Harvey Wasserman : The Demand for a Global Takeover at Fukushima

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's reactor building number 4 seen in aerial view on July 5, 2012. Photo by Kyodo / Reuters.

The demand for a global takeover
at Fukushima has hit critical mass

Since the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, the six-reactor Daichi site has plunged into lethal chaos.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 2, 2013

More than 48,000 global citizens have now signed a petition at NukeFree.org asking the United Nations and the world community to take charge of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. Another 35,000 have signed at RootsAction. An independent advisory group of scientists and engineers is also in formation.

The signatures are pouring in from all over the world. By November, they will be delivered to the United Nations.

The corporate media has blacked out meaningful coverage of the most critical threat to global health and safety in decades.

The much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” has turned into a global rout. In the face of massive grassroots opposition and the falling price of renewable energy and natural gas, operating reactors are shutting and proposed new ones are being cancelled.

This lessens the radioactive burden on the planet. But it makes the aging reactor fleet ever more dangerous. A crumbling industry with diminished resources and a disappearing workforce cannot safely caretake the decrepit, deteriorating 400-odd commercial reactors still licensed to operate worldwide.

All of which pales before the crisis at Fukushima. Since the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, the six-reactor Daichi site has plunged into lethal chaos.

For decades the atomic industry claimed vehemently that a commercial reactor could not explode. When Chernobyl blew, it blamed “inferior” Soviet technology.

But Fukushima’s designs are from General Electric (some two dozen similar reactors are licensed in the U.S.). At least four explosions have rocked the site. One might have involved nuclear fission. Three cores have melted into the ground. Massive quantities of water have been poured where the owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), and the Japanese government think they might be, but nobody knows for sure.

As The Free Press has reported, steam emissions indicate one or more may still be hot. Contaminated water is leaking from hastily-constructed tanks. Room for more is running out. The inevitable next earthquake could rupture them all and send untold quantities of poisons pouring into the ocean.

The worst immediate threat at Fukushima lies in the spent fuel pool at Unit Four. That reactor had been shut for routine maintenance when the earthquake and tsunami hit. The 400-ton core, with more than 1,300 fuel rods, sat in its pool 100 feet in the air.

Spent fuel rods are the most lethal items our species has ever created. A human standing within a few feet of one would die in a matter of minutes. With more than 11,000 scattered around the Daichi site, radiation levels could rise high enough to force the evacuation of all workers and immobilize much vital electronic equipment.

Spent fuel rods must be kept cool at all times. If exposed to air, their zirconium alloy cladding will ignite, the rods will burn, and huge quantities of radiation will be emitted. Should the rods touch each other, or should they crumble into a big enough pile, an explosion is possible. By some estimates there’s enough radioactivity embodied in the rods to create a fallout cloud 15,000 times greater than the one from the Hiroshima bombing.

The rods perched in the Unit 4 pool are in an extremely dangerous position. The building is tipping and sinking into the sodden ground. The fuel pool itself may have deteriorated. The rods are embrittled and prone to crumbling. Just 50 meters from the base is a common spent fuel pool containing some 6,000 fuel rods that could be seriously compromised should it lose coolant. Overall there are some 11,000 spent rods scattered around the Fukushima Daichi site.

As dangerous as the process might be, the rods in the Unit Four fuel pool must come down in an orderly fashion. Another earthquake could easily cause the building to crumble and collapse. Should those rods crash to the ground and be left uncooled, the consequences would be catastrophic.

Tepco has said it will begin trying to remove the rods from that pool in November. The petitions circulating through NukeFree.org and MoveOn.org, as well as at Roots Action and Avaaz.org, ask that the United Nations take over. They ask the world scientific and engineering communities to step in. The Roots Action petition also asks that $8.3 billion slated in loan guarantees for a new U.S. nuke be shifted instead to dealing with the Fukushima site.

It’s a call with mixed blessings. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency is notoriously pro-nuclear, charged with promoting atomic power as well as regulating it. Critics have found the IAEA to be secretive and unresponsive.

But Tepco is a private utility with limited resources. The Japanese government has an obvious stake in downplaying Fukushima’s dangers. These were the two entities that approved and built these reactors.

While the IAEA is imperfect, its resources are more substantial and its stake at Fukushima somewhat less direct. An ad hoc global network of scientists and engineers would be intellectually ideal, but would lack the resources for direct intervention.

Ultimately the petitions call for a combination of the two.

It’s also hoped the petitions will arouse the global media. The moving of the fuel rods from Unit Four must be televised. We need to see what’s happening as it happens. Only this kind of coverage can allow global experts to analyze and advise as needed.

Let’s all hope that this operation proves successful, that the site is neutralized and the massive leaks of radioactive water and gasses be somehow stopped.

As former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata has put it: full-scale releases from Fukushima “would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.”

[Harvey Wasserman is senior editor of the Columbus Free Press and The Free Press. He edits NukeFree.org, where all factual material in this article can be linked. He hosts the Solartopia Green Power & Wellness radio show at the Progressive Radio Network, and is author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Jonah Raskin : In the Wake of Sandy

The Rag Blog's Jonah Raskin in post-Sandy Far Rockaway, New York.
In the wake of Sandy:
An interview with Far Rockaway
community organizer Ofelia Mangen

'I think Sandy is a human disaster. We’re the disaster, not nature. We created it. If you call it a natural disaster, that’s a way to deny responsibility. Experts on climate change have been predicting this kind of storm for at least a decade.'

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

FAR ROCKAWAY, New York -- She’s so thin she hardly casts a shadow on this cold blustery January afternoon. Ofelia Mangen is one of the fortunate ones. She has electricity and heat in her house in Far Rockaway, in a neighborhood hard hit by Superstorm Sandy.

Far too many of her neighbors -- hundreds if not thousands of families -- still don’t have light and heat as of January 2, 2013. Dozens of others have boarded up their homes and have evacuated the area hoping to return in spring and make repairs then. Many feel downright powerless to do anything to improve their living conditions, and it’s months after Sandy, the storm of the century, hit the East Coast.

Relief from the federal government hasn’t arrived in Far Rockaway and no one seems to know when and if it will arrive. (Two days after my conversation with Mangen, the U.S. House of Representatives approved $9.7 billion to pay flood insurance claims for the damage caused by Sandy. The Senate hadn't acted; it would be months at best before citizens received funds to rebuild.

Volunteers have helped immensely. For months, Mangen, who is 30, worked around the clock with all the grit and gumption she could muster. Now, not surprisingly she’s as exhausted as any activist and organizer would be after living through the storm itself and then battling the political storm that followed hard on its heels.

In Manhattan for the day, she’s in need of a little relief and recovery.

Community organizer is a term you won’t find on her hefty resume, though she might add it. She’s a graduate student at New York University (NYU), with heaps of fellowships, though over the past two months, nothing new has been added to her resume. Sandy put her Ph.D. on hold.

After years of seminars, Mangen has trouble thinking of herself as an organizer in a community that sorely needs organizing and organizers. But now that she is, in fact, Far Rockaway’s most visible community organizer she inhabits the role as though she’s spent a lifetime preparing for it.

Abbie Hoffman would embrace her; Tom Hayden would cheer her. Gloria Steinem would yell, “Go Girl, or maybe Go Woman!”

A native of Ohio, Mangen earned a B.S. in visual communication from Ohio University, and an M.A. in media ecology from NYU. As a graduate student working on her dissertation, she conducted research on topics such as the use of technology in crises and how to be a catalyst for positive social change. Indeed, “social catalyst” might define her more precisely than “community organizer.”

