Ace Hoffman's Nuclear Failures Reports

Monday, April 12, 2010

A spate of earthquakes, a documentary about a plane crash, and an old power plant...

April 12th, 2010

Dear Readers,

A pair of old nuclear reactors operates -- most of the time -- about a dozen miles from where I live. I'm downwind of them a lot of the time.

Recently, two events -- an ongoing series of local earthquakes, and a documentary about a local plane crash -- reminded me what a nightmare-waiting-to-happen nuclear power plants really are.

"SONGS" (as the radiation factory calls itself) stands for San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. I call it SONWGS, which stands for San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station. The waste from "SanO" has been building up since the first reactor opened in 1967. That unit operated until 1992, but nearly all its fuel remains on-site and is expected to stay there for the foreseeable future. (The proposed national repository, Yucca Mountain, has been all but canceled by the Obama administration and in any case, is inadequate -- and was more than a decade behind schedule when it was mothballed.)

The strongest of the recent earthquakes (and the only one I felt) was a 7.2, centered in northern Mexico, less than 100 miles from San Onofre. San Onofre is only built to withstand a 7.0 earthquake whose epicenter is no closer than about five miles away. That's hardly the same as a 7.2 earthquake directly underfoot. It's one thing to be shaken, it's another to be ripped apart.

It costs a lot to "over-engineer" a building, but nevertheless the assumption made at San Onofre is that it has been over-engineered to withstand at least a 7.5 trembler, which is much, much worse than a 7.0 earthquake. (On the logarithmic Richter Scale an 8.0 earthquake creates ten times the ground shaking of a 7.0.) Thus, the "experts" are routinely claiming that they are certain that San Onofre has been built to withstand five times more ground-shaking than it is actually designed to withstand! They delude themselves in many ways, and try to delude the public along with them.

Despite assurances, there is NO basis to assume San Onofre has been over-engineered at all, and every reason to think it might not survive a "design basis earthquake" (7.0). For example, many other buildings, built more recently, did NOT survive earthquakes with magnitudes LESS than their design basis. Building earthquake-resistant structures is an inexact science, if not pure art.

The other event which occurred recently, and made me think about possible outcomes of San Onofre's continued operation, was the premier run of a documentary, Return to Dwight and Nile. The documentary covers the 1978 crash -- mainly, the immediate aftermath -- of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 in North Park, San Diego, about 50 miles from San Onofre. Shown only a few miles from the crash site, the movie brought many in the audience to tears.

PSA Flight 182 was a Boeing 727 three-engine jet, packed with 135 souls on board, originating in Sacramento, the state capital, with a brief stopover in Los Angeles, the state's largest city. On final approach to Lindbergh Field in San Diego, the jet collided with a Cessna 172 which had inexplicably changed course from the heading Air Traffic Control (ATC) had given it. The jet did not inform ATC that it had lost sight of the Cessna, despite having been told by ATC to maintain visual traffic separation. The tower was not using radar even though it was available to them. Just prior to the accident joking and laughter can be heard on the Flight 182 cockpit voice recorder...

Famously, a person on the ground managed to snap two photos of the doomed and plummeting jetliner moments before impact. The photos show the plane at about a 50 degree angle to the ground, right wing down and in flames, visibly gashed. "Ma, I love yah" are the last words on the cockpit voice recorder, coming about one second after the captain told the passengers, "Brace yourself" and a few seconds after his last transmission to ATC: "Tower, we're going down, this is PSA."

Many of the passengers happened to be PSA employees and probably knew that bracing themselves wouldn't have helped. After the crash, pieces of bodies hung from trees and were in piles knee deep in the impact zone. The mushrooming cloud of black smoke was visible for miles. 144 people died altogether, including the two occupants of the single-engine prop plane and seven people on the ground.

The normal commercial airline route from Los Angeles to San Diego overflies San Onofre Nuclear (Waste) Generating Station. There is a small uncontrolled airport near San Onofre, from whence crazy people have sometimes stolen airplanes. From whence airplanes have sometimes taken off only to crash into the sea less than a mile from San Onofre.

In 2003, in Angola, Africa, someone STOLE a 727 jet! It was never recovered.

At any moment, San Onofre could be hit by an earthquake or by a commercial jetliner, falling uncontrollably or guided by terrorists. And it's simply not worth the risk.

San Onofre's nuclear waste cannot be safely contained or transported. Nor can it be easily or entirely or efficiently or (for that matter...) cost-effectively transmuted, let alone destroyed. Virtually all of the waste ever created at every nuclear power plant in America is still located on-site where it was created -- and NOT even in the famous "containment domes" (only the fuel in the operating reactor is inside the domes, not the waste). The waste currently being stored at San Onofre contains the equivalent potential radiological impact of more than 50,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. Each operating reactor contains about 1000 Hiroshima-sized bombs worth of radiation. Each year, about 50 bombs worth of plutonium is included in that production of radioactive "byproducts." Rogue country's nuclear power plants do the same...

The vulnerabilities increase daily as more and more nuclear waste piles up with nowhere to put it. Waste so deadly that one sugar-cube-sized chunk of it, if it were dispersed locally, would be enough to contaminate a medium-sized city for thousands of generations and fatally poison tens or hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions.

Waste so deadly that in official public documents describing "worst case scenarios" only a tiny fraction is released -- on the order of 0.001% or even 0.000001% of the total inventory of one shipment or one storage cask (and most of what is released is assumed to remain nearby, in chunks...).

When the atomic bomb was used against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many people died due to the immediate effects of the blast: First there is the intense broiling heat of the gamma radiation burst (which lasted only milliseconds). Then there comes an intestine-yanking, eyeball-popping, object-tossing, window-shard-making concussion wave. That's soon followed by tornado-force winds and the debris they carry, along with horizontal sheets of fire, which suck the oxygen out of the collapsing buildings. Then a rain of radioactive fallout, "hot" chunks, some as big as your thumb, fall from the sky, a black rain, an inescapable, choking dust.

Then, in the aftermath, the lack of proper medication for so many gravely-injured people kills thousands more... But it was the long-term effects of the radiation exposure which killed the most people and which is STILL killing people. And deforming them. And debilitating them. So far, hundreds of thousands have died from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki radiation. Radiation which will keep on killing, because some of the isotopes are very long-lived... and because genetic damage can appear many generations after exposure... and because there is no safe dose of radiation. None whatsoever.

Unlike conventional weapons, which only kill noncombatants who happen to be in the vicinity of the blast, uranium and plutonium weapons kill randomly for many millennia after they are used -- including so-called "depleted" uranium weapons, which are only "depleted" of one radioactive isotope of uranium, but not other radioactive isotopes. The use of uranium weapons in any form is truly a crime against all of humanity. So too is the use of nuclear power to generate electricity, or for propulsion for military vessels.

When Chernobyl exploded and spewed radiation into the water, air and soil globally, "only" dozens of people died from the blasts, the fires, and the gamma radiation at the power plant, and other immediate effects. The entire nuclear industry's success -- such as it is -- is based on the lie that these deaths were virtually the ONLY deaths from Chernobyl. Nuclear power proponents don't even acknowledge the continuing deaths of the "liquidators" -- the brave (though often compelled into service, and kept ignorant about the risks) Russian citizen-soldiers who smothered the flames and built the cement enclosure -- known as a sarcophagus -- around the stricken plant (which leaks and must be rebuilt, and which will need to be rebuilt many times over the coming millennia). The nuclear industry denies that anybody who survived those first few days after Chernobyl's "accident" was harmed in any way. But in fact it is an ongoing catastrophe.

