear waste storage in highly populated areas for the next 200 years because they don't know what else to do with the waste, even after 60 years and tens of billions of dollars worth of research. Not that there's anything surprising there: How can you make a container for something that can destroy its container? But the NRC doesn't see that as insurmountable, even though it is.

The NRC is beholden to no one but the nuclear industry they regulate. Their motto -- protecting people and the environment -- is criminally hollow.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Concerned Citizen
Carlsbad, CA

The author is a computer programmer and educational software developer. In 2008 he wrote The Code Killers, a pictorial expose of the nuclear industry. The Code Killers is available online at his web site: www.acehoffman.org .

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For more information about Vermont's attempt to shut down its sole reactor, check out these URLs:
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Conservation Law Foundation hopes that perhaps Vermonters can get VY shut down on grounds other than "safety", such as: "economics, land use, and trustworthiness of the plant�s owners":
http://www.clf.org/blog/clean-energy-climate-change/vermont-still-has-authority-to-retire-vermont-yankee-nuclear-plan-for-good/

Also see Karl Grossman's article, "The Saga of Vermont Yankee, Nuclear Power in the US: a Rigged System," on CounterPunch at http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/23/nuclear-power-in-the-us-a-rigged-system/

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Ace Hoffman speaks to the Carlsbad City Council January 10th, 2012

2012-01-11T02:37:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

Earlier this evening I spoke to my city council about San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station's impact on a local fossil-fueled power plant which the owners wish to upgrade. San Onofre is about 15 miles north of here.

I think most of my city's residents want the fossil-fueled power plant closed down entirely (and don't think much about San Onofre at all, since it's further away).

But the budget crunch has demolished the "redevelopment agency" which, it had been expected, was going to stop the upgrade project. Suddenly the city itself has to take over trying to stop the project, and so Carlsbad is appealing to the California Energy Commission for regulatory authority to stop the project.

I was the only speaker on the topic this evening. Total running time is about four and a half minutes:

Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
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© Ace Hoffman
www.acehoffman.org

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Is cancer an epidemic in America?

2011-12-20T23:13:00.001-08:00

December 20th, 2011
Dear Readers,
A friend and I were looking back at 2011.
She remarked about all the cancer she's seen this year. Last month she lost a close friend -- a woman in her 30s. Another friend, 40, has bladder cancer for the second time.
My step-mother recently made a similar remark about cancer in my own family. She lives on the other side of the country and the family is scattered all over the globe. One brother-in-law has stomach cancer which has metastasized, and many of us are cancer survivors (including me (bladder, 2007)). And on my own newsletter list I know of a number of ongoing cancer cases as well.
It feels like an epidemic, but of course, the epidemiologists who work for the state or the federal government would undoubtedly tell us they can't discern anything "statistically significant" (they love that phrase!) from our "data" -- it's just a few random points, it doesn't show a trend. That's true of course -- but we're talking about real lives of our friends and families, not raw, impersonal numbers. We're looking for answers.
The epidemiologist will also point out that cancer will strike about one in two Americans at some point in their lives, and will be the underlying cause of death for somewhere between one in four, and one in three of us. So they're not really looking for an epidemic. They're looking for a worsening trend within an ONGOING epidemic.
Baseline radiation values vary enormously from one location to another. Accurate data isn't available. By the time something is occurring so frequently that researchers find it to be "statistically significant," it might already be killing tens of thousands of people annually, or even more.
As an example, it took thousands of carefully-done studies to show there was a legally-defensible, statistically-significant connection between cigarettes and lung cancer, heart disease, throat, lip, esophageal, stomach, colon, and rectal cancer, and low birth weight among the babies of smokers. All these and many additional health effects are now well-established, yet each connection was hard to prove.
But even today about a billion people think the statistics are wrong, or that they don't apply to them for any of about a billion reasons. They smoke anyway (including my friend, who's excuse is that she only smokes one or two cigarettes a day).
Radiation deaths are far more difficult to prove than smoking deaths, because the source is almost always unknown in its quantity, who it was delivered to, and when. A two-pack-a-day smoker knows he or she is a two-pack a day-smoker.
Who got what dose from Fukushima? Nobody knows, not even in Japan. So proper epidemiological studies will be nearly impossible to accomplish. Three radiation experts -- Robert Alvarez, Joseph Mangano, and Janette Sherman -- have made an attempt to calculate Fukushima's impact. They estimate that nearly 14,000 excess deaths may have occurred (including over 800 infants) in America in the first few months after Fukushima (see below).
The nuclear industry will tell you they don't see anything unusual going on. They'll remind you that: "No one was harmed by Three Mile Island." Independent studies indicate otherwise. They'll remind you that: "No one has ever been harmed by living downwind of a properly operating nuclear reactor". Again, independent studies indicate otherwise. And they'll tell you that: "Hardly anyone was harmed by Chernobyl" but again, independent analysis indicates as many as a MILLION people have already died because of Chernobyl!
And of course, they'll say that: "No member of the public was harmed by Fukushima" but they'll be wrong about that, too.
People don't like to talk about cancer. But ever since cancer "came out of the closet" about forty years ago, it's felt like an epidemic even though the obituaries stopped routinely listing the CAUSE of death -- about thirty years ago! Independent studies of cancer clusters have become much more difficult since we all started clamming up about who we are, where we live, where we work, and so on. Studies are even more difficult because we move so often, change jobs and companies, partners and eating habits.
And when a victim does manage to reach a settlement with a polluter, the terms and conditions are invariably kept secret, making the clusters that much harder to find for everyone else.
My friend is not a nuclear activist and wasn't talking about Fukushima and its aftermath. She just was wondering why so many people seem to have cancer these days.
"Could be Fukushima" I said.
"What's that?" she responded.
"Remember that nuclear accident in Japan last spring? It's still spewing radioactive poisons into the environment, and is still out of control. We need to shut them all down, including San Onofre." (SanO is our local pair of poorly-run nuclear reactors, about 15 miles away.)
"Where will we get our energy?" she asked.
I answered that San Onofre only supplies about 7% of California's power, which could easily be replaced by solar, wind, etc.. If I had more time, I would have made her aware of some other considerations besides just where our electricity will come from.
Here are some other reasons she might be thinking we can't shut San Onofre:
"Wind turbines kill birds!"
They do. So do plate glass windows in high-rise buildings, and so do cars, trucks, busses, trains and airplanes, deforestation and climate change -- but no one seems to care about those! Only wind turbines. And there are a variety of ways to increase wind turbine blade visibility to birds, ways to site them and so on, that can greatly reduce the incidence of bird strikes.
"You'd have to cover the whole country with solar panels!"
Not true! Actually an area in the southwest approximately 100 miles on each side would be enough -- and much of that can be found on existing rooftops, which are mostly just tar-covered, wasted space anyway!
"Hydroelectric power damages the river life."
You can install anything improperly if you like. Or you can build fish ladders, you can control the water levels in the rivers appropriately, you can locate the dams properly and make existing dams more efficient and so on.
"Mining for Rare Earth Elements (REEs) is extremely polluting -- but all the renewable energy sources needs REEs!"
That's right: For example, they need "permanent" magnets made of REEs. However, these are 100% recyclable! And don't forget that "rare" is just a name: These elements are fairly abundant, actually.
"Nuclear power has worked for 50 years."
No it hasn't! Accidents have been covered up, and when that isn't possible, they've been swept from the front pages of the news even as they're still happening! Fukushima is no longer the top item in the news each day, and yet it's an ongoing tragedy -- the most massive single environmental catastrophe the world has ever seen -- and capable of an even-more catastrophic "hydrovolcanic explosion" if any of the molten cores hit the water table underneath.
Lastly but most importantly, she might think:
"They've solved the nuclear waste problem, it's just a political issue now."
Completely false! In fact, the Yucca Mountain scientific team was allowed to come up with ANY scientifically-viable alternative to Yucca Mountain if they could. They only thing they couldn't consider was the same thing in a different location. They couldn't come up with anything else that would work, and neither will Obama's "Blue Ribbon Committee."
Nothing else works any better than Yucca Mountain would, but Yucca Mountain wouldn't work, either: It's geography is unstable, it suffers from water seepage, the population centers nearby are too close, transporting the waste there would be a nightmare.
Unfortunately, any OTHER location will have the same problems, or worse! Therefore, the only solution to the nuclear dilemma -- and it's a partial one -- is to stop making more waste.
But unfortunately, the average adult in America has no idea what "radiation" is. They don't know an element from an isotope from a molecule from a sub-atomic particle, and couldn't care less. The word "epidemiology" causes their eyes to glaze over. And cancer scares them.
How will it be possible for a "democratic" society (let alone any other) to fulfill its promise to protect its citizens, when those same citizens are ignorant of the dangers they face? When the problems are too complex to grasp in a sound bite? When there is always an opposing view, who usually sounds just as passionate or more so (after all, their livelihoods are usually at stake)?
My hope for 2012 is that the world will educate itself more about the problems it faces.
It is our duty to our children to learn how to protect them.
My friend has a wonderful child. But she is probably unaware that radiation harms young children at roughly 10 times the rate it harms adults. Infants are a hundred times more vulnerable, and fetuses a thousand -- or thousands of times -- more so, because their cells are differentiating.
The Nuclear Age has been an epic failure so far, and is destined only to be more so in the future. A third of a trillion dollars are projected to be put into a dozen (or more) genocidal, environmentally-devastating nuclear-armed and nuclear powered submarines for the next generation to play war games with. Then those sailors will need jobs in the industry. Same as now. But nuclear weapons have not prevented war, as was promised, and nuclear power plants have only made us vulnerable. Electricity has not been "too cheap to meter," as was also promised. Nothing's worked out for the nuclear industry -- except their ability to fool the public.
After 2011, the world is three meltdowns more polluted than it was in 2010. It also has about 20,000 tons of NEW "High Level Radioactive Waste" from ~500 commercial reactors still operating around the world. This new "HLRW" waste (mostly used nuclear reactor cores) is about ten million times more hazardous than before it was put in the reactor (and it was no picnic then, either).
TEPCO, the owner of the stricken reactors, lies constantly. The reactors spew radioactive waste constantly. The Japanese government lies constantly. No one knows what's really going on anyway. Everyone is now admitting that it will take "40 years" to put Fukushima into "Safe Store", a fictitious state of temporary nuclear bliss.
2012, here we come.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author has been writing about nuclear power for a number of decades. His book on the subject, called The Code Killers, is available from his personal web site: www.acehoffman.org . He also writes educational software using animation as a teaching tool. His software products, as well as many free educational animations about nuclear issues, are available at: www.animatedsoftware.com .
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PRESS RELEASE - Janette D. Sherman, MD:
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12-19-2011
This report, "An Unexpected Mortality Increase in the United States Follows Arrival of the Radioactive Plume from Fukushima: Is There a Correlation?" published in the International Journal of Health Sciences today, is not new science, but confirms research done over the decades as to adverse effects caused by radioisotopes to the unborn and the very young because of their rapidly developing cells, immature immunological systems and relatively small weight.
As background, in the 1950s, I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission (the forerunner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) at the Radiation Laboratory, University of California in Berkeley and the US Navy Radiation Laboratory at Hunter's Point in San Francisco. Near 60 years ago, we learned that radiation could damage animals and plants and cause cancer, genetic damage, and other problems.
The issue of the danger from nuclear power plants is not just the engineering, but biology and chemistry. We have understood for decades where and how radioisotopes interact with life systems.
Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 have half-lives of approximately 30 years. It takes 10 half-lives for an isotope to fully decay, thus it will take 300 years or Three Centuries before radioactive cesium and strontium will be gone.
Cs134, Cs-137 and Sr-90 continue to be released from Fukushima in tons of contaminated water that is making its' way across the Pacific Ocean. Cesium concentrates in soft tissue, strontium in bones and teeth, of the unborn and young.
Immediately after Chernobyl the level of thyroid disease increased. Given the large amounts of radioactive iodine
(I-131) released from Fukushima, thyroid disease will develop in those exposed in Japan, as well as in those exposed to lesser amounts throughout the northern hemisphere. Public health officials need to anticipate and prepare for these findings.
The highest levels of I-131 measured by EPA in precipitation varied from a high of 390 picoCuries (pCi) in Boise to 92 in Boston, with intermediate levels in Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Jacksonville and Olympia, WA. (Normal is @ 2 pCi)
Not every system was evaluated after Chernobyl, but of those that were: wild and domestic animals, birds, fish, plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses - even humans - were altered by the radiation, often for generations.
Birds in the 30-kilometer "exclusion zone" of Chernobyl display small brain size, alterations of normal coloration, poor survival of offspring, and poor adaptability to stress,
Recent, independent studies conducted in Scandinavia shows a decline on academic performance in children exposed during the Chernobyl fallout.
80% of children in Belarus are considered un-well by government standards.
Unless the earth stops turning, and the laws of biology, chemistry and physics are rescinded, we will continue to see sickness and harm spread to the children of Fukushima, the same that occurred after Chernobyl. We ignore history at our peril.
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Full article available on 12-20-2011 at:
www.janettesherman.com
www.radiation.org
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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
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© Ace Hoffman
www.acehoffman.org
rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
www.animatedsoftware.com
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Dear Lord: Please send Einstein back! We're scared!

2011-11-19T12:42:00.001-08:00

11/19/11

Dear Readers,

I've been following nuclear issues for more than 40 years -- since I was about fourteen years old. I watched as Three Mile Island unfolded, and then Chernobyl, the loss of the Russian submarine Kursk, and a thousand other events. I'd guess I've testified at over 100 nuke hearings (10 more, and I get a free pizza!) and written over a thousand essays (we'll call this one #1,167, though it may not be). A phone call in the middle of the night on 3/11 from Harvey Wasserman alerted me to Fukushima. (So now I owe Harvey a pizza.)

Suffice it to say, it's not often I read a headline about nuclear dangers that scares the daylights out of me. They all distress me, but I don't lose my daylights (wherever they happen to be) very often. However, here's a headline that DOES scare the daylights out of me:

"Architect of Reactor 3 warns of massive hydrovolcanic explosion."

(Full article and links, below).

Here's my take on it (with a little history to set the scene):

In the fall of 1945 Vern Partlow was a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.

After interviewing scientists about the atomic bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he became so alarmed that he wrote a song about the dangers, called Old Man Atom.

The song was an enormous hit among folksingers of the time (Pete Seeger among them) but was (famously) banned during the McCarthy Era. (Even the New York Times editorialized that the song's ban was "a threat to freedom.")

The song has a line that describes "the atom" as: "...the thing that Einstein says he's scared of" then goes on to say: "And when Einstein's scared, brother, I'M SCARED!"

If Einstein were alive today, I think he'd be VERY scared.

Of Fukushima.

Professor Haruo Uehara is a former president of Saga University and the primary architect of Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor 3. Professor Haruo is scared. So I think we should ALL be scared. Not that Professor Uehara is saying anything significantly different from what I -- and others -- have been saying we thought happened in Fukushima, or is happening, or will happen. But now it's coming from someone with very heavy credentials AND close ties to Fukushima Dai-ichi itself.

There may be nothing we can do about Fukushima, but ADDITIONAL nuclear catastrophes can be relatively easy to prevent: Shut the reactors down. Shut 'em ALL down.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author was born during atmospheric weapons testing (1956, to be exact) and is an educational software developer. He witnessed the breakup of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) into the NRC and the DOE (1974). He was working at a college news department as Three Mile Island unfolded (1979). He was a computer programmer by the time of Chernobyl (1986). His older brother died of leukemia (1994), then he had bladder cancer himself (2007). Then Fukushima started raining radioactive poisons down on us all (2011). What's next? San Onofre? Indian Point? Or any of a hundred others?

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Architect of Reactor 3 warns of massive hydrovolcanic explosion:
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From:
http://fukushima-diary.com/2011/11/architect-of-reactor-3-warns-massive-hydrovolcanic-explosion/?mid=531

Posted by Mochizuki on November 19th, 2011

Architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, the former president of Saga University had an interview on 11/17/2011.

In this interview, he admitted Tepco�s explanation does not make sense, and that the China syndrome is inevitable.

He stated that considering 8 months have passed since 311 without any improvement, it is inevitable that melted fuel went out of the container vessel and sank underground, which is called China syndrome.

He added, if fuel has reaches a underground water vein, it will cause contamination of underground water, soil contamination and sea contamination. Moreover, if the underground water vein keeps being heated for long time, a massive hydrovolcanic explosion will be caused.

He also warned radioactive debris is spreading in Pacific Ocean. Tons of the debris has reached the Marshall Islands as of 11/15/2011.

Original source: http://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/6041353/

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Sent by: Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, CA
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Half a country, and half a world away...

2011-11-16T10:47:00.001-08:00

November 16th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Victor Dricks is up to his usual tricks.

Dricks is the Region IV Public Affairs Officer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). He's based in Arlington, Texas, nearly 1500 miles away from Southern California. Half a country, and half a world away...

On Saturday the North County Times ( nctimes.com ) published a commentary by Roger Johnson, asking for IMMEDIATE shutdown of San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station. He got IMMEDIATE action: On Monday the NC Times published Victor Dricks' response! Somehow he had heard about Roger Johnson's commentary and must have worked weekends to counter it. I wonder if he collected overtime pay or just comp time for his efforts?

At any rate, congratulations, Roger Johnson! You're scaring them!

Below are both items, plus Roger Johnson's excellent follow-up to Dricks' drivel. Dricks response is something only a propagandist could love: He takes exception to practically every word of Johnson's letter and ignores countless facts (as Johnson points out in his follow-up). But what is really astonishing is Dricks' description of the 1982 Sandia Labs study as "outlandish" and "unlikely" when all that's missing is the rainstorm -- we saw all the rest of it already happen in Fukushima Dai-ichi! Three times!

Our reactors can explode, just like theirs did. Our spent fuel can burn, just like theirs did.

In fact, what happened at Fukushima Dai-ichi isn't over, isn't as bad as it can get, and isn't being fully reported! A recent busload of reporters, finally let in to "see" the plant for the first time since the accident, weren't allowed off the bus, even though they were each dressed in full-body protective hazmat suits, to add to the 480,000 hazmat suits used so far at Fukushima Dai-ichi.

The NRC would have you, the public, FORGET FUKUSHIMA DAI-ICHI. More than eight months after the tragedy, Dricks isn't even close to spelling it right, and he won't dare to give the NRC's official estimate of how many people Fukushima Dai-ichi will eventually kill (cancer takes many years to develop).

Of course, the NRC doesn't make such estimates. It would be bad for business.

The NRC and the nuclear industry wants the public to think that our reactors, spent fuel pools, and dry casks are somehow less vulnerable, less dangerous, and better protected through better regulatory oversight than Japan's were.

But it's all lies.

Fukushima USA nearly happened many times already: At Brown's Ferry in 1975, at Three Mile Island in 1979, at Davis-Besse in 2002, during an earthquake a few months ago at North Anna, from a tornado near Calvert Cliffs a few years ago, and so on. It's just a matter of time before a nuclear plant in America melts down, and there is a 2 in 104 chance it will be one of San Oofre's and about a one in 25 chance it will be one in California -- NOT counting any increased probability due to our nearby seismic faults and tsunami risks, or our aging/embrittlement issues, workforce issues, etc.. It assumes all other nuclear power plants are equally-poorly run, poorly built, poorly maintained, and have their own environmental risks that weren't properly considered. 104 reactors. 104 mistakes.

The only way to significantly change the odds is to shut San Onofre down immediately and forever. The longer the fuel has cooled, the safer it becomes, and the less of it we make, the less we have to protect and guard for millions of years. Extremely toxic radioactive waste is created at San Onofre at the rate of about 500 pounds PER DAY.

Nuclear energy is a dangerous and costly mistake. It can easily be replaced with cleaner alternatives. Nuclear power is profitable for a select few, who use official mouthpieces such as Victor Dricks to lull the public into accepting the enormous and unnecessary risk nuclear power presents.

But Dricks' lies can't change the facts. His resignation should be demanded by all citizens who want their paid servants to tell the truth.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California
www.acehoffman.org

The author has been studying nuclear power for several decades, and predicted cascading nuclear accidents long before Fukushima Dai-ichi...

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FORUM: Time to close San Onofre nuclear plant

By: Roger Johnson | Posted: Saturday, November 12, 2011 9:00 pm | No Comments Posted
Â·
Related Stories
Â· REGION: Group seeks independent oversight of San Onofre earthquake studies
Â· REGION: Anti-nuke movement in North County starts to stir
Â· SAN ONOFRE: San Clemente council poised to punt on no-nuke vote
Â· REGION: Anti-nuclear sentiment strong at San Clemente meeting
Â· FORUM: Forum on nuke plant misuses study

Memo to North County Residents from Fukushima and San Clemente:

When people moved to North County, they knew about the San Onofre nuclear power plant and accepted it as a necessary evil. The meltdown at Fukushima last March changed everything. Fukushima is now an uninhabitable dead zone, and some experts predict that eventually a million people all over Japan may die from Fukushima radiation.

Everyone is now reassessing their stance on nuclear power. Solana Beach is taking the lead in San Diego County with a public hearing set for Nov. 16. San Clemente already conducted three town meetings called, "The Lessons of Fukushima." Meanwhile, Southern California Edison (operators of San Onofre) is gearing up for a 20-year license renewal application.

Like Fukushima, San Onofre has aging reactors vulnerable to equipment failure, human error, earthquakes, tsunamis, sabotage, and terrorist attack. The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has warned that a meltdown could cause 50,000 fatalities and hundreds of billions in unrecoverable property loses.
How far could the radiation spread?

Until Fukushima, the evacuation zone was 10 miles, with an ingestion zone of 50 miles (all food and water as far as San Diego could be contaminated). But when the U.S. government saw the winds in Fukushima turn inland (as they do here all the time), it ordered evacuation within 50 miles.

There are 8.4 million people within 50 miles of San Onofre (everyone between San Diego and Los Angeles), and anyone who imagines that they are safe had better think again.

The problem with radiation is that it cannot be seen, heard, tasted, or smelled and can silently penetrate all objects including lead, concrete, and steel. Trillions of microscopic particles can contaminate food, water, soil, plants, clothing, pets, and everything you own. A millionth of a gram of plutonium 239 can be lethal. No, there will not be a nuclear explosion, but those exposed may get some form of deadly cancer. Pregnant women and children are especially vulnerable.

Even more dangerous than the material inside the reactors are the radioactive fuel rods stored outside the reactors. These 2,500 fuel rods have the equivalent of thousands of Hiroshima bombs.

Because Yucca Mountain is closed, San Onofre will remain a huge nuclear waste storage facility until the plant is closed. Evacuation is no solution. A large earthquake would make roads impassable and thousands could be stuck in cars absorbing even more radiation.

The NRC says it is concerned with public safety, but in reality the NRC is part of the nuclear industry. The industry picks the commissioners, and the funding comes from the utilities it is supposed to regulate.
The NRC has made relicensing of San Onofre easier by grandfathering the plant to make it exempt from modern safety standards. This is especially troubling because San Onofre has one of the worst safety records in the U.S.

San Clemente unanimously passed resolutions demanding new seismic studies and the removal of nuclear waste before there is any relicensing. It is now time for towns in North County to examine this issue and recommend even stronger action: Close the plant immediately.

Roger Johnson was on the faculty of Amherst College, Tufts University and Ramapo College and is now professor emeritus residing in San Clemente.

FORUM: Forum on nuke plant misuses study

By Victor Dricks | Posted: Monday, November 14, 2011 9:00 pm | (3) Comments

Â· FORUM: Time to close San Onofre nuclear plant

In his commentary calling for the immediate closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station published Nov. 12, Roger Johnson, a professor emeritus residing in San Clemente, said a Nuclear Regulatory Commission study predicts 50,000 fatalities in the event of a catastrophic accident at the plant.

While he cites no reference, we believe Mr. Johnson was referring to "Technical Guidance For Siting Criteria Development." This report, prepared for the NRC in 1982 by Sandia National Laboratory, was not an effort to determine how many people might die or how much property might be damaged in the event of a severe accident. It was an effort to determine how large a role factors like population densities, meteorology, geography, and emergency planning could play in the consequences of a nuclear accident. It used a hypothetical scenario in which all of the plant's safety systems and barriers fail, spouting a radioactive geyser into the air. The entire contents of the reactor core get injected into a rain cloud hovering above the plant, and the cloud then floats over a major population center where it drenches a population with radioactive rain. The scenario is so outlandish and considered so unlikely, the people who designed the study said at the time they doubted it could occur.

Despite numerous explanations and clarifications by the NRC over the past three decades, this study has been misused by many.

Mr. Johnson also noted that San Onofre "has aging reactors vulnerable to equipment failure, human error, earthquakes, tsunamis, sabotage and terrorist attacks." The NRC has rigorous requirements for the design and operation of nuclear power plants that ensure that they are built to rigorous standards, operate safely, are capable of withstanding all manner of natural hazards and are secure from terrorist attack. The agency holds the industry to a high standard, and our inspectors have a low threshold for concern. Our regulations require multiple safety barriers and "defense in depth" to protect the public from exposure to radiation. Our rigorous oversight ensures that adverse performance trends are identified long before they become safety-significant.

After the accident at Fukushima Diaichi, the NRC conducted inspections at all 104 reactors to ensure they could deal with the loss of major equipment or electrical power following extreme events. Some deficiencies were identified at San Onofre, but nothing that would have prevented the safe shutdown of the plant.

Mr. Johnson's commentary is peppered with other inaccuracies. Far too many, in fact, to address here. But here are a few:

* Contrary to Mr. Johnson's assertion, the industry doesn't pick NRC Commissioners; the president of the United States does, and they are confirmed by the Senate.

* Yucca Mountain is not closed; it was never built.

* The used fuel rods at San Onofre do not "have the equivalent of thousands of Hiroshima bombs;" they are being safely stored in a water-filled pool or are transferred to massive steel and concrete storage casks.

* And the industry does not pay for the NRC; fees charged to the industry for safety oversight are sent to the U.S. Treasury.

Victor Dricks is a public affairs officer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is based in Arlington, Texas.

Copyright 2011 North County Times. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Posted in Commentary on Monday, November 14, 2011 9:00 pm Updated: 5:11 pm. |
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Read more: http://www.nctimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/forum-forum-on-nuke-plant-misuses-study/article_b2728ad1-1e69-5a97-ab66-dcc68cb2d7eb.html#ixzz1dp5ZTOt4

Prof. Johnson replies:

The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) in Texas has seen fit to respond through public affairs officer Victor Dricks to my Forum commentary of Nov. 12 in North County Times asking for the closure of the dangerous San Onofre nuclear power plant.

One of my major arguments was that the NRC is actually part of the nuclear industry despite its claim to be an independent agency of government concerned with protecting the safety of citizens. The vigor with which Mr. Dricks attacks my commentary together with his enthusiastic support of the nuclear industry speaks volumes for the true interests of the NRC.

Mr. Dricks demeans the Sandia National Laboratory study in 1982 which predicted 50,000 deaths in the event of a meltdown at San Onofre. The population of this area has grown by a third since that study and the estimated death toll would now be far higher. It seems disingenuous for the NRC to cherry pick studies of the U.S. Dept. of Energy National Laboratories and pick reports which glorify nuclear power and criticize those that warn of the dangers of nuclear power. My commentary was limited to 500 words and I could not mention many additional studies including those that predict a million eventual cancer deaths in Europe from Chernobyl and in Japan from Fukushima.

Mr. Dricks boasts about the âœrigorous standardsâ of the NRC, yet he fails to mention that the NRC compromised these standards for the purpose of promoting the relicensing of San Onofre. The fact is that the NRC went out of its way to protect San Onofre from meeting the safety requirements of new nuclear power plants. This illustrates the embarrassing fact that a major priority of the NRC is to protect aging and dangerous plants from closing.

With regard to Yucca Mountain near the California border, it was first recommended by the Dept. of Energy in 1978 and in 1987 President Reagan approved it being one of the top three destinations for nuclear waste. In 2002 it was approved by Congress and signed by President Bush. The facility will end up costing taxpayers $11 billion. It is outlandishly deceptive of Mr. Dricks to claim that Yucca Mountain "was never built."

Mr. Dricks is technically correct that the President picks the NRC commissioners. What he doesnâ™t say is that all commissioners are first vetted by the nuclear industry. No commissioner is ever nominated let alone approved unless he or she is already a proven cheerleader for the nuclear industry.

Mr. Dricks employs more deception when he claims that the NRC is not funded by the nuclear industry. The fact that the money trail goes from the industry to the treasury back to the NRC means only that the NRC is doing summersaults trying to conceal its actual funding. The NRC representative at the San Clemente hearings was quick to admit that 90% of NRC funding comes from the nuclear industry.

Finally, Mr. Dricks claims that highly radioactive nuclear fuel is safe because it is in pools or in temporary concrete casks. If anything goes wrong with the pumps, pipelines, switches, valves, power supplies, or concrete pools, we have a nuclear catastrophe. The Veterans Today Military and Foreign Affairs Journal reported that the radiation released by Fukushima is the equivalent of 66,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

Finally, I take offense that Mr. Dricks wrote that my commentary was peppered with inaccuracies when in fact it is his commentary which was full of inaccurate, misleading, and deceptive statements. The truth is that the NRC is an out-of-control agency which cannot be trusted. The fact that the NRC is so deceptive and unprincipled in its rush to promote nuclear power should be of major concern to everyone.

###

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Newsletter by: Ace Hoffman
==================================================

Modern Warfare: The relief of Bastogne, the relief of us all...

2011-11-10T14:35:00.001-08:00

November 10th, 2011

Dear Readers,

11/11/11 is Veteran's Day in America.

Veteran's Day was originally created as Armistice Day, to be held in commemoration of the end of The Great War and to promote the cause of world peace.

But war did not end, and in 1954 Armistice Day officially became Veteran's Day, and became dedicated to honoring those who sacrificed for the cause of peace, rather than being dedicated to the cause of peace itself.

World War One ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, so Veterans Day is always on the 11th day of the 11th month.

Could World War One have ended a day sooner, or maybe an hour sooner? It would be another half century, and another war, before a young veteran, John Kerry, pondered the question: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

My father, Howard S. Hoffman, became a Quaker in his mid 30s and is now buried in a small Quaker cemetery. Howard was a peaceful man: A scientist, a college professor, a musician, a painter, an author, and most of all (from my perspective) a loving father. My step-mom, also a former college professor, is a Quaker pacifist. Despite her years, she has been attending the Occupy Philadelphia rallies. She protests war, nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and the destruction of Social Security, which her father, Nelson Cruikshank, helped establish in the 1950s and '60s.

My father was not born to a peaceful time. He fought and killed with the best of them: As an American soldier during World War Two.

His first battle was Cassino, Italy, 1943, where a new technique was used on the whole town -- civilians, German liaison officers, Italian soldiers, cows, goats and chickens alike: Fire the big guns first, they are farthest away. Fire the medium-range guns second, as the big gun's projectiles pass overhead. Then fire the close-in weapons, the mortars (the ones my father manned) as the long- and medium-range shells passed together over the mortar-men, a few hundred yards behind the front line. Then, all at once, a few seconds later...

BOOM!!!!

Shock and Awe had been invented.

Howard fought the Axis forces throughout Europe, pushing the Germans back a yard, a mile, a battle and a town at a time. More than a year after Cassino, he was trudging through icy, snow-covered forests in Belgium during a German offensive that later became known as The Battle of the Bulge.

My father's company came upon a place called Malmedy, where nearly a hundred American prisoners of war had been machine-gunned in cold blood (and cold weather) by German soldiers of the 1st SS Panzer Division, then left to die in the snowy fields. Hitler had ordered no quarter be given, no prisoner be taken, no civilian be pitied in the attack. The ill-conceived offensive was to be swift and brutal. It was.

