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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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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