Nuclear power proponents ignore all the damage to the local population around Chernobyl because they say all excess radiation fades to "background" dose levels, which, they say, are harmless. Wrong! Wrong because many types of man-made radioactive isotopes are especially good at getting inside the body, where they can do the most harm. These isotopes are rare or unheard-of in nature but are created in copious quantities in nuclear power plants. And wrong because "natural, background" radiation DOES cause cancer. Adding to the background radiation dose just causes MORE cancer.

According to peer-reviewed scientific studies which have been suppressed in the United States and by all nuclear nations, the real number of dead from Chernobyl may already be over one million, making it by far the worst industrial accident in history. And the death toll from Chernobyl will continue to climb for thousands of generations.

Cancers from a single (brief) high radiation exposure to a population tend to show up in waves: Various types of cancers often have "typical" latency periods before appearing -- they are now discovering types of cancers that only start to show up more than 50 years after exposure! Cancers from long-term exposures presumably also tend to have a latency period, but it's harder to define, and even harder to analyze.

Children in the areas surrounding Chernobyl are especially at risk, not only because of their much-greater sensitivity to radiation's harmful effects, but because they are much more likely to play in the dirt, and are closer to the "ground shine" that still occurs nearly a quarter of a century after the accident, over thousands of square miles of contaminated soil around Chernobyl. (Nevertheless, the most common pathway into the body for radionuclides from Chernobyl is currently ingestion of contaminated food and water.)

Chernobyl is in our blood, in our brains (not just figuratively) and in our flesh and bones. Chernobyl kills silently. We are ALL victims of Chernobyl. Chernobyl must never be repeated, yet another Chernobyl-size accident (or worse) is threatened daily by more than a thousand nuclear reactors, including military reactors and research reactors, both of which are just as dangerous as commercial reactors.

In the blink of an eye, reactor operators can make a fateful error. Pilots do. Submarine captains do. Presidents do. So naturally, one must assume that control room operators can and do, too. But even if they and everyone else were infallible, nature still has its say.

The tsunami sea wall at San Onofre is only about 30 feet high. Dry casks, filled with used reactor core assemblies, are stored along the coast, and are said to be effective under up to 50 feet of water -- but it was never properly tested, of course, or even asserted to be true under oath. In 2004 there was widespread evidence of tsunami waves greater than 60 feet. And in the past few years there have been widespread allegations of fraud and cover-ups in the dry cask construction business, including at San Onofre.

Nuclear power is an expensive excess. We don't need it because there are safer ways to get electricity, which is, itself, only a transport method for getting energy to do work wherever we happen to need it or want it. There is no intrinsic reason our electricity must be generated by one source over any other. The cleanest possible energy source should be used, and nuclear power has no place in any proper energy portfolio. It's yesterday's solution that didn't work then, and doesn't work now.

Energy conservation (such as a widespread and rapid switch to L.E.D. lights, for instance) combined with pumped energy storage, offshore wind farms, solar panels on rooftops, and a variety of other renewable energy methods would rejuvenate our economy, eliminate excess CO2 production, reduce our risk, eliminate future costs of handling nuclear waste we don't make, and promote the public welfare, as required by law and common sense.

Like most of the world's nuclear power plants, San Onofre is old and dilapidated. It's falling apart. And even if it weren't, even if it were shiny and new, the combination of San Onofre's incredibly toxic, unbelievably unstable, unquestionably immoral, and undoubtedly uneconomic (in the long run), lethal waste amidst millions of mostly-unaware people and "routine" events like earthquakes and airplane crashes dooms Southern California for no good reason.

It's time to shut San Onofre and all of the other nuclear power plants for good.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

The author has studied nuclear power for many decades, and has had a fascination for aviation and aircraft handling characteristics, as well as accident statistics, for even longer. He also writes award-winning educational science tutorials for The Animated Software Company.

Note: This post is dedicated to the late Polish President Lech Kaczynski and the 95 other victims when his plane went down recently... Also to the victims they intended to honor rather than join at Katyn. To the Polish people, who know the tragedies that can occur from mechanical and human failure, and to the liquidators of Chernobyl, who also know it all to well, and to so many others...

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

A miracle or a meltdown... one or the other...

March 24th, 2010

Dear Readers,

Tonight in Dana Point, California, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be holding its annual hearing on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station's recent performance, which has been lousy. They'll give San Onofre an overall "B" where it should be getting a failing grade. San Onofre should never have opened, and should be closed for good immediately. For safety. For economics. Forever.

At the hearing, the public will be allowed to speak for two, maybe three minutes each. Nothing said by the public will be considered. Nothing will be under oath. Nothing will be officially recorded. Only a few reporters will show up, who will dutifully interview the spokespeople for San Onofre and the NRC, and perhaps one or two of the most staid activists, and then they'll report whatever platitudes are said as if they are facts. The plant is safe, they'll say.

But the plant isn't safe. Not even close. A trillion-dollar accident, costing America a million lives, waits quietly for the perfect opportunity... The plant is a nightmare, and numerous workers from the plant have come forward in recent months, to myself, to other activists, to the media, and to the NRC, at great risk to their careers (in fact, usually knowing ANY exposure will mean the end of their careers) to say that THEY are scared.

Right now at San Onofre, one reactor, Unit Two, is down for a major overhaul that's taking much longer than expected, and the remaining reactor, Unit Three (Unit One was shut down in the early 1990s) is conserving fuel for the summer by operating at half power. After months and months of projected start dates (all missed), suddenly the expected start date for Unit Two has become "proprietary."

One cannot help but think they do not expect to have Unit Two up and running reliably anytime soon, and they are hoping they can keep Unit Three running until Unit Two is restarted, because there is nothing they fear more than to have both reactors down for extended periods of time. People might get used to it, especially since the lights would probably stay on. And later, epidemiological studies can more easily use those times to show that YES, nuclear power plants DO harm children and other living things even when they don't have an accident.

The overhaul project was supposed to take six to ten weeks, but it's been over six months. They were about to start the reactor without an unfueled water test. They ALMOST skipped that final test, they were so sure of themselves. They almost went straight to running the reactor with fuel in it!

But people within the company complained. Despite the fear of retaliation, they complained.

And the company relented, and did the test. And it didn't work right!

Even so, one of the San Onofre executives recently told a local activist that he expects the plant will continue running for 60 MORE years -- a total of one hundred years!

This in a state which banned NEW reactor construction decades ago, until a solution to the waste problem has been found. Instead, the utilities just keep rebuilding the old reactors, to get around the state law! At the time the ban was enacted, the nuclear waste was supposed to be removed soon after it was taken out of the reactor. But it wasn't. Virtually all the waste from all of California's reactors is still in California.

And what of the federal government's ACTUAL attempts at nuclear waste management? Utter failures: Yucca Mountain would be a disaster if it ever got built (it's currently "on hold"). Hanford, Washington, the nation's main military nuclear waste dump and the only high level waste dump America has, is considered by many to be the most polluted place on earth, and if it isn't, God help those who live near whatever is.

To keep a nuclear reactor designed for 20 years of operation -- perhaps 40 -- operating for one hundred years will be very difficult, if not impossible. Parts unknown to anybody fail imperceptibly. Constant vigilance would seem to be the order of the day, but true vigilance is impossible: Not only is much of the reactor off-limits for months at a time during operation, and difficult to get at in any case, but vigilance costs money. At San Onofre, every old pipe they tap on falls apart. So to as great an extent as possible, they simply don't tap.

What about old wiring? Nobody at the plant is worried about it! When a transformer or breaker or something explodes or shorts out, they figure they can just emergency-shut-down the reactor and replace whatever is damaged. The fire department will come put out the (non-nuclear) fire -- like last time (which bent the turbine shaft, and took five months to fix).