Within a month, nearly 100,000 soldiers on each side were killed, wounded, or missing -- and thousands more civilians had also perished: Buried under rubble, shot by stray bullets, mistaken for a soldier, or starved or frozen to death in their homes.

My father participated in the relief of Bastogne, the central hub in the Ardennes forest, where seven roads converged, all held by German troops, and where the American commander, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, sent a famous one-word response to the German commander's demand for surrender:

"NUTS!"

After The Battle of the Bulge, it is doubtful many Germans thought they could win the war. It was just a matter of time before their inevitable defeat. Did Germany stop fighting? Hardly! Did German soldiers stop committing atrocities? HARDLY! Howard came upon a place where the Germans had burnt a barn full of civilians. They were too difficult to move as swiftly as the Americans were advancing. The Americans had seen the smoke rising for days.

Today the world still has little trouble starting a war, and we seem no better at ending them, either.

If the atomic bomb had been ready while we were still at war with Germany, would we have used it there? Did we use "The Bomb" for demonstration purposes more than anything else when we bombed Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki (as a demonstration to Russia, specifically)?

Was the demonstration effective? What did we demonstrate -- that civilian populations will never be safe from war again? That a sudden escalation of war may come at any time, even when it appears to be the eleventh hour of a war everyone knows must end soon? That global pollution is now an inevitable consequence of war? That we've got The Bomb, now go get one yourselves? They did: Russia, England, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel too it's believed, and perhaps Iran now, too.

Why does it take so much violence to stop violence? Or does it? Is the use of overwhelming force against a weaker enemy justifiable? If so, is the use of overwhelming force operated entirely by remote control equally justifiable? When will war itself become a war crime? Do the actions of a small group of terrorists mostly from one country against another justify destroying the entire civilian infrastructure of a third? Who owns the oil and other riches beneath their feet, or the air we all breath, or the water that runs by, unpolluted?

When a veteran comes back from combat duty with no visible wounds but a head full of mental problems, what should society do? Have a parade? Or have police in riot gear beat him when he protests the greed of the 1%, pepper-spray and tear-gas him, and then arrest him for "assaulting a police officer"? Is this what democracy looks like? Is this the peace our veterans fought for?

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California

The author, 55, yearns for peace and love in a nuke- and violence-free world...

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RE: Fw: Scientist Presents Data Confirming Hot Particles- response from Tim Brown

2011-11-02T21:07:00.000-07:00

To: "Brown, Tim" <BrownT@san-clemente.org>, "Scarborough, George" <ScarboroughG@san-clemente.org>

November 2nd, 2011

Dear Tim Brown,

Dust storms created in the African deserts are clearly visible on satellite images thousands of miles out over the Atlantic ocean, and they are even visible to the naked eye in the West Indies when they pass over -- and settle out -- there. Insects far larger than a fuel flea are carried aloft -- and alive -- for thousands of miles through the air.

It doesn't take a scientist to know which way the wind blows.

My wife and I attended the public portion of the National Academy of Science's meeting on the current state of epidemiological studies of low level radiation dangers from nuclear power plants, held in Irvine this past July. Scientists from several different countries were Skyped in. Others appeared in person. A scientist from the Hiroshima bomb study group was one of the presenters.

I didn't see any representatives from San Clemente there to make a request that their community receive extra scrutiny. Although San Onofre Nuclear (Waste) Generating Station had several employees present, none spoke. The only members of the public to speak during the opportunity provided were my wife and myself.

When I spoke, I mentioned that although I'm not an "expert", I have programmed a statistics tutorial (written by my father, who taught statistics for nearly fifty years) and it's currently used by students in over a thousand universities. I said that: "I can program a two-way Analysis of Variance [an 'ANOVA', a standard statistical analysis technique] in three different computer languages".

I then said that the overriding theme of the day seemed to be that reliable statistical data regarding cancer clusters around nuclear power plants is very difficult to collect. I pointed out that no definitive results have come after more than half a century of research, and none are likely in the near future, because everything is going to be drastically under-funded, short-term, small scale, half-measures, and, in the end, ANY results will invariably be considered unreliable, because the results will be full of possible confounding factors.

I added that I hadn't heard the word "Fukushima" all day, where theory has turned to gruesome reality.

Afterwards, in a conversation with the scientist who I felt had presented the most pro-nuclear views of the day (I tend to gravitate towards those people, for information, but in this case I just plain liked his style and his honesty), I was told that after a lifetime of research, he has NEVER found the slightest proof that "hot particles" are any more dangerous (that is, cause proportionately more cancers) than the same amount of radiation delivered as vapors or any other way (what organ is targeted by the radioactive isotopes is far more important, for example). I was also told that yes, we're a long way from knowing for sure if "Linear, No Threshold" is correct, and in a hundred years, we probably still won't be sure. But we'll be closer to being sure.

Like you, I'm not a scientist, either. But like you, I know what a plume of poison gas can do. I know what happened in Ypres during World War One. I know San Onofre was partially evacuated today because of non-radioactive poison gas. I know that "LNT" is the accepted scientific theory, and has been for decades, and according to that theory, Fukushima IS poisoning us all. And so is San Onofre. Whether its daily releases are significant or not can be debated forever, because it will be long closed before definitive data exists, if the NAS meeting is anything to go on. But San Onofre's vast potential for suddenly devastating San Clemente, Carlsbad, and all points in-between, and much farther out too, is undeniable.

My educational software, that I wrote, and/or programmed, is used by scientists and engineers all over the world. My animation of a Fukushima-style reactor, done several years ago, is so accurate that it's used for training in reactor engineering classes, by emergency responders, and by the nuclear industry. My book, The Code Killers, has been out for three years, and I've begged for anyone to make corrections, and I've put it in the hands of dozens and dozens of San Onofre employees -- every one of whom has been polite thus far, by the way. Some have even said they've enjoyed reading the book. None have been able to disprove its conclusion.

During the NAS session, the KIKK study from Germany was talked about quite a bit. That's the study cited by Helen Caldicott on October 11th as one of the cornerstones of the current epidemiological debate against operating nuclear power plants. But in Irvine, conflicting results of an apparently more complete study were presented. But the "more complete" study wasn't very good, either! I don't refer to the KIKK study to support my opposition to nuclear power, I don't need to. Nuclear power doesn't make sense anyway, even if it DOESN'T double the likelihood of childhood leukemias among those living nearby.

I don't recall that the Chernobyl Consequences book (translated in 2010 by my friend Janette Sherman, who is a medical doctor and radiation expert) was mentioned at all during the NAS hearing. I read that book very carefully shortly before publication, with the eye of someone who can program any basic statistical function, and I was absolutely aghast. Aghast, not by the lack of scientific credibility of each individual study, many of which had essentially none whatsoever, but by the overall emotional effect of reviewing the results of THOUSANDS of studies. THAT had impact. The author's conclusions -- that Chernobyl appears to have already killed nearly a million people -- seems very, very plausible. But there will be no proof. Even a hundred years from now, there will be little "scientific proof" that Fukushima killed millions, including thousands in California alone, but it will.

Exact numbers are impossible to find, but as late as August, 10 trillion Becquerels of radiation were still being released every hour at Fukushima. The half-lives vary from seconds to days to centuries to millennia.

All that radiation IS going to kill people all around the world for generations to come. That's the nature of LNT, combined with massive releases of poison gas. It doesn't take a scientist to know this.

You and I are both qualified to know that San Onofre can do the same thing -- release massive amounts of poison gas -- in a heartbeat. San Onofre can lay waste to San Clemente for generations, starting today.

You and I are also fully qualified to know that if they shut the reactors down, many of the "routes to catastrophe" are immediately eliminated, and additional fission products are no longer being created once criticality is stopped. We are qualified to assess the fact that in 65+ years, the so-called scientists have not solved the waste problem because ionizing radiation destroys ANY container you put it in -- by definition. And for that matter, we know that "finding a place to put it" isn't the same as solving the problem anyway!

Lastly, we can plainly see that all the "experts" in the world can't put Fukushima together again -- or even stop it from going critical again right now!

We are all experts in one thing: Ourselves. We each have a right to try to protect ourselves and our loved ones. We each know it is also our duty to live in peace on this earth, not to harm others, not to leave anything but daisies popping up from our graves, and a good impression among those we influenced during our lives.

Highly irradiated workers, as happened in Idaho some years back when one was impaled on the ceiling of a building by an ejected control rod, have to be buried in lead-lined coffins, and even then, it's a inadequate solution.

It does not take a scientist to know that there are cleaner energy alternatives. If two scientists want to argue whether coal or oil is worse than nuclear, so be it -- let them argue. In the meantime, any economist worth their title can tell both scientists that there are vastly cleaner alternatives than either coal, oil, or nuclear, available to San Clemente's residents, and for everyone else, too.

There is nothing good about nuclear energy. Prolonged debate over exactly how bad an idea it actually is, isn't necessary. The facts are overwhelmingly against nuclear power, and were before San Onofre was ever built, and long before the chickens came home to roost in Fukushima.

We can hope and pray Fukushima doesn't happen here, but that's not being very scientific.

Instead, we can make it IMPOSSIBLE to happen here, by shutting the plant down, removing the waste, and turning to clean energy.

If we can't remove the waste today, that's no reason not to shut the plant down and switch to clean energy. Two out of three ain't bad. For now.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
www. animatedsoftware.com
www.acehoffman.org

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At 06:34 PM 11/2/2011 +0000, "Brown, Tim" <BrownT@san-clemente.org> wrote:
>Ace/Roger,
>
>I have corresponded with Mr. Kaltofen about his findings, and there is actually no scientific paper to accompany the announcement right now - just a summary page and a powerpoint. The final paper will actually be Mr. Kaltofen's doctoral thesis for his PHD - no word on when that will be available.
>
>As there is not data to confirm the hot particles, just a powerpoint, the video presentation is somewhat premature. I have no doubt at some point I will receive the paper, which should be subjected to peer review and analysis before making broad statements of confirmed facts. I am not a scientist, but I do believe in the scientific process - which we should stick to when making decisions and reviewing the facts here.
>
>I am also copying the City Manager on my response in case he feels the Council may benefit from the findings.
>
>Tim
>
>
>________________________________
>From: Ace Hoffman [rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 5:31 PM
>To: Brown, Tim
>Subject: Re: Fw: Scientist Presents Data Confirming Hot Particles- response from Tim Brown
>
>Hi Roger,
>
>I believe the important thing, from Tim's perspective, is that it's usually pronounced "wooster" (with the "oo" pronounced more or less as in the word "wood" (not "rooster")), although when locals denounce their city, the first part is pronounced more like "wus".
>
>Ace
>
>At 04:57 PM 11/1/2011 -0700, you wrote:
>Can anyone dig into this so we can respond to Tim Brown. You can respond yourself or get back to me and I will reply to him since I passed this video on to the council.
>
>R. Johnson
>
>----- Forwarded Message -----
>From: "Brown, Tim" <BrownT@san-clemente.org>
>To: r johnson <r66nj@yahoo.com>; "Tucker, Jen" <TuckerJ@san-clemente.org>; CityManager Mail <CityManager@san-clemente.org>
>Sent: Tuesday, November 1, 2011 4:44 PM
>Subject: RE: Scientist Presents Data Confirming Hot Particles- please watch short video
>
>Mr. Johnson,
>
>The video is nice as is the website on APHA - but there is not scientific paper available for review. I have emailed Mr. Kaltofen for the original. He is currently studying at Worcester for his PHD, I believe this is his dissertation. Having tracked this pretty closely, his results are not typical - particulary when compared to UC Berkley's findings. I would be interested to know who is wrong here.
>
>Check out the following from UC Berkley Nuclear Lab:
>
>http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/3801
>
>http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4503
>
>and another take from Energy News:
>
>http://enenews.com/university-researcher-topsoil-8000-pcikg-cesium-fukushima-10000-higher-highest-levels-found-uc-berkeley
>
>I would be interested more in this paper once it has been peer reviewed. You may also want to email Mr. Gunderson and let him know that it is Worcester Polytechnic and not Worchester Polytechnic.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Tim
>________________________________
>From: r johnson [r66nj@yahoo.com<mailto:r66nj@yahoo.com>]
>Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 11:44 AM
>To: Tucker, Jen; loridonchak@gmail.com<mailto:loridonchak@gmail.com>; City Council; CityManager Mail
>Subject: Fw: Scientist Presents Data Confirming Hot Particles- please watch short video
>
>
>R. Johnson
>
>----- Forwarded Message -----
>From: r johnson <r66nj@yahoo.com<mailto:r66nj@yahoo.com>>
>To: "r66nj@yahoo.com<mailto:r66nj@yahoo.com>" <r66nj@yahoo.com<mailto:r66nj@yahoo.com>>
>Sent: Tuesday, November 1, 2011 11:43 AM
>Subject: Fw: Scientist Presents Data Confirming Hot Particles- watch short video
>
>
>
>
>
>
>[cid: 1.1478430718@web38604.mail.mud.yahoo.com<mailto:1.1478430718@web38604.mail.mud.yahoo.com>]
>
>
>VIDEO UPDATE: October 31, 2011
>Scientist Marco Kaltofen Presents Data Confirming Hot Particles
>Watch Video Now< http://fairewinds.com/sites/all/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=34&qid=39934 >
>Washington, DC - October 31, 2011 TToday Scientist Marco Kaltofen of Worchester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) presented his analysis of radioactive isotopic releases from the Fukushima accidents at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Mr. Kaltofenâ™s analysis confirms the detection of hot particles in the US and the extensive airborne and ground contamination in northern Japan due to the four nuclear power plant accidents at TEPCOâ™s Fukushima reactors. Fairewinds believes that this is a personal health issue in Japan and a public health issue in the United States and Canada.
>
>Watch Video Now< http://fairewinds.com/sites/all/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=34&qid=39934 >
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An accident waiting to happen...

2011-10-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

October 25th, 2011

Dear Readers,

To give you some idea of how bad the worst industrial accident in human history actually is, a team of international experts recently concluded that the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear catastrophe has already released 2.5 times as much radioactive Xenon-133 (a noble gas) as was released by the Chernobyl catastrophe -- the previous worst industrial accident.

Both accidents are ongoing: Chernobyl's poisons will be emitted for thousands of years, and so will Fukushima's. Fukushima is still spewing radioactive poisons by the terabecquerel (a technical term for: A lot). Chernobyl's effluents are somewhat better contained, although Chernobyl's precarious sarcophagus is in need of immediate repair.

But bad as things still are at Fukushima after the March 11th, 2011 earthquake and tsunami (and numerous mechanical and human failures, too), things can get MUCH worse at Fukushima.

Unit #4's Spent Fuel Pool contains the equivalent of about three fully-fueled nuclear reactors: 1,331 fuel assembly bundles. And because of structural damage from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, plus an explosion in the reactor building housing the SFP on March 15, and numerous earthquake aftershocks, Unit #4's SFP is even more precarious right now than Chernobyl's sarcophagus.

Some of the fuel assemblies are extremely radioactively "hot" since the reactor itself was emptied entirely in December 2010 for extended maintenance. They take a minimum of about five years to cool enough to be removed from the pool. It's way too soon right now.

But if an accident (caused by an aftershock or a new earthquake, for instance) causes the Unit #4 Spent Fuel Pool to drain -- which nearly or partially happened, but things are sort of stable right now -- ALL of the fuel in the pool might catch fire and burn. This could approximately double the size of the Fukushima releases so far!

Below, Gordon Edwards, from the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, describes the dangers to Unit #4's SFP in more detail, and proposes an international team be immediately convened to secure the site better. The efforts necessary are agonizing processes, which will take an agonizing amount of time to accomplish. And they won't be cheap, which may be the main reason they are not being done.

But they MUST be done!

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

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To: Akio Matsumura

From: Gordon Edwards, Ph.D., President,
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility

Date: October 24, 2001

In your recent blog, entitled �The Fourth Reactor and the Destiny of
Japan�, you correctly identify the spent fuel pool in Unit 4 as the
most serious potential threat for further massive radioactive
releases from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. (http://
tinyurl.com/6dlxek5)

If not cooled by mechanical means for at least several years, the
irradiated fuel in the spent fuel pool will overheat due to
radioactivity alone. The heat generated by radioactivity must be
removed as fast as it is being produced to keep the temperature of
the nuclear fuel from soaring out of control.

If the temperature climbs toward 900 degrees C, the metal coating
("cladding") on the outside of the fuel pellets rapidly deteriorates,
releasing large quantities of radioactive gases and vapors.

At these elevated temperatures, the cladding also reacts with steam
(H2O) to produce hydrogen gas (H2) which explodes with great force,
as it did in Unit 4 on March 15 blowing the roof off the building
and providing a pathway for radioactivity to escape into the atmosphere.

At about 1000 degrees, the fuel cladding can catch fire, emitting
tiny radioactive cinders miniscule particles of irradiated fuel
called "nuclear fleas" particularly dangerous when inhaled or
ingested.

Currently , the situation in Unit 4 is under control but things
could change quickly if the spent fuel pool collapses or the support
structure is severely damaged by a strong aftershock. It may then be
impossible to cool the irradiated fuel effectively. Temperatures will
climb, and the irradiated fuel will overheat and may even catch fire.

In such an event, with no roof on Unit 4, and no containment
structure surrounding the spent fuel pool, there is no barrier to
prevent or even limit further radioactive releases. Thus there is no
way to protect the Japanese population or the environment from these
renewed emissions.
Ten years ago, a technical study from the US Nuclear Regulatory
Agency pointed out that �the long-term consequences of an SFP [spent
fuel pool] fire may be significant. Analysis indicates that when
air flow has been restricted, such as might occur after a cask drop
or major earthquake, the possibility of a fire [in a spent fuel pool]
lasts many years.� (US NRC NUREG-1738, http://tinyurl.com/65aa4ue)

Because of the serious nature of this threat, it would be wise for
the Japanese Government to call in experts from other countries to
assess the structural integrity of the spent fuel pool in Unit 4 and
to recommend measures that can be taken to strengthen it. It is
imperative that the spent fuel pool and its supporting structures are
capable of withstanding the most severe imaginable aftershock.
Experience has shown that TEPCO and the Japanese regulatory body have
not always been correct in their assessments of the situation at
Fukushima Daiichi. On numerous occasions misinformation has been
communicated to the government and to the public. In such
circumstances, it is important to seek the advice of experts who are
genuinely independent having no conflict of interest and no need
to save face. National pride makes it understandably difficult to
seek help from outside, but sometimes it is the best thing to do.

As an example, here in Canada, the Board of Directors of Ontario
Hydro decided in 1997 to ask a team of American nuclear experts to
carry out an Independent Integrated Performance Assessment (IPPA) of
Ontario's 20 operational nuclear power reactors. This unprecedented
decision was taken in order to provide the Board with a truly
independent review of safety-related questions associated with
Ontario Hydro's large fleet of nuclear reactors. (http://ccnr.org/
hydro_report.html)

The reason for calling in outside experts was to overcome a
significant degree of confusion and uncertainty created by obscure
and seemingly contradictory reports from the nuclear division of
Ontario Hydro and from Canada�s regulatory agency at that time, the
Atomic Energy Control Board.

As a result of the independent review, 7 of Ontario Hydro's reactors
were shut down for more than 7 years. This allowed management and
staff to focus on a large backlog of important safety-related
maintenance tasks and to improve the safety culture within the
nuclear division of Ontario Hydro (now Ontario Power Generation).

We in Canada have observed that, under extraordinary circumstances,
it can be very beneficial to have the advice of outside experts who
bring fresh eyes to bear on the problems and who have no need to
defend past pronouncements or justify decisions that may have been
previously made.

I believe that such an independent assessment is needed for the spent
fuel bay in Unit 4, aimed at producing specific recommendations for
ensuring the integrity of the pool and its support structure against
any foreseeable earthquake or other stresses they may be subjected to.

It is important to remove the irradiated fuel from the damaged spent
fuel pool of Unit 4 as soon as possible. But for this, it is
necessary to have (1) a destination pool prepared to receive the
irradiated fuel from Unit 4, (2) a containment structure to prevent
radioactive emissions during transfer, (3) two cranes (with needed
infrastructure) for managing the fuel removal, and (4) transport
flasks with cooling capabilities. The fact that the fuel is already
damaged further complicates the procedure.

Clearly it will not be possible to remove the irradiated fuel from
the spent fuel pool until 2014 at the earliest. In the meantime, it
is urgent that action be taken to obtain objective advice from
structural experts to ensure that the existing spent fuel bay is as
strong and secure as possible.

The stakes are too high to accept unsupported reassurances from TEPCO
without first subjecting their analysis to the disinterested scrutiny
of others. The dangers associated with the Unit 4 spent fuel pool
that were described in a recently-released simulation by Japan's
Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (completed in June, but only
released in October) are still present. (http://tinyurl.com/3b7dmwn)

-------------------------------------------------------

Come one, come all! Tonight we have a chance to change the world...

2011-10-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

10/11/2011

Dear Readers!

I'm excited!

Tonight some of the greatest minds on the planet will gather electronically, physically, and/or spiritually, to try to explain nuclear power to the public, to city leaders, to state officials if they show up, and to the media.

Presenting tonight [October 11, 2011] will be Helen Caldicott, Dan Hirsch, Arnie Gundersen and Bill Perkins. If all goes according to plan, the public will have many chances to speak, too.

The time? 6:30 pm Pacific Time (9:30 pm Eastern)

The place? Community Center, 100 Calle Seville, San Clemente, California

The event? A city-sponsored information presentation. This is a follow-up to the September 27, 2011 hearing held by the city of San Clemente (nearest city adjacent to San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station (SONWGS)). The previous hearing included Southern California Edison and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It was a white-wash. This won't be.

(SCE are the operators of the nuclear waste generating system; the NRC are the lap-dog regulators of those operators, paid for (90%) by the industry. The NRC theoretically takes over where industry self-regulation ends, but "mind the gap".)

SONWGS, also called SONGS by those who ignore the hazardous waste it produces, is in the process of being shut down by the citizens. I'm sure we will win. But afterwards, San Onofre will leave a costly legacy for the human race to have to handle for hundreds of thousands of years.

The legacy is the "spent" fuel.

Don't let names used in the nuclear industry fool you -- "spent" fuel isn't "spent" at all, it's lethality has been greatly ENHANCED -- by a factor of perhaps 10 million times!

Thus, one pellet is now as dangerous to human life -- to all life -- as ten million pellets were BEFORE they were placed in the reactor and bombarded with slow neutrons.

Every time an atom is split for energy, two atoms (on average) of lethal hazardous waste are created. (I know of no other industrial process so capable of creating more of a mess than it starts with than the nuclear process.)

So a pair of 1,000-megawatt reactors is creating an unbelievably large quantity of hazardous poisons every single day! 250 pounds per day per reactor, according to the industry itself (and that's only the "high level" radioactive waste. It produces many times more than that of so-called "low-level" rad waste every day, too. And the only difference between "high-level" and "low-level" is the dilution level -- NOT the lethality level! One atom can kill you, but it's not very likely to. That's a statistical fact. However, there are about a thousand times MORE decays per second in one gram of tritium than there are stars in the Milky Way! And tritium is so hazardous that a nuclear reactor is "ONLY" allowed to release about one thirtieth of a teaspoon of tritium per year! And that must be diluted in billions of gallons of air and/or water as it is released. (In actuality, the average known tritium releases are usually several times higher than the permissible levels, but the additional releases are considered "exceptions" even though they generally happen at every power plant on a regular basis.)

And even that is too much -- the standard should be made more stringent.

Tritium also leaks from every reactor, uncounted and unreported, and it is only one of THOUSANDS of types of radioactive isotopes released from EVERY nuclear reactor all the time.

Radioactive noble gases, radioactive strontium, iodine, cesium, plutonium... These radioactive versions of normal elements, and new (manmade) elements, are not healthy for your body -- or your baby's body. They masquerade as safe, stable, normal elements until the moment of radioactive decay. Then they send out a huge (on an atomic scale) burst of energy, change into a different (often also radioactive) element, and destroy whatever they were a part of at the time -- a water molecule perhaps, or perhaps they were one atom in a DNA strand of billions of precisely-placed atoms. Or maybe the energy burst destroyed some DNA it was near, but not a part of...

So-called "spent" fuel is the most hazardous stuff on earth. We make it, but we have no place to put it.

What was once raw ore in the earth, was first processed into a ceramic pellet and still not very hazardous but no picnic, has become a problem with no solution -- a hazard so lethal you can't stand next to it without many feet of steel and concrete, or lead. You can't use it for anything. It would cost a fortune to try to get rid of by trucking it somewhere (no one wants it), rocketing it to the sun (way, way, WAY too risky and equally too expensive), burying it at sea (uh oh, that's been tried, it failed miserably...) or anywhere else... nobody wants it, no place on earth is stable enough, far enough away from people and wildlife, isn't a source of drinking water or anything else we need (such as minerals), and yet is somehow close enough that we can safely transport the waste from hither to yon a hundred thousand times across the country, and many thousands of times from San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station alone.

There's no such place.

Instead, they are building dry cask storage. Hidden from I-5 highway view but only a few hundred feet away, nestled carefully behind the bluffs and the (14') sea wall, are dozens and dozens of "dry casks" which contain this deadly waste (along with spent fuel pools and the reactors themselves). More are being added as the reactors continue to operate. The waste has to go somewhere, but it has nowhere to go. So it ends up in dry casks. Deadly, silent, waiting to make their own version of Fukushima...

The dry casks are carefully sealed up. That is, they are ready to burst into flame at the slightest trouble -- such as an airplane strike by accident (they are DIRECTLY under several jet airliner routes) or on purpose. Or such as an earthquake stronger than they predict, and a tsunami (which could provide the moderator needed to slow the neutrons down, and allow a criticality event in the spent fuel after an earthquake jostles them together, in this writer's opinion).

So come to this hearing. Learn why babies are perhaps a hundred times more susceptible to radiation's dangers than adults (yet the standard reference for calculating radiation's dangers to a population are adult males -- the LEAST susceptible of all populations!).

Learn why fetuses are perhaps a thousand times more susceptible to radiation's dangers -- because their cells are differentiating and determining their future, adult's cells are already specialized in their function.

Learn about nuclear power. And learn why so many experts want to shut it down forever.

We hope to see you there.

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

www.acehoffman.org

-----------------------------------------------------------------

From: Gary [mailto:gary@sanclementegreen.org]
Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2011 5:42 PM
Subject: SC Green - Our Biggest Contribution Ever

It is difficult to imagine anything we could ever bring to the region that will be more important than the meeting on Tuesday, 10/11, 6:30 pm at the San Clemente Community Center, 100 Calle Seville.

Some of the world's best known Nuclear Experts that are not on the payroll of the nuclear industry will be presenting an entirely different perspective regarding "Implications for San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station from the Disaster at Fukushima". At the same meeting, you'll learn about the safe, renewable technologies that await exploitation. Cost effective and economically stimulating options abound.

We see this as an emergency, and we believe you will too, once you better understand our vulnerabilities and opportunities to change course ASAP. A large earthquake is overdue by 150 years and is expected to exceed the design basis for San Onofre. This is only one of many potential causes for a meltdown at this particular plant rated the second most dangerous of all 104 in the USA. It will take at least five years from the date we shut it down until nuclear waste can be stored in much safer dry casks as recommended by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. While shut down, we will only need to make up for 6.5 percent of our electricity. We can immediately begin the quest in earnest for a truly sustainable future.

You can't begin to imagine the effort some of your fellow citizens have gone to in bringing such an important meeting together. Now it is up to you to actually benefit from all of this effort by showing up and bringing friends to get the latest information about our nuclear power plant. Help us spread the word. Learn about important considerations the industry often glosses over so you can make informed decisions and encourage our city council to do the same at their next regular meeting at City Hall on 10/18.

See what the experts expect from the big earthquake, without even considering damage to San Onofre. (the Newport/Inglewood fault just 3 miles off shore is capable of a mag.7.5 to 8.0)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z5ckzem7uA&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=xioHswbahPc

Expected Panel of Nuclear Experts:
http://www.sanclementegreen.org/?q=node/188

Google Maps:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=san+clemente+community+center+100+calle+seville&hl=en&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=50.37814,86.044922&vpsrc=0&hq=san+clemente+community+center+100+calle+seville&t=m&z=4

SCG/ Decom SONWGS Public Service Announcement for the hearing tonight:
http://youtu.be/7oY0ttX9AV0

San Clemente Patch article about tonight's hearing:
http://sanclemente.patch.com/articles/independent-nuclear-experts-to-speak-at-fukushima-forum-tuesday

------------------------------------------------------

Tsunami threats discussed in June, 2001:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/pararas1.htm

------------------------------------------------------

"There are about 1 * 10^4 Curies in a gram of tritium. 1 curie is 3.7 * 10^10 decays per second, so that's 3.7 * 10^14 dps per gram. There are about 3.7 * 10^11 stars in the Milky Way -- a thousand times LESS than the number of decays per second emanating from a single gram of San Onofre's so-called "safe" tritium. "

The above quote is from my 2004 essay on tritium:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/2004/TritiumComments%2020041223.htm

------------------------------------------------------

************************************************

How to dwarf Fukushima...

2011-10-05T00:18:00.000-07:00

October 4th, 2011

Dear Readers,

If you don't want Fukushima USA to happen, there's only one choice:

Shut 'em down! Shut 'em all down NOW!

But don't for a minute think that Fukushima was as bad as it can get!

It was bad. It was under-reported how bad it was -- and is.

But Fukushima could have been worse -- and still might be. In fact, it still probably WILL get worse -- when the corium (reactor cores, melted into blobs) start hitting the water table.

At that point, Fukushima will get worse.

But there are other ways things can be worse than Fukushima is already.

For example, the entire core of the reactor can be blown to vapor, hot particles, fuel fleas and bits of corium in an instant (it's called a "core rubblization").

This can happen to any nuclear reactor anywhere in the world. Is it likely? No. Is it possible? Yes. Would it take an extraordinary sequence of events to happen? Yes.

But so did Fukushima.

Calling for increased regulatory oversight in light of Fukushima, calling for increased safety, calling for increased "margins of error" -- all these won't do much more than loosen up the tight packing in the spent fuel pools -- and increase the dry cask storage capacity from beyond intolerable to whatever comes after that.

They might add additional battery-backed up electronic monitors for the water levels and temperatures in the spent fuel pools (gee, you'd have thought they already did that, wouldn't you?).

They might have to purchase a fire pumper truck to keep on hand at every reactor site -- not to put out fires (though it can be used for that, too) but to pour water on the reactors or spent fuel pools if needed.

They might require eight full hours of battery backup power for each reactor, instead of just four. They might require that radiation monitors be "hardened" to survive hydrogen explosions, and have battery backup in case of "Station Black Out" (SBO), a danger they practically never considered before Fukushima.

They might store an extra diesel generator on the West Coast somewhere, to be used by seven different reactors in case of emergency (I wonder how they decide who will get it if two places need it?) Similarly, a few diesel generators will be "strategically located" to provide mutual backup for all the other 97 reactors around the country.

That's all the "increased safety" calls will ever accomplish. Little steps. All good, but none decisive. Fukushima, USA will still come if these are the kinds of steps America will be taking in light of Fukushima, Japan.

You can be sure that even with all these improvements, nuclear power will still not be able to get insurance. The despicable Price-Anderson Act will not be rescinded.

To make things truly safer, we MUST shut the plants down.

And even that doesn't guarantee safety. Only moving the waste to an isolated location (which doesn't exist) AND shutting the plants down gives us any sort of reasonable guarantee, but then you still need: A safe way to store the waste (doesn't exist), and a safe way to transport it there (also doesn't exist).

The tragedy at Fukushima happened because the plants were operational and because fresh, hot fuel was in the spent fuel pools.

