On
May 26, 1958, President
Eisenhower waved a wand with a little light bulb on the end of it in front
of an electric eye, starting up the first commercial reactor, located three
hundred miles away at Shippingport,
Pennsylvania.
That was as close to it as he
wanted to be.
We are told that nuclear power is being
used to generate electricity. That is not correct. Nuclear power is being used
to boil water, and the resulting steam is being used to generate electricity in
variants of the same way it has always been generated. What the enormously
expensive nuclear plants do is generate heat in the most dangerous way
imaginable, with waste products that are, so far, unmanageable. Conversion of
the energy of nuclear fission or fusion directly into usable power would be a
new and different kind of process. Perhaps it can be done; maybe people are
working on it; but the present system is not it. The present system is a fancy
steam engine.
We
are told that nuclear plants are pollution-free. On July 9, 2002 Senator Trent Lott,
then Senate Minority Leader, said, "Nuclear power is a clean, efficient
source. We need to deal with nuclear waste." By "clean" the Senator
evidently meant that nuclear plants do not give off air-polluting smoke. Indeed,
it is impossible for them to give off air-polluting carbon-based smoke, as they
do not burn any carbon-based combustible substance. But clean they are not. They
pollute in three ways:
1. Normal emissions. There are
emissions from these places and all the other kinds of nuclear manufacturing
and storage places. A study states
that "...nuclear power accounts for a very small fraction of the radiation
experienced by the U. S.
population - less than 1.6% of total artificial radiation, and less than 0.3%
of all radiation. One source estimates that ... nuclear power plants cause ...
roughly ... between 8.3 and 30.2 annual statistical cancer deaths nationally,
plus a comparable number of survivable cancers. However, individuals in contact
with various segments of the nuclear fuel cycle may have much higher exposure
with correspondingly higher effects: the same source notes that nuclear workers
bear 99.9% of the risk of fatal cancer from normal nuclear operations."
When
the plants have worn-out, broken or defective parts, their more abundant emissions,
if "not very dangerous" before, may become quite dangerous. (If they were dangerous before, how much more
dangerous?)
In 2003 a big hole was found in the
reactor head of the
Davis-Beese plant in Toledo--a plant, already well-known for bad safety,
belonging to FirstEnergy Corporation, a company that the Government blamed for
the infamous blackout of August 2003. Leakage
of tritium from Reactor No. 1 of California's
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was discovered during demolition, long
after the reactor had been retired; similar leakage has occurred in at least
nine other plants. Numerous plants in the United States and elsewhere are
old, worn out, suffering corrosion problems, emission problems, and still
permitted to run.
2.
Accidents. Inevitably, accidents happen. When a nuclear plant has a
catastrophic accident, people die immediately and a lot of people die slowly
over years. Many unborn descendents will remain unborn, or be deformed at
birth, or have fatal cancers at rates greatly above the rates elsewhere.
Chernobyl is famous for its catastrophic breakdown on April 27,
1986; the eventual toll is still unknown, unknowable. Famous as well is the
cover-up of the disaster for more than two weeks by the Soviet army and
Government, a cover-up that included failure to inform neighboring countries
and failure to evacuate and otherwise protect inhabitants of the region. Even
several years later, it is believed, relevant information, such as the amount
of radiation actually released, had not been divulged. (Time Magazine, May 18,
1986 and Nov. 13, 1989)
The
March 23, 1979 Three Mile Island accident
in Pennsylvania was just barely prevented from
getting as completely out of hand as Chernobyl.
The data on damage it may have caused to present and future human beings and
animals are not yet cleared up. Files were placed behind a stone wall. Quite
high State employees were fired, apparently for reporting embarrassing
information about the disaster, etc.[1]
In
a symposium held
in Harrisburg, Pa. on March 26, 2009 to commemorate the 30th
anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster, Arnie Gunderson, a former
nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower, stated, "I think the
numbers on the NRC's [Nuclear Regulatory Commission's] website are off by a
factor of 100 to 1,000." Data presented in the symposium by nuclear
engineers supported Gunderson's statement.
Besides
the few catastrophes or near catastrophes, there are many accidents at "nuclear
plants" that do not produce many fatalities, but nevertheless suggest
that--industry and Government protestations notwithstanding--the safety of these
complicated artifacts is not what one might wish; that, indeed, they are
disasters waiting to happen.
The
world's largest "nuclear power plant" in Kashiwazaki,
Niigata Prefecture, Japan, was damaged in a 6.8
magnitude earthquake on July 16, 2007. Water containing radioactive material
leaked into the Sea of Japan; drums containing
nuclear waste fell over, many losing their lids, 800 liters of turbine oil
leaked from a reactor, and small amounts of radioactive materials were emitted
into the atmosphere. Industry spokesmen (who had, on the day of the earthquake,
stated that no leaks occurred) claimed that "the emissions, although
inadvertent, had been within legal limits."