Old pipes? No worries! Even if they don't actually know where all the pipes are (they don't) or what condition they're in, they don't care. If tritium leaks into the ground, nobody will notice until they dismantle the reactor (like what happened with Unit One). And if the deadly tritium leaks out, but instead of accumulating in the ground it evaporates into the air, no one will notice at all! (And since tritium is usually found as part of an otherwise-normal water molecule, it is excessively good at simply evaporating, thus destroying the evidence of its escape from the facility.)

Old thinking? Who cares? The NRC actually believes that nuclear power is still good "baseline" power for America, even though offshore wind turbines combined with hydro-energy storage ("pumped storage") works perfectly well at no significant risk to the environment. Solar power is far cheaper than nuclear power (even ignoring all of nuclear's subsidies and hidden costs) in a very reasonable time frame. There are energy systems available for use, well-studied by qualified scientists, just waiting for the funding breaks that nuclear gets every day, let alone what it got in its heyday. But they don't need as much, since renewable energy doesn't even NEED a "Price-Anderson Act" insurance fraud to operate. Simple business insurance will do. Renewables don't need the unkept waste management promises. They certainly don't need to "mitigate" their cost to the environment, since they ARE the preferred mitigation! I'm referring specifically to things like Atmospheric Vortex Engines, Wave and Tide Energy systems, and other things the NRC doesn't know about and won't learn about. After all, you can't be an expert in everything, and they aren't.

And the Department of Energy? They support nuclear power, as always. Their standard line is that, since the NRC says the plants are safe, they assume they are safe, and see the plants as a benign source of energy. No consideration of all the issues the NRC won't even consider, such as renewable energy alternatives, or the science of radiation damage to fetuses. These are beyond the NRC's, and the DOE's, areas of expertise (the NRC has NO medical doctors on their staff, and certainly no pediatricians specializing in radiation damage to infants, for instance).

San Onofre is a tremendous risk to the environment, and every day it operates, it leaks deadly, carcinogenic radioactive effluent into our air, soil, and water. It piles even more of these carcinogens up on our coast, with nowhere on earth to put the waste. It just piles up, waiting for a disaster. Most years, San Onofre's owners make billions of dollars from this criminal arrangement. This year things aren't going so well.

Right now, San Onofre is limping along at 25% of capacity. The plant could even be shut down by its owners due to economic reasons (that's what shut down Unit One). Their employees are expensive, their new equipment, which cost about a billion dollars to install, doesn't work because it wasn't built or assembled properly, the employees at the plant -- even the hordes of new ones -- falsify records, they are intimidated and intimidating, they poison the atmosphere with their lies about being a clean energy source, as well as with radioactive particles.... San Onofre is costing their parent company, Edison International, a fortune just to stay in business in the hopes they can get things squared away for another 20 years of high-risk, dirty, dangerous operation... or maybe 60.

Is it worth it? They've tried everything to cut costs, from delaying virtually all maintenance until the last possible minute, or until a failure has actually occurred, to forcing every employee who wins a lawsuit against them for a radiation-induced cancer to sign a promise not to talk to anyone about their agreement -- these things cost money!

In short, San Onofre can't even operate at a profit when the government promises both to pay for any catastrophic accident damage that might occur (reducing their insurance costs from prohibitive to piddling) and further promises to take all the waste off San Onofre's hands somehow, someday. San Onofre is even suing the government over the waste issue, since it's costing them money to build semi-permanent and highly-dangerous dry-cask storage systems in the meantime.

Other cost-cutting measures have occurred at San Onofre besides fix-on-fail, such as giving up on finding a permanent home for the Unit One Reactor Pressure Vessel, which sits on the crowded site spewing radiation to the universe right off of Interstate I-5, as do Unit Two's old steam generators. Nobody wants this crud, and the cost of disposal is only going up. So instead, such things just sit there. And they aren't one ten-millionth as radioactive as the so-called "spent" fuel, which, pound-for-pound, is the deadliest stuff on earth.

If they can't get the new steam generators in Unit Two to work properly any time soon, or at all, they may not get permission to replace the leaky steam generators in Unit Three. Despite the federally-funded push for new reactors, and new reactor designs, nuclear power is not working out for the corporations who bought up reactors across the country. Generically they are financially unstable corporations. For example, the owner of Vermont Yankee is trying to create a new limited-liability corporation to avoid upcoming decommissioning costs for Vermont Yankee and half a dozen other nuclear power plants, and to avoid other liabilities. It's not very profitable to be a nuke operator these days, even with all the additional "gimmes" many reactors enjoy, such as rate guarantees and stifled competition.

Of course, the NRC doesn't see it that way. They think "SONGS" is singing a fine tune, humming along at quarter power. The NRC thinks the managerial / behavioral / team player problems that San Onofre is experiencing can be solved by showing minor improvements in their human performance metrics charts. Any improvement is considered proof that the problem is solvable, and to just keep going. Any decline just shows that "more needs to be done."

The NRC doesn't see that there is a culture of defiance and cover-up, of lies to the public and lies to each other, of peer pressure and hidden fears and doubt at ALL nuclear power plants, and even within their own staff! They try to hire smart people. But smart people ask: What if the activists are right? Why ARE so many highly respected scientists dead-set AGAINST nuclear power? Sure, there are a few highly qualified nuclear power supporters. But they are almost invariably specialists associated with nuclear energy. For the most part, nuclear supporters are NOT geneticists, epidemiologists, microbiologists, physicians.... humanitarians, philosophers, poets, artists... And they are not "Generalized Thinkers" who try to assess the "Big Picture." They are specialists who have, intentionally or unintentionally, MISSED the big picture.

In an Op-Ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Energy Secretary / pro-nuker Steven Chu admired "Small Modular Reactors" (SMRs) as "affordable" (they aren't) and says they will be "plug and play upon arrival" (I doubt it). He estimated their earliest arrival at ten years in the future, but I wouldn't put money on that time frame (he expects Wall Street to, though). These proposed new reactors will create hazardous fission and activation products just like their big brothers, and there remains no waste solution, because radioactive waste destroys any container you put it in. Even many layers of gold would not suffice forever (though it would be a good start)...

Every nuclear power plant, including Chu's proposed SMRs, are weapons for terrorists and other enemies of humanity. They are prone to failure and even constant vigilance clearly wouldn't be enough -- if it existed.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

Monday, March 8, 2010

The Chernobyl catastrophe and its effects on language, health, politics, and the environment

March 8th, 2010

Dear Readers,

Nearly 24 years later, Chernobyl is still a dirty place, a dirty word.

Chernobyl has almost surely killed hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps already it is more than a million. And over time, it will kill many more. In fact, many estimates are that the vast majority who will be killed or harmed by Chernobyl were not even born at the time of the accident.

This is the legacy denied by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI, the public relations arm of the American nuclear industry) and other nuclear supporters -- including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organization (WHO, which submits all its regulations to the IAEA for approval).

IAEA and WHO admit to a few thousand dead. The NEI claims that only 38, or "under 50" people were killed due to Chernobyl (their exact guess changes now and then, but never by enough). But the truth, like the poisons, seeps out anyway. A new book about Chernobyl was recently published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The book's esteemed authors collected several thousand scientific studies about the after-effects of the Chernobyl meltdown. Until now these studies have never seen the light of day in America, mainly because both America and the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as all the other nuclear nations of the world, do not want this information "scaring" the public.

It IS scary, but it's worth knowing!

The book, painstakingly edited in English by Dr. Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger, is both shocking and depressing (this author had the honor of co-writing an article with Dr. Sherman in 2009, published in Friends Journal). The book is 335 pages long, and nearly every page has about two dozen studies described briefly (more than 33,000 studies of Chernobyl's effects have been done; they could not all be reviewed or included in the book). It's stupefying. One goes numb. One can't believe the figures (and occasionally, in part due to translation errors from the European mathematical conventions to American notation, the figures undoubtedly ARE wrong). But taken as a group, the evidence is overwhelming.