Not that dry casks can't have problems just as fierce: In my opinion, a jetliner crashing into the line of dry casks here at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station a few miles from where I live, for example, could conceivably cause a CRITICALITY EVENT which would DWARF FUKUSHIMA. The casks can be rearranged to prevent that (it's a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic) but there are still other dangers to dry casks which need to be addressed.

But at least the full spectrum of accidents possible with an operating reactor can't happen IF we shut the plants down.

A pro-nuker in a debate I watched recently hit the nail on the head about what the REAL problem is: Once a nuke is built, it becomes a cash cow for the utility that operates it.

Once it's built. New nuclear power plants aren't financially viable in America (without massive government subsidies), and new nuclear construction isn't even allowed in California until the impossible happens -- the nuclear waste problem is solved. So instead, we have old nukes across the country, with hoped-for 40 year lives being extended to 60 years, and if they haven't melted down by then, 80 years, then 100 and 1000.

Sooner or later, leaving these old deathtraps running is what will kill us by the hundreds of thousands, ruin our lifestyle, and poison our land, air, and water forever.

Shut-down isn't a guarantee of eternal safety, but it's a huge step in the right direction and stops us from increasing the size of the problem every day.

Across America the problem of "spent fuel" piling up with nowhere to put it increases by about 10 tons PER DAY.

It is impossible to make a totally safe nuke. It is impossible to find a totally safe storage place for the waste.

That's why the concept of "probabilistic risk assessment" is used to justify nuclear power. But all such calculations are based on faulty assumptions and wishful thinking by those desiring to promote the industry -- and being paid to do so.

The "passive" emergency cooling systems promised for the next generation of nuke plants MIGHT work... but they might not... especially if an airplane crashed into the facility.

It is impossible to make a totally safe nuke.

Even if the nuclear power plant operates perfectly for its entire life -- which has never happened and never will -- it creates an enormous hazardous waste pile which cannot be safely or economically contained.

Every nuclear power plant is capable of an accident which can dwarf what happened at Fukushima. When that happens, it will be very difficult to analyze what went wrong! They still haven't figured out what happened at Fukushima almost seven months later, or what's happening there at this moment.

Yet still, the pronukers insist that increased safety measures are all we need. They point out weak spots in the Japanese latticework of regulations and claim that America's system is better. But in March of 2002 Davis-Besse nearly did what Fukushima did in March of 2011, without any act of mother nature except rust (and rust never sleeps), and there have been numerous close calls before and since -- perhaps less dramatic than a football-sized hole in the reactor pressure vessel head, as happened at Davis-Besse, but no less dangerous.

Fukushima can -- and will -- happen in America. And when it does, we will no longer be a first-world country. We will be a pitiable, poverty-stricken, has-been nation of mutants, debtors, the diseased and the dying.

Just like Japan is now. Oh, you don't think so? Look more closely -- look past the official reports, past the main stream media, and read about the abortions, the suicides, the deformities that are showing up everywhere.

Weep for Japan today. Weep for us tomorrow.

Yours,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

************************************************

The Sky(scraper) Is Falling -- Commentary by Ace Hoffman (written 9/11/01)

2011-09-12T07:52:00.000-07:00

September 11th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Probably all of us spent some time today remembering and reflecting
on what happened a decade ago, now simply called "nine-eleven" and
written "9-11".

Most people on this newsletter subscription list probably remember
where they were when they heard the news. In so many ways, nothing
has been the same since that day. The costly wars. The pervasive
lies. The demoralizing Patriot Act. Enhanced interrogation
techniques. Wikileaks. Well, okay, it's not all bad!

Our nation's greatest vulnerabilities are surprisingly similar to
what they were back then.

Below are my original comments from the day of the 9-11 attacks, with
the original Subject given above. I'm sorry to say I stand by them today.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

-------------------------------------------------------------

September 11th, 2001

Fellow Citizens:

If I had told you, yesterday, that today two commercial airplanes,
loaded with passengers and fueled for cross-country flights, would
crash into New York City's World Trade Center, one into each of the
twin tower buildings, and that shortly thereafter both towers would
come crashing to the ground, and also told you that the Pentagon
would be hit at about the same time, and another plane would be
brought down too, you would have called me "Chicken Little".

America's nuclear power plants are vulnerable. And don't call me
Chicken Little.

A structural engineer who appeared on CNN today said that the World
Trade Center towers were designed to withstand a 707 crashing into
them. 757s and 767s are somewhat bigger than a 707 (but with two
less engines). However, the airplanes probably aren't directly
responsible for bringing down the towers. The real culprit was most
likely the fires they started.

My understanding is that the design criteria for the containment
domes of America's nuclear power plants was that they should be able
to withstand the impact of a 727, which is even smaller than a 707.

I don't know if the design criteria included that the plane would be
full of fuel as these planes obviously were. Whatever the design
criteria was, it was never actually tested. (Note that in a
conversation by phone with me in June 2001, Charles Marschall, from
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Region IV office in Texas, claimed
that a nuclear power plant's containment dome could withstand an
impact from a 747. He refused to put his claim in writing. But
regardless, would any of us believe it today?)

It should be obvious now that we have no reason to think the nuclear
containment domes are safe from planes. But in any event, many of
the systems vital to keeping a nuclear power plant from melting down
are located OUTSIDE the containment dome, including the control room,
the primary coolant pumps, and other systems. There are numerous
holes in the containment dome for pipes, wire, personnel, and
equipment to go through. Accidents outside a containment dome can
affect systems inside the containment dome, and a subsequent meltdown
inside the containment dome WILL release radioactivity to the environment.

A meltdown at a nuclear power plant would be 1000 times worse than
everything we saw today.

There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that a meltdown would have
occurred if one of the hijacked airplanes had been flown into a
nuclear power plant. We can be thankful the hijackers passed over
these targets.

The spent fuel pools are outside the containment dome, providing an
even easier target than the containment dome. And, spent fuel
storage casks located near some reactors can also be potential
targets, and thus add significantly to the danger at those facilities.

In short, America's nuclear power plants are extremely
vulnerable. And don't call me Chicken Little.

Our nation's firemen and other emergency personnel are NOT adequately
trained or equipped for handling a severe nuclear radiation
emergency, and the evacuation plans for nuclear power plants are
absolute garbage.

Everyone recognizes what an incredible job the firefighters, police,
and other emergency personnel must be doing, but their task today
pales when compared to what emergency personnel would face if a nuke
plant was attacked.

All nuclear reactors need to be shut down immediately and
permanently, and their waste needs to be stored
underground. (However, I am not advocating Yucca Mountain as a solution.)

Clean, renewable energy solutions do exist, and they are far less
vulnerable to terrorism and other calamities than our nuclear power
plants, and provide cheaper energy as well. Perhaps quickly
switching to safe renewable energy solutions would cause some
temporary hardship, but nothing is impossible for our great nation,
if we recognize our vulnerabilities and seek to eliminate them as
quickly as possible.

I for one, want to know who masterminded this wicked act of
ignorance. But even more, I want to know why we left ourselves so
vulnerable in the first place, and why we continue to leave ourselves
vulnerable to additional natural and man-made misfortunes? Today it
was an act of man. Tomorrow it could be an act of
Providence. Perhaps an asteroid smashing into a nuclear power
plant. Perhaps an Earthquake. Perhaps a Tsunami along Southern
California's coast. But whatever it is, we should no longer be able
to say it came as a complete surprise. Very little should surprise us now.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Concerned Citizen
Carlsbad, CA

Note: Last week (Wednesday, September 5th, 2001) I attended a
hearing in Nevada on Yucca Mountain. At that hearing I stated that
nuclear power plants are potential targets of terrorists....
---------------------------------------------------------

Fwd: zonie goof darkens southwest, and more

2011-09-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

9/10/11

Dear Readers,

This description of "current" events out here in California had me in stitches and hopefully will "brighten" (or at least "electrify") your day, as well. And it drives home a lot of vital points at the same time. Thanks, Jerry, for sending it around!

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
www.acehoffman.org

-------------------------------------------------------------

>A zonie-tech aka Arizona electrical technician,
>either flipped the wrong switch, pulled the wrong
>plug, cross-wired his (or her) motherboard, spilled
>coffee onto his (or her) control panel, backed his
>(or her) desk chair into a stack of computing
>hard-drives, or accidently poked his (or her)
>philips head screwdriver into the wrong port,
>shorting out a huge chunk of SoCal, and Baja,
>and 1-nuke plant.
>Stop laughing. It just happened.
>It wasn't a terrorist plot, or dive bombing sea gulls.
>Not an earthquake, or tsunami.
>Just one zonie-tech, screwing up big time.
>This is why a growing number of citizens
>(especially since Fukushima) throughout
>SoCal, and most certainly us living near
>SONGS' (San Onofre's faulty-towers) aged
>nuke plant, know better than we know anything:
>it only takes one human goof, to upset a
>nuclear reactor's apple cart. Just one.
>The good news: when power went, SONGS
>shut itself down automatically. Which is
>paradoxically thought provoking, and ironic.
>One zonie-tech, 1000-miles from San Clemente
>accomplished in 1-second, what hardworking
>anti-nuke SC-residents have not achieved in
>35-years playing nice with our deaf & dangerous
>nuke industry - and or, what SC-residents have
>been demanding (since Fukushima) at every
>city council meeting -
>"SHUT SONGS NOW!, before it's too late,"
>when suddenly our prayers were answered.
>One human-oops darkened 6-million lives
>and one ol'nuker with the flip of the wrong
>switch 1000-miles away. Sept 11th is just
>around the corner. It too, came flying in on
>a picture perfect, late-summer morning.
>Omen? Coincident? A heads up? Or a clear
>message: it doesn't take much, and certainly
>not a genius, to squelch a nuke plant.
>So here's an idea:
>Let's NOT start SONGS up!
>Let sleeping dogs lie.
>What purpose does SONGS' puny 7.5%
>electrical output serve anyway? It didn't
>keep us from blacking out. It blacked-out
>too. SONGS isn't even a reliable back-up
>power source when we need one.
>One haphazard zonie-tech proved, we can
>live without SONGS. Our lights are back on,
>but SONGS is off.
>Let's keep it that way.
>So thank YOU, accident prone zonie-tech,
>for proving, SONGS is wholly unnecessary
>in our busy lives. San Clemente to World,
>"are you listening?"
>
>jerry collamer
>
>San Clemente
>Ca - 92672
>
------------------------------------------------------------------

The Great San Diego Black-Out of 2011...

2011-09-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

9/9/11

Dear Readers,

It looks like everyone survived the Great San Diego Black-Out of 2011.

I didn't even notice there was a black-out at first, other than the printer going off while I was trying to print protest books against San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. A group of us formed up post-Fukushima, and we're going places and raising awareness. And we need books -- lots of books! People are pretty ignorant about the dangers, even post-Fukushima. There's a lot of information being kept from the public and misinformation being presented to them.

San Onofre didn't help at all to keep the power on when the grid went down.

Instead, they had to shut down themselves! Supposedly this was because "they had no place to send the power." That's how the spokesperson for the plant describes it.

But I would say it was because they had no offsite power coming INTO the plant! That's what probably really shut the plant down.

But one way or the other, here's the obvious thing: San Onofre is not helping.

San Onofre is presumably currently operating on Emergency Diesel Generators as I write this -- and generating ZERO power to help alleviate the situation. [Note (added 9/9/11 online): They were actually using their "emergency feed actuation system", they say...]

Thanks for your help, SONGS -- NOT!

About one and a half million homes -- five million people -- were without power for at least six to eight hours yesterday and today, and many of them are still without power.

There WAS a seven-car pile-up on I-5 (the main freeway that runs near San Onofre), which shut it down in both directions, and I-5 was shut down heading out of San Diego elsewhere at the same time -- it was a mess!

But I was prepared -- or so I thought. When the printer went out, my UPS beeped and the front panel lit up. Those were my clues that five million of us were in the dark. I paid little attention, being in the middle of writing a newsletter about what an atom is, an alpha particle, a beta particle, a gamma ray, a half-life, and so on.

But then the UPS beeped again, and the print job was clearly not running (the printer pauses now and then anyway, for some reason), so I went upstairs and checked the printer, and it was completely off and the on/off switch wouldn't do anything.

So then I started to grasp that there was a blackout, and shut down the computer so that I wouldn't drain the UPS battery just in case I needed it.

I tried to count up all the ways I wasn't prepared for real trouble -- like, a meltdown at San Onofre because of the "Station Black-Out" conditions (the same as occurred at Fukushima after the earthquake and tsunami, but minus the earthquake (which actually started the inexorable sequence that led to meltdown of the three reactors in Japan) and minus the tsunami (which is blamed for the meltdowns, but apparently was NOT responsible -- it was the earthquake).

We have earthquakes here, too. Bad ones. Right near San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Small-scale distributed renewable energy is a much safer way to power the grid. In an emergency, nuclear power is unlikely to be there to help at all! We've seen this now, time and again.

And the traffic! Oh, the traffic! Because the traffic lights were out everywhere, it took my wife more than an hour to get home, normally a 12 minute drive in clear traffic and a 20 minute drive at rush hour. The 60 or so trolleys in the city of San Diego all stopped at the same time, and only a couple of trains ran, so if you missed them, you missed them.

Could we evacuate five million people if San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station melted down? No! Can San Onofre melt down?

In a heartbeat. It's useless, wrong, and crazy to continue risking the enormous death and destruction that would accompany an serious accident at San Onofre. Trapped as we are with only a few roads out of the area, San Onofre actually cuts in half the main evacuation route needed in case of an accident at the plant! That is, the plant itself is located so close to the freeway that ANY accident at the plant will close I-5 immediately, and probably I-15 as well.

Meanwhile, the plant itself has been on restrictions and tightened inspections for years now because of worker apathy, anxiety, and audacious arrogance: They faked safety inspections, fire inspections, security inspections, and medical claims, work records, time sheets, and, of course, worker's own complaints were filed in the "circular" file or actually given to the supervisor about whom the complaint was filed -- the LAST person who should be seeing the complaint!

Now, these guys are all scared the power plant WILL actually be shut down! They put on a brave face, but scratch the surface, and you find out they are being told not to talk to the public, not to talk to reporters, not to talk to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission unless they absolutely have too -- and WHY are they so scared?

They're afraid they'll lose their jobs. Get thrown out in the bad economy just like so many of the rest of us. Never mind that they could be building solar and wind turbine power supplies instead. Never mind that they are generating 500 pounds of high-level nuclear waste every day that they don't know how to store or how to get rid of. (The most toxic stuff on earth, and, thanks to Fukushima, the most toxic stuff in your lungs and the rest of your body right now.)

Never mind that there is no way to evacuate San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles ....

Never mind the lives that would be lost if there was a meltdown, or a spent fuel pool fire, or a dry cask fire, or all three, due to an earthquake, or a tsunami, or a power black-out, or all three.

Never mind all that -- they are afraid they'll lose their jobs.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author, 55, has been studying nuclear power for about 40 years. He is a bladder cancer survivor, educational software developer, technologist, computer animator, survivalist, humanitarian and small businessman.

************************************************

Musicians United for Safe Energy concert, Mountain View, California THIS Sunday!

2011-08-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

August 5th, 2011

Dear Readers,

In 1979 the first Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts were held, a few months after Three Mile Island. A sold-out series of concerts showed the world (and the nuclear industry) how strong and vocal the opposition really was, how well organized they could be, and how well they knew the facts.

Not one new nuclear power plant has been started in America since Three Mile Island and perhaps the MUSE concerts are part of why.

Now, let's hope the MUSE 2 concerts help put a stop to nuclear power once and for all: Shutdown before meltdown.

I will be tabling the west coast MUSE 2 concert this Sunday (August 7th, 2011) in Mountain View, California, along with other SoCal activists calling for the immediate and permanent shut-down of San Onofre.

If you're attending, I hope you'll stop by the booth and introduce yourself! Look for the Ionizing Radiation poster, or a Shut San Onofre banner which I understand someone in the group is bringing. Our table will be representing three groups: CREED, ROSE, and SCG.

If you're not attending the concert, you can view it on the Internet for a small donation -- it should be a lot of fun!

Yesterday I ran across my ticket stub from the original MUSE concert series in 1979, and have posted a photo of it at my Picasa web site and Facebook page. Here's the URL for the Picasa image (shortened):

http://goo.gl/P734j

No Nukes!

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

-------------------------------------------------------------

Begin forwarded message:

From: wasserman harvey <solartopia@me.com>
Date: August 3, 2011 11:21:04 PM EDT
Subject: Green Music Again Confronts Atomic Power by Harvey Wasserman

Harvey Wasserman

Green Music Again Confronts Atomic Power
August 3, 2011

Amidst a life-and-death struggle to finally shut the nuclear energy industry, the power of green music flows again this Sunday.

It's also pouring over the Internet, as the historic all-day MUSE2 gathering is staged at the Shoreline Amphitheatre south of San Francisco, re-uniting Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Crosby-Stills-Nash, the Doobie Brothers, John Hall, Sweet Honey in the Rock and many more who'll sing to benefit victims of the Fukushima disaster and promote a green-powered Earth.

The concert runs from 3pm through the evening Pacific Time and comes as the nuclear power industry desperately seeks federal funding to build new reactors while fighting a tsunami of citizen opposition demanding the shut-down of aging radioactive power stations.

Music has been a unifying, empowering force for social movements for decades. The labor union movement used it during strikes and solidarity marches. It was at the heart of the most powerful campaigns for civil rights. A whole generation's demand for peace in Vietnam got electrified with rock and roll.

And yet another round of citizen activism against nuclear power has been put to music from the grassroots and the sound stage, including that of Musicians United for Safe Energy.

The first MUSE was formed after the 1979 melt-down at Three Mile Island. For five nights Raitt, Browne, CSN, Hall, the Doobies, Sweet Honey were part of an astonishing galaxy of stars that lit up Madison Square Garden. The shows were accompanied by a massive rally at Battery Park City that drew 200,000 people and featured the likes of Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Peter Tosh and many more. (Battery Park City is now the site of one of the nation's largest solarized urban developments).

A three-record album followed that went platinum, along with a Warner Brothers feature film called "No Nukes."

In the wake of Three Mile Island, MUSE and a huge upwelling of grassroots citizen opposition, the corporate push to build atomic reactors shriveled and died. For three decades the industry went moribund, with virtually no US construction of new reactors.

Thanks to citizen action, the thousand nuclear reactors Richard Nixon promised for the US by the year 2000 became just 104.

But those decaying, radioactive death traps are under increasing citizen pressure to finally shut. Many are near major earthquake faults. Some two dozen are virtual clones of Fukushima Unit One, now spewing radiation in the air and sea around Japan.

The lead shut-down fight now is in Vermont, where the state legislature has voted to deny Entergy the ability to run the Yankee reactor after March, 2012. The vote stems from a contract signed by Entergy with the state giving it the power to shut the reactor if it chooses.

But Entergy is now in court trying to overturn the deal it made, arousing fury throughout New England, even among mainstream commentators. Entergy has gone so far as to order more than $60 million in fuel rods meant to keep the reactor operating after the 2012 deadline, intensifying the anger of the region.

Meanwhile, fueled by wads of radioactive cash, the nuclear lobby has come back to Congress demanding taxpayer subsidies. Omitted from the recent budget deal, it's widely expected the industry will try to insert into a Continuing Resolution or some other legislative vehicle a loan guarantee program forcing taxpayers to underwrite new reactor construction.

Along with aid for the people of Japan, opposition to that and other nuclear subsidies are at the core of MUSE2. Grassroots nuclear opponents from all over the country will be tabling at Sunday's concert, which will also feature an eco-village organized by long-time benefit promoter Tom Campbell. The Shoreline Amphitheatre is the nation's largest green-certified concert venue.

In person or on line, we'll see you there on Sunday!

--
Harvey Wasserman edits http://www.nukefree.org and helped coin the phrase "No Nukes" in 1973. He is author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, which available at http://www.solartopia.org .

---------------------------------------------------------

NASA hopes you won't get too curious about Curiosity, their newest, nuttiest, nuke-powered Mars rover. But you should!

2011-08-03T18:32:00.000-07:00

August 3rd, 2011

Dear Readers,

3, 2, 1 ... poof! Dusted!

Houston, you caused a problem!

Even as people in Japan experience "black rain" because of Fukushima, NASA is threatening a plutonium-laden "black rain" for Christmas.

Some time between November 25th and December 15th, 2011, NASA plans to launch a plutonium 238-laden rocket carrying a robotic rover named Curiosity, aimed for Mars.

Curiosity will be NASA' 27th nuclear space launch. Three have already failed, and failures are hardly a thing of the past, nor can they be, because of the debris field, and because everything we build, and do, is imperfect.

One of the three failed nuclear launches resulted in the INTENTIONAL (as in: "this is what WILL happen in an accident, and of course, there will be accidents") release of several POUNDS of plutonium (in 1964).

There were several other failures and countless near-misses, all in just 26 flights. We can't get lucky all the time, but luck is what NASA relies on to succeed. Dumb luck.

NASA hopes you won't get too curious about Curiosity. The robotic mission is extremely risky (as in: "will probably not achieve objectives due to critical failure at some point") and should be abandoned.

NASA's use of plutonium-238 (in dioxide form) for this mission follows a pattern of partial fixes to insurmountable problems with nuclear fuels.

After getting the idea for radioisotope-powered thermoelectric generators (RTGs) for space (and undersea) missions from the Russians, NASA's original "containers" for the plutonium were designed to simply vaporize their contents in most accident scenarios: In other words, there was virtually no containment whatsoever. The "theory" was that they would be extra-careful for those flights carrying plutonium, and wouldn't have accidents that way. It didn't work out. The other part of the "theory" was that by having the thermocouples right next to the plutonium, you could get more useful heat out of the unit -- and thus it was more efficient. More electricity could be generated from a given quantity of plutonium.

The theory "snapped" when a mission blew up during late launch, destroying the Transit Satellite and its SNAP-9A nuclear power unit, scattering its deadly contents, and causing a global, measurable increase in plutonium levels and -- according to eminent nuclear physicist and medical doctor John Gofman -- causing as many as one million additional lung cancers globally.

A single pound of plutonium could cause lung cancer in every person on earth if we each inhaled a little portion of it. And then it could do it again, and again. NASA is threatening to vaporize 10.6 pounds of plutonium into our fragile environment. We should stop them.

Admittedly, the "modern" containers for the plutonium are somewhat better than the old system. The new containers are designed to safely hold the plutonium in many potential accident scenarios -- but by no means ALL accident scenarios. In fact, during EVERY phase of flight while within earth's gravitational pull, plutonium can be released which will descend back upon us. In some phases of the flight, a complete release of the entire contents is practically guaranteed if an accident occurs!

The containers (there are dozens of individual plutonium-packages inside the single RTG on Curiosity) are designed to reduce the CHANCES of SOME TYPES of releases in FAVOR of increased QUANTITIES of released plutonium in case of other types of failure, especially late in the launch, or during a full-stack powered impact into the earth (something they have self-destruct mechanisms to avoid, but even self-destruct mechanisms have been known to fail at critical times).

There are many pathways to failure in this mission. For example, the additional weight of this new rover over previous, solar-powered units demanded a new method of landing on Mars -- the old one ("Bouncy Bouncy") was unreliable anyway. The new method -- a tethered descent -- is very difficult and is sure to be unreliable, too. If we were risking only money, I guess it wouldn't matter, although a few billion dollars could build a lot of schools and pay a lot of teachers' salaries for a while.

Instead, all that money might be wasted, and all that plutonium might be launched for naught -- hundreds of billions of lethal doses' worth of one of the world's most deadly poisons.

(Plutonium-238 is about 275 times more toxic than normal "weapons grade" plutonium (Pu-239), often cited as the world's deadliest substance. Pu 238's half-life, about 87.75 years, is correspondingly about 275 times shorter than Pu-239's 24,100 year half-life. A significant portion (about 10%) of the Pu is Pu-239 with its 24,100 year half-life.)

Thousands of people have already protested these dangerous nuclear launches. But to no avail. NASA's arrogant continued use of plutonium-238 for "civilian" space purposes appears to be directly related to the U.S. government's stated desire to launch plutonium and uranium-powered military rocketry for "domination" of outer space near earth. So there are some very good reasons to oppose THIS launch, besides that it's a waste of money.

The amount of space debris already in orbit guarantees that if nuclear payloads are launched, there will be catastrophic accidents, possibly over highly-populated areas. This launch could fail over a major city, causing massive evacuations and widespread contamination! It could start a war.

Hundreds of studies with animals (and a few that were done on humans) have indicated reliably that plutonium follows a "Linear, No Threshold" health effects pattern. So, if there's an accident, no matter where or how it comes down, it's bound to poison a lot of people before all the plutonium decays, and decays again, and again, finally into something stable.

This launch is anything but an engineering marvel. It is a potential engineering disaster. Anyone truly curious about it will surely be aghast, but forcing this risk on billions of unsuspecting humans (who are now breathing Fukushima's effluent as well) is especially cruel.

There is simply no sane reason for NASA to do this.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author's prior comments on Cassini were published in Space News, The Washington Post and elsewhere. He is a computer programmer and co-author of Statistics Explained, a computer program which teaches first-year statistics for scientists. He is also the author of All About Pumps and the Animated Periodic Table of the Elements, and a co-author of The Heart: The Engine of Life, all computer programs. He has also authored a book about nuclear power called The Code Killers (2008).

---------------------------------------------------

************************************************
** Ace Hoffman, Owner & Chief Programmer, The Animated Software Co.
** POB 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018
** U.S. & Canada (800) 551-2726; elsewhere: (760) 720-7261
** home page: www.animatedsoftware.com
** email: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
************************************************

Is San Onofre a terrorist's target?

2011-07-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

To: docket@energy.state.ca.us, bbyron@energy.state.ca.us
Re: "California Nuclear Power Plant Issues" (Docket #11-IEP-1J)

July 26th, 2011

To Whom It May Concern;

Below are two articles about insider-sabotage at nuclear plants from Philip D. Lusk's Know No Nukes' weekday daily briefing for July 22nd, 2011. The first paragraph of the second article is particularly chilling to those who live around San Onofre, Indian Point, and a few other "choice" reactor sites.

If San Onofre were shut down, sabotage would immediately be much more difficult, and get more difficult as the fuel cools. Only a relatively small security team would be needed to guard the waste (it's classified just how many that would be...). Their backgrounds would, presumably, be very carefully checked. Practically the only "expertise" needed on the site would be expertise in guarding things. Not high-pressure thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, hydraulics, metallurgy, electronics, electrical systems, computer hardware, software, network security, nuclear engineering, and all the other various people who are vital (and who must do their jobs faithfully) to keeping a nuclear power plant operational and safe.

Special inspections would still be needed regularly, and when the waste is finally moved somewhere, guess what? There aren't enough experts in the world YET who really know how to do THAT safely. But letting the used reactor cores just sit there -- in pools preferably, NOT dry casks -- isn't as dangerous as having operational reactors in California, or recently-removed spent fuel.

There have been terrorism threats against reactors worldwide, including ours, for decades. That further terrorism attempts against American nuclear power plants are coming seems inevitable in light of last week's reports, as if prior reports and incidents hadn't already made it clear.

Based simply on random chance, there's about a 2% chance it will be San Onofre. Based on many other factors, it might be 10 times more likely. In fact, San Onofre might be TODAY'S TARGET.

"The terrorists" have proven time and again to be cunning, capable, smart, determined adversaries who will kill thousands on a moments' notice. 9-11 was so carefully carried out that "conspiracy theorists" STILL think there were additional bombs inside the buildings! (I'm not talking about what happened at Building Seven (or at the Pentagon, for that matter...) I'm talking about the twin towers...)

9-11 was a tragic and colossal failure to stop an insane plan.

The insane plan worked that day.

There were warnings, and clues even months earlier, and the actual acts of demonic violence could have been minimized by shooting down, say, the second plane, or the third... but no one acted fast enough. In a nuclear accident, fast action by hundreds or even thousands of people may be all that will stop a catastrophic tragedy. It is possible that the fourth ("Shanksville, PA") plane on 9-11 was heading for Three Mile Island (one is hard-pressed to figure out what else the target might have been) and only the actions of a few heroic citizens who stormed THAT cockpit saved us from a meltdown that day. If that's true, then the insane plan that worked, didn't really work at all. Damage WAS minimized, because a few alert citizens didn't wait for government action.

Nuclear power plants will ALWAYS be targets, and always have been, as the book Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy by Dr. Bennett Ramberg explained, in the 1980s.

It's time to get rid of San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. They are old and dilapidated. They are terrorist's beaconing beacons for wreaking catastrophic blight -- death and suffering -- on Southern California. They are not necessary; their power production can easily be replaced by other methods, and have been, virtually, many times in the past. In one 14 month period not too long ago, for example, California added more generating capacity than all our nuclear power plants combined produce. So really, it wouldn't be that hard to replace that power with alternative energy sources -- especially conservation.

Instead, the power plants have continued to operate despite the fact that they are falling apart at the seams (literally, and elsewhere). Their biggest success -- upping their "up time" to 9 hours out of every 10, on average (not particularly good for "baseline," especially when they tend to fail during natural disasters) was accomplished NOT by greater skill, efficiency, and "togetherness" on the part of the workers as they claim, but by increasing the enrichment of the uranium-235 to approximately double what it was when they started operating the reactors here, and then shutting down for refuelling less often.

One result is that, pound for pound, our "spent" fuel is far MORE dangerous than it used to be, because when it comes out of the reactor it has accumulated far more fission products. Another result is that there is more radioactive and thermal "heat" in the spent fuel, which takes longer to decay to "safe" (I use the term VERY loosely) levels after the fuel has been removed from the reactor. It undoubtedly has more plutonium, pound-for-pound, as well.

Nothing comes for free in the real world and it doesn't happen in the nuclear world either. We will all be paying for Fukushima in increased cancer rates throughout the planet. Animals and plants will all suffer needlessly from THAT tragedy.

Here in California, such a tragedy is still preventable, but only by determined action by everyone who cares about our great state. The federal regulators have proven time an again that they would approve just about anything and call it "safe" even when it isn't. The utility will lie about anything (such as: "we do our fire rounds properly") and make up any story (such as: "there are ZERO emissions from an operating reactor"), and then say it's the public that's confused. If so, it's the industry's fault.

Shut San Onofre. Shutdown before meltdown.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
POB 1936
Carlsbad, CA 92018

The author has lived downwind from San Onofre for nearly 20 years. He had bladder cancer a few years ago (one known cause of bladder cancer is radiation.) He is a computer programmer.

---------------------------------------------
Attachments (2):
---------------------------------------------

2) Progress responds to terrorism threat on utilities
Triangle Business Journal - July 21, 2011
http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2011/07/21/progress-responds-to-terrorism-threat.html

A recent federal report has raised alarms about the potential dangers of internal terrorist attacks at U.S. utilities, but a spokesman for Progress Energy Inc. says the Raleigh-based company has appropriate measures in place to protect itself and its customers.

It s something, obviously, we take very seriously, Progress Energy (NYSE:PGN) spokesman Mike Hughes said Thursday morning.

He adds that Progress conducts thorough background checks on all employees, including contract employees, and continues to monitor workers throughout their stay with the company. Some are subjected to psychological examinations.

As for physical protection, Progress, and indeed all nuclear energy facilities, have ramped up security measures, Hughes said, to include more security personnel and better physical barriers to prevent a break in.

Progress operates three nuclear plants in the Carolinas, including the Harris plant in Wake County.

Hughes comments came in response to questions regarding a report titled Insider Threat to Utilities by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The department issued the report July 19 regarding potential threats to private sector utilities, according to Matthew Chandler, a department spokesman.

While DHS has no specific, credible intelligence of an imminent threat posed to the private sector utilities, several recent incidents highlight the on-going threat to infrastructure in the utility sectors from insiders and outsiders seeking facility-specific information that might be exploited in an attack, he added.