Fierce and outspoken, she has a way of reading troubled social situations quickly and knowing what needs to be done to improve them. I’ve known her for years. In November 2012, I visited her in Far Rockaway 10 days after the storm ripped her life apart much as it ripped up the fabric of the whole community. The house in which she was living had been flooded with water from the sea, and the drywall had to be ripped out, along with all the electrical wiring and all the appliances on the ground floor.

Like everyone else for miles around, Mangen was without cell phone service, and without the ability to send and receive emails. Almost immediately, she leapt into action and began to communicate with her neighbors face-to-face and without technology. Everything she studied at school, every paper she wrote, and every article and book she read, seemed to have prepared her for the fallout from Sandy.

When I met her in Manhattan at the start of January 2013, she was just beginning to pick up the scattered pieces of her life. She wore a black cap, a dark vest, and a dark sweater. Sitting opposite me at the kitchen table in a New York apartment owned by mutual friends, Mangen began by discussing communication theory -- encoding and decoding -- but she soon came down to earth and talked about her own experiences and about her neighbors in Far Rockaway.


Jonah Raskin: Why did you throw yourself into relief work and community organizing after Sandy?

Ofelia Mangen: Far Rockaway, which was very hard hit by the storm, is my home and my community. I care about it and the people who live and work there. They were in need and I wanted to help them. But perhaps most of all, I did the work for myself. I haven’t been selfless about it, but rather selfish. I became involved to get my community back. I felt as though I’d lost it. I need it and want it back.

For those who don’t know much if anything about Far Rockaway can you say something about the place?

It’s a peninsula eleven miles long and a part of New York City. The subway -- the "A" train -- runs to Far Rockaway. It has spectacular beaches and it has oceanfront property that has lured real estate developers there. For a long time it was an out-of-the-way place. If you said you were going to Far Rockaway people looked at you as though you were going to fall off the map. It has some very poor sections and some very well-off sections. I’m in the middle.

Do you think of Sandy as a natural disaster?

No not at all. I think Sandy is a human disaster. We’re the disaster, not nature. We created it. If you call it a natural disaster, that’s a way to deny responsibility. Experts on climate change have been predicting this kind of storm for at least a decade. People read the reports about climate change, but they did nothing, made no changes. Sandy was actually very close to the storm that scientists predicted.

The storm made it difficult for you and for others to communicate didn’t it?

Very much so. All the cell phone networks were down. When we were most in need of information, we had the least possible information. If we’re going to survive storms like Sandy we’re going to have to figure out how to communicate more effectively.

When you were able to get in touch with people who did you call?

My sister. I only had a minute. I wanted to let her know I was okay. After I called her, she called my mother and then my mother and sister phoned everyone else in the family and friends, too. They had a kind of phone tree. Now I have a zillion emails to answer.

How effectively did newspapers cover the storm and its aftermath?

The Wave, the local paper, isn’t very good. It hasn’t had a print edition since before the storm; it’s only online now and I don’t trust it. I never did. The information is often inaccurate.

What about The New York Times?

The reporters from the Times didn’t provide a sense of context for the stories they wrote. They didn’t understand that there’s a difference between the Rockaway Peninsula and Far Rockaway, for example, which is a specific community on the peninsula. The nomenclature was off. The Times reporters came and looked around and went home at the end of the day. They didn’t take the time to get to know the place.

Did you become a hub for communication?

I did on my block, Beach Ninety-Second Street. I went around and asked people if they needed anything. I didn’t tell anyone what to do, but if neighbors asked for assistance I provided it. Unlike many residents, I had access to a car and could drive to Manhattan where I could watch TV and read newspapers and find out what was going on. People in wheelchairs, for example, had little mobility and were often isolated. I was able to act as a go-between for them.

Are you able to gage the mood of the community?

What I’ve noticed is that, as the storm passed and receded in memory, people didn’t calm down. In fact, they felt an increasing sense of frustration and despair. When they took the time to reflect, they became more and more angry. Some people are also stuck in depression now.

I would think that in a storm like Sandy the social veneer is peeled away and you see the rifts in the community.

Yes, that’s especially true of the east end of the Rockaway Peninsula, which has been a violent place with poverty and gangs for years. There’s been more violence and more gang activity after the storm. The whole environment has been fractured. Some people probably won’t get their lives back together again; some people and some business will be permanently broken. Others are finding a sense of purpose. I know artists who have come out here and have become community organizers.

Can you stand back and reflect on your own personal experience?

My whole life was upended. I was a college student working on my Ph.D. Sandy wasn’t an intellectual experience. In many ways it was weird. I’m just beginning to understand it. I was at home and in my own house, but I felt that I was in a foreign country and a traveler for two months.

How did you cope?

Well, I have a great support group and a real network of friends. My brother, Andrew, came and he has been a help. I was trying to be Superwoman. I pushed myself to my outer limits. Now, I ‘m resting, eating well, and doing yoga again. I’m getting myself back again.

Did you feel that there was a storm inside you?

I was tossed and turned. All of my emotions were heightened. Everything I did I did intensely. I had moments of anger and I expressed my anger. I put it out there.

Do you think people in Far Rockaway are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

Oh, absolutely! Some people are just now finding out that they have PTSD. Other might not find out for a month or even a year. Some people were on the periphery of the storm and not at the center, but they were still powerfully affected by it, though they’re just discovering how and in what ways.

Does it make sense to compare Sandy to Katrina?

No, I don’t think so. They’re radically different. Katrina affected all of New Orleans. Sandy only affected parts of New York. Katrina was in August, Sandy in November when it’s cold. Now, it’s below freezing; in New Orleans people didn’t have to deal with the cold. Katrina was officially designated a hurricane; Sandy was termed a “Superstorm.” The Gulf Coast is accustomed to hurricanes. New York wasn’t used to anything the likes of Sandy.

Was there disaster tourism in Far Rockaway?

Madonna came out with her entourage in black SUV’s and gave out copies of the Kabala. Some people drove around in their vans and never got out of their vehicles. They looked from behind closed windows.

What about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg?

His convoy came through. He’s very unpopular now in Far Rockaway. He could do so much; he’s done so little.

I’m reminded of the lines from Roman Polanski’s movie, Chinatown, in which the top L.A. cop tells the detective played by Jack Nicholson, ”It’s Chinatown.” There always seems to be a “Chinatown” -- a place that’s written off, a place where the laws and the rules don’t apply, a place ignored and pushed off to the side.

That’s Far Rockaway. Actually, designating Sandy a "superstorm" prohibits insurance companies from charging a hurricane deductible. Some insurance companies have been documented trying to do so, even though they aren't permitted since Sandy wasn't technically a hurricane when it made landfall. This is a disaster in which ordinary people sorely need the government to help. The government isn’t doing nearly enough to help them. The crisis isn’t over yet.

[Jonah Raskin, a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University. The editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution and the author of James McGrath: In a Class By Himself, he has published interviews on The Rag Blog with Bernardine Dohrn, Eric Foner, Steve Halliwell, Michael Klare, Fred Klonsky, Gus Reichbach, and Allen Young. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Countdown to Nuclear Disaster

Political cartoon by Olle Johansson, Sweden / Cagle Cartoons.
Countdown to disaster:
Fukushima spews, Los Alamos burns,
Vermont rages, and we’ve almost lost Nebraska

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / June 29, 2011

Humankind is now threatened by the simultaneous implosion, explosion, incineration, courtroom contempt, and drowning of its most lethal industry.

We know only two things for certain: worse is yet to come, and those in charge are lying about it -- at least to the extent of what they actually know, which is nowhere near enough.

Indeed, the assurances from the nuke power industry continue to flow like the floodwaters now swamping the Missouri Valley heartland.

But major breakthroughs have come from a Pennsylvania senator and New York’s governor on issues of evacuation and shut-down. And a public campaign for an end to loan guarantees could put an end to the U.S. industry once and for all.