So many numbers to absorb!

But fear not: The authors have thankfully provided dozens and dozens of graphical charts.

After a while, when you turn to a new page and see a new chart, you can put your finger on "1986" virtually every time (some effects are delayed). Things start to go wrong in dozens of countries: Birth rates go down, perhaps due to people being cautious about having children right after Chernobyl, or perhaps due to unrecorded miscarriages, or both. Age at time of death is down, childhood leukemia is up. The list goes on and on and on.

Chernobyl has killed as many as a hundred times more people than the next-biggest industrial disaster in human history, generally considered to be the mass chemical poisoning in Bhopal, India in 1984. Chernobyl has probably killed more people than the atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, including their horrible (and continuing) aftermath.

To this day, the nuclear industry pretends that Chernobyl killed only as many people as might die in a train wreck, or maybe in a bus going over a mountainside. Sad, but nothing substantial.

Chernobyl kills every which way imaginable. But the NEI and other pro-nuclear advocates only count obvious, unmistakable, indisputably-attributable deaths. For every death they acknowledge, their methodologies inevitably miss tens of thousands of deaths that were, in reality, caused by Chernobyl. One could dismiss their estimates out-of-hand as being the work of fools, but the problem with doing that is that a lot of fools believe those estimates.

It's the biggest lie of the 21st Century, since trillions of dollars are being spent based on the idea that nuclear power is "safe" and "clean." In reality, all designs of reactors -- new and old (and old with new names and minor refinements) -- are capable of releasing huge quantities of radioactive isotopes into the environment. Certainly, most designs are different from Chernobyl. But none are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps an accident in America is less likely, but there is NO significant evidence of that. There is only evidence that America has been very, very LUCKY not to have experienced a full-blown meltdown yet. (Google Davis-Besse 2002 for one example of a "close call.")

The more reactors we build (if we build ANY more) and the longer we let our old reactors continue to operate, the greater the likelihood that a Chernobyl-size disaster will happen here. Many U.S. reactors are now well beyond their designed-for years of operation, but the old clunkers are kept going by a corrupt regulatory system that refuses to do its job.

And then there is the spent fuel. A catastrophe just as big or BIGGER than Chernobyl could happen in any spent fuel pool, or any dry fuel storage cask, at any time. These imperfect and inadequate storage methods are subject to earthquake or construction failures, as well as terrorists, tornadoes, tsunamis, even asteroids! No one can rightly claim that our nuclear facilities are secured -- not even against rogue employees. We have built the seeds of our own destruction into our environment. We should be reducing the risk, not increasing it.

But what if we are led to believe that the "disaster" would be minor? What if we are told that wildlife is flourishing in the "exclusion zone" around Chernobyl, now that there are no humans? Would it make us happy? Or would we look for the underlying facts: Birds and other animals can't read signs saying "KEEP OUT!" (in any language). So yes, there is wildlife in the "exclusion zone," but there is strong evidence that many of the creatures are dying when they get there. They don't reproduce properly, and more birds and other animals from the nearby, less-contaminated areas come in to replace them, and this just keeps on happening. Migratory species pass through, eat Chernobyl's plants and animals, which are often highly irradiated, and then leave their droppings (or die) elsewhere, in a continuous, deadly, but gradual cycle.

Chernobyl had a poor design. The operators were running unauthorized experiments without proper safety equipment ready. There was no containment dome. Well, that had pluses, actually. In fact, it saved the day in some sense, since they were able to pour sand, lead, and other materials directly onto the hot reactor from helicopters flying overhead, through the invisible radioactive plume. Otherwise, the reactor might have burnt completely. As it was, "only" about 3 to 5% of the reactor core was dispersed into the environment. The rest sits there to this day, still hot thermally and radioactively, still seeping nuclear poisons into the ecosystem, untouched for the most part. Covered once with a poorly-built concrete sarcophagus, it is soon to be covered again. Right now, water gets in, and then radioactive crud oozes out. Radioactive gasses seep constantly from the numerous cracks in the "vault".

What once were some of the richest agricultural areas in the world are now foraged by scavengers: Poor, uneducated people who drift into the "exclusion zone" that surrounds the plant, where only authorized people taking proper protective measures are supposed to go.

Chernobyl's pollution is still spreading. The soil holds the cesium and the strontium and other radioactive elements, until years of rain bring them down to the roots of deep-root trees, which take them up to the surface again. Then a wildfire burns those trees, and a cloud of radioactive crud is wafted onto some other community downwind from Chernobyl. Of course the dose will be lower, but the damage will be more widespread.

Currently, most of the radiation doses that the residents of the contaminated regions are receiving are from the food they eat and the water they drink (mostly the food), not the air they breathe (although that too is poisoned).

Chernobyl changed the definitions of words and gave us many new phrases which the book discusses.

Perhaps the most well-known new term is: "Children of Chernobyl."

Each year, a few hundred young children, usually with thyroid problems but always with health problems, are brought to "healthy" environments such as Southern California, USA (where this author lives and got bladder cancer a few years ago). There is always a lot of media publicity about the children, which is good for the organizers, fun for the children, and useful for the public, who are thus reminded each year of the horrible events that occurred in Chernobyl 24 years ago next month. The downside is that the public is led to believe that helping these few means the problem is being properly handled. There is, for the most part, no assistance for most of the millions who have been harmed.

Normally, and thankfully, only a small fraction of children are born with health problems. In areas that were heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's invisible poisons (invisible, but relatively easy to measure IF you have the money, the time, and the equipment), 80% of the children are born with health problems. In very heavily contaminated areas, 98% are not healthy. One of the "solutions" recommended in the book -- presumably out of desperation -- is better testing of fetuses, and abortions if the findings are severe enough.

Another new term that came out of Chernobyl is: "Liquidators." Liquidators are the people who went into the reactor to put out the fire, or flew over it -- people who put their lives on the line to save their families, their country, and our environment. There were over 800,000 liquidators. Now they are dying in droves, dying early, of cancer, heart disease, leukemia, and a general degradation of their body organs. (That's what radiation does at the very least: It ages you.)

Another new term that came out of Chernobyl is "Chernobyl AIDS." One of the main ways that radiation damages the body is that it weakens the immune system, leading to death from infectious diseases that the person might have otherwise survived.

"Chernobyl babies" are children who have serious malformations such as organs outside their bodies, shortened limbs, or no brain (only a brain stem, so they breathe, but can never think). Some have essentially no bones -- they are called "jellyfish children" and the only other place they have been seen was on the Marshall Islands after nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. The children of liquidators are especially likely to be "Chernobyl babies."

What a thing to look forward to if YOUR nuclear power plant melts down, or if its spent fuel burns up, or if some other catastrophe causes another massive spill! Or if your local nuclear power plant just leaks too much tritium, like so many do.

If you live in the northern hemisphere (as most of us do), Chernobyl is blamed for about 2% of what is now called your "natural background radiation." But one should not be too encouraged to hear that it is "only" 2%. For one thing, it is reasonable to believe that the background radiation, which is unavoidable, is also the root cause of many cancers which have no other obvious cause. Second, the actual value for some places may be much higher than the "average" for the whole planet (or a little lower). There are millions of hectares of farmland which still have significantly higher radiation levels as a result of Chernobyl.

Monitoring what is being fed to people who already live in contaminated zones is one of the most important tools for protecting them from the damages of radiation. Needless to say, it's expensive and is rarely done. Another problem is that companies which know they are "over the limit" with some of their supplies mix the contaminated food with less radioactive food so the average dose is legally permissible. But the same amount of radionuclides are being dispersed into the population. It's an inexcusable crime that happens all the time.

More new phrases and meanings:

The "Red Forest" is the area immediately surrounding Chernobyl -- hundreds of square miles -- where the trees have turned color for some unknown reason.