The report was supposed to be confidential, but was leaked to ABC News, which did a story on it Wednesday (SEE STORY BELOW).

A Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) spokesman did not immediately return phone calls made Thursday morning. Charlotte-based Duke, which is buying Progress for $13.7 billion, provides power in the western part of the Triangle.

---------------------------------------------

3) New Terror Report Warns of Insider Threat to Utilities
By BRIAN ROSS (@brianross), RHONDA SCHWARTZ and MEGAN CHUCHMACH
ABC News - July 20, 2011
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/terror-alert-warns-insider-threat-infrastructure/story?id=14118119

Sabotage by an insider at a major utility facility, including a chemical or oil refinery, could provide al Qaeda with its best opportunity for the kind of massive Sept. 11 anniversary attack Osama bin Laden was planning, according to U.S. officials.

A new intelligence report from the Department of Homeland Security issued Tuesday, titled Insider Threat to Utilities, warns "violent extremists have, in fact, obtained insider positions," and that "outsiders have attempted to solicit utility-sector employees" for damaging physical and cyber attacks.

"Based on the reliable reporting of previous incidents, we have high confidence in our judgment that insiders and their actions pose a significant threat to the infrastructure and information systems of U.S. facilities," the bulletin reads in part. "Past events and reporting also provide high confidence in our judgment that insider information on sites, infrastructure, networks, and personnel is valuable to our adversaries and may increase the impact of any attack on the utilities infrastructure."

In the materials recovered after the Navy SEAL operation that killed Osama bin Laden in May, officials found evidence bin Laden sought to repeat the carnage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on or around its ten year anniversary.

"The only way you can actually kill the large scale number of Americans that [bin Laden] literally was calculating was through the use of this critical infrastructure," Chad Sweet, former DHS chief of staff and co-founder of the Chertoff Group, told ABC News.

After gaining access to such sites, causing mayhem could be relatively easy, according to former White House counter-terrorism advisor and ABC News consultant Richard Clarke.

"There are a lot of very sensitive facilities where someone can get a job on the inside, get access to a control room, flip a switch, which causes an electric power grid to short circuit, causes a pipeline to explode," Clarke said.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement there was no specific threat.

"DHS routinely shares information with its state and local partners on a wide-range of potential threats, and as part of this responsibility, DHS issued an intelligence note to its federal, state, local, tribal and private sector partners on July 19 regarding potential threats to private sector utilities. While DHS has no specific, credible intelligence of an imminent threat posed to the private sector utilities, several recent incidents highlight the on-going threat to infrastructure in the utility sectors from insiders and outsiders seeking facility-specific information that might be exploited in an attack," DHS press secretary Matt Chandler said. "We will continue to work closely with our state and local partners, including our partners in the utility sector, to take steps to best protect from potential threats including protecting our nation's infrastructure. This includes sharing information as well as best practices."

'I am Taking This Plant Hostage

U.S. officials were stunned last year in Yemen with the arrest of an alleged American recruit to al Qaeda, Sharif Mobley, of New Jersey, who had been employed as five different U.S. nuclear power plants in and around Pennsylvania after successfully passing federal background checks.

If someone is determined, and has the right access, they could do damage that would affect thousands of lives," Sweet said.

Al Qaeda has already put out the word in its online magazine, Inspire, for "brothers of ours who have specialized expertise and those who work in sensitive locations that would offer them unique opportunities to wreak havoc on the enemies of Allah."

As evidence of American infrastructure vulnerabilities, the report specifically cites the attempted insider sabotage this April at a water treatment plant in Arizona

Officials said then a disgruntled night shift worker took over the control room and tried to create a giant methane gas explosion.

"I am taking the plant hostage," the worker said in a recorded 911 call.

There was no tie to al Qaeda and his plot failed, but the incident was a reminder of how easily one insider could create potentially deadly mayhem.

"Facilities in the United States don't have to be attacked by terrorists with airplanes or bombs outside the facility," Clarke said.

===========================================

OH NO: Ace slips up on H2O2; The Zirconium Connection; Transuranics and Cancer.

2011-07-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

July 20th, 2011

Dear Readers,

In my previous newsletter, I mistakenly referred to the molecule HO (or OH) as Hydrogen Peroxide, which is actually H2O2. My thanks to the writer who pointed it out (see below). I apologize for the error and should, as the writer suggests, be more careful. What happened? I had meant to go back and check my prior article and slipped up! Also below is the relevant quote from what I had written five years ago, and I think you can see where I forgot a step...

My worries about zirconium needed clarification as well. Fortunately, I recently discovered a terrifying document about zirconium in my files, written in 1979, which I had scanned on March 3rd, 2011, eight days before Fukushima.

The article is called The Zirconium Connection and was written by Daniel M. Pisello. It was published in the June/August 1979 issue of The Ecologist magazine in England, shortly after Three Mile Island. (My photocopied version appears to have been hand-dated even earlier: April 25, 1979, less than a month after TMI.)

The ecologist version is available online:

http://exacteditions.theecologist.org/exact/browsePages.do?issue=5392&size=3&pageLabel=116

The Zirconium Connection describes precisely what went wrong in Fukushima, proving unequivocally one of two things. Either the nuclear industry has, indeed, been lying about the known dangers of using zirconium fuel cladding as the author suggests, or of course, they've forgotten, which proves that ANY safety improvements will, in fact, also be forgotten over time. Either way, the industry is a disaster-waiting-to-happen.

Accompanying my copy of The Zirconium Connection, which was probably sent to me by the late Pamela Blockey O'Brien, were two other pages of documents. I've typed one of them in (the portion I have) called Transuranics and the Impact on Health, by Carl J. Johnson, MD, MPH, and have included it below.

The second document which accompanied my copy of The Zirconium Connection is a letter dated August 8th, 1979 to the NRC's suddenly-famous Chairman, Joseph M. Hendrie, from then-State Representative Stephen R. Reed (later, mayor of Harrisburg, now a private consultant). It starts out as follows:

-----------------------------

Dear Chairman Hendrie,

I am entirely baffled by the apparent refusal of the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to have extensively reviewed the reports of hundreds of Three Mile Island area residents who, during March 28-31, 1979, primarily, and at times subsequent, experienced:

(a) metallic taste in their mouth
(b) metallic or Iodine-like odor in the air
(c) irritated and watery eyes
(d) moderate or severe respiratory inflammation
(e) gastro-intestinal dysfunction and diarrhea
(f) disruption of the menstral (sic) cycle in females
(g) skin rashes (some appearing as radiation burns)
(h) sharp, abnormal pains in joints
-------------------------------

He goes on to compliment plans by state and federal health services -- that were in fact not properly implemented -- to do studies over the coming 25 years, and then asks:

-------------------------------
But why is there a complete dismissal by the NRC of any immediate indications of exposure to levels of radiation higher than what were immediately thought the first dates of the accident? Psychosomatically induced ailments are possible with some, but not with hundreds or even more persons and I suggest this matter has been conveniently laid aside.
-------------------------------

In light of the fact that right now, the National Academies (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, National Research Council), "Advisers to the Nation on Science, Engineering, and Medicine", Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board is JUST NOW STARTING to undertake an assessment of the dangers, and is only at this time in the process of establishing the protocols, I'd say Reed's compliments that studies would be properly done were unfounded!

http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/nrsb/agenda/Irvine_public_agenda.pdf

On page 31 of my 2008 book The Code Killers (available as a free download, see URL below) you will find a document supplied by Richard Webb, who studied Three Mile Island extensively and many other reactor designs (and worked at Shippingport, his career goes so far back), indicating that peak releases from Three Mile Island were "off scale" at least twice during the event, plus the recorder stopped for several critical hours when releases were probably off scale as well.

Fukushima not only CAN happen here, Fukushima WILL happen here (unless we shut the plants down and start to properly protect the waste, and let it begin to cool).

If we keep the 104 Light Water Reactors with their zirconium-clad fuel running, it's just a matter of time before Fukushima happens here -- BWR, PWR, GE, Westinghouse... it doesn't matter. Anyone who believes anything else believes blatant nuclear industry lies! Honest people correct their mistakes and I've tried to correct mine. The nuclear industry has had more than 30 years to fix THIS problem, and instead they've pretended it didn't even exist!

Once you read The Zirconium Connection in light of Fukushima, I don't think you will EVER trust the nuclear industry again!

You shouldn't have, anyway.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
...trying to remember everything in...
Carlsbad, CA

(1) A letter of reprimand
(2) Transuranics and the impact on health by Carl J. Johnson, 1985
(3) Contact information for the author of this newsletter

==================================================
(1) A letter of reprimand:
==================================================

--------------------------------------------------------------
At 04:35 PM 7/18/2011 -0700, "nolonger withus" wrote:
>in your #7 paragraph you call an OH radical "hydrogen peroxide" whereas it's really a hydroxyl or hydroxy, the common chemical base or lye. Hydrogen Peroxide is H2O2, a completely different chemical. This is a very glaring oversight in that it opens your otherwise pertinent information to question by those out to discredit the anti-nuke crowd at every opportunity. You ought to be more careful.
--------------------------------------------------------------

From:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environment/tritium/2006/EPATritiumStandard.htm

HO is an especially reactive "molecular fragment" and to make things worse, in dealing with the HO, the body often makes hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), which can be very damaging if it's not in the right place. (Cells do have peroxisomes (little bags which can safely contain hydrogen peroxide), but the odds are against the H2O2 forming there. Some cells in the body actually poison invading cells with H2O2 to kill them, so obviously, you don't want this stuff any more than you wanted the HO or the 3He, or the beta particle.)

==================================================
(2) Transuranics and the impact on health by Carl J. Johnson, 1985:
==================================================

The following document accompanied my printed copy of The Zirconium Connection by Daniel M. Pisello, which was published in The Ecologist, June-Aug 1979.

---------------------------------------

Note at top of page:

"Recently GPU [TMI's owner] and the NRC acknowledged that the core of Unit 2 at TMI reached a temperature of 5,100 degrees F and that transuranic materials were released into the environment. Below is a statement that was part of the May 28 press conference in Washington D.C. sponsored by the SVA"

May 21, 1985
Transuranics and the impact on health
Carl J. Johnson, MD, MPH

A typical nuclear reactor like TMI-2 has about 97 tons of uranium 238 and 3 tons of U-235. Although some reactors are also fueled with plutonium, all operating reactors make large amounts of plutonium.

A typical reactor in a year will produce 100,000 to 600,000 curies of alpha-radiation emitting plutonium, 7,000 to 110,000 curies of americium, and 400,000 to over one million curies of curium.

Each curie will exceed the Department of Energy's (DOE) maximum permissible body burden for 24 million nuclear workers, or 2.4 billion people. This DOE exposure standard does not protect workers, however. At Rocky Flats, nuclear workers with less plutonium in their bodies than permitted by DOE had sharply increased rates of chromosome damage, even at only 1% to 10% of the permitted dosage of plutonium.

Put another way, a teaspoon of plutonium-238 would exceed the DOE exposure limit for 40 billion nuclear workers, or 4 trillion people, and even a small fraction of this maximum permissible dosage will cause severe chromosome damage.

There are about 40 transuranics of importance, like plutonium 238, produced in all nuclear reactors. Some are somewhat less toxic, some are more toxic. Plutonium and similar radionuclides occur in all tissues in the body in man, and become a permanent resident in the body. The excretion rate is very slow, about one-half would be excreted every 200 years.

In animals, plutonium causes cancer of the lung, bone, kidney, mammary gland, lymph nodes nesothelium, and ten types of soft tissue cancer. In one animal study, plutonium caused a cancer rate of 114% with a mean induction period of about one year. Many animals [had] two different types of cancer.

Excess cancer incidence has been reported in Rocky Flats workers and in the population living downwind in Denver. The children and young adults in Arvada and the area near the plant in 1957, when an explosion blew out the filters at the plant, had a greater than four-fold excess of leukemia in 1969-1971 at the time of the National Cancer Institutes's Third National Survey of Cancer Incidence. I estimate that the Rocky Flats exposures will cause more than 12,000 excess cases of leukemia and cancer in the Denver area between 1960 and 1990, and a somewhat greater number will be affected by birth defects and non-specific effects on health. This was the only Federally-supported study of cancer incidence around a Federal nuclear facility.

An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report states that a nuclear reactor can routinely release over a million curies of fission products in the exhaust each year. These routine releases include 6.8 curies of neptunium, a transuranic. I asked the EPA regional radiation officer why the release of the other 40 plus transuranics were not reported, and he said, "that would not be self-serving to the industry."

(The document then says "Continued on the next page" but unfortunately, that's all I have of it.)

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(3) Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
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San Onofre: A trillion-dollar threat to SoCal; Tritium 101

2011-07-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

[Note: corrections as noted in the next newsletter have been made here in [brackets] -- Ace, 20110720)
July 12th, 2011

Dear Readers,

San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station (SONWGS) is a pair of aging Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) in the midst of Southern California's burgeoning, vibrant, forward-thinking, technologically advanced, interconnected, health-conscious population.

It doesn't belong here at all, and it's well past time to get rid of it.

Conceived in the 1950s, the two units that still operate were designed in the 60s, built in the 70s, went online in the 80s, and have been falling apart ever since. And they have been piling up nuclear waste along our coast ever since, too -- at the horrific rate of 500 pounds per day, with nowhere to put it. There are over eight million pounds of so-called "spent fuel" at the site right now -- making it potentially worse than Fukushima in an accident.

And "spent fuel" is quite a euphemism, considering that after use, it is about 10 million times MORE hazardous than before it went into the reactor. And it will remain so for tens of thousands of years. After use, it's full of biological-systems targeting fission products.

Spent fuel's "protective cladding" -- one of the major shields of defense that the nuclear industry promotes (along with the domes, the emergency core cooling systems, backup diesel generators, and one or two other systems that may or may not work when needed (and don't always work when tested, and aren't always tested)) -- is pyrophoric and releases explosive amounts of hydrogen gas when it comes in contact with air. The gas can collect under one of the other "shields," causing an explosion.

If it sounds complicated, it is. So complicated, the "experts" got it wrong. Very wrong.

Fukushima proved the "experts" didn't understand how accidents can progress at nuclear power plants (although we had warned them pretty exactly...), and continues to prove that the "best" minds in the nuclear industry don't know what they are doing (and still won't listen to us...).

Fukushima has baffled the "experts" for more than four months now. Yet they (the NRC, DOE, SCE, TEPCO, etc.) still pretend to be experts! The public should not be fooled. Real "experts," first of all, oppose nuclear power. And even they are baffled as to how to keep Fukushima's deadly effluent away from the environment, from people, from fish, from plants, from everything that lives.

Back in the USA, San Onofre has had numerous fires, explosions, electrical shorts, radioactive coolant leaks, and even a few near-misses over the years. It was only built (rebuilt, actually) to withstand earthquakes less than one tenth the magnitude scientists predict can (and probably WILL) occur in the area.

SanO's tsunami sea wall is barely 14 feet above mean high tide! Evacuation plans are obsolete and were never workable anyway. KI tablet (potassium iodide) distribution systems in the event of an accident are a joke -- a deadly one.

Not that KI does all that much good, but it does do some good, protecting the thyroid from the uptake of radioiodine (Iodine-131), which has a half-life of about eight days. However, the PROPOSED response -- distribution after the fact -- is virtually useless, since in a meltdown, the iodine is usually (as we have seen at Fukushima) released from the fuel pellets in a matter of hours (or even minutes) as the actual meltdown occurs. Fukushima suggests this is usually followed by a hydrogen explosion, which is when everything actually gets released to the environment. San Onofre claims to have "hydrogen recombiners" which Fukushima could have had, but didn't. However, even the most passive hydrogen recombiners can fail, be poorly maintained, poorly positioned, or simply be overwhelmed.

There is a better solution, of course. Shut San Onofre down forever. It's a failed technology even without a catastrophic failure. It's not cost-effective. It never can be.

San Onofre's workers are totally unprepared for an accident. Many are foreign, speak little or no English, and can't follow the public debate about the plant. They have neither family nor roots here (there are exceptions, of course). Many are contract workers and/or temporary hires, and/or have only been at the plant for a few years, since massive replacements of contractors and SCE employees have occurred periodically.

Not surprisingly, the staff are scared to report problems, and lie to the regulators publicly and to the public regularly. They fear retaliation, and there are numerous testimonies from whistleblowers that those fears are fully justified.

It's a given that the plant is far more dangerous than it looks. Fukushima looked very pretty, too. It's easy to paint the walls and ignore the cracking, the rust, the embrittlement, the growing misalignments of parts... everything can be covered up with fresh paint! (Yes, they even paint the domes at San Onofre now and then, because so much bird poop accumulates on one, and not the other, that it looks strange and worrisome to the plant's owners; it might attract publicity again (it has in the past...)!)

More than seven million people live within 50 miles of San Onofre, and 20 million more live just beyond the 50 mile mark. San Onofre is a catastrophic trillion-dollar accident just waiting to happen.

San Clemente is the nearest city to San Onofre, just a few miles north of the plant. The mayor of San Clemente has recently assured nervous residents that the tritium which leaks out of San Onofre is minor, harmless, and safe. She uses, as her source for information on tritium, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's web site, a very poor choice (the EPA's web site wouldn't have been much better).

Over the years, San Onofre has leaked an enormous amount of tritium into the environment -- dozens of teaspoons' worth!

Of course, that doesn't SOUND like a lot!

But it takes tens of billions of gallons of water to dilute it to regulatory (drinking water) standards! That should be a clue to tritium's extreme toxicity. In fact, the current regulations are probably way too lax. Too much tritium gets out, and permissible levels are too high.

The NRC downplays the dangers from tritium as well as the difficulties in handling it. They appear, in fact, to be unfamiliar with the many ways tritium can be harmful, and even (hopefully not on purpose) present some of tritium's most dangerous properties as if they were benefits!

If enough people understand the hazard this one radioactive isotope -- tritium -- represents to humanity, perhaps it will be enough of an impetus to get the public to demand the permanent shut down of the tritium-producing, plutonium-producing reactors (merely two of over a hundred radioactive elements reactors produce and release, these two being just about as nearly at the opposite ends of the periodic table of elements as you can get, and two of the most hazardous, as well).

About 2/3rds of all U.S. reactors have recently been "discovered" (like we couldn't have guessed) to have leaked tritium; the others might also be leaking it as well (gee, I wonder...). It's time to shut down the tritium factories!

Here are ten facts about tritium (T) that every lay person should know:

1) T, aka H3, is normally bound with water (ie, a normal H and an O to make HTO, aka H2O, aka water). Tritium has a half-life of about 12.3 years.

2) Water evaporates, leaks, damages electronics and electrical equipment, flows to the sea, floods your basement, corrodes pipes, carries even more corrosive substances... Water can be nasty stuff when it's where you don't want it (tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, waterboards, inside your cell phone...).

3) No living organism, and no normal table-top chemistry process can distinguish tritium or any other radioactive substance from a stable isotope of the same substance until the moment of radioactive decay occurs. By then, of course, it's too late. (You need rows of thousands of centrifuges or other special equipment to separate various isotopes of elements. Just ask Iran, they do it all the time...)

4) Hydrogen is a basic building block of all life-forms. Proteins are molecules often containing thousands of hydrogen atoms in a precise configuration with other atoms. Damage one atom, break the special shape of the molecule in any way (as all ionizing radiation can do), and a signal protein could become a poison instead -- or at least, would fail to transmit its signal. (Life is made of signal proteins more than just about anything else.)

5) If they leak tritium, which is almost always bound up as HTO, chances are pretty good it will evaporate, and never make it into the ground. We will breath it as water vapor. It will be in doses too low to measure accurately, thanks to all the tritium everyone is already dumping into our environment. (There is very little 'natural' tritium on earth at any one time.)

6) When tritium decays, it releases a beta particle. The way beta particles harm biological systems is by the fact that they are (negatively) charged and very high speed. Damage is done on a time and distance basis: The longer and/or closer the beta particle is to another charged subatomic particle (electron) or particles (atoms, molecules) the more effect the beta particle can have on any given thing, and thus, the more damage it can cause. Therefore, virtually all the damage is done at the END of the beta particle's track. THEREFORE when the NRC or SCE describes tritium's beta particle as a "soft" or "low energy" beta particle, it is a misrepresentation, because they want you to believe that's a GOOD thing, and protects you. Actually, since they measure tritium by total energy dumped per unit of body mass, the fact that it is a relatively low energy beta release means there are more releases per total energy amount -- and thus there is MORE, not LESS, damage for a given amount of energy released! (This phenomenon is known as Bragg's Hump.)

7) Since T is usually bound with H and O as HTO (masquerading as H2O), when it decays from that state, it leaves an OH free radical molecule -- [which the body soon converts to hydrogen peroxide], which is extremely damaging to cell structures in its own right! Your body does make [hydrogen peroxide] only in very controlled ways. THIS OH molecule is almost invariably in a bad place, and causes a lot of damage for a long time (eat your anti-oxidants, folks!)

8) Normal cell death is a biologically controlled function. Cells normally live until signalled by the body's control mechanisms to commit "cell suicide" (apoptosis) and then they do so, and are absorbed by a nearby cell before completely collapsing as a structural unit. It's very controlled and happens about a million times a minute inside your body, and is part of the process of life. But random cell death causes inflammation, which is NOT a good thing! And random damage to the DNA can cause cancer, which is even worse!

9) The biological hazard rating for tritium has been raised in the past, but surely is still not high enough (it's more dangerous than they admit). Tritium is used in fewer and fewer medical procedures because it is so difficult to handle safely, and so dangerous in such minute quantities.

10) A typical reactor is only allowed to release about a thirtieth of a teaspoon of tritium in a whole year! A bad year is maybe a whole teaspoon of tritium. That's how deadly this stuff is! And if that teaspoon of tritium evaporates, do you think it gets measured accurately, and properly reported? What it does get is a special dispensation from the NRC to release the extra tritium that year.

And here is one bonus fact about tritium:

Tritium is a vital part of thermonuclear weapons. Eliminate access to tritium, and such weapons become duds after a few years. Wouldn't that be nice?

For more information about tritium, please visit my web site:

www.acehoffman.org

Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Independent Researcher
Carlsbad, CA

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Iodine yield from nuclear reactors:
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"The fission yield of iodine-129 is about 1% and the yield of iodine-131 is close to 3%. That is, about one atom of iodine-129 and three atoms of iodine 131 are produced per 100 fissions."

Source: http://www.evs.anl.gov/pub/doc/Iodine.pdf

(To produce electricity, each uranium atom can only be split once, so a lot of radioactive iodine MUST be produced to generate power from nuclear energy. -- Ace)

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Facts about Passive Hydrogen Autocatalytic Recombiners (PHARs):
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From:
http://elliron.com/hydrogen_r/

"The trouble-free life is 8 years. The lifetime of the PHAR is 30 yeas. The lifetime of the PHAR autocatalytic modules is 5 years. The PHAR should be placed under the dome. General maintenance every 5 years. Regenerating time is no more than 50 hr."

(Judge for yourself if so-called hydrogen recombiners are absolutely positively guaranteed to be there when you need them! Would you bet all of Southern California on it? Because you are! -- Ace)

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Recommended music video:
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Great song in any language!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EeDurg_ubM

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From OC register:
http://www.ocregister.com/news/san-307831-tritium-nuclear.html
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Published: July 11, 2011 Updated: 1:39 p.m.

Ask the Mayor: Is tritium from San Onofre reason to worry?

Tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, has not been detected in the ground, water or air in San Clemente, Lori Donchak says. The city shut down its water well at the south end of town in 2006 to test and confirm that tritium at the San Onofre nuclear power plant couldn't get into the well.

By FRED SWEGLES / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

A resident wants to know if there's any danger to San Clementeans from tritium leaking from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. It's one in a series of questions posed to San Clemente Mayor Lori Donchak on her Mayor's Blog at san-clemente.org.

San Clemente shut down its water well at the south end of town in 2006 to test and confirm that tritium in groundwater where the San Onofre nuclear plant's Unit 1 reactor was located couldn't get into the well.

Mayor,

MSNBC.com reports that three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power plants leak radioactive tritium. As a longtime San Clemente resident, I'm seriously concerned.

I'd like to know if San Onofre is one of them. Being the closest city to San Onofre nuclear plant, does our city have any oversight on the safety of the nuclear plant?

Yong

......................................

Hi, Yong.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the federal agency with oversight over San Onofre. Despite our proximity, the city of San Clemente has no legal or regulatory influence on the operation of the plant.

As you may know, tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that occurs as part of the operation of a nuclear power plant. Tritium particles pose a potential radiation hazard when inhaled, absorbed through the skin or ingested through food or water.

The city's emergency planning officer, Jen Tucker, is familiar with tritium and indicates that testing for it and other contaminants is done regularly. She says tritium has not been detected in the ground, water or air in San Clemente.

In 2006, there was evidence of tritium in groundwater where San Onofre's Unit 1 was located. At the time, the city shut down its only well until extensive tests were completed that showed that water at the plant couldn't migrate to the well and that the well was free from contamination.

Jen says questions about the current monitoring program can be sent to nuccomm@sce.com. Tritium and contamination are also addressed on the NRC's website, nrc.gov.

[ -- Mayor, San Clemente]

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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
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Check out YouTube - IS IODINE-131 KILLING BABIES IN PHILADELPHIA?

2011-06-19T19:51:00.001-07:00

Father's day, 2011

Dear Readers,

All around the world, a lot of people who thought they were going to be new fathers by today have instead found out they're not -- not this time around, anyway.

Infant deaths are up alarmingly in a number of cities in AMERICA (and up slightly across the whole U.S.A.) since Fukushima. And we're thousands of miles away, we should be safe, right?

But unfortunately, quite probably, the cause IS Fukushima.

Wherever it rained radioactive crud heavily, pregnant woman breathed polluted air, drank polluted water, ate polluted food, and lost their (polluted) babies. This has occurred in "statistically significant" numbers.

The cause, of course, is especially difficult to prove because the government of Japan has refused to tell the truth about what has been released from the reactors, and because the government of the United States has restricted testing to a a few locations in a few cities.

What a day to be reporting something like this, eh? I feel sick. I despise nuclear power, and this is why! For our own babies to have to be the "canaries in the coal mines" for nuclear power ... how sick is that? We MUST stop this thing! Oh yeah, and coal must go, too. NIRS' campaign: No Nukes, No Coal, No Kidding is a good one. And for those on the West Coast: August 7th, 2011, Shoreline Amphitheater, Mountain View, California, a HUGE No Nukes concert!! Get info from NIRS' web site: www.nirs.org .

We MUST and we WILL shut San Onofre and all the other nukes!

If you have not had a chance to view the recent Fox29 news report on Joe Mangano's research, a link appears below and I don't suggest waiting, since the report was removed from the Fox29 web site already due to "complaints" (from who?) and for all we know, it might be taken down from YT at any moment.

This newsletter is being sent "formatted" instead of my usual "plain text" so that Joe's tables (hopefully) come through.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMV4p6RS1c8
or
http://ow.ly/5lqSS

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At 09:11 PM 6/19/2011 -0400, Odiejoe@aol.com wrote:

Dear Friends:
A few days ago, I sent many of you a link to the Fox-Philadelphia story on the rising infant deaths in Philadelphia (up 48% since late March) since the fallout from Japan arrived (Philadelphia had the highest levels in drinking water in the U.S.).

Sorry to say that the link didn't work, as the station took it down due to complaints. But now it's working, so just click on below.

If you want to know more, I've also pasted on a press release and report now getting some coverage, about rising infant deaths in the Pacific Northwest (up 35% since late March), where the highest levels of radiation in precipitation were found.

Of course, there is much more study to be done, but this is the first indication that the Fukushima fallout that entered the air and diet - and human bodies - may have harmed Americans.

With kind regards,

Joe Mangano

Click here: YouTube - IS IODINE-131 KILLING BABIES IN PHILADELPHIA? - INFANT DEATHS UP 48% SINCE REACTOR 3 EXPLOSION

It has been put on You Tube...thankfully.
__,_._,___

INFANT DEATHS SOAR 35% IN PACIFIC NORTHWEST ---

AREA HIT HARDEST BY JAPANESE NUCLEAR FALLOUT

Embargoed until 12 p.m. EST, June 9, 2011                                      Contact Joseph Mangano 609-399-4343

June 7, 2011 – Infant deatths rose 35% in the Pacific Northwest since mid-March, when fallout from the meltdowns at Japanese nuclear reactors reached the U.S., according to data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and featured in a new report by health researchers.

Soaring infant deaths occurred in the region where the highest levels of environmental radiation were found in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) samples, raising the possibility that there is a link between Japanese radiation and risk of infant death.

â€œThe fetus and infant are highly susceptible to harm from radiation,â€ says Joseph Mangano MPH MBA. â€œThe Fukushima meltdowns are still releasing radiation, so trends should be monitored further,â€ he adds. Mangano is Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP), a New York-based health research group. He is the author of the new report on Fukushima fallout in the U.S. and infant death trends.

The airborne radioactive plume from Japan reached the West Coast on March 17, six days after a powerful earthquake and tsunami caused meltdowns in four reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant. EPA data shows that most of the highest levels in the continental U.S. of radioactive Iodine-131 (I-131) in precipitation in late March were found in Idaho, northern California, Washington, and Oregon.

The two highest precipitation levels found by EPA were in Boise ID (390 and 242 picocuries of I-131 per liter of water, hundreds of times greater than the typical level of about 2). Along with Boise, samples from Richmond CA (near San Francisco), Portland OR, and Olympia WA made up 6 of the 10 highest measurements in the U.S. I-131 is one of over 100 radioactive chemicals found only in nuclear reactors and atomic bombs.

Infant deaths reported to the CDC in eight northwestern cities averaged 9.25 per week for the four weeks ending March 19. The average jumped to 12.50, a 35.1% increase, in the following 10 weeks. Cities include Boise ID, Portland OR, and Seattle WA, plus the northern California cities of Pasadena, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Cruz. Total U.S. infant deaths increased 2.3% during this time.

Infant deaths are published in the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. They are preliminary (final figures are available in 2014), but are often similar to final data. The CDC data can be accessed at http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_wk/wk_cvol.html; EPA data is at http://www.epa.gov/japan2011/rert/radnet_sampling_data.html#precip .

RPHP health researchers ( www.radiation.org) have published 27 medical journal articles and 7 books on health hazards of radiation exposure. Their work has been covered by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, and Fox News.

ENVIRONMENTAL RADIATION IN THE UNITED STATES

FROM THE NUCLEAR MELTDOWNS AT FUKUSHIMA JAPAN

AND POTENTIAL EFFECTS ON INFANT MORTALITY RATES

Joseph J. Mangano MPH MBA, Radiation and Public Health Project, June 7, 2011

Purpose. This report will present and analyze data on radioactivity levels in the U.S. from the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns, and any changes in health status since this radioactivity entered the U.S. environment and diet.

Background. On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear plant, with six reactors, to lose cooling water (from loss of electricity). Three reactor cores and two waste pools suffered meltdowns. Explosions caused breaches in containment buildings, and high levels of radioactivity entered the environment. The radioactive plume moved east, reaching the West Coast on March 17.

Japanese radioactivity in the U.S. is being ingested by Americans through breathing and the food chain. This phenomenon has occurred previously, such as above-ground nuclear weapons tests and the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.

This report examines changes in environmental radiation levels in the U.S., along with changes in health status, since the arrival of the plume in March.

EPA System of Measuring Environmental Radiation. The federal government has monitored levels of environmental radioactivity since 1957, during the time of above-ground nuclear weapons testing. Originally managed by the U.S. Public Health Service, this task has been assigned to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1975.

The EPA makes periodic measurements of radioactivity concentrations in air, precipitation, water, and milk. It operates a system known as RADNET, which includes 124 stations in the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, Saipan, and Guam.