FUKUSHIMA: The bad news continues to bleed from Japan with no end in sight. The “light at the end of the tunnel” is an out-of-control radioactive freight train, headed to the core of an endangered planet.

Widespread internal radioactive contamination among Japanese citizens around Fukushima has now been confirmed. Two whales caught some 650 kilometers from the melting reactors have shown intense radiation.

Plutonium, the deadliest substance known to our species, has been found dangerously far from the site.

Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government have admitted to three 100% meltdowns but can’t confirm with any reliability the current state of those cores. There’s reason to believe one or more have progressed to “melt-throughs” in which they burn through the thick stainless steel pressure vessel and onto the containment floor.

The molten cores may be covered with water. But whether they can melt further through the containments and into the ground remains unclear.

Possibilities may include a “China Syndrome” scenario in which one or more still-molten cores does melt through the containment and hits ground water. That could lead to a steam explosion that could blow still larger clouds of radioactive steam, water and debris into the atmosphere and ocean.

At least three explosions have occurred, one of which may have involved criticality.

There is no doubt at least two containments were breached very early in the disaster. Unit Four is cracked and sinking. The status of its used radioactive fuel pool, which has clearly caught fire, is uncertain. Also unclear is the ability of the owners to sustain the stability of Units Five and Six, which were shut when the quake/tsunami hit.

That stability depends on continued power to run cooling systems, which could disappear amid seismic aftershocks many believe are inevitable. A very substantial quake hit after the tremors that led to Indonesia’s devastating tsunami, and few doubt it could happen again -- soon -- at Fukushima.

All the above is dependent on reports controlled primarily by Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government. There is every reason to believe the situation is worse than it seems, and that those in charge don’t really know the full extent of the damage or how to cope with it.

Just five years ago a quake shut seven reactors at Kashiwazaki. The entire nation of Japan sits on a wide range of fault lines. Tsunami is a Japanese word.

Radiation from Fukushima has long since been detected throughout the northern hemisphere, with health effects that will be debated forever.

Some 50 reactors still operate in Japan. According to some, the Japanese public has the legal right to shut them all.

Let us pray they do. Yesterday.


LOS ALAMOS: A massive wildfire has swept at least to the outskirts of the national laboratory that was at the core of the program that built the Atomic Bomb.

The first explosion irradiated a nearby valley on July 16, 1945. Then came the two that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are significant quantities of stored radioactive material in and around Los Alamos. How much there is, where it is, how badly it is threatened, how much (if any) has already been engulfed in flames remains to be seen. Evacuations are underway.

Official reassurances are not reliable.

Nor are estimates of the potential for radioactive fallout to spread throughout North America and beyond.

Political cartoon by R.J. Matson / The St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Roll Call.

VERMONT YANKEE: Entergy, owner of the one reactor in Vermont, has sued to shred a solemn public contract.

The one thing certain here is the company’s contempt for the sanctity of its own word.

Years ago Entergy sought official permits at VY. It promised in return that the state could choose to shut the reactor on March 21, 2012, which it’s now done.

In recent years VY has spewed tritium into groundwater and the Connecticut River, in some cases from underground pipes whose existence the company denied. A cooling tower has collapsed.

But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has extended the reactor's license and asked the federal Justice Department to intervene on behalf of the utility.

The request trashes any credibility retained by the NRC. The Commission was established in the mid 1970s to be a disinterested party on which the public could rely. For it to now take a partisan stand on behalf of a reactor owner it’s bound to regulate thoroughly contaminates the core of its existence.

Entergy has sued so it can buy some $65 million in radioactive fuel the people of Vermont do not want burned on their land.

This will go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the future legal sanctity of any and all public contracts signed by any corporation, nuclear or otherwise, may be determined.


NEBRASKA: The flooding Missouri River continues to threaten at least two heartland reactors.

Late reports indicate Cooper may still be running, with public assurances it could be shut very quickly. What might happen if the operators are a little bit late has not been explained.

Nor is there much to go on about the impacts of flooded cores and fuel cooling ponds on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers or the eco-systems along the way to a Gulf of Mexico still reeling from BP’s toxic dose.

But an almost surreal set of circumstances surrounds the true nature of design specifications and protections in place (or not) at Ft. Calhoun.

They may be best summarized by what happened to a “flood berm” meant to protect Ft. Calhoun. This huge rubberized water-filled sausage was 16 feet at the base and eight feet high.

But CNN has quoted a company representative as saying that some sort of equipment “came in contact” with the berm and punctured it.

Not to worry: the “same level of protection is in place” as had been prior to the installation of the berm.

In other words, the device was installed to protect the reactor. Then somebody punctured it. But things are as they were before so they must not have needed that berm in the first place. Got it?

It’s as yet unclear whether flood waters will continue to rise at these two reactors, whether the operators can protect them, and what will happen if they can’t.

The corporate media is carrying virtually zero coverage of any of the above stories. All are subject to rapid, dangerous changes about which we may have little reliable information.

But we do know for sure that U.S. Senator Robert Casey, Jr. (D-PA) now wants to see more deeply into one of the key holes in the nuclear façade: evacuation.

After Three Mile Island’s 1979 partial melt-down, new federal legislation allegedly gave states more power over how to get people out of the path of a melting nuke.

But after an as-yet unopened Perry reactor was damaged by a 1986 earthquake, Ohio's then-Governor Richard Celeste sued to keep Perry shut pending a state evacuation study.

The NRC refused and won in federal court. Perry opened. Ohio’s official study then said evacuation was virtually impossible.

A quarter-century later, Casey wants to see what it might now take to move downwinders out of harm’s way from a TMI, Perry, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Vermont Yankee, Cooper, Ft. Calhoun... you name it.

Casey’s being joined by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose demands for the shut-down of Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan, have left its owners “shaken.”

Cuomo and Casey might do well to join governors of states like Vermont, Massachusetts, California, and others in testing the law on evacuation planning. Populations have vastly increased at virtually all U.S. reactor sites since TMI. And the ugly realities that define the so-called “peaceful atom” are still making themselves all too apparent.

Whether the U.S. will now turn with Germany, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, and others away from atomic power and toward a green-powered Earth is up to us. The Solartopian technologies of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal, bio-fuels, increased efficiency, and conservation are now demonstrably cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable, more job-producing, and quicker to install than anything atomic energy can promise.

A $36 billion loan guarantee give-away still mars the proposed 2012 federal budget. Constant pressure on Congress and the White House can kill that, and any other proposed funding for still more of these nightmares.

The stream of reactor disasters spewing from this dying industry is certain to escalate. The toll rises with each leak at Fukushima, every flame at Los Alamos, each legal brief at Vermont Yankee, every foot of Nebraska floodwater.

The need to stop the madness grows more desperate every day.

[Harvey Wasserman edits the NukeFree.org website. His most recent book is Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. His “Solartopia! Green-Power Hour” is at www.talktainmentradio.com every Wednesday, 8-9pm. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Jordan Flaherty : Rising Anxiety on the Gulf Coast

Many residents have been forced from their homes as a spillway is opened to protect major cities from the flood. Photo by Gallo / Getty / Al Jazeera.
One disaster after another:
Mississippi flood renews Gulf Coast anxieties

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- Byron Encalade grew up in the swamps of southeast Louisiana, a place where day-to-day life hasn’t changed much in generations. “I grew up tying my Pirogue to the front porch when the tide would come up,” he says. “For a lot of us born and raised fishing and trapping and hunting, it’s a way of life.”

That way of life is now in danger.

First there was Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, two storms in 2005 that famously devastated the Gulf Coast, and literally changed the map of southern Louisiana, quickening already-rapid coastal erosion while destroying homes and communities. Just as coastal residents had begun to recover from those storms, last year's BP Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster had a catastrophic effect on the economy and health of the region and its people.