The "Chernobyl effect" is an increased thyroid cancer rate. There is also an increased mortality rate if you do get the disease (perhaps because your entire body is already degraded by the radioactive poisons).

We all are degraded by Chernobyl. Chernobyl's radioactive isotopes continue to invade us all. The general term for what Chernobyl has done is "geobotanical catastrophe."

Like the "Children of Chernobyl," "Physicians of Chernobyl," "Widows of Chernobyl" and "Liquidators Unions" are large groups of people who have been adversely affected by the tragedy.

"Chernobyl limbs" are deformities of the arms and/or legs, more common in the more contaminated zones.

"Chernobyl heart" is a malformed heart which does not do its job properly.

"Radiation in utero" is the poisoning of a fetus in the womb, also an ongoing problem.

Other new medical terms arising from the Chernobyl disaster include "vegetovascular dystonia," a nervous system breakdown, "incorporated long-life radionuclides," and "acute inhalation lesions of the upper respiratory tract" which are mainly seen in liquidators, and include a combination of: "rhinitis, throat tickling, dry cough, difficulty breathing, and shortness of breath, owing to the effect of inhaled radionuclides, including 'hot particles'."

Chernobyl illnesses are no fun. "Typical complaints from liquidators" include: "severe headaches, not relieved by medication, impaired memory of current events, general weakness, fatigue, diminished capacity for work, generalized sweating, palpitations, bone and joint pains and aches that interfere with their sleep, sporadic loss of consciousness, sensation of fever or heat, difficulty in thinking, heart seizures, flashes, loss of vision, and numbness in hands and feet."

Chernobyl's tendrils of poison have only begun to spread. Inadequate containment measures ensure that more of the original reactor core will leak out of the site, into the environment, and into our bodies. Chernobyl's radiation has damaged hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, and continues to do so.

The truth about the Chernobyl catastrophe is being systematically hidden from the people, especially in every country with nuclear power, by their governments and by their nuclear industries. It is good to read the truth, but it hardly feels like a breath of fresh air.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA (images added 2025)

Hoffman is an educational software developer and the author of The Code Killers, a technical guide to the nuclear industry. The Code Killers is available as a free download from the author's web site: www.acehoffman.org .

URL to obtain a copy of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment:

[Unfortunately, CCPE is no longer available from NYAS]

Written by Alexey V. Yablokov (Center for Russian Environmental Policy, Moscow, Russia), Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko (Institute of Radiation Safety, Minsk, Belarus). Consulting Editor Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger (Environmental Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan). Volume 1181, December 2009, 335 Pages

Ralph Nader: No Nukes (includes comments about the book): http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/13

Karl Grossman talks about the book (a more complete review from Karl will be forthcoming): http://www.counterpunch.org/grossman02172010.html

Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

Monday, February 22, 2010

If you think nuclear power is safe and clean (like the President does), think again (like the President should)!

Date: February 22nd, 2010

Subject: If you think nuclear power is safe and clean (like the President does), think again (like the President should)!

(Note: This is a correction to yesterday's newsletter, which incorrectly referred to Finland's new reactor as an AP-1000. It is an AREVA EPR, and its construction is, indeed, wracked with scandal, cost over-runs, fraud, lies, and propaganda. The author regrets the error and has deleted the paragraph referring to the Finnish reactor from this version.)

Dear Readers,

President Obama thinks he can jumpstart a new generation of safe and clean nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power is neither safe nor clean, nor cheap, nor useful, nor vital, nor good for America. And no "new" nuclear power plant design will make nuclear power any of these things.

There are "safe, clean" ways to obtain electrical energy for everybody. Obama paid them lip service in his State of the Union speech last month. But he is actually giving billions of dollars to nuclear power -- a gift from each of us, whether we like it or not. Many of us don't like it, and the rest of us might want to understand why not.

Obama's nuclear funding bill is being presented as a jobs program, but since nuclear-related construction jobs average higher salaries than many other jobs (including photovoltaic or wind turbine installation jobs -- which still pay pretty well), you get fewer jobs created for every dollar invested.

And more of the money goes out of the country, too. Many major parts of any new reactor, including many of the largest steel forged pieces and a lot of the electronic control hardware, will be made overseas, in dozens of different countries. Nuclear power plants are NOT "Made In America."

Once the plants are running the jobs are worse than ever: Every employee at a nuclear power plant is under stress not to be the cause of some trillion-dollar, million-death accident. And not to get themselves too irradiated to be allowed to work at the plant anymore.

This stress actually causes them to lie about their mistakes. Everyone is in "cover-up mode." Employees hide things from their managers for fear of retaliation, and everyone hides things from the federal inspectors. Since on average there is about one inspector on site for every 500 employees, they miss nearly everything that actually happens... When the inspectors do see problems, they help hide everything from the media and the public.

It's a dangerous cycle of lies and cover-ups and it happens at EVERY nuclear power plant.

To make matters worse, the official policy is that the nuclear industry is largely a "self-regulated" industry. The nuclear industry does not get inspected by the normal government agencies such as OSHA -- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission handles everything, due to special laws just for nuclear power plants which keep the other federal agencies out. State agencies have little or no jurisdiction, either.

The courts have abdicated responsibility, too. They say that the Federal regulators can make the decisions -- that nuclear power is too complicated for the courts to understand, so anything the NRC and/or the Department of Energy (DOE) says about nuclear power is considered to be the truth. There's no arguing in court with an NRC or DOE ruling! More scientifically accurate information will not be considered, and experts (even if you could afford them) cannot appear before the court to support your case.

Nuclear power plants all over the country -- at least 27 of our 104 operating reactors -- are leaking tritium into our water, soil, and air. Tritium is "a marker for other radionuclides" and a very hazardous radionuclide itself.

It's worse overseas, of course. Here, bribes like those my former Congressman (Randall "Duke" Cunningham) accepted will (or at least might) land you in jail, as it did Cunningham. In China, where more nuclear power plants are being built than everywhere else on earth combined, such bribes are a routine part of the process and no large project moves forward without them. But the punishment -- if the Chinese government decides you should be punished -- is likely to be death.

Here in the United States, to move a bad project forward, you have to dupe the public, using persuasive advertising and anti-environmentalist propaganda by people such as Patrick Moore, whose brief stint at Greenpeace has forever branded him -- to some people -- as a "good guy" who speaks for the environment. In fact, Moore has been well paid to speak for earth-plundering corporations for decades, culminating in years of financial support directly from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the lobbying, advertising, and media outreach arm of the nuclear industry. Each year, Moore is quoted in hundreds of articles, endorsing nuclear power. And virtually every time, his decades-old Greenpeace connection is mentioned (and usually inflated), but his current NEI connection is not.

How did America get to the point where it would even consider building a new generation of nuclear power plants? In China you can blame all kinds of things, including a lack of any semblance of democracy. But in America, blame a lack of education first. Go out on the street and randomly ask people to describe what "tritium" is. Will one in one hundred even be able to say: "It's a radioactive isotope of hydrogen"? Not a chance! Maybe not even one in one thousand. This lack of basic knowledge among the voters makes it very easy to dupe the public. One of the most abused principles of government in America is that the voting public should be properly informed about the issues. But, even the president is not properly educated about nuclear issues and won't let those with the proper knowledge have access to him. The nuclear corporation CEOs, of course, can walk right in.

And the waste -- let's not forget about the waste issues. The Yucca Mountain scientific team was told they could study AND SUGGEST TO CONGRESS any alternative if it was technologically better. The only thing they were forbidden from spending time and money considering was doing the same sort of underground, monitored storage in a different location -- Kansas, for instance, or Alaska.