Historical data beginning in 1978 are available on the EPA web site, and earlier data are also available in hard copy format. After Fukushima, the EPA increased the frequency of their measurements, and on April 5, made 2011 data available in interactive format. However, on May 3 the Agency reverted to its normal schedule of quarterly measurements, claiming recent samples could detect no radioactivity.

For March and April 2011, the EPA has made available online hundreds of radioactivity measurements (Table 1). All individual readings can be accessed by visiting www.epa.gov/japan2011/rert/radnet-sampling-data.html#precip .

Table 1

March-April 2011 EPA Measurements of Radioactivity

Indicator                        Precipitation     Milk   Drinking Water   Air (Filter)   Air (Cartridge)

Number of Sites                         32        36                    72                  21                      12

Number of Samples                  157        67                  153                  79                    150

Samples with                              77          9                    34                  72                    105

Detectable Iodine-131

The EPA made measurements of 10 radioactive chemicals only produced in atomic bomb explosions and nuclear reactor operations. The vast majority of measurements did not detect radiation, and were marked â€œNDâ€ (not detectable). The one exception to this general inability to detect radiation was Iodine-131 (I-131). This chemical has a short half-life (8 days), which means it originated from a current source – most likeely a nuclear reactor. It is not clear why the EPA detects I-131 more easily than other chemicals.

I-131, like all forms of radioactive iodine, attacks the thyroid gland after ingestion. It can cause cancer and other disorders of the thyroid, which plays a key role in physical and mental development, especially in the fetus and infant.

The greatest number of detectable I-131 samples are in air (cartridge method), air (filter method), and precipitation, with 105, 72, and 77, respectively. Unfortunately, the air cartridge samples cover 12 sites, only 4 in the continental U.S., limiting a national analysis. Air filter samples include 13 sites in the continental U.S., just 6 outside California and Florida. Precipitation has the greatest geographic spread of measurements and will be analyzed as a rough proxy for U.S. levels of radioactivity from Japan.

Patterns of Iodine-131 in Precipitation. Historical EPA data shows the typical level of I-131 in U.S. precipitation is about 2 picocuries of I-131 per liter of water (pCi/l). This number was determined by measurements at 9 U.S. sites on May 1-3, 1986, just before the plume from the Chernobyl accident arrived over the nation. A picocurie is a measure of radioactivity, and is one-trillionth of a curie.

After Fukushima, from March 22-25, samples of I-131 in precipitation at 12 U.S. sites had an average (median) level of 39.6 pCi/l, or about 20 times greater than normal. This figure was roughly half of 1) the peak level after Chernobyl and 2) after a large above-ground atomic bomb test by China in late September 1976 (Table 2):

Table 2

Historical EPA Measurements of I-131 in Precipitation

Event                             Dates                No. of Sites   No. of Samples   Median I-131

Large Chinese              10/ 4/76-                     11                    26                    75.5

Bomb test                     11/ 2/76

Prior to Chernobyl          5/ 1/86-                       7                      9                      2.0

(â€œnormalâ€)                      5/ 3/86

Chernobyl peak              5/14/86-                     36                    45                    99.5

                                      5/16/86

Chernobyl end                5/27/86-                     18                    20                    25.5

                                      5/30/86

Fukushima peak             3/22/11-                     22                    37                    44.5

                                      3/31/11

Concentrations of I-131 in 77 EPA measurements in precipitation with a detectable level varied greatly. Some were quite small, while others were much greater than normal, approximating or exceeding 100 times the normal concentration. Table 3 lists the 10 highest individual U.S. levels of I-131 in March and April.

Table 3

Iodine-131 in Precipitation, Highest Levels in U.S., March/April 2011

Location                                    Date                  I-131 Level

*   1. Boise ID                          March 22              390

*   2. Boise ID                          March 22              242

     3. Kansas City KS              March 29              200

     4. Salt Lake City UT           March 28              190

     5. Jacksonville FL                March 31              150

*   6. Richmond CA                 March 22              138

*   7. Richmond CA                 March 22              138

*   8. Olympia WA                   March 24              125

     9. Boston MA                     March 22                92

* 10. Portland OR                    March 25                86.8

* Located in the Pacific Northwest

Of the 10 highest samples, 6 were from stations in the Pacific Northwest, including northern California, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. A seventh, Salt Lake City, is not technically part of the Pacific Northwest, but is relatively close to the region. Thus, it is prudent to conclude that this region received the greatest amount of fallout from Fukushima, and thus any changes in health status that might be linked to the Japanese meltdowns would occur there.

Trends in Infant Deaths in the Pacific Northwest. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) for decades.   Since 1993, each edition of the MMWR includes deaths by age group for each of 122 U.S. cities with a population of over 100,000. The MMWR is available at http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_wk/wk_cvol.html.

The MMWR report on deaths has certain limits. It only represents 30% of all U.S. deaths. It lists deaths by place of occurrence, while final statistics are place of residence. It also represents deaths by week a report is filed to the local health department, rather than date of death. Finally, some cities do not submit reports for all weeks.

Despite these limits, patterns of deaths reported in the MMWR are often consistent with final statistics, if a large enough group of cities and/or long enough time period are used. Final data for 2011 deaths are released in 2013 or 2014, and are only available for full years. Thus, MMWR data are helpful to make before-and-after comparisons in a year.

One age category used by the MMWR is under age one (infants). This is the most likely group to detect any link with Japanese fallout. All humans are affected by radiation exposure, but the fetus and infant are much more susceptible, because of their rapid growth and cell division. Damaging a fetal or infant cell makes it more likely that the cell with divide into more damaged cells before it can repair itself, as opposed to a slower-dividing adult cell. Damaging a cellâ€™s DNA code, as radiation does, makes it more likely that a baby will be stillborn, die in infancy, be born prematurely/at low weight, or be born with a birth defect.

There is a precedent for radioactivity linked with higher infant deaths. On May 5, 1986, fallout from Chernobyl reached the U.S., just 9 days after the meltdown. EPA measurements of I-131 in U.S. milk showed that from mid-May to late June, average concentrations were 5-6 times greater than in the same period in 1985. Several years later, a journal article presented official CDC data showing the U.S. infant death rate rose in the four months after Chernobyl compared to a year earlier (+0.43%, compared to a decline of -4.22% for the other 8 months, an excess of 593 deaths). CDC data confirm the magnitude of this four month â€œbumpâ€ was unprecedented, suggesting Chernobyl fallout may have contributed to higher infant death rates in the summer of 1986 (Table 4).

Table 4

Changes in Infant Death Rates, U.S., 1985-1986

                                    Deaths < 1 Yr             Rate/1000 Births          % Change

Date                              1985    1986                 1985    1986                 In Rate

May-August                 12788 12800                9.85     9.90               + 0.43

Other 8 Mos.               27242 26091              11.04   10.58               - 4.22

Note: Chernobyl fallout arrived in the U.S. environment on May 5, 1986. Excess Deaths = [0.43 – (-4.22) ] x 12,800 = 593. Source: Gould JM and Sternglass EJ. Low-level radiation and mortality. CHEMTECH, Jan. 1989, 18-21.

The MMWR 2011 data show that in the four weeks immediately preceding the arrival of Japanese fallout, an average of 181.5 infant deaths were reported (in 111 cities with full reporting for each week). For the 10 weeks following, the number increased to 185.6 deaths per week, a 2.3% increase, which is not statistically significant (Table 5).

Table 5

Infant Deaths, 111 U.S. Cities, By Week, 2011

Week Ending                Infant Deaths

BEFORE JAPAN FALLOUT ARRIVES

2/26/11                        173

3/ 5/11                        189

3/12/11                        164

3/19/11                        200

                                                            Number /average 4 weeks        726 (181.5)

AFTER JAPAN FALLOUT ARRIVES

3/26/11                        182

4/ 2/11                        200

4/ 9/11                        187

4/16/11                        154

4/23/11                        167

4/30/11                        190

5/ 7/11                        183

5/14/11                        200

5/21/11                        212

5/28/11                        181

                                                            Number /average 10 weeks      1856 (185.6)

% Change in Average                           +2.3%

Note: Includes all 122 U.S. cities in the MMWR, except for those with at least one week missing data (San Francisco, Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Columbus, Fort Worth, Paterson, New Orleans, Phoenix, Worcester, Tucson).

The MMWR includes 8 cities in the Pacific Northwest, namely Boise ID, Portland OR, Seattle WA, Berkeley CA, Sacramento CA, Santa Cruz CA, San Francisco CA, and San Jose CA. Weekly reported infant deaths in the four weeks immediately preceding the arrival of Japanese fallout and the 10 weeks following are given in Table 6.

Table 6

Infant Deaths, 8 Pacific Northwest Cities, By Week, 2011

Week               Infant Deaths (Deaths < 1 Year)

Ending             Boise    Portland   Seattle   Berk   Sacra   S. Cruz   S. Fran       S. Jose   Total

BEFORE JAPAN FALLOUT ARRIVES

2/26/11                2           0              3           0        2              0          4              0           11

3/ 5/11                0           4              1           0        1              0          0              3             9

3/12/11                0           1              2           0        2              0          1              2             8

3/19/11                0           0              2           1        2              0          2              2             9

AFTER JAPAN FALLOUT ARRIVES

3/26/11                1           2              6           1        2              0          2              2           16

4/ 2/11                0           0              3           0        1              1          ---            1             6

4/ 9/11                1           0              0           0        2              1          1              1             6

4/16/11                0           1              2           1        5              0          0              2           11

4/23/11                0           0              4           0        1              0          2              4           11

4/30/11                0           3              5           0        4              0          1              5           18

5/ 7/11                1           0              2           1        4              0          3              7           18

5/14/11                2           2              3           0        3              0          2              1           13

5/21/11                2           1              2           2        5              0          1              2           15

5/28/11                0           2              0           0        1              0          3              5           11

4 Weeks Before Japan Fallout            Total (Average) Weekly Deaths              37 ( 9.25)

10 Weeks After Japan Fallout               Total (Average) Weekly Deaths            125 (12.50)

% Change in Average                                                                              +35.1% (p<.09)

Note: No data reported for San Francisco, week ending April 2

The average weekly infant deaths for the 8 cities rose sharply from 9.25 to 12.50, a jump of 35.1%. Because a large number of deaths are involved (37 and 125 in the two periods), the change approaches statistical significance at p<.09 (p<.05 is significant).

A review of MMWR data shows that the average weekly number of deaths for all other age groups in the Pacific Northwest (and the U.S.) changed little in the periods before and after the arrival of Japanese fallout.

Discussion. The EPA increased the frequency of monitoring environmental radioactivity in the U.S. after the meltdowns at Fukushima. The Agency documented higher concentrations in the U.S., especially in late March. However, most measurements of chemicals other than I-131 did not detect radioactivity, and after observing declining levels, the EPA decided to resume its normal schedule of quarterly measurements.

Despite these limitations, it appears that the Pacific Northwest received the most Japanese fallout in the U.S. While these levels are much lower than near the Fukushima plant, it is still important to review health status data for unusual patterns.

The MMWR is useful for examining very recent mortality data in cities across the nation. A comparison of infant deaths during the four weeks prior to the arrival of Japanese fallout and the 10 weeks following showed a 35.1% rise in 8 Pacific Northwest cities.

The data suggest that the following steps be taken to enhance the research:

1. Review independent measures of U.S. radioactivity to confirm EPA data are consistent

2. Review changes in environmental radioactivity and infant deaths in Japan, as high radioactivity levels and rising infant deaths would be expected

3. Continue to monitor infant deaths in the Pacific Northwest and the U.S., using MMWR

4. Request data from state/local health departments on infant health, even if incomplete

Finally, the data should be shared with the appropriate regulators, namely the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the EPA, and state radiation protection bureaus. Information suggesting that relatively low exposures to radiation from nuclear reactors are linked with infant health problems should be part of the regulatory process.

REFERENCES:

1. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Radiation Programs. Environmental Radiation Data. Montgomery AL: Eastern Environmental Radiation Facility. Report 8, April 1977 (hard copy reports with radioactivity in precipitation after China bomb test), and Report 46, September 1986 (radioactivity in precipitation after Chernobyl).

2. Environmental Protection Agency. RadNet, formerly Environmental Radiation Ambient Monitoring System. http://oaspub.epa.gov/enviro/erams_query.simple_query (radioactivity in air, precipitation, water, and milk, beginning 1978).

3. Environmental Protection Agency. www.epa.gov/japan2011/rert/radnet-sampling-data.html#precip (radioactivity in air, precipitation, water, and milk for March/April 2011).

4. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_wk/wk_cvol.html (weekly deaths by age for 122 U.S. cities).

Are We on the Brink of Burying Nuke Power Forever? by Harvey Wasserman (& radio debut)

2011-06-15T12:49:00.001-07:00

June 15th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Harvey Wasserman has summed up the current global energy situation very nicely in the article shown below. Both the tragedy of nuclear power and the practically-simple solution to the energy problem (renewables -- duh!) are described with straight-forward logic and fact-based explanations. All that's really missing is the solution to the nuclear waste problem! But it's hardly fair to expect Harvey to solve that, too! However, at least he has solved the WORST aspect of the radioactive waste problem: That it is constantly growing by approximately 50 tons per day -- PER DAY!!! -- worldwide. If there's anyone who can truly solve the waste problem (and it's certainly not Jaczko!) let them speak up! (Note: A real solution would defy the laws of physics...)

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

---------------------------------------------

>>FYI: Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA GREEN POWER HOUR
>>debuts Wednesday, June 15, 8pm EST
>>
>>Special guests Bob Fitrakis & David Swanson.
>>
>>Call in at 1-877-932-9766 from 8pm to 9pm EST.
>>Tune in at www.TalkTainmentRadio.com.
>>
>>
>>
>>Harvey Wasserman
>>
>>Are we on the brink of burying nuke power forever?
>>June 15, 2011
>>
>>This may be the moment history has turned definitively against atomic energy.
>>
>>To be sure: we are still required to fight hard to bury reactor loan guarantees in the United States. There are parallel struggles in China, Indian, England, France and South Korea.
>>
>>The great fear is that until every single reactor on this planet is shut, none of us is really safe from another radioactive horror show.
>>
>>Thus the moment is clearly marked at Fukushima by three reactors and a radioactive fuel pool still untamed after three months, with the horrific potential to do far more apocalyptic damage than we've seen even to date.
>>
>>That image includes Japanese school children being issued Geiger counters to carry with them 24/7.
>>
>>And Fukushima's radiation raining down on the United States, with links to reports of a heightened infant death rate in Seattle.
>>
>>And by countless other on-going disasters and near-misses at reactors everywhere on the planet. Included is Cooper, in Nebraska, which got zero corporate media coverage as it was nearly flooded and did lose power to its radioactive fuel pool.
>>
>> From well-reasoned fear, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Israel and other critical players have announced they will build no more reactors. Some will start shutting the ones they have.
>>
>>Japan and Germany are the third and fourth largest economies on Earth. Japan has long been at the core of the reactor industry. Germany's economy is the largest in Europe. Some European nations are rumbling about an alliance to shut the reactors among their nuclear neighbors.
>>
>>All this could be happening merely in reaction to yet another Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The corporate media has attempted to induce a coma over Fukushima by simply refusing the cover the on-going disaster.
>>
>>But the worsening realities are as utterly relentless as they are terrifying. In the age of the internet, there is simply no way to totally suppress the horror of what is happening to our Earth, especially at its lethal, festering wound at Fukushima.
>>
>>But what truly sets this moment apart is not just the radioactive nightmare. There have been others. There will certainly be more.
>>
>>What's unique about now is the Solartopian flip side. It is the irrepressible fact that we have finally reached the green-powered tipping point.
>>
>>For the first time in history, the financial, industrial and trade journals are filled with pithy, number-laden reports declaring the moment has come---and this can not be overemphasized---that solar power is definitively cheaper than nuclear.
>>
>>It is an epic moment that future economic and technological historians will note as a true turning point.
>>
>>In real terms, Solartopian technology----wind, solar, geothermal, ocean thermal, bio-fuels, wave, current, tidal, efficiency, conservation---has always been cheaper than nukes.
>>
>>The �Peaceful Atom� has always been a creature of subsidies, a happy face painted on the Bomb. Its true health, safety and environmental costs can never be reliably calculated.
>>
>>What, after all, will be the true price tag on Fukushima? How do we begin to calculate the costs in human agony and ecological destruction?
>>
>>Already Japan is being torn apart by who will pay: the utility (it doesn't have enough assets), the government (it could go bankrupt) or the victims (who else?). The only thing certain is this once-powerful industrial nation will never recover.
>>
>>It's no accident the reactor industry cannot get private capital for new reactor construction, or private liability insurance of real consequence, and cannot solve its waste problems without the federal government taking responsibility---which, in truth, even it cannot do.
>>
>>The true installment cost of the US reactor fleet can't even be calculated, as much of the liability was dishonestly wiped off the books in the deregulation scam of 1999-2002.
>>
>>What we're left with worldwide is 440 uninsured ticking time bombs, potential Chernobyls and Fukushimas, every one of them. There are 104 in the US. The only real question is when the next one will go off and how long it will take to actually hear about it.
>>
>>Atomic energy also feeds global warming. Who will account for the enormous heat still rising from Fukushima? How much did Chernobyl spew? Carbon emissions come with the mining, milling, enrichment and ultimate disposal of radioactive fuel, not to mention the building and dismantling of the reactors themselves.
>>
>>For yet another summer, nukes in France, Alabama and elsewhere must close because the infernal machines that �fight global warming� must shut shy of heating the rivers they use for cooling to 90 degrees Farenheit.
>>
>>What's peaked now, as Fukushima melts and burns and dumps its radioactive poisons into the air and the oceans and the people of this planet, is one financial reality: even with all its subsidies, nuclear power can no longer stand in the market place.
>>
>>The first option, of course, has become natural gas, whose price has plummeted. But the gas boom is based in large part on fracking, an unsustainable environmental disaster. Its momentum is huge, but so is its threat to the waters we need to survive.
>>
>>In the long term, the future is with renewables. They are often subsidized as well. But the scale is not comparable, and does not fully compensate for the hidden realities of atomic power's uninsurability and its inability to solve its basic waste, health and eco-impacts.
>>
>>Were the nuclear industry forced to fully insure itself, or were it charged the true cost of its invested capital, or what it does to the planet and the humans who live on it, not a single reactor owner could afford to keep a reactor running for a single day.
>>
>>Small wonder Wall Street has long been more anti-nuclear than Main Street.
>>
>>The numbers are now easy to find. WorldWatch has just issued the definitive END OF NUCLEAR by Mycle Schneider, laden with charts, graphs, tables and all the financial data anyone needs to confirm the case. The Rocky Mountain Institute has long had similar material on file and at the tip of Amory Lovins's tongue.
>>
>>Now we see Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the core corporate press conceding the obvious.
>>
>>In short, the bottom line has now become the bottom line. Reactor costs have doubled and tripled in the past few years even before Fukushima. Green energy costs continue to plummet.
>>
>>The last barrier is that to understand how a Solartopian economy works, you have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
>>
>>Base-load power is readily available from geo-thermal, bio-fuels and a broad mix. One does need to balance the various intermittent sources---wind, solar, tidal---to keep the glass full.
>>
>>But Fukushima has shown that nukes are also intermittent in the worst imaginable way.
>>
>>Any sane for-profit player with the bucks enough to build a new reactor will now put them into renewables. Witness Google, now investing $280 million in a fund for installing solar panels on home rooftops, and millions more for undersea links to offshore wind farms.
>>
>>The dream of a Solartopian future has become the capitalist present. Germany and Japan would not be committing to a green-powered future if its large corporations couldn't make a profit. Siemans, Enercon, Mitsubishi, Sharp---their CEOs have run the numbers and decided that nukes are a loser. And that the real profit center for the long-term energy biz is in green power.
>>
>>What remains for us is to get the government out of the game. The $36 billion in loan guarantees Obama wants in the 2012 budget must come out. We need to call the White House and Congress CONSTANTLY until this happens.
>>
>>Then we need to find a way to get the Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Brits and French to join Germany, Japan and the rest of us in a post-nuclear world.
>>
>>How soon this gets done is up to us. Our fervent hope---and greatest incentive---is knowing this MUST be done before the next Fukushima strikes.
>>
>>
>>
>>Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! GREEN POWER HOUR runs Wednesdays at 8pm EST on www.talktainmentradio.com (877)932-9766. He is senior editor ofwww.FreePress.org and www.solartopia.org.
---------------------------------------------------

The scariest thing I've read since 3/11/2011

2011-06-10T20:43:00.001-07:00

June 10th, 2011

Dear Readers,

It is now known that women are more susceptible -- approximately twice as susceptible, or worse -- to radiation's harmful effects than men who get the same dose. Young people are more susceptible than old.

Young children are perhaps ten times as susceptible to radiation's dangers as adults are, because their cells are dividing and establishing themselves. The cells of some organs will continue to divide; but cells such as neurons and heart muscle cells stop dividing at adulthood. Cancer can also get established at this early stage. Cancer usually requires a long sequence of cell changes to occur -- often 10 or 12 or more changes in the cell DNA's structure will have to occur, which can take many years.

Starting early is a very bad thing.

Infants are even more susceptible than young children. Newborns, preemies... immune-challenged... even more so.

Since Fukushima, on the west coast of the United States, our babies are dying at a significantly increased rate (see article, below). Across the country deaths are up as well, though not as much (ibid).

And fetuses. Can we even talk about fetuses? As two cells, separated by space - the sperm and the egg -- "it" is utterly vulnerable! One zap from a nuclear buzzsaw and it's over. So much for the next Einstein! Another Da Vinci? Gone! Oh well, there's millions where they came from, right? (If so, I haven't seen them.)

After the cells start to multiply, they begin "specification", becoming hearts, lungs, brains, bones, intestines, and all the other little warts and dimples that make us who we are as individuals and as a species.

Fetuses vary from "infinitely" more susceptible to radiation's dangers, to thousands of times when they are very small, to "merely" hundreds of times as they grow, to whatever they are at birth -- no one knows precisely. Reasonable estimates can be made. If what is reported below is, indeed, caused by Fukushima, it should surprise no one.

The authors of the article shown below are both friends of mine; I've known them for years. I authored an article or two with one of them. They've both written extensively about the scientific data which condemns nuclear power and been involved in all aspects of research into the dangers of radiation, and are both book authors of wonderful scientific books on the subjects, as well.

They research everything they do very carefully and shoot straight when they talk about it.

They are scientists in the best sense of the word.

Nevertheless, let's hope they're wrong.

If what they report below is even half true, we're all in for a whole lot of hurt. Our babies are taking the "hits" now. We all will in one way or another -- by losing loved ones, if nothing else.

If this anomaly has any other explanation, I challenge anyone to find it. And stop it.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

-----------------------------------------
From:
http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

Weekend Edition
June 10 - 12, 2011

A 35% Spike in Infant Mortality in Northwest Cities Since Meltdown

Is the Dramatic Increase in Baby Deaths in the US a Result of Fukushima Fallout?

By JANETTE D. SHERMAN, MD
and JOSEPH MANGANO

U.S. babies are dying at an increased rate. While the United States spends billions on medical care, as of 2006, the US ranked 28th in the world in infant mortality, more than twice that of the lowest ranked countries. (DHHS, CDC, National Center for Health Statistics. Health United States 2010, Table 20, p. 131, February 2011.)

The recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)
10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)

This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant. Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster. In 2001 the infant mortality was 6.834 per 1000 live births, increasing to 6.845 in 2007. All years from 2002 to 2007 were higher than the 2001 rate.

Spewing from the Fukushima reactor are radioactive isotopes including those of iodine (I-131), strontium (Sr-90) and cesium (Cs-134 and Cs-137) all of which are taken up in food and water. Iodine is concentrated in the thyroid, Sr-90 in bones and teeth and Cs-134 and Cs-137 in soft tissues, including the heart. The unborn and babies are more vulnerable because the cells are rapidly dividing and the delivered dose is proportionally larger than that delivered to an adult.

Data from Chernobyl, which exploded 25 years ago, clearly shows increased numbers of sick and weak newborns and increased numbers of deaths in the unborn and newborns, especially soon after the meltdown. These occurred in Europe as well as the former Soviet Union. Similar findings are also seen in wildlife living in areas with increased radioactive fallout levels.
(Chernobyl Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Alexeiy V. Yablokov, Vasily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko. Consulting Editor: Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger. New York Academy of Sciences, 2009.)

Levels of radioisotopes were measured in children who had died in the Minsk area that had received Chernobyl fallout. The cardiac findings were the same as those seen in test animals that had been administered Cs-137. Bandashevsky, Y. I, Pathology of Incorporated Ionizing Radiation, Belarus Technical University, Minsk. 136 pp., 1999. For his pioneering work, Prof. Bandashevsky was arrested in 2001 and imprisoned for five years of an eight year sentence.

The national low-weight (under 2500 grams, or 5.5 lbs) rate has risen 23% from 1984 to 2006. Nearly 400,000 infants are born under 2500g each year in the U.S. Most of the increase in infant mortality is due specifically to infants born weighing less than 750 grams (1 lb 10 1/2 oz). Multiple births commonly result in underweight babies, but most of the increase in births at less than 750 grams occurred among singletons and among mothers 20-34 years of age. (CDC, National Vital Statistics Report, 52 (12): 1-24, 2005.)

From an obstetrical point of view, women in the age bracket 20 to 34 are those most physically able to deliver a healthy child. So what has gone wrong? Clues to causation are often revealed when there is a change in incidence, a suspicious geographical distribution, and/or an increase in hazards known to adversely affect health and development.

The risk of having a baby with birth defects is estimated at three to four of every 100 babies born. As of 2005, the Institute of medicine estimated the cost of pre-term births in the US at more than $2.6 billion, or $51,600 for each infant.

Low birth weight babies, born too soon and too small, face a lifetime of health problems, including cerebral palsy, and behavioral and learning problems placing an enormous physical, emotional and economic burdens on society as a whole and on those caring for them. Death of a young child is devastating to a family.

As of June 5, 2011, The Japan Times reported that radiation in the No. 1 plant was measured at 4,000 milliseverts per hour. To put that in perspective, a worker would receive a maximal "permissible" dose in 4 minutes. In addition there are over 40,000 tons of radioactive water under that reactor with more radioactivity escaping into the air and sea. Fuel rods are believed to have melted and sunk to the bottom of reactors 1, 2, and 3.

Tepco, the corporate owner took more than two months to confirm the meltdowns and admitted lying about the levels of destruction and subsequent contamination, resulting in "Public Distrust." Over 100,000 tons of radioactive waste are on the site.

Why should we care if there may be is a link between Fukushima and the death of children? Because we need to measure the actual levels of isotopes in the environment and in the bodies of people exposed to determine if the fallout is killing our most vulnerable. The research is not technically difficult the political and economic barriers may be greater. Bandshevsky and others did it and confirmed the connection. The information is available in the Chernobyl book. (Previously cited.)

The biological findings of Chernobyl cannot be ignored: isotope incorporation will determine the future of all life on earth animal, fish, bird, plant and human. It is crucial to know this information if we are to avoid further catastrophic damage.

Janette D. Sherman, M. D. is the author of Life's Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer and Chemical Exposure and Disease, and is a specialist in internal medicine and toxicology. She edited the bookChernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, written by A. V. Yablokov, V. B., Nesterenko and A. V. Nesterenko, published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Her primary interest is the prevention of illness through public education. She can be reached at: toxdoc.js@verizon.net and www.janettesherman.com

Joseph Mangano is an epidemiologist, and Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project research group.

It's shutdown or meltdown. Take our pick.

2011-06-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

June 10th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Nuclear power is losing ground everywhere in the world. Literally and figuratively.

Nuclear accidents have permanently poisoned large swaths of northern Japan, having similarly poisoned Ukraine and Belarus 25 years ago, and not to mention Hanford, Washington, the Nevada Test Site, the Savannah River Site, and THOUSANDS of other places around the globe.

The latest poll by the uber-pro-nuclear World Nuclear Association indicates less than half the 34,000 people polled in 47 countries favor nuclear power -- a drop of 8 percent since before the accident, by their own admission. And that poll was conducted in late-March to early-April! Undoubtedly, disfavor has continued to increase sharply, as the revelations about the lies are uncovered, and as the reactors continue to smoulder and poison the earth, wind, and water.

The World Nuclear News report about their poll adds, with the happiest spin possible that a pro-nuker could put on the situation: "Unsurprisingly, Japan saw the biggest drop in support for nuclear energy, with the number of people in favour dropping from 62% before the accident to 39% afterwards. Meanwhile, those saying they were opposed to nuclear increased from 28% to 47%."

Clearly, nuclear power's "popularity" is at an all-time low (along with TEPCO's stock price).

It's strange that those of us in America, who have the most freedom to speak out and stop nuclear power, a relatively high education level, and were the birthplace of this global mistake and have more proof that it was a mistake than anyone, actually seem to have the most apathy.

But that lack-of-attitude IS changing! Even in -- and in many ways especially in -- the hometowns of nuclear power plants (where all the workers live and the nuclear power corporations have been pouring funds into the community for decades) the nuclear reactors are suddenly being reviled as the tools of death they really are.

With this new awakening, it may NOT take a meltdown in America to stop nuclear power dead in its tracks after all! I sure hope it doesn't "require" a trillion-dollar accident, with its hundreds of thousands of deaths over the coming years, and the nuclear industry's hollow talk about "lessons learned" while slipping you the bill for the damage and laughing all the way to the bank.

No: Let's not let it come to that. But it's shut down or meltdown. One or the other is inevitable.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

Today's items:
---------------------------------------------
(1) Letter to FT (by Ace Hoffman)
(2) The lie that closing the nukes is expensive continues
(3) Is Yucca Mountain the solution? Not bloody likely!
(4) Palo Verde's power lines threatened! But with what?
(5) Why are you against music?
(6) Contact information for the author of this newsletter
---------------------------------------------

==============================================
(1) Letter to FT (by Ace Hoffman):
==============================================

To: ean@ft.com
Subject: Nope, they can't fix it...

June 7th, 2011

Dear Financial Times,

Crook's and Pfeifer's commentary yesterday (6/6/11) about nuclear power missed the boat. Nuclear power is a dying industry because it has to die. If it doesn't, the human race will die -- of stupidity.

And please: Don't bother dismissing this letter as the words of a crackpot. Perhaps I am, but they are the words of scientists -- merely parroted, paraphrased, and presented by your humble and obedient servant.

Nowhere in your article were the medical issues addressed -- because they can't be. It's the true Achilless' heal of the industry. Every radiation release can kill -- no exceptions. Trillions of lethal doses of radiation have been released at Fukushima. Incomprehensibly-large numbers for a poison which knows no threshold (BIER VII, and many other references confirm the LNT theory, okay?).

Some groups of scientists have studied the effects of Chernobyl more carefully than the nuclear industry wanted to. The death toll from Fukushima will be either the largest from an industrial accident in history -- worse than Chernobyl -- or it will be nearly as bad. But either way, the two are in a class by themselves, and this scar won't be healing in Japan, or in Germany which as realized how dangerous their reactors are, or in many other countries that are rethinking their past mistakes.

Furthermore, besides causing cancers, leukemia, heart disease, a host of degenerative diseases, and perhaps a thousand other things, radiation -- worst of all -- lowers IQs (hence the final word of my opening retort to yesterday's commentary).

Throughout that commentary we are told that what the nuclear industry needs and intends to do in order to gain the public trust is to become more open about everything. Fat chance! And besides, that's what they ALWAYS say! But look at what's happened at Fukushima: Governments and industry colluded to keep from the public the fact that three meltdowns had occurred virtually simultaneously! And you want to build WHAT from that not-humble rebirth (or death) of an industry? A flowering, growing, loved industry? Ain't gonna happen. TEPCO's shares' new low is the wave of the future for nuclear power companies. When viewed from history, the industry IS just one disaster after another, and WILL be stopped eventually. Will it take another Fukushima? Then there will be another -- and another. Such accidents are inevitable (as a careful, jaundiced reading of the Surry tornado event proves, by the way -- or the TVA event shortly before it (I could go on...)).