Now, the waters of the Mississippi River have reached historic heights, and Encalade is worried. “For the small fishers, it’s a very thin line between losing money and making a profit,” he explains.

The Mississippi is central to economic life here on the Gulf, and it’s rising waters have wide-ranging effects, from disrupting shipping and causing rising prices for gas, food, and other necessities, to a loss of tourism dollars and the destruction of an estimated 100,000 acres of crops, as well as oyster fisheries, in the now-flooded Atchafalaya Basin.

A third generation oyster fisherman, Encalade serves as president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, which represents minority fishers, including African-American, Vietnamese and Cambodian and Native Americans. “This flooding is going to have a enormous economic effect in the fisheries,” he explains.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency charged with maintaining the levees and overseeing the flood controls, has acted to preserve the safety of Baton Rouge and New Orleans; two cities perched along the Mississippi. To reduce the stress on the levees around the urban areas, the Corps has let water flow through the Morganza Spillway, flooding farmland and rural communities upriver from Baton Rouge, including thousands of houses, farms and oyster fisheries.

The Morganza, a flood control structure designed and built in the aftermath of a devastating 1927 flood of the Mississippi, has only been opened once before, in 1973.

While no one can say for sure the lasting effects of this flooding, optimism is rare. “The oyster people, they’re screwed again,” says George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association. “The oysters that survived the BP spill, they’re going to die now.”

Barisich, a fisherman who lives and works in southern Louisiana, says that across the Gulf Coast fishing industry, people have been hit hard, both economically and personally. “A lot of people, this is wearing down on them,” he says. “For the people with the small boats, it’s going to wipe them out. People have heart attacks over this.”

The high waters in the Mississippi have brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state -- especially in “cancer alley,” the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge.

Matt Rota, science and water policy director for the Gulf Restoration Network, says that pollution carried by the Mississippi will create a massive “dead zone,” a lifeless stretch of water that he says will further harm the Gulf ecosystem and impact fishers.

According to Rota, the combination of oil company exploration with the construction of levees that have cut off the natural delta-building processes of the river has resulted in a massive loss of coastal land. The state loses a football field-sized area of its coast every 45 minutes, he says. Since 1930, Louisiana has lost over a million acres of land, an area the size of a small state.

While plans have been drafted to stop the erosion and replace the coast, the federal government has never found the money to actually follow through. “I’m seeing this as a squandered opportunity,” he says. “We need to build our wetlands and build our coast instead of losing it.”


Residents don’t trust the levees

Even with the Morganza open, high water levels continue to alarm residents of New Orleans, who are suspicious of the Army Corps of Engineers. “We can’t trust the levees, and we cant trust the Corps,” says Monique Harden, the co-director Advocates for Environmental Human Rights.

Harden, as with many Gulf residents, lost trust in the Corps after faulty construction and maintenance allowed the levees to fail in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Her organization has worked to bring accountability to the U.S. government, even bringing charges of environmental injustice on the part of the U.S. to the United Nations. “This whole thing is going to be weeks, not days,” she says. “And no one’s giving any guarantees.”

Matt Rota of Gulf Restoration Network thinks the whole system of flood control needs to be rethought. “We’re still stuck in this opinion that we can control the Mississippi River,” he says. “We need to shift our thinking and let the river have more room. We’ve walled off the Mississippi from the vast majority of its floodplain.”

While freeing the river in these areas would carry great costs, it would also help restore the coast, and ease pressure on other levees, such as those protecting New Orleans, explains Rota.

“Right now, we’re very confident in the system we have,” responds Mike Petersen, public affairs officer for the Corps, when asked about the concerns expressed by Harden and Rota. However, says Petersen, there are still risks. “There’s no such thing as a flood-proof levee,” he acknowledges. “Although the system works beautifully now, it’s taking a beating like it never has before.”

First Sergeant Jimmy Hankins, with the New Orleans office of the Army Corps of Engineers, says he understands people’s fears. “People in New Orleans are always concerned about their levees. Were under sea level.” But he says New Orleans is safe. “Of course, we always recommend to be safe and concerned,” he added. “But the best levees there are, are the ones on the Mississippi because they’re tested every day.”

Byron Encalade doesn’t want to talk too much about the Army Corps or other federal agencies. “It gets to the point when you’re tired of saying who’s at fault,” he says. “Lets move forward with a solution.”

For Encalade, this means a comprehensive approach that repairs the Gulf, restores the coast, and maintains the freshwater, brackish water, and saltwater marshes so important to fisher communities and local ecosystems. “To do a plan that leaves out a part of it is to ruin it,” he says. For Encalade, whose family has been fishing here for generations, there is no other choice. “I just don’t know where else to go. I can’t live anywhere else. Louisiana is me.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was also published at Al Jazeera. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Let's Join Japan in Junking New Nukes

Workers cycle past a nuclear power plant on a tricycle cart in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province, Dec. 17, 2010. Japan and Germany are limiting or phasing out reliance on nuclear power after the Fukushima accident. Photo from AP.
We're at a turning point:
Let's join Japan
and junk new nukes

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / May 11, 2011

Japan will build no new nuclear reactors. It's a huge body blow to the global industry, and could mark a major turning point in the future of energy.

Says Prime Minister Naoto Kan: "We need to start from scratch... and do more to promote renewables."

Wind power alone could -- and now probably will -- replace 40 nukes in Japan.

The United States must join them. Axing the $36 billion currently stuck in the 2012 federal budget for loan guarantees to build new reactors could do the trick.

Wind potential alone between the Mississippi and the Rockies could produce 300% of the nation's electricity. That doesn't include solar, geothermal, ocean thermal, sustainable biofuels, and the many more renewable sources poised to reshape the American energy future once the prospect of new nukes is discarded.

Japan was set to build 14 new nukes before Fukushima. Six of Japan's total of 55 reactors were shut by the earthquake and tsunami. Three at Kashiwazaki remain shut from the seven that were hit by an earthquake less than five years ago. Kan wants three more closed at Hamaoka, also in an earthquake/tsunami zone.

Japan's reactor fleet remains the world's third-largest, behind the U.S. and France. The General Electric and Westinghouse nuclear divisions, builders of nearly all the commercial reactors in the U.S., are at least partly controlled by Japanese companies. Reactor Pressure Vessels and other major components are built there.

Four California reactors also sit in earthquake zones vulnerable to tsunamis. San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego, has 7.5 million people living within a 50-mile radius. Its two operating reactors and one dead reactor sit less than a mile from the high tide line.

Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, sits near a series of earthquake faults, including one newly discovered less than two miles from the two reactor cores there.

Numerous other U.S. reactors are perilously close to earthquake faults, including two operating at Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan. The Perry reactor, on Lake Erie east of Cleveland, was damaged by an earthquake in January, 1986.

Massive quantities of heat have poured into the global ecosystem from the multiple explosions, partial meltdowns and spent fuel fires at Fukushima, contributing significantly to global warming.

Highly radioactive fallout has been found miles from the site. Millions of gallons of extremely contaminated water have poured into the ocean.

Radioactive fallout has also been detected in rainwater, milk, and on vegetables throughout the United States, threatening the health of millions of Americans, especially small children and embryos in utero.

Now Fukushima Unit Four appears to be on the brink of physical collapse. Fission may be continuing in at least one spent fuel pool, and possibly in one or more cores. Radiation levels are high enough at the site to guarantee certain near-term death to workers, many of whom have come to consider work at Fukushima to be a virtual suicide mission. A definitive end to the disaster could be years away.

Kan's decision to shut Hamaoka and then to cancel future nukes came as a shock. Widely criticized for weakness in the wake of Fukushima, he has now redefined Japan's energy future.