The Yucca Mountain team looked at all the things that Obama's new committee is going to look at. Rocketing the waste to the sun, putting it in underwater subduction zones, vitrification, on-site storage -- everything.

As to reprocessing, that's just a lousy -- and expensive -- idea. The most lethal part of the waste is NOT the uranium or even the plutonium. It's the radioactive isotopes of elements which mimic biologically-useful isotopes of those same or similar elements. These are mostly beta emitters with relatively short half-lives -- the newly-radioactive results of the nuclear reaction. Radioactive isotopes of things like strontium (which the body treats like calcium), iodine, and hydrogen. When you reprocess the waste, you don't eliminate these things, you just separate the uranium and plutonium (for bombs, if you want bombs) from them. So reprocessing, even if you can reuse some of the uranium, doesn't solve the waste problem. Additionally, reprocessing is chemically very polluting as well as invariably creating a new and very expensive clean-up nightmare.

The slightly new reactor design that Obama wants the taxpayer to fund -- the "AP-1000" -- which the nuclear industry chooses to call Gen III, practically guarantees cost over-runs. For example, they designed a less expensive containment dome, but the new design is untested and might not work (it's been described as "metal plates between layers of concrete" instead of a mesh of rebar embedded in the concrete). It's cheaper to build now, but will it last 60 years or 80 years, and THEN work when it's needed?

The containment dome is not the only acknowledged uncertainty in the new design: Technicians are also worried that the safety systems are not separated properly from the normal operating systems, and therefore a fire could destroy both. (Something similar happened at Browns Ferry in the mid 1970s.)

Where will the money come from, that these loan guarantees guarantee? From the Feds -- that is, from the taxpayer! The funds will be distributed through banks, so they can make a profit on the transaction. Without government guarantees and government money to invest, those banks would not put one red cent into nuclear power.

Many of the cost overruns will probably be paid by the ratepayers. And we'll all pay for accidents out of our own pockets and with our health. Liability for catastrophic nuclear accidents is practically zilch, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, an archaic law allowing government to evade responsibility for its crimes. All countries operating nuclear power plants have some form of the Price-Anderson Act -- it's especially useful for evading responsibility for damage to neighboring countries.

In Obama's new nuke bill, a few million dollars has even been set aside to fight activist lawsuits. They feel a drop in the bucket is all it will take to fight the truth, probably because they know how many things are already stacked against us: The courts, the federal agencies, the corporations, the money.

But one thing Obama has clearly already miscalculated is how many people think this is a bad idea. Around the country, environmental groups which have been relatively quiet on the subject of nuclear power are decrying Obama's nuclear madness. And even the economic watchdogs are speaking out loud and clear: This is no jobs program! This doesn't solve our energy problem! It doesn't solve our balance of trade problem!

It certainly doesn't solve our nuclear waste problem (it makes it worse), and it doesn't solve anything else. The way to solve the over-use of fossil fuels is with renewable energy, not nuclear power.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA (images added 2025)

The author has been investigating nuclear power for more than 30 years. He has been searching for a reason to like it for that entire time so that he, too, could make a fortune from NEI (and their predecessors), but has come up empty-handed. His 2008 book on nuclear technology and its problems is available as a free download from his web site: www.acehoffman.org

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Yankee terrorists...

February 14th, 2010

Dear Readers,

Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant is leaking copious quantities of tritium, a relatively rare (in nature) and extremely hazardous radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium can be absorbed through the skin, as well as ingested or inhaled.

Water from test wells around the Vermont Yankee reactor has over 2 million picoCuries of tritium per liter -- more than 100 times the legal limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for tritium in drinking water, which is 20,000 picoCuries of tritium per liter (20,000 picoCuries equals about 740 radioactive decays per second (740 Becquerel ("Bq")).

Two million picoCuries per liter is nearly as poisonous as the 2.7 million picoCuries per liter that occurs in the chemical brew of a nuclear reactor's primary coolant loop.

Nuclear reactor operators are allowed to release a small fraction of a teaspoon of tritium offsite per year. But even that tiny amount must be diluted in billions of gallons of water to meet the legal standards for drinking water. If the water in your body was polluted with tritium at the legal limit, it would contain about 400 times the average concentration of tritium in the human body.

Tritium has a half-life of about 12.3 years, meaning half of any given quantity of tritium will decay in that time and in the next 12.3 years, half of what is left will spontaneously decay, and so on. It takes about 20 half-lifes (about 250 years) for any spilled tritium to be eliminated from the environment.

By definition all hydrogen has one proton, but the tritium isotope also has two neutrons in its core and is unstable -- radioactive. The most common isotope of hydrogen is stable and has no neutrons. Hydrogen with one neutron in its core, called deuterium, is also stable.

The body cannot detect the difference between radioactive tritium and stable isotopes of hydrogen (nor can it distinguish radioactive isotopes of any other elements from stable isotopes of the same (or chemically similar) elements).

When a tritium atom decays, it releases a beta particle. Beta particles are normal electrons, except they are traveling at very high speed (within a few percent of the speed of light). The beta particle immediately starts to slow down as it passes things with electrical charges -- other negatively-charged electrons and positively-charged protons.

Beta particles only exist for a fraction of a second. Tritium's beta particle typically travels less than a millimeter through human tissue before it is slowed to normal electron speeds and is captured by something needing an extra electron.

The nuclear industry likes to point out that tritium's beta decay particle is a "low energy beta particle." That's true, as beta particles go. But here's what the nuclear industry doesn't like to tell you about "low energy beta particles": They are essentially just as dangerous as high-energy beta particles because nearly all the damage from a beta particle comes at the end of its travel, when it's slowed down so much that it stays near the last few thousand atoms it passes long enough to have a significant effect on each of them in turn as it passes.

Since radiation damage is often measured in total energy dumped into a given quantity of tissue, by that measure, low-energy beta particles are actually proportionately MORE damaging! Just the opposite of what the industry claims!

When the beta particle is released, one of the neutrons in the core of the tritium atom converts to a proton. With two protons and one neutron in the nucleus of the atom, the element is now a stable isotope of helium, not hydrogen. Chemically, helium won't combine with much of anything. Certainly not with a molecule comprising one hydrogen and one oxygen atom, which is what's left of the water molecule the tritium atom probably was originally a part of. The remaining "OH" molecule is a potent "free radical" which can damage your body until it is absorbed by something: Vitamin C or some other anti-oxidant, for instance.

Tritium is called an "activation product." Vermont Yankee is not only leaking tritium: Within the millions of gallons of chemically-treated and highly irradiated primary coolant loop water that has been spewing out of Vermont Yankee -- probably for years, maybe even for decades -- are undoubtedly a whole rainbow of radioactive elements, including long-lived isotopes of elements such as iodine and technetium and many others.

Fuel assemblies in nuclear reactors commonly fail by cracking slightly. The zirconium shielding deteriorates and the radioactive uranium gets out, and so does anything else inside. What's inside, besides the unfissioned uranium, are "fission products." Fission is what they are trying to do inside the reactor, enough to boil water but not enough to melt down the reactor. For every uranium atom that is fissioned, there are usually two fission products that result, each of which is radioactive and each of which weighs, on average, about half as much as the original uranium atom. All fission products are radioactive because they invariably have too many neutrons to be stable.

When setting standards, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) generally does not aggregate radioactive components in your drinking water. Just because you have one contaminant in your water doesn't mean you don't have many others there as well. In the case of Vermont Yankee, the pollutants presumably include strontium, cesium, and many other radioactive elements. But as long as each one has been diluted to Below Regulatory Concern (BRC), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) doesn't care, and EPA doesn't care, and the nuclear industry certainly doesn't care. Just dilute it, and, as far as they're concerned, it disappears. Such thinking is self-serving, insulting, dangerous, and archaic. It flies in the face of the standard, accepted scientific theory that radiation damage follows an "LNT" ("Linear, No Threshold") pattern. (In fact, some experts believe low levels of radiation cause proportionately more damage. And admittedly, there will probably always be a few "experts" (usually well-paid by the nuclear industry) who "honestly" believe that low doses of radiation are actually beneficial, regardless of how randomly those doses are administered.)