From the still-smoldering (and for another 30 years or so, probably...) ashes of Fukushima does ANYONE really think a nuclear renaissance has a chance? Look at how bad the "renaissance" was to begin with: AREVA, or Toshiba, or whoever, would claim they had sold a reactor in one place, having pushed it through a relatively small first step, just so they can go to another place, another country, and say "look, so-and-so bought one, you should too!" And with bribes under tables and fast talking in back rooms, the deal is made. That's the "renaissance" that melted down at Fukushima -- not a real one. One propped up by donating millions of dollars to candidates who would back the nuclear agenda. One propped up by lies. One propped up by claims the waste problem has been solved, or can be (which would defy the laws of physics). One propped up by billions of dollars in loan guarantees and trillions in insurance fraud (Price-Anderson, and every other country's equivalent Acts (they all have one) is nothing but a fraud perpetrated on the people that their homes are safely insured against a nuclear accident at their local (within 50 miles, even though evacuation plans only go out to 10 and aren't used in the event) nuclear reactor.

Nobody reads the fine print. That's the nuclear industry's only hope.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author, a computer programmer and award-winning educational software developer, has been studying computers for more than 30 years and nuclear technology for more than 40. His book on the nuclear industry, THE CODE KILLERS, is available as a free download from his web site: www.acehoffman.org

-------------------------------------------------------------

Nuclear power: Atomised approach
By Ed Crooks and Sylvia Pfeifer
Financial Times - June 6 2011
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/27e83c54-9074-11e0-9227-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1OYUJqBfC

On Saturday April 16, a tornado hit the Surry nuclear plant in Virginia,
cutting off the supply of power from the grid to the US site's two reactors.

...

###

==============================================
(2) The lie that closing the nukes is expensive continues:
==============================================

If Reuters really thinks shut-down is expensive, they should balance it against meltdown...
------------------------------------
www.reuters.com
Japan may have no nuclear reactors running by next April

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/us-japan-nuclear-reactors-idUSTRE7572P920110608

TOKYO (Reuters) - All 54 of Japan's nuclear reactors may be shut by next April, adding more than $30 billion a year to the country's energy costs, if communities object to plant operating plans due to

Comment on FB:
All over the world people are protesting against nuclear power, getting arrested, demanding their rights. This isn't NIMBYism, it's survival, and the public can see that now. The hordes of people who have lost their homes, and now may die of cancer because of Fukushima, will be very vocal in the coming years, you can count on it. They all know how to use the Internet, and they are very VERY upset. I do believe they will drive nukes out of Japan, and quickly. Not just "No New Nukes" which is a placebo to the people for the nuke industry, with 440 nuke operating "comfortably" around the world. We need the old ones shut down most of all! And we can't just talk about what to do with the waste, we have to really do something effective. But before shutdown, the waste will always be an afterthought. As Mary Olson (NIRS) puts it: "When you have a plumbing problem, you don't go for the mop first. You go for the wrench." Turn the wrench. Shut off the spigot. Close the spent fuel production facilities -- shut the reactors. By the way only one or two reactors in the whole world are set up to produce medical isotopes because THAT'S ALL YOU NEED and in fact, if no reactors were operating, you could probably get the isotopes other ways or use other LESS DANGEROUS methods like MRIs for CT scans and so forth, which are often medically more useful anyway. Never believe a word a pro-nuker tells you. If Fukushima didn't teach the world that, the world need only look at the timeline, it will always be there for all to see. Governments lie. Nuclear power companies lie. People die.

###

==============================================
(3) Is Yucca Mountain the solution? Not bloody likely!
==============================================

From: Nikoli McCracken
To: stephen.power@wsj.com
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 9:59 PM
Subject: About Yucca Mountain

Hello:

I read your article about Yucca Mountain. I have a rather unique point of view about it; I was raised in Nevada until age 13. My father worked at both of the Nevada Test sites, and when I grew up, I married a Navy submariner who, within a few short years, was transferred from diesel electric submarines to nuclear boats. I also worked outside the home, and was for 34 years, a technical illustrator, graphic artist, electronics drafter and oil, gas and nuclear power worker. Twice in that 34 years I worked for companies which built nuclear power plants. At first, I was Pro - nuke. Was proud of my Navy husband and his service, and of the work I did both in aerospace and nuclear power. Worked on many space programs, aircraft, you name it, I probably worked on it. Here's the problem with Yucca Mountain: Beneath it, there is a huge earthquake fault, and below that, a water table. It is only 95 miles from Las Vegas. And it simply is not safe, and cannot be MADE safe. There is also strong evidence of vulcanism at the site. Ancient, but then, so was Pompeii! Further, it belongs to the Shoshone People, from whom it was taken without compensation, and for whom it is held as sacred. Is there ANY treaty with Native Americans we have NOT broken? Besides that, the trains and/or trucks could be sabotaged. Or just sheer dumb luck could come into play: In LA, people died because a train engineer was TEXTING! There are 22,000 train vs. car accidents in the US every year. Some of them are train vs. Semi. One drunken driver, one inattentive engineer - and the consequences are too horrible to contemplate. Further, our railroads are in such terrible shape, it would be foolish to use them to transport the waste. One accident - oh, yes, and we are not insured! Look at YOUR personal insurance policy. You are NOT insured against 'radiation.' And the industry is not well-enough insured against catastrophe. We have come closer to a core meltdown more times in the US, than you could believe possible. I can furnish proof if you want it. Finally, after Fukushima-Daiichi, how much proof do we need that nature can screw us over, anytime? I've never been an 'activist.' But the US will open Yucca Mountain over my dead body! I have ten living descendants for whom I want to leave a clean Earth. Six of them are children under age 10.

Very truly yours,
Nikoli A."Penny" McCracken
Fallon NV

###

==============================================
(4) Palo Verde's power lines threatened! But with what?
==============================================

BTW, it was a fire...

----------------------------------------------
At 05:34 PM 6/9/2011 -0700, Penny wrote:
>Hi: News reports on NBC are stating that the power lines to Palo Verde are threatened.
----------------------------------------------

Threatened with what? High winds? Earthquakes? Fires? Terrorism? Rust? Airplane strikes? Tension poorly adjusted? Laser weapon from space? Overheated? Transformers exploded? Switchyard overrun by rodents? Sandstorm? Fleas? Fuel fleas? Metal-eating microbes? Drunken operators?

==============================================
(5) Why are you against music?
==============================================

From Gene Stone, regarding San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (known locally as SONGS):

So I am out putting up signs yesterday "Stop SONGS" and a lady walks up to me in San Clemente and says why are you against music? So we had a great talk about the nuclear power plant that she did not know was here.

==============================================
(6) Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
==============================================

Shut San Onofre video: 5/17/11 public hearing in San Clemente, California

2011-05-26T11:55:00.001-07:00

May 26th, 2011

Dear Readers,

My new video is about 13 minutes long and called: Shut San Onofre Public Hearing San Clemente CA May 17, 2011:

This event was organized and arranged by Gary Headrick, San Clemente Green. Gary had asked the city council for the time because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a few weeks earlier, had only let about half the public speak at their last hearing -- their first post-Fukushima hearing on San Onofre -- which was a complete whitewash of the dangers and risks we face.

The council was surprised by how many people wanted to speak, but ultimately accommodated everyone -- unlike the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which cherry-picked the speakers, controlled the order, and wasted everyone's time allowing SanO employees to denigrate the opposition and give mindless pep-rally presentations best left for small groups at company breakfasts, if they really feel such cheerleading should happen at all.

I recorded both hearings (my video from the NRC hearing is available at my You-Tube channel and called "You Call This A Tsunami Wall?"). Here, I have presented a portion of every speaker on the issue, in order, except two: An employee who tried to explain to the council a very dangerous technical problem at San Onofre, and a former plant worker (yawn...) who told us that the daily releases of poisons into the air from a coal plant are more dangerous -- and more visible -- than the daily radiation releases from a nuclear plant (presumably true, and very old news, and not relevant since wind turbines, solar panels, and energy conservation -- the obvious alternatives to nuclear power -- don't have those problems, and coal plants can't melt down).

Although we don't hear him here, the San Onofre employee does appear in one quadrant of the opening scene. His complaint, about a "technicality," a cabling issue, should, ALONE, SHUT THAT PLANT DOWN and would, if we had a working, effective Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He has made his exact same complaint in front of the NRC several times already, to no avail. The results, as usual, could be tragic.

Of course, if we had an effective NRC, they would shut down ALL the nuclear power plants, not just ours.

Meanwhile, in Japan, things are getting worse and worse. TEPCO admits to meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi site, and thus, admits they were lying for two months about how bad things really are, since they must have known this, because of the spectrum and quantities of radionuclides being released. American "experts" must have known it, too. I just don't see how they couldn't have.

The air and oceans of the world continue to be terribly poisoned, and we are all at risk of things getting MUCH worse than they already are at Fukushima.

This was precisely the horrific accident people like myself have (accurately) predicted for decades. It is the accident the nuclear industry assured you would never happen.

The next task -- besides whatever cleanup is possible at Fukushima Daiichi -- is to prevent it happening again. This video speaks to THAT task.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

New video: 9-year-old Ella says: "Please shut down the nuclear power plant."

2011-05-19T04:13:00.000-07:00

May 18th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Yesterday I videotaped the San Clemente (California) Common Council meeting, where activists were seeking support from the city for a resolution asking for the immediate closure and decommissioning of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, in light of all we've learned from the ongoing tragedy in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The entire city of San Clemente lies within a few miles of San Onofre. It has few egresses. In a nuclear emergency, its people are toast and they know it. But the plant does generate a substantial amount of revenue for the city.

Several dozen people spoke, including myself. Nothing was accomplished, unless the city common council deciding to write a letter to our Senators and various officials in Washington, D.C., asking them to remove the spent nuclear fuel as soon as possible counts as accomplishing something in your book (it doesn't in mine).

Oh and, of course, they are going to ask the federal and state governments for hundreds of millions of dollars. Not to build up the tsunami wall at San Onofre, nor to reinforce the spent fuel areas, nor to add extra backup generators or batteries. No: To finish a planned secondary escape route!

They do not seem to understand that evacuation, even with a hundred escape routes, will probably be impossible -- as it was in Japan -- because it will be too late by the time you hear there's an accident already in progress. Duct tape the windows and doors, run HEPA filters if you have electricity, and pray the cloud passes over you and on to the next house. And every road will be jammed, even if they succeed in getting funding for an alternate route out of the area.

Many of the citizens who spoke were very good -- one even rode her bike some 75 miles just to get there. Only one person spoke in favor of the plant, a retired worker.

Unfortunately, cameras were only allowed where they could film the backs of people's heads. However, speaking for less than a minute, nine-year-old Ella, whom I had the pleasure of meeting the day before, brought the house down. Fortunately, she happened to be the only person who faced the audience, and I had a good camera angle on this precious little angel:

Ella was a welcome alternative to the photographs of deformed Chernobyl babies which the activists felt obliged to present. If we wish to avoid that fate, we MUST shut these (and all) nuclear reactors down forever!

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author has been blogging about nuclear issues for decades.

---------------------------------------------------------

SHUT DOWN SAN ONOFRE NOW! Petition, debate, video, hearing...

2011-05-16T17:50:00.000-07:00

May 16th, 2011

Dear Readers,

The San Clemente Common Council has placed the issue of the dangers presented by San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on its agenda for tomorrow night (May 17th, 2011). San Clemente is the nearest city to the power plant. Citizens will be given about 8 minutes to make a formal presentation, then additional time for comments. Below is a link to a proposed resolution.

I've created a video of the April 28th, 2011 Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing in San Juan Capistrano, California. The URL is below.

Also shown below is a debate between myself and a 25-year former employee of San Onofre, a whistleblower who has appeared at several public hearings (and in my videos of those hearings).

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
----------------------------------------------
Today's items:

(1) Video of NRC hearing April 28th, 2011 in San Juan Capistrano, CA (URL)
(2) A debate between a 25-year SONGS employee/whistleblower and Ace Hoffman...
(3) A proposed Resolution by the people of San Clemente (URL)
(4) UCBerkeley Dept. of Nuclear Engineering food chain sampling in California (URL)
(5) Contact information for the author of this newsletter

------------------------------------------
(1) Video of NRC hearing April 28th, 2011 in San Juan Capistrano, CA:
------------------------------------------

This video, which I posted today, runs a little under 20 minutes and shows how a civilized country discusses nuclear power -- and accomplishes nothing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SL4crKwBdI

Those appearing include representatives from the plant's regulators and operators, as well as local citizens Gary Headrick, Steve Netherby, Gene Stone, Nancy Nolan, myself and others.

Both my books about nuclear power, which I mention in the video and one of which I handed out for the first time at the hearing, are available for free download from my web site:

www.acehoffman.org

------------------------------------------
(2) A debate between a 25-year SONGS employee/whistleblower and Ace Hoffman...
------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: Estimate of total amount of spent fuel at SONGS...

May 15, 2011

Rick, all,

It's good that we agree on the essential outcome -- that San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station should be shut down.

It seems that the crux of our disagreement is whether SONGS should remain open until all of the spent fuel is removed from the site -- but to where, no one knows.

If we do as you suggest -- keep San Onofre running -- I better not be right about the dangers.

So, we better ignore the numerous similarities between San Onofre and Fukushima, ignore the dangers you yourself described in public hearings, and ignore everything anyone else has ever written condemning nuclear power in general or San Onofre in particular.

We must ignore long lists of infractions and falsifications in the decades before the current debacle, in order to pretend that once the NRC cleans things up THIS TIME at San Onofre, Southern California Edison won't become complacent or dishonest again.

San Onofre has had its share of near-misses. Everyone ignored them. Now we know what might have really happened, but we must continue to ignore them anyway.

We have already ignored Chernobyl, always saying that couldn't happen with "Western" style light water reactors. Oops. But let's ignore that, too.

We must ignore the recent estimate that, if we actually had the nuclear-powered energy-based economy nuclear enthusiasts envision, we would be experiencing multiple Fukushima tragedies every year.

If we keep the old plants running, we will be very lucky indeed to go 25 years -- as we almost did (but not quite) between Chernobyl and Fukushima -- without another meltdown, or cascade of meltdowns.

TEPCO lied. People died. SCE lied. They got their wrists slapped by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and were told to keep lying to the public -- we'll even help you with that -- but don't lie to us. At least, not so often. Please. But we love you, you're as safe as a baby in baby carriage. Quoth the NRC to SCE. I don't happen to believe it.

If we do it my way instead of yours, we turn to renewable energy regardless of whether nuclear power might have been marginally better economically -- which you would be very hard-pressed to prove -- and magically safe, which I contend is impossible for you to prove.

In other words, if we choose renewable energy and could have chosen nuclear power instead, oh well. Little damage is done. The truth can always be told. We don't need annual or semi-annual public hearings about the safety of our energy source, with permanent on-site federal inspectors who can't even maintain control after 14,000 hours of inspections last year alone -- 366% above normal and still the place rots from within. We don't need any of that.

If we switch to renewables, but you were right and I was wrong, we might some day realize we could have saved a little money achieving the same thing -- energy independence -- with "clean, safe nuclear power", which never had another accident anywhere, especially not at an American reactor, ever, after Cherno-- sorry, after Fukushima -- and we would regret spending a little more on energy and/or conservation than the absolute minimum we could have spent, which, you are telling me, is achievable only by continuing to run San Onofre which, you are telling me, is perfectly safe because it's run by humans who can fix everything that goes wrong when the earthquake, tsunami, faulty wiring and come-out-of-the-closet employee-based terrorism all happen at once.

I don't believe it.

Nevertheless, it is precisely because of your experience inside the industry that your concerns about the potential impact of a natural disaster or a careless worker are so chilling.

It's also true that you would not have reached out to the public, would not have attempted to rectify your issues with San Onofre through the legal system, would not even have contacted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, if you thought San Onofre's management were capable of solving the problems you brought to their attention first.

They've failed four different ways to solve your issues, yet I'm to trust your assertion that San Onofre can, and will, fix EVERY issue? Every whistleblower's warning? Every expert's assessment of 100-foot and 200-foot tsunami wave's can be ignored? Every allegation I've made is inconsequential, never mind that it's been proven right already, and that can't be debated anymore?

I'm to trust San Onofre, when I've seen no evidence of anything positive -- they are right that the sea wall it high enough. That a previously-unknown fault doesn't run right under the plant. That no nearby fault can produce an earthquake larger than the "design basis" earthquake. That every part has not rusted away or embrittled (hardened) over the decades of use, to where a little extra shaking -- not a lot -- will break it, and in truth, the plant can't even survive a design-basis event?

I'm to believe that unlike TEPCO, Edison International is an honest conglomerate, and wouldn't suffer a meltdown or two, and then not tell anyone for two months.

You are not the first, the last, or the only whistleblower from San Onofre, let alone from the nuclear industry, to come forward. Nor are your stories the most chilling we've ever heard, chilling though they are.

Other 25+ year San Onofre veteran employees have also -- like you -- talked to us. Have also, like you, come out of the U.S. military nuclear programs (Los Alamos, for example) before working at San Onofre for several decades.

In making my own judgement that San Onofre should be shut immediately, your voice is one in a din of voices everyone should listen to, including yourself. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tries to silence the dissenters, placate them, calm them, and then ignore them. I wish to amplify, investigate, remember and honor them. And act on what they say.

This story is BIG. This is NOT merely reasonable people agreeing to disagree about how a fly ball was caught. San Onofre Nuclear (Waste) Generating Station has its jackboot on our throats as we speak.

It is killing us, as well as our neighbors, our friends, our families. Our pets, our livestock, our fauna, our flora. It is threatening mass devastation.

Around Fukushima, fetuses will be spontaneously aborted, infants will be born deformed, cancer rates will zoom, mothers will cry, children in pain will ask why. Fathers will head off to work at the plant, to die. All this is already happening.

Right now they are culling the livestock around Fukushima. Hundreds of thousands of horses, cows, pigs, goats, and sheep, and millions of chickens and turkeys. They are "destroying" all those that haven't died already of starvation, dehydration, radiation or exhaustion. None of the animals know to run from radiation. Thanks to TEPCO's lies, the people didn't know, either.

Daily nuclear releases from commercial reactors DO kill, and they ARE large. Such releases are dwarfed only by things like nuclear weapons testing, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and, most of all (we now know...) by Fukushima.

San Onofre is highly vulnerable to mother nature, human frailty, terrorism, and errors in judgement. Fukushima is a tragedy for all of northern Japan and the whole world, not just a 10-mile area. The spectrum of isotopes being released have half-lives from fractions of a second to thousands of millennia. All are highly carcinogenic in minute amounts, and all are being released continuously in massive quantities. Criticality events may still be occurring or might occur again at any time. Radioactive steam and water continues to be released. The groundwater, the sewage system, the seas... everything is being poisoned as we speak.

Worse than that, if there's an expert here who can help them, they shouldn't be talking to me! So I assume you feel helpless as to what to do next. Make a note of that in your arguments for continuing to operate SONGS. That all you could do in Fukushima if you were there now is to suit up, run in, turn a valve a few revolutions or attach a pipe or something, absorb your maximum permissible dose, and run out.

In Japan they are carefully keeping the workers at around 150 mSv and suddenly are allowing a lifetime exposure of 250 mSv, 150 mSv higher than the previous Japanese worker's limit (which was twice our own) just so that those workers can continue to work in the nuclear industry afterwards.

Smart thinking? No: It's purely criminal!

But you say we merely respectfully disagree. I say the playing field in not level. San Onofre remains open.

Many of the workers who will be needed at Fukushima will die from their exposures, assuming the "LNT" (Linear, No Threshold) dose model is correct.

But perhaps they have received a healthful dose of "sunshine vitamins" if Bernard Cohen and anyone else who believes in "Hormesis" (that a little radiation, no matter how much you have received previously in your life, is always good for you) is correct! I don't know where you stand on that, but I do confess, I have become curious...

As long as any nuclear power plant is running, it is especially vulnerable to consequences not unlike Fukushima, and perhaps far worse. A jetliner smashing through the dry cask field at San Onofre would probably be worse than Fukushima, for instance.

A jetliner smashing into the containment domes would be devastating -- they aren't nearly as strong as they look to most people. After all, they were built specifically to withstand hydrogen explosions from within non unlike the ones we've been seeing at Fukushima (especially Unit 3's explosion), and they probably can't even do that very well. At any rate, they certainly were NOT designed to withstand an airplane strike, and CANNOT do that very well. This was firmly established and admitted soon after 9-11. The "solution" was that the newly-formed Transportation Safety Agency would be perfect all the time. In case you wonder why TSA is so intrusive...

The greatest levels of vulnerability can be reduced substantially and instantly by shutting the reactors down. Nothing else can remove that much risk so easily.

It was the running reactors that caused virtually ALL the problems at Fukushima, with the exception of the spent fuel pool at unit four, which appears to have been neglected, and then damaged by the explosion at unit three. And Unit 4's main problem was that the fuel was still extremely "hot" having been removed from the reactor fairly recently when the reactor was shut down for maintenance.

The devastation from Fukushima probably wouldn't have happened if the reactors had been shut down for even a few months prior to March 11th, 2011. But they weren't. We have the chance to do that here, and, perhaps, thus save SoCal.

Removing all of the spent fuel from the site BEFORE shutting down the reactors, as you suggest we should do -- aside from being impossible -- is putting the cart before the horse. It substantially increases the risk to all seven+ million of us who live and breath in SoCal, and millions more around the world.

After all: Are you saying Fukushima did not have wonderful engineers and builders and designers also? Were they good enough or weren't they? Were they your equals or weren't they? Are you claiming to be super-human, as they thought they were? As everyone in the nuclear industry MUST think? The rest of us make mistakes. We also accept overwhelming evidence as fact.

Fukushima does not just show us that nuclear accidents can and will happen -- triggered one way or another. It also shows us that besides the meltdown itself, many other things are tragically inadequate about nuclear power:

I'm referring to evacuation plans. They only go out to 10 miles, or sometimes 12. It would be more appropriate if they went out 50 or 100 miles, or maybe 500 miles.

I'm referring to the ignorance of the media, the public, our government employees, and the so-called "experts".

I'm referring to honesty from management after the accident starts (let alone, today). It looks like Fukushima Unit 1 was a core-meltdown from the get-go. No wonder Americans 50 miles out were told to evacuate, and the Ronald Reagan high-tailed it away as fast as its jobs-training-program-for-SONGS-reactors could haul it (which, in reality, is no faster than a conventional carrier can go. One should note, during war, for protection, the carriers must stay deep within the fleet, which can only travel at the speed of the slowest vessel).

SONGS-era technology has sunk Japan. Surely you are not claiming that Fukushima's Boiling Water Reactors are the problem since they are not Pressurized Water Reactors? Surely that's not what makes ours safe instead? Do you think the public would buy that excuse, especially considering the higher pressures a PWR operates at, and thus, the extra stresses involved throughout the system in the name of "efficiency"? I can't think of any significant difference, really.

After rereading your letters, I ask: What do we really disagree on? Is it the statistical chance of an airplane landing on a dry cask? Is it the total havoc such an event would create? Is it the epidemiological reasons to think such catastrophic events would kill X number of people, versus Y? I'm not sure.

As far as I can tell, the only thing we actually disagree on is the order of events for shut down. In my opinion, shutting down the plants immediately would hardly mean getting rid of the workforce. True, some would become wind turbine installers and so on, but many people would have to remain at the site for years or decades, at least until all the spent fuel is removed (somewhere!?!).

Shutting down the plant gives the fuel a chance to cool and stops the ever-growing collection of used nuclear "piles".

We are more than 65 years into nuclear technology. There's a perfectly sound reason the nuclear waste problem hasn't been solved yet: Ionizing radiation destroys its containers. Shipping the radioactive waste anywhere on earth doesn't really solve the problem. Certainly putting it in an earthquake-prone hole, as you suggest, doesn't solve the problem, either. Magic materials, let alone cost-effective magic materials don't exist. With your experience, you should know prohibitive costs constantly prevent you from using all sorts of materials that would actually work a lot better than steel and cement for containment of radionuclides -- gold, for instance, though I hear iridium would be even better (and vastly more expensive).

Society thinks its nuclear engineers have actually engineered real solutions to the problems associated with nuclear energy. It's simply not true. What we are really doing is playing Russian Roulette with everyone's lives.

Fukushima changed everything except, I suppose, the nuclear industry's thinking.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

-----------------------------------------------------------------

At 08:25 PM 5/14/2011 -0700, "Rick Busnardo" rbusnardo wrote:
>Ace
>
>
>Thank you for your response. Reasonable people can agree to disagree . Please donâ€™t belittle my time actually working in a nuclear power plant . By the way I worked for Diablo , Canyon Nuclear Power plant for PG&E and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories in 1973 for the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) . Please do not presume that I do not know what I am talking about we can respectfully disagree. I have been to Yucca Mountain and there is no other viable solution at this time. I WISH THERE WAS. As I have said the ship has sailed (SONGS) I understand why you wish it was never there but it is and in the interests of the community it is simple. I my expert opinion it is safer having a fully staffed nuclear power plant as long as there is spent fuel on the site. Make the plant as safe as possible , get rid of the fuel then close down the plant. Rick Busnardo
>
>From: Ace Hoffman
>Sent: Saturday, May 14, 2011 7:52 PM
>To: rbusnardo
>Cc: Gary Headrick ; Ace Hoffman ; Mike Mason
>Subject: Re: Estimate of total amount of spent fuel at SONGS...
>
>5/14/11
>
>Hi Rick,
>
>For at least ten years longer than you've worked at SONGS, I've been studying nuclear issues, too. Please don't belittle my time buried in technical books, talking to experts, reading, reading, reading. And being out in the real world, visiting scores of factories of all types, large and small, and working with technical people all my life... Not to mention interviewing doctors and writing articles with them about radiation damage...
>
>Yucca Mountain is full of problems, it should never open, and almost surely won't. Yes, the waste should be moved to a less populated area (name a place you'd like to poison forever...) but as long as the plants remain open, at least five years' worth of fuel would have to remain on site as it would not be cool enough for transport until then. Plus the loads in the reactors.
>
>Plus ANY waste solution is decades in the future at best. And merely a pipe dream, at best. I've studied Yucca Mountain, looked over half a foot of documentation on it, and every other proposal for decades.... if you think that's the solution, well, good luck with that. It isn't.
>
>And lastly, my accusation of what an airplane, terrorist, earthquake etc. could do to the dry casks (or spent fuel pools) remains....
>
>I'll admit that I wish it were possible for there to be a way to make nuclear power safe. After all, that would solve everything! And I'll even admit that San Onofre tried -- many of the employees tried. 95% perhaps. But that wasn't good enough and never will be. You said it yourself: One dropped wrench that one guy doesn't say anything about. 99.9% honest workers would be nice, but not enough, and not attainable.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Ace Hoffman
>Carlsbad, CA
>www.acehoffman.org
>
>At 07:23 PM 5/14/2011 -0700, rbusnardo wrote:
>>
>>Gary
>>
>>
>>Below is a very good article from the NYT I am sending you . In answer to your other questions ;
>>
>>1 ) The canisters that are built at SONGS are built to the highest standards possible. When the project was designed we self imposed an ASME Ã¢Â€ÂœNÃ¢Â€Â and Ã¢Â€ÂœNPTÃ¢Â€Â Stamp on the fabrication and design of the canisters. This was done at great extra expense but gave us an independent inspector to oversee the project (ANI & ANIS ) . I can tell you with 100% confidence that canisters 1 thru 36 were built to the highest standards in the world. I can also attest to the quality of these casks which are / were the best in the world. I can not speak for any canisters that were built after I left. There was NEVER a welding issue that had anything to do with canister quality. This issue was an isolated case of one individual that willfully choose not to follow a specific parameter called out in a procedure. The activity that he choose not to follow had no affect to quality of fabrication or welding. This was strictly a case of willfully violating a procedure. That is a serious and in-excusable offense in the nuclear industry as it should be.
>>
>>I know you fellas think that SONGS should be closed. I am not a civil engineer , seismologist or geologist. I do have 25 years at SCE and have been in every nook and corner of all three Units at SONGS. Speaking from my experience and as a private (retired) citizen I would much rather have both power plants fully operational with a full crew in the control room , maintenance , health physics , engineering ect. on site overseeing both spent fuel pools and the dry cask stored fuel. Our fight is with the Federal Government for not opening a depository on the West and East coast as was agreed upon prior to building any of these 104 nuclear plants.
>>
>>Our focus should be on making SCE more transparent , ensuring they allow folks to speak up without fear of retaliation , demand an open and collaborative work environment and hold the NRC along with SCE accountable. We should ensure there is every possible contingency covered in case of a Japan-like event. We should assume that is possible not have a seismic study to prove it is not. I have never seen any seismic studies that can determine what Mother Nature has in store for us. If we need a better and higher tsunami wall it should be built. Back-up emergency diesel generators could be built on higher ground on the other side of I-5. We need to have some way to remove hydrogen from the spent fuel buildings in the event of an uncovering of the fuel. We could use a reservoir with ample borated water supply to fill and refill 100 spent fuel pools. It never what we do know it's what we don't know.
>>
>>The bottom line is our energy should be put into removing the SPENT FUEL which is not going to happen for several (20? ) years. The community has a responsibility to ensure the Site is run safely. I would be willing to help in this effort . Shutting the Plant down makes the problem even more dangerous that ship has sailed. REMOVE THE SPENT FUEL , work with the Utilities to get the DOE , DOT , NRC and Congress to open Yucca Mountain as soon as possible. We all want what is best for the community as do folks working at SONGS. There must be a way where we can work together to do what is best for all.
>>
>>Rick Busnardo
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>>Greater Danger Lies in Spent Fuel Than in Reactors
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>>By KEITH BRADSHER and HIROKO TABUCHI
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>>Published: March 17, 2011
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>>RECOMMEND
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>>Years of procrastination in deciding on long-term disposal of highly radioactive fuel rods from nuclear reactors are now coming back to haunt Japanese authorities as they try to control fires and explosions at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
>>Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg News
>>
>>A pre-earthquake view of fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
>>1 of 7
>>Status of the Nuclear Reactors
>>A daily tracker of the damage at the two imperiled nuclear plants.
>>How a Reactor Shuts Down and What Happens in a Meltdown
>>Related
>>Radiation Spread Seen; Frantic Repairs Go On (March 18, 2011)
>>Easy Fixes at Reactors in Long Run Are Elusive (March 18, 2011)
>>Japan Offers Little Response to U.S. Assessment (March 18, 2011)
>>Radiation Fears and Distrust Push Thousands From Homes(March 18, 2011)
>>
>>Andrea Salazar, Airman 1st Class/U.S. Navy
>>
>>Loading high-capacity pumps from the United States Navy for use in the effort to cool Reactor No. 3.
>>
>>Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants: Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while China sends them to a desert storage compound in the western province of Gansu. But Japan , like the United States, has kept ever-larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the plants.
>>
>>Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves.
>>
>>The electric utility said that a total of 11,125 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site. That is about four times as much radioactive material as in the reactor cores combined.
>>
>>Now those temporary pools are proving the power plant's Achilles' heel, with the water in the pools either boiling away or leaking out of their containments, and efforts to add more water having gone awry. While spent fuel rods generate significantly less heat than newer ones do, there are strong indications that some fuel rods have begun to melt and release extremely high levels of radiation. Japanese workers struggled on Thursday to add more water to the storage pool at Reactor No. 3.
>>
>>Helicopters dropped water, only to have it scattered by strong breezes. Water cannons mounted on police trucks Â— equipment designed to disperse rioters Â— were then deployed to spray water on the pools. It is unclear if that effort worked.
>>
>>Richard T. Lahey Jr., a retired nuclear engineer who oversaw General Electric's safety research in the early 1970s for the kind of nuclear reactors used in Fukushima, said that the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods could burst into flames if exposed to air for hours when a storage pool lost its water.
>>
>>Zirconium, once ignited, burns extremely hot and is difficult to extinguish, added Mr. Lahey, who helped write a classified report for the United States government several years ago on the vulnerabilities of storage pools at American nuclear reactors.
>>
>>Very high levels of radiation above the storage pools suggest that the water has drained in the 39-foot-deep pools to the point that the 13-foot-high fuel rod assemblies have been exposed to air for hours and are starting to melt, said Robert Albrecht, a longtime nuclear engineer who worked as a consultant to the Japanese nuclear reactor manufacturing industry in the 1980s. Under normal conditions, the rods are kept covered with 26 feet of water that is circulated to prevent it from growing too warm.
>>
>>Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made the startling assertion on Wednesday that there was little or no water left in another storage pool, the one on top of Reactor No. 4, and expressed grave concern about the radiation that would be released as a result.
>>
>>The 1,479 spent fuel rod assemblies there include 548 that were removed from the reactor only in November and December to prepare the reactor for maintenance, and these may be emitting more heat than the older assemblies in other storage pools.
>>
>>Even without recirculating water, it should take many days for the water in a storage pool to evaporate, nuclear engineers said. So the rapid evaporation and even boiling of water in the storage pools now is a mystery, raising the question of whether the pools may also be leaking.
>>
>>Michael Friedlander, a former senior nuclear power plant operator who worked 13 years at three American reactors, said that storage pools typically had a liner of stainless steel three-eighths of an inch thick, and that they rested on reinforced concrete bases. So even if the liner ruptured, "unless the concrete was torn apart, there's no place for the water to go," he said.
>>
>>Mr. Lahey said that much of the water may have sloshed out during the earthquake. Much smaller earthquakes in California have produced heavy water losses from sloshing at storage pools there, partly because the pools are located high in reactor buildings.
>>
>>Its like being at the top of a flagpole, and once you start ground motion, you can easily slosh it, he said.
>>
>>A version of this article appeared in print on March 18, 2011, on page A12 of the New York edition.
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------
>>From: Ace Hoffman
>>Sent: Saturday, May 14, 2011 10:48 AM
>>To: Gary Headrick
>>Cc: rbusnardo ; Mike Mason
>>Subject: Re: Fwd: Estimate of total amount of spent fuel at SONGS...
>>
>>5/14/11
>>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>Thanks for this information.
>>
>>Items #2 and #6 are particularly scary; they show there's an awful lot of fuel on site!
>>
>>Dry casks are like a spent fuel pool with the water already missing... anything can set them off, especially a tsunami, terrorist act, airplane strike, explosion on the tracks nearby, etc. etc. etc. Heck, a marlinspike or a tamping rod dropped from a freakin hot air balloon could start a disaster... not your typical terrorist's tools, but they would work...
>>
>>5328 * 1500 = 7,992,000 lbs...
>>
>>Yours,
>>
>>Ace
>>
>>
>>At 10:38 AM 5/14/2011 -0700, Gary Headrick wrote:
>>>Thanks Rick. Any idea how much capacity (number of years) this can continue? Are you satisfied that the welding procedures you had to call them out on have been done correctly now?
>>>
>>>On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 8:32 AM, rbusnardo <rbusnardo@cox.net> wrote:
>>>Gary
>>>below are estimates within plus or minus 10%
>>>1 ) Spent fuel rod is 9Ã‚Â" square x 15 feet long and weighs 1500lbs
>>>2 ) the spent fuel pools were modified in the early 90Ã‚Â's to double their capacity
>>>3 ) There are 291 fuel rods in each reactor = 582 total
>>>4 ) Every 12 to 18 months we remove app one third of the fuel rods and store them in the spent fuel pool . WeÃ‚Â've been doing this since 1984 in both Units
>>>conservatively 26 years x .7 = 18.2 cycles x 2 Units = 36.4 cycles x 100 fuel rods = 3640 fuel rods
>>>5 ) We need to remove app 100 fuel rods in each pool every outage to ensure we have the room to refuel
>>>6 ) There are 46 canisters with 24 fuel rods each stored in spent fuel dry canisters to date 46 x 24 = 1106 fuel rods stored in dry canisters removed from the pools
>>>7 ) Of the above stored canisters 17 of them are fuel from Unit 1
>>>Total
>>>1106 fuel rods stored in dry canisters
>>>582 active fuel in both reactors
>>>3640 spent fuel rods in pools (est)
>>>5328 TOTAL FUEL RODS AT SONGS
>>>From: Gary Headrick
>>>Sent: Saturday, May 14, 2011 6:54 AM
>>>To: rbusnardo ; Mike Mason
>>>Subject: Fwd: Estimate of total amount of spent fuel at SONGS...
>>>Hi Guys,
>>>Any chance you can answer how much spent fuel we've accumulated? How much capacity do we have? Any concerns about what is already in storage, like bad welding?
>>>Gary
>>>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>From: Ace Hoffman <mailto:rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
>>>Date: Fri, May 13, 2011 at 11:18 PM
>>>Subject: Estimate of total amount of spent fuel at SONGS...
>>>To: Jerry Collamer <jcollamer@att.net>
>>>Cc: Gary Headrick <mailto:gary@sanclementegreen.org>, Darin McClure <darin@rtgit.com>, Gene Stone <genston@sbcglobal.net >
>>>5/13/11
>>>Hi Jerry, all,
>>>I believe the correct figure is at least 3,000,000 and maybe 4,000,000 pounds of spent fuel -- or more!
>>>--------------
>>> From my own nuke plant list:
>>>http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/nukelist1.htm#CA
>>>794 tons as of 1995.
>>>--------------
>>>So that's one firm number I got somewhere...
>>>I seem to recall crossing about 1000 tons around 2001, and I'm pretty sure I heard someone from the plant say they have 2000 tons now, which is quite an increase but maybe it was 1500? I can't remember exactly.... 1500 would be 3,000,000 pounds. It's got to be at least that much...
>>>I tried calculating by adding 250 pounds per day to the 794 figure for 16 years -- that's another 3,000,000 pounds or so right there, but I think I heard 3 or 4 million pounds total... but maybe it's 5,000,000. Maybe it depends on if you include the fuel rod assemblies, or just the pellets, or what?
>>>It's a lot, that's for certain!
>>>Yours,
>>>Ace