Though dependent on imported fossil fuels, major Japanese corporations have substantial investments in wind, solar, and other Solartopian technologies. This will push them to the forefront of Japan's energy future.

Likewise Germany. In the wake of huge public demonstrations and a major electoral defeat, Prime Minister Angela Merkel has shut seven old reactors and says 10 more will go down by 2020, making Germany nuke-free. For decades Germany has been pushing wind, solar, and other green technologies harder than any other industrial nation, with enormously profitable results.

In the U.S., renewables are also booming, while the reactor industry has been taking hard hits. Just this week a major French-operated component factory proposed for Virginia has been pushed back two years -- which means likely cancellation. A $5 billion taxpayer-funded facility in South Carolina to produce plutonium-based Mixed Oxide reactor fuel faces a lack of customers, and growing doubts about the project's viability or real purpose.

Overall, Fukushima has complicated an already dark financial picture. A Texas project meant for Japanese financing is now all but dead. So is one proposed for Maryland by the French.

While the Obama Administration continues to push for those $36 billion in loan guarantees, it's unclear what reactor projects are in credible shape to accept them.

Meanwhile ferocious battles to shut old reactors in Vermont, New York, New Jerse, and elsewhere are heating up. With roughly two dozen of similar design to Fukushima Unit One now operating in the U.S., the public demand for more shutdowns continues to escalate.

We need to finish the job and get to a green-powered Earth.

Nuclear power makes global warming worse, and spells economic as well as ecological doom.

The industry can't get private financing, can't get meaningful liability insurance, can't deal with its wastes, can't compete in the marketplace, can't guarantee us we won't suffer a Fukushima of our own, can't provide a reliable energy supply into the future.

What lies before us once we kill these loan guarantees is a Solartopian reality powered by the sun, wind, tides, waves, earth's heat, and more.

Those countries like Germany, Denmark, and now Japan that head definitively toward a nuke-free future are in the process of turning toward survivability and prosperity.

Let's kill that loan guarantee package, shut the dying nukes like Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, and join them in truly green-powered future.

[Harvey Wasserman's most recent book is Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. He edits the NukeFree.org website, where this article was also published. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Emily Hellewell : Public Radio and the West Texas Wildfires

The Southwest Incident Management Team conducted burnouts April 19 near the McDonald Observatory in far west Texas. Photo by Frank Cianciolo / McDonald Observatory / Marfa Public Radio.
Why public radio maters:
Marfa station is critical resource
during west Texas wildfires

By Emily Hellewell / NPR / April 21, 2011

MARFA, Texas -- Deep in far west Texas, about 60 miles north of the Rio Grande, lies a city called Marfa. While the population might be sparse (about one person per square mile), the cattle are plentiful and tourists are known to especially appreciate the city's unique art scene -- as well as the wide open spaces, of course.

On Saturday, April 9, a brush fire sparked and quickly spread across the ranch lands, eventually blazing through more than 182,000 acres, destroying homes, killing cattle, leaving many without power but, remarkably (even for this rural space), not taking any human life.

In the thick of it all, was KRTS, the only local radio broadcaster in its listening area. Their story is just one example of the value of public radio stations, and the importance of federal funding in their operations.

Like any good news organization staff serving the community they live in, KRTS' three-member team set out to cover the Rock House Fire. General Manager Tom Michael, Programming and Production Manager Rachel Osier Lindley and Office Manager Anne Adkins stood on the front line of the fire on that first day. They were actually on the scene from the start, covering the fire as it spread and developed into a major wildfire.

With lives at stake the small crew went to work broadcasting critical emergency alerts and information to their community.

Over the next several days these three were joined by volunteers and the station's former high school student intern, Daniel Hernandez, who all simply showed up at the station to help KRTS bring the community news of the evacuations, the path of the fire, and road closures and openings. Listeners would call the station to give first-hand reporting and updates on road closures, often before the Texas Department of Transportation could confirm.

When the station, like many residents, lost power late on Saturday night, Michael knew he couldn't stand for the estimated five days the local electricity provider expected it would take to get back to full service.

Just three weeks ago KRTS was awarded a Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP) grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to purchase a backup power generator. They were in the process of purchasing the generator when the station went off the air.

"Unacceptable," Michael said of the time KRTS would be off-air, given its critical role in sharing the public emergency information and updates.

So, in short order he wrestled the complicated logistics necessary to get back on air. An engineer from NPR Member station KUT in Austin was tapped to bring the station back on the grid.

Marfa Public Radio, Marfa, Texas.
Michael then accomplished a few more Herculean tasks in a matter of hours: 1) finding a donor to cover the cost of the engineer's flight, 2) getting special permission from the FAA for the engineer's plane to land at the closest airfield which was under a temporary flight restriction, 3) arranging a 4x4 vehicle ride up the mountain, and 4) negotiating with the area's wireless provider, whose tower was adjacent to KRTS's tower, to tap into their backup generator.

Fortunately, the power came back on just as they got to the tower. The KUT engineer checked the connection and the station was back on the air. Just 24 hours later.

That's not to say KRTS wasn't reporting during the time of dead air. Through the station's website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed they covered the wildfire's status, every critical community evacuation, and road closures and openings.

As the wildfire's containment increased and the immediate threat lessened, the station added reports on Red Cross services for those who had homes destroyed as well as details on local drives being set up to donate household items and food. During that first day alone Michael contacted the station's streaming provider three separate times to double their capacity so they could accommodate the growing volume of online listeners.

Michael isn't hesitant to share his projection about what would happen if federal grants were eliminated. The station relies on grants like the PTFP and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Community Service Grants, which make up 30-50% of KRTS's annual budget.

"We would go away if that money was lost," Michael said.

The station's operations are lean; without an engineer, music library, or a dedicated news staff, Michael doesn't have to worry about many expenses beyond utilities and paying for the NPR programming that contribute to the station's schedule.

With a tight margin between expenses and revenue and the looming threat of cuts to federal grant money, Michael is working hard to protect his station from going permanently dark. The station's 600 members and total potential audience of 12,000-- consisting largely of ranchers, border control agents, tourists, art gallery owners, and residents -- relies on KRTS, he says.

"People are listening, especially in times of crisis. I feel terrible about the one day we were off the air during the wildfire, but fortunately during the evacuations we were able to get people to safety." said Michael.

Michael thanks the first responders and the community that came together to fight this fire. And although he would probably never admit it himself, especially when it comes to the Rock House Fire, KRTS could certainly be considered among those first responders who helped residents stay informed and safe.

Whether bringing listeners the important details of a wildfire deep in west Texas or providing NPR's coverage of a firefight on the streets of Kabul, KRTS is keeping the residents of Marfa informed every day.

Read the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's thoughts on Marfa Public Radio's efforts during the fire here, and find out more about the station online at www.marfapublicradio.org.

[This article was published by National Public Radio and was distributed by Free Press' Media Reform Daily.]

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Harvey Wasserman : End Nuclear Power Before It Ends Us

Environmental activists, wearing ghost masks to symbolize victims of a nuclear meltdown, demonstrate near the Presidential Palace in Manila, Philippines, Tuesday March 15, 2011. Photo from AP.
End nuclear power before it ends us

For 25 years the nuclear industry has told us Chernobyl wasn't relevant because it was Soviet technology. Such an accident 'could not happen here.'

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / March 17, 2011

The Japanese people are now paying a horrific price for the impossible dream of the "Peaceful Atom." For a half-century they have been told that what's happening now at Fukushima would never occur.

Our hearts and souls must first and foremost go out to them. As fellow humans, we must do everything in our power to ease their wounds, their terrible losses and their unimaginable grief.