"Japan
has a history of cover-ups
and accidents at nuclear power plants..." For example, on December 8, 1995,
three tons of liquid sodium coolant spilled from a pipe at the Monju reactor at
Tsuruga, 200 miles west of Tokyo,
Japan. At a
news conference on January 13, 1996, "...officials acknowledged that a video of
the accident had been heavily edited before it was given to news media to make
the leak appear less serious." (Reuters, Jan. 14, 1996)
And
so forth.
3.
Waste. These reactors produce tons upon tons of radioactive and otherwise
poisonous waste. No satisfactory way to dispose of it has yet been discovered.
Typically, the radioactivity in it will last, not a short while, but thousands
of years. As Senator Lott said, we certainly need to deal with the waste. Waste
from all nuclear installations,
including the power plants--radioactive trash of all kinds--is part of an impending
disaster. Nobody knows what to do with it, really. Nobody knows how to make it
safe. Everywhere it has ever been put, it is causing trouble. The barrels will
not last as long as the half-life of the stuff in them; the stuff will leak
out, is leaking out.
Barrels
of it have been thrown in the deep ocean.[2]
Some of the people in charge would like to throw more of them there. Who knows
what those substances are doing or will soon do to life on the abyssal plain,
to the entire food chain for that matter? For the waste will outlast the
barrels by thousands of years.
They
bury it in the ground. It gets into the water table. It gets into the water
people drink, as it is alleged to have done in Pensacola
and Gulf Breeze, Florida.
From
1952 to 1970 the people in charge of the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory
dumped 16 billion gallons of waste
into wells that feed directly to the water table. It wasn't even in barrels,
didn't have to leak out, already out.[3]
Transport of nuclear waste, as well
as other nuclear materials, seems to be handled rather well nowadays. It is
different from other types of toxic waste, which are often shipped to and
unceremoniously unloaded in countries whose people, it is felt, are not as
valuable as Americans and whose governments are willing for a price to let
their land be a dump for hazardous, perhaps mortally dangerous garbage. On
the contrary, nuclear
waste is often shipped for recycling from
other countries to the United States, the United
Kingdom, France,
or Russia.
It is shipped all over the United
States on the highways and by rail. The
containers used are accident-proof; successfully so until now; the difficulty
is at the destination..
Most
nuclear waste is kept where it was generated or "temporarily" stored somewhere
else, waiting for somebody to figure out what to do with it. This is a
considerable problem. In Scientific
American, June, 1996, Chris G. Whipple wrote: "In the half century of the nuclear age, the U.S. has accumulated some 30,000
metric tons of spent fuel rods from power reactors and another 380,000 cubic
meters of high-level radioactive waste, a by-product of producing plutonium for
nuclear weapons. None of these materials have found anything more than
interim accommodation, despite decades of study and expenditures in the
billions of dollars on research, development and storage." That
statement was written in 1996. In 2009, only the numbers have changed.
"Currently,
only temporary storage areas exist for the disposal of radioactive waste.
The U.S.
government is working to devise a plan for the safe storage and permanent
disposal of nuclear wastes." That statement was written in Environmental
News Online in 1999. Ten years later it is still true.
In
a September 5, 2001 public hearing of the U.S. Department of Energy, Governor Guinn
of Nevada, furious about the U. S. Government's desire to make Yucca Mountain
a depository for enormous quantities of nuclear waste, declared the scientific
evidence was not complete, yet the DOE had called this meeting to gather public
comment on that evidence "prematurely" and over "our reasonable and
faithful objections." The Governor remarked that United States Government
agencies denied "until just a few years ago" the illness
and death their atomic folly caused to thousands of Nevada
and Utah
citizens. Nevada, it seems, did not want "the most
deadly substance on earth" to be buried in the Yucca Mountain
site, which would happen, said the Governor, "if the DOE has its way."
In
2003, President Bush signed a joint resolution into law, officially designating
Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste
repository site. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified 293
technical issues DOE must solve before submitting the license application. The
State of Nevada
filed major lawsuits against the plan.
On
April 6, 2009 the New York Times published an article with dateline March 31,
2009 entitled: "Yucca
Mountain Plan for Nuclear Waste Dies."
The
people who invented the nuclear power plant for generation of electricity didn't
plan for it to be mortally dangerous. They thought it was a pretty good idea and
would solve many problems. Unfortunately, it has solved few problems and
created new, threatening ones. The response of official people to these
problems is not encouraging.
Scientists
that prepare reports that mention unusual levels of fatalities, cancers, birth
defects, fetal death, anomalous births of farm animals, and so forth, find
themselves marginalized, maybe out of a job, their reputations damaged, no
funding for their research. Government people and the people in the "nuclear
power" business like reports that explain that the danger is minimal or that it
does not exist.