The only way to clean up the radiation at Vermont Yankee is to close the plant, build a big pit somewhere where it doesn't rain much, line it with a lining that will last practically forever (good luck finding these things) and move all of the waste (including the dirt and concrete) there. But instead, right now, Vermont Yankee's tritium, strontium, iodine, technetium, and everything else WILL get into the drinking water in Vermont and into the Connecticut River. It WILL kill children and other living things in the communities downwind and downstream of the reactor, which potentially includes anywhere on Earth. Radiation from Vermont Yankee has undoubtedly been killing people for years, and it will continue to kill for many years to come even if the reactor is shut down permanently, as it should be.

Vermont Yankee is one of the oldest reactors in America. So what's happening there -- namely, it is falling apart and it's owners don't want to spend any more than they have to to keep it going -- is a precursor of what's to come at other reactors. The owner (Entergy, which is trying to sell it) claimed in sworn testimony to the people and elected officials of Vermont that Vermont Yankee was NOT leaking tritium, but they knew it was. Then they said it wasn't leaking MUCH tritium, but they knew it was. Now they say the tritium is harmless, but any sane person knows that's a lie, too.

In addition to the leaks, Vermont Yankee also is piling up enormous quantities of used reactor cores at the site. One third of the reactor core assemblies are removed every eighteen months to two years. These irradiated "hot" fuel assemblies are extremely hazardous -- ten million times more hazardous than when they were placed inside the reactor (approximately).

By now there is about a thousand tons of "spent fuel" (what an innocuous-sounding name!) located at Vermont Yankee. A fraction of a milligram is a lethal dose, if inhaled or ingested. You could not stand near the fuel for 2 seconds if it were unshielded. If it catches fire, the local fire department will not be able to extinguish the flames, and cancer clusters will appear later, as much as 500 miles (or more) downwind. A single gram of "spent fuel" would have a significant impact on Vermont and its neighboring states, were it to be released by accident or by terrorism or acts of God.

Vermont Yankee is a relatively small reactor, about half the size of more modern reactors in terms of electrical output, and it could easily be replaced by renewable options. Nuclear reactors are terrible "baseline" power sources anyway, since they are prone to sudden and prolonged shutdowns. They create, and then leak, horrifically dangerous poisons which deform our babies, give our children cancer, and can cause heart attacks, dementia, and a thousand other illnesses -- and they make other illnesses worse. Their owners lie and obfuscate, and their nuclear waste is a growing nightmare.

It's time to shut Vermont Yankee down -- and the rest of our reactors, too.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA (images added 2025)

The author, born and raised in Connecticut (now living in California), is a computer programmer. He has interviewed hundreds of nuclear experts, and has based this article on the information gleaned from his research. Any errors are his own. For more information on tritium, please see:

The Code Killers (book) / free download (2008): www.acehoffman.org

It's All About the DNA (2007): http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environment/tritium/2007/ItsAllAboutTheDNA.htm

Tritium Explained (why "Low Level Radiation" can be disproportionately harmful) (2006): http://animatedsoftware.com/environment/tritium/2006/EPATritiumStandard.htm

Tritium -- A response to a San Onofre employee's comments (also included) published in the North County Times (2004) http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/2004/TritiumComments%2020041223.htm

Thursday, February 4, 2010

We should not put our money into Obama's misguided nuclear dementia.

February 4th, 2010

Dear Readers,

There is no such thing as safe, clean nuclear power, and there never will be. There is no such thing as safe containment of nuclear waste, and there never will be. Therefore, we should not put our money into President Obama's misguided nuclear dementia.

Did we learn nothing from 9-11? Did we learn nothing from the tsunami in Banda-Ache? Did we learn nothing from the earthquake in Japan that nearly initiated "Genpatsu-Shinsai"? Did we learn nothing from Davis-Besse's near-meltdown in 2002? Did we learn nothing from Chernobyl?

So far we have been lucky: Lucky the terrorists only flew directly over, instead of into, the Indian Point Nuclear Power Facility. Lucky the nearest nuclear power facility to the 2004 tsunami was thousands of miles away and the waves only did "minor" damage. Lucky none of the seven nuclear power plants at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Facility melted down when a "beyond design basis" earthquake occurred in 2007. Three years later, only two of those plants have come back online. Lucky a worker at Davis-Besse inadvertently leaned against a control rod housing during maintenance, and it gave way, alerting them to the severe corrosion in the reactor pressure vessel head below them. Lucky Chernobyl happened there, not here.

Steven Chu and the entire DOE (Department of Energy) couldn't stop 9-11 style terrorists no matter how much money Obama gives them to "solve"the nuclear waste problem with so-called "temporary" onsite storage. In fact, DOE won't even try -- they say the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) handles that. Since no planes will ever be hijacked again, they don't have to protect against airplane strikes structurally. No airplane will fall uncontrollably out of the sky onto a nuclear power plant, either -- even though numerous commercial flight paths overfly nuclear power plants around the country. The containment domes are touted as being airplane-proof but they aren't. And even if they were, MOST of the nuclear poisons at each reactor site are stored OUTSIDE the containment domes, in the spent fuel pools and dry casks. The control rooms are also outside the domes, and without the control rooms, the plants would surely melt down, releasing billions of Curies of deadly radiation.

Only geologic storage combined with constant monitoring has any hope of protecting nuclear waste from a 9-11 type of attack, and even then, rogue employees can sabotage any physical fortress.

Geologic storage also may not be able to protect the radioactive waste from earthquakes or other hazards. For the past 20 years Yucca Mountain was the presumed future national repository for nuclear waste, but it has technical flaws as well as political hurdles. Any repository will have such problems. Over time, water, rodents and insects will always move the waste out of the repository. Finding a community that accepts nuclear waste means finding a community that is desperately poor, poorly educated, and has corrupt leaders. The Yucca Mountain team was allowed to suggest anything different if they could -- just not the same thing in a different place.

Obama is correct that Yucca Mountain is a flawed solution for the waste problem, but so is Obama's current plan for spent fuel -- known as "on-site storage" -- which means dozens of different things at dozens of different reactor sites, each with a scandal behind it.

Reprocessing is intensely polluting and expensive, and doesn't eliminate the deadly fission products. And worst of all, reprocessing enables the nuclear weapons industry.

Rocketing spent nuclear reactor cores to the sun costs too much and would fail too often, because humans fail, and so do their materials. Materials ARE failing at all our old nuclear power plants, and so are the humans. Fraud, cover-ups, circular arguments, intimidation of activists, and lies are the stock-in-trade of the nuclear industry.

Radiation, heat, pressure, and vibration are all very damaging, even to so-called super-alloys. New steam generators start to fail almost as soon as they are installed, but the industry accepts this, and makes wild claims about the great research and new materials that will be used to replace the old stuff. And then they deliver the same old leaky parts made of the same old leaky materials, and that's why there is tritium (and other radioactive substances) in the groundwater under so many reactors.

Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen, the most common element in our bodies and in the universe. Hydrogen is used in our bones, brains, heart, blood... everywhere. The legal limit for reactors to release each year is about one thirtieth of a teaspoon of tritium, and they have to dilute even that much in billions of gallons of water before they can legally release it. Neither the Nuclear Regulatory Commission nor the nuclear reactor operators care about tritium leaks as long as the deadly pollutant is diluted to legally-dispersible (but still hazardous) quantities.