We are also obliged -- for all our sakes -- to make sure this never happens again.

In 1980, I reported from central Pennsylvania on what happened to people there after the accident at Three Mile Island a year before.

I interviewed scores of conservative middle Americans who were suffering and dying from a wide range of radiation-related diseases. Lives and families were destroyed in an awful plague of unimaginable cruelty. The phrase "no one died at Three Mile Island" is one of the worst lies human beings have ever told.

In 1996, 10 years after Chernobyl, I attended a conference in Kiev commemorating the tenth anniversary of that disaster. Now, another 15 years later, a definitive study has been published indicating a death toll as high as 985,000... so far.

Today we are in the midst of a disaster with no end in sight. At least four reactors are on fire. The utility has pulled all workers from the site, but may now be sending some back in.

The workers who do this are incomparably brave. They remind us, tragically, of some 800,000 Chernobyl "Liquidators." These were Soviet draftees who were sent into that seething ruin for 60 or 90 seconds each to quickly perform some menial task and then run out.

When I first read that number -- 800,000 -- I thought it was a typographical error. But after attending that 1996 conference in Kiev, I spoke in the Russian city of Kaliningrad and met with dozens of these Chernobyl veterans. They tearfully assured me it was accurate. They were angry beyond all measure. They had been promised they would not encounter health problems. But now they were dying in droves.

How many will die at Fukushima we will never know. Never have we faced the prospect of multiple meltdowns, four or more, each with its own potential for gargantuan emissions beyond measure.

If this were happening at just one reactor, it would be cause for worldwide alarm.

One of the units has been powered by Mixed Oxide Fuel. This MOX brew has been heralded as a "swords into ploughshares" breakthrough. It took radioactive materials from old nuclear bombs and turned them into "peaceful" fuel.

It seemed like a neat idea. The benefits to the industry's image were obvious. But they were warned repeatedly that this would introduce plutonium into the burn chain, with a wide range of serious repercussions.

Among them was the fact that an accident would spew the deadliest substance ever known into the atmosphere. If breathed in, the tiniest unseen, untasted particle of plutonium can cause a lethal case of lung cancer.

But like so many other warnings, the industry ignored its grassroots critics. Now we all pay the price.

For 25 years the nuclear industry has told us Chernobyl wasn't relevant because it was Soviet technology. Such an accident "could not happen here."

But today it's the Japanese. If anything, they are better at operating nuclear reactors than the Americans. Japanese companies own the Westinghouse nuclear division, whose basic design is in place throughout France. Japanese companies also own the GE nuclear division. Among others, 23 of their U.S. reactors are extremely close or virtually identical in design to Fukushima I, now on fire.

Jeffrey Immelt, head of GE, is one of the many heavy corporate hitters now advising Barack Obama. Obama says (so far) that he has no intention of changing course in nuclear policy. That apparently includes a $36 billion new reactor loan guarantee giveaway in the 2012 budget. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has made clear he considers the situation at U.S. reactors very different from those in Japan. Essentially, he says, "it can't happen here."

Chu and others keep saying that our choice is between nukes and coal, that atomic energy somehow mitigates global warming. This is an important sticking point for millions of concerned citizens, and an important and righteous legion of great activists, who see climate chaos as the ultimate threat.

But especially in light of what's happening now, it's based on a non-choice. Nukes are slow to build, soaring in cost, and clearly have their own emissions, waste, and safety problems. The ancillary costs of coal and oil are soaring out of reach in terms of environmental, health, and other negative economic impacts. The "bridging fuel" of gas also faces ever-higher hurdles, especially when it comes to fracking and other unsustainable extraction technologies.

The real choice we face is between all fossil and nuclear fuels, which must be done away with, as opposed to a true green mix of clean alternatives. These safe, sustainable technologies now, in fact, occupy the mainstream.

By all serious calculation, solar is demonstrably cheaper, cleaner, quicker to build, and infinitely safer than nukes. Wind, tidal, ocean thermal, geothermal, wave, sustainable biofuels (NOT from corn or soy), increased efficiency, revived mass transit -- all have their drawbacks here and there. But as a carefully engineered whole, they promise the balanced Solartopian supply we need to move into a future that can be both prosperous and appropriate to our survival on this planet.

As we see now all too clearly, atomic technology is at war with our Earth's ecosystems. Its centralized, heavily capitalized corporate nature puts democracy itself on the brink. In the long run, it contradicts the human imperative to survive.

Today we have four reactors on the coast of California that could easily have been ripped apart by a 9.0 Richter earthquake. Had this last seismic hit been taken on this side of the Pacific, we would be watching nightly reports about the horrific death toll in San Luis Obispo and the catastrophic loss of the irreplaceable food supply from the Central Valley, and learned calculations about the forced evacuations of Los Angeles and San Diego.

There are nearly 450 atomic reactors worldwide. There are 104 here in the U.S.

Faced with enormous public demonstrations, the Prime Minister of Germany has ordered their older reactors shut. At the very least this administration should follow suit.

The Chinese and Indians, the biggest potential buyers of new reactors, are said to be "rethinking" their energy choices.

As a species, we are crying in agony, to the depths of our souls, from compassion and from fear.

But above all, the most devastating thing about the catastrophe at Fukushima is not what's happening there now.

It's that until all the world's reactors are shut, even worse is virtually certain to happen again. All too soon.

[Harvey Wasserman edits the NukeFree.org website, and is author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. This article was also posted to BuzzFlash at Truthout.]

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Ted McLaughlin : The Japan Quake and Nuclear Power

Explosion at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi No 1 plant following Japan's earthquake and tsunami. Image from Reuters.
After the Japan quake:
We must rethink nuclear power

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2011

By now everyone knows about the disastrous earthquake that has hit Japan. At a magnitude of 8.9 it is one of the largest earthquakes to hit any country, and it has been a catastrophe to the heavily populated nation.

As I write this the official death toll is around 700 people, but many thousands are still missing and there's little doubt that the death toll will climb much higher. My thoughts and best wishes go out to the people of Japan in their time of need, and I hope this country will offer Japan all the aid it is possible to give.

But in this post I want to concentrate on one aspect of the disaster -- nuclear power. Japan has invested heavily in nuclear power and currently receives a large portion of its electrical power from this source. But they may now be paying the price for that. At least two nuclear power plants at Fukushima have been heavily damaged and are currently in danger of a "meltdown," which could cause a large explosion that would release heavy doses of very radioactive material into their environment.

They are trying to cool the nuclear cores down by flooding them with seawater and boron, but that is a desperate measure that will take days and no one knows if the cores can be cooled in time to prevent a meltdown. The authorities have said that little radioactivity has been released so far, but they are evacuating people from within a 12-mile radius of both plants and are issuing iodine tablets to the population living in those areas (iodine is supposed to inhibit the body's intake of radioactivity).

And that is just what is happening at those two plants. Other plants were also damaged and are currently being evaluated. More may be heading for the same kind of trouble. The earthquake and resulting tsunami were bad enough for the Japanese people -- the damaged nuclear plants are just adding to their difficulties.

Here in the United States we are currently having a debate over energy. Currently the country relies heavily on fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) but those fuels are causing problems. Much of the oil we use comes from foreign countries -- countries where the supply is always in danger (as we can see from the current problems in the Middle East).

Many on the right seem to think that this problem can be solved by just drilling more and more. But the fact is that there just aren't enough American reserves of oil (even if we tap into our protected wilderness areas) to satisfy the addiction this country has to oil. And many experts (including our own military) believe the world is reaching (or has already reached) the point of "peak oil" -- the point at which production begins to fall no matter how much drilling is done.

Coal is not a much better alternative. Although it is plentiful right now and could last for many years, it is also one of the dirtiest of the energy-producing fuels. Even with the new technologies (which industry is fighting tooth-and-nail) it continues to destroy our environment.