For many years U. S. government people and business people (and
some science people; for example Dr. Teller) suppressed information contained in
their own reports of studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[4]
They also lied about the harm
from exposure to radiation suffered by American servicemen sent into Nagasaki in September,
1945.[5]
They said, continued to say,
insisted, that the exposure of 45,000 servicemen ordered to the 1946 "Operation
Crossroads" atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands was within "allowable
limits", and steadfastly refused for many years to admit that the multiple
grave ailments many of these men suffered came from that exposure. The
servicemen were a few miles from the explosions, were splashed with water from
them, could see the bones in their hands when they covered their eyes, were
irradiated. Were moved up to where the blasts had occurred. The government's
people refused them treatment, but it's a dead issue now, because most of the
people affected are dead.[6]
More
than 700 nuclear bombs have been tested by the United States since World War II.[7]
At least 317 of these were atmospheric tests, 208 of which were in the
continental United States.[8]
Government people and their hired help insisted that the fallout from these
artifacts did not harm the people that it is alleged to have harmed, cause the
leukemia, the cancers that it seems to have caused, produce the birth defects
and fetal deaths that it is reputed to have produced, create in livestock the
anomalous births and strange maladies that it is claimed to have created.
Recently they have relented a little on this issue.
In
the 1950s, U. S. Army people ordered thousands of their soldiers ever closer to
atmospheric nuclear explosions. At first they were placed seven miles from
ground zero, then four, then two miles from ground zero. They were ordered to
move toward the blast center several hours, two hours, one hour, even immediately
after detonation--just to see what would happen to them.[9]
Army and Government people refused to admit radiation was the cause of many of these
soldiers' multiple grave ailments--radiation that army people had sent the
soldiers to absorb!
Their
faithful servants were denied both help and comfort.
"People."
Not "the Government," not "the Army," not "the Atomic Energy Commission," not
"Business." People do this, make these decisions, make these statements, write
these letters; people, male and female human beings, mostly male, not some abstract
metonymy like "the Government," "the Army," "the VA," "the AEC," "business,"
etc. They do it because they are told to, or because to do otherwise would be
job-threatening, or because it's their duty. Like Eichman. Call them eichmen
(occasionally eichwomen). Or because they believe in a "greater good."
Maybe
some of them believe what they say.
What's to be done? A few
suggestions for people who cause things to be done in the U. S., Russia,
Britain, India, China, Japan, Pakistan, Israel, France, Brazil, :Korea, and so
on:
Admit the danger.
Stop using fissionable
material in large quantities for anything whatever. This is not a frivolous suggestion.
Besides the emissions of radiation and besides the danger of meltdowns, nuclear
waste is making more and more pieces of the earth irreversibly unsuitable for
living creatures. Having proved yourselves unable to solve this problem, you should
stop these dangerous activities.
Develop practical fusion
technology and find out how to use it to make electricity without hazardous
waste--with or without a steam engine.
Develop practical alternate
methods that do not use nuclear fission or fusion.
Don't make new kinds of nuclear
weapons.
Don't make old kinds of nuclear
weapons.
Don't claim that Uranium 238
doesn't do any harm, and stop calling it "depleted uranium" when it's used to
make shells, bullets and armor, or made into commercial products. It is uranium.
When uranium dust (an inevitable product of the military use of U-238) gets
into the human body it makes the body sick. To say that Uranium 238 emits very
low levels of gamma radiation is correct; to say this makes it innocuous is disinformation.
It is poisonous--a question of biochemistry, not nuclear physics. And as for
radiation, once inside the body, the alpha and beta radiation (which, it is quite
true, will not pass through paper) have no shield, for they are right there
with the cells. There are numerous sources for this information, by both
science professionals and journalists; for example, the presentation by Doug Rokke, PhD at the
UN-UNESCO International Conference, Athens,
May 24-25, 2001, and Dr. Helen
Caldicott's article on "Medical Consequences of Depleted Uranium.")
Take proper care of the people
your folly has made sick, and compensate the survivors of the dead; do not say
that what made them sick was something else, and that you aren't responsible
for their problems. And don't put people into this kind of danger. For more
than sixty years you have sent your soldiers into places full of radiation and
poisonous materials; most recently, because you use uranium to make bullets,
shells, and armor that vaporize into poisonous dust, full of U-238.
Don't use cheerful slang for
the things made to kill people, things that contaminate earth, sky, and sea.
"Nuke," "Boomer," "Star wars," "Bunker-buster," and so on.
Be trustworthy. If you would become
trustworthy, after a while you could be trusted and respected without
suspension of disbelief. Wouldn't you like that?
[1] Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon with
Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Waters, , Killing our Own--the
Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, Chapters 13 and
14 (Published in 1998 as a Delta Book by Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1 Dag
Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017. (The entire book can be downloaded in
various formats.)
[2] Ibid.., page 162
[3] Ibid.. Page 139
[4] Ibid.. Chapters 4, 5
[5] Ibid., Chapter 1
[6] Ibid., Chapter 2
[7] Ibid.. p. 7 (Introduction by Dr.
Benjamin Spock)
[8]
Gallery of U. S. Nuclear Tests: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/index.html
, last updated 6 August, 2001
[9] Ibid., Chapter 3