The nuclear industry assumes that a little radiation, of any type, absorbed by any part of the body, is good for you. Therefore, they believe that every release is harmless as long as it's sufficiently diluted. In reality there is no safe dose of radiation. Benefits from using radiation in medicine come at a price in cancers for some percentage of the patients later, and even in cancers for the medical personnel.

The nuclear industry and its supporters insist that renewables won't work. But wind power ALONE could supply all of America's energy needs -- with a properly-designed power grid. We need a better grid anyway, to avoid colossal blackouts like we had in the Northeast in 2003, impacting approximately 50 million people and causing emergency shut downs at dozens of nuclear power plants, when their offsite emergency backup power supplies failed. Even Obama favors investing in a better, more robust power grid.

The nuclear industry claims nuclear power can be a cure for global warming. It can't be. There are the uranium mining companies with their enormous earth-moving equipment, the construction process, the storage of the waste for millennia afterwards, the operational costs in fossil fuels for the thousands of employees at the plants, the superfund cleanup sites the nuclear fuel cycle has already created, and the hospitalizations resulting from accidental (and intentional) releases of radiation. These are all "carbon intensive" activities.

President Obama wants to invest $54 billion dollars (of taxpayer's money) in a "new" generation of nuclear power plants which will be marginally more efficient -- if that -- and marginally safer -- if that -- and dozens of times more expensive than previous generations of nuclear power plants. And they'll generate thousands of tons of new nuclear waste each year, just like the currently-operating, "old" generations of nuclear power plants do.

Instead of finally ending the senseless production of more nuclear waste, Obama has set up a new committee to "study" the waste problem for two more years. In two years, these people will throw up their arms, like everyone else before them, and declare, as quietly as possible, that they couldn't solve the problem either. But creating the committee gives the 104 currently-operating nuclear power plants a green light to keep making more waste. Over the next two years, thousands of TONS of NEW nuclear waste will be created, any milligram of which can kill, and kill, and kill, and will destroy any container you put it in.

All just for electricity (or so they say). Electricity which is easily obtained through other methods that are truly safe, clean, and green.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA (images added 2025)

The author has written thousands of essays about nuclear power but only one book, THE CODE KILLERS, which is available as a free download from his web site: www.acehoffman.org . The author is also a computer programmer; his educational software programs are used by students and teachers at over 1000 universities around the world: www.animatedsoftware.com .

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Liberty, turned on its side...

January 10th, 2010

Dear Readers,

A few days ago I received an anonymous letter in a Southern California Edison company envelope. It concerned the behavior of a manager in the control and electrical design engineering department at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).

The letter alleged "Ethical Misconduct" and was apparently sent to San Onofre's Chief Nuclear Officer and Senior Vice President, Ross Ridenoure, on Christmas Day, 2009. The letter also described a "fear of retaliation" simply for complaining.

Rightly or wrongly, the industry previously considered the pair of reactors at San Onofre to be among the best-operated in the world. The workers took pride in their "culture of safety."

Now, San Onofre is near the bottom in the industry's own self-ranking, and is under special scrutiny by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

And despite that scrutiny -- or perhaps in part because of it -- things are actually getting worse at the site. Extra inspections and mass firings have served only to increase the desire of the plant workers to hide their mistakes.

But what are they covering up?

Fire inspections that aren't actually being done. Emergency generator tests that aren't being carried out. Regulations that are being purposefully violated without anyone checking to see if anyone authorized the "over-ride." Dangerous ramifications that aren't being considered before projects are started. Safety lock-outs that aren't being applied to heavy machinery while people are working on it. Areas under lifts that are not roped off. Damaged cables that aren't being replaced until after a failure occurs. High-radiation operations that aren't properly staffed. (At San Onofre, "ALARA" stands for "Always Let Another Run Ahead.")

These are just the things we've eventually heard about. Undoubtedly there are many more problems.

The anonymous letter described an incident where a manager, Mr. Rak, deleted a survey from one of his employees' email, thus preventing the employee from returning a possibly-unfavorable evaluation of the manager. The survey was being conducted to fulfill NRC requirements to show that the plant was addressing their "culture of cover-up."

Certainly one of the easiest ways to introduce a statistical bias into a survey's results is: Don't let people take part in the survey if they might not answer questions the way you'd like. And this apparently happened over what the employee described as a "minor altercation." What about when things go really bad? What cover-ups occur then?

As it turns out, the answer to that question at San Onofre is also known, because of what's happened to people like Rick Busnardo: Employees who try to break through the "culture of cover-up" are denied access to email (they must put all their complaints in hand-written notes). They are also prevented from talking to their own supervisors -- sometimes for months at a time. And they -- or the departments they supervise -- are issued "Stop Work Orders" (SWOs) for no reason.

Furthermore, the official wording of any complaints that do get into the system are based on the upper-level manager's idea of how the complaint should be worded, NOT the wording of the actual complainant. So if a line manager writes that one of his employees knowingly and intentionally violated procedures, executive management can instead -- without any facts to back up their version -- describe the incident by saying that the line manager was unable to properly supervise his employees.

In the past year, I've seen or met, or received letters, phone calls, or emails, from about half a dozen San Onofre whistleblowers. This level of activity is astounding and unprecedented.

It's very hard for an outsider to know what's really happening at the plant. Secrecy is firmly embedded in the culture of nuclear energy, regardless of whether there's also a "culture of safety" at the same time. It can -- and should -- be argued that the two cultures are incompatible, and ONLY in a culture of openness can there be any hope of a culture of safety.

While recognition of the "culture of cover-up" by the NRC and San Onofre employees is new, the culture itself is not new. For example, in Spring, 2001, San Onofre employees dropped an 80,000 lb crane they were hoisting. The NRC put a slew of lawyers on the phone with me, trying -- unsuccessfully -- to get me to reveal the name of the employee who told me about the incident! The openness the NRC wants does NOT extend to the public.

Later, when I complained about numerous instances of the P.R. spokesperson for the plant lying to the media and to the public, I was told by the NRC that statements made by the public affairs officer of an NRC-licensed facility are not "regulated activities" and their veracity will NOT be investigated.

But the media will report what these P.R. spokespeople say as if they are speaking the gospel, in part because the NRC won't correct even the most blatant lies.

Nuclear power is not cheap, it's not carbon-free, and it's not safe. The waste problem is intractable. A meltdown, which can contaminate an area the size of Pennsylvania, can occur at any moment, at any plant.

Huge amounts of money are spent in back-door ways to keep nuclear power plants operating. Huge amounts of water and other natural resources are wasted every day, and huge amounts of coal and oil are burned to mine and mill the fuel that is used in nuclear power plants. Just look at the clean-up bills for our weapons sites, such as Hanford, Washington, to get an idea of what the real clean-up costs for nuclear power plants (which create even MORE waste than our military programs) will be.

Over the past four decades, San Onofre has created millions of pounds of deadly radioactive waste. These are poisons whose dangers are not diminished by baking, burning, cooling, compressing, decompressing, mixing, shocking, shaking, liquefying, gasifying, or solidifying. Poisons which physically destroy any container you put them in. (Containers which would be destroyed anyway, collapsing to dust or rusting away over the eons during which nuclear waste must be stored.)

There is no reason to keep San Onofre open any longer, and many good reasons to shut it down forever -- including the 500 NEW pounds of high-level nuclear waste it creates every day it remains operational.

Safer alternatives exist, which can provide enough jobs for every skilled and honest worker currently employed at the plant.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

The author has been writing about nuclear issues for several decades and is the author of THE CODE KILLERS, an expose of the nuclear industry, available as a free download from the author's web site. He is also an educational software developer.

Important Pages

Monday, April 12, 2010

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Monday, March 8, 2010

Monday, February 22, 2010

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Sunday, January 10, 2010