Using more coal will simply speed up global climate change (which is a looming environmental and economic disaster regardless of what the right-wing climate-deniers claim). Some are talking about the development of a "clean coal" technology, but this is just a myth being advanced by the coal industry. There is no such thing as clean coal, and I doubt that there ever will be.

But even if the fossil fuels weren't damaging our environment, they will run out in the future. Coal and natural gas may be more plentiful than oil, but there is not an endless supply of any fossil-based fuel. And someday they will all disappear.

The fact is that new sources of energy must be found or developed. The ideal thing is to find renewable and clean sources of energy (like wind, solar, wave, or geothermal). So far, these sources have not been developed to the point where they could completely replace fossil fuels. That is why many in America (and elsewhere) are advocating a return to nuclear power.

After the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, nuclear energy was put on the back burner in this country. But now the idea of nuclear power is making a comeback. Many believe it could fill the gap left by renewable sources and help to wean the country off fossil fuels. And they are quick to tell us that the technology has advanced to the point where accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl couldn't happen again.

I don't doubt that the technology has advanced. I'm sure it has. I'm also sure that the Japanese were using the best technology available (since they are one of the most technologically-advanced countries in the world). But that 8.9 magnitude earthquake didn't care about the technology, and the best technology in the world couldn't have prevented the damage to the Japanese nuclear plants.

This should give Americans pause. Should we go back to building nuclear power plants -- knowing the dangers they could pose? And lest we forget, we still haven't come up with a solution for disposal of nuclear waste from these plants (which is highly radioactive and will remain so for a very long time).

I have to say that I really don't know what to do about nuclear energy. I like the idea that it doesn't pollute the environment while producing energy, but I have to wonder if it's only delaying that pollution since we haven't solved the disposal problem. I would feel a lot better if we could figure out how to safely dispose of the nuclear waste (for many centuries). And the Japanese experience is showing us, at the very least, that great care must be taken about where any new nuclear power plants are located.

It is time to rethink the usefulness of nuclear power. Maybe it is a viable alternative, but we should carefully consider all the dangers before proceeding with building any new plants.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Harvey Wasserman : California Quake Hit Could Irradiate Entire Country

The Fukushima No. 1 power plant of Tokyo Electric Power at Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan, shown in a photograph from October 2008. Japan has issued a state of emergency at the nuclear power plant after its cooling system failed. Photo from AP.
Had it hit off the California coast:
Japan's quake could have
irradiated the entire United States

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011

Had the massive 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.

The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.

All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as 50 countries.

San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.

Diablo Canyon is at Avila Beach, on the coast just west of San Luis Obispo, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A radioactive eruption there would pour into central California and, depending on the winds, up to the Bay Area or southeast into Santa Barbara and then to Los Angeles. The cloud would at very least permanently destroy much of the region on which most Americans rely for their winter supply of fresh vegetables.

By the federal Price-Anderson Act of 1957, the owners of the destroyed reactors -- including Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison -- would be covered by private insurance only up to $11 billion, a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars worth of damage that would be done. The rest would become the responsibility of the federal taxpayer and the fallout victims. Virtually all homeowner insurance policies in the United States exempt the insurers from liability from a reactor disaster.

The most definitive recent study of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster puts the death toll at 985,000. The accident irradiated a remote rural area. The nearest city, Kiev, is 80 kilometers away.

But San Luis Obispo is some ten miles directly downwind from Diablo Canyon. The region around San Onofre has become heavily suburbanized.

Heavy radioactive fallout spread from Chernobyl blanketed all of Europe within a matter of days. It covered an area far larger than the United States.

Fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within 10 days. It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States.

Chernobyl Unit Four was of comparable size to the two reactors at Diablo Canyon, and somewhat larger than the two at San Onofre.

But it was very new when it exploded. California's four coastal reactors have been operating since the 1970s and 1980s. Their accumulated internal radioactive burdens could exceed what was spewed at Chernobyl.

Japanese officials say all affected reactors automatically shut, with no radiation releases. But they are not reliable. In 2007 a smaller earthquake rocked the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki site and forced its lengthy shutdown.

Preliminary reports indicate at least one fire at a Japanese reactor hit by this quake and tsunami.

In 1986 the Perry nuclear plant, east of Cleveland, was rocked by a 5.5 Richter-scale shock, many orders of magnitude weaker than this one. That quake broke pipes and other key equipment within the plant. It took out nearby roads and bridges.

Thankfully, Perry had not yet opened. An official Ohio commission later warned that evacuation during such a quake would be impossible.

Numerous other American reactors sit on or near earthquake faults.

The Obama Administration is now asking Congress for $36 billion in new loan guarantees to build more commercial reactors.

It has yet to reveal its exact plans for dealing with a major reactor disaster. Nor has it identified the cash or human reserves needed to cover the death and destruction imposed by the reactors' owners.

[Harvey Wasserman edits NukeFree.org. He is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. He co-authored Killing Our Own: the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation.]

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Ansel Herz : Cholera Spreads in Haiti

Above, MINUSTAH soldier points his gun at former Austin activist/independent journalist Ansel Herz in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on October 15, 2010, at a demonstration against the renewal of MINUSTAH, the UN peackeeping mission. Photo from Gaentantguevara / Flickr.

For more about photo see sidebar story below.

Port-au-Prince fears the worst
as cholera spreads in Haiti

By Ansel Herz / The Rag Blog / October 24, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Days after an outbreak of cholera began in Haiti’s rural Artibonite region [see story below], killing at least 200 people, there are now five confirmed cases of cholera in the busy capital city.

The cases “do not represent spread of the epidemic” because they originated in central Haiti, according to a bulletin circulated by Haiti’s UN peacekeeping mission with the heading “Key Messaging,” obtained by IPS.

“The fact that these cases were picked up and responded to so fast demonstrates that the reporting systems for epidemic management we have put in place are functioning,” it concludes.

Residents of the capital city are not so confident. “It’s killing people -- of course, I’m scared. We’re in the mouth of death,” 25-year-old Boudou Lunis, one of 1.3 million made homeless by the quake living in temporary settlements, told the Miami Herald.

Radio Boukman lies at the heart of Cite Soleil, an impoverished slum crisscrossed by foul trash-filled canals where cholera could be devastating. The station has received no public health messages for broadcast from authorities, producer Edwine Adrien told IPS on Saturday, four days after reports of cholera-related deaths first emerged.

At a small, desolate camp of torn tents nearby, a gleaming water tank is propped up on bricks. Camp-dwellers said it was installed by the International Organization for Migration last week, more than nine months after the January earthquake damaged their homes.

But it’s empty because no organization has filled it with water. “We need treated water to drink,” a young man named Charlot told IPS matter-of-factly.

Cholera, transmissible by contaminated water and food, could be reaching far beyond the capital city. There are suspected cases of the disease in Haiti’s North and South departments, according to the Pan-American Health Organization, as well as confirmed cases in Gonaives, the country’s third largest city.

In Lafiteau, a 30-minute drive from Port-au-Prince, Dr. Pierre Duval said he had stabilized two cholera-infected men in the town’s single hospital, but could not handle more than six more patients. One died yesterday. All of them came from St. Marc, near the epicenter of the epidemic.

The main hospital in St. Marc is crowded with the infected. Supplies of oral rehydration salts were spotty when he arrived Friday after rushing from Port-au-Prince, American medic Riaan Roberts told IPS.

“We first talked to some lady from the UN who told us, ‘Oh I have to go to a meeting, I’ll mention your names, but just come back tomorrow,’” he said. “These microcosms of operational logistics are just beyond them.”