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(3) A proposed Resolution by the people of San Clemente:
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Written by Gary Headrick, San Clemente Green:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/help-save-so-cal/

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(4) UCBerkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering food chain sampling in California:
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"Radionuclides, once deposited by rainwater or air onto the ground, will find their way through the ecosystem."

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/2525

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(5) Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
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Scratch three more nuke plants. The easy way.

2011-05-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

May 6th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Japan's Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, has called for closing the Chuba Electric Power Company's Hamaoka reactor site. So scratch three more nuclear power plants. The easy way.

And if Japan didn't have about 45 other nuke plants still operating, this would be bigger and better news. But it's a start.

And if America's leaders were to do the same thing -- say, close San Onofre, Diablo Canyon, and Indian Point's reactors immediately -- THAT would be even bigger news! And an even better start.

As with the Hamaoka reactors in Japan, there is plenty of criticism that America's faulty nuke plants can't survive much of anything; that the populations around them cannot be evacuated; that the safety records speak for themselves and cry out for closure.

But this is good news, and we need all the good news we can get!

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

Today's news:
(1) ALERT: Japan orders 3 nukes to close over seismic dangers!
(2) Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

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(1) ALERT: Japan orders 3 nukes to close over seismic dangers!
-----------------------------------------------------------------

At 10:12 AM 5/6/2011 -0700, Roger Herried <rogerh@energy-net.org> wrote:

Subjec: ALERT: Japan orders 3 nukes to close over seismic dangers!

This is possibly one of the most important news stories to hit as the Japanese are no longer willing to endanger their culture in exchange for the claims of nuclear engineers (Probabilistic Risk Assessments)...

Maybe its' time to see if we can get Loni Hancock to follow through with hearings that address emergency planning that didn't happen on 3-21 or 4-14.

----------------------------------------------

Kan Orders Operations Halt at Chubu Plant

By HIROYUKI KACHI http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703992704576306692795339376.html

TOKYOJapanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Friday submitted a formal request for a halt to all electricity production at Chubu Electric Power Co.'s Hamaoka nuclear power plant in the central Chubu region due to concerns about the plant's preparedness for a major earthquake.

The move immediately affects the No. 4 and 5 units, which are currently operating with an output of around 2,500 megawatts. In addition, it cancels the potential resumption of electricity production at the No. 3 unit, which has a capacity of 1,100 megawatts and is currently on a planned maintenance outage.

In announcing the shutdown, Mr. Kan noted that the Science Ministry estimates an 87% chance of a massive magnitude 8 earthquake in the region over the next 30 years.

"I have requested Chubu Electric to suspend operation of all nuclear reactors at Hamaoka. The reason for this is for the safety of the Japanese people," Mr. Kan said in a televised news conference.

He said the shutdowns would be in effect until appropriate safety measures can be taken, but gave no time frame.

The move will worsen the already constrained power supply situation as Japan enters its highest-demand summer period following the shutdown of nuclear plants following the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami. But Kan said that the government hoped to avoid major disruptions due to the additional outages.

"I believe that we can overcome the risk of a power shortage with the cooperation of the Japanese public," Mr. Kan said.

Kyodo News quoted the company as saying that it had ordered a suspension of all operations at the plant.

Mr. Kan's high-profile closure of the plant comes after criticism that the facility was not adequately prepared for a major quake and that the government was not doing enough to protect against the risk of a second nuclear power plant crisis after the Daiichi crisis became the second-worst nuclear accident on record.

Briefing reporters after Mr. Kan's statement, Trade Minister Banri Kaieda said that the government was asking neighboring Kansai Electric Power Co. for potential assistance.

However, Kansai Electric announced just hours earlier that it was shutting down its own Tsuruga No. 2 plant with an output of around 1,100 megawatts after finding elevated radiation levels in its cooling water. It stressed that there was no release of radiation in the incident but needed to make checks on whether one or more of the fuel rods might have been damaged, allowing small amounts of fuel to leak out.

A Kansai Electric spokeswoman said the company would try every alternative measures to provide sufficient power, including asking help from adjacent Chubu Electric, Chugoku Electric Power Co. and Shikoku Electric Power Co.

Nevertheless, if many of the nuclear power reactors supplying electricity for Kansai remain idle and if temperatures are high this summer, Japan's second-largest power utility, based in Osaka, may have to ask its customers to save electricity, including implementing planned power outages.

In response to the March 11 quake and tsunami, Mr. Kaieda has ordered over the past two months all nine utilities operating nuclear power plants to enhance safety against earthquake and tsunami such as equipping more backup power sources and making doors water-proof.

The nine utilities have implemented some of the measures and reported to the government with schedules to undertake the remaining safety work.

Mari Iwata contributed to this article.
Write to Hiroyuki Kachi at hiroyuki.kachi@wsj.com

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Tweet

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(2) Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
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Cancer, Deformities and Chronic Diseases: The Future Children of Fukushima

2011-05-03T12:13:00.001-07:00

May 3rd, 2011

Dear Readers,

Below is an absolutely stunning, powerful article by Joe Giambrone, published in CounterPunch today and forwarded to me by Tim Seitz in Canada, along with Tim's letter to Stephen Harper, newly-reelected Prime Minister of Canada.

The only thing I would change is I would change the word "bordering on" to "amounting to". See if you don't agree.

Also, a very useful interview from Fairewinds Associates, also just posted today.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

Today's items:
(1) Where is all that Fukushima radiation going, and why does it matter?
(2) "The atomic power industry, it can be proved, has been an unprecedented catastrophe for mankind."
(3) Contact information for the author of this newsletter

---------------------------------------------------------
(1) Where is all that Fukushima radiation going, and why does it matter?
---------------------------------------------------------

Fairewinds' founder Maggie Gundersen interviews environmental scientist and professional engineer Marco Kaltofen about his ongoing analysis of radioactive fallout from Fukushima.

http://vimeo.com/23186557

Fairewinds Associates Vimeo Channel:
http://vimeo.com/user6415562

###

---------------------------------------------------------
(2) "The atomic power industry, it can be proved, has been an unprecedented catastrophe for mankind. "
---------------------------------------------------------

Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Parliament Hill
Ottawa, Ontario

May 3, 2011

Dear Mr. Harper;

Congratulations.

Now I hope you will use your newly given power to rid Canada of all its Atomic Power applications.

Sincerely

Tim Seitz

607-91 King St E
Kingston, ON K7L 2Z8
(613) 544 0453

--------------------------------------------------

http://www.counterpunch.org/giambrone05032011.html

May 3, 2011

Cancer, Deformities and Chronic Diseases

The Future Children of Fukushima

By JOE GIAMBRONE

"[A] woman in her fourth month of pregnancy was contaminated with 137Cs [radioactive cesium]… The concentration of 137Cs in the mother (0.91 kBq/kg bw) was similar to that in her newborn child (0.97 kBq/kg bw)." 1

Children in Belarus, Ukraine and certain provinces of Russia tell us what to expect from a massive radiation contamination such as Japan is currently experiencing. Radiation attacks the young to a harsher degree than it does adults, and yet we do know that it kills adults. Radioactivity causes numerous illnesses including terminal cancers, and not just from a large initial dose but over time from absorbed emitting particles inside the body.

A senior nuclear adviser to the Japanese Prime Minister, professor Toshiso Kosako resigned in protest from his government. This as the Japanese government raised the level of permissible exposure to schoolchildren twenty fold, from 1mSv/year to 20mSv.

The atomic power industry, it can be proved, has been an unprecedented catastrophe for mankind.

One of the world's leading experts on radionuclide contamination is Dr. Yury Bandashevsky based in Minsk, Belarus. Near Chernobyl's "ground zero" Bandazhevsky has published hundreds of scientific papers and has studied the radioactive contamination absorbed by children there for decades.

The parents of northern Japan had best investigate Dr. Bandashevsky's dietary recommendations. He's found that apple pectin helps remove radioactive cesium-137 from the body.

However, food grown and animals grazed in contaminated regions will pass along radiation to human populations for centuries. The Japanese reliance on fish will soon produce another shock to their nation as larger fish absorb more radioactive particles up the food chain.

Dr. Bandashevsky has placed hard numbers on the dangers of internal contamination from radiation,

"Chronic Cs-137 levels over 30 Bq/kg body weight is often associated with serious cardiovascular diseases 2."

For children with cesium 137 in excess of 50 Becquerels/kg body weight, "pathological disorders of the vital organs or systems will occur 3." These levels can produce grotesque malformations in newborn babies and increase the risk of spontaneous abortions.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) says, "Both 134Cs and 137Cs emit beta particles and gamma rays, which may ionize molecules within cells penetrated by these emissions and result in tissue damage and disruption of cellular function 4."

Expecting Japanese mothers should flee the north of Japan as quickly as possible. Abandon the region for the sake of their children's safety. Fetuses are in imminent danger and are many times more vulnerable to radiation than are adults.

How much radiation is Japan bathed in right now?

Nature magazine online reported that soil 40km northwest of the plant contained, "Cesium-137 levels of 163,000 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg) and iodine-131 levels of 1,170,000 Bq/kg, according to Japan's science ministry 5."

Tellingly, the new official "exclusion zone" is only a 30km radius from the plant. This means that those living atop the irradiated soil described above will not even be prompted to leave. Most will not. They will eventually return to life as usual. Only the colorless, tasteless, odorless radioactive isotopes will poison their families ceaselessly for the rest of their lives. Cesium, strontium, iodine and other radionuclides will continue to attack life forms in that contaminated environment despite any hollow assurances to the contrary.

Plutonium, the most toxic substance on earth, has been detected at eight different monitoring stations in Korea.

Radioactivity is a highly contested and controversial subject. Vast caches of medical evidence are routinely ignored in the mainstream media. At the nerve center of the controversy is the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose entire purpose is to promote the atomic power industry worldwide. Many don't know, but the IAEA has the authority on all health matters concerning radiation, both military and civil.

The World Health Organization can simply be blocked by the IAEA from publishing its findings concerning radioactive disasters like Chernobyl. This exact scenario occurred in 1995 under the tenure of WHO Director Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima 6.

A Swiss documentary team discovered that Dr. Nakajima's 1995 international conference of "700 experts and physicians" was prevented from publishing its findings on Chernobyl by the IAEA. The 2004 Swiss film Nuclear Controversies documents this battle between doctors and scientists on the scene vs. the IAEA.

Regarding the IAEA, Dr. Nakajima said, "for atomic affairs, military use and civil use, peaceful or civil use they have the authority. They command 7."

The elephant in the room is that word "military," and the desire of Western militaries to pummel other lands with "depleted uranium" (sic) munitions. As NATO currently plasters Libya with uranium tipped bombs, it must deny that the uranium contamination will harm the civilian population there. That admission alone would constitute a confession of war crimes, and so the fiction continues.

Radiation attacks DNA and causes horrific malformations, sudden mortality, and diseases that persist for the rest of the person's life.

Several films have documented the radiation effects on the children of Chernobyl including the Academy Award winning Chernobyl Heart (2003). This film shows harrowing images of deformed infants and numerous teenagers who suffer from thyroid cancers and other thyroid diseases. Fewer than 20% of children in the nation of Belarus can be classified as "healthy," according to official government studies.

A Ukrainian study found that, "for each case of thyroid cancer there were 29 other thyroid pathologies 8."

Dr. Bandashevsky found further health effects at even lower levels of cesium contamination. For "children having 5 Bq/kg more than 80% are healthy, while having 11 Bq/kg only 35% of children are healthy 9."

Chernobyl Heart, The Battle of Chernobyl (2006) and Nuclear Controversies (2004) have been available streaming online for all to see. The evidence that radiation destroys the lives of entire populations is irrefutable.

Official United Nations studies have failed to reflect this reality on the ground. What the UN has fallen back on as a rationale for its behavior is found in the 2008 UNSCEAR report on Chernobyl:

"As discussed previously in the section on the attribution of effects to radiation exposure, because presently there are no biomarkers specific to radiation, it is not possible to state scientifically that radiation caused a particular cancer in an individual 10."

By their own logic it is also not possible to scientifically rule out that radiation caused the epidemic of cancers found in the highly contaminated regions. But, that's exactly what the UN has shamelessly done in a series of reports that deliberately under-count the deaths from the Chernobyl catastrophe.

While the IAEA refuses to accept medical consequences of the radioactivity it promotes, it does acknowledge that radiation has spread from the crippled Fukushima plant. Readings as high as 25 Megabecquerels per sq. meter iodine-131, and 3.7 Megabecquerels per sq. meter cesium-137 were reported "at distances of 25 to 58 km 11" from the still out of control plant. These numbers should prompt massive evacuations at much greater distances than the official exclusion zone (read: uninhabitable zone) of 30km.

Facing that reality would render a large chunk of Japan a wasteland with economic costs beyond calculation. The numbers of refugees would surpass anything that the government could possibly manage. The absolute insanity of atomic power would instantly become an unavoidable fact to the entire (sane) world.

All exposures to radiation increase the risks of cancer, and there is no such thing as a "safe dose." This is the determination of the National Academy of Sciences 12, the EPA 13, NRC 14, CDC 15 etcetera. Thus, when a population is exposed to any increase in radioactive particles, some percentage of people and animals will be adversely affected. The exact number is difficult to determine, but estimates are made through extrapolation.

Dr. Chris Busby has predicted "400,000" cases of cancer for the population within 200 kilometers of Fukushima 16. That includes the suburbs of Tokyo. Studies from Europe after Chernobyl were used in his calculations. Cancers include thyroid, leukemia, pancreas, prostate, lung, skin, bone every type of cancer that exists. This is what radiation does to living organisms.

The evidence is clear. Children living "in contaminated regions, in a radius of 250 - 300 km from Chernobyl show an increase in mutations 17." From the years 1987 to 2004, "the incidence of brain tumors in children up to 3 years of age doubled and in infants it increased 7.5-fold 18."

Thousands of studies from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the surrounding countries were compiled in 2009 by Dr. Alexey Yablokov and Drs. Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko. Chernobyl, Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment was published by the New York Academy of Sciences and cites 5,000 studies. Forty percent of Europe was dosed with significant radiation. Radioactivity spread across the northern hemisphere where it continues to affect human health to this day.

The most contaminated provinces show human devastation directly correlated to radiation levels. Gomel province in Belarus had 90% healthy children in 1985, the year before the meltdown. By 2000, "fewer than 10% of children were well 19." Effects were directly related to the levels of contamination, eliminating other possible factors.

Rare deformities in infants increased radically. Severe Congenital Malformations (CMs) "such as polydactyly, deformed internal organs, absent or deformed limbs, and retarded growth increased significantly in the contaminated districts… officially registered CMs increased 5.7-fold during the first 12 years after the catastrophe 20."

This is what the parents of Northern Japan should expect if they decide to stay. This is what the promotion of high risk atomic power has bequeathed to the next generations of those who live near the contaminated zone.

The IAEA's methodology showed obvious holes in the counting of victims, post-Chernobyl. Stillbirths aren't counted at all. The reality is that up to 2004, "the estimated total number of miscarriages and stillbirths in Ukraine as a result of Chernobyl was about 50,000 21."

Those are fifty thousand human deaths in the single nation of Ukraine that did not even merit a mention in the UN's so-called "official death toll."

How many really died from Chernobyl's meltdown?

The Yablokov/Nesterenko book places the death toll at about one million.

"Thus the overall mortality for the period from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated at 985,000 additional deaths. This estimate of the number of additional deaths is similar to those of Gofman (1994a) and Bertell (2006). 22"

Three independent studies arrived at similar findings.

The atomic energy industry today across many nations displays a reckless disregard for human life bordering on Crimes Against Humanity. The Rome Statute, employed by the International Criminal Court, added the following category to Crimes Against Humanity:

(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

As all nuclear plants regularly and routinely discharge harmful radioactive particles, which all governments admit are unsafe, the case is pretty clear. Nuclear power must be abolished while there is still enough uncontaminated arable farmland to sustain us.

In a strictly moral sense, these reckless plants endanger millions of other people's children, perhaps 12,000 human generations yet to be born 23. Radioactive power generation places us in jeopardy at risk for catastrophic illnesses. This is a gross deliberate violation of millions of people's human rights.

Plutonium remains a threat to future civilizations. This reckless, uncontrolled release of radioactive isotopes has fouled the earth.

The people of Japan should remember the people of Belarus. Birth defects in children "whose mothers live in contaminated zones is twice as high as compared to those, whose mothers live in clean regions 24."

Joe Giambrone is a filmmaker and author of Hell of a Deal: A Supernatural Satire. He edits the Political Film Blog. He be reached at: polfilmblog at gmail.

Notes

1. World Health Organization, International Agency for Research on Cancer IARC, Monographs on the Evaluatiion of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, Vol. 78 Ionizing Radiation Part 2: Some Internally Depostited Radionuclides, 2001, IARCPress, Lyon France, p. 343.

2. Yuri Bandazhevsky, Chronic Cs-137 incorporation in children 's organs, 488 SWISS MED WKLY, 2003;133:488490 · www.smw.ch (peer reviewed), Official journal of, the Swiss Society of Infectious disease
the Swiss Society of Internal Medicine, Swiss Respiratory Society

3., 17., 24. The Chernobyl Catastrophe and Health Care, By Dr. Michel Fernex, Professor emeritus, Medical Faculty of Basel, F-68480 Biederthal, France.

4: Center for Disease Control Publication p157-c2, CESIUM, 2. RELEVANCE TO PUBLIC HEALTH, CDC website.

5. Nature Journal Online, Radioactivity Spreads in Japan, March 29 2011, http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110329/full/471555a.html

6., 7. Nuclear Controversies, 2004, Swiss TV, Film by Wladimir Tchertkoff, Feldat Film Switzerland.

8. ,18., 19., 20., 21., 22. Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko, 2009, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol.1181.

9. V.B. Nesterenko's report at the International conference "Medical Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe: results of 15-year researches", June 4-8, 2001, Kiev, Ukraine.

10. SOURCES AND EFFECTS OF IONIZING RADIATION, United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation UNSCEAR 2008 Report to the General Assembly with Scientific Annexes, VOLUME II Annex D Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident

11. IAEA website, Fukushima Nuclear Accident Update Log, March 30, 2011, http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2011/fukushima300311.html

12. National Academy of Sciences, 2006, Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR VII Phase 2. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11340&page=1#

13. EPA website, Radiation Risks and Realities, "The more radiation dose a person receives, the greater the chance of developing cancer… Current evidence suggests that any exposure to radiation poses some risk, however, risks at very low exposure levels have not been definitively demonstrated." ["very low" not defined JG] www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/402-k-07-006.pdf

14. NRC website, Fact Sheet on Biological Effects of Radiation, "This dose-response hypothesis suggests that any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk."

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/bio-effects-radiation.html

15. Center for Disease Control website, Prenatal Radiation Exposure: A Fact Sheet for Physicians, "However, the human embryo and fetus are particularly sensitive to ionizing radiation, and the health consequences of exposure can be severe, even at radiation doses too low to immediately affect the mother. Such consequences can include growth retardation, malformations, impaired brain function, and cancer."

16. Dr. Chris Busby, Reuters, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S0H-mtsdsgg.

23. Al Jazeera, April 4, 2011, No safe levels' of radiation in Japan by Dahr Jamail, quoting Dr. Kathleen Sullivan.

###

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(3) Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
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Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
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Send "Unsubscribe" in subject line.
-----------------------------------------

Comment about this blog from Dr. Conrad Miller:
Ace: You're missing reference 24, plus also 17-22. Take a look.

also, why does Yablokov and those who read him keep calling Chernobyl a 'meltdown' - it may be a convenient word that people can appreciate, but Chernobyl was not a meltdown, it was a steam explosion and graphite fire; what do you know about Chernobyl's 'containment' structure? Dr Vladimir Chernousenko said Chernobyl had one (but it couldn't contain the explosion anyhoo); also
a quote in 'Voice From Chernobyl' stated that in just 1993, in Byelorus alone: 200,000 abortions. Didn't say how many were voluntarily induced. But....

My thoughts for the day...Conrad

www.crestofthewave.com

-----------------------------
Note: I think the missing references are only available in the print edition from CounterPunch...

Who needs Osama bin Laden anyway?

2011-05-02T18:33:00.000-07:00

May 2nd, 2011

Dear Readers,

Who needs Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda anyway, when we've got the Nuclear Mafia and their lapdog regulators to do us in?

Item #2 (below) is a recent report about the Brown's Ferry General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors -- which are the same design as the reactors in trouble in Fukushima. All three reactors at Browns Ferry were suddenly forced to SCRAM during storms earlier this week when offsite power was lost after tornadoes tore up scores of power lines. The reactors are currently in "cold" shut down (one isn't quite there yet...). "Cold" is a relative term, of course.

None of these reactors should EVER be restarted. Period. But we all know there's no stopping the TVA.

Browns Ferry is the site of the most notorious fire in U.S. commercial reactor history, in 1975. But fires didn't stop 'em. These tornados won't stop 'em.

Apparently only a meltdown -- or a cascading series of meltdowns like in Japan -- will stop the TVA (another spoiled child of Al Gore Sr.).

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

Today's items:

(1) Dr. Helen Caldicott: Unsafe at any dose
(2) Brown's Ferry nuke plant planning to melt down sooner rather than later...
(3) Contact information for the author of this newsletter

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(1) Dr. Helen Caldicott: Unsafe at any dose:
=========================================================

Dr. Caldicott had a great piece in the New York Times yesterday:

UNSAFE AT ANY DOSE

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01caldicott.html

It's also available here:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/02-9

Meanwhile, George Monbiot has published a "how to become a journalist" article, revealing his secret: Just pick a topic other journalists know even less about: "It's surprising how quickly you can become an "expert" in a particular field: simply because so few other journalists will know anything about it. You will find opportunities, and opportunities will find you." He's certainly done that with nuclear power!

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(2) Brown's Ferry nuke plant planning to melt down sooner rather than later...
=========================================================

From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/28/alabama-tornadoes-nuclear-power-2011_n_854929.html?ref=fb&src=sp

Alabama Nuclear Power Plant Loses Power From Tornadoes, Could Be Down For Weeks

Posted: 04/28/11 12:18 PM ET

NEW YORK A nuclear power plant in Alabama that lost power after violent thunderstorms and tornadoes on Wednesday will be down for days and possibly weeks but the backup power systems worked as designed to prevent a partial meltdown like the disaster in Japan.

The Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, one of the biggest in the country, provides power to 2.6 million homes. It has three reactors that are similar in design to the Fukushima Daiichi reactors crippled by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan on March 11.

"The reactors will remain shut until we have restored the reliability of the transmission system," said Ray Golden, spokesman for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which owns and operates the 3,274-megawatt Alabama plant.

When the plant lost power, the reactors automatically shut down and emergency backup diesel generators kicked in to cool the nuclear fuel. In Japan, the reactors also automatically shutdown when they lost power due to the earthquake but the backup generators were wiped out by the tsunami, allowing the fuel to overheat.

The repairs to the U.S. reactor's transmission lines would take days and could possibly take weeks, Golden said, but the plant itself was undamaged.

The tornadoes and thunderstorms left a trail of destruction across northern Alabama and northern Mississippi on Wednesday, killing at least 131 people in Alabama, according to Alabama's Governor Robert Bentley.

The storm knocked out power to about 300,000 homes and businesses, primarily in the northern parts of Alabama and Mississippi, Golden said.

In addition to the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, the Tennessee Valley Authority operates several other facilities and provides power to about 150 municipal utilities, which distribute electricity to some 9 million people in seven states.

The federally owned power generator said its two nuclear power plants in Tennessee -- Watts Bar and Sequoyah -- were largely unaffected by the storm. Sequoyah continues to provide power to customers and Watts Bar was already shut for scheduled maintenance when the storm hit.

As of 6 a.m. EDT, the Tennessee Valley Authority had restored 12 large transmission lines but still had another 78 out of service, said another spokesman, Scott Brooks.

TWO REACTORS COOLED TO SAFE TEMPERATURE

Two of the units are cooled to a safe temperature so that the water around the reactor's core will not boil away -- as happened at Japan's Fukushima. The third unit should be in cold shutdown soon.

The Browns Ferry nuclear power plant is located in Decatur on the banks of the Wheeler Reservoir along the Tennessee River about 170 miles north of the Alabama state capital of Montgomery.

It has three units -- the 1,065-MW Unit 1, the 1,104-MW Unit 2 and the 1,105-MW Unit 3 -- which are of similar design to the Fukushima Daiichi reactors.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

--------------------------------------------

Comment by markofthetides:
06:35 PM on 4/30/2011

"The nation's top nuclear regulator cast doubt Thursday on whether reactors in the U.S. are prepared for the type of days-long power outage that struck a nuclear power plant in Japan"

Just a couple of days and we can have a very nasty problem.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/29/us-nuclear-power-blackout_n_855424.html

That's from the head of the NRC, he should know.

###

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Protect our nuclear power plants!

2011-05-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

5/1/11

Dear Readers,

Osama bin Laden is dead, killed in Pakistan today. We have the body.

We MUST protect our nuclear power plants!!!! They are surely going to be targeted (see below). This is a very dangerous time. I hope our politicians understand that! Please tell them that extraordinary measures MUST be taken immediately!

Yours,

Ace

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NUCLEAR HELL IF BIN LADEN DIES

Terrorists have threatened to unleash a "nuclear hellstorm"

Tuesday April 26, 2011

By Daily Express reporter

AL QAEDA terrorists have threatened to unleash a "nuclear hellstorm" on Europe if Osama bin Laden is captured or killed, leaked documents have revealed.