Roberts said a Doctors Without Borders team quickly put his skills to use, adding, “[The UN] is so top-heavy with bureaucracy that they can’t effectively react to these small outbreaks which quickly snowball and spread across an area.”

Buses and tap-taps filled with people speed in both directions on the dusty highway connecting the Haiti’s stricken central region to Port-au-Prince. There are no signs of travel restrictions or checkpoints near the city.

At a Friday meeting convened by the Haitian government’s Ministry of Water and Sanitation, “there were conversations around shutting down schools and transportation routes,” said Nick Preneta, Deputy Director of SOIL, a group that installs composting toilets in displacement camps.

“But if that’s the conversation now, however many hours after the first confirmed case, it’s already too late,” he continued. “One of the recommendations was to concentrate public health education at traffic centers... there were a lot of no-brainers at the meeting.”

Cholera bacteria can cause fatal diarrhea and vomiting after incubating for up to five days, allowing people who appear healthy to travel and infect others. The medical organization Partners In Health calls it “a disease of poverty” caused by lack of access to clean water.

The Artibonite river, running through an area of central Haiti known as “the breadbasket” for its rice farmers, is considered the likely source of the epidemic after recent heavy rains and flooding. Analysts say the regional agrarian economy has been devastated by years of cheap American imports of rice to Haiti.

Be sure to check the Haiti Documents Index for the latest internal reports, (mostly) free of spin, from officials.

[Ansel Herz, a former Austin activist, is a multimedia journalist and web designer based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. This article also appears on Ansel's blog, Mediahacker, and was distributed by IPS.]

Relatives of Haitians struck by cholera, outside a local hospital in Saint Marc, Haiti, October 22, 2010. St-Felix Evens / Reuters.

Health workers scramble to keep
cholera out of crowded camps

Some 1.3 million people have lived in makeshift camps throughout Port-au-Prince since the January earthquake devastated the city. Living conditions are "appalling," according a recent report by Refugees International.

But one bright spot of the multi-billion-dollar relief effort, touted by the United Nations and Haitian President Rene Preval, has been the prevention of the spread of a highly infectious, catastrophic disease.

Until now.

At least 160 people have died this week [the number has now passed 200] from an outbreak of cholera in the central Artibonite region, according to Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian arm of renowned health organization Partners in Health.

The fear now is that the disease will reach Port-au-Prince [see story above] and wreak havoc in the crowded camps by contaminating the water.

There are already six suspected cases of the illness in the capital city, Monica Ferreira, a Portuguese medic, told IPS on Friday. Her team has operated a health clinic for quake victims since January.

"All defensive countermeasures should immediately focus on Cite Soleil and Lafiteau if they want to save Port-au- Prince," said Dr. James Wilson of the Haiti Epidemic Advisory System (HEAS).

A HEAS partner reported that a market woman and child died from cholera in the small town of Lafiteau, just 25 kilometres from the capital.

Melinda Miles, director of the Haitian organization KONPAY, told IPS she witnessed a man die of cholera Friday afternoon at the Hospital Centre of the Haitian Academy in Lafiteau. Doctors at the hospital could not be reached for comment before publication.

"We went into the room and he died right in front of us," she said. "He came from St. Marc. The doctor said there are a lot more patients on their way with cholera."

"If a case from St. Marc has had time to arrive in Lafiteau, then it's had time to arrive in Port-au-Prince. So I'm really scared," she added.

The Haitian government says the disease is cholera, a waterborne bacterium that can incubate in bodies for days and suddenly cause death by dehydration. Officials from the Pan American Health Organization, the regional arm of the Geneva-based World Health Organization, said Friday that laboratory tests had confirmed the outbreak.

Authorities have rushed medical resources to St. Marc, about 70 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, where a single hospital is overcrowded with patients. Villagers who traveled from far away are lying on the floors, hooked up to IV drips, while lines amass outside the gate.

Attempting to cope with the overwhelming patient load, a Doctors Without Borders team has moved from the hospital to construct their own treatment center, spokesperson Petra Becker told IPS.

Other medical teams are gathering information from rural villages to isolate areas where the illness is concentrated and discourage people from moving, she said.

In a blog post on Partners in Health's website, Chief Medical Officer Joia Mukherjee called cholera "a disease of poverty". She wrote that loans from the Inter-American Development Bank meant for the development of a public water supply in the Artibonite region were blocked on political grounds during the tenure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"The international community's failure to assist the government of Haiti in developing a safe water supply has been violation of this basic right," Muhkerjee continued.

If the disease reaches Port-au-Prince, the number of victims is likely to skyrocket.

The New York Times reported Friday that cholera cases are surfacing on the island of La Gonave, as well as the areas of Arcahaie and Croix-des Bouquets closer to the capital.

The United Nations and Haitian government are holding emergency meetings in Port-au-Prince to counter the cholera outbreak. Daily truckloads of water delivered by relief group Pure Water for the World to the seaside slum of Cite Soleil have received double the usual chlorination, said Noelle Thabault, the group's deputy director.

Nesly Louissaint, who lives in Camp Carradeux, an officially recognized camp for thousands of quake victims, received a short text message on his cell phone alerting him to the outbreak of the disease. But no authorities have visited the camp with further information, he said.

It's not clear what prevention measures have been taken in the capital city. Traffic, schools, businesses and markets were open Friday and the streets appeared to be bustling as usual.

"I have not seen any general information distributed in the streets or camps at this time. I don't see relief groups out here," Mark Snyder, a development worker with International Action Ties, told IPS.

"I do see U.N. peacekeeping trucks full of troops, but they are not being utilized to spread information," he continued. "They're doing security patrols, which seems like a waste of resources."

Earlier this week, at least 12 people died when heavy rains flooded some of Port-au-Prince’s displacement camps. Dr. Wilson warns that October is the peak of Haiti's rainy season, making any further outbreak of the disease more difficult to contain.

-- Ansel Herz / Oct. 22, 2010

MINUSTAH peacekeeper guards food in Haiti, January 17. Photo by Win McNamee / Getty Images.

UN peacekeeper to photographer:
'Shoot me and I'll shoot you'

By Mac McClelland / October 21, 2010

SEE PHOTO AT TOP OF POST

When I showed this amazing picture [at top of post] to my friend, after she registered what she was looking at, her eyes went huge while she exclaimed, "Oh my god!" with her hand over her mouth.

The scene is a protest last week in Port-au-Prince. The guy on the left is a clearly unarmed and videotaping journalist from Texas named Ansel Herz, whom I happened to work with when I was in Haiti last month. The uniformed fellow pointing a gun directly at his face is a United Nations peacekeeper.

I didn't meet many (okay, any) Haitian fans of MINUSTAH, the UN stabilization force that's been in the country since 2004. I have, for the record, met some MINUSTAH who are definitely good guys and have, for example, helped a woman in labor get to the hospital, and helped stop a man who was trying to kill his wife for refusing to have sex with him.

But the force has also shot civilians. It's had to have meetings about how not to sexually abuse the Haitian population. In fact, last week's protest erupted after the UN officially renewed MINUSTAH's mandate.

Some of the protesters' complaints, which echo those I heard while in-country, are that MINUSTAH doesn't actually do anything to protect civilians living in filthy, violent, rape-infested displacement camps, and that the money could be better spent dealing with those issues.

I asked Ansel how he ended up on the business end of a UN gun, just in case there was any kind of conflict or missing context surrounding this photo. Not so much, he says: "Maybe they felt threatened by my camera."

--Mac McClelland / Mother Jones

Also see:

• Citizen Protests, Government Repression Mount in Haiti by Beverly Bell / Oct. 18, 2010 / CommonDreams.
• Previous posts from Haiti by Ansel Herz on The Rag Blog.

The Rag Blog

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