Senior al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told interrogators at Guantanamo Bay they were prepared to kill tens of thousands of innocents.

Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind behind the 9/11 atrocity, warned there was a nuclear bomb ready, hidden somewhere in Europe.

He said al Qaeda was actively trying to recruit Heathrow ground staff to help it target the world's busiest airport.

The threat was contained among thousands of top-secret files given to whistleblowers' website Wikileaks. The papers detail interrogations of more than 700 terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay detention camp and were written by officials at the Cuban base.

Sheikh Mohammed's file reportedly says he was plotting attacks in Asia, Africa, America and Britain for "the greatest economic impact".

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Godspeed, indeed! Maybe we'll get on Oprah - if we hurry!

2011-05-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

May 1st, 2011

Dear Readers,

Thank you, dear readers -- I'm blushing (see below). Thank you very much!

Yesterday I learned that copies of both my books (Shut San Onofre, my new 20-page pictorial book, and The Code Killers, my handbook of nuclear information from 2008) have been personally handed to California's Senator Dianne Feinstein (possibly with a photo of the event taken by the Sacramento Bee),and to Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders. The books were also given to an environmental aide to Jerry Brown, and Congressional candidate Norman Soloman, who was already calling for shutdown of California's four nuclear power plants at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre:

www.counterpunch.org/solomon04292011.html

Both my books are available as free downloads from my web site:

www.acehoffman.org

The new book only happened because someone asked for a short document to hand out at the then-upcoming Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing held last Thursday in San Juan Capistrano, California. Of course it helped that I had been collecting hundreds of images for the past six weeks... I thought about what was needed for a day or so, and started creating the document on Wednesday, the day before the event, having decided to try to "say it with pictures" in a one page flyer. Almost immediately it didn't fit on a page, hence the new book.

At the hearing, even Victor Dricks (public affairs spokesman for the NRC's Region 4 district) asked for a copy! And I'm fairly certain a copy ended up with the executives of Southern California Edison too, or even Edison International's CEO, who was there. After all, they would at least want to know what they're up against, right?

This coming week, another subscriber, a reverend, will be trying to deliver copies in Washington D. C. (I overnighted several dozen copies to him over the weekend, and anyone else who wants printed copies should contact me by email).

A lot of people believe we can shut down San Onofre. A lot more people believe we should, but are afraid it would impact our economy or cause rolling blackouts or something bad like that. They know something worse COULD happen, but they also feel such disruptions WILL happen if we shut SanO. It's true that shutting San Onofre would impact our economy. People would be put to work building renewable energy systems, money would not be poured into the nuclear rat-hole, and cancer rates in the communities surrounding San Onofre would go down, saving money, pain, and resources. Most importantly, the CHANCE of a disaster would be significantly reduced.

As to rolling blackouts, the last time California was forced to close three of four nuclear reactors (due to fires and various extended, unexpected maintenance issues at three of them) we did, indeed, have rolling blackouts. However, the blackouts were later proven unequivocally to be Enron-related and politically motivated. The artificial blackouts were given as a reason to relicense the reactors and approve the installation of new steam generators.

That was ten years ago. Ten years ago, we came that close to getting San Onofre closed, and maybe Diablo Canyon too. But we failed. Failing again may be disastrous.

Anyone who doesn't understand the risks we all face now, after Fukushima, probably works in the industry with rose-colored glasses and a fat paycheck each week. Or pays too much attention to the main stream media, who, of course, have been downplaying the magnitude of the nuclear disaster in Japan, along with the government of Japan (and Hillary Clinton, too).

Keep up the heat, folks. We can get California nuke-free if we try.

I hope some newspapers will consider reviewing my two books together. Not many books (or even booklets) are created and then travel around the world so quickly, even with the power of today's Internet!

Who knows? Maybe it'll end up on Oprah! If so, we better hurry -- 19 days left!

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

Items included below:
1) Several nice comments about my new book
2) A wonderful information timeline from R. C. Hoelzlein
3) Contact information for Ace Hoffman

----------------------------------------------
Craig Beauchamp reports:

Just spoke with Diane Feinstein and gave her Ace's booklets. In her speech she spoke about the nuclear power plant, and the issue of the spent fuel rods . Long term storage is unacceptable and she said we need to rethink our nuclear energy policy . I spoke to her for a minute and gave her the two booklets and our protest flyer. I explain that we were supporting her effort and Barbara Boxer's effort to get seismic studies and that we were trying to get the plants decommissioned and transit to renewables since SONGS only provides 10-12% or less energy and shut off one extra light could save that much. Sac Bee took my picture talking to her! More later.
..................
Just handed Bernie Sanders Ace's two booklets and told him we were fighting the NRC to decommission San Onofre. He nodded as he was being whisked away.

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Dr. Janette Sherman writes:
Another brilliant publication by Ace!!!!
Thank you.
I'll send it to my web and to my contacts.
...
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Dr. Conrad Miller writes:
Cool happening, Ace.
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"Firefly" writes (to her list):
Pls make this viral. San Onofre nuke plant is
like a time bomb...One large quake... and its another Fukushima.
----------------------------------------------
Penny offered some minor typo corrections and added:
"Best wishes, and give 'em hell!"
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Jack Shannon writes:

Ace:

You are truly my hero. I have been trying to write a book for 20 years and I'm not off of the ground.
...
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... and Paul de Burgh-Day writes:

My friends,

Brilliant work by Ace Hoffman!
READ WHAT HE TELLS US BELOW, about the 20 page online little book he has produced.
Titled SHUT SAN ONOFRE, it applies to ALL NUKE power-plants!
You can download it from
http://www.acehoffman.org/petitions/shut-san-onofre.pdf

Ace has produced a very powerful message.
Read and study it yourself!
Forward it to all your family and friends! Ask them to pass it on too!
Educate our children!
Send it to every politician you know! Or don't want to know!
Even here in Australia - we don't have nukes, but we mine vast quantities of uranium!

My strongest thanks to Ace for what he has offered us all!
All power to him!

Paul
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Shucks!

Thanks everyone!

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author's books are available as free downloads from his web site:
www.acehoffman.org

----------------------------------------------
Here are some wonderful comparison maps of Fukushima radiation by R. C. Hoelzlein, courtesy Roger Herried:
http://www.rchoetzlein.com/theory/?p=171
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Godspeed, little book!

2011-04-29T02:25:00.000-07:00

April 28th, 2011

Dear Readers,

There has certainly been a change in the weather. It's irradiated, and nobody likes it.

Opinion polls around the world are running strongly against nuclear power even in France and here in America. And that's despite the official lies, cover-ups, and secrecy that's been going on regarding Fukushima.

Or maybe it's because of those things, too. I always thought it was the lies about Chernobyl that did in the Soviet Union.

Either way, as the truth gets out, people everywhere are getting disgusted with nuclear energy. Thank God (and DARPA) for the Internet!

This evening at a Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing in San Juan Capistrano, California, I handed out about 75 copies of a new book I've just completed, a pictorial called SHUT SAN ONOFRE.

You can download the (free) 20-page book here:

http://www.acehoffman.org/petitions/shut-san-onofre.pdf

(File size is about 7 megabytes.)

It's VERY new -- in fact, I only started writing it yesterday morning! Hooray for modern technology*!

The book includes more than 50 photos related to Fukushima which I've collected off the web over the past six weeks, and some information about alternative energy, wasted energy, the damage from Chernobyl, etc..

Fortunately a lawyer who also attended the (otherwise rather useless, as usual) NRC hearing is going to Sacramento (the state capital) tomorrow, and will try to put copies in the hands of staff members of our two senators! And a reverend who happens to be attending a national religious convention in Washington, D.C. will be doing the same thing next week! (I'll be overnighting a few copies to him tomorrow.)

Not bad for a book that still isn't even 48 hours old from original concept (for a one-page information sheet, but it grew...) to right now! Godspeed, little book!

I hope you enjoy it and I'll look forward to hearing any comments anyone might have. I'm sure there's room for improvement, but it was pretty well-received at the hearing.

(Note: In the back of the book are a few pages for collecting signatures, which are for when the book is printed. It's hoped that people will gather signatures and then send (or bring) the book to their elected officials. Anyone who would like to be sent printed copies at cost (including shipping) should contact the author.)

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author is a 54-year-old computer programmer, bladder cancer survivor, educational software developer, independent researcher, animator, videographer and writer. He has been investigating nuclear power for about 40 years. His in-depth book on nuclear power, The Code Killers, is also available as a free download from his web site: acehoffman.org

* Adobe CS5 In-Design running on a Pentium i-7-powered Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard with 16 gigabytes of Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM and five 320 gigabyte Western Digital VelociRaptor Hard Drives (four as a single RAID system (striped and mirrored) plus another drive for the operating system). BFG G-Force graphics card, LG 1920 by 1080 monitor, Kensington Expert Mouse Pro trackball, Wacom tablet (not used for this project), Logitech keyboard. Thermaltake 750 Watt power supply (energy supplied in part by SONGS). USB3 tri-terabyte back-ups with Norton Ghost, of course. My browser of choice these days is Google Chrome, but I keep Firefox at-the-ready. And the Operating System? Gee, I wonder. I also wonder if the owner of that OS is still hot for the traveling wave nuclear reactor after Fukushima, that he spoke of so glowingly (yes, it's a pun) at TED just a few weeks before the nuclear disaster? His "TerraPower" reactors would ALSO create tons and tons of nuclear waste -- each microgram just as dangerous as a microgram (a lethal dose) of Fukushima's "spent" fuel.

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TODAY: (April 28 2011) 5 pm Protest/Inform Media and Appeal to NRC! Capistrano Unified School District Board Chamber

2011-04-28T09:06:00.001-07:00

April 28th, 2011

Let the NRC know... San Onofre has got to go! The following was sent to me by Lyn Hicks, CREED.

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

--------------------------------------------------------
From: Lyn Hicks [mailto:lynharrishicks@cox.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 11:25 AM
Subject: DESTRUCTION BY CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR DISASTER.doc

FUKUSHIMA RESPONSE BY SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CREED LEADERS

REMINDER TO ORGANIZATION LIAISONS!
April 28 5 pm Protest/Inform Media and Appeal to NRC
Capistrano Unified School District Board Chamber
33122 Valle Road, San Juan Capistrano

This high spirited event is the crest of two and a half years identification of on-site nuclear hazard roulette at San Onofre. The action was led by Gary and Laurie Headrick, founders of San Clemente Green and San Onofre Safety. On site safety issues were gradually brought to the arena of action, the San Clemente City Council Chamber. The focus leaders� testimony was recorded, and is available to officials and the public by links to city video archives.

Headrick is coordinating the press-conference safety Issues and FOR A NUCLEAR FREE WORLD/ END NUCLEAR POWER/TRANSITION NOW/FAST TRACK TO RENEWABLES/ SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, other, themes. Thursday evening media event. Come and be part of the supporting backdrop, after you sign in to speak in NRC session.???.
.
Gene Stone, organizer of individual concerned residents, is compiling� list of Focus Leaders� urgent questions and comments for NRC microphone response. Official assessment of the Japanese six reactor conflagration and contamination has risen to most devastating rank (7) and radiation now surpassing the on-going, circling our planet ,destruction by Chernobyl nuclear disaster, commemorating the accident 25th year, anniversary, yesterday.

Please communicate background info on both accidents to your organizations and respond
their choices of action themes when we poll everyone.

DESTRUCTION BY CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR DISASTER!!!!

Ukraine�s President Viktor Yanukovyeh marked the 24th with announcement of government assessment that approximately two million persons are suffering Chernobyl caused illnesses, and that nongovernmental organizations are attributing to Chernobyl more than 700,000 early deaths.

Concerns about genetic damage were raised more than a year ago concurrent with the Ukrainian president�s appeal for aid from the nuclear nations. Pictures showed children�s body deformities attributed to parental exposure to the Chernobyl explosion, and children in a hospital for child victims of cancer, and care facilities for children with severely damaged or destroyed immune systems

News accounts reported the Ukraine president�s plea that the people of Ukraine could no longer afford to provide adequate medical care for those afflicted by Chernobyl. That plea was followed by an international appeal to the nuclear nations to subsidize a more effective containment for the nuclear radiation emitting Chernobyl remains. Requests by CREED researchers for report of international response have not been answered. Anyone who knows a diligent reporter, who will follow-up this one, please volunteer to accept and file info. and please reply/respond to this email.

Committee to Bridge the Gap, contact in the 100 high hazard radius, has provided samples of needed protective actions. disclosed that the Environmental Protection Administration monitors that could measure radioactive iodine were not in place in California. CBG persistence disclosed that levels of radioactive iodine in rainwater were 25-100 times higher than EPA�s maximum contaminant levels specified in the clean water act. We must enroll our emergency planners in fast action to obtain appropriate monitors and place them were they can protect our children.

WHAT ARE THE CAUSE/EFFECT SIMILARITIES BETWEEN CHERNOBYL, Fukushima AND SAN ONOFRE THAT WE MUST�GLIMPSE� TO PROVIDE INFORMED PUBLIC protective actions? Please reply email participation comments designating them as your personal, or your organization board, or membership, if that is requested in the polling.

In peace process for nuclear free world Lyn Harris Hicks, CREED Advocate (949) 492-5078

One more request: Please pick up the phone and call your favorite news reporter and invite him/her to cover this story.

=================================================

The first million is the hardest...

2011-04-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

April 26th, 2011

Today's topics:

(1) The first million is the hardest... (by Ace Hoffman)
(2) The Real Story: Chernobyl show to air on Earth Focus TODAY
(3) Jeff Phillips (writing from New Zealand): Uranium mining over and under
(4) Iris Cheng (Greenpeace): Chernobyl: distorted reality, and unanswered questions
(5) Conrad Miller: Chernobyl 25th anniversary disaster
(6) Google Earth Maps Out At-Risk Populations Around Nuclear Power Plants
(7) Contact information for the author of this newsletter

----------------------------------------
(1) The first million is the hardest...:
----------------------------------------

April 26th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Today is the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. Today, a quarter century ago, the ruthless murder of a million people began. And the cover-up.

How quickly we forget! How destined we are to repeat!

Today's commemorations around the world might have gone practically unnoticed by the mainstream media, save perhaps for a 60-second spot about a decaying sarcophagus, were it not for Fukushima.

Today we honor and remember the already-dead from Chernobyl:

1) The "liquidators" who helped clean it up (about 800,000 young men) who now die like flies of cancer, leukemia, and a thousand other stranger ailments.

2) The local citizens who were not told for a week or more that anything was wrong, even while the rest of the world knew because a nuclear reactor power company in Sweden had alerted the "free" public (that is, the Western media) several days after Chernobyl exploded, after the ill winds tripped their own monitors.

3) The people around the world who also MUST have died, in addition to the million who lived nearer the plant or were among the liquidators.

4) The descendents, for at least seven generations, of all these people -- that's how far the DNA is likely to show damage, perhaps even further down the line.

"The million" are only the ones that were reasonably easy to count. I use the term "easy" very relatively: WHO wouldn't count them -- for five years they didn't even start to take a half-hearted look. IAEA wouldn't count them (and probably prevented WHO from doing so). It would be bad for the promotion of nuclear power, their mandate and perceived mission. The nuclear industry didn't want them counted. The nuke-loving cash-strapped secretive militaristic Russian government certainly didn't want them counted. Nobody wanted them counted.

So they weren't counted. Not easily, unless the term is relative. People halfway around the world, not under Soviet censorship, propaganda, or oppression, were NEVER counted by anyone. Billions of Curies, tens of thousands of terabecquerels... didn't just disappear. Many of them were breathed in by someone. They killed people all over the world, and still do. So will Fukushima Daiichi.

Cover-ups and lies hide the million-dead from the ongoing Chernobyl horror. Some say it's only tens of thousands, some say "merely" thousands, and some -- the nuclear industry in America, for instance-- just three or four dozen.

Nobody says, "nobody died at Chernobyl" like they (lie) and say about Three Mile Island.

Until last month Chernobyl was the worst industrial accident in human history -- unless you believe the lies.

New pictures have reportedly been released of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 -- the MOX reactor -- indicating the reactor pressure vessel itself had exploded last month (see Jeff's article, below).

The nuclear industry represents a small fraction of 1% of the human work force, even in America or France. These people could all be building wind turbines, except for those people who will have to guard the waste -- a cost society must incur forevermore, and which keeps getting more and more costly, and will continue to do so, at least until we stop making more waste every day.

It's time to stop the assault on human and other life. It's time to turn off the nukes.

Forced down our throats, and paid well to work there, society gave it a try.

Nuclear power has failed miserably. It's not enough to prevent new reactors, or even to prevent relicensing -- one unit at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another ten years just weeks before the catastrophe began. It's not enough to wait months and months for the "lessons learned" from Fukushima. It's not enough to be promised improvements, changes, more and better backup systems. All those are nice. But we need to close the reactors down forever.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author. 54. has, like you, seen far too many nuclear disasters (one is too many). Visit his web site: www.acehoffman.org to read his book online or as a free download: "The Code Killers", about the many ways the nuclear industry destroys humanity.

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(2) The Real Story: Chernobyl show to air on Earth Focus TODAY:
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Earth Focus, the environmental news magazine of LinkTV, has produced a documentary called Chernobyl -- The Real Story. It features interviews with Dr. Janette Sherman editor and Dr. Alexey Yablokov who is a Councilor Russian Academy of Sciences and co-author of the book Chernobyl Consequences for People and the Environment published by the National Academy of Sciences. The documentary was produced by Raisa Scriabine, edited by Toni Genberg, Sean McAll and Dustin Harrison Atlas. Producer for LinkTV is Kim Spencer. The piece is made possible with support from the Wallace Genetic Foundation, the Marisla Foundation and the Park Foundation.

You can download the documentary (2.5 GB) here:

ftp://4.71.46.20/Web%20Deliverables/Earth%20Focus/Chernobyl%20wWrapper.mov

Username ftp-guest
Password w3lc0me

If the direct link does not work, try this (username and password are the same):

ftp://4.71.46.20/

Click on Web Deliverables, then click on Earth Focus, then click on Chernobyl wWrapper.mov.

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Democracy Now! has a segment devoted to the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl featuring Dr. Janette Sherman and Dr. Jeff Patterson, the immediate past-president of Physicians for Social Responsibility:

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/26/chernobyl_catastrophe_25th_anniversary_of_worlds

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(3) Jeff Phillips (writing from New Zealand): Uranium mining over and under
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At 11:33 PM 4/25/2011 -0700, synthaissance-owner@yahoogroups.com wrote:
Re: [synthaissance] CHERNOBYL DAY/RUSSIAN TRANSLATION ASSISTANCE REQUEST
======================

"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."

Today is the 25th anniversary of the reactor explosion/meltdown at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, which contaminated thousands of square miles of Russia's "bread-basket" and has already caused over a million premature human deaths, not to mention incomprehensible damage to non-human lives and marine and terrestrial eco-systems.

As the Fukushima nuclear debacle continues to unfold, and it's true nature is revealed, we are witnessing two parallel streams of extremes: unprecedented release of extremely dangerous radio-nuclides into the planetary biosphere that is by no means over, at levels that have long surpassed Chernobyl and may have already surpassed the sum total of all nuclear detonations since 1945; and unprecedented levels of corporate fraud, governmental deception, institutionalized cover-up and systematic brain-washing blitz using the Hitlerian 'big lie' technique. While carcinogenic and mutagenic levels of radioactive actinides and isotopes are disseminated throughout the biosphere, the leaders of the modern world tell us to watch tv and be happy.

That the public as a whole is so indifferent to this global catastrophe, the likes of which has never been experienced in the history of civilization, despite having been exposed to and having access to reasonably accurate information on what is happening, is to me beyond belief. We seem to be witnessing a totally new level of active denial and intentional unreality in the mass population. Although most people are relatively ignorant scientifically, by choice, and could not possibly explain why ionizing radiation is dangerous to life as we know it, most people do possess the deep-seated and almost common-sense intuition that it's certainly not good for us. So why do so few people seem to care at all about what is going on?

On this day in 1986 I was in the high desert of Arizona, at a place called Big Mountain, on the Navaho reservation. A group of us had gone there from Santa Cruz California in support of the indigenous people who were being forcibly relocated so that Peabody Coal could strip-mine their land. During the week we spent up there we met with elders and learned of the ancient prophecies, particularly those of the Hopi. We sang, danced and talked. I walked around with a Geiger counter taking readings of back-ground radiation as an F-111 fighter plane swooped over menacingly at less than 100 feet of altitude.

We learned that we were on the Grant Mineral belt, near a place called Black mesa, where the uranium for the first atomic bomb was extracted. We heard Hopi elder Thomas Banyacya tell us about the ancient prophecy, "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."

We were out of touch with the outside world for a week, and when we came down to Flagstaff, we saw the biggest head-line possible for a newspaper: the Chernobyl meltdown. This is still the freakiest "synchronicity" of my entire life.

Ever since then I have undertaken to spread the word of nuclear awareness, and have realized this to be the single greatest threat to life as we know her on this planet. Astronomer Carl Sagan made a huge effort to create awareness of this situation, and contracted a fatal leukemia because of his massive number of personal protests at the Nevada Test Site. As a scientist, Sagan was fully aware that the Earth is the only planet we know of in the entire universe that is home to life; unfortunately, his belief was that the danger we faced was from all-out thermo-nuclear war. I don't think he was aware of the less visible but equally real form of "nuclear war" being waged in the form of DU and later from "geo-terrorism" environmental warfare techniques as envisioned by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Central in the on-going battle of life against death, quite literally on this planet, is the unique down-under country of Australia. Home to approximately 40% of the world's entire uranium reserves, she has traditionally limited herself to 3 uranium mines. But in recent years mining interests and pro-nuclear power-brokers are storming the government and populace with 'safe and clean' propaganda designed to manufacture consent not only for expanded uranium mining, so that Australia can become the "Saudi Arabia of uranium", but worse, for the construction of dozens of nuclear reactors across her wonderfully subtle landscape, the power from which could easily be supplied by means far less necrophilous in nature, even including the totally taboo concept of "conservation." Moreover, more solar energy falls onto the surface of Australia than any other country, yet she has less solar technology than Germany.

The battle for the survival of life as we know her may in fact be under way right now in Australia, a battle within an historically and legendarily apathetic people who have a chance to rouse themselves from their beer and telly, to rise up and make a difference that DOES matter in a big way, the battle against their tendency to adopt an attitude of "no worries" even when confronted with not only the on-going genocide of their own indigenous people but themselves as well. Soon I'll be posting a more in-depth version of this story.

I have recently gotten in touch with Dr. Alexy Yablokov, co-author of the recent and excellent book on the long-term health effects of Chernobyl. Soon I will be posting excerpts from this book. Dr. Yablokov has agreed to do an interview with me and to answer some questions, but his English isn't very good and my Russian is nil.

I wanted to ask if anyone out there happens to be fluent in Russian or knows someone who is who might have a little time to translate a few paragraphs from English into Russian and then from Russian in to English? If anyone can help, you will be making a big contribution to the sharing of extremely important information, plus I'll send you some hand-painted rocks! Please get in touch if anyone can help with this.

Happy Chernobyl Day. By the way, photos just coming out show that Reactor #3 at Fukushima fully exploded very early on...this is the reactor itself, the one with the MOX plutonium fuel rods. This means that large amounts of plutonium have been going around the world in all those radiation clouds.

Jeff Phillips
New Zealand

http://dolphinmatrix.com/Jeff/
http://picasaweb.google.com/therockist
http://rachels-carson-of-today.blogspot.com
http://www.synthaissance.blogspot.com/
http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/synthaissance/
http://cryo-now.blogspot.com/
http://www.regainyourbrain.org/
http://thebrink-jeffphillips.blogspot.com/

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." Mark Twain

"Politics is the entertainment branch of government." Frank Zappa

"Government is the public-relations branch of globalisation." K. Rubrick Shreddinger

"The only thing that's faster than light is simultaneity." J. Paul Serengeti

"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's." William Blake

"On Spaceship Earth, there are no passengers: everyone is crew." R. Buckminster Fuller

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(4) : Chernobyl: distorted reality, and unanswered questions:
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Blogpost by Iris Cheng - April 19, 2011 at 16:32

We have just returned after completing an important mission in Ukraine taking around 70 journalists from 18 countries with us to Chernobyl, nearly 25 years after the nuclear catastrophe. It was one of the largest media trips Greenpeace has organized. These seasoned journalists asked critical and insightful questions, none of them easily moved.

But many of them were deeply disturbed by what they saw and heard often by the mundane details that were mentioned matter-of-factly by the interviewees.

Like every year Ukraine government needs to spend between six to eight percent of the fiscal budget to cope with the consequences of Chernobyl.

Like how tens of thousands of Ukrainian children need to be sent away every year to uncontaminated areas for at least a month, in order to allow the body to get rid of some of the Cesium-137 accumulated through eating everyday food like milk, mushrooms, berry jam and meat.

Like how food sold in every market needs to be tested for radionuclide like Cesium and Strontium.

Like how children of Rokytne get tonsillitis several times a year because their immune systems are compromised by radionuclide. According to deputy head doctor from the District Hospital, two-thirds of the population of 53,000 he cares for is affected by Cesium-137 contamination in food. Rokytne is 300km away from Chernobyl, on the other side of the country.

Like how the local health and sanitary station in some areas need to make maps to tell local communities where the radiation hotspots are and thus unsafe to go.

Like how in school children are taught the practical steps of radiation safety, and do emergency drills with gas masks.

Like how young expectant mothers get advice about what food they need to avoid, in order to minimise radionuclide uptake, which causes deformity in the developing fetus. They need frequent checks and if the fetus develops serious deformity then it may have to be aborted.

Like how it is considered impolite to ask workers building the new sarcophagus about their personal radiation dose. If it reaches the limit then they cannot work, which means they lose their job.

Like how radioactive waste containment and management had become an important sector of the economy, because of the Chernobyl disaster. The original sarcophagus, hastily built in the months after the accident, is meant to only last 25-30 years and now at risk of collapse. Underneath, the destroyed reactor is still on site and cannot be dismantled because of its extreme radioactivity.

The consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster lie in these mundane everyday facts. Life for these communities is brutally distorted, for centuries to come.

However, when I returned from Ukraine, I was hit by another distorted reality.

Nuclear proponents now claim that despite the fact that the situation in the Fukushima nuclear plant is still not under control, despite the massive amount of radioactive water dumped into the sea with unknown consequence Fukushima proves that nuclear energy is safe, because so far no one has been killed by the radiation?

I want them to say that to the doctors and the parents who are told that the state can now only afford to send children away for breaks in clean areas for 18 days per year. Nuclear supporters probably donâ€™t know that it takes 50 days for the body of a child (100 days for adult) to get rid of half of its radioactive Cesium-137.

I want them to say that to the public health officials who are struggling to find funding to continue monitoring food contamination.

I want them to say that to the young woman who told us her favourite fruit is the blueberries from the forests. She knows they are contaminated by Cesium but she cannot help eating them sometimes.

I want them to take human life more seriously. There are 442 nuclear power plants in the world today and the majority are aging. There will be leaks, power outages, human errors, design flaws. The nuclear industry has no solutions to the radioactive waste problem. How many more life-crippling nuclear disasters will it take before the world gets rid of this outdated, dangerous and unnecessary technology?

Iris Cheng is a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace International, based in Hong-Kong.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/chernobyl-distorted-reality-and-unanswered-qu/blog/34331?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Test%20-%20GPI%20Newsletter%20-%20April%202011&utm_content=&utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GPI%20Newsletter%20-%20April%202011%20%281%29&utm_content

or:

http://tinyurl.com/3qg97lo

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(5) Conrad Miller: Chernobyl Disaster 25th Anniversary In Fukushima's Radioactive Shadow:
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http://crestofthewave.createsend2.com/t/ViewEmail/y/A759F7E350A81800/55F0287C079F94AEC4DA2C823DDA3384

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(6) Google Earth Maps Out At-Risk Populations Around Nuclear Power Plants:
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"If a nuclear power plant in the US were to have issues, who would be affected? In a partnership between Nature News and Columbia University, we now have a Google map that tells us the population sizes around plants so we can easily scan and see the number of people that could be affected should anything occur at the plants."

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/04/google-earth-maps-out-at-risk-populations-around-nuclear-power-plants.php

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(7) Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
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Mother Earth is "hot"! We irradiated her!

2011-04-22T20:49:00.001-07:00

Earth Day indeed...

April 22nd, 2011

Dear Readers,

The total volume of the earth is about 260,000,000,000 (260 billion) cubic miles.

The oceans are about 320,000,000 (320 million) cubic miles (average depth: about two miles). Thus, oceans comprise just over one tenth of one percent of the total volume of Earth (not counting our atmosphere), all of it very close to Earth's surface (maximum depth of the oceans: Just under seven miles).

The oceans contain about 97% of all the water on earth. Ice caps and ground water are most of the rest.

Fresh water rivers, lakes and streams amount to less than 1% of all the water on Earth.

All water is precious.

There are about 139,400,000 square miles of oceans on earth, and about 57,500,000 square miles of land area. A lot of Fukushima's radiation is now becoming fallout all over the earth, and will be in our environment for thousands of years: Plutonium, uranium, cesium, strontium, iodine, technetium, tritium... you-name-it, it's radioactive and has been released at Fukushima.

Only a tiny fraction of the total volume of the earth is ever used by humans. Everything's within a few feet, or a few hundred feet, of the surface, except for a few slightly deeper things such as mines, wells, and submarines. Virtually all the subways, sewers, building foundations, electric and data cabling, gas pipelines, and so on are closer to the surface than that. No living quarters, schools or factories are built deep underground under normal circumstances. Some crazy military projects maybe, but that's about it.

So we need to protect this fragile surface! We aren't doing a very good job. The nuclear industry's constant release of radioactive isotopes into the environment lays down a patina of poison which damages all living things.

We have scorned and scorched our mother earth! She's hot! We irradiated her!

We defiled her. We challenged her. We lost, of course. Now we suffer, and all her other beautiful creatures suffer, and once again, an enormous area has been created where no one can ever live again.

Birds fly in. Birds eat radioactive insects, rodents, reptiles -- many of which can survive much higher doses of radiation than the birds can. ("Yummm! Cockroaches! Get you fill at the abandoned diner in Fukushima!" yells one crow to another.)

In 20 years, maybe in 10, someone will go into the Fukushima exclusion zone, as they do around Chernobyl now, and take pictures and count animals per square mile, and pronounce the area a "thriving" wildlife sanctuary. They'll go in with rose-colored glasses about radiation's effects (or they wouldn't go in at all!) and they won't remove the glasses no matter what they see.

When an animal slows down because it gets cancer, does it get health care?

Of course not! It gets eaten!

(The cancerous part is sometimes avoided by the more delicate carnivores.)

Nothing to see.

3-legged ponies won't survive long in the wild.

Nothing to see.

The rose bush in my backyard produces many different colors of roses. Is that caused by its DNA constantly being damaged by radiation? No, that's just the type of rosebush it is.

There's variation everywhere. But what "produces" evolution is NOT random damage to our DNA! It's the semi-random joining of two DNA strands together in new sequences which produce all the variation we need in life. Why muck with such an exquisite system? The other method might work occasionally, but usually it just produces deformities, cancer, and pain.

Those who go into the "forbidden zones" see what they want to see.

So here's to Mother Earth.

There are 440 other Fukushimas waiting to happen (plus another thousand or so military reactors).

Earth day is a sham. A mockery. A sin. If we each devote only one day a year to saving Mother Earth, well then, as we can see, she doesn't stand a chance.

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author has seen a lot of Earth Days once a year, and has seen the earth suffer every day for 54 years